Author Archives: Dana Bernstein

‘PRINCE’ EDITOR-IN-CHIEF LUC COHEN ’14 CAN HACKY SACK, HAS RIDDEN A MOTORCYCLE TAXI IN RIO, LOVES HUMMUS, AND HAS DESPERATELY AWAITED THIS 21Q SINCE HE BECAME EIC

Name: Luc Cohen
Age: 20
Major: Wilson School
Hometown: New York, N.Y.
Eating Club/Residential College: Terrace / Whitman

In one sentence, what do you actually do all day?
Delete the massive amounts of spam comments the ‘Prince’ website gets. Distinguishing between a bootleg Gucci salesperson and an average ‘Prince’ troll is harder than it may seem.

What is your greatest guilty pleasure?
Skins. UK version.

What are your plans for the ‘Prince’?
To enhance our online strategy and make sure we’re prepared for the launch of our redesigned website (!!) later this year. Also, to improve long-term, enterprise reporting in all sections of the paper.

What were you doing right before you started filling this out?
Twiddling my thumbs waiting for my 21 questions to arrive, as I have been since I was elected in December.

Favorite thing about yourself?
I can hacky sack pretty well.

Chocolate or vanilla?
Vanilla, for ice cream. Chocolate for candy or anything else.

What is your biggest fear?
Missing a good story, or learning of it too late.

Top three things on your Princeton bucket list?
Go to the Grad College tower, eat a late-meal quesadilla at least one more time, and publish important stories that people wouldn’t have heard otherwise.

If your life were a movie, what would be the theme song?
“No Surrender.”

What’s the most dangerous thing you’ve done in the past year?
Probably getting on a motorcycle taxi through a neighborhood in Rio with steep, windy roads. Isaac Lederman ’15 was on the one in front of me, and his crashed into a car. He was fine though, and he got his 2 reais back.

Are you a morning person?
What’s a morning?

When was the last time you cried?
When Andy Roddick lost to Del Potro in the U.S. Open last year, his last match ever.

Role model?
See above.

Favorite movie?
Pirates of the Caribbean.

What’s the best meal you’ve eaten at Princeton?
Terrace Mexican night, every Friday.

What’s hanging above your desk and/or bed?
The front pages of the ‘Prince’ Homecoming issue, the Election issue, the Tilghman issue, and the issue with the Michelle Obama article.

If you could receive any gift, what would it be?
A lifetime supply of hummus, and anything (carrots, Wheat Thins, etc.) I can dip in it.

What are your pet peeves?
People who respond to the question, ‘Where are you from?’ with ‘Near New York City.’

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned at Princeton?
That the CIA considered contracting the mafia to carry out the Bay of Pigs operation. Buried in a memoir I was reading for my JP last semester.

In 25 years, you will be…
Elated, because the Mets will have won a World Series in my lifetime.

What makes someone a Princetonian?
The ability to direct a lost tourist from the depths of the junior slums to the art museum.

 

There’s nothing like a compliment to brighten up your day, right? A new project called Pton Compliments hopes to “spread some love” via Facebook compliments, according to its Facebook page (“Pton Compliments”), which was created on Thursday.

Pton Compliments was inspired by a similar project started at Queen’s University, and the phenomenon has spread to Harvard, Yale, McGill, Columbia, Wash U, Stanford, Penn and William & Mary, among others.

So how does it work? Submit a compliment/shout-out for a fellow Princeton student here and then it will be published anonymously on the Pton Compliments page. The recipient of the compliment gets tagged in the post (once he/she accepts Pton Compliments’ friend request). And happiness is spread. Happy complimenting!

Whether you’ll be attending the Yale game or not, hopefully you’re excited about the (very real) possibility of having a Bonfire (yes capital b) next week. Here’s a brief history of the Bonfire, according to the Princetoniana website:

The Bonfire used to celebrate baseball, not football, victories. And if you were a freshman, well, you had to do some of the grunt work; freshmen were tasked with gathering wood from the surrounding area. So current frosh, start looking for wood now. I mean Hurricane Sandy already did most of the work for you…

An additional feature of the Bonfire celebration used to include an effigy of John Harvard and/or a Yale Bulldog.

