I began my readings with Loubna Mrie’s memoir, she had an emotional story to tell. Although she discussed being unable to come to terms with her mothers death, or face the reality of it, perhaps this memoir and reflection was a way of doing that.

I felt these chapters reflected a journalistic intent to investigate, particularly when attempting to track down her mother. Mrie reflects on calling anyone and everyone to find her mother, “I try reaching out to everyone I know who has worked for him,” (238) then proceeds to list all of the connections or connections to connections, it is frantic, it is honest and it is brutal. At the same time, the readers cling onto a hope that she will find her mother, we are safe behind the pages, we keep the faith that in a few pages time, Mrie and her mother will be reunited. But as Mrie eventually explains, “to see my own story unfold in the same space where I have shared the suffering of countless others,” (247) highlights a harsh truth – this was a sickening reality to exist in. One line which I felt particularly moved by was Mrie’s understanding of her mother’s disappearance as fragmented into two parts: “before my mother’s disappearance and after,” this is very much how grief feels. There is a life that exists before a loss, a life with the person – it looks different, more colourful, and then there’s the bleak and grey aftermath – it takes time to return to normalcy, but normal will never be the same again. Then she questions whether she is grieving correctly, unsure how to deal with it, reckoning with its unusualness. I feel that Mrie captures this unavoidable part of life so well but also so uniquely as she mentions at the end of chapter 21, that therapy is unheard of in her hometown.

For Anand Gopal’s, Days of Love and Rage, I had read the first few pages about Abdul Hadi Bisher’s dreams of becoming a footballer and thought it would be a sporting success story similar to the movie “The Swimmers” which I had watched with a full heart a few years ago. However, this one quickly became political, when Bashir fell-short of professional football and seemed to  channel his failed sporting passions into activism instead. Again I hoped that for this chapter, it would end in optimism, especially as Bashir’s parents philosophy endorses “the faith that everything will work out in the end.” Bashir’s efforts fail, and I don’t think we see the reconciliation we’d wanted but Bashir appears to learn a lot about himself.

With Patrick Kingsley’s The New Odyssey, the structure felt as though it began with a typical family introduction, and quickly evolved into a statistical and graphic recounting of all the different violent events that occurred in the detention centers. None of these readings hold back from being dysphemistic with descriptions of the torture and crimes to mankind that took place. It certainly gets to point across, it cannot be ignored when it’s staring us directly in the face.

