The “but-for” test of life
What I encourage everyone to do, then, is to just take some time to think about the critical junctures in and influences on our time here.
What I encourage everyone to do, then, is to just take some time to think about the critical junctures in and influences on our time here.
So, what we’re left with is simply more questions, and it’s incumbent on good journalists to dig further, and for the State Attorney Generals’ office to release more information on the exact circumstances of the shooting on March 20. For our community’s part, Princeton seems to want to sweep the memory of the shooting away. A window was shot out in the Panera on the day of the shooting; it was replaced by evening the next day, as I walked by. And then a week later, Panera reopened, as if nothing had ever happened. “We remodeled,” read a cheery sign outside the storefront.
In December 2014, one of my high school classmates, Paige Stalker, was killed in a hail of gunfire on the east side of Detroit. Police reports suggest that this was a case of mistaken identity in a dispute between drug gangs. But the circumstances of the shooting are irrelevant to the outcome of the case. About 30 shots were fired in the course of the altercation. Three other teenagers riding in the car with Paige were injured. Paige was 16 years old.
The way we think about unique cultural heritages in the United States needs to change. Differentiating culinary traditions across cultures — rather than conflating and generalizing these traditions — is vital to appreciating the qualitative uniqueness of cultures.
A few weeks ago, Life Time Fitness, a Minnesota-based gym chain, made national news by announcing that it was going to eliminate all news channels from its TVs. Members still had the option of watching cable news networks on individual workout machines, but the large TVs in the gym showed lighter content from channels like HGTV or USA.
Here at Princeton, some go so far as to allege that the University has become a haven of left-wing groupthink. For its part, the left seems like it will tear itself apart over ideological differences — just look at the Ta-Nehisi Coates and Cornel West feud, or the continued battles in the Democratic Party between the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton wings.
Incoming Undergraduate Student Government President Rachel Yee has promised to improve USG’s communication with the student community at large. Sadly, far too many students live under the mistaken impression that USG “doesn’t do anything.” My fellow columnist Jan Domingo Alsina went so far as to argue that our Undergraduate Student Government members were nothing but “glorified social event organizers” — and that there was nothing inherently political about the position.
A piece of documentation should not stand in the way of a person’s dreams. It’s on all of us to make undocumented people’s dreams a reality.
I wondered what I would write in this column. What would I have told myself three years ago, in the summer of 2014?
Last month, the news broke that an imprint of Simon and Schuster had inked a publishing deal for Milo Yiannopolus’s autobiography, Dangerous. He’s an editor of Breitbart News, a conservative news site that has been condemned for publishing anti-Semitic, racist, and misogynistic articles.
