Today’s Briefing: 

The Daily Princetonian sat down with Anne-Marie Slaughter ’80, President and CEO of the think tank New America, to discuss her most recent book “Renewal: From Crisis to Transformation in Our Lives, Work, and Politics,” her experiences as a leader, and her hopes for the future. Responding to the question of what lessons current students can take away from “Renewal,” Slaughter said she thinks “there are a lot of leadership lessons in there, which if you learn earlier, so much the better, everything from running towards the criticism to learning how to share power, thinking about risk and resilience.”

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On Tuesday, Feb. 1, Princeton students celebrated Lunar New Year on campus, blending tradition with creative approaches. A group of students gathered in Dod basement to hang up decorations commemorating Tết, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year, and prepared various traditional Vietnamese dishes in the Lockhart kitchen. Some students in Terrace F. Club gathered to make dumplings. Yet others, took advantage of Chinese restaurant 锦里 SC house on Nassau Street, eating with friends as they rang in the new year.

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Appearing for the first time as a stand-alone work in print, Toni Morrison’s only short story “Recitatif” depicts the lives of two orphaned girls — one child is Black and the other white, but Morrison never specifies the race of the individual characters. The two children meet at an orphanage where they bond over their feeling of rejection and, later, meet again during a series of encounters. Morrison once described the story as “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.”

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Obituary:

From Opinion:

• Columnists Braden Flax and Julia Chaffers comment on the focus of mindsets in society, particularly the growth versus fixed mindset, and argue that this line of thinking is over-relied upon. Flax and Chaffers write, “At a place like Princeton, and at a time like this, it is especially important to transcend the obsession with ‘mindset.’ The pandemic has magnified the extent to which this mindset model fails to take into account external factors that affect performance, and the extent to which academic performance simply is not the most important measure of personal character.”
• Guest Contributor Matthew Wilson discusses recent backlash against Amy Wax, tenured law professor at The University of Pennsylvania, and Ilya Shapiro ’99, a guest lecturer at Georgetown Law. Wilson focuses on the importance of upholding academic freedom, which he argues is “a two-way street.” “We must vigorously and consistently stand up for the freedoms, including the freedoms of those whose views we loathe, that help ensure our college education is just that — an education — rather than merely a four-year vacation in an ideological safe space,” Wilson argues.

At Your Leisure:

• SATIRE: The Satire section brings you two entirely fictional and wonderfully hilarious pieces.
  • Read about the University’s shock to discover some students in isolation are report feeling ... isolated?
  • Read a memo from “Dean [REDACTED]” containing new updates to campus life for Spring 2022. It may contain guidance ... or not! 
• PODCAST: Listen to a new episode of Daybreak, a daily news podcast from The ‘Prince,’ here.
• PUZZLES: Try your hand at a new crossword puzzle titled ‘Star Studded’ by Staff Constructor Jaeda Woodruff.