College Dorm Quotes

So the greatest source of happiness is other people--and what does money do? It isolates us from other people. It enables us to build walls, literal and figurative, around ourselves. We move from a teeming college dorm to an apartment to a house, and if we're really wealthy, to an estate. We think we're moving up, but really we're walling off ourselves.

Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life.

Everybody drinks," she said calmly. The Only Rational One. "Your sister doesn't." When rolled her eyes. "Forgive me, but I'm not going to spend my college years sitting soberly in my dorm room, writing about gay magicians." "Objection," Cath said, reaching for a burrito.

You're sure your new roommate won't be like the last one who wore tinfoil socks and had a tendency to occasionally urinate in the refrigerator. You're sure you'll pass Math 106 this time around. You're determined to actually join some clubs this year and not just sit around in your dorm eating spray cheese from a can and watching youtube videos about cats.

On TV, talking heads wrung their hands over a lack of traditional feminine values and wondered if girls’ sports were to blame. Then they cut to a commercial featuring a sexy college coed vacuuming her dorm room in her underwear.

I believed that books might save him because I knew they had so far, and because I knew the people books had saved. They were college professors and actors and scientists and poets. They got to college and sat on dorm floors drinking coffee, amazed they'd finally found their soul mates. They always dressed a little out of season. Their names were enshrined on the pink cards in the pockets of all the forgotten hardbacks in every library basement in America. If the librarians were lazy enough or nostalgic enough or smart enough, those names would stay there forever.

Maybe we were being a bit unrealistic, but we had this hope that if we could just get into the Ivy League, everything would be set. We dreamed of Gothic libraries and leafy green quads and romantic dorms with fireplaces and guys who were not only cute but also smart and charming, and, quite possibly, British. In college, we believed, we’d finally find our people.

He walked straight out of college into the waiting arms of the Navy. They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back? Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river. Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If that didn't prove his intelligence, what would? Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal. Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else.

I thought of the cool, fresh air of the city I'd always dreamed of living in. The art museums and trolleys and the mysterious fog that blanketed it. I could almost smell the cappuccinos I'd planned to drink in bohemian cafes or hear the indie music in the bookstores I would spend my free time in. I pictured the friends I'd make, my kindred art people, and the dorm room I was supposed to move into.

When I got to college, the fake ID thing wasn't that important, since pretty much everyone could get away with drinking in New Orleans. But the drugs, well, that was a different story altogether, because drugs are every bit as illegal in New Orleans as anywhere else--at least, if you're black and poor, and have the misfortune of doing your drugs somewhere other than the dorms at Tulane University. But if you are lucky enough to be living at Tulane, which is a pretty white place, especially contrasted with the city where it's located, which is 65 percent black, then you are absolutely set.

It all made sense: my shyness, all the times I was dismissed for not being “black enough,” my desire to reframe the images of black film and television, which I started to do when I created a series in college called Dorm Diaries, my inability to dance—these were all symptoms of my Awkward Blackness.

Looking back, it’s embarrassing to recognize the degree to which my intellectual curiosity those first two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was attempting to get to know: Marx and Marcuse so I had something to say to the long-legged socialist who lived in my dorm; Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks for the smooth-skinned sociology major who never gave me a second look; Foucault and Woolf for the ethereal bisexual who wore mostly black. As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless; I found myself in a series of affectionate but chaste friendships.

Somehow, four strangers who had been randomly assigned to the same dorm room their freshman year of college had evolved into what we were now—a beautifully messy, perfectly imperfect family that’d gone through our share of ups and downs but made it through to the other side.

Now, Woolf calls her fictional bastion of male privilege Oxbridge, so I'll call mine Yarvard. Even though she cannot attend Yarvard because she is a woman, Judith cheerfully applies for admission at, let's call it, Smithcliff, a prestigious women's college. She is denied admission on the grounds that the dorms and classrooms can't accommodate wheelchairs, that her speech pattern would interfere with her elocution lessons, and that her presence would upset the other students. There is also the suggestion that she is not good marriage material for the men at the elite college to which Smithcliff is a bride-supplying "sister school." The letter inquires as to why she hasn't been institutionalized. When she goes to the administration building to protest the decision, she can't get up the flight of marble steps on the Greek Revival building. This edifice was designed to evoke a connection to the Classical world, which practiced infanticide of disabled newborns.

It is a well known fact that Abraham Lincoln spent much of his spare time visiting wounded soldiers in Union Army hospitals. I've spent thirty years teaching history at Columbia and I don't think I've spent more than fifteen minutes in the freshman dorm. Are we the ones keeping Lincoln's memory alive? Or are we burying it?

She hugged me tight, and I hugged her back. I was going to miss her—I knew it. But somehow, I had the feeling that we were going to be okay. I didn’t know what would happen with us. Maybe we’d find a way to attend the same college and be roommates and have the most amazingly decorated dorm room ever. Maybe we’d end up being pen pals, sending lists back and forth. Or we’d just stick to talking twice a week, or we’d video chat, or else just spend all our money traveling to hang out with each other on weekends. I somehow knew that the particulars didn’t matter. She was my heart, she was half of me, and nothing, certainly not a few measly hundred miles, was ever going to change that.

Eventually my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college, I'd begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses and its own orthodoxy. I started to reexamine my assumptions, and recalled the values my mother and grandparents had taught me. In this slow, fitful process of sorting out what I believed, I began silently registering the point in dorm-room conversations when my college friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into can't: the point at which the denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the freedom from the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without fully understanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was too readily embraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement, or claiming moral superiority over those not so victimized.

As though I had displeased the gods with my erotic hubris, I managed to be the only bisexual girl in the history of colleges who failed to arouse the interest of the campus queers immediately upon setting foot in the dorms.

It was more as if Casa del Sol were their college dorm rather than their senior-care facility. It didn’t help that the two tended to view the senior-living center’s strict rules as friendly suggestions. “Your feelings aside,” Maria continued

The notion that a vast gulf exists between "criminals" and those of us who have never served time in prison is a fiction created by the racial ideology that birthed mass incarceration, namely that there is something fundamentally wrong and morally inferior about "them." The reality, though, is that all of us have done wrong. As noted earlier, studies suggest that most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime. Indeed, most of us break the law not once but repeatedly throughout our lives. Yet only some of us will be arrested, charged, convicted of a crime, branded a criminal or a felon, and ushered into a permanent undercaste. Who becomes a social pariah and excommunicated from civil society and who trots off to college bears scant relationship to the morality of the crimes committed. Who is more blameworthy: the young black kid who hustles on the street corner, selling weed to help his momma pay rent? Or the college kid who deals drugs out of his dorm room so that he'll have cash to finance his spring break? Who should we fear? The kid in the 'hood who joined a gang and now carries a gun for security, because his neighborhood is frightening and unsafe? Or the suburban high school student who has a drinking problem but keeps getting behind the wheel? Our racially biased system of mass incarceration exploits the fact that all people break the law and make mistakes at various points in their lives with varying degrees of justification. Screwing up-failing to live by one's highest ideals and values-is part of what makes us human.

She learned that rather than perceiving time as a continuum, we tend to think about our lives in “episodes,” creating story arcs from the notable incidents, or chapters, in our lives. One chapter might start the day you move into your college dorm (“the college years”), another with your first job (“the consulting

This produces teen vulnerability to peer pressure and emotional contagion. Moreover, such pressure is typically “deviance training,” increasing the odds of violence, substance abuse, crime, unsafe sex, and poor health habits (few teen gangs pressure kids to join them in tooth flossing followed by random acts of kindness). For example, in college dorms the excessive drinker is more likely to influence the teetotaling roommate than the reverse. The incidence of eating disorders in adolescents spreads among peers with a pattern resembling viral contagion. The same occurs with depression among female adolescents, reflecting their tendency to “co-ruminate” on problems, reinforcing one another’s negative affect.

Hail, Columbia! Home of the six inch cockroach and the stadium-sized lecture hall. A reservation for rich white people guarded by poor brown people in a sea of urban decay. Where nobody on the faculty has ever spent ten minutes in the freshman dorm, but everybody talks about humanism and compassion. They teach you that military people are scum, trash, the lowest of the low -- and then they assign Homer's ILIAD just to develop your sense of irony. Where else can you see three suicides a month dismissed as "slightly above average, but better than Smith or Brown?

Everybody drinks,” she said calmly. The Only Rational One. “Your sister doesn’t.” Wren rolled her eyes. “Forgive me, but I’m not going to spend my college years sitting soberly in my dorm room, writing about gay magicians.“ “Objection,” Cath said, reaching for a burrito. “Sustained,” their dad said.

It was more when things slowed down, during the parts when you were supposed to have fun, that my lack of friends felt obvious- on Saturday nights, when there dances I didn't go to, and during visitation... I spent those times hiding. Most of the other girls propped open their doors for visitation, but we kept ours shut.

If the virus and the inequalities it creates were ever to leave us, America’s extremities would fade. They wouldn’t disappear—no country on Earth can claim that—but some things would no longer be considered normal. There would no longer be those who are taught Latin and those who are barely taught to read. There would no longer be too many people who count their wealth in the multimillions and too many who live hand to mouth. A space launch would not be hard followed by a riot. White college kids would not smoke weed in their dorms while their black peers caught mandatory sentences for selling it to them. America would no longer be that thrilling place of unbelievable oppositions and spectacular violence that makes more equitable countries appear so tame and uneventful in comparison. But the questions have become: Has America metabolized contempt? Has it lived with the virus so long that it no longer fears it? Is there a strong enough desire for a different America within America?

As noted earlier, studies suggest that most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime. Indeed, most of us break the law not once but repeatedly throughout our lives. Yet only some of us will be arrested, charged, convicted of a crime, branded a criminal or felon, and ushered into a permanent undercaste. Who becomes a social pariah and excommunicated from civil society and who trots off to college bears scant relationship to the morality of crimes committed. Who is more blameworthy: the young black kid who hustles on the street corner, selling weed to help his momma pay the rent? Or the college kid who deals drugs out of his dorm room so that he’ll have cash to finance his spring break? Who should we fear? The kid in the ’hood who joined a gang and now carries a gun for security, because his neighborhood is frightening and unsafe? Or the suburban high school student who has a drinking problem but keeps getting behind the wheel? Our racially biased system of mass incarceration exploits the fact that all people break the law and make mistakes at various points in their lives and with varying degrees of justification. Screwing up—failing to live by one’s highest ideals and values—is part of what makes us human.

You sort of lose your nonfinance friends,” he said. “My friend might be in Teach for America, and they can’t afford to go out to the places I go out. It’s shitty, because for the first time, it’s almost like money matters. In college, you’re all living in that dorm. Here, there’s hierarchy. And that level of spending, all the time, means that you just naturally grow away from people who don’t work in the industry.

Something about my going away to college changed her, softened her. I was already my mother's daughter by then, callous, too callous to understand that she was reckoning with the complex shades of loss -– her son, an unexpected, physical loss; her daughter, something slower, more natural. 4 weeks into my freshman year, she ended a phone call with "I love you," spoken in the reluctant mumble she reserved for English. I laughed so hard I started crying. An "I love you" from the woman who had once called the phrase aburofo nkwaseasem, white people foolishness. At first she chastised me for laughing, but before long she was laughing too, a big – bellied sound that flooded my dorm room. Later, when I told my roommate, Samantha, why I was laughing, she said, "It's, like, not funny? To love your family?" Samantha, rich, white, a local whose boyfriend would occasionally make the drive over from UMass, leaving me displaced in the common room, was herself the embodiment of aburofo nkwaseasem. I laughed all over again.

I tell him I’d better get going, because Margot’s coming home from Scotland tonight, and I want to stock the fridge with all her favorite foods. Peter’s face falls. “You don’t want to hang out a little longer? I can take you to the store.” “I still have to clean up the upstairs, too,” I say, standing up. He tugs on my shirt and tries to pull me back onto the bed. “Come on, five more minutes.” I lie back down next to him and he cuddles in close, but I’m still thinking about the yearbook. I’ve been working on his scrapbook for months; the least he can do is write me a nice yearbook message. “This is good practice for college,” he murmurs, pulling me toward him, wrapping his arms around me. “The beds are small at UVA. How big are the beds at UNC?” My back to him, I say, “I don’t know. I didn’t get to see the dorms.” He tucks his head in the space between my neck and shoulder. “That was a trick question,” he says, and I can feel him smile against my neck. “To check and see if you visited a random UNC guy’s dorm room with Chris. Congrats, you passed the test.” I can’t help but laugh.

The suite was set: Chris and I in the left, back room; Tom and Ricky in the left, front room; Junior and Danny Tampon in the back, right room next to the bathroom; and Dickstein all by his peanut-dick-self in the front, right room. It was quite a radical change from the suite that surrounded me, Chris, and Tom the previous year. Just getting rid of Lebeuf was addition by subtraction. The Beachside Dorm, Suite 524, would be one of the happiest places in my two-decade life. Freedom of expression was never diminished, unless Dickstein opened his mouth and shit flew out of it.

In this slow, fitful process of sorting out what I believed, I began silently registering the point in dorm-room conversations when my college friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into cant: the point at which the denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the freedom from the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without fully understanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was too readily embraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement, or claiming moral superiority over those not so victimized.

