The audience for Samantha Power last Friday appeared to be the usual crowd for talks at Princeton: half students interested in the subject matter at hand, and half older townies getting a taste of culture. “War Crimes and Genocide Today: What Can One Person Do?” was hosted by the Woodrow Wilson School, and it showed in the composition of the crowd. The students had a confused, sympathetic mixture of careerism and noblesse oblige; one, after asking what she should do to prepare for her trip to Bosnia this summer (that’s right, she’s going to Bosnia, folks! Sniper fire!), was happily offered a card from the wife of a UN official. The older ones, on the other hand, had the weary, insecure but comfortable look of those inhabiting the many, multiplying rings of power just outside the one that matters. “What can one person do,” of course, is heard by all of these people as “What can I do?”—a question that, in its necessity and its limitations, cuts to the heart of what is both brilliant and unfortunate about Samantha Power.
What do you get when you take a group of gangly teenagers with teased-out hair and black eyeliner? Emo kids who let out their emotions through Good Charlotte? Well, yes – but that’s not all.
New Jersey dog owners and immigrant baiters breathed a sigh of relief last week as Congo the German shepherd dodged death. Less than 24 hours before his appeal was scheduled to be heard before Superior Court Judge Mitchel Ostrer, the pooch’s lawyer, Robert E. Lytle, cut a deal with prosecutor Doris Galuchie. As it turns out, the deal was quite a good one for Congo’s owners Guy and Elizabeth James–if by good, one means getting to keep with minimal penalties a violent dog one cannot control.
Q: How important is size really? for real? A: The answer would have been “not at all” until I personally experienced the magic of a throbbing 8-inch cock extending from the body of a crew-rowing Adonis with unrivaled stamina and cardiovascular ability.
Installation art evokes a cyclical arc of feelings: first, walking into a room of junk or seeing a bizarre box with a peephole: “This is retarded.” Then, once the initial assault wears off comes the feeling that maybe something complicated just happened. Depending on the particular piece, the final stage involves either the sense of satisfying complexity or the feeling that you have probably just seen another overly pretentious piece of modern art.
Whether or not we agree that the iPod somehow essentializes the twentyfirst century–an intriguing claim, if not intentionally exaggerated–the more general principle underlying that claim is reasonable enough: the idea that one might “read the state of the cultural spirit [Geist] off of the sundial of human technology.” (1)
I don’t really examine things too closely. Everything is not a work of art. I’m not like those academics, those writers that go along looking for the meaning of the world in everything that they find on the street.