Jack and/or Jill

This week, the Nass conducts a social experiment on BeReal, predicts the next 70 campus construction projects, and determines which famous philosophers are totally like 10/10 cuties.

The Nassau Weekly

I’m not a robot

70 of Princeton’s Next Big Construction Projects: A Nass List

By Staff

Designed by Vera Ebong

We Added 200 Strangers on BeReal, And We’re Never Opening the App Again

By Lucia Brown and Charlie Nuermberger

Designed by Helena Richardson

THE PHILOSOPHICAL FIVE (My Very Objective Opinion on the Best and Worst Philosophers of All Time)

By Lumepa-Rose Young

Designed by Lily Turri

On Fanning Flames and Drowning: A Reflection of Grief and Fury

By Isabella Clayton Designed by Pia Capili

On Fanning Flames and Drowning: A Reflection of Grief and Fury

By Mina Quesen Designed by

Tong Dai

Art and Cartoons

By Emma Mohrmann and Hazel Flaherty

Designed by Hazel Flaherty

Editors-in-Chief

Juju Lane Mina Quesen Publisher

Abigail Glickman

Alumni Liasion

Allie Matthias

Managing Editors

Sam Bisno Sierra Stern

Design Editor

Cathleen Weng Senior Editors

Lauren Aung Lara Katz

Junior Editors

Lucia Brown Kate Lee Anya Miller Charlie Nuermberger Alexandra Orbuch

Art Director Emma Mohrmann Assistant Art Director Hannah Mittleman

Assistant Design Editors

Vera Ebong Hazel Flaherty

Head Copy Editor

Andrew White Copy Editors

Bethany Villaruz Noori Zubieta David Edgemon Teo Grosu

Events Editor David Chmielewski

Audiovisual Editor

Christien Ayers Web Editor

Jane Castleman Social Chair Kristiana Filipov

Social Media Manager Ellie Diamond

On electromagnetism, bodies, and the nature of overthinking

Mon

This Week:

4:00p ZOOM Weekday Meditation

Tues Wed Thurs

All Day 185 Nassau

Fall 2022 Painting Classes Show

Thanksgiving Break

5:00p East Pyne

My Big Fat Interfaith Thanksgiving

All Day 185 Nassau Fall 2022 Fabric Logics: Textiles as Sculpture Show

Fri Sat Sun

Thanksgiving Break

Thanksgiving Break

Thanksgiving Break

Thanksgiving Break

Got Events? Email David Chmielewski at dc70@princeton.edu with your event and why it should be featured.

Verbatim:

Overheard at a pregame Whilewatchingsomeone singtoTaylorSwift: “You’re awakening my latent homosexuality.”

Overheard on a Sunday evening Atruefriend: “I feel like you sell yourself short in the Russian department.”

Overheard at RoMa Breakfast Gimmickyanthromajor: “And the whole epistemological gag of the thing is...”

Overheard at Terrace Simple-needssophomore: “My love language is simple. You should be fucking obsessed with me.”

Overheard near Frist Bro1: “I love to eat pussy.” Bro2: “I love the smell of laundry.”

Overheard during a visitation Uninvitedguest: “Your room is so not child-friendly.” Resident: “Are you a child?”

Overheard during a gay hangout Feminist: “And the best part is they literally objectify men!”

Overheard in Spelman Frequentlyverbatimedsenior: “How do you write that in a verbatim? Eye Contact, gay handsigns?”

Overheard on NJ Transit ChaoticSPIAmajor: “Gavin Newsom is so hot.” Concernedfriend: “Would you quit it with that? You need to go to therapy.”

Overheard while leaving Whitman dining hall Candidstudent: “Why would we go to the Whitman library? Do you hate joy?”

Overheard via text Recentgraduateaftermeeting withaPrincetoncareeradvisor: “I feel like she’s going to peel off her skin and reveal that she’s an alien who eats résumés for sustenance.”

Overheard on Nassau St. Wide-eyedjunior: “How do you buy sweatpants? Are they widely available?”

For advertisements, contact Abigail Glickman at alg4@princeton.edu.

Overheard at Terrace Determinedjunior: “I’m in a war of attrition with my Coffee Club crush. And I intend to win.”

Overheard at the architecture library Preppyarchitecturemajor: “So, are you interested in the architecture of—” Tiredclassmate: “Dude, I’m just trying to build some things.”

Overheard in common room Arealisticromantic reflectingonlong-distance relationships: “An hour is kind of far. I wouldn’t even settle for Forbes.”

Submit to Verbatim Email thenassauweekly@gmail.com

About us:

The Nassau Weekly is Princeton University’s weekly news magazine and features news, op-eds, reviews, fiction, poetry and art submitted by students. Nassau Weekly is part of Princeton Broadcasting Service, the student-run operator of WPRB FM, the oldest college FM station in the country. There is no formal membership of the Nassau Weekly and all are en couraged to attend meetings and submit their writing and art.

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We meet on Mondays and Thursdays at 5pm in Bloomberg 044!

70 OF PRINCETON’S NEXT BIG

CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS A

PRINCETON BUILDS:

A doomsday bunker, an embassy for Bumble ambassadors, a cold brew river, and 67 other projects.

By STAFF

NASS LIST

For months, Princeton University has been a frenzied hellscape of construction. (If we hear the godforsaken beeping sound of a truck backing up, we will lose our minds haha!) We hope you enjoy this list, from Nass staff and contributors, of the construction projects that might soon grace this campus.

1. A settlement of straw menstruation huts to cut back on costs.

2. The Enemy Center.

3. A literal pipeline between the Econ department and Goldman Sachs.

4. Another building named with a random number generator between 1900 and 2000.

5. A twenty-person suite called The Colossus.

6. Slot machines, with prizes including priority for making a CPS appoint ment, airpods, and a Patagonia jacket from eating club lost & found. Installed in an effort to get students off Twitter.

7. An entire res college for the 400 people on the football team.

8. A seven-lane parkway for electric scooters.

9. A new eating club just for people who have done Bridge Year.

10. An all-day cafe serving fourth-wave, single-origin, fruity light roasts, parsed-back, vegetable-forward small plates (there is one 40oz tomahawk steak per day for $430 though), and responsibly produced, bio-dynamic, oranges, pinks, and purples, with a retail space in the front for carefully considered, sustainable menswear, post-minimalist home goods, and selections from the baristas’ personal record collections.

11. An iron dome around campus to fend off attacks from alumni whose kids didn’t get in.

12. A museum documenting the construction of the new art museum.

13. An eco-friendly student-powered hamster wheel that recent humanities alums have to run on until they can find jobs that make more than 100K.

14. A doomsday bunker called “Last College”.

15. An embassy for Junbi and Bumble ambassadors.

16. A safe space for students to tell their fears and concerns to a hyperrealistic

bust of Jill Dolan that smiles and nods her head and occasionally says phrases like “campus community” “acknowledge” and “academic rigor”.

17. A wishing fountain that only accepts PawPoints instead of coins.

18. A competitor to the Bent Spoon called the Contorted Fork.

19. A nudist colony, built solely to ensure that pre-med students will ace their future anatomy classes.

20. A new D floor of Firestone containing nothing but thousands of copies of Jordan Salama’s book.

21. The chocolate river from Willy Wonka, but cold brew.

22. Garden Theater 2 but it only shows Marvel movies.

23. The removal of all barriers to Princeton, including but not limited to: sidewalk barriers, railings, and walls.

24. A slip ‘n’ slide on Washington Road.

25. New College South by Southwest, a forum for enterprising COS333 stu dents to market their products directly to venture capitalists.

26. A large egg in Cannon Green, to be worshiped daily—rumors say Eisgruber, impregnated by a divine spirit, laid it. Who knows what will hatch?

27. A new, second Hermès store to replace Murray-Dodge Café.

28. A real-life political echo chamber.

29. A third Whig-Clio building for students who are fiscally conservative and socially liberal.

30. The Mouth Of Hell.

31. A billboard spanning the entirety of McCosh Courtyard explaining Princeton’s commitment to minimizing construction-related inconvenience.

32. Mezzanine, balcony seating for Addy Common Room piano performances.

33. A permanent temporary housing site for students whose dorms are being built.

34. Crypto.com Arena.

35. An empty swimming pool to facilitate a cappella riff-offs.

We added 200 strangers on BeReal, and we’re never opening the app again…

“Hypothesis: people our age around the world are alone during a significant portion of their waking hours. And hypothetically, BeReal is the perfect observational device.”

By LUCIA BROWN AND CHARLIE NUERMBERGER

We had suspicions that this man was Natalie’s boyfriend on Day 4 of our observational study. It was a selfie of the two of them driving; the caption read “in a random man’s car.” The next morning, she was in bed with him, and on Day 7, they sat together on a city bus. They took their lunch break together on Day 9, in bed again on Day 13 when we became more confident of their relationship—and when Day 19 came around, he took up the whole frame. This is when we were sure.

We have never met Natalie, or her anonymized lover.

