This week: the birth of our nation and the validation of our physics. And a couple things of lesser gravity, too, like this picture of John Nash and Tina Fey chatting on Cannon Green.
Still unclear as to why our favorite game theorist is on the set -- could be a nice cameo, though. (image courtesy of the University's Facebook account)
And in case you were unsure, this useful website confirms your suspicions. We’ll be offering occasional dispatches on the insanity, as per usual. In mere hours, thousands of accomplished alums will return to campus to regress into some kind of animalistic state. Among those accomplished alums is Brooke Shields ’87, who is said to be returning for her 25th Reunion. And while we’re on the subject of famous people, non-alum Bon Jovi will perform at the 25th tent, according to several anonymous tipsters.
Coming to a beery, sweaty tent near you.
Maybe you’ve already heard about the record-low 7.86% admit rate out of 26,664 applications, but in this digital age you’ve probably forgotten that all 26,664 of those strivers still need to be notified by mail, by physical things made of out paper. Which makes for a lot of paper. Check out admissions folk loading all those fateful letters onto trucks outside West College today, circa 2 PM:
(image courtesy of Abby Klionsky '14)
I wonder what kind of letters they are holding, and whether they have adjusted their facial expressions accordingly.
(image courtesy of Abby Klionsky '14)
Generally looking pretty stolid — hard to read into the emotions. But my tentative guess is, from left to right, admit, reject, waitlist, waitlist, reject, reject, reject. More importantly, none of them look as gleefully sadistic as these guys. Best of luck to all those on the receiving end of these letters; you’ve still got a solid hour before you get to convulse in front of your computer screens (whether positively or negatively).
The highlight of tonight’s U-Store run was uncovering the following artifact from the future:
"Fettuccine Summer 2088," confoundingly, expires in early 2012
For a mere $3.99, D’Angelo’s offers you a taste of the late 21st century. Their distinctive medley of pasta, roasted peppers, and grilled chicken is prophesied to dominate Summer 2088. Perhaps I’ll enjoy some at my 75th Reunion.
But given the average American lifespan, you might not live to taste it again; this might be your only chance. Go get it before someone sprints out of a white DeLorean to reclaim it, or before that drunk dude haphazardly snags it while staggering past the refrigerated section, oblivious to the 76-year sneak preview he’s been granted.
Coming to an eating club near you
Good news for all of you who are 1) somewhat hiphop-inclined, and 2) looking for some hope to keep you afloat in these trying pre-Dean’s Date times. Madlib, one of the finest producers alive, will be performing at Terrace on Tuesday night. A Madlib beat is an odd specimen, radiating the hazy warmth of vinyl, constantly teetering on the verge of a groove before twitching and fracturing and meandering away to explore some other musical thought. He often eschews the typical hook-verse-hook template in favor of weirder, looser song structures, all the while sampling voraciously and multiculturally. Sometimes he raps, too. Maybe we’ll hear some of that at Terrace, but his beats alone will be more than enough to satisfy. Maddeningly prolific, he’s dropped tape after tape of instrumentals (see especially his jazz-inflected stuff), but he might be best known for his collaborations with rappers. Most recently with Freddie Gibbs, most mainstreamly with Mos Def, and probably best of all with MF Doom — their brainchild, Madvillainy, ranks among the top rap records of the last decade, and every time my stomach sinks with the dread of Tuesday 5 PM I just think about prospect of hearing some of those beats live. Hear the flute loop on this song and know that everything will be okay:
Opening acts Shigeto and Dabyre are sure to impress as well. Terrace sets are hard to predict, but I can’t imagine Madlib himself will go on anytime before 12:40 or so. Go listen.
NEWLY MINTED ‘PRINCE’ EDITOR-IN-CHIEF HENRY ROME ’13 RESENTS ELVES/PRINTERS, BRAVES BOMB THREATS FOR THE SAKE OF JOURNALISM, FEARS GETTING SCOOPED BY US
Name: Henry Rome
Age: 20
Major: Politics (Near Eastern Studies certificate)
Hometown: Strafford, PA
Eating Club/Residential College: Charter/Forbes College (both are worth the walk)
What was your initial reaction when you found out about the position?
Very excited and deeply honored. We have a great publication, and I look forward to leading our team forward over the next year.
Who’s your favorite Princetonian, living or dead, real or fictional?
Sam Seaborn from West Wing.
What’s the best meal you’ve eaten in Princeton?
Forbes always pulled off impressive holiday-themed dinners, and Charter pub nights. Grad College has pumpkin pie to die for.
In one sentence, what do you actually do all day?
Lots and lots of email, reading a lot of newspapers (yes, in print!), following the latest trends in terrorism/insurgency and domestic Iranian politics and watching crime shows (NCIS, Criminal Minds, CSI, Homeland). Also going to class and hanging with friends.
What is your greatest guilty pleasure?
Listening to my police scanner at odd hours of the night.
What are your plans for the Prince?