Marisa Hirschfield is a musical comedy writer. She can easily make you cry, but would rather make you laugh. She hates self-definitions, still, she describes herself as a ‘character.’ “I hate thinking of who I am…but I love to narrativize my life.”
“She is effortlessly funny, and a great writing partner,” Mira Ho-Chen, Marisa’s co-head writer for the Princeton Triangle Club, a 135-year old musical comedy club at Princeton University, describes her. “She’s good in a room and good at making people feel thoughtful and valued. When she talks to people, it can look like she knows for years, but she had in reality just met them one minute prior.”
India Brown, one of Hirschfield’s closest friends, described Hirschfield endearingly. “She has a lot of intelligence and sophistication, is funny and down to earth, and is stupid in a good way, in an unpretentious way. She’s somebody you’d want to experience things with.”
Hirschfield illustrates her personality through a story about swimming in the ocean with a friend. Despite rough water and red-flag conditions, she was a strong swimmer. A lifeguard checked on her, and she waved him off, signaling she could swim fine. He misinterpreted the gesture, concluding that she was drowning despite her nonchalance.
“Two lifeguards on either arm began to non-consensually rescue me while everyone on the beach was applauding.” She insists she didn’t need the help and the entire time was so confused. The moment was humiliating, but Hirschfield believes it summarizes who she is, or at least how she views herself. “I love describing my life as funny and dramatic, it makes it more manageable and fun.”
Brown laughs when recounting Hirschfield’s unneeded rescue. “Marisa is a character, she is singular and unique and on her own plane of being. But that story with the lifeguards, I just laugh, because there are paradoxes to Marisa. She is very mature, but is also very fresh to the world. I think she’s very self aware of that fact, too. She aims to be so aware of the world, that there’s many things she’s completely unaware of. She’s aware on a cerebral level of so much, but not so much in her actions. With the lifeguards, how does that happen? There’s a certain passivity to her.”
Beyond her verbal wit and humor, Hirschfield brings physical comedy along the lines of a sitcom to daily life, largely through her obliviousness to routine chores. “She is very motivated to pursue her own ambitions and is unconcerned about small things that get in the way of that. She’s actually really terrible at menial tasks.” Brown recalls a dinner party at a friend’s house where they had to clean up afterward “as is was our duty”, and Hirschfield struggled with the basics. She would grab a single knife and placing it on the counter instead of in the sink instead of multiple plates. It stemmed from genuine confusion rather than a lack of willingness. “She excels at so many things, but simple chores…not so much.”
Still, Hirschfield is hardly detached from reality, approaching life and social justice with serious care. Growing up in a Jewish home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and attending a K-12 private school focused on ethical culture in the Bronx, she developed an acute awareness of her sheltered upbringing and a boundless curiosity about people from different backgrounds. “Since I was five years old, I have always believed one should work in the public interest.”
As a comedy writer, she harbors doubts about whether humor is an inherent force for good. “Comedy is helpful for a purpose of levity when the world feels serious. But in comedy, you can also be restricted to preaching to the choir. I don’t want to just tell feminist jokes in a room of feminists,” she explains.
In practice, however, Hirschfield does tell feminist jokes to feminist audiences and beyond since she founded a campus club called ‘Women Aren’t Funny.’ According to Ho-Chen, traditional writers’ rooms, including the Princeton Triangle Club, can sometimes skew male, leading to situations where men decide what is funny on their own. “The bigger comedy organizations skew more normative, so when Marisa pitched a really funny joke about Gloria Steinem, the women loved it, but the guys wouldn’t get it and would shut it down” Ho-Chen explained. “‘Women Aren’t Funny’ helps carve out space for women and other marginalized voices in comedy to produce headlines, stand-up shows, and short films.”
Ho-Chen reflects on her co-writer’s approach: “Jokes just come to her, and she is very dedicated to getting jokes right.” Hirschfield is indeed committed to the craft of comedy and is equally dedicated to creating space for others. She may struggle with washing knives, but Hirschfield is sharp enough to carve out a whole new space for comedy on her own terms.

The imagination of Devonne Piccaver, an eight-year-old girl who sought nothing less than becoming something, settled on earning the title of Olympian. As she claims, she would gladly suffer through “living in a crack house” just to achieve her goal, and demonstrated this tenacity during the summer she attended a rowing camp in Reading, UK. Devonne mustered through the visible, physical challenges of training, her hands blistered and torn, while she dealt with the invisible, emotional turmoil of isolation. She would return home to find the walls of her accommodations damp with mold, while her teammates had their laundry done for them. Devonne shared her teammates athletic privilege, but not their pedigree. For years, Devonne endured the enormous physical tax athletes pay, supported by people who encouraged her pursuits. Yet, after years of training toward that goal, Piccaver decided she didn’t want it anymore. 

Ellie, her older sister and close confidant, remembers Devonne as someone who organized all aspects of her life around getting what she wanted. When Piccaver desired to attend college in the United States, she structured her life around that goal. She sought out American rowing coaches at regattas and exchanged emails with them while studying for her A-level examinations. “No one else in our family had attempted anything quite like it [Princeton].” Devonne’s ambitions eventually settled on Princeton; however, regardless of any diligent effort put forth, matriculation failed to offer her the satisfaction she was yearning for. For someone already accustomed to effort yielding success, Princeton resurfaced a familiar feeling of being separated from her peers. This was heightened through, as a result of the technical differences of American rowing, left her moving between higher and lower boats. Devonne arrived at Princeton afraid she would not meet its standard and spent part of her freshman year considering whether she would return at all. Congruent with her personality, Devonne did not quit and, by senior year, continued rowing. 

Devonne’ tenacity proved her to become a leader on campus. She had manicured herself into someone approachable by becoming a community living adviser in Dod Hall. Her sister, Ellie, sees beyond this face. “I think she definitely puts on a face a lot of the time, to make everything seem great and okay, but a lot of the time she’s hiding things that are whirring round in her head.” Ellie wonders if the training, rigorous coursework and responsibilities that keep her sister constantly engaged provide a distraction from possible internal struggles. She does so by continuously striving to help others in need, show up for herself in daily discipline, and look for meaning in challenging situations.

Piccaver has shaped herself into someone deeply searching for meaning and depth. During the 2026 summer reporting migration in Greece, Devonne encountered the tangible discards of displaced people. She witnessed the torn rubber boats in the sand, wet clothes, and life jackets left along the coastline. This reinvigorated her pursuit for depth and meaning, and through Journalism, found became a vessel to channel her ambition. That eight-year-old who needed to become something now has the tools to become anything.

The Holocaust was at the forefront of my mind as I completed this week’s readings. Of course, no other atrocity in human history compares, but German callousness towards the survivors of a brutal dictatorship is particularly horrifying given the country’s own recent history. Anand Gopal’s account of Abdul Hadi and Oday finding each other in prison, for instance, felt reminiscent to me of the accounts of Holocaust victims who reunited with their friends in concentration camps. For me, these stories amplify the paradox of how Germany has effectively integrated Holocaust remembrance into its civic infrastructure while turning its back on the kinds of vulnerable people that it systematically annihilated only eighty years ago. The surge of anti-immigrant hostility seems to render those memorialization efforts shallow.

I was struck too by the irony of European countries demanding the departure of Syrian immigrants while also providing sanctuary (if inadvertently) to the war criminals who precipitated their pursuit of refuge. Austria harbored Khalidi al-Halabi for years, but is now pushing for Syrian immigrants to return to Syria. I was fascinated that Halabi’s violent techniques were in part inherited from Nazis like Brunner who found refuge in Damascus, exacerbating my disgust that the countries that helped create a legacy of destruction and persecution have no interest in alleviating that wrongdoing by accepting asylum seekers.

While the AfD’s xenophobic bellicosity is particularly pronounced, I encountered a theme throughout the readings of a veneer of politeness masking sinister immigration policies and prejudices in Germany and Austria. The New Arab article highlights how the German government has offered to charter planes for immigrants returning to Syria, reflecting a theme in right-wing politics of couching racist policies in spurious benevolence. For me, this recalled Gopal’s characterization of Aleppo under Assad: “Beneath the niceties of neighborhood hookah bars and sports clubs was the true order, a hidden order, which dictated every breath and every step a human being might take.” Although Germans aren’t subjugated by a despotic regime, the undercurrent of racism in German society reveals the fragility of the social fabric. For instance, the Syrian ENT featured in the Washington Post article who was mistaken for a native-born German by a racist patient railing against foreigners corroborates how seamlessly Syrian refugees have been integrated into German society. I wondered if this increases or mitigates calls for these immigrants to repatriate Syria; their natural incorporation into German society is likely alarming for racist Germans because it emphasizes the lack of innate differences between ethnicities, but as a group, Syrians seem to conform to “model minority” myths and offer Germany tangible benefits, making it difficult for even the most vehement racists to argue that Syrians are a drain on the social welfare system.

I was also intrigued by Kingsley’s interrogation of the framework of a “refugee crisis” in discussions of the influx of migrants to Europe. I had no idea that the developing world is home to 86% of refugees, because the word “crisis” is usually only applied to migration to Europe. This suggests that in the West, we think of the “crisis” as beleaguering not the migrants who have endured unimaginable suffering and left behind everything they know, but the European countries being asked to welcome them. No one is talking about a refugee crisis in Lebanon; instead, the country is implicitly blamed for its own struggles, reflecting a neocolonial mentality of the innate superiority of Western European countries. This made me contemplate the journalistic obligation to correct misleading narratives while preventing opinion from encroaching on our storytelling.

Leila Leibert embraces juxtaposition: Community college to the Ivy League, San Francisco to Hong Kong, mathematics to art history. This juxtaposition has allowed Leibert to view the world through a more holistic lens. “She is a maverick. She likes to try everything and go for everything,” said Manuel San Millan, Leibert’s boyfriend. Not only does Leibert try everything, but San Millan explains that Leibert puts her all into everything that she tries, making her a truly special person to be around. 

Leibert spent her first year out of high school at a community college near her hometown in San Francisco, California. It was there that she first embraced her varied interests and genuine desire to learn. “I had taken 120 units, which is almost four years worth of courses in a year and a half. So I was taking a lot of courses in many disciplines like art history, architecture and math,”  she explained. 

In community college, Leibert was immersed into a non-traditional college environment. “A lot of the students there came from all backgrounds, and all ages, so in a lot of my classes I was surrounded by adults and even people who were working full time or returning back to college to pursue their studies.” Despite these varied backgrounds, and having classmates who were only in college part time, Leibert fully immersed herself into her studies. She explained how she has never been a stickler for grades, and instead was always focused on taking classes she was interested in, and building relationships with professors.  