We accessed these dai ly glimpses of Natalie’s life through BeReal, a platform

that, once a day, notifies us ers that it’s “Time to BeReal.” Users then have two minutes to take their BeReal: a simul taneous photo, from the front and back cameras, of whatev er they are doing and whoever they are with. BeReal is adver tised as an authentic, refresh ing look into the lives of your close friends and family. But another, decidedly secondary tab, the “Discovery” feed, al lows users to see what strang ers around the world have post ed publicly. What was going on here? Who were these users interacting with? Why were they posting publicly, and what would we find if we just tried to add them?

On September 23, we sat down and staged the experi ment. This was the plan: ev ery day for twenty days, be tween September 24, 2022 and October 13, 2022, we would post BeReals and collect brief observations on the strangers on our feed. We would cre ate BeReal accounts with our faces in the profile photos, but we would generate fake names and usernames for rel ative anonymity: Sara McGuire (saramcguire11) and Matthew

Norris (matthewnorris11). We would both add 100 strang ers off of the “Discovery” tab. Ideally some strangers would add us back, ideally they would be from around the world, and ideally they would post con sistent and interesting con tent during the twenty days of observation. We hoped that around ten would accept our requests—we would then be able to view the strangers’ daily posts on our “My Friends” feed.

When a user posts a BeReal, they can choose to post it pri vately to their friends or pub licly to both the friend feed and the Discovery feed. Because the home feed is limited to the posts from a user’s friends within that day’s period, BeReal’s Discovery feed is the only place a user can engage with the app beyond their add ed friends, unlike Instagram’s almost-endless home feed and actually endless Discover feed.

The Discovery feed allegedly selects public users at random from around the world: tog gling over to the feed reveals us ers from Kentucky, Venezuela, and Serbia. This feature has largely been neglected by

essays on BeReal published by major media outlets, like the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, and Wired Magazine.

Through these strangers, we hoped to understand not just the social media habits of our generation, but also how every day users pushed against the expected uses of the app. How can we see how alone our gen eration is in the modern day, through a platform designed to present “authentic” life? How can we show how much the structure of BeReal as a social

media platform diverges from that of established platforms, like Instagram and Facebook? And what weirdness could we find by paying close atten tion to the app for twenty days straight?

Pivoting from using this app as it was designed and ad vertised—for close friends—to fit the experiment was strange and more difficult than we ex pected. On our preparatory Day 0, we already knew that we were fighting a losing bat tle against the platform if we tried to control our BeReals too much. Matthew’s loca tion was on for his first post; Sara’s first two takes had the school crest in them. We had both had personal accounts since January 2022, soon af ter the app became popular in the United States (though it was started in France in 2020). Most of our close friends used the app, and we would interact with them almost every single day through the platform. But these were our close friends. We knew that when strangers added us back—if they added

us back—we would still have to post content from our own lives to be able to see theirs. How would we set boundar ies? How was what we could expect of strangers intertwined with our own expectations for posting?

Based on our previous ex periences with the app, we set a few guidelines. We would try to post as naturally as possi ble, with whoever was around and consented to being in the BeReal, as close to on time as possible. We would try not to post anything from our envi ronment too explicitly univer sity-branded or identifiable. And we would not react to or comment on other posts. We did not want our posts to be distracting, and, at the same time, we wanted to maintain the authentic, “real” part of the BeReal user experience.

We hoped that by Day 1 of the experiment, September 24, at least ten people each would have accepted our friend re quests, giving us some con tent on the “Friends” feed. For some reason, strangers added

us back in surprising numbers: the Sara and Matthew accounts would have a combined 72 friends by the time the experi ment began.

Living with Strangers

On Day 1, Cooper is in a bright blue rain poncho at Niagara Falls—the only data point we have on him until he’s in a cab in Manhattan on Day 2, then at Wicked on Day 3, then eating pizza at a mural on Day 4, and finally, on Day 5, at home in Las Vegas.

Only twenty days before the experiment began, the official BeReal Twitter account post ed: “PSA: only add your close friends & family on BeReal.” And over the summer, there were tweets circulating that claimed high schoolers were trying to accumulate as many “RealMoji” reactions as possi ble on their posts. But while we observed high schooler users, many of the people who add ed us back were young adults:

THE PHILOSOPHICAL FIVE

“Also known as the father of all philosophy (daddy?) Socrates is the original playboy. Everyone, and I mean everyone, fangirls over him.”

By LUMEPA-ROSE YOUNG

(my very objective opinion on the best and worst philosophers of all time)

1. PARFIT

Attractiveness Scale: 10/10

• I mean... look at him, he’s gorgeous.

How likely is it that their work will make me cry: 3/10 (might tear up a little)

• When reading philo sophical essays, phi losophers have the ten dency to say a whole lot with only a little. Parfit, on the other hand, gives it to us straight. Some might think his lay man-like essays do not

make him worthy to be on the top of the list, but I say it’s a welcome reprieve from the usu al drab philosophical essays.

Notes

• Derek Antony Parfit is the best philosopher of all time. His hair is as beautiful as his philo sophical essays, and his smile is as radiant as his thoughts. Maybe it is his suave looks or maybe

it’s his charismatic aura (charisma is basically dripping off of him), but we can forget some of his more confusing essays in favor of watch ing his hair flow in the wind. Parfit’s essays are perfect for all who have an interest in delving into philosophy

2. PLATO

Attractiveness Scale: 4/10

• I would suggest he invests in some hair growth oil, or maybe at least a comb. Plato does get extra points for the cool pose (very philosopher-like).

How likely is it that their work will make me cry: 5/10 (quietly crying in Firestone)

• Crying in Firestone seems to be a rite of

passage for Princeton students so I won’t rate Plato too high on the likely-to-make-you-cry scale. But he will make you shed a few tears ev ery now and again.

Notes

• Though Plato might not be the best-looking lad, this Greek philosopher took the world by storm with his conception

of ethics. Plato always comes in clutch when it comes to making you re think your existence (in a good way).

3. SOCRATES

Attractiveness Scale: 4/10

• Socrates once said, “I cannot teach anyone, I can only make them think.” Yeah, he’ll make us think about if there is any possible way for us to go back to a time where we weren’t hav ing an existential crisis.

How likely is it that their work will make to me cry: 6/10 (might have to go the bathroom to cry)

• Socrates is funny

sometimes, but his hu morous quotes are not appreciated when it’s 2 a.m. and you’re trying to read his 300-page dissertation on why we should care about our soul.

Notes:

• Also known as the fa ther of all philosophy (daddy?), Socrates is the original playboy. Everyone, and I mean

everyone, fangirls over him. Why? Well, he ba sically thought of every philosophical theory known to man. Though he might confuse you now and again, you can’t really call yourself a philosopher without reading the classics.

4. DESCARTES

Attractiveness Scale: 6/10

• I know a few people who would kill to have his hair (maybe he used it to disguise his evilness). While I can’t say I’m a fan of his philosophy, I am a fan of the looks he’s serving.

How likely is it that their work will make me cry: 8/10 (sobbing *loudly*)

read Descartes.

Notes

5. HUME

Attractiveness Scale: 6/10

• He gets extra points for the outfit, but there is a cold dead look in his eyes that reflects his need to be the bane of every philosopher’s existence.

How likely is it that their work will make me cry: 100/10 (sobbing uncontrollably)

• This man seems to use the same three words to write a onethousand-word essay. Procrastinators should study this man’s work, he took the job of

reaching the word count to a whole new level.

Notes

• Though he might look innocent, David Hume’s philosophical essays are a quick way to get a good cry. Do you en joy the sounds of inno cents suffering? GREAT! Stop by any philosophy class on campus when we start talking about Hume.

• There are a number of ways to make your self cry, some watch sad movies, some listen to sad songs. Philosophy students

• If you enjoy being hap py… Descartes is not the way to go. His philoso phy not only makes you rethink your existence but also makes you wonder if existing real ly matters. His essays are enough to make the best of us cry. I think, therefore I am? More like he thinks, and we get confused.

FINAL THOUGHTS

While there have been many philosophers throughout time, these five definitely stand out. They’ll make you sob, mania cally laugh, and reconsider if you actually wanted to take a philosophy class. Take what you will from this list. Maybe some of you really enjoy being miserable (Socrates can help with that), or maybe some of you want to ask Parfit what con ditioner he uses, whatever you do, just don’t read Hume (I’m serious).

When reading the Nassau Week ly, Lumepa-Roes Young has the tendency to say a whole lot with only a little.

On electromagnetism, bodies, and the nature of overthinking

By ISABELLA CLAYTON

Sunset skies paint the white stones indigo. We lower ourselves to sit on the cool rock’s edge, and sharp crevices in the stone scrape at our tanned legs. Warmth rushes through us to hug the red marks left by these little cool blades. But this warmth is not our own. It is taken from the stone which wounds us. Our wounds hug this warmth; accepting it as apology; knowing warmth is the only way for wounds to become smooth skin. Each time we move to adjust, the silence between us a discomfort only motion can quell, we feel stinging heat, then refreshing cool. A thousand I’m sorry’s made manifest in hot, cold.

Hot, cold. Hot, cold.

I overthink when I’m with you and I usually only overthink about work. Maybe that’s why I defer to speaking about your hobbies, interests, daily activities. I come off as boring, asexual. I’m really just doing what I know; resigning myself to habit; talking about politics and childhood pets... Oh god.

My heart races. My mind stills. Words escape me. And they never escape me. Maybe it’s a sign, I tell myself. Don’t get too attached. Apology rises through throbbing legs, filling language-less throat, staying there. Because an apology requires a subject; because I’m still not sure who it’s for.

Hot, cold.

Hot, cold.

Hot, cold.

Water laps against the rocky sides below, spraying us with salty mist. We sit together, our two bodies close, but not touching. They say that opposites attract, but there is a void between us, a siren. It flags this small space between opposite ends of our dipole. Perhaps only I can hear this warning cry. It fills my head all the same. Not just here, on the purple stone, but when I see you in a café, or walking towards me on the sidewalk. When distance stands between us nerves percolate through my veins; avert my eyes from yours. I look down at my phone. I study my chipped green nail polish. I even bend down to tie my shoes. A bodiless voice tells me we are estranged, and my actions make it so that we are: they sever me from you, so that we are two bodies, marking the rock as a colon marks a page. A pause. An awaiting.

Hot, cold.

Hot, cold.

An especially large wave rolls in and suddenly I’m squeezing water out of my hair; he’s shaking it out of his. I smile when he smiles; laugh when he laughs. We’re always laughing, aren’t we?

The water enrobes us, presses us together like a period. A breath. We laugh and the rhythm of our laughter is the same. Words, growing out of the moisture of salty spray, nourished by the light of your laughter, fill my mouth once more. They fill the air. And you take them, replenishing mine with your own.

It’s funny how distance changes things between us, don’t you think? Reveals that perhaps we aren’t occupying oppo site poles, but the same pole. We are repulsed because we are the same; we are attracted because perhaps, we know that in sameness, there is understanding.

Isn’t there?

Your eyes drop to the water below. They’re glistening with excitement when you look at me again. We’re already wet. You smirk. Might as well…

Hot, cold.

It’s a far way down.

Hot, cold.

You’re standing up.

Hot, cold.

You glance back at me, wearing a grin so warm, so welcoming, it lifts me up.

My feet sting.

Your feet are in the air.

Distance grows, but this time, I’m not repulsed.

Sirens growing louder now.

You’re falling faster and faster. And I jump.

On Fanning Flames and Drowning: A Reflection of Grief and Fury

By MINA QUESEN

Recently, I’ve been knee-deep in the rela tionship between an ger and grief, in the way that they feed each other, and in the way it is so difficult to manage either one let alone both. I’ve walked alongside anger and grief not just this semester, but it seems for all of my young adult life. I did not have the language for it, the words to justify and advocate for it, until I came to Princeton. It’s iron ic that the institution which taught me the language of my inner turmoil also fu eled the need for such lan guage even more.

On November 7th, Judith Butler, renowned third-wave feminism theo rist, gave a guest lecture in McCosh 10: Fury and Justice

in the Humanities. They fo cused on the transition of the lawless Furies into the systematized Eumenides, and what it means for the Furies to settle into a new justice system. I’m not a classicist—and neither is Butler, to be frank, as they reminded the audience throughout the lecture— but I was struck by Butler’s connection between anger and grief. “Where there is fury, there is grief,” Butler said.

I was raptured by Butler’s discussion of this relation ship. And yet, despite this concept of fury and grief being what I thought was one of the most compelling points, I was disappointed that the idea seemed to die beyond the prepared pages of the lecture. Butler de flected a question asking them to elaborate more about the work of grief in their research. “I’m not the orizing about grief,” they said before proceeding to a tangential point in order to

“I cannot unlearn that my fury is not just something that sparked and never died. It is born out of mourning.”

seem “responsive.”

Despite this, my primary takeaway was in fact a theory about grief, and a theory about grief that goes beyond the Furies, one that bleeds into how I now seem to navigate everyday life.

I’m taking a class on Latinx autobiographies this semester. The works seem to have a common thread in which the authors channel an anger from their youth into a book in their adulthood. I don’t think their anger has simmered, it’s only become more artic ulate and more productive.

Anger is the song of marginalized communi ties. It is the chorus which raises voices and fights.

“To my sisters of Color who like me still tremble their rage under harness, or who sometimes question the expression of our rage as useless and dis ruptive (the two most popu lar accusations)—I want to speak about anger, my an ger, and what I have learned from my travels through its dominions,” Audre Lorde writes in her 1981 speech “The Uses of Anger.”

