We asked members of the Class of 2024 to react to Jill Lepore’s "This America: The Case for the Nation," this year’s Pre-read selection. Here are their reflections.
Based on the seminal James Baldwin novel of the same name, Barry Jenkins’ “If Beale Street Could Talk” (2018) mesmerizes viewers with Jenkins’ Academy Award-winning directing, the actors’ poignant performances, and composer Nicholas Britells’ rich, melancholy score.
I had decided to sublet an apartment a mere five-minute walk away from the University of Chicago (UChicago) campus for the fall and live with a stranger, rather than stay at home in New York, a decision that often warranted some explaining. The short answer is that I wanted to spend time near my older sister, who’s currently living in Chicago.
Jamaica always seems to call me home — despite the fact that I haven’t actually been home since I had to flee two years ago.
“La La Land” is more than just its plot — Chazelle tells Mia and Sebastian’s story, with its themes of dreams, reality, relationships, facades, and sacrifice, by manipulating colors, lighting, camera direction, and music.
As the music industry slowly moves toward re-opening, violinist Nathan Meltzer and pianist Jun Cho appeared at Dreamstage (an online concert-streaming venue) on Oct. 4, playing a program of Ludwig van Beethoven, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Johannes Brahms, and Maurice Ravel.
Through illustration and prose, Wendy Ho reflects on the value of National Coming Out Day in 2020.
Growing up, writing was my haven. My friends teased me for carrying a marble notebook wherever I went, pages brimming with mediocre poems my 12-year-old mind thought Shakespearean. Words, I discovered, have the power to forge rivers, oceans, mountains. They immortalize the rise and fall of civilizations, etch our names in rock and dust.
Thanks to Spike Lee’s masterful directing, a bold screenplay, and an all-star cast, “BlacKkKlansman” combines absurdity, dark humor, and horror into a nuanced commentary on social issues through the true story of a Black police officer leading an undercover mission to infiltrate the country’s most notorious white supremacist organization.
It sounds strange when I explain it. Why Boston? Why these girls, who I barely knew before we signed the lease? I still have trouble picturing the series of events that led me here; the days after Princeton announced that fall semester would be online are a blur.
Whether you’re a die-hard makeup enthusiast or just someone interested in experimenting with their look, Prospect senior writer Megan Pan shares her tips and tricks for makeup designed for Zoom.
With all this rumbling in the back of my mind, throughout the past months I stumbled into a habit of trying to bring home the remaining things that make Princeton, well, Princeton.
We asked students to submit a picture of a place or person that was significant to them as a child and share what the subject's memory continues to mean to them.
Wendy Ho reflects on this unusual semester.
This summer I was fortunate to be supported by the John C. Bogle ’51 Fellowship in Civic Service to return home and assist Dr. Erika Kitzmiller with her research project, “Youth Inequality, Mobility, and Opportunity in Red and Blue America.” I took this valuable experience as an opportunity to explore the dissonance I felt while reading Vance’s memoir and reflect on my own experience growing up in Appalachia.
The future I see in front of me for the next couple months is the white wall that stands behind my desk as I write these words. It looks like my friends and classmates and professors confined to Zoom boxes. It looks like more time hundreds of miles away from the place I’d grown to love as my other home. This is all so different from the future I so wish lay ahead instead.
Many of us have decided to behave as if the pandemic is over, or at least less dangerous than before. But why?
Arriving home in March without a return date, I sought to reconnect with those I had lost touch with. In doing so, I learned what could have been and, more importantly, what Princeton has given me instead.
I thought I’d been careful, and indeed I had been — degrees more so than most, if not all, of my friends and family. Then came the email: my SARS-CoV-2 test, which I’d taken as a precaution before seeing my grandparents, and not at all because I was symptomatic, was positive.
Fall semester classes used to kick off on a Wednesday. A wake-up slap after the four-day fever dream known as Frosh Week. Yet it's a Monday — which should usher in some sense of normalcy, since Monday is the start of the typical work week. But come on, it's Princeton. We fly in the face of everything “normal.”