No one from Leibert’s community college has ever transferred to an Ivy League, and no one from Leibert’s high school’s graduating class went to an Ivy League. It was only through Leibert’s involvement in research that she was introduced to the opportunities available to apply to and attend an Ivy League. Evidently, Leibert was an anomaly and a trail blazer. 

However, being the first to do something is never without its struggles. Leibert had to grapple with how her old classmates and friends would perceive her move to an Ivy League. “I told no one I was applying, so I just kind of left and disappeared, because people already have preconceived notions about going to a school like Princeton.” Leibert was also worried about how her life would be at Princeton, and what it would be like to make new friends in a school where transferring is rare. “When I got in, I didn’t even pick up the phone call. I was a bit apprehensive about whether or not it was a mistake.” 

Although Leibert describes her first year at Princeton as “pretty rough,” she was able to hit her stride during her second year at Princeton and find great success. Leibert was able to leverage the strengths that she embodied in her academic curiosity while studying at a community college to find success at Princeton. Although her major, ORFE, is known to be a tough one, she really enjoys it because “you don’t need to specialize or feel confined to one specific field of study. ORFE is for generalists who love quantitative challenges,” she described. 

Just as would be expected from someone with such diverse interests and backgrounds, you cannot put Leibert in a box. She has since lived in Hong Kong, Wyoming, and Los Angeles, pursuing research related to ORFE and beyond. “Leila is very difficult to describe in words, there is a certain energy about her – very warm and positive, and everyone feels very heard when talking to her,” said Leibert’s friend from Princeton, Isabelle Tseng. Tseng also explains that Leibert has the extra enrichment of being on another college campus and is very open minded.

Although it wasn’t easy for Lubert to take the jump into attending an Ivy League, she was able to leave her mark on the people she left behind in California, as well as inspire those that she met at Princeton. There is a portrait of Leibert hanging proudly in her community college, displaying her name, major, and education at Princeton. “Whatever she does, she cares about it very deeply. Anything from horses to sailing, or interior design, she loves to talk about it and immerse herself in it,” San Millan said. “She is the whole package,” said Tseng. “Talking to her is like a warm ray of sunshine.”

By: Carina Fucich

The youngest-ever Princeton student is notorious for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Aaron Burr was thirteen years old when he matriculated. He went on to become a Revolutionary War hero, Senator, and Vice President. But he died destitute and forgotten, perhaps a victim, like generations of Princeton alumni to follow, of gifted-kid burnout. 

In the intervening years, Princeton has been reluctant to admit child prodigies. Jasper Gebhardt, however, was only fifteen when he arrived at Old Nassau from Ione, California, a rural hamlet founded by his grandfather, to study mechanical engineering. “There was so little to do around me that I had to find and create my own things to do,” he said. “At a certain point, this accumulated into a resume.”

Homeschooled and without siblings, Jasper’s was a lonely childhood, saved from drudgery by his ravenous appetite for the way things work. Like the plucky protagonist of a children’s novel, he read every book in the town library, which wasn’t that many. He took apart old cars and excavated an accordion from a neighbor’s attic and won a slew of geography bees and wandered off into the nearby hills, armed with science kits from his grandparents, to look at bugs under microscopes. “I was very excited by the world out there,” he mused. “I feel like people stressed me out.”

At first, Princeton was intoxicating. “He was very humble, young, and innocent,” Jasper’s friend Jackie recalled. “He didn’t even have a Facebook account…Social life was very exciting to him.” Jasper became the president of Princeton Racing Electric, teaching students years older than him how to take apart cars. But the engineering path began to feel “stifled,” and the pressures of Princeton became unbearable. When Covid began, a still-teenage Jasper took an extended leave from school.

He had nowhere to go. Although he had “nostalgia” for Ione, his relationship to the town – and his parents – was complicated: his dad is local royalty, his mom a Korean immigrant in a conservative hotbed, forever an outsider. So Jasper moved to Orlando to be with his partner, Tim, a gun-control activist he first met online, and then in person, in a whirlwind romance defined by marathon conversations about esoteric philosophy and their remarkable biographies. “I was super off the wall crazy,” Tim confessed, “and he was down for the ride.” In Florida, they were broke, renting a room from an older gay couple, quarantined together on the precipice of the end of the world. Jasper worked in a UPS warehouse, then sold handbags for Coach and Kate Spade, then became a front desk receptionist for a defense contracting company. Intellectually restless, he assembled a project brief for an important client that made its way to the company president, who told Jasper, “That’s kind of weird that you’re a receptionist. Why don’t you manage projects?”