Anger is relatable. It’s a fire catching from person to person. And like Lorde I am so tired of muz zling it. But I cannot forget Butler, now, either. I can not unlearn that my fury is not just something that sparked and never died. It is born out of mourning.

“You can be anything you want to be,” if you’re a straight white boy with resources. A mixed,

low-income girl is being misled; she’s being told that hard work will solve everything, when in reality that mentality will lead to burnout sooner than any form of success.

Princeton was a dream, the dream. But that dream crumpled when my burn outs were answered with more work instead of space for healing, when my peers entered a never-ending period of grieving, when I struggled to justify how the institution viewed me.

I was left angry with the ad ministration, with a lack of action, with how little this institution seems to care about its students unless it comes back with a pretty check.

This campus is just a mi crocosm of the larger issue because leaving Princeton will not suddenly resolve my grief, quell my rage. As naive as it seems, I’m still grieving the world I thought I could dream.

I’ve reflected be fore on my expectations for Princeton, about the school I had imagined myself at tending. As a low-income, Latina-Asian woman, this school was originally an idea sprouted from an en couragement to dream big. I worked tirelessly in high school and even my burnout became systematic. Every fourth quarter, between the release of the last newspa per issue and the beginning of AP exams, I would fall ill with a stress fever. My body would collapse and force me to take a break, at least for a week.

When I first came

to Princeton, I genuinely thought my mental health had improved because I had lightened my list of re sponsibilities considerably.

I worked hard on saying no. The stress fevers stopped. All my interactions with ad ministrators and professors were kind, and perhaps it was because at the time I didn’t have any problems yet.

It’s when the problems arose that I was faced with bureaucratic systems, wild goose chases to find the right person to ask for help, and the ever-infuriating statements of “According to our policy” or “It’s out of my hands.” When I informed a dean that I needed to take a few days off due to a per sonal emergency and was returning home, the re sponse claimed my mental health was important, but my decision was inadvis able. I emailed back stating that my tickets were already purchased.

The school I imagined cared about intellectual curiosity, about exploring, about passion, about com munity. All these phrases are on recruitment mate rials. My imagined school exists on paper. My imag ined school was the school they wanted everyone else to imagine. But the school in reality cares more about returns and the future than the current population’s well-being.

During a commu nity reflection meeting in one of my extracurriculars, I started crying. We went around the table, and ev eryone was invited to say

anything that they wanted to put out into the commu nity. We’re a small group— nine students and three staff coordinators. I could have said anything, as if they had simply asked me how I was instead of what I wanted to put into the space. Instead, I fumbled over my anger and gave up after a couple of sentences. “I’d actually like to pass.”

For the next hour, I acted as a secretary, typing up notes of what my peers said as silent tears started falling onto my keyboard. I pre tended they weren’t there. So did everyone else.

In the moment, I was angry that I couldn’t even get a complete sen tence out to contribute, but

it was also one of the first signs that I hadn’t let myself feel grief. I wanted to build on a point that the school doesn’t show any empa thy, and I started by talking about how I felt when I first came to campus, but I shut up when I felt the tears well ing up.

There are so many levels of grief. I’ve lost family and a dear mentor this semes ter. But I also had assign ments due and midterms and the looming threat of doing nothing after gradu ation. It’s business as usu al on campus, so I bite my tongue, my exhaustion, and my grief and keep moving forward. Or at least, I do until suddenly I can’t even make it through a meeting

without crying. It’s not just people I mourn, but I’ve also realized a piece of it is mourning the school I thought I was attending freshman year, because that school surely would’ve realized I was drowning and pulled me up not down.

Near the end of their lec ture, Butler posed a ques tion about inclusion: “What society do we want to be in cluded in?” When it comes to Princeton, the university bears so many flags of DEI efforts and pitches “in clusion” as a buzzword to seem like an inviting space for marginalized students. For marketing purposes, to be “inclusive” is to seem ingly be politically correct, which means you get more donations. But inclusion is a tricky word. Butler agrees, as do many people of color I encounter. I didn’t quite understand it until the pro fessor of my night seminar right after the guest lec ture highlighted the prob lem with white feminism. Where white feminism strives to have women gain the same rights as a man in a patriarchal system, wom en of color feminism seeks more radical, systemic cri tique and change. Butler grappled with inclusion in a similar fashion, claiming that inclusion was in fact a form of inaction.

I work in worlds re-imag ined. I specialize in specu lative fiction because it provides the opportunities to use fiction as a mode to bust down systemic issues and rebuild with limitation. Fantasy and science fiction

taught me to dream, not to dissociate. The speculative doesn’t act to be included. It challenges you to imag ine what could be instead, to create that society that you want to be in.