From 1950 until 1966, the University had seven bonfires. But since then, there have only been four. Here is proper protocol for the Bonfire, according to Sam Howell ’50:

  • Schedule the Bonfire for the Thursday or Friday following the Yale Game, and treat it as both a Big Three celebration and a rally for the season finale.
  • Assign the Freshman Class to collect scrap lumber, crates, and pallets from University workers, town merchants, and other local sources.
  • Seat a stuffed bulldog in the outhouse.
  • Begin the festivities by unleashing the Band to roust students from across campus.
  • At the foot of Blair Arch, hold a pep rally at which the head coach and team captain make brief remarks.
  • Follow the anointed flarebearers to Cannon Green for ignition.

The last Bonfire occurred in 2006. Come on, Tigers, time to crush Yale!

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stacy Schiff spoke about her most recent book, Cleopatra: A Life, last Wednesday. The biography was a New York Times Book Review’s “Top 10 Books of the Year,” one of Time Magazine’s “Top Nonfiction Books” and one of The New Yorker’s “2010 Favorites.”

“As subjects go, they really don’t get much bigger than Cleopatra. She’s part of that exclusive club of historical figures whose names we all recognize but about whom we know virtually nothing,” Schiff explained. “What we do know about her is twisted beyond all recognition.”

Read more at The Princeton Packet.

Hey Princeton engineers! This one’s for you (for real)! The Times Higher Education has just released its list of the top 50 engineering schools, and guess what? Princeton ranked second – that is, second in the world – after the California Institute of Technology and ahead of MIT. #EQuadftw.

The rankings were based on “teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.” So I guess having a dining hall on the premises wasn’t a prerequisite. #Princetonengineeringstudentsproblems.

Nothing ever happens in Princeton? With the tale of the U-Store employee accused of engaging in prostitution after hours spreading like wildfire comes the release of the University’s annual security report. Here are some highlights:

There were 30 instances of “burglary,” 16 “forcible sex offenses,” one “aggravated assault,” four “drug abuse violation arrests,” and three cases of “illegal weapons possession judicial referrals” on the main campus in 2011.

Regarding the fire reports (in undergraduate and graduate buildings), there were 16 fires in 2011, some of which were “fires in a trash can” (3), “burnt food in a microwave” (3), and, my favorite, “paper towels in an oven” in Joline. Good thing there wasn’t a question about combustion on the Princeton college app…

In case you missed the last 5,000 emails about the football tailgate at Frist (um since when does a tailgate include an inflatable obstacle course?), the Princeton vs. Georgetown game was yesterday evening. Here are two videos from the halftime show (because we’re not so into the actual football part either).

Yes, the band did just make fun of Mitt Romney. I think they’re in the formation of a stick figure man. Hangman anyone?

And, of course, no halftime show is complete without “Call Me Maybe”:

 

Steve Carell speaks at Class Day 2012 (via nj.com)

Hey Princeton! In the past month, have you: (a) absentmindedly brought your prox with you to the kitchen, (b) asked a friend if a local bar was “on pass,” (c) craved freshly-baked cookies between 10 p.m. – 12:30 a.m., or (d) all of the above? Yeah, we miss the Orange Bubble, too. So for those who are desperate for some mid-summer news, we’ve got you covered. Beginning today, on Monday of every week, we’ll feature a roundup of Princeton-related news from the prior week, which will hopefully help get you through the next few months.

What’s going on this week? First, professor of politics and international affairs and former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School Anne-Marie Slaughter recently wrote an article titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” which has been blowing up the interwebs. It has attracted more visitors to The Atlantic’s website in a 24-hour period than any other story the magazine has ever published, according to the New Jersey Herald. The article details Slaughter’s struggles with balancing her high-powered career and motherhood. Writes Slaughter:

“I still strongly believe that women can ‘have it all’ (and that men can too). I believe that we can ‘have it all at the same time.’ But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured. My experiences over the past three years have forced me to confront a number of uncomfortable facts that need to be widely acknowledged—and quickly changed.”

In other faculty news, according to The Daily Princetonian, Brown University president Ruth Simmons will join Princeton’s Board of Trustees early next month. Simmons was a professor of Romance languages at Princeton in the 1980s and later served as a vice provost of the University. The Board of Trustees recently approved 26 other faculty appointments.

