2010. A year of the same old Princeton happenings–bitching about Dean’s Date, bitching about grade deflation, bitching about bad FML posts. But there were a few things that we think set Oh-Ten apart: Robot Unicorn Attack, Supreme Court dominance, and the demise of Four Loko.
Here’s what happened in 2010:
January: There were exams. There are always exams. For the four years you are at Princeton, you will never have a January that isn’t at least partly awful, on account of exams. However: Dean’s Date liveblog. —DCW
February: Chatroulette was just starting to become a campus phenomenon, and by phenomenon, we mean something that people would do at parties when they were drunk. In February, we brought you the story of three friends who ran into each other on Chatroulette–while 16,216 other users from around the world were also chatting and nexting each other. -AWAll month, we crossed our fingers and it happened: February 10th — Snow Day! With classes cancelled, Princetonians’ inner five-year-olds came out to play. The day unfolded like a story — like Beginner’s Reading story from Highlights For Children where nothing bad ever happens ever and instead the characters perform one wholesome recreational activity after another until it’s time to go home and get warm and Mom’s made hot chocolate with marshmallows oh yeah! It was simple. It was uncool. It was so, so wonderful. It was: Snowball fight in the Junior Slums! Quick now sled down Whitman Hill! Hide out in an igloo! Build a snowman on Alexander Beach! How could you not go to bed that night with a smile? — DCW
March:A monsoon hit campus over Spring Break, shutting down the Dinky and leaving some on campus without power. Nonie Darwish finally spoke on campus, after last year’s hullabaloo. The women’s basketball team became Ivy League champions. We uncovered the mystery of FML meme “Anna?” And most importantly, March marked the arrival of Robot Unicorn Attack. That’s all we’ll say about that. No link to the game in this post. It’s almost Dean’s Date. You don’t need that temptation. That’s for the liveblog. —AW
April: April is the cruelest month. It doesn’t take Eliot to figure that out, my sinuses conveyed the message just fine. Oh, as did several thousand high school students worldwide. But for those that did make the cut, there was plenty of fun to be had during prefrosh weekend, where they enjoyed the anomalously bad weather and practiced the fine art of stilted conversation. And yeah, they may not have picked up on this, but in lieu of the Deep Intellectual Conversations they had envisioned for their undergraduate years, they walked right into a robust discourse on bodily function — April had the dubious distinction of being the first-ever Excretory Month at The Ink. On a non-prefrosh, non-poop note, we did have some fun with music. The Roots swung by for a memorable Lawnparties, and Professor Paul Muldoon hit viral status with his stone-faced critique of Ke$ha lyrics, which reared its hilarious head on pretty much every internet web site ever. – GNGovernor Chris Christie announced that the price of NJ Transit train tickets would go up, starting May 1, and your escape to New York started costing $32, round-trip—about 50% more than it used to. And the fight over the dinky started to heat up. After the announcement in March that the dinky might be replaced with a bus, April saw Princeton students and residents raising their figurative pitchforks on Facebook, fighting to keep the dinky for financial, environmental and nostalgic reasons. (The controversy was finally put to bed in December with the announcement that the Dinky would not be replaced.) In other happenings, Princeton students had their first opportunity to fill out the census individually rather than as part of their families, and a fire started in Dod Hall when cigarette ashes were dumped in a trash can. —MG
Let’s end on a happier note: That month, we also almost got into a blog war with IvyGate, and taught you how to become a Supreme Court justice. —AW
May:So the end of the year rolled around, and we were like, aw, sad! And then Da’s Thai closed and we were like, oh that actually kind of really sucks. And then TV producers wanted to shoot a reality show about Princeton and we were like, this is the saddest thing, but why not try out for it? But then May decided to be nice, so Elena Kagan ’81 got Obama’s nomination to the Supreme Court, our Dean’s Date liveblog was better than ever, and, of course, alumni destroyed campus in the collective rage of Princeton reunions (which happened to be the hottest thing in the May issue of GQ). The cherries on top? One, Prez (but not a bro) Shirley Tilghman herself stared down the barrel of a Smirnoff Ice. Two, CDY and Jonathan Schwartz ’10 skipped the whole graduation thing and headed straight onto CBS’s The Amazing Race, giving us oh so much to write about for the following months. —WAS
Summer! I don’t know, what were you doing? —AWNothing ever happens in Princeton? Well, maybe, but alumni keep chugging along. For instance, Gen. David Petraeus *85 *87 took over U.S. forces in Afghanistan (fun!), Meg Whitman ’78 won the California Republican primary (premature celebration!), and Elena Kagan ’81 was confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court (hearings!). Also, some Some Dude, Princeton Class of 19??, claimed to be LeBron James’s dad. As per the usual summer news, undergraduate life was wholly unexciting, peaking perhaps when Yaro unveiled the new webmail client. …Awesome? —WAS
More terrifyingly for us undergrads, Kagan’s old History department thesis received a lot of scrutiny during her confirmation hearings, showing us that (gulp!) our work here might actually come back to haunt us in the real world. —JMB