At this point, I find it hard to imagine the society I want to be in. I find it hard to look past this cycle of grief and fury, grief and fury. The burn of Princeton’s reality still feels too raw, and I’m not excited for what comes next. I’m exhausted. I’m counting down the weeks until the semester is over, but I dread it too. The orange bubble isn’t isolated in the fact that

my mental health, that my peers’ mental health isn’t the priority.

For now, I’m giv ing myself the space to feel what I’m feeling. In my ex haustion, I go to bed earlier. I leave campus more fre quently. I take breaks. And in these spaces, I let myself grieve. I let myself be. But I won’t forget that anger. I can’t let it burn out. I let it fuel my writing and give it a life of its own. And soon I’ll let it fuel something more, and let it motivate me to build that better world. For now, I just need the space to mourn.

seem “responsive”.

70 OF PRINCETON’S NEXT BIG CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS

36. Not the Campus Club Coffee Club or the NCW location but a secret, third location that sells adderall-infused drinks. 37. Gender. 38. A modernist-style multi-story apartment complex for the campus fox and his friends and relations. 39. A collection of upright stones with no known purpose or significance. 40. A tightrope connecting Fine Hall and New South. 41. A comically large button next to Nassau Hall that instantly unsubscribes you from listservs. 42. An exact copy of Kwanza Jones Hall but with unstealable doors. 43. A New New South to accommodate the Campus’s changing center due to southward expansion.

44. An eerie, dark, gloomy addition to Chancellor Green donated by Princeton alumna Judy Moody ’81. 45. Hobson College. 46. A building made entirely of Dean Jill Dolan’s memos. 47. Building-to-tent conversion for all on-campus structures. 48. One singular COVID isolation room. 49. An official DMZ between Whig and Clio. 50. A big concrete cube. 51. An alumni welcome center that takes over all of the land on Poe Field. 52. The TigerBog, a swampeous mixture surrounding Cloister. 53. 20 more boba stores to reach 500% market saturation. 54. Prox checkpoints for all Nassau Street businesses.

CAUTION CAUTION CAUTION CAUTION CAUTION CAUTION

55. An arena for eating club presidents to fight to the death. 56. Several more of those multi-million-dollar pink banquet tables. 57. A cryogenic chamber to preserve Joseph Schein ‘37.

58. The removal of all pedestrian paths in preparation for a scooters-only campus.

59. A forcefield around campus to keep out all news of the outside world.

60. A dodecahedron-shaped monument to commemorate the 12-sided legacy of Woodrow Wilson.

61. A large painting of a tunnel on the side of Frist for cartoon characters to comically run into, thinking it is real.

62. Another grocery store five miles from campus with no public transportation to get there. 63. Paul Bunyan. 64. The replacement of all the gargoyles on campus with President Eisgruber’s face.

65. Conversion to a more eco-friendly vertical campus. 66. Replacing the paths with moving walkways FOR TOURS ONLY.

67. Cap & Gown 2: 2 Cap 2 Gown.

68. An immersive historical village for alums to relive their all-male, allwhite college experience. 69. A McDonald’s play pen. 70. Oil rigs.

working at Home Depot, the Port of Los Angeles, and Skooter’s Roadhouse: Bar and Grill.

BeReal is explicit about how they intend users to interact in the app. They expect that users only add close friends and fami ly, so that the intimacy of daily posts is limited to a specific set of individuals. BeReal distinguishes their app from platforms like Instagram and Facebook, by offering a fully authen tic, “real” user experience. What we gained from interact ing with these strangers was an understanding of the diverse landscape of users today— from middle schoolers to full adults, users were posting in timate glances into their every day lives.

The BeReal app description warns that the app won’t lead to fame: “If you want to become an influencer, you can stay on TikTok and Instagram.” So why were people adding us back?

If we operate under the as sumption that teenagers use social media to build social capital and establish social networks, BeReal does not

immediately fill this need. When the novelty of the app wears off, it becomes clear that BeReal is for maintain

Presenting it All

It’s Day 19, and Anna Jane is posting for the first time with another person. Her prior BeReals would feature (with surprising consistency) a New Mexican golf course, a smoothie shop, and a leath er couch—but never anoth er person. We call that “pre sentation of aloneness.” In this Day 19 BeReal, she pos es with a coworker at Foot Locker, and they are both smiling.

ing relationships, not for cre ating new ones—are the total strangers who added Sara and Matthew back challenging this expectation?

BeReal has no direct mes sage feature, as there is on most social media platforms; you cannot go through and “stalk” old posts; the Discovery tab is the only way to interact with strangers. After the exper iment, we reached out for com ment by posting a BeReal email address on Sara and Matthew’s accounts and asking people if they wanted to talk. We did not get any responses.