Members of the economics department have a reason to celebrate – University officials have submitted plans to the Princeton Borough Zoning Board of Adjustment for proposed renovations to 20 Washington Road, which is set to house the Department of Economics (as well as several international offices and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies). As a result, all of Princeton’s economists will be able to gather together in one place (and, you know, figure out how to get us out of this double-dip recession). The building used to be home to the Department of Chemistry. If everything goes as planned, the building will be completed by fall 2016.

On a different note, Hoagie Haven lovers listen up! According to nj.com, a new Subway shop is due to open just two doors down from the beloved haven of hoagies on Nassau Street. The sub vs. hoagie battle is on. Guess that just means you’ll have to eat more hoagies to prevent Subway from beating out the Haven…

If you are on campus currently, you may have the opportunity to see Tina Fey and Paul Rudd (@#*&!). The two will be filming scenes for the movie Admission near campus on July 2 and 3, borough administrator Robert Bruschi said. Speaking of comedians on campus, Steve Carell detailed his Class Day visit, among other things, when he appeared on The Today Show on June 18, which you can check out here.

That’s all for now! Check back next week – and every week this summer – for more dispatches from the Orange Bubble.

Preview weekend round 2 has now come and gone. Already forgotten how awesome it was? Here’s a video of the prefrosh exiting Richardson Auditorium at Alexander Beach (lesson number one, prefrosh: Alexander Beach is not an actual beach) Thursday afternoon. If you watch long enough, you can hear them blasting “Call Me Maybe” on the loudspeakers—nothing like a little Carly Rae Jepsen to welcome you to Princeton.

Hey Princeton! The prefrosh activities fair was hoppin’ on Friday afternoon. It was a sea of orange lanyards, Princeton drawstring backpacks (why didn’t we get those last year??), and, of course, the overwhelmed prefrosh. Oh, and a bunch of crazy people yelling at the prefrosh to join their club/activity/sports team/[insert group here].

Here are some DOs and DON’Ts, for both prefrosh from this past Preview weekend and those coming next weekend:

DO: Sign up for a lot of clubs you’re interested in.

DON’T: Sign up for every single club because you’ll regret the 5,000 emails later on (although you can always unsubscribe).

DO: Ask club members questions to find out more information about the club.

DON’T: Be overwhelmed when all the older students attack you so that you join their club. It’s Tiger love.

Activities Fair

DO: Keep an open mind. Always wanted to learn about hypnosis? Sign up for the Princeton Hypnosis Club (yes, this club really does exist).

DON’T: Belittle your abilities. If you like to sing but only your shower head recognizes your talent, please don’t be afraid to try out for an a cappella groups anyways.

DO: Stay on a club’s email listserv for a bit, even if you decide not to join that club. It’s always interesting to know what other clubs are up to, and you may change your mind about not joining.

DON’T: Be that kid who hits “Reply-All” saying, “Please remove me from the list.” Don’t do it.

DO: Sign up for the University Press Club.

DON’T: Not sign up for the University Press Club.

Spotted Friday afternoon: Princeton male students sporting blazers and khaki shorts while their female counterparts were clad in preppy sundresses. They were playing croquet near Dillon gym on the lawn outside some dorm rooms. And blasting classical music. While drinking. Another one of your What in the world?! musings of the day. It’s not Lawnparties yet, guys.

Cricket

Evidently this “polo and top-sider” prefrosh won’t feel out of place then. Here come the College Confidential posts…

Last week, we showed you pictures of admissions officers doling out the fate of thousands of high schoolers. But the admissions officers can’t rest just yet. Now, they’re busy getting ready for the arrival of the new Princeton young’uns at Preview in two weeks. Friday afternoon, they were spotted filming students in Forbes for their admissions video. And, well, it seems that they were desperate for student participants:

Admissions Vid

So much so that they came over to my table at lunch to beg us to be in their video. After the admissions officer introduced himself—“Have I bothered you guys yet? No? Okay, good”—he asked if we would move to the lobby to be filmed. When we all hesitated, he quickly responded with a, “Well, without my boss, Janet Rapelye, you guys wouldn’t be here.” True story. But did he just guilt-trip us? I think he did.

So, fair warning, you might find a camera in your face in the next few days. But, hey, it’s for a good cause: