By: Carina Fucich 

This week’s readings really gave me a varied view into both the experience of people dealing with the Syrian revolution, and the conflicts in Ukraine. I really appreciated how this weeks’ readings showed us perspectives through novels, articles, podcasts, and memoirs because I admittedly did not know much about these two revolutions previously. I thought that the articles showing how Syrians are being financially incentivized to leave Germany combined with the perspectives of Syrian doctors in Germany to be very interesting. When this is coupled with the memoirs of the experiences of these people during the revolution, I felt like I got a view into the tumultuous emotional pathways of Syrians who ended up in Germany. 

 Although I enjoyed all of the readings, I found the defiance reading to be the most interesting and eye opening. The imagery and details shown through the reading helped me really get into the head of the main character and get a glimpse into what it is like to live in Turkey during the revolution. Additionally, I thought discussions of mental health were very interesting. For example, when the main character showed up to work after sleeping in, it was an American who referred her to a mental health specialist. The main character then explains how she had never heard of anyone who sought mental health, and she immediately took offence to the suggestion, although she was evidently struggling with her mental health. Why was the person to suggest to her to seek mental health specifically identified as an American? Is the author biased in claiming that Americans are more forward with destigmatizing mental health? I am also interested in learning more about that American character and how they are portrayed. 

Additionally, I enjoyed reading about the main characters’ interactions with social media. I of course know the great impacts of social media and how prevalent it is in global conflicts currently. However, reading about how people reacted to the main character’s social media post was very eye opening. The global impacts and visibility to issues that social media no doubt offers is definitely shown here, but the passionate and angry comments were also shown to hurt the main character’s mental health even more. Is there a way that we can adjust how people interact with social media so that these stories can still be shared, while protecting the mental health of the users? By showing both the impacts in visibility from posting on social media, as well as the detriment to the main characters’ mental health, the author opens an interesting discussion surrounding social media. When arguing for the benefits of social media in conflicts like these, are we inherently overlooking the mental health of these individuals, and in doing so shortening them to insignificance?

A profile on Carina Fucich by Leila Leibert

When you have the opportunity to sit next to Carina Fucich, you can’t help notice her calm and attentive nature. Once you listen to her, you begin to better understand the history of restlessness and recovery that has shaped her.

Shifting her weight, crossing one leg, then uncrossing it the next minute, she maintained full attention throughout our interview. This was despite, her body negotiating a comfortable seating position with the park chair. Post-interview, when the lecture ended and we said our goodbyes, she didn’t linger. She grabbed her bike, secured her helmet, and was gone within seconds, pedaling off smiling and waving a friendly goodbye. 

It was a small moment, but it captured something her friend Rachel had told me. Fucich physically cannot sit still, “Her mental health and wellness fully depends on her ability to do some sort of active sport every single day.”It’s a rule Fucich has lived by for years. One that outlasted the sport that defined her very childhood and adolescence: soccer.

Watching her that afternoon, that claim didn’t feel like an exaggeration. If anything, it felt like a doctor’s diagnosis.

Soccer was less a hobby but more of an organizing principle throughout her childhood. It was something deeply rooted in Fucich, something that she thought about constantly, trained relentlessly for, and built her identity around. Another friend, Kyle, who met her only after she’d arrived at Princeton, remarked how “She would talk about how her practices went and stuff… how she wouldn’t have the chance to become as good as her soccer idols.”

A knee injury ended her dreams of going pro her senior year of high school. For a person who had built her sense of self around motion, the sudden stillness was its own kind of injury she had to battle. Her ambitions of becoming a D1 athlete naturally faded away and her focus became honed in on her immigrant parents objectives of academics over athletics. The daughter of a Maltanese immigrant mother and Croatian father, she described her upbringing was largely shaped by the “American Dream”, where academics were viewed as the surer path forward. 

