Passing by: On Triangle Tour 2023, Part Two
See the first part of this two-part installment here.
Use the fields below to perform an advanced search of The Princetonian's archives. This will return articles, images, and multimedia relevant to your query. You can also try a Basic search
734 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
See the first part of this two-part installment here.
Day One
Dear Sexpert,
Content warning: The following piece includes reference to sexual assault.
From the first floor of East Pyne, I head toward Chancellor Green and turn right just before reaching the doors of the rotunda. There are four benches in total, three on one side and one on the other. The three oriented toward Nassau Street face a rusted statue of John Witherspoon, and the last one stands alone. Even though these wooden benches seem old and worn, often suffering the harsh wind and rain without proper support from the slanted ground underneath them, they have character. One is more intimate than the others and hides me from the open space of Firestone Plaza. Another encourages vulnerability as it inches me toward a pair of trash cans.
The routine goes like this. By 10:30 p.m., I arrive in the Midtown area — the 34th Street-Herald Square station is closest and most convenient if I’m coming from downtown, like I usually am. I turn onto 6th Avenue, walk down two blocks, then make a left onto 32nd Street. On Friday nights, this block of 32nd Street — the backbone of Manhattan’s K-Town district — is a frothing, swirling mess of gorgeous young adults dressed in their best night-out clothes. Platinum-blonde hair, the thump-thump-thump of the latest K-pop track, and heavy eye glitter pass by; as always, I can’t help but marvel at this display of glamor, beauty, and nouveau riche excess.
“Paris is cold,” I offered, and he responded, “The weather or the people?”
You are reading the words of someone who has celebrated Christmas Eve in a McDonald’s and New Year’s Eve in bed before 10 p.m. These are the words of someone who spent Thanksgiving online shopping for five hours in a fit of mild delirium and Independence Day frowning at the American tourist who yelled “Happy Fourth of July!” in the middle of the seventh arrondissement of Paris last summer.
If not redirected, click here.
All this from noticing an architectural quirk: these nine empty statuary niches led me along a year-long journey of observation and intrigued writes head editor José Pablo Fernández García in a visual journey through history and memory on campus.
The first two times I watched Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch,” I got awfully close to crying at the end when all the staffers assembled to write the editor’s obituary. I certainly at least teared up at this scene — not because of the film’s own emotional stakes, but rather because it made me think of my own newsroom experience as an editor at The Daily Princetonian.
Some spring day, a close friend told me that I’m very comfortable being the exception. She meant it as a compliment — that I’m confident enough in myself to find and follow my own path. I understood it as such. But it has also been haunting me since I heard her speak it. It’s an idea I’ve found myself returning to quite often, whenever not distracted by the day, or music, or some writing.
To digest life in this world is such a messy undertaking that I find great satisfaction when everything seems to converge in a point of understanding — a point in which it all, for a moment oh so brief, assumes some unifying clarity. Oftentimes, this arrives a couple weeks into the semester, in the form of my courses melding into one overlapping set of questions and ideas — no longer discrete sets of readings, discussion posts, and final essays. This semester, I have felt everything barreling toward a most essential question of the self. Montaigne and Camus, Impressionist artworks and other European landmarks, they’ve all been racing to make sense of the self, the individual — or at least that’s how they’ve entered my mind.
As the fall semester comes to a close, it’s hard to keep count of all of the Christmas decorations that have popped up around Princeton’s campus. On a brisk day in November, I was walking by McCarter Theatre when I noticed it had been decorated with giant Christmas wreaths. I took out my phone to snap a picture, but decided against it. Instead, I kept walking, fleeing the wind that cut through my jacket.
Dear Sexpert,
On a Friday night, the Frist Film/Performance Theatre was buzzing with excitement. In the darkness, the dancers struck their starting pose. The crowd waited with bated breath. Soon enough, the bright lights came up and Michael Jackson’s “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” rang through the speakers. It was time to get down.
Saskia Vogel, a translator in residence at Princeton for the fall of 2022, is a writer, screenwriter, and translator from Swedish and German into English. In 2021, she received an English PEN Translates Award and her novel “Girls Lost” was a PEN America Literary Award Finalist. Her debut novel, “Permission,” was published in five languages and longlisted for the Believer Award. She’s currently translating Linnea Axelsson’s epic poem “Ædnan,” which explores Sámi history as experienced by two Sámi families. The Sámi are an indigenous group recognized as one of Sweden’s official national minorities.
Making art is one of the earliest memories for Omar Farah ’23. They were raised by a mother with a talent for painting and drawing, and their childhood home’s basement was an art studio. This early exposure to artistic practice quickly proved itself to be quite influential: Farah remembers filling their sketchbook with fashion designs and forcing their younger sisters to star in their feature-length home movies from an early age. For them, practicing and engaging with art was never a question.
“We’re not hip-hop, we’re not anything,” Stage Manager Etiosa Omeike ’24 told the audience before the show started. “We’re African.”
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to make a movie about your childhood?