Jasper met Afghan refugees at military inspection bases, and then switched to construction management for Florida’s state parks system. But despite his rags-to-riches professional ascendance, he never abandoned the notion of returning to Princeton. Last year, ten years after he first arrived, he came back.

Now, Jasper lives with Tim in Spelman Hall. When I visited, the living room was littered with Tim’s paintings. Two black-and-white cats deftly navigated the cramped space, and the speakers oscillated between Doja Cat and Nina Simone. According to Tim, Jasper “can be really specific about the strangest things. He has a stick up his butt.” He doesn’t like the clutter in the apartment, and he would wake up at a regimented 7am every day if Tim weren’t there to wreak havoc on his schedule. (He may be a clean freak, but he’s also a “hoarder” – of, among other things, a Snoopy magnet advertising “Free Hugs,” a Dolly Parton votive candle, and tomes from Jung to Shakespeare). His thin frame belies his ability to put away food, which Tim compared to a “garbage disposal.” He is a maximalist in life as in learning and love.

At twenty-six, Jasper is no longer cowed by Princeton’s intensity. He is not so volatile. He wears button-down shirts and cooks Korean food with Tim. “I feel like as a kid, everybody was just telling me, ‘Oh, you’re amazing. You can do all these things…You’re going to cure cancer,’” he reflected. “And then you come to Princeton and you lose some confidence.” A newly minted anthropology major, Jasper now immerses himself in the way people work, a gifted kid turned gifted adult refusing to burn out.

By the time she was 19 years old, Marvel Jem Roth had toured several continents with world-renowned orchestras, her original classical compositions played by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Juilliard School, and Carnegie Hall. But what motivates her isn’t the glamor of performance. It’s the pursuit of authenticity.

“I’ve always found it where I could be authentic without it being judged,” Roth explained. “People judge [classical music] based off of usually the attentiveness you put into it, and how much, as a composer, you demonstrate that you care about the people playing your music, and that’s why I found I was able to be successful.”

A proud Angeleno, Roth grew up in the music industry surrounded by creatives. She came to music as a young performer, competing in state competitions for classical pianists. A consistent runner-up, Roth tired of hearing that her playing was not perfect.

“I hated that concept of perfection,” she reflected. “I think there’s a bit of an oxymoron to perfect music because perfect music never sounds good.”  

At nine years old, frustrated by the expectation of perfection, she stopped training as a performance pianist and began to improvise, inadvertently creating her first compositions. “I just started playing what I thought sounded good because I was tired of playing what other people told me to play.”

By age 14, her compositions could be heard around the world. She became an apprentice composer for the National Youth Orchestra, which performs at Carnegie Hall, and joined them on a tour of South America. She wrote for Julliard, for the Curtis School, and for the LA Philharmonic all throughout high school. 

One of her biggest pieces, “Lens,” was commissioned by the three-time Grammy-winning Kronos Quartet, a group she idolized as a child. It’s a song about LA and the industry, she says, and how the media misrepresents the city she calls home. To compose the piece, Roth drove around LA recording sounds of the natural and urban landscapes – helicopters whirring, waves crashing, trees rustling in the wind. Next, she used audio software to distort the noise and produce an underscoring track for the live instrumentals. Over the course of the piece, the recordings become increasingly pitched like the string instruments on stage. According to Roth, this blurring of sound mirrors the way that influencers and tabloids distort the image of LA.

 “I grew up around all of that. But LA is also full of people like me who are multi-generations, born and raised in Los Angeles. My dad has never left the Valley. I have a severe LA Valley accent… I think there’s very authentic people and very authentic scenes within music that aren’t flashy. It’s not going to be picked up by TMZ, but that is a real part of LA that does get distorted and not seen.”

Though a product of the West Coast, Roth isn’t your typical Angeleno, says her friend Haeon Lee, a Princeton student whom she met through a composing fellowship. “California has this image of being very slow, very relaxed, just takes the things at their own pace. And I think, relative to that, she does care more about this driven efficiency.”

In her short time at Princeton, ambitious is indeed what she’s been. On top of completing professional commissions, Roth composes and conducts for the Lewis Center for the Arts, serves as treasurer for the Undergraduate Student Government, and researches cultural capital in pursuit of an Economics degree.

Her peers notice and admire her energy and initiative. “She always struck me as someone with a lot of self-assuredness and confidence, and I was like, I want more of that presence in my life, specifically from another woman,” said Gabrielle Liberman, Roth’s sophomore year roommate. “I really enjoyed sometimes just the fact of being around someone with no bullshit.”

How does such an accomplished teenager envisage her long-term goals? She simply smiles and shrugs, no bullshit. “I don’t know yet, man. I’m 19.” 

But then she ponders further, turning the question over in her head. “I know what I love. I know I love to think…and I want to enter somewhere where I will be able to spend my time thinking and being productive and contributing to society in some capacity. And I think the arts contribute to society.”

As a kid, Ellis Speagle would constantly get in trouble, the rules always seemed to be in the wrong place at the right time. It didn’t seem fair. Six years in the military didn’t help either, and unable to avoid their towering landscape of regulations, he learned every rule in their book. So, when forces of power tried to defy the rules, he noticed – and made certain – that justice was served. Now, Speagle is a sophomore in Princeton’s politics department, working towards law school.

After graduating high school, Speagle travelled from his home in Phoenix to Palma de Mallorca, Spain, and to a realisation that he needed a fixed job. On his second day working as a waiter in a steak restaurant, his boss shouted at him concerning his apron length. Fed up with being ordered around, “I said you know what, fuck this, I’m never gonna put myself in a position where someone yells at me like that,” so that same day, “I signed up for the military, where they yelled at me like that every single day,” Speagle laughed.

Beginning in 2019, Speagle’s journey in the military proved a gruelling yet enlightening six years, and he was moved around – a lot: deployed, stationed, returned – repeat.

It was 2021 when Jessica Tutor walked into a job training class required by the military and saw only one open seat, nervous and slightly embarrassed in the new environment, she slowly took the open chair beside Speagle. It was an instant connection. “He was the first one that made me feel comfortable,” Tutor said. Through this class, they became close, but by the end of their deployment on a ship that sailed around the middle-east, they were family.

“We were on deployment in Guam when it happened,” Tutor began. Tutor and Speagle’s ship had docked in Guam one evening, and off-duty members of the corps, including Tutor, partied in the bars and clubs. With it being humid and uncomfortably hot, Tutor left the party to sit in her rental car with the air conditioning on. Mistaking her stationary time-out for drink-driving, a Chief Officer filed a case against her which would have resulted in severe punishments or expulsion from the military.

“I was beside myself because I felt wrongfully convicted and targeted, no one was on my side,” Tutor said. Feeling alone, Tutor turned to Speagle. “I was reading [Tutor’s] statement, and I don’t know why, but I was calling bullshit,” Speagle said. Afterwards, he researched the rental car model, and learned that it was a push-to-start, so Tutor couldn’t have placed the keys in the ignition like the statement against her claimed. “The next day, the whole case was dismissed,” Speagle said. “That man saved my life, and he didn’t even have to,” Tutor added.

However, separately, Speagle acquired his own court cases. In August 2021, Speagle had been stationed in a psychiatric unit. “I was dealing with my own mental health problems, and here I am in the psych ward, giving mental health coaching to other people. It was insane” Speagle said. Speagle turned to psychedelics to guide him through this period, finding himself spiritually, on numerous ayahuasca retreats. “That saved me,” Speagle added. During this time, he took a leave for two-weeks to Guadalajara, Mexico and tried Kambo, a drug where one burns tree frog poison into their skin thus becoming extremely ill, but “you have this amazing, profound experience throughout the process,” Speagle said. However, an illness prevailed following the return to his post which required surgery. While sick, his superiors in the military ignored, delegated, and built a court case against him, claiming he was faking doctors notes.

“I still remember this moment. I remember I woke up, and something came over me. But I said, I’m gonna fucking fight this. I’m gonna throw everything at this, and if I lose, I lose, but I’m gonna do something,” Speagle said. He ended up writing a 105 page long statement from 277 pieces of evidence and was found not guilty on all charges. “I proved it,” he told me.

“I would say that he is easily the most incredibly gifted, smartest person I’ve ever met,” said Brendan Merrill, an extremely close friend of Speagle’s. Merrill and Speagle had worked at the same unit in the Navy hospital in early 2022, “Every time I need someone, the first person I call is him,” Merrill said. “I always wanted to become the person that I always wished I could call when I needed help,” Speagle said.

