Solveig Lucia Gold

Tuesday

Solveig Lucia Gold

In Georgetown, the scariest part of Halloween is the virtue-signaling

Halloween has never been my favorite holiday, but as I was warned when we moved here last November, in Georgetown it is a serious affair. For the entire month of October, giant spiders scale the rowhouses, ghosts and cadavers dangle from trees, cackling animatronic witches guard the cemetery and the local bed and breakfast, parking spaces are “reserved” for ghostbusters and on every other block there’s a 12-foot-tall skeleton waiting to send my two-year-old into shrieks of delight. Then there are the pumpkins: every shape, size and color, stacked by the dozen in tasteful arrangements on every step of every stoop in town. How does everyone pull this off, I asked my real-estate agent, my one-stop source for all Georgetown-related trivia.

georgetown halloween

Monday

Solveig Lucia Gold

Plane stupidity: my waking flight-mare

The skies above the Atlantic As airplane doors and Boeing stock prices continue to fall, I think it’s time to tell the story of my iPhone and how it spent almost a week last October trapped inside the belly of a Boeing 767. A few hours into a United flight home from London, I was standing up to check on my then-five-month-old daughter, who was sleeping sweetly in the bassinet beside her father, when I felt my iPhone slip between the armrest and the window. It was still plugged into the outlet, so naturally I gave the charging cord a little tug, hoping to rescue the phone without incident. Instead, I felt it disconnect. No big deal, I thought. I scoured the area around my seat: no phone.

phone plane

Tuesday

Solveig Lucia Gold

Americans invade Cambridge

The University of Cambridge appointed a new vice-chancellor earlier this month: Deborah Prentice, the current provost of Princeton University. Prentice brings degrees from Yale and Stanford and thirty-four years at Princeton with her across the pond, but no experience of the United Kingdom, let alone of Cambridge. As both a Princetonian and a Cantabrigian, I’m here to tell you that this is not good. On the one hand, Cambridge can, perhaps, benefit from Prentice’s acquaintance with Princeton’s finances. As Malcolm Gladwell recently explained, with its $37.7 billion endowment, Princeton is the world’s first perpetual motion machine. Cambridge has over 500 years on Princeton, yet its endowment is a measly £3.6 billion.

cambridge

Monday

Solveig Lucia Gold

Cancel culture comes for Bachelor Nation

For 25 seasons, The Bachelor has marketed a fantasy: one man, 30 women, jetting around the globe on a ‘journey to find love’. The faces change, but the tropes remain: the picnics, the lingerie wrestling matches, the bungee-jumping that heavy-handedly symbolizes ‘falling’ in love. A girl who’s ‘not here to make friends’ steals the bachelor away one too many times and is designated the villain. A girl who’s ‘here for the right reasons’ tearfully tells the bachelor her traumatic past and is rewarded with a rose and fireworks. Finally, after eight weeks, the host Chris Harrison escorts one lucky lady down a long pathway to a dais of candles and flowers, where the bachelor gets down on one knee and proposes.

bachelor

Sunday

Solveig Lucia Gold

American Athens

I never understood why Plato wrote so harshly about democracy. Was he simply bitter over the death of his beloved mentor Socrates? And could his criticism of direct democracy in ancient Athens apply to a representative democracy like ours? Right now, the United States is looking increasingly Athenian. Plato characterized the birth of Athenian democracy as a rejection of expertise. The masses, previously content to defer to experts who knew what was good for the city, were led to believe that they could determine the good for themselves — and that the ‘good’ was whatever they subjectively found pleasurable.

athens

Wednesday

Solveig Lucia Gold

Ivies offer half-baked education at full sticker price

Princeton won’t be Princeton without anyone present, grumbled president Eisgruber, lying on the rug. Harvard and Princeton yesterday announced their plans for the 2020-21 academic year, and they don’t look good. Harvard will welcome ‘first-year students’ on campus in the fall and seniors in the spring; Princeton will welcome ‘first-year students’ and juniors in the fall and sophomores and seniors in the spring. (God forbid either university use the term ‘freshmen’.) Remote learning will be the norm and parties will be prohibited. Princeton, at least, offers a 10 percent tuition reduction. Harvard is increasing its tuition by 4 percent.

ivy league Harvard University

Sunday

Solveig Lucia Gold

It’s not about Woodrow Wilson. It’s about indoctrination

On November 18, 2015, a group of Princeton University undergraduates calling themselves the Black Justice League, or BJL, invaded historic Nassau Hall and occupied President Christopher Eisgruber’s office overnight, refusing to leave until Eisgruber had agreed to, and signed off on, their list of ‘demands’. Most famously, they demanded the purging of Woodrow Wilson’s name from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and from one of the residential colleges, Wilson College. At the time, Eisgruber promised to form committees to discuss the students’ demands; skillfully sidestepping the controversy. Today, however, nearly five years later, Eisgruber has announced that Wilson’s name is coming down.

woodrow wilson

Tuesday

Solveig Lucia Gold

Cotton, slaves and arrogance: the message of Gone with the Wind

In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times last week, filmmaker John Ridley urged HBO Max to remove Gone with the Wind from its platform. HBO Max capitulated right away, temporarily withdrawing the film until it can ‘return with a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement of [its racist] depictions’. As HBO weighs how to address what Ridley and others have described as the film’s romanticizing of slavery, I would encourage them to use the message of the movie itself as their guide.Gone with the Wind is about the perils of romanticizing. The movie begins with young men romanticizing the impending Civil War. ‘War! Isn’t it exciting, Scarlett?’ exclaims one of the Tarleton twins.

gone with the wind