Many of my plans are behind-the-scenes changes to streamline paper operations and leverage the resources of our extremely-talented sections to put out the best paper and website possible. More broadly, I believe we have tremendous potential to fulfill our role on campus as a leader. To do that, we must focus on covering — and uncovering — the most current, compelling and controversial stories in the Princeton community and presenting those stories in new and creative ways, including special print and online packages, videos and graphics.
This feels strangely CGI
Ah, Whitman, the newest of them all, whose neo-Gothic arches and towers we owe to erstwhile eBay honcho/gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman ’77. From an aerial view, the college forms a “W”, said to be in her honor (definitely apocryphal). It’s no eyesore from the outside. Though Whitman does seem to be aping the time-earned classiness of, say, Rocky — it’s all like “hay look I’m 4 years old but I can be castle-y and majestic too” — it’s a pretty nice-looking crib overall. And there are some nice things on the inside, too. I’ll be quick to admit, the Whitman experience is an overwhelmingly positive one. But I’ve still got some pretty serious reservations about the place. It looks good on the surface, but under that perfect veneer there’s something’s just a little … off. If that’s cryptic, good — I’ll take you through the usual tour, and then I’ll explain myself more clearly when we get to the end, because, suspense, or something.
The résumé:
Laundry: Thanks to ridiculously generous laundry room distribution, no matter where you live the nearest washing machine won’t lie more than a hallway’s length away — you’ll be grateful that you don’t have to clamber up and down stairs with a hamperful of misery. But because of the easy access, these rooms are always busy, so to guarantee yourself an open machine you’ll often have to make the arduous (ok, elevator-assisted) trudge to the 1981 basement, where you’ll find a wondrous array of washers and dryers.
Kitchen: Like the laundry rooms, they’re sprinkled throughout, usually two to a floor, and they’ve got all the usual amenities: fridge, stove, oven, microwave, requisite filthy dishes, etc. Since they’re fairly cramped and devoid of any homey ambiance, the kitchens don’t make for particularly good study or social spaces — I never visited them except to raid someone’s fresh batch of cookies (note: easily sniffed out from afar). Be careful what you cook, though, because air circulation tends to, uh, share your creations with everyone in the vicinity. My freshman year, someone managed to stank up all four floors of 1981 with the thick reek of five-spice. This happened on a regular basis. I will never forgive you, O anonymous purveyor of Asian cuisine.
Computers: Printers on every floor is a godsend, but for usable computers you’ll have to venture to Whitman Library. (We’ll deal with that place in a second.)
More than a year after President Tilghman intimated the possibility of an full-on Greek ban, a few months after the residential and social life working group released their much-discussed report, and with the images of vigorous student/administration debate fresh in our collective memories, the U. has finally announced a policy change. It’s a two-pronged ban: freshman are forbidden from affiliating with Greek organizations, and members of the other three classes are forbidden from conducting rush for freshman. (Meanwhile, the university will continue to withhold official recognition of Greek organizations.) The ban goes into effect in fall 2012, so the upcoming school year will be business as usual. In a letter to returning students, Tilghman justified the decision as an attempt to recenter student life around the residential colleges, the Street, and the “shared experience of essentially all undergraduates living and dining on campus.”
Yet the most interesting ramification of this new policy — exactly how the administration plans to police something as wide-ranging and hazily defined as “rush” — remains to be seen. Later in the letter, Tilghman explained her intention to form a new committee this year, which will seek
to consult widely with interested students; to think carefully about precisely how the prohibition should be described and enforced, and about the penalties that would be imposed for infractions; and to bring forward its recommendations by early in the spring semester so they can be discussed by the broader University community prior to adoption.
The letter also manages to somewhat awkwardly shoehorn in details about an upcoming campus pub, which, although promising, is profoundly benign news, and probably the only one of the working group recommendations that could be deemed completely uncontroversial.
… so we’ll stick with the controversial stuff. To gauge the Greek response to this announcement, The Ink spoke to Jake Nebel ’13, one of the students most deeply (and publicly) involved in the Greek conversation with the adnimistration. A member of the AEPi fraternity, Nebel spearheaded the Princeton Greek Council and drafted a pro-Greek petition that gathered over 700 signatures.
Our friends at the Daily Princetonian provided an update on the Tony Kadyhrob saga: after incidents at several Mercer County campuses, the 68-year-old has been indicted on one count of second-degree attempted kidnapping and one count of third-degree luring. While many students might recognize the face, fewer are familiar with the peculiar tragedy of Mr. Kadyhrob, who suffers from schizophrenia and was overheard telling himself that he was a 21-year-old graduate of Princeton. No date has been set for the trial.
In an overzealous post-admission shopping spree, this was purchased
We’ll turn now to a less serious, much broader kind of identity crisis, one that has seized many students (or at least the internet-list-reading subset). The past week has given me pause, has forced a more careful interrogation of Princeton’s essence. What are the defining values of this school?* A year ago, you might have looked around and unwaveringly answered: our douchebaggery and our preppiness, celebrated both as discrete virtues, and also in their sublime union (see left; see also Lawnparties, the general phenomenon of).