After landing himself in $20,000 of credit card debt in 2023 from multiple ayahuasca retreats, Speagle decided to ditch his rented apartment and moved into his Toyota Takoma. From here, he worked tirelessly to pay off his debts, continued to fight a court case against the military, and learned that he had a benign brain tumor on April 10th 2024. 3 weeks after winning the court case, “I had another coming to Jesus moment, and thought, what am I going to do with my life?”  His father desperately wanted him to apply for Princeton, “I have a really good feeling about it,” said Speagle’s father. “So I threw everything I had into this one basket, and it paid off,” Speagle said.

“He always happens to be in the right place at the right time, and he always does the right thing,” Tutor said.

Speagle defined himself as resilient and defiant, but Tutor said that he is irreplaceable.

When it comes to making things right and making things happen, “Whatever it takes,” said Speagle, “I’ll do whatever it takes.”

I have never yet thought about how much of a luxury it is to have the privilege to grieve; yet after reading Loubna Mrie’s Defiance chapters, I have never felt so lucky.

I see a lot of myself in her. Her drive to report on what she sees as necessary, her passion for her country by way of seeking its change and revolution, her love for her family that leads her to regret not giving her mother that hug before she left for the last time. She too finds the value in the grief she can’t afford: “The sadness of realizing that I never imagined experiencing a war where I would be overwhelmed with uncontrollable jealousy toward someone because he was able to bury the upper half of his mother’s dead body” (Mrie, 257).

The almost inconceivable level of brutality she lives through over and over, both through the viewing of online documentation of torture and governmental corruption and through her own lived experience informs a reality I will never be able to relate to, and one that many others will not be able to either. Even the well-meaning Egyptian activist workshop leader, seeking to have Mrie prove that “as an Alawite and a Kurd, we can engage in conversation and share the fruit equally between us” (240) is so far removed from the breed of viscerality Loubna has experienced that she may as well be trying to teach activism to a person from another planet. The aid that so many Western countries believe they are giving to these activists can be so much less than is needed that it becomes a condescension, a mockery of what these people have already suffered.

I cannot say I can see myself in this part of Mrie’s experience, but I can see it in the way she tries to move on from it. Disconnect from her sister and a sense of insult at the prospect of needing help through therapy are familiar feelings for anyone who has suffered from mental health crises or from the loss of a loved one. It is this humanity that ties not only me to the narrative of her life, but also the numerous Western media outlets interested in her story following her post of her mother’s murder leading her to further online abuse. This media affiliation leads Mrie to later reflect that it  lifted her “family out of extreme poverty, making them one of the wealthiest Alawite families in Syria” (254) while also being the presumed cause of her mother’s death.

Media, defined only as the flow of potentially information, is both a lifeline and a death sentence for her, and its reliability even on the basis of truth is contentious; the call of mother’s death and the complete lack of clarity or closure, the documents signed by families sacrificing truth to the government to recover their childrens’ bodies, and the communication that led that woman back to her town to be stoned to death all functioned as media that was meant to seem truthful. The same vehicle that can and will bring about revolution brings about the same death it seeks to prevent.

The strikingly relatable, human personal narrative of these refugee stories connect audiences just enough to have a taste for the pain suffered, but not enough to ever understand the scope of the cost of the migration they undergo.

The same may be said of Abdul Hadi in Anand Gopal’s Days of Love and Rage; ever the young impassioned child, Abdul’s first spark was seeing the sacrifice made by women protesting. All they had to lose outweighed what they had to gain, and Hadi’s call of “What’s our excuse?” echoed the call of so many mobilized by media of protest. But that truth that mobilized him similarly steered others away; “Once word spread of a disturbance downtown, people avoided the area entirely. Fear was still their master” (Gopal, 137). Even here in the United States, the constant inundation of suffering in the media both at home, particularly through ICE raids and continued police brutality, and abroad, through the genocide in Gaza and the war in Ukraine, exposure to information does not equate to activism. For all those it radicalizes, it similarly numbs; in seeing so much pain we lose the impact and motivating value of it.