Even that reinvention came with its own cost. Fucich tried to keep soccer alive in her life at Princeton by joining the club team as a freshman and got injured again. “It would have been easy for her to put soccer and the complexity of her injuries behind her,” her friend Sophia said, “but she put her passion and enthusiasm first.” The second injury arrived at a particularly hard moment being her first time living far from home, facing a recovery process she’d already been through once and had hoped never to repeat. “Not only was she a freshman at Princeton, but she also had to confront a daunting recovery process and the reality that she would lose her sport,” Sophia said. “However, her strength and humility triumphed once more.” This strength to bounce back was something that every friend of hers I interviewed brought to light. What stands out in the accounts of people who know her well is the fact that she still managed to shrink passions to a scale that her knees could tolerate.

What she rebuilt after the injury was the very infrastructure of a life that was never meant to be static or still. Her vision for her life is designed around being organized, deliberate, and constantly, staying in motion.

Whilst soccer gave her the structure to become a stellar athlete. Losing soccer taught her the habit of being dynamic.

In 2021, shortly after the last American plane left Kabul, I found myself working on a desolate stretch of New Mexico desert somewhere between Fort Bliss and White Sands Missile Range. Over ten thousand Afghan refugees were living in a temporary settlement that had been thrown up in just a few weeks. The area had until recently been used as a training range for artillery and small arms. Wind lifted the dusty ground and turned over scattered piles of spent ammunition. Hundreds of diesel generators roared day and night. Black Hawks tore low across the sky. The port-a-potties baked in the sun, overflowing into lagoons of waste that dried into twenty-foot wafers, and I wrote reports about it. 

We were instructed to only call them guests. Not refugees, or asylum seekers, or Afghans. 

Soldiers and contractors told me about the opium rings and the child marriages supposedly running in the tents, though nobody seemed to have actually witnessed any of it. Most of the guests had been doctors, lawyers, translators, government officials. Now, they were just foreigners in tents. Maybe the rumors made the conditions easier to stomach. 

In The New Arab’s article, the first talk of Syrians going home from Germany came within hours after Assad’s fall. Alice Weidel posted that anybody celebrating a free Syria on a street in Berlin “evidently no longer has a reason to flee.” Bavaria’s interior minister put it more graciously: the well-integrated remain welcome, while the rest should be helped back. 

Three months later, the Washington Post counted some 6,000 Syrian doctors propping up German hospitals, and the same ministry that had suspended asylum decisions was warning that whole areas of the health sector were dependent on these Syrians. 

Kingsley offers a more intimate and striking view of the machinery that refugees must navigate. The New Odyssey opens with Hashem al-Souki in a smuggler’s boat on the night of his son’s birthday, unable to see the people around him and able only to hear them.

Loubna Mrie ends up inside the machinery from the other side. Months after her mother is disappeared by her own father’s men, she is flown to a donor-funded “civil society workshop” in an Istanbul hotel. She realizes she was invited because she is Alawite — exactly what the donors wanted to see. She is not there to be taught. She is there as evidence that the intervention is working.

I wrote environmental inspection reports, and I understood who they were for. 

What happens to a refugee when the regime they fled is gone?

The fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 seems, at first glance, to transform the story of the millions of Syrians who fled to Europe. The political reason for their displacement has changed, and more than three million displaced Syrians have reportedly returned. Yet this week’s readings make clear that the end of Assad’s rule does not produce an uncomplicated “return home.”

Patrick Kingsley’s The New Odyssey emphasizes the extraordinary risks Syrians and other refugees took to reach Europe in the first place. They crossed seas in overcrowded boats because remaining home had become unbearable or dangerous. It set in motion years of adaptation. Refugees found employment, learned languages, built friendships, raised children, established professional identities, and became part of communities that had initially been imagined as temporary places of refuge. That history has been put in motion when European governments begin discussing whether Syrians should now go back. Return is not simply the reversal of migration. People have spent years establishing careers, relationships, communities, and identities elsewhere.

The reporting on Syrian doctors in Germany complicates the idea that refugees are people waiting to go home. Some Syrians have become part of German society while also contributing skills that Germany needs. Their presence and stories are about labor, citizenship, and belonging. At the same time, the readings about European attempts to encourage return reveal the political pressure placed on Syrians after Assad’s fall. A refugee can be welcomed when fleeing a dictatorship and then become politically inconvenient once that dictatorship disappears. Should political reasons supersede the societal reasons for refugees to stay?

Loubna Mrie’s Defiance adds another layer to this question. Her experience of Syria shows that “home” itself is complicated by political violence, identity, and memory. Returning to a country after years of displacement is therefore not necessarily a return to the place one remembers. The physical landscape may be familiar while the political and social meaning of home has fundamentally evolved.

What struck me most is how easily “the right to return” can become “the expectation to return.” Those are not the same thing. A person may finally have the possibility of returning without actually wanting to, or being able to, rebuild the life they had before. The end of a regime can remove one reason for displacement without erasing the consequences of displacement. As such, when governments begin to decide how populations should en route on their way home, it raises questions of whether return is possible given how embedded into the societal fabric refugees become in host countries. In this way, the host country, could or is in fact, become “home.”

That raises an uncomfortable question about who gets to define home. Is home the place where someone was born? The place they fled? The place where their family remains? Or the place where they have spent the last decade building a life?

Altogether, the stories seem less like a journey with a clear endpoint than the continued evolution of the question: after surviving exile, who gets to decide what home means? 

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.

The first secret Frances Brogan ever kept was that she could read. Her mother, Meagan, was reading aloud when three-year-old Frances interrupted and asked to read the next part. “I asked her, have you been reading for a long time?” Meagan recalled. “And she said yes, but she hadn’t told me because she was afraid I’d stop reading to her if I knew she could read by herself.”

Meagan’s proud stories of her daughter’s youth reveal an early fascination with social experiences and human connection. She laughed as she described how Frances began speaking before her peers. “She was this little tiny baby talking to people. She made the other babies cry, because she’d be like, ‘Hi! What’s your name?’ She was very intense.” At a year and a half, Frances realized that the other children on the playground wouldn’t respond to her insistent introductions, so she began approaching their parents instead. As a toddler, she asked her mother to draw family trees and friend trees, tracing out the invisible lines connecting the people around her. 

Today, Frances is in her final year at Princeton, her sights set on journalism once she graduates. She is managing editor of the Daily Princetonian; she reads New Yorker articles on the incline treadmill at the gym; she spent the past summer reporting on the ground in Palestine and Israel, despite her friends’ concerns for her safety. And in a rigorous environment where the academic and the social are often seen as separate or even at odds, Frances has cultivated an intellectual life that is fundamentally social. 

Frances’ friend Sofia, also a Princeton senior, said that their bond first solidified freshman year, during a coffee meetup that turned into an hours-long conversation. Anna Karenina, Sofia noted, was one of many topics they discussed. “Frances has a tendency of making friendships that way. She’s a good conversationalist. She has a way of asking questions and making you think deeply about things.”

Anna Karenina is one of Frances’ favorite books, an example of the sweeping epics that she gravitates toward, though she reads voraciously through everything she finds interesting. “She loves a meaty engagement,” Meagan said, “and then she loves to have someone to talk about it with. She’s a very intense conversationalist.” Frances, her mother said, is drawn to the emotional and social aspects of learning as much as the learning itself — like she did as a toddler, when she hid her ability to read for fear of losing out on the shared experience. 

From a young age, Frances took firm positions on causes from geopolitics to environmentalism to feminism. Her father was a professor and a Catholic, and they often found themselves on opposing sides of issues, engaging in heated debate over religion and morality. He passed away when Frances was 13. “It’s tragic that she lost her dad,” Meagan said, “but part of the tragedy is that they can’t continue that conversation. She has to do it in her head.” 

Whether in her head or with the people around her, Frances is continuing these conversations. “I care and think a lot about how to live an ethical life,” she said. “I can be an asshole, and I gossip, and I’ll be mean to my siblings — so I try to morally commit where I can.” 

Frances sees her mother as a defining role model — for her strength and resilience but also for her authenticity. Though Frances views herself as having “a pathologic need to be liked,” she admires how her mother never seems to code-switch or act like anyone other than her true self. Meagan recalled feeling similar when she was Frances’ age, struggling to know if she was being herself. But she has a different perspective on her daughter. “I don’t think she’s very good at contorting herself. I don’t think that’s a skill she’s ever developed, and I don’t think she ever will. She may not know it, but she is very authentic. I think that’s her lot in life — to be herself.”

It’s darkly humorous to want to keep only certain types of refugees. The German health care system being reliant on Syrian doctors staying, while pushing legislation to make Syrians leave Germany is reminiscent of my experiences in America. In conservative politics: there are the minorities that are ‘good’ or ‘serve an economic purpose’ and there are those that are demonized. In the New Arab article, I was struck by the descriptions of those who were able to successfully integrate into German society as “cordially welcome” while those who haven’t should be returned to Syria. 

The profile on four of the 6,000 Syrian doctors working in Germany was striking in their similarities: those with profound pride in their Syrian identity, making homemade flags and hoping to help rebuild his broken county in the post-Assad era, while continuing to serve the German healthcare system. Still, even in a post-Assad Syria, infrastructure remains bleak. The healthcare system is not as advanced as the German one, incentivizing Syrian doctors to continue to work in Germany, even in its less desirable and rural hospitals. 

The German government has been attempting to encourage voluntary return of Syrian asylum seekers and refugees to Syria, though despite Assad’s fall, 91% of a returnees to Syria arrived in community lacking essential services (New Arab). German society allows for this scale of hatred to be stated.

I was struck by the Washington Post’s feature of Rania Kadib Alban, a Syrian ENT who has integrated into German society. She describes that the quality of her German is now strong enough that a patient at her practice thought she was a “native-born local” before going on a rant against foreigners. Alban’s summary of this interaction as “‘funny, sad, racist’’ is accurate but chilling (Washington Post). Growing up in America, I am used to these “funny, sad, racist” interactions, though they are often less overt. I am shocked by the blatancy during in-person conversations in which Germans feel comfortable to voice their prejudices, especially considering their history. I am curious what this comfort stems from, and particularly, if it stems from the differences in German freedom of expression than the American freedom of expression allowances. I find this interesting largely because hate speech and insults are explicitly outlawed in Germany, whereas they are not in the US while German anti-immigrant sentiment appears incredibly vocal during in-person interactions such as this one with Alban.

There is also some level of saviorism amongst Europeans and the US that Mrie explores in Defiance despite those same anti-immigrant sentiments explored. One of those examples is the civil society workshop Mrie attended hosted by an Egyptian activist acting as though the an Alawite and a Kurd would be unable to split an orange equally or create a YouTube account (Mrie). Those moments reminded me of social justice fundraising initiatives that often go not directly to survivors or refugees, but towards broken systems or these sorts of westernizing workshops, in solving problems in ways that feel comfortable. Meanwhile, Syria still doesn’t have the proper infrastructure for refugees to repatriate, despite efforts of nations like Germany and Austria (InfoMigrants). 

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.”

One thing that struck me about the readings was the tendency for dictatorships to document their brutality. Kingsley, for instance, notes that a photographer codenamed Caesar (now known to us as Fareed al-Madhhan) was tasked by the government to take photos of victims in detention centers. This suggests a bureaucratic, even clinical approach to keeping track of brutality. Mrie, on the other hand, writes that government soldiers leaked videos of torture to “instill fear by showing us what awaits us inside detention centers if we dare to challenge the government.” Given this view, it seems that the documentation can be attributed to a feeling of being above the law — torture, and similar exercises of power, are trophies for the regime.

I also noticed in the readings the complex familial ties that factor into decisions about leaving and/or staying, and even whether to protest. Again, Mrie is a quite obvious example of this, wrestling with the decision to speak up or stay with her family, and then eventually grappling with guilt and anger over the news of her mother’s death. The Washington Post article explains that even for well-settled Syrian doctors in Germany, they’re torn between a desire to return to a potentially unstable home and a desire to stay — one of the interviewees, Rania Kadib Alban, points out that Syria is her home, but her children call Germany home. This, of course, hasn’t stopped politicians from being eager to stop incoming refugees and force current refugees who aren’t as integrated into the society out of Germany — it strikes me, as The New Arab piece writes, an “indecently hasty” policy proposal that would affect possibly hundreds of thousands of people. The recent victory by the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt will no doubt change the calculus for Syrians and other refugees, and I’d be curious to see how this story develops over time. 