Reading Chip's college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he'd bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of foam rubber. They were heavy and bulky and stiff. "You'll appreciate these on a cold night," he told Chip. "You'll be surprised how much they cut down drafts." But Chip's freshman roommate was a prep-school product named Roan McCorkle who would soon be leaving thumbprints, in what appeared to be Vaseline, on the fifth-grade photo of Denise. Roan laughed at the curtains and Chip laughed, too. He put them back in the box and stowed the box in the basement of the dorm and let it gather mold there for the next four years. He had nothing against the curtains personally. They were simply curtains and they wanted no more than what any curtains wanted - to hang well, to exclude light to the best of their ability, to be neither too small nor too large for the window that it was their task in life to cover; to be pulled this way in the evening and that way in the morning; to stir in the breezes that came before rain on a summer night; to be much used and little noticed. There were numberless hospitals and retirement homes and budget motels, not just in the Midwest but in the East as well, where these particularly brown rubber-backed curtains could have had a long and useful life. It wasn't their fault that they didn't belong in a dorm room. They'd betrayed no urge to rise above their station; their material and patterning contained not a hint of unseemly social ambition. They were what they were. If anything, when he finally dug them out of the eve of graduation, their virginal pinkish folds turned out to be rather less plasticized and homely and Sears-like than he remembered. They were nowhere near as shameful as he'd thought.

The silence of the apartment pressed on Ithan. He’d never lived on his own. He’d always had the constant chaos and closeness of the Den, the insanity of his college dorm, or the hotels he’d stayed at with the CCU sunball team. This place might as well have been another planet. He rubbed at his chest, as if it’d erase the tightness. He’d known precisely why he’d disobeyed Sabine’s order this spring when Bryce had screamed for help. The sound of her pleading had been unbearable. And when she’d mentioned children at risk, something had exploded in his brain. He had no regrets about what he’d done. But could he endure its consequences? Not the beating—he could weather that shit any day. But being here, alone, adrift… He hadn’t felt like this since Connor and the others had died. Since he’d walked away from his sunball team and stopped answering their calls. He had no idea what the Hel he’d do now. Perhaps the answer wasn’t some big, life-altering thing. Maybe it could be as simple as putting one foot in front of the other. That’s how you wound up following someone like Amelie, a voice that sounded an awful lot like Connor growled. Make better choices this time, pup. Assess. Decide what you want. But for now…one foot in front of the other. He could do that. If just for today.

Dear Mother and Dad: Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you are sitting down, okay? Well, then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out the window of my dormitory when it caught on fire shortly after my arrival here is pretty well healed now. I only spent two weeks in the hospital and now I can see almost normally and only get those sick headaches once a day. Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory, and my jump, was witnessed by an attendant at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the Fire Department and the ambulance. He also visited me in the hospital and since I had nowhere to live because of the burntout dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It’s really a basement room, but it’s kind of cute. He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to get married. We haven’t got the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show. Yes, Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the same love and devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child. The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has a minor infection which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him. Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or skull fracture, I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged, I am not infected, and there is no boyfriend. However, I am getting a “D” in American History, and an “F” in Chemistry and I want you to see those marks in their proper perspective. Your loving daughter, Sharon Sharon may be failing chemistry, but she gets an “A” in psychology.

be apart. Despite getting rejected by my top-choice school, I was starting to really believe in myself again based on all the positive feedback we continued to get on our videos. And besides, I knew I could always reapply to Emerson the following year and transfer. • • • College started out great, with the best part being my newly found freedom. I was finally on my own and able to make my own schedule. And not only was Amanda with me, I’d already made a new friend before the first day of classes from a Facebook page that was set up for incoming freshmen. I started chatting with a pretty girl named Chloe who mentioned that she was also going to do the film and video concentration. Fitchburg isn’t located in the greatest neighborhood, but the campus has lots of green lawns and old brick buildings that look like mansions. My dorm room was a forced triple—basically a double that the school added bunk beds to in order to squeeze one extra person in. I arrived first and got to call dibs on the bunk bed that had an empty space beneath it. I moved my desk under it and created a little home office for myself. I plastered the walls with Futurama posters and made up the bed with a new bright green comforter and matching pillows. My roommates were classic male college stereotypes—the football player and the stoner. Their idea of decorating was slapping a Bob Marley poster and a giant ad for Jack Daniels on the wall.

On September 30, 1988, I got another summons to the dean’s office. This time, the president of the college, all of the deans, and two Resident Assistants were present, each holding a 3 x 5 card. I knew exactly what this was, an intervention. I didn’t give anyone a chance to read their cards; I simply started crying and asked them what I had to do. One of the deans said that they had made a reservation for me at a treatment facility in Atlanta and that I had until 8 PM to get there or be terminated. I went back to the dorm, packed a small suitcase, gathered up the liquor bottles and threw them in a trash bag. Before I left, I taped a purple sheet of construction paper to my door saying, “Ms. Davis will be away for the weekend.” Six weeks later, I returned from treatment.

Decades ago, I'm told, my sister-in-law...was stepping out of the shower in the bathroom of her all-women's dorm, and she heard the call "Men on the floor!" At many schools, this would have been a non-event, but she was in a highly conservative religious college. She was naked. She had only a small towel to cover herself, and there were men prowling the hallways. She could hear them. She waited, but they didn't go away. So she began to think about which part of her body to cover with the towel. It barely fit across her bottom or her top. It certainly didn't cover both. She had to make a choice. Finally, she had an inspired idea. She threw the towel over her head and scampered naked to her room. Given the options, it was more important for her to cloak her identity than her body.

The hot case at a kombini features tonkatsu, fried chicken, menchikatsu (a breaded hamburger patty), Chinese pork buns, potato croquettes, and seafood items such as breaded squid legs or oysters. In a bit of international solidarity, you'll see corn dogs, often labeled "Amerikandoggu." One day for lunch I stopped at 7-Eleven and brought home a pouch of "Gold Label" beef curry, steamed rice, inarizushi (sushi rice in a pouch of sweetened fried tofu), cold noodle salad, and a banana. Putting together lunch for the whole family from an American 7-Eleven would be as appetizing as scavenging among seaside medical waste, but this fun to shop for and fun to eat. Instant ramen is as popular in Japan as it is in college dorms worldwide, and while the selection of flavors is wider than at an American grocery, it serves a predictable ecological niche as the food of last resort for those with no money or no time. (Frozen ramen, on the other hand, can be very good; if you have access to a Japanese supermarket, look for Myojo Chukazanmai brand.) That's how I saw it, at least, until stumbling on the ramen topping section in the 7-Eleven refrigerator case, where you can buy shrink-wrapped packets of popular fresh ramen toppings such as braised pork belly and fermented bamboo shoots. With a quick stop at a convenience store, you can turn instant ramen into a serious meal. The pork belly is rolled and tied, braised, chilled, and then sliced into thick circular slices like Italian pancetta. This is one of the best things you can do with pork, and I don't say that lightly.

