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Author Archives: Samantha Pergadia

On Jan. 12 Miriam Camara ’10 was surfing the Web when she stumbled upon news of the Haiti earthquake on Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell’s Twitter account. Although Camara was raised in New York, her mother is from Haiti and has strong ties to the many members of her family in Port-au-Prince. “I called my mother immediately and she was in tears,” Camara said.

Camara, who lost two uncles in the disaster, worked with two other Haitian-American students, Astrid Rousseau ’10 and Emmanuelle Pierre ’10, to help plan a series of campus activities in support of Haitian relief efforts. A bake sale in Frist Campus Center raised $1,200 in three days immediately following the earthquake, and fundraising by the Undergraduate Student Government to support Partners in Health reached nearly $8,000.

Read entire story here.

In a 2003 interview for the documentary Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without a Pause, Chomsky said: “I’m a boring speaker and I like it that way.” The swarm of people who flooded McCosh 50 (and the simulcast room in McCosh 46) to hear Chomsky speak tonight might attest to the contrary. During his speech entitled “I am Kinda: Reflections on the Culture of Imperialism” Chomsky ruminated on how the media “manufactures consent” and how historical memory is often lost.

Chomsky had a couple of things to say, however, about aspects of life that you might find especially pertinent:

On the intellectual: “ ‘Intellectual’ is the terminology we use about people with a certain amount of privilege, who write the history that is to be read.” So much for believing in the inherent worth of our ideas. It might be helpful to repeat this like a mantra as you crank out 80 pages of your “intellectual” thesis.

On your college debt: Chomsky said that the aftermath of the ‘60s left many worried about “unruly teenagers,” whom he believes were actually “civilizing the country.” Many spoke of the “excesses of democracy” and proposed  ways of subduing radicals and restoring the obedience of pre-war times. One such “disciplinary measure”: ensure that students come out of college with an enormous amount of debt. That’ll teach ‘em.

image source: image source: http://192.211.16.13/curricular/nchomsky/chomsky3.gif

Why would NYU students refer to him as a "self-important jackass"

We wonder why NYU students refer to him as a "self-important jackass"?

Have you ever spent shopping period class hopping (i.e. sitting in on multiple classes that occur simultaneously)?  One student at NYU’s Stern Business School employed such a strategy during their add/drop period to devastating ends. As he attempted to walk into the middle of Professor Scott Galloway’s course, he was kicked out and informed that late students were not permitted to enter. The student later emailed the professor, insisting that this policy was unfair. Here’s an excerpt from Professor Galloway’s response:

“Thanks for the feedback. I, too, would like to offer some feedback.

Just so I’ve got this straight…you started in one class, left 15-20 minutes into it (stood up, walked out mid-lecture), went to another class (walked in 20 minutes late), left that class (again, presumably, in the middle of the lecture), and then came to my class. At that point (walking in an hour late) I asked you to come to the next class which “bothered” you.

Correct?

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Although the free coffee and abundance of comfortable couch space hasn’t been enough to put Campus Club on your list of pre-class (or post-street) stops, here’s an announcement from the Taproom Café that just might change that:

FRESHLY BAKED CINNAMON ROLLS AND POPCORN!! Starting Monday at the Taproom Café (Campus Club Basement)

Mornings—Money to Friday 8:30-10:30am

Evenings—Sunday to Wednesday 8pm-12am

Thursday to Saturday—8pm-2am

Cinnamon Rolls 2 for $1

Popcorn just $1!!

Popcorn AND Cinnamon Rolls? From the infinite number of food items with which the Taproom Café could inaugurate its non-beverage menu, why would it choose these two? One is an offensively-sweet baked good from Sweden and the other is the most deformed species of corn invented as a gustatory antidote to the Great Depression. Maybe the popcorn-cinnamon roll combo will help us weather these difficult economic times.

sitney

“I came into this room yesterday and someone had been watching a movie. I imagine it was a Princeton student because of the eloquent words inscribed on the board. The comment was a short, 2-word Haiku: ‘Fuck Subtitles.’ ”

- P. Adams Sitney, Professor of Visual Arts

image source: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpd/Sabbat/2007/03.28-04.05.07CelebrationsAndPeople/P1100011.jpg

STsalingerWith the announcement of his death, fans of The Catcher in the Rye anxiously await the fate of J.D. Salinger’s literary estate. Firestone’s Department of Rare Books holds a small portion of the writer’s unpublished works:

The collection includes seven short stories from the 1940s, the most well-known of which is “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls.” Firestone’s unpublished, 18-page carbon copy of the original typescript is a story about the death of Kenneth Caulfield, who appears as Holden Caulfield’s brother Allie in The Catcher in the Rye. The files also contain 36 letters from Salinger and copies of letters to him, according to Don Skemer, curator of manuscripts with the Department of Rare Books.

