Evolution by Firestone
(12/06/20 11:29pm)
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Incumbent members Michele L. Tuck-Ponder and Beth A. Behrend as well as newcomer Jean Y. Durbin have won the Nov. 3 election for the Princeton Board of Education, according to a Nov. 20 update from the Mercer County Board of Elections. They ran for three open seats on the 10-member board and were elected for three-year terms.
In the documentary “HyperNormalisation,” Adam Curtis explains that cyberspace, as it was initially conceived, promised an alternate world free from the politics and corruption of the “real world.” This digital realm, its idealist advocates believed, presented an opportunity to build a democratic utopia accessible anywhere by anyone — it would be a sacred and protected space separate from reality.
Trading in large gatherings for Zoom dinners, people worldwide will be experiencing a holiday season completely unlike that of past years. Combine that with Princeton’s calendar shift toward a much longer winter break, giving students more time to pursue non-academic activities and leisure, and some people may be stumped about what to get for the holidays to be equipped for free time. Enter this guide, composed of affordable gifts that Princeton students will truly appreciate for the extended winter break and next semester’s mostly online classes. Everything on this guide is best purchased at small businesses to keep them afloat, but if necessary, they are also available at the large retailers mentioned below.
One of my best friends has a great memory, and, over the years, she has become the de facto historian of our friend group. She can remember all the important things: the shenanigans, where we were, who we were with. That kind of memory is a gift to all of her friends, and it demonstrates an important lesson for a year as tumultuous as 2020. With two vaccines for COVID-19 entering new phases of testing, a semester on campus, and a new year fast approaching, some people are justifiably itching to move on. These developments should undoubtedly be celebrated, as should the prospect of a fresh start. But, just like my friend, we cannot forget everything we have been through: Instead, should find creative and healthy ways to catalogue all that has happened in 2020.
Early in November, Harry Styles made history as the first man to have a solo feature on the cover of American Vogue magazine — but he went even further, making history while wearing a dress. There have been many pioneers of crossing clothing boundaries in the past (Prince, Elton John, or David Bowie) but Styles’ historic cover brought the fight for gender-neutral dressing to the forefront of our current cultural debate.
Every Princeton student remembers the moment in mid-March when the world ground to a halt. For some, it was the memo announcing that classes were moving online. For others, it was the cancellation of the NBA season or the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament, or perhaps even Tom Hanks announcing he had tested positive for COVID-19.
On Friday, the Texas Rangers named Chris Young ’02 as the team’s next executive vice president and general manager (GM). Young, 41, who retired from pitching in 2017 after 13 MLB seasons, most recently served in the MLB office as the senior vice president of on-field operations.
I would love to begin this column by saying “with the election behind us.” Yet, as of writing, the election is enduring endlessly, at least in certain quarters.
During a period in which a pandemic has restricted communication, both verbal and musical in nature, brother-sister cellist and pianist duo Sheku and Isata Kanneh-Mason performed a program of chamber works rich in interaction, comprised of works by Beethoven, Saint-Saëns, and Rachmaninoff, that spanned the widest possible breadth of the Romantic period.
The sun sets later day by day in the southern hemisphere. By an unfortunate combination of Princeton’s academic calendar and the onset of COVID-19, I have lived through three consecutive autumn/winter cycles, so it’s a refreshing change of scenery to finally roll into summer.
About a month ago, I was left awe-struck, hopeful, and empowered. Oct. 29 marked the conclusion of the Program in Visual Arts’s three-part webinar series, “Combahee Experimental: Black Women’s Experimental Filmmaking.” Each session brought a beautiful range of Black women in conversation with renowned curators Simone Leigh and Tina Campt. Needless to say, spending Thursday evenings hearing from visionaries like Garrett Bradley to pioneers like Angela Davis all but cured my Zoom fatigue.
Creating a sequel to a cult classic is a hard task. This task is even harder when the original movie is itself an adaptation of a much-acclaimed sci-fi novel, Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” It probably doesn’t come as a surprise, then, that “Blade Runner 2049” does not match the quality of its predecessors, even though it’s a decent action movie. Despite having the potential to level up to and even surpass the original, the film fails to fully develop the themes that made the original “Blade Runner” so captivating.
Each November, Native American students at Princeton raise a tipi outside of Prospect House to celebrate Native American Heritage Month. This year, amid the pandemic and a reckoning with injustices on and off campus, the student group Natives at Princeton (NAP) designated November 2020 as Native American Activism Month.
There have been several times in the past year where I have slipped into what I refer to as “the fog.” I scroll endlessly on social media, I click on YouTube video after YouTube video, only to start part of it and move onto the next one. I eat food until I’m sick. I stay up until 5 a.m. even though I felt tired hours ago. I sleep 14 hours a day and then take a two-hour nap on top of that. I binge all four seasons of The Good Place in a weekend. There is no past or future, only the present and the over-saturated indulgence. In non-pandemic times, I usually chalk “the fog” up to the utter emptiness that I feel after a semester has ended. I feel relieved. I can finally avoid all responsibility for a brief moment. I can let go of control, just for a second. But, this past year, during lockdown, “the fog” has come back several times, and it’s easy to forget that I used to not feel this way.
It’s no secret that Princeton professors are the cream of the crop. Their teaching is routinely lauded as some of the best in the world; they have been awarded Pulitzer Prizes for their artistic collections, MacArthur Grants for their groundbreaking research, and even Nobel Prizes for their contributions to the public knowledge. And these patterns are hardly new — scholars have been producing important work from within the Orange Bubble for generations.
The University has established a new professorship in Indigenous Studies, in recognition of students’ “strong and growing interest” in Native American and Indigenous Studies, according to a Dec. 3 announcement.
William Rice Elfers ’71, The Daily Princetonian’s undergraduate business manager in 1970 and a longtime alumni trustee, died on Saturday at the age of 71.
To the editor: