We all know the phrases “time flies when you’re having  fun” or “work doesn’t seem like work if you enjoy it.” So when Professor Amos said “this is not a vacation” when speaking of our time in Berlin and subtly reminding us of the goal to report and collect information for our sources, I was almost scared. Scared I was not doing enough, did not have enough interviews lined up, etc. However after conducting my first interview this morning, and throughout our eventful day, I am reflecting that our work can be fun.

My first full day in Berlin began on foot. Our spontaneous tour of the neighborhood (Mitte?) led us through the side streets toward Hackescher Markt. Between the cafés and graffiti-covered courtyards, I kept noticing small brass plaques set into the sidewalk. These are Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones,” each engraved with the name of a person deported or killed by the Nazis, placed in front of their last chosen home. Several were clustered outside a single doorway on one block. It struck me that in Berlin, remembrance isn’t confined to museums; it is literally underfoot, something you trip over on the way to get coffee. I am a history nerd, so that idea stayed with me as we headed to Bayer’s pharmaceutical campus for lunch.

Over a surprisingly elegant spread, Thore, the company’s historian and archivist, walked us through Bayer’s history, from aspirin to its place in today’s global market. When he reached the Nazi era, though, his account grew noticeably vague. He acknowledged that Bayer was folded into IG Farben, the chemical conglomerate that collaborated with the regime, but the details stayed abstract. What he did not dwell on is that IG Farben was among the largest corporate donors to the Nazi party, or that Degesch, a firm IG Farben subsidiary albeit through many other subsidiaries, produced the gas used in the gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The web of subsidiaries made it easy to keep Bayer at arm’s length from the worst of it, but I kept waiting for a direct and short: this is our history, we messed up, it was not that long ago but here is what we’ve done in those years to attempt to regain the trust of the public and those we’ve hurt, and, this is our business strategy now to ensure the strongest ethical standards today. But after seeing those stumbling stones that morning, the contrast felt sharp: the city names individual victims on its sidewalks, while the company’s own archivist seemed most comfortable speaking in terms of corporate structure.

I don’t think Thore was hiding anything outright. But I left wondering whether a company can truly reckon with its past when the person telling that history is also on its payroll.

The walk back to the train was bitterly cold, the kind of damp October wind that cuts straight through a jacket (and I thought I was prepared). Back near our hotel, I thawed out over coffee and a delectable vegan lemon couture with Marisa and Frances before we wandered the boutiques along Alte Schönhauser Straße. “Shopping” is generous; mostly we tried on coats we had no business buying. Still, the difference in quality from the fast fashion I’m used to back home was obvious. The wool was thicker, the seams cleaner, and everything seemed made to last more than a season, which perhaps explains the price tags.

Dinner was the highlight of the day. We took the S-Bahn, Berlin’s above-ground commuter rail, to a neighborhood in West Berlin, where we ate at a small Palestinian restaurant. The walls were covered in photos of activists and personal trinkets, my favorite the dinnerware with colorful patterns hung above Devonne’s head.  Our server, the owner’s son, was the kind of person who makes a whole table feel like regulars. He kept bringing dishes, encouraging us to save space for the seemingly infinite courses that still remained, and told us a bit about how his family started and now maintains the restaurant and the original recipes that came from his Grandma (or aunt?). Between plates of hummus, musakhan, and lemonade, he made it clear that this place was as much a community gathering spot as a business.

I look forward to speaking with him again. After a day spent thinking about how Berlin remembers the people it lost, it felt meaningful to end it with someone actively shaping the city’s present.

Eala’s rise draws a new Filipino audience to tennis

By Xavier Latimer

Filipinos who had never followed tennis are now buying tickets, streaming matches and signing their children up for lessons, a shift in the Philippines and across its diaspora that has followed almost entirely from the rise of 21-year-old Alexandra “Alex” Eala.

Before the Mubadala DC Open in August, nearly all of the tournament’s ticket requests were about Eala, its chairman, Mark Ein, said at the trophy ceremony, according to CNN. A one-set exhibition she played before the U.S. Open passed one million views on the tournament’s YouTube channel in less than a day, Tennis365 reported. In the Philippines, Decathlon told AFP that its sales of beginner racquets had risen 66 percent over the past year.