A topic I’d like to learn more about is what Kingsley mentioned as “an organized system of mass resettlement,” a hypothetical solution that Kingsley says would have alleviated pressure on Europe’s infrastructure while also allowing humane treatment of refugees. I’d be curious to know more about the behind-the-scenes debates that politicians and policymakers had over how to address the influx of refugees, and I wonder what feasible (in hindsight) policy proposals might have been shot down due to political unpopularity. And, if the EU’s treatment of migrants and refugees should be considered generally a failure, what countries and policies can be held up as successes?

Finally, on the journalistic level, I thought the variety of approaches was quite fascinating. There were the pieces that leaned to “hard news” and analysis, like the Slate and The New Arab pieces, but I found myself most interested in the pieces of reportage that told stories through characters, especially Gopal’s book, which reminded me very much of the kinds of pieces The New Yorker publishes — character and quote driven, but with the journalist’s own observations playing an important driving force.

Christopher Bao profile of Xavier Latimer

When Xavier Latimer speaks about topics as diverse as his career aspirations (finance probably, but working as a pilot would be cool) or a superpower he wished he had (the ability to communicate with Princeton’s squirrels), he seems to have endless words. When someone is talkative during an interview, ready to spout off words with little prompting, it can sometimes be a sign that they just enjoy hearing their own voice. For Xavier, though, it’s as if his ideas couldn’t possibly be expressed in tight confines.

When I first started interviewing him, I was somewhat worried that Xavier would take some coaxing to start speaking. He seemed relaxed and mellow, content with being present and observing silently. Yet when he started talking, it took very little to get him to continue. At one point, he got into great detail about the tourists in New York, the city he calls home.

“They just walk slowly,” he said, mildly exasperated. “They’re just kind of walking around aimlessly.” 

While we chatted on the grass in front of Nassau Hall, Xavier kept smiling and waving at friends passing by. One of them was Ashlena Brown, a sophomore at Princeton who met Xavier when they participated in Princeton in Beijing together. She remembered her first impression of him as “laid back, nice, and open and friendly to a lot of people.” 

Later, when the two of them worked more closely together as Outdoor Action orientation leaders, she said that he was always willing to lend a hand to people: not because he had to, but because he wanted to build a human connection.

“He seemed very willing to be a friend and connect with a lot of different people, which was a bit surprising,” Ashlena said. “Not a lot of people are really like that.”

Xavier comes to Princeton from Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, around the corner from where Biggie Smalls grew up. His mom pushed both him and his younger brother (Xander — his parents went for alliteration) to have the best education possible, and so he eventually ended up at Regis High School, a competitive Catholic high school. 

“I always kind of had three different worlds.” Xavier told me. “[There are] my worlds at home, being Filipino, half-Asian, being Jamaican, half-Black, not being fully either one of those, and navigating that and also navigating school. I’m amongst some of my peers who, you know, use summer as a verb.” 

It was in high school that he met one of his closest friends, Ethan Klimczak, who now goes to Notre Dame. The two of them became close friends when they played on the basketball team together in the winter of their freshman year. 

One of Ethan’s first impressions of Xavier is that he’s “a genuinely happy kid,” he told me over Zoom. “I think positivity is infectious, and he certainly embodies that.”

The two often hung out at Ethan’s house, which was right next to their school. Ethan quickly found Xavier to also be honest and straightforward in conversation, whether they had them late at night before a basketball game or while riding Citi Bikes uptown. 

“He is someone who will tell you what he likes about you, and he will also tell you what he doesn’t like about you as well.” Ethan said. It takes a real friend, he thinks, “ to be able to tell you what they mean to you.” 

Yet Xavier, despite his “go with the flow” personality, is someone who is always up for a challenge. Ashlena noted that in Beijing, Xavier would “push himself to say more challenging things” and embrace language immersion. He’s currently preparing for the New York Marathon, which according to Ethan is borne out of a desire to do a “really hard thing this year.” 

He seems particularly drawn to trying things off the beaten path. He’s travelled to over 20 countries, but wants to go beyond, in his words, “the Parises, the Londons, the Madrids, the Romes.” He seemed to have endless ideas on how he wanted to spend his time, but he didn’t seem hassled or uncertain. 

“He always figures it out,” Ethan said. “There’s never a doubt that Xavier will figure it out.”