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Vol. LXII, No. 14
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Wednesday, April 2, 2008
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Vol. LXII, No. 14
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Wednesday, April 2, 2008
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 (Photo by Matthew Hersh)
AN EYE ON THE FUTURE: Princeton Future hosted a discussion Saturday at the Princeton Public Library that focused largely on the prospect of municipal consolidation and the role of Princeton University in the greater community. There were, however, bread and butter issues like retail diversity and growth downtown that played a prominent role in the four-hour event. Contemplating the future are, clockwise from top left: Princeton University Vice President and Secretary Robert Durkee; Princeton Township residents Bill and Pam Wakefield; Princeton Future Council Chair Robert Geddes; and former Borough Mayor Marvin Reed. |
If you listened carefully to the wants of roughly 100 Princeton residents who showed up on a Saturday morning at the Princeton Public Library, here’s what you might have found: they want one Princeton, not two; they want a downtown that is small-business-friendly; they want growth, but not too much, or none at all; they want/don’t want Princeton University; they want a place in town to buy their underwear.
The Mercer County business community was offered a sobering assessment of the county- and state-wide business climate last week: all forecasts are calling for recession, job growth is weak, home prices are tumbling, and there’s a sense of fear on the street.
Between 200 and 250 Princeton High School students were expected to participate in a teach-in and march to the Princeton Regional School Board meeting on Monday to protest the two-day detentions they received as a result of the walkout they staged on March 19 to rally against the war in Iraq. In the end, only three PHS students, accompanied by two students from Rutgers, made an appearance.
The publication of Flatland: The Movie Edition, a companion volume to a new movie version of Edwin Abbott’s classic 1884 mathematical novel, served as the occasion for last week’s opening program in “Thinking Allowed,” a collaborative effort between Princeton University Press and the Princeton Public Library, featuring talks at the library by authors of newly-released PU Press books.
Chinua Achebe, often called the “father of African literature,” engaged a standing-room-only crowd at the Nassau Presbyterian Church last Wednesday in the culminating event of “Princeton Reads,” a month-long celebration of his book, Things Fall Apart.
Describing a memoir as the creating of a story that “must expand and accrue like an Alice Munro short story, a Hank Williams song, a poem by Langston Hughes, or a novel by Willa Cather,” writer Nicholas Dawidoff, this year’s Anschutz Distingished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton, recently spoke about the art of memoir-writing at the James. M. Stewart ’32 Theater. He called his talk “Next to Love is the Desire for Love: The Search for Meaning in American Memoir,” taking a line from a Wallace Stevens poem.