You began receiving the texts in late September, after the first date. You wore the translucent dress with the high collar and open-shoulder sleeves that made you feel like you were a fashion writer for a New York magazine, or a high-powered exec of a Fortune 500 company: a shimmering butterfly, someone who mattered, not a barely-eighteen college freshman who spent most evenings in her dorm room slurping Top Ramen. The first guy was forty-five. His wife was the same old song on the radio. He took you out for lobster and fried oysters. Afterwards, he grabbed your neck like you owed him something, and you closed your eyes and imagined pretty things: white-gold ribbons of sunlight skimming the belly of oceans, the sequins falling from your prom dress the first time you slept with a guy, movies where everyone sings soprano and defies the laws of flight.

A liberal arts education teaches you how to think – I read that somewhere. The hard facts you learn are secondary to that. The big thing you take away from school with you is how to induct and deduct in a constructive way.’ ‘That’s good,’ Harold said. ‘I like that.’ Now his hand did drop on Fran’s shoulder. She didn’t shrug it away, but she was unhappily conscious of its presence. ‘But it isn’t good,’ Peri said fiercely, and in his surprise, Harold took his hand off Fran’s shoulder. She felt lighter immediately. ‘No?’ he asked, rather timidly. ‘He’s dying!’ Peri said, not loudly but in an angry, helpless way. ‘He’s dying because we’ve all been spending our time learning how to bullshit each other in dorms and the living rooms of cheap apartments in college towns. Oh, I could tell you about the Midi Indians of New Guinea, and Harold could explain the literary technique of the later English poets, but what good does any of that do my Mark?’ ‘If we had somebody from med school –’ Fran began tentatively.

She also felt like there was something slightly more insidious going on, about how you were now supposed to feel like your work was your everything: where you got your paycheck, yes, but also where you got fed and where you found your social circle. Everything had started bleeding into everything else. These kids—she felt no compunction about calling them kids—expected that their workplaces would provide all this for them, as if work were an extension of college, with its own clubs and student organizations. Even more disconcerting was that many TakeOff employees lived together or had roommates who were in some way connected to other TakeOff employees, and now there were even apartment buildings that were actual dorms for grown-ups, where you lived in a suite with a few other people and had common areas and nightly activities. It was almost like a return to the days of Henry Ford, when a company provided you with housing and meals and social events. What had happened to having to figure out life on your own?

READER’S REPORT From the Parent of a College Coed Dear Mother and Dad: Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you are sitting down, okay? Well, then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out the window of my dormitory when it caught on fire shortly after my arrival here is pretty well healed now. I only spent two weeks in the hospital and now I can see almost normally and only get those sick headaches once a day. Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory, and my jump, was witnessed by an attendant at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the Fire Department and the ambulance. He also visited me in the hospital and since I had nowhere to live because of the burntout dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It’s really a basement room, but it’s kind of cute. He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to get married. We haven’t got the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show. Yes, Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the same love and devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child. The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has a minor infection which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him. Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or skull fracture, I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged, I am not infected, and there is no boyfriend. However, I am getting a “D” in American History, and an “F” in Chemistry and I want you to see those marks in their proper perspective. Your loving daughter, Sharon Sharon may be failing chemistry, but she gets an “A” in psychology.

New Rule: Democrats must get in touch with their inner asshole. I refer to the case of Van Jones, the man the Obama administration hired to find jobs for Americans in the new green industries. Seems like a smart thing to do in a recession, but Van Jones got fired because he got caught on tape saying Republicans are assholes. And they call it news! Now, I know I'm supposed to be all reinjected with yes-we-can-fever after the big health-care speech, and it was a great speech--when Black Elvis gets jiggy with his teleprompter, there is none better. But here's the thing: Muhammad Ali also had a way with words, but it helped enormously that he could also punch guys in the face. It bothers me that Obama didn't say a word in defense of Jones and basically fired him when Glenn Beck told him to. Just like dropped "end-of-life counseling" from health-care reform because Sarah Palin said it meant "death panels" on her Facebook page. Crazy morons make up things for Obama to do, and he does it. Same thing with the speech to schools this week, where the president attempted merely to tell children to work hard and wash their hands, and Cracker Nation reacted as if he was trying to hire the Black Panthers to hand out grenades in homeroom. Of course, the White House immediately capitulated. "No students will be forced to view the speech" a White House spokesperson assured a panicked nation. Isn't that like admitting that the president might be doing something unseemly? What a bunch of cowards. If the White House had any balls, they'd say, "He's giving a speech on the importance of staying in school, and if you jackasses don't show it to every damn kid, we're cutting off your federal education funding tomorrow." The Democrats just never learn: Americans don't really care which side of an issue you're on as long as you don't act like pussies When Van Jones called the Republicans assholes, he was paying them a compliment. He was talking about how they can get things done even when they're in the minority, as opposed to the Democrats , who can't seem to get anything done even when they control both houses of Congress, the presidency, and Bruce Springsteen. I love Obama's civility, his desire to work with his enemies; it's positively Christlike. In college, he was probably the guy at the dorm parties who made sure the stoners shared their pot with the jocks. But we don't need that guy now. We need an asshole. Mr. President, there are some people who are never going to like you. That's why they voted for the old guy and Carrie's mom. You're not going to win them over. Stand up for the seventy percent of Americans who aren't crazy. And speaking of that seventy percent, when are we going to actually show up in all this? Tomorrow Glenn Beck's army of zombie retirees descending on Washington. It's the Million Moron March, although they won't get a million, of course, because many will be confused and drive to Washington state--but they will make news. Because people who take to the streets always do. They're at the town hall screaming at the congressman; we're on the couch screaming at the TV. Especially in this age of Twitters and blogs and Snuggies, it's a statement to just leave the house. But leave the house we must, because this is our last best shot for a long time to get the sort of serious health-care reform that would make the United States the envy of several African nations.

The Pillowcase" is printed with iridescent fish, each facing a different direction. I bought it for you at the Portland Goodwill our last semester in college. Spring break we brought it camping. I pretended I’d eaten sardines before, pretended I liked them. I don’t remember what you said when the condom broke. Probably ‘Oh, shit.’ The next day we drove into town. I took a pill and another pill and it was over. I couldn’t tell the difference, could have told my friends but didn’t, just made lots of dead baby jokes and went to bed in your dorm room. You’d put painter’s tape on all the edges. With the pillowcase, it was like living in the blueprint of an aquarium. I slept there the night I smoked Sasha’s weed and you stayed up for hours rubbing my back, telling fairytales so I wouldn’t totally lose it. I slept there the night I tried reading you Haruki Murakami’s Sleep but fell asleep. I slept there the night after the day I lost the bet and had to wear a lampshade on my head and your professor said ‘Nice hat.’ Later I learned she owns a lamp in the shape of a woman. I slept there the night you said ‘I think I’m falling in love with you,’ igniting a great unendurable belongingness, like a match in a forest fire. I burned so long so quiet you must have wondered if I loved you back. I did, I did, I do.

Dear John, I, Lara Jean, hereby make a solemn vow--nay, an unbreakable vow--to return my letter to you, intact and unchanged. Now give me my letter back! Also you’re such a liar. You know very well that plenty of girls liked you in middle school. At sleepovers, girls would be like, are you Team Peter of Team John? Don’t pretend like you didn’t know that, Johnny! And to answer your question--there were five letters. Five meaningful boys in my whole life history. Though, now that I’m writing it down, five sounds like a lot, considering the fact that I’m only sixteen. I wonder how many there’ll have been by the time I’m twenty! There’s this lady at the nursing home I volunteer at, and she’s had so many husbands and lived so many lives. I look at her and I think, she must not have even one regret, because she’s done and seen it all. Did I tell you my older sister Margot’s all the way in Scotland, at St. Andrews? It’s where Prince William and Kate Middleton met. Maybe she’ll meet a prince, too, haha! Where do you want to go to college? Do you know what you want to study? I think I want to stay in state. Virginia has great public schools and it’ll be much cheaper, but I guess the main reason is I’m very close to my family and I don’t want to be too-too far away. I used to think I might want to go to UVA and live at home, but now I’m thinking dorms are the way to go for a true college experience. Don’t forget to send back my letter, Lara Jean

Although thrilled that the era of the personal computer had arrived, he was afraid that he was going to miss the party. Slapping down seventy-five cents, he grabbed the issue and trotted through the slushy snow to the Harvard dorm room of Bill Gates, his high school buddy and fellow computer fanatic from Seattle, who had convinced him to drop out of college and move to Cambridge. “Hey, this thing is happening without us,” Allen declared. Gates began to rock back and forth, as he often did during moments of intensity. When he finished the article, he realized that Allen was right. For the next eight weeks, the two of them embarked on a frenzy of code writing that would change the nature of the computer business.1 Unlike the computer pioneers before him, Gates, who was born in 1955, had not grown up caring much about the hardware. He had never gotten his thrills by building Heathkit radios or soldering circuit boards. A high school physics teacher, annoyed by the arrogance Gates sometimes displayed while jockeying at the school’s timesharing terminal, had once assigned him the project of assembling a Radio Shack electronics kit. When Gates finally turned it in, the teacher recalled, “solder was dripping all over the back” and it didn’t work.2 For Gates, the magic of computers was not in their hardware circuits but in their software code. “We’re not hardware gurus, Paul,” he repeatedly pronounced whenever Allen proposed building a machine. “What we know is software.” Even his slightly older friend Allen, who had built shortwave radios, knew that the future belonged to the coders. “Hardware,” he admitted, “was not our area of expertise.”3 What Gates and Allen set out to do on that December day in 1974 when they first saw the Popular Electronics cover was to create the software for personal computers. More than that, they wanted to shift the balance in the emerging industry so that the hardware would become an interchangeable commodity, while those who created the operating system and application software would capture most of the profits.

The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that’s why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world. The notion that a vast gulf exists between “criminals” and those of us who have never served time in prison is a fiction created by the racial ideology that birthed mass incarceration, namely that there is something fundamentally wrong and morally inferior about “them.” The reality, though, is that all of us have done wrong. As noted earlier, studies suggest that most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime. Indeed, most of us break the law not once but repeatedly throughout our lives. Yet only some of us will be arrested, charged, convicted of a crime, branded a criminal or felon, and ushered into a permanent undercaste. Who becomes a social pariah and excommunicated from civil society and who trots off to college bears scant relationship to the morality of crimes committed. Who is more blameworthy: the young black kid who hustles on the street corner, selling weed to help his momma pay the rent? Or the college kid who deals drugs out of his dorm room so that he’ll have cash to finance his spring break? Who should we fear? The kid in the ’hood who joined a gang and now carries a gun for security, because his neighborhood is frightening and unsafe? Or the suburban high school student who has a drinking problem but keeps getting behind the wheel? Our racially biased system of mass incarceration exploits the fact that all people break the law and make mistakes at various points in their lives and with varying degrees of justification. Screwing up—failing to live by one’s highest ideals and values—is part of what makes us human.

45. Remember that advanced placement doesn’t necessarily have to mean early graduation. Our two older children were talented in math and science, and easily completed more than the required number of secondary credits in sciences and humanities well before their peers. We drove our oldest son two hours away to live in a dorm at a state university the week before his 18th birthday, and our second-born graduated from high school when she was 15. Her college adviser mapped a plan where she could have finished her PhD in nursing by the time she was 21! Academically, they were fine. But socially and emotionally, it was tough to transition to the rigors of full-time college life (even junior college) one or two years before their traditionally-schooled friends. Because of that, their younger brother, a scholar in his own right, was not given the option to graduate early. Although he was frustrated with this limitation, it has alleviated a lot of pressure the other kids were forced to deal with before they had reached appropriate emotional maturity.

Dorm Rules It was the first day of the new year at a college and the dean was addressing the freshman class. “We have very strict rules here regarding the dormitories,” the dean explained.  “The female dorms are not to be visited my any male student and the men dorms are off limits to the female students.” “Anyone caught breaking this rule will be fined $50 for the first time.” “Anyone caught breaking this rule a second time will be fined $100,” he added. “Breaking the rule three times will cost you $200.  Any questions?” the dean asked the students. One male student in the back raised his hand and spoke out, “How much for a season pass?

I said he was a shitty agent, not a shitty politician.” Claire still couldn’t read the man’s expression. “You don’t sound like a fan.” Nolan clasped his hands together on the table. “On the surface, it seems like we’re making progress, but when I think back on the last few minutes of our conversation, I get the feeling that you’re questioning me instead of the other way around.” “You’ll make a great detective one day.” “Fingers crossed.” He flashed a grin. “I want to tell you something about the FBI.” “You always win?” “Sure, there’s that, and terrorists, of course. Kidnappers, bank robbers, pedophiles—nasty fuckers—but nuts and bolts, what we at the ol’ FBI deal in day-to-day is curiosities. Did you know that?” Claire didn’t respond. He’d clearly given this speech before. Nolan continued, “Local cops, they find something curious they can’t figure out, and they bring it to us, and we either agree that it’s curious or we don’t. And generally when we agree, it’s not just the one curious thing, it’s several curious things.” He held up his index finger. “Curious thing number one: your husband embezzled three million dollars from his company. Only three million dollars. That’s curious, because you’re loaded, right?” Claire nodded. “Curious thing number two.” He added a second finger. “Paul went to college with Quinn. He shared a dorm room with the guy, and then when they were in grad school together, they shared an apartment, and then Quinn was best man at your wedding, and then they started the business together, right?” Claire nodded again. “They’ve been best friends for almost twenty-one years, and it seemed curious to me that after twenty-one years, Quinn figures out his best buddy is stealing from their company, the one they built together from the ground up, but instead of going to his buddy and saying ‘Hey, what the fuck, buddy?’ Quinn goes straight to the FBI.” The way he put it together did seem curious, but Claire only said, “Okay.” Nolan held up a third finger. “Curious thing number three: Quinn didn’t go to the cops. He went to the FBI.” “You have domain over financial crimes.” “You’ve been reading our Web site.” Nolan seemed pleased. “But lemme ask you again: Is that what you’d do if your best friend of twenty-one years stole a small, almost negligible, amount of money from your zillion-dollar company—find the biggest, baddest stick to fuck him with?” The question gave Claire a different answer: Adam had turned in Paul to the FBI, which meant that Adam and Paul were not getting along. Either Adam Quinn didn’t know about the movies or he knew about the movies and he was trying to screw over Paul.

Okay, I’ll admit that Chris and I still want each other. But need? Need is for your first lover on your twin bed in your college dorm.

After a stint at community college, and with the encouragement of professors, Roberts applied to Berkeley and was admitted at age twenty-three. There was no box on the form to check that would indicate he was disabled, so, after his acceptance, he had to figure out how he would live on campus. Students with other disabilities had attended Berkeley and other colleges in the United States, but nearly all of Roberts’s body was paralyzed, so he would need assistance in an acute way, for things like getting from his bed to his wheelchair every day—the kind of help that exceeded dormitory norms. Berkeley administrators initially tried to backtrack and refuse him admission, citing past failed experiments with enrolling disabled students. Roberts went to see Dr. Henry Bruyn at the Cowell Hospital on campus. Bruyn had overseen the care of children in Roberts’s generation who’d contracted polio and lived with the aftermath of the disease. He agreed to work with Roberts to outfit a hospital room for his needs while on campus—as a makeshift, semipermanent approximation of a dorm room. Berkeley agreed, and Roberts arrived on campus, but expectations were low. The headline in Cal’s own newspaper read: “Helpless Cripple Attends UC Classes Here in Wheelchair.

Of course, there are other memories. There are memories of her leaning over the stove, the light from the window haloing her hair, turning it a gold-tinged brown. There are memories of her, young and bright with joy, dancing around on a soccer field at midnight, her feet bare, her skirt flying. There are memories of your first kiss, on the roof of a college dorm, the fear of getting caught mixed with exhilaration, her hair tickling your cheek. There are memories of fights, of romantic dinners, of vacations to Alaska and Venice. But they are all memories from the distant past.

In the messy world of a college dorm, I made a point to keep my room neat and tidy. These improvements were minor, but they gave me a sense of control over my life.

Who is more blameworthy: the young black kid who hustles on the street corner, selling weed to help his momma pay the rent? Or the college kid who deals drugs out of his dorm room so that he’ll have cash to finance his spring break? Who should we fear? The kid in the ’hood who joined a gang and now carries a gun for security, because his neighborhood is frightening and unsafe? Or the suburban high school student who has a drinking problem but keeps getting behind the wheel?

the woman I loved. Several months passed with no resolution of this dilemma. Finally, spring break approached. My fiancée was planning to go home to Pittsburgh from the college where she was studying, and I persuaded her to stop at my college, attend a campus Bible study with me, and then spend the night in the girls’ dorm. I cannot remember anything for which I spent more time praying. I spent virtually the whole day before she arrived

Lord Byron kept a pet bear in his Trinity College dorm room. He was told that dogs were strictly banned from the campus, so he brought along a different furry friend.

Win, on the other hand, seemed to have been weaned on schnapps. Liquor never really affected him much. But at this particular party, the grain alcohol–laced punch made even his steps wobble a bit. It took Win three tries to unlock their dorm room door. Myron quickly collapsed on his bed. The ceiling spun counterclockwise at a seemingly death-defying speed. He closed his eyes. His hands gripped the bed and held on in terror. His face had no color. Nausea clamped down painfully on his stomach. Myron wondered when he would vomit and prayed it would be soon. Ah, the glamour of college drinking. For a while neither of them said anything. Myron wondered if Win had fallen asleep. Or maybe Win was gone. Vanished into the night. Maybe he hadn’t held on to his spinning bed tightly enough and the centrifugal force had hurled him out the window and into the great beyond. Then

The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting. It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. The narrator of this story is Steve Jobs, the legendary CEO of Apple. The story was part of his famous Stanford commencement speech in 2005.[23] It’s a perfect illustration of how passion and purpose drive success, not the crossing of an imaginary finish line in the future. Forget the finish line. It doesn’t exist. Instead, look for passion and purpose directly in front of you. The dots will connect later, I promise—and so does Steve.

pushed. I watched the white tail of the tampon slip out of the applicator as both fell to the ground. I repeated this with half of the box before I gave up, decided it was best to keep some things a mystery. It wasn’t until my freshman year in college, in biology class, that I learned what and where a vagina truly was. In class that day, I stared at the diagram in wonder, the secret world, an inner world, revealed. I looked around at my classmates and could see in their business-as-usual faces that they already knew all of this. Their bodies had not been kept from them. It was neither the first nor the last time at Harvard that I would feel as though I was starting from behind, trying to make up for an early education that had been full of holes. I went back to my dorm room and tentatively, furtively pulled out a hand mirror and examined myself, wondering all the while how, if I hadn’t left my town, if I hadn’t continued my education, this particular hole, the question of anatomy, of sex, would have been filled. I was tired of learning things the hard way. —

so I focused on getting my life in order. While my peers stayed up late and played video games, I built good sleep habits and went to bed early each night. In the messy world of a college dorm, I made a point to keep my room neat and tidy.

Nine years later another computer hit 1.8 teraflops. But instead of simulating nuclear explosions, it was devoted to drawing them and other complex graphics in all their realistic, real-time, three-dimensional glory. It did this not for physicists, but for video game players. This computer was the Sony PlayStation 3, which matched the ASCI Red in performance, yet cost about five hundred dollars, took up less than a tenth of a square meter, and drew about two hundred watts.11 In less than ten years exponential digital progress brought teraflop calculating power from a single government lab to living rooms and college dorms all around the world. The PlayStation 3 sold approximately 64 million units.

A 4-year-old loves her toy puppy’s golden brown fur. Her teenage brother is annoyed by its loud bark. Her mom sees it as a tool to keep the 4-year-old busy. Her baby sister finds the puppy’s big teeth scary. Her dad considers it an overpriced piece of plastic. The same toy evokes different feelings depending on how one looks at it. We see what we seek. When you don’t attend to attention — when you’re inattentive — life may pass you by. The tulips come and go, the seasons change, and the baby climbs out of the crib, off the bunk bed and on to the college dorm. We forget that joy is in the details. As a Jewish prayer says, “Days pass, and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles.” Intentional trained attention is directed by your will. This trained attention pulls you away from distractions to savor a more wholesome morsel of life. Trained attention doesn’t deny or repress reality. It gives you temporary freedom from negativity. You stop carrying the entire load of the past and the future in your head. Trained attention is focused, relaxed, compassionate, nonjudgmental, sustained, deep and intentional. This meditative attention is essential to experiencing flow. Its optimal practice helps you forget yourself, immerses you in the world’s novelty, and frees your mind for creativity and joy.

Sometimes I think you’re allergic to fun,” Carrie said. That stung. He was having fun right now! He wasn’t wild enough for her. When she was slipping into restaurants in scant clothes, he walked around Berkeley in the dark. Carefree, the politician had called college students. Walter had cares, but he’d also had days at Ken’s house; he’d gone swimming in a pond at dawn with a girl he almost loved. His first day in the dorm, the glimpse of gold under the cloth draped over Ken’s French horn. He wouldn’t have swapped his own youth.

So the greatest source of happiness is other people—and what does money do? It isolates us from other people. It enables us to build walls, literal and figurative, around ourselves. We move from a teeming college dorm to an apartment to a house and, if we’re really wealthy, to an estate. We think we’re moving up, but really we’re walling off ourselves.

Kara Martinson squeezed her way toward the crowded bar, nudging between two kids she couldn’t quite believe were old enough to be legally drinking in public. They should have been funneling cheap beer in a college dorm somewhere. Or sneaking shots from Daddy’s liquor cabinet. Art gallery openings used to be much more sophisticated than this. When

Dear Mother and Dad: Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you are sitting down, okay? Well, then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out the window of my dormitory when it caught on fire shortly after my arrival here is pretty well healed now. I only spent two weeks in the hospital and now I can see almost normally and only get those sick headaches once a day. Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory, and my jump, was witnessed by a worker at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the Fire Department and the ambulance. He also visited me in the hospital and since I had nowhere to live because of the burnt out dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It’s really a basement room, but it’s kind of cute. He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to get married. We haven’t got the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show. Yes, Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the same love and devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child. The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has a minor infection which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him. Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or skull fracture, I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged, I am not infected, and there is no boyfriend. However, I am getting a “D” in American History, and an F in Chemistry, and I want you to see those marks in their proper perspective. Your loving daughter, Sharon Author’s note: Sharon may be failing chemistry, but she gets an A in psychology.

In a lot of ways it was like the last summer. That fall, Conrad would start college. He was going to Brown. He might not come back next summer. He might have an internship, or summer school, or he might backpack across Europe with all his new dorm buddies. And Jeremiah, he might go to the football camp he was always talking about. There were a lot of things that could happen between now and then. It occurred to me that I was going to have to make the most of this summer, really make it count, in case there wasn’t another one quite like it.

Dartmouth College built real-time energy displays to show energy usage in student dorms. The catch? The main energy display linked the health and happiness of an animated polar bear to the level of energy usage. Global warming is often seen as a vague, abstract problem that has consequences that are very far off; it’s easy to think that one person’s action can’t make a dent in this issue. But at Dartmouth, if students didn’t turn off their lights, the animated polar bear in the display would appear to begin drowning. The polar bear created an emotional connection between energy used and the impact on the environment. The animated polar bear energy display, combined with competitions to “save the polar bear,” reduced usage by 10% in dorms that used the polar bear.

As numerous economists and positive psychologists have observed, globally we make the mistake of becoming less social the richer we become as individuals, and as a society. As Weiner observes: “The greatest source of happiness is other people—and what does money do? It isolates us from other people. It enables us to build walls, literal and figurative, around ourselves. We move from a teeming college dorm to an apartment to a house and, if we’re really wealthy, to an estate. We think we’re moving up, but really we’re walling off ourselves.

Even though I'm trying hard not to let it show, I want to swim past the breakers, and sink to the bottom and stay there with my eyes closed and the water covering my ears. And yes, I know that's an overreaction. When you read this you'll think "Mom, please. Really?" You'll roll your eyes in that carefree way of yours and shrug those rebellious bangs off your forehead. You'll offer the one-sided smirk that says "you and I are the weird ones in the family - the two that always get each other's hidden meanings". Only this time, you don't get it. You can't. You won't for another 25 or 30 years - until you lie on the sand, or sit in a stadium seat somewhere or stand at your kitchen stove and catch a glimpse of your first born, your baby, suddenly inhabiting the body of an adult. Someone you barely recognize. In that instant, you'll think "how did this happen? When did this happen? Have I taught enough? Have I listened enough? Have I coached and planned and laughed and worried enough? Can I let go enough?" I'm afraid I won't be able to do it gracefully when the moment comes. I'm not ready. It's too soon. Instead of compiling pictures for a tasteful collage to make your dorm room homey, I want to climb inside the photos and live them again. Every bedtime story, lost tooth, birthday cake, backyard campout, ballgame, wildflower bouquet, rainy day and homemade Mothers Day card. All the golden moments and all the quiet, ordinary ones. I'd treasure them even more the second time around. If only life came with a rewind button, with do overs.

The amount of time that elapsed between my two-year-old self toddling along the National Mall waving a flag and my eighteen-year-old self moving into a dorm feels vast to me, but I know now how time moves when you're grown-up, and I know those years must have gone much faster for my parents than for me. To my dad, hardly any time at all passed between when the siren called him into the bunker and when he started packing boxes full of shelf-stable food to send to his baby at college.

In less than ten years exponential digital progress brought teraflop calculating power from a single government lab to living rooms and college dorms all around the world. The PlayStation 3 sold approximately 64 million units. The ASCI Red was taken out of service in 2006.

capital expenditures required in Clean Technology are so incredibly high,” says Pritzker, “that I didn’t feel that I could do anything to make an impact, so I became interested in digital media, and established General Assembly in January 2010, along with Jake Schwartz, Brad Hargreaves and Matthew Brimer.” In less than two years GA had to double its space. In June 2012, they opened a second office in a nearby building. Since then, GA’s courses been attended by 15,000 students, the school has 70 full-time employees in New York, and it has begun to export its formula abroad—first to London and Berlin—with the ambitious goal of creating a global network of campuses “for technology, business and design.” In each location, Pritzker and his associates seek cooperation from the municipal administration, “because the projects need to be understood and supported also by the local authorities in a public-private partnership.” In fact, the New York launch was awarded a $200,000 grant from Mayor Bloomberg. “The humanistic education that we get in our universities teaches people to think critically and creatively, but it does not provide the skills to thrive in the work force in the 21st century,” continues Pritzker. “It’s also true that the college experience is valuable. The majority of your learning does not happen in the classroom. It happens in your dorm room or at dinner with friends. Even geniuses such as Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, who both left Harvard to start their companies, came up with their ideas and met their co-founders in college.” Just as a college campus, GA has classrooms, whiteboard walls, a library, open spaces for casual meetings and discussions, bicycle parking, and lockers for personal belongings. But the emphasis is on “learning by doing” and gaining knowledge from those who are already working. Lectures can run the gamut from a single evening to a 16-week course, on subjects covering every conceivable matter relevant to technology startups— from how to create a web site to how to draw a logo, from seeking funding to hiring employees. But adjacent to the lecture halls, there is an area that hosts about 30 active startups in their infancy. “This is the core of our community,” says Pritzker, showing the open space that houses the startups. “Statistically, not all of these companies are going to do well. I do believe, though, that all these people will. The cost of building technology is dropping so low that people can actually afford to take the risk to learn by doing something that, in our minds, is a much more effective way to learn than anything else. It’s entrepreneurs who are in the field, learning by doing, putting journey before destination.” “Studying and working side by side is important, because from the interaction among people and the exchange of ideas, even informal, you learn, and other ideas are born,” Pritzker emphasizes: “The Internet has not rendered in-person meetings obsolete and useless. We chose these offices just to be easily accessible by all—close to Union Square where almost every subway line stops—in particular those coming from Brooklyn, where many of our students live.