Read more in PAW here.

image source: http://blahblahblahwriter.blogspot.com/

We dominate.

We dominate.

Yale has a few reasons to be ashamed of itself: We routinely beat them at the U.S. News and World Report game. Our application numbers soared this year while they saw 200 fewer suitors. Despite all this, there is one department in which Elis seem to be more…satisfied…than Princetonians.

It’s “Sex Week” at Yale, which means the Yale Daily News conducted and released a sex survey, pretty similar to the one The Daily Princetonian printed last month.

Let’s check the competition:

Percent of Men Who Claim to Have Had Sex:
Yale: 69.5%
Princeton: 62.4%

Percent of Women Who Claim to Have Had Sex:
Yale: 59.8%
Princeton: 51.0%

What could possibly account for Yale’s ability to beat us at this game? One Yale student says, “At the end of the day, you can get laid. … You’re not forced to see them on a daily basis so you can get away with it.” Is the problem just that Princeton is too small for this spirit of casual hookups to be acceptable? No. The problem must be deeper than that. Let’s look at some parallel discrepant figures:

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In his NYT blog column today, Economics Professor Uwe E. Reinhardt described what would happen if Princeton were run more like the current health care system. Reinhardt said that unlike the piece rate payment model of health care, which pays physicians for each unit of service provide, universities operate with prepaid packaged deals, where one annual tuition fee covers “all the pedagogic services going into the education of the student.” Here are some of the changes Princeton would undergo were it to operate less like prepaid H.M.O. plans and more like piece rate compensation plans of the our health care system:

  • Rented Office Space: Unlike our current inegalitarian system of delegating office space—which sticks assistant professors with offices in the bowels of McCosh, while proving tenured professors with pristine, wood-engraved fireplaces and windows overlooking the chapel—this system would allow all professors an equal opportunity for renting space from the university. They would use their spaces as the “their own profit centers,” finding ways to charge students for visits.
  • Senior Thesis Consultation Fee: That’s right. Under this new system, all those advisor meetings you’ve been delaying would cost between $150-300 (fee varies by student). Those office-hour visits you use to score points with preceptors would take on a different tone, as each visit sends home a bill to mom and dad.

Continue reading…

image source: http://blogs.edweek.org

image source: http://blogs.edweek.org

“When preceding a vowel, the Latin ‘i’ functions as a ‘y’ or ‘j,’ like in Jail…or Yale.”

–Robert Kaster, Professor of Classics

image source: wws.princeton.edu

image source: wws.princeton.edu

United States ambassador to Libya Gene Cretz said that “continued engagement with Libya is in our long-term national interest,” during an afternoon speech at the Woodrow Wilson School Dec. 4.

A unique aspect of the event was that it was streamed live to Tripoli, where students from six Libyan universities gathered at the U.S. embassy to watch the speech and participate in a question and answer session with the ambassador and with Princeton and Woodrow Wilson School students present in the audience. Showing their support for Princeton, the Libyan students wore orange and black lanyards around their necks.

“I thought it would be useful to take stock of our relationship and make the case, once again, about why continued engagement with Libya is in our long-term national interest,” Cretz said.

Read the entire story here.

image source: summer.about.com

image source: summer.about.com

Many Princeton students are dying to unravel the incestuous subtext of their favorite children’s stories. After SCORE opened to seniors this week, over 200 members of the class of 2010 signed up for ENG335: Children’s literature. Professor William Gleason has taken on this course, last taught in the fall of 2006 by Professor Emeritus Ulrich C. Knoepflmacher. As of now, there are 369—the sexual subtext of that number is curious, given the content of the course—upperclassmen signed up, making it the course with the highest enrollment so far (ITA319: The Literature of Gastronomy lags behind with an unremarkable 150 students). We expect many sophomores and freshmen will join the bandwagon next week. If the spring class is anything like its predecessor, it will corrupt the innocence of most classical children’s stories by positioning them as tales of incest, pedophilia, etc. One reviewer on Point said of the course, “The only drawback is that it could ruin some of your favorite childhood stories as apparently most of these tales are all about repressed incestuous desires.”

If this doesn’t concern you, join what is sure to be a major source of Princeton academic culture.

image source: dailyradar.com

image source: dailyradar.com

Have an insatiable desire for Robert Pattinson that you can’t express within the confines of Princeton’s academic setting? There’s no need to hide it anymore! Many Princeton professors are turning to mainstream movies, books, and music to create their syllabi.  Here’s a list of some spring semester highlights:

1) COM372: The Gothic Tradition

Interspersed with Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher are Stephanie Meyer’s Twlight and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. You’ll get to examine the “persistence in contemporary culture” of these popular vampire stories.

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