Why were Americans not as outraged by the Charlie Hebdo shootings as were Europeans? If anything, the reaction in the U.S. has been strikingly muted. Here there were no mass demonstrations anywhere close to the scale of the Paris march where the absence of President Obama and other top-tier administration of officials was noted with dismay.
‘Pick you up tomorrow morning at 7 a.m.,” my friend says to me. I glance dubiously at my watch. That’s rush hour at my house.
“Okay,” she quickly adds, “make it 7-ish.”
"The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses."
With that opening sentence of Goodbye, Columbus, Philip Roth stepped into his writing career in 1959 at the age of 26. So it had the feeling of a bookend this past Friday night when, with the 81-year-old Roth sitting smiling in the audience, Meryl Streep walked onto the stage of Alexander Hall on the Princeton University campus.
Read April madness: The problem with American college admissions, originally published The Washington Post, Sunday Outlook, March 21, 2014.
by Pia de Jong and Lanny Jones
The guard in the kiosk raises the gate and waves the truck into a paved road winding through an expanse of snow-covered fields, ponds, and fountains that might as well be in a French country estate. But this is the corporate headquarters of Bristol-Myers Squibb on Route 206 in Lawrenceville. We park in a brick courtyard, almost a piazza, as smiling people carry out two dozen bags packed with cans and boxes of cereal, tomato sauce, meatballs, and all the canned delicacies prepared by Chef Boyardee.
“Princeton is in the at midlands of New Jersey, rising, a green Phoenix, out of the ugliest country in the world.”
That’s how F. Scott Fitzgerald described this university town in 1927.
In 1930, the British satirical magazine Punch published a cartoon of a boy, lying on his side on the lawn, reading a book on relativity. When asked where his sister is, he replies, “Somewhere in the absolute elsewhere.”
When I think about what I miss most about my native country, the short list starts at my kitchen table with two things: fresh-baked Dutch bread and its closest companion, Dutch cheese.