As Patrick Kingsley’s The New Odyssey, all the  disgust of the pain and brutality of migration and what it entails becomes something normalized and accepted; “Perhaps the most extraordinary part of this scene is just how ordinary it has become” (Kingsley, 4). It is no wonder that after so many years of main, migration, loss of identity, and regaining it, those who have finally taken root and whose families have grown up on shores not familiar to the parents’ don’t feel like they can lose their new stability (Washington Post, The New Arab). They have spent more of themselves trying to achieve this dream than many can understand, even when looking directly through the eyes of Mrie, Hadi, or Hashem. The media that can communicate this information has become distrusted, unreliable, and numbing– only through an intentional empathy and critical understanding will necessary change be made in the way we tell stories, how we understand them, and how we employ them to make those tales of suffering no longer ‘ordinary.’

By Winnie Lin

For Luna Ramirez Castellanos, life at Princeton comes with an unexpected luxury: sleeping in until 6:50 AM. Back home in Bogotá, Colombia, her high school routine demanded a 4:45 AM alarm. Despite moving across continents, she bridges the gap through a phone call at 5:50 AM Colombia time to her eight-year-younger sister, Martina, each morning.

“It’s just that daily reassurance that they’re there, and that she’s there,” says Eduardo, her boyfriend, who has known her since their first week at Princeton. “That they remain in communication no matter what’s happening in either of their lives.” 

The habit fits her busy family she describes as intensely close. Her mother, a teacher who trains teachers, and her father, who manages logistics for a consortium of manufacturers, worked long hours when Luna and Martina were growing up. Luna often found herself looking after her younger sister and cooking separate meals for Martina, a particularly picky eater. It’s part of why, she says, she thinks of herself as a “mini-adult.” Eduardo doesn’t disagree, but he’s also seen another half to that description. He remembers one afternoon on Cannon Green, him struggling through a paper, Luna beside him with a book of poems, neither speaking, as one of the more telling moments of their relationship. “She’s mature, thinks about things like an adult,” he says, “but she’s also excited and childlike in the way she reacts to things she loves.” 

When Eduardo first met Luna during international orientation, he misread her. At a Whitman barbecue, he remembers her seeming “quite serious, even a little irritated.” He had expected her to be as excited as he was to meet another Latin American student. Months later, he understood the difference: Luna wasn’t cold, but had been navigating the nerves of a new place. After spending the summer together in West Harlem, he’d found she is “a very open, very happy person” and learned her mannerisms, especially the delight she shows when she tastes her own cooking. 

Some of that childlike wonder, she says, traces back to Colombia. Luna calls herself a city girl, and Bogotá is the kind of sprawling, foggy, rain-pelting metropolis that trained her for it. Princeton’s quaint, suburban neighborhood took some getting used to; she says the sameness drives her a little crazy. Bianca, a close friend, isn’t so sure. “I’ve never seen her be bored on Princeton’s campus,” she says. “She always has some activity planned”—tango lessons, most recently. 

Bianca first met Luna at a Whitman international dinner. They had hardly sat down before Luna explained which Colombian dishes Bianca needed to try and what she should see when she visited Colombia. Months later, when Bianca mentioned she had been accepted to a program there, Luna immediately wanted to know more. “We need to get a meal,” she remembers Luna saying, eager to talk more about Colombia.

“We are people people,” Luna says of Colombian culture. “I love people. I love hanging out with people. I love cooking for people. I love spending hours and hours, grabbing coffee, having a meal, being around them.”

When Bianca visited her in Bogotá last year, Luna gave up her own bedroom for the week. “She was very much like, do you want food, do you want me to cook you anything,” Bianca says. “She literally gave me her bedroom, just to make me feel at home.” In between, she took her to the Museo del Oro, the city’s gold museum, and made sure Bianca got to taste Bogotá’s street food.

Last December, missing the Novena, Luna “smuggled” ingredients into the Brown Co-op and made arroz con leche and buñuelos. Her friends then prayed and sang along, even when, she laughs, “none of them knew what was going on.” That instinct to care goes beyond the kitchen. “It’s made me very service-oriented,” Luna expresses. “I’m someone who loves to be there for others, loves to share.” This is consistent with how she spends the rest of her time on campus, often tutoring ESL and organizing a Spanish-language table that pairs beginners with native speakers so people, as Bianca puts it, “don’t lose their connection to their culture.”

Bianca has a phrase for Luna: “más colombiana que la arepa.” More Colombian than the arepa. At Princeton, from putting together Spanish-language tables at Whitman to making 5:50 AM calls to her family every morning, Luna carries Bogotá with her.