This year, you might answer exactly the same way, because neither of those two values appears to have waned in the last year. But the public recognition of them has. Despite our prominent #3 ranking on GQ’s last “Douchiest Colleges” list, we are conspicuously absent from the 2011 edition. Ivy-wise, Princeton and Harvard have been supplanted by Cornell and Yale — which might itself call for some intra-Ivy douchiness, but I’ll let you fill those punchlines in yourself. Princeton did manage a tangential mention on Yale’s page, serving as the “robot” foil to their “passion.” (Incidentally this entire list is excerpted from the “groundbreaking new book” The Rogers & Littleton Guide to America’s Douchiest Colleges. It doesn’t take a Princeton douche to gawk at the fact that this book exists — maybe we lurk somewhere in its 176[!] pages.)
This news arrives just weeks after another surprising omission: Princeton was left out of The Huffington Post’s “Preppiest Schools” list. Last time we were represented by this somewhat cryptic tableau of not-particularly-preppy-looking silhouettes in a random Whitman arch, but this time, nothing. This is very unfortunate because I was looking forward to an even more confusingly irrelevant photo this year.
DID YOU READ…? YOUNG ALUMNI TRUSTEE AKU AMMAH-TAGOE ’11 TELLS US WHAT’S WRONG WITH PRINCETON, WROTE A KANYE-FUELED THESIS, IS AN “OLD PERSON”
Name: Aku Ammah-Tagoe
Age: 21
Major: English
Hometown: Silver Spring, MD
Eating Club/Residential College/Affiliation: Terrace/Forbes RCA
What was your initial reaction when you found out about your selection?
It was the Thursday morning of Reunions, and I was sitting on the Dinky platform at Princeton Junction as it slowly filled up with alumni getting off the train from New York. I wasn’t allowed to talk about the results yet, so I couldn’t do anything dramatic, but it was cool to sit there surrounded by so much of Princeton’s past and present, knowing that I’ll get to impact all of their lives now in tangible ways. At that point the election process had been going on for what, two and a half months? So I felt more relieved than anything else. But I definitely got excited as the weekend went on.
Who’s your favorite Princetonian, living or dead, real or fictional?
Adoley Ammah-Tagoe ’14, my little sister! She actually makes Princeton sparkle.
What’s the best meal you’ve eaten in Princeton?
Dinner at Prospect House at the English Majors Colloquium my junior spring. I don’t actually remember what we ate, but the Majors Colloquium is one of my favorite things about our department, and the company — juniors and seniors in the department, our favorite professors — was perfect.
In one sentence, what do you actually do all day?
Read and write (and read and write emails).
What is your greatest guilty pleasure?
Lately, one of my Pandora stations, TLC Radio. It’s so 90s! And you get a lot of girl power, “Independent Women Part I”-style songs that are ideal for, um, cruising through your childhood suburb in your parents’ Toyota.
What do you hope to accomplish as a YAT?
My two main constituencies — the residents of McCosh Hall and the Forbes Addition — have been asking a lot about renovation plans. But mostly I’d like to become the type of person who should hold Princeton in trust; I’d like to listen a lot, learn as much about the University as possible, and make informed decisions that are in its best interests.
A bit of shuffling over at the helm of The Daily Princetonian: Ameena Schelling ’12 was appointed the new editor-in-chief after Gabriel Debenedetti ’12 resigned for “personal reasons.” Schelling, who formerly served as managing editor, took over as per Prince bylaws, and she’ll hold the position until February 1.
Debenedetti declined to comment, citing the Prince policy that only the editor-in-chief is authorized to speak to the media; Schelling did not respond to requests for comment. In an email to the Prince staff, president of the Prince grad board Richard W. Thaler, Jr. noted that it was a “difficult decision” for Debenedetti, thanked him for his service, and summed it all up as “a painful moment for Gabe, a challenging moment for Ameena, and a hopeful moment for the Prince.”
This is known as "steeplechase."
Meanwhile, some more literal batons were being passed. While you were trolling Hulu or interning or exploring exotic locales on the Princeton dollar, a handful of your peers were running extremely quickly in Iowa. Donn Cabral ’12 and Ashley Higginson ’11 both notched top-10 finishes at the track and field NCAA Championships in Des Moines, and a total of 12 Tigers earned All-America honors. That includes the members of the 4×400 relay team, who were profiled in a fresh NYT piece a while back.
Last year, we tried to capture the aftermath of the P-rade in all its trashy resplendence, the empty husks of 30-racks, the crushed cans of Bud Light shining like so many diamonds. This year’s photographic evidence of Reunions excess comes from Whitman Library. We’ve already introduced you to the squalor of the thesis hermit, but this is, uh, something else. A Sunday morning tiptoe through Whitman Library revealed the following:
It’s a bad and blurry picture because I struggled to find an angle that could capture it all: more than 50 boxes of Old World Pizza, washed down by several dozen cups of beer in varying states of depletion.