September: Classes began, but more importantly, so did the Fall TV season. Usually I feel guilty for holing up in my room to watch hours upon hours of reality television — when I could be, you know, socializing with my peers and stuff — but this year two shows allowed me to get my fix in the company of some fellow Princetonians. September 8th saw the premiere of America’s Next Top Model, in which History major Jane Randall ’12 vied for a spread in Italian Vogue. And on September 26th, recent grads Connor Diemand-Yauman and Jonathan Schwartz ’10 set off on an Amazing Race around the world. Unfortunately, they flamed out just three episodes later. Jane stuck around, however, making Top Model’s final four – “personality” be damned. She then went on to reach even greater heights of fame and fortune in a series of Press Club YouTube videos. Team Nassoon hasn’t done so bad for themselves either: Connor’s in Seoul producing content for Korean PBS, while Jonathan gets to experience one of America’s most dynamic work environments as a cast member of the Spiderman musical. Hopefully 2011 will keep Princeton’s reality streak alive — fingers crossed for the Bad Girls Club! — DCW
October:For Tigers past and present, it was a month of epic highs and, well, some pretty dismal lows. While we undergrads were slaying the dragon better known as midterms, things started looking bad for California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman ’71. Whitman’s $162 million campaign set a self-financing record but it still wasn’t enough to beat rival Jerry Brown. To top things off, her son Griff Harsh ’09 was accused of covering up a rape allegation during his sophomore year at Princeton – not exactly ideal for mom’s campaign, or Princeton. On a brighter note, Mario Vargas Llosa, the 2010 Distinguished Visitor in Princeton’s Program in Latin American Studies, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In addition to author, journalist and critic he’s been a Peruvian presidential candidate and winner of a fistfight with rival author Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. Neither newfound celebrity status nor a “Kafkaesque” 5:30 am commute kept him from his classes on Borges and creative writing – now that’s dedication. -LEZIn perhaps less important, but more compelling (I think) news, Dan Feinberg ’13 got trapped between the stacks in Firestone, Star Wars style. —AW
November: We mourned the death of a favorite potent potable – Four Loko, how little we knew thee. Perhaps that was intentional on your part, you fickle mistress; your unique blend of 12% alcohol by volume and copious caffeine made it virtually impossible for one to remember anything ten minutes after polishing off a can (it’s ironic, perhaps, to write a remembrance of something whose primary goal seemed to be making its user forget). Your meteoric rise and subsequent fall has been well-chronicled (thanks ASG!); You were guzzled by rappers and Ivy League students alike. But while every Attorney General in America vilified you, we here in the journalistic community loved you because, like every craze to ever sweep the nation, you brought heretofore unseen linguistic versatility to the English language.
You were, of course, a noun: Four-Loko (n): A highly caffeinated malt liquor in a variety of fruit flavors. See Also: cocaine-in-a-can, Insta-Blackout
And an adjective:Lok’d (adj.): The state of being under the influence of Four-Loko, usually used as an euphoric exultation or a means of apology (sometimes simultaneously). Used in the expression, “Get lok’d and be someone!”, also known as the worst advice ever issued on Princeton campus.
And an adverb:Man, I was so lok’d up last night that I raged until 5 a.m., vomited on my roommate’s shoes, and missed my French exam this morning.
So the collective livers, GPAs, and legal records of Princeton students will be better for your demise. But we’d be lying if we said there wasn’t something bittersweet about seeing the biggest trend story of the year fade into oblivion. And until college kids start licking toads, or drinking mead ironically, or whatever the next crazy trend ends up being, know that there’s a 23.5 fl. oz., fruit-flavored, can-shaped hole in our hearts. —SKG
Hummus happened. The Princeton Committee on Palestine looks into Sabra hummus (late meal staple, sold at a C-Store near you) and argues that the chick pea dip is linked to human rights violations by the Israeli military. Tigers For Israel isn’t convinced, and the sparring begins. For a few weeks, our typically sedate campus erupted with petitions and editorials and USG referendums and appeals of USG referendums, and people were talking. The result of all that talking, for better or worse: Princeton got some heavy international media coverage. —GN
December: Ultimately the student body votes against the request for alternative brands of hummus, 1014 to 699, but PCP prez Yoel Bitran ’11 says it’s not over — he plans on taking the results to the administration as a “consumer survey.” In other words, November and December marked the most recent sightings of that rare flightless bird, Student activism, once rumored to be extinct but now confirmed as alive. – GN.In December, the university announced that Dean Malkiel, known to many students as the architect of Princeton’s grade deflation policy, will step down in July, and will be replaced by Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature Valerie Smith. We also introduced you to Rhodes scholars, Nick DiBerardino ’11 and Khameer Kidia ’11, and most importantly, batman at princeton.edu. And…ugh, it was so cold. And later, snowy. —AW