Arjun came from a staid Pakistani family that prioritized academics and shunned alcohol. When he had moved into his dorm last week, his parents asked Jake, whom they knew was not a drinker, to watch over their son.

Traveling with us did have its advantages. Before Barack’s presidency was over, our girls would enjoy a baseball game in Havana, walk along the Great Wall of China, and visit the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio one evening in magical, misty darkness. But it could also be a pain in the neck, especially when we were trying to tend to things unrelated to the presidency. Earlier in Malia’s junior year, the two of us had gone to spend a day visiting colleges in New York City, for instance, setting up tours at New York University and Columbia. It had worked fine for a while. We’d moved through NYU’s campus at a brisk pace, our efficiency aided by the fact that it was still early and many students were not yet up for the day. We’d checked out classrooms, poked our heads into a dorm room, and chatted with a dean before heading uptown to grab an early lunch and move on to the next tour. The problem is that there’s no hiding a First Lady–sized motorcade, especially on the island of Manhattan in the middle of a weekday. By the time we finished eating, about a hundred people had gathered on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, the commotion only breeding more commotion. We stepped out to find dozens of cell phones hoisted in our direction as we were engulfed by a chorus of cheers. It was beneficent, this attention—“Come to Columbia, Malia!” people were shouting—but it was not especially useful for a girl who was trying quietly to imagine her own future. I knew immediately what I needed to do, and that was to bench myself—to let Malia go see the next campus without me, sending Kristin Jones, my personal assistant, as her escort instead. Without me there, Malia’s odds of being recognized went down. She could move faster and with a lot fewer agents. Without me, she could maybe, possibly, look like just another kid walking the quad. I at least owed her a shot at that. Kristin, in her late twenties and a California native, was like a big sister to both my girls anyway. She’d come to my office as a young intern, and along with Kristen Jarvis, who until recently had been my trip director, was instrumental in our family’s life, filling some of these strange gaps caused by the intensity of our schedules and the hindering nature of our fame. “The Kristins,” as we called them, stood in for us often. They served as liaisons between our family and Sidwell, setting up meetings and interacting with teachers, coaches, and other parents when Barack and I weren’t able. With the girls, they were protective, loving, and far hipper than I’d ever be in the eyes of my kids. Malia and Sasha trusted them implicitly, seeking their counsel on everything from wardrobe and social media to the increasing proximity of boys. While Malia toured Columbia that afternoon, I was put into a secure holding area designated by the Secret Service—what turned out to be the basement of an academic building on campus—where I sat alone and unnoticed until it was time to leave, wishing I’d at least brought a book to read.

For all the jokes about students living off ramen, undergraduates are significantly more likely to experience high levels of food insecurity (in technical terms: “hunger”) than to live in a dorm. 7 Millennials have changed what it means to be a college student in practice, but the American “Town vs. Gown” imaginary hasn’t been updated.

Who is more blameworthy: the young black kid who hustles on the street corner, selling weed to help his momma pay the rent? Or the college kid who deals drugs out of his dorm room so that he’ll have cash to finance his spring break? Who should we fear? The kid in the ’hood who joined a gang and now carries a gun for security, because his neighborhood is frightening and unsafe? Or the suburban high school student who has a drinking problem but keeps getting behind the wheel? Our racially biased system of mass incarceration exploits the fact that all people break the law and make mistakes at various points in their lives and with varying degrees of justification. Screwing up—failing to live by one’s highest ideals and values—is part of what makes us human.

That same year [2001], young anthropology professor Cathy Small went undercover as "Rebekah Nathan, undergraduate student" and lived in a first-year form at Northern Arizona University. She was repeating the study of anthropologist Michael Moffatt, who in 1977 had attempted to pass himself off as an undergraduate at Rutgers. Like him, she found virtually no evidence that students derived intellectual benefit from classes. They skipped more frequently than she had expected: in the one large course for which she had solid data, barely half came to class on any given day. The students in her dorm, moreover, almost never discussed academic issues — in class or outside of it. Small's 'most sobering' insight was 'how little intellectual life' mattered to students.

A few months ago, leaving for college seemed glamourous, but now it’s hard to believe that this little dorm room, with its scratchy sheets and a lock that sticks, is home. It’s hard to accept that this is my new life, that these are my new friends. I am one in many here. There are dozens here as good as me, even more who are smarter, funnier. And it scares me because before I stuck out and now I blend in.

Richard had been the first of the Showtime boys to quietly come out after his stint at the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts, an exclusive state-run arts intensive that might as well have been called the Pennsylvania Governor’s Blow Job Academy. Imagine a bunch of seventeen-year-old theater boys away from home for the first time for six weeks. They were living in empty college dorms, for the love of Mike! Literally! Think of the joy and freedom they must have felt, like being on an all-gay space station. (I’m sure there were one or two straight boys there, too, and I imagine they did incredibly well with the one or two straight girls.)

And then your bags will be packed, and mom and dad will drop you off at your college of choice (Or not), and your first night in the dorm room you might realize that you're not at sleep-away camp this time, and this doesn't feel like your queen sized bed at all and you sure wish you'd brought your Lovey or that Winnie the Pooh night-light, but hey, "It ain't no thang," so you just have to adjust to that twin bed and maybe one or two strangers commonly referred to as your roommates who now live in this miniature room with you called home, but if you feel a bit nervous or scared or even lonely on this- your very first night at college- do what E.T. did: PHONE HOME!

Give me one good reason,” Boy Toy countered. “I’ll give you five.” Larkin raised his free hand and began ticking points off on his fingers. “One, I prefer older men and you’re a fetus. Two, the last time I hooked up in a bunk bed was my freshman year in the college dorms, and I don’t plan to fuck in the same bed you fall asleep eating Fritos in. Three, my tastes are expensive and you can’t afford to iron the wrinkles in my suit coat afterward. Four, you don’t know my name—” “I have to know your name for a hookup?” “It’d be better than you screaming ‘Spooky.’ Which, by the way, you would because I always top. Five, and most importantly, I’m in a relationship.