Loneliness, Aloneness, and

It seemed that, in our brief, initial forays through the Discovery tab, many users were totally alone. They were in bed, watch ing television, sitting behind screens blacked out by their hands. We first took pilot data of user aloneness by scrolling through ten accounts, then twenty, before realizing that a larger experiment could more clearly illustrate a pattern.

Hypothesis: people our age around the world are alone during a significant portion of their waking hours. And hypo thetically, BeReal is the per fect observational device. We could assemble a randomly selected group of observation al subjects from across the world. We could automatically receive data points from that

group at random times every day. And we could do this all anonymously.

In our day-to-day data col lection, we included whether users were alone or in the pres ence of other people. This pre liminary binary of alone/notalone, however, broke down very early in the observational period.

On Day 3, Paulo posts at a local restaurant in Belo

Quickly, we realized that our working definition of aloneness needed refining. Above all, we wanted to re main empirical. In an effort to avoid these judgment calls, we decided that we could not accurately gauge loneliness, so we opted instead to look at “presentation of aloneness”: if there were another person in the frame, we determined that the user was not present ing loneliness. Also, dogs do not count as people, but babies do. Paulo’s alone. Fernanda’s alone. Summer is not.

Focusing on presentation of aloneness likely deflates our numbers on loneliness. People who post in anonymous

with loneliness. We could add friends from all over the world to get a general, working sense of what social media habits looked like, without the lim its and biases of interacting just with users we know. But in the end, we might also have just been playing into the dis junction that emerges on every social media platform—in ob serving the individual, 72 ac counts, we were also avoiding understanding the networks that exist within the platform.

It’s Time to Be Real

“Te odio derecho económico”; “caminar para comprar agua”; “Troste troste troste.” Mathias

not, BeReal users presented aloneness. Of accounts that posted each day, an average of 56% of users presented alone ness. Generally, users were most alone on Wednesdays and least alone on Fridays. On Day 14, friends from Matthew’s account displayed their high est rate of aloneness (82%), but friends from Sara’s account displayed their lowest (39%). Data from both accounts float ed around this consistent av erage, but there were often erratic, outlying data points. It is important to note here that realistically, we cannot extrap olate this data to larger user trends. However, this data is useful for understanding a younger generation’s social

patterns through BeReal’s pur portedly more authentic lens.

BeReal doesn’t have much of an “algorithm,” at least not an explicit one. The platform recommends accounts from among your contacts, but their network-building capacity es sentially ends there. This mod el defies the way many other so cial media platforms operate.

In the New Yorker, Cal Newport uses the term “lega cy platforms” to describe so cial media institutions like Instagram and Facebook, plat forms girded by effective, resil ient “social graph” algorithms. These algorithms facilitate the gradual construction of net works of individuals at varying degrees of closeness with the user.

Newport argues that the rap id ascent of TikTok, a platform constructed on a disparate

ly, have eroded the durability of their “social graph” algo rithms. Newport is optimistic about this dynamism, writ ing, “The Internet at its best should be weird, energetic, and exciting.”

BeReal seems symptomatic of this broader Internet shift. The platform is weird and bold,

least “presenting aloneness,” more often than not.

A new sort of sociality, fa cilitated by social media, has emerged from this type of re lation. And this is the sociality that we inadvertently engaged in during our study.

Sophie Haigney introduc es her essay “BeReal Captures Our Nostalgia for a Time When Social Media was Boring,” by describing stills from her own feed: “In one, I might see a friend’s face, in miniature,

We were left wondering what the value of the platform is, how we would continue to challenge our consciousness in our own social media us age, and what else. What hap pens in the world beyond the

internal debate of what to watch next.” Noah has dyed his hair. Shawn hasn’t kicked marijuana yet. Drew has gotten the new job he had interviewed for on Day 18—he’s wearing a MEDIC hat inside of an ambulance. The oth er Drew finally has a coworker at Planet Fitness. Now that football season is over, Mia is cheerlead ing for the basketball team. And Liam is making a bold launch of a bright blue winter coat.

Disclaimer: all names have been changed for the privacy of the users.

When the novelty of Lucia Brown and Charlie Nuermberger wears off, it becomes clear that the Nassau Weekly is for maintain ing relationships, not for creating new ones

EMMA

MOHRMANN

“My Relationship With My Father”

I’ve been really interested in old postcards and translating the emotions I project onto them. I’ve been drawing these emotions that the writers tap into, and exploring how they reveal more about myself than the original strangers.