Eala was ranked 49th when she played the Australian Open in January and is now No. 18, the highest ranking ever held by a Filipino or Southeast Asian player. In July she beat defending champion Iga Swiatek on the way to the fourth round of Wimbledon, and in August she beat Jessica Pegula in the DC Open final to become the first Filipino to win a singles title on the WTA Tour. She reached the third round of the U.S. Open and won a bronze medal at the Asian Games in Japan on Oct. 1, an event she chose over the WTA’s China Open, a mandatory tournament, at the risk of a $10,000 fine.

At Home

Tennis has long been treated as a sport for the wealthy in the Philippines, where basketball and boxing draw most of the attention. The Philippine Tennis Association estimates there are fewer than 1,000 tennis courts in a country of about 116 million people, and AFP reported in August that parents were crowding their preschoolers onto the few that exist. The association’s executive director, Tonette Mendoza, told Front Office Sports that Eala’s results have made it easier to ask the government for money to build and refurbish tennis facilities.

Counting how many Filipinos watch at home is harder. WTA matches air in the Philippines on pay channels such as Premier Sports 2 through Cignal, and Spin.ph reported in March that informal Facebook livestreams, in which fans film a TV with a phone and collect small donations through the mobile wallet GCash, had multiplied around Eala’s matches to fill the gap. Much of her home audience never appears in official ratings. A clearer count may come Dec. 8, when she plays an exhibition at the 55,000-seat Philippine Arena. A full house would break the attendance record for a tennis match.

Abroad

More than 11 million Filipinos live overseas, and about 4.6 million people in the United States identify as Filipino, according to Pew Research Center’s analysis of Census Bureau data.

At the U.S. Open in September, thousands of Filipino fans filled Louis Armstrong Stadium for Eala’s first two matches, and the Associated Press reported that every seat at her practice court was taken hours before her opener, many by fans who did not have tickets to the evening session.

Jackie Chan, 46, who owns a hair salon in Queens, went to Eala’s second- and third-round matches with her parents, who moved to New York from Davao City around 1965 and had never followed tennis.

“It was amazing seeing how many Filipinos showed up,” Chan said. “You could feel the support throughout the stadium, and it made the match feel like more than just a tennis match.”

Eala lost in the third round to American Iva Jovic. “Seeing a Filipino player make it that far meant a lot to us,” Chan said. “My family will definitely keep following her.”

For some younger Filipino Americans, following Eala has become a way into the community as much as the sport. Nicolas Wright, 20, a sprinter at the University of Connecticut, started watching her at watch parties hosted by the Filipino student club on campus.

“I’m only half Filipino, but being involved with the Filipino club at UConn has helped me connect with that side of myself,” Wright said. His family now watches her together during big tournaments. “It’s something that gives us another reason to connect with our Filipino side.”

In Stockton, California, Eala’s following reaches back to one of the oldest Filipino American communities in the country. From the 1920s through the 1960s, the city’s Little Manila neighborhood held the largest Filipino population outside the Philippines, until most of it was torn down to build the Crosstown Freeway. Rhonda Ureta-Villalos, a fourth-generation Filipina American who has chaired the board of the preservation nonprofit Little Manila Rising since 2015, said her father, who was born in the Philippines, hears from relatives there that they have been watching more tennis because of Eala.

“Historically, I wouldn’t say tennis has occupied the same place in our community that basketball and some other sports have,” Ureta-Villalos said, pointing to the cost of equipment, courts and lessons.

“Our community has always had talent, ambition, and determination,” she said. “Seeing someone like Alex succeed helps make that visible to a much wider audience.”

What Comes Next?

Whether these new fans are following tennis or following Eala is still an open question, and her results have slipped since New York. She lost in Singapore to Tatiana Prozorova, ranked 180th, and in the Asian Games semifinals to China’s Wang Xiyu, ranked 85th, a loss that also cost her the automatic spot at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics that came with a gold medal. This week she lost her opening match at the Wuhan Open.

The tennis association is betting that the children now filling courts will keep playing either way. Mendoza said it is working with World Tennis to certify more coaches and is trying to bring tennis into the country’s public schools.

What stood out to me across these readings was how much depends on the word “remigration” and how differently it gets defined. The InfoMigrants explainer covers the AfD’s migration positions going into the February 2025 election, when delegates voted the term into the federal program. Officially it means deporting people with no right to stay, removing criminals, and sending refugees back once the reason they fled is gone, with Syrians given as the example. That reminded me of the Syrian doctors from our earlier reading, since it is the same argument about going home after Assad, now written into a party program. By the CNN piece in April 2026, the Saxony-Anhalt branch had built its manifesto around the word and extended it to Ukrainian refugees, and Ulrich Siegmund was telling delegates in Magdeburg, “We say yes to consistent deportations.” More and more I see similarities between this far-right movement in Germany and that of the MAGA movement in the US. I even recently saw a video interviewing AfD supporters at a rally in which multiple were donning MAGA paraphernalia.

The Courthouse News article was the most interesting to read in hindsight. Cain Burdeau describes the week in January 2025 when Friedrich Merz passed a non-binding migration motion with AfD votes and then lost the binding bill 350 to 338, after at least 12 members of his own party didn’t vote for it. The headline says the firewall held, though one of the political scientists he quotes says it fell. I found Benjamin Höhne’s point the most convincing, which is that dismantling the firewall ends up legitimizing the AfD’s positions on migration. On September 6 the AfD won 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt and 39 of 83 seats, three short of a majority. In Burdeau’s article the firewall is about whose votes Merz would accept, and in Magdeburg it is now what keeps the largest party in the state out of government.

The Economist piece complicated that picture for me. It starts in Gelsenkirchen, where the AfD took about 30 percent of the council vote in September 2025. But it argues that the AfD did slightly worse across North Rhine-Westphalia than in the federal election, that the party is much weaker in wealthier, graduate-heavy cities like Cologne and Münster, and that strong AfD results tend to mobilize its opponents. It predicted the party would lose its mayoral runoffs, and it lost all three. I think the argument still holds, because two weeks after Saxony-Anhalt, Berlin put Die Linke first with 25.7 percent.

I think this matters most for our trip to Berline. I expect people in Berlin to describe the city as the opposite of Saxony-Anhalt, and my nightlife story is partly a way of testing that, since Arab and Turkish men report being turned away at club doors regardless of who wins elections. I also noticed that Burdeau quotes politicians and two political scientists but nobody the bill would have applied to. I’d want to hear from someone with a migration background in Magdeburg about how the firewall looks from there.

The idea I’ve had since the start of the semester is Muslim Berliners and the city’s nightlife. Through the few weeks we have had together, the topic of migrants and navigating LGBTQ+ identities’ and spaces has been quite. Particularly as I think about this in the context of Berlin, the city is known as maintaining a strong queer community especially in its nightlife. Recent news gives multiple examples of evidence I can explore. For example, in July a van was driven into a crowd at the edge of the Pride parade, killing one woman and injuring 31, and the Interior Minister called it an Islamist attack. The parade’s organizers warned against using it to stir up hatred of Muslims, which tells me they expected that. Two days later Güner Balcı, the  integration officer of Berlin’s SE Neukölln borough, said on the radio that the district has had a massive problem with anti-gay attacks for years. So I can see how a club would say it is protecting the people inside, and how that could end up looking the same as profiling to the person in line. I want to know if anything changed at the door of these historically exclusive places pre and post migration waves of demographics that are not allowed to be openly gay, especially for queer Muslims and for Arab and Turkish men who were already getting turned away.

A bouncer’s decision doesn’t leave a record, so I’d probably have to stand in lines and talk to people. I grew up in New York and have some sense of how doors work, but I don’t know how to read one in Berlin yet. I’d start by contacting DJ Ipek, who founded Gayhane, a monthly queer Turkish and Arabic night that has run at SO36 in Kreuzberg since 1997, because the people around it would know both sides of this. I also plan to contact the Club Commission and ADNB, the Turkish Federation’s anti-discrimination network, which takes complaints about club doors and has used test visits to document discrimination.

My second idea is Turkish Berliners and the election. Die Linke won on September 20 with 25.7 percent, and its lead candidate, Elif Eralp, is the daughter of Turkish immigrants. If she finds coalition partners she would be the first head of Berlin’s government with a migration background. Her party has invited the Greens and SPD into exploratory talks, but the SPD is divided and the CDU could still govern with those same two parties. A Turkish broadcaster covered the result as a win for the Turkish-origin candidate, but post-election polling found that housing and social security drove the vote. I’d like to ask people in Kreuzberg or Wedding which of those it was for them, and whether it would matter to them if she ends up in opposition anyway. I’m especially interested in older guest workers who have lived there for decades and still can’t vote. The recruitment agreement with Turkey turns 65 on October 30, which could be a way into those conversations. Berlin also naturalized about 39,000 people last year, around 4,100 of them Turkish citizens, so there are first-time voters to find too.

I’m still most attached to the nightlife story, but it’s also the harder one to get people on the record for and the time commitment is a little different than a normal article’s reporting, so I want the election idea ready in case it doesn’t come together once we’re there.

When Jackie Chan’s parents moved from Davao City in the Philippines to New York around 1965, tennis was not a sport they followed. Earlier this month, they sat in the stands at the U.S. Open for the first time to watch Alexandra “Alex” Eala, the 21-year-old who has become the Philippines’ first major tennis star.

“It was a really special experience for our family,” said Chan, 46, a hair salon owner in Queens who went to Eala’s second- and third-round matches with her parents.

Eala’s season has drawn Filipinos to a sport many of them had never watched, both in the Philippines and among the roughly 10 million Filipinos living abroad. Her matches in Melbourne, Dubai and New York this year have filled with fans carrying Philippine flags, many of them overseas workers and immigrant families.

On Monday, Eala beat Thailand’s Patcharin Cheapchandej 6-1, 6-0 at the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan, to reach the quarterfinals. She chose to represent the Philippines there instead of playing the WTA’s China Open, a mandatory tournament, and could be fined up to $10,000 for skipping it.

Eala began the year ranked No. 53 in the world and has since climbed to No. 18. At Wimbledon in July, she beat defending champion Iga Swiatek to reach the fourth round. In August, she beat Jessica Pegula in the DC Open final and became the first Filipino to win a singles title on the WTA Tour.

At the U.S. Open, Eala reached the third round for the first time. Chan and her parents were in Louis Armstrong Stadium for her second-round win over Ukraine’s Oleksandra Oliynykova, when Filipino fans filled the stands with flags and chants.

“It was amazing seeing how many Filipinos showed up,” Chan said. “You could feel the support throughout the stadium, and it made the match feel like more than just a tennis match.”

Eala lost her next match to American Iva Jovic. Chan said her family was disappointed but still proud. “Seeing a Filipino player make it that far meant a lot to us,” she said. “Though this was my family’s first time really supporting tennis, [we] will definitely keep following her.”

Nicolas Wright, 20, a Filipino-American sprinter who runs the 60-meter dash for the University of Connecticut, had not watched much tennis before Eala. He started following her through watch parties hosted by a Filipino student club on campus.

“I’m only half Filipino, but being involved with the Filipino club at UConn has helped me connect with that side of myself,” Wright said. “Seeing Eala compete at that level made me proud.”

Wright said his family now watches her together when they can, especially during big tournaments. “It’s something that gives us another reason to connect with our Filipino side,” he said.

Eala faces Joanna Garland of Chinese Taipei in the Asian Games quarterfinals on Wednesday. The winner of the women’s singles event will earn a spot at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, provided she stays in the top 500 through June 2028.

Chan said she would go see Eala play again. “I hope she keeps improving and gets more experience playing against the best players,” she said. “I’d love to see her make another deep run at the U.S. Open and represent the Philippines at the Asian Games.”

During this week’s readings, I kept noticing how much someone’s life was dependent on the label they are assigned. Whether you’re a “vulnerable Afghan,” a deportee with a criminal record, or a Dublin case that belongs to Sweden decides almost everything that happens to you next, and it seemed like those labels were often settled before anyone took a close look at the actual person.

The Reuters numbers made this pretty concrete. Approval rates for Afghan asylum claims dropped from 74 percent in 2024 to 52 percent in early 2025, even though the government says it has no policy of cutting Afghan numbers. Lawyers told Reuters there’s an assumption that Sunni men aren’t really at risk under the Taliban, and a Berlin legal adviser said the outcome was “simply about luck.” That’s a hard thing to hear about a system that is supposed to assess each case individually. Meanwhile Kimia, the artist waiting in Islamabad, had her embassy interview cancelled with no explanation of when it might come back. She said her whole life comes down to that interview, and I believe her.

The Times piece on church asylum in Steglitz surprised me, mostly because of Pastor Martens. I went in expecting a progressive activist, and instead he’s someone with fairly conservative views on migration who has pushed back on the AfD trying to claim his work. Amir’s story also shows how the categories stack on top of each other. He lived in Sweden for ten years and worked as a nurse, then got swept up in a Swedish policy aimed at young Afghan men, and under EU rules Germany could send him right back there. What also stood out to me was how small the numbers are. There were fewer than 3,000 church asylum cases last year against roughly 250,000 applications, and yet it turned into a public fight between the mayors of Hamburg and Berlin. Since we’re going to Berlin, I’d be curious to see how people in that neighborhood actually feel about the church and what it’s doing.

Azmat Khan’s investigation felt like the odd one out at first, but I think it ties the rest together. So many of the deaths she documents came from the military seeing what it expected to see, like a family’s car read as a car bomb or a cotton gin read as an explosives factory. The Band-e-Timor section hit hardest for me, where young men who ran from raids to avoid being held for ransom were killed from the air as suspected Taliban. It made me think about how Germany’s resettlement program only existed because of the West’s twenty years in Afghanistan. I don’t see how that obligation just ends because the politics at home shifted.

Reading these side by side, I also noticed how differently the outlets handled the same policy. The Euronews piece mostly passed along what the Interior Ministry said and gave critics a sentence or two towards the end of the article, whereas Reuters and Politico built their stories around people on the ground like Kimia and Shakerah Baresh. Khan’s story came entirely from checking what the official government—in the case the Pentagon—records say.

All four of these articles cover about the same years, with two covering thhe same city, yet they do not sound like they are describing the same place. February, Ukraine and Germany sign a declaration at the Munich Security Conference to open a “Unity Hub” in Berlin — education, careers, help for people who want to go home — on top of the €20 billion Germany’s already spent and the 200,000 Ukrainians who found work through Jobturbo. Two months later Berlin’s own numbers come out: 77 assaults on asylum seekers and refugee housing in 2024, roughly double the year before, 34 people hospitalized, 16 of them women. Nationally, 218 politically motivated attacks on refugee shelters. Same city, same calendar year, two completely different welcomes that reflect the rising anti-migrant sentiment we touched on last class.

One thing I keep getting stuck on is the part of that gap that never produces a number. Berlin can count 34 hospitalizations because when someone is hospitalized that generates paperwork—a police report, a suspect, medical records. However this is only the floor not the ceiling.  This is partly influencing what I could choose for my final topic. Reading the German statistics they all seem to be built around events violent enough to be official, but if far-right violence is up 17 percent, what about the ordinary, unrecorded stuff underneath it? I don’t know how I would source that, but that was something going through my mind during these readings.

Professor’s Amos’s piece hit me differently. The detail that resonated the most with me was the commitment by  the judges, in their chambers during the day then a twelve-hour night shift on the Dnipro with a machine gun that, as Anton says, is “older than my grandma, but they still work.” I found it funny the Constitutional judge is the one with the power to mandate the others go home.  But at least they are getting paid for it now, up to $2,400 a month. That’s not heroism language, that’s HR language. Three and a half years in, shooting down drones has become a second job with a pay scale. Meanwhile the Reuters episode is off in the other direction entirely — swarms, fiberoptic drones, Ukraine as “a testing ground for the next generation of weaponry.” So you’ve got 1940s guns pointed at the most advanced weapons anyone’s built, and both things are true at the same moment on the same river. It is absolutely insane that in the early years of the war, I remember seeing videos of trench warfare with Russian waves close enough for bayonet combat. Now, videos of the drone warfare is showing a more human side: conscripts and criminals not even attempting to defend themselves against a Ukrainian drone.

It seems that the drone warfare switch is giving Ukraine an edge they did not have before. With Russian military now resorting to reporting false victories on the front-line, sometimes 10 to 15 to even 20 kilometers into proven Ukrainian territory. Just like with Germany, Russian state elections are influencing the politics on the ground. Cheapness is a major factor in allowing Ukrainian defense to go on indefinitely — and the longer it goes on, the longer Ukrainians stay in Berlin, and the more that second set of Berlin numbers matters. I’d like to know whether anyone at the Unity Hub is thinking on that timeline, or still treating this as temporary.

The readings for this week reminded of my own experience growing up in New York Cit. There’s a stretch of Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge where the signs are in Arabic and the bakery windows are stacked with trays of baklava. I spent a lot of my childhood on that block. Abu Sami, who ran the place, gave me free knafeh whenever my mother sent me for bread, and I knew in the vague way you know things at twelve that he had come from somewhere and that the somewhere had gone badly. I never asked. Not asking felt like manners. Reading Kingsley this week brought me back to those memories.

The detail that got me was the key. Hashem al-Souki leaves Damascus in April 2012 and all that’s left of his house is the key in his pocket, because the Syrian army blew up the door it opened. Kingsley drops it into a paragraph and keeps moving. A key is an object that assumes a future; you keep one because you expect to come back and use it. Hashem is carrying a promise the war already broke, and he carries it across the Mediterranean anyway, in a boat where everyone ends up covered in each other’s vomit.

Kingsley also wrecked a word I’ve used my whole life without examining. He notes that the 850,000 people who left Turkish shores in 2015 are about 0.2 percent of the EU’s population, and that Lebanon was then holding close to 1.2 million Syrians in a country of roughly 4.5 million — one in five people. The infrastructure genuinely buckling was never European. Nobody wrote about a Lebanese refugee crisis. This is very similar to the Bay Ridge neighborhood. Before Arabic signs it was traditional Chinese characters, before that Italian and Polish. But with each wave of migrants, the issue is never immirgation itself or the now established migrant populations inability to provide the say empathy they recieved, just a racial, religious, or other issue.  I’ve seen what that discrimination can do in my own communities, and reading the articles this week brought it back to meecause I watched New York run it a few years ago, when the story on the news was never really about the families arriving, it was about what their arrival was doing to us.

The Washington Post’s doctors are where I got uncomfortable in a way I’m still sitting with. Rania Kadib Alban named her children Stefan and Ella Sofie after reading about racism in the German workforce. My friend Yasmine was Jasmine from first grade through graduation, and at the time I thought that was just a thing, maybe even a smart thing. It never occurred to me that it was a fee. Alban also says doctors are a little safer because the German health system needs them, and then refuses the safety outright: if her family and friends can’t stay, she doesn’t want to either. She sees the bargain and says it out loud, which is more than anyone on my block ever did in front of me.

The New Arab piece strips the bargain of its manners. Jens Spahn floats chartered planes and 1,000 euros within about two days of Assad falling. Joachim Herrmann sorts Syrians into the superbly integrated, cordially welcome, and the ones without jobs, for whom return is suddenly “right.” Deservingness measured in labor. Which is why Yamn Molhem’s line stuck — Syrians don’t just sleep here — delivered from a restaurant on Sonnenallee, a street I have never seen but can picture exactly, because I grew up on its cousin, and because I grew up thinking that kind of self-defense was a success story.

Devon Williams Profile by Xavier Latimer

At just four years old, Devon Williams announced to her parents that she would attend Princeton. She had been watching a lot of Disney movies and concluded, from the name alone, that this is the place where one could find her prince. After falling in love with romance languages — she is now a Comparative Literature major in Spanish and Italian at Princeton — Williams maintains she has accomplished both goals.

She will joke about the prince — that is Francesco, her boyfriend. She will not joke about the languages. “I’m definitely the kind of person that is studying exactly what I want to be,” she said. “I don’t really care to study something just because it’ll make me more money.”

That conviction has cost her things. Before Princeton, Williams competed in Grand Prix show jumping with her horse Celine, at a level the University’s club program does not even touch. So she did not join. “I care more about my academics,” she said. “I’ll die on that hill.”

What she made room for instead was journalism, which she minors in and treats as an extension of the same work. Two summers ago, she reported in Italian alongside migrants on a University program in Pisa. This past summer she covered legislation at the state capital, where the range of bills forced a kind of serial expertise. “You kind of have to become an expert to be able to explain them to others,” she said. Then she spent her own money on Rome, Florence and Bologna, alone, and came home with friends.

Her friends describe someone who collects people at that speed by default. Yeonwoo Kook, who joined the Princeton Tiger Lilies a year behind Williams, said half her photographs from rehearsals show Williams embracing those around her, mid-song. Williams has a theory about why the group is close. “Singing psychologically makes you bond more quickly to people,” she said. During beach week, she stopped a screening of Hercules to argue the film is a retelling of the Gospels — a reading the room spent the rest of the movie testing.

Emma Cinocca, who met Williams studying abroad in Italy, offered three words: ambitious, bubbly, aesthete. “She’s a very ambitious and hardworking person, but she also doesn’t take life too seriously,” she said.

The seriousness surfaces around where she comes from. Williams grew up seven minutes from Stanford and describes the Bay Area now as billboards selling AI to AI companies above people sleeping on the street. Asked whether Princeton is its own bubble, she did not argue. “Most places of privilege, including Princeton, are going to be in a bubble.” Asked whether living inside one disqualified her from criticizing another, she said the opposite. “You have to be privileged, at least in some regard, to be able to change that privilege.”

Law school, journalism, or both. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said. “Just wait. I’ll fix it. Don’t worry about it.”

At just four years old, Devon Williams, announced to her parents that she would attend Princeton. She had been watching a lot of Disney movies and concluded, from the name alone, this is the place where one could find her prince. After falling in love with romance languages—she is now a Comparative Literature major in Spanish and Italian at Princeton—Devon maintains she has accomplished both goals.