Author Archives: Daniel Bethencourt

I was in a guesthouse in Johannesburg, South Africa that had its own high white walls and electric sliding gate with four dogs, they barked at anything and everything within 30 feet, I thought that was excessive — two weeks in someone jumped over our wall to nab a laptop from the house next door »

In 2006, Harvard and Princeton made a bold move: they ended a program that had sustained college admissions for decades. They claimed their early admissions policies were leaving behind students at large, underfunded public schools, who often don’t apply early because they may not know about the option or are discouraged from applying early by »

When Charlie Croom ’12 entered the world of programming, he was six years old and had just learned to read. When he switched on his mom’s computer, he was met with a blank screen and a blinking cursor. The machine ran on floppy disks and a dial-up modem, and only understood commands typed out in »

I made it to the Toledo Blade newspaper every morning on a bike from Target whose rubber handles slid off slowly and whose back brakes were almost useless. Riding in khakis and a button-down, I looked so earnestly out of place that pedestrians who saw me were too confused to laugh out loud. In the »

This is the state of the commercial rave scene in Los Angeles: there are tides of dark jeans on pencil bodies with shy faces, and waves of exposed push-up bras on pale and tan chests, the bras laced or otherwise, most of them exuding that Halloween quality, like they might be some kind of joke. »

Standing at the entrance of Payne Whitney’s sprawling fourth-floor fitness center feels something like floating inside an enormous, whirring human brain. It’s 7 p.m. on a Thursday, and I’m wading past three soaring rows of treadmills and ellipticals, every last one of which is packed with sweating figures whose vaguely desperate gazes aim toward nowhere. »

Seconds after 1 a.m., in an off-campus apartment at the top of a steep and claustrophobically narrow flight of stairs, there’s a pitch black room whose air and walls are shaking with sound waves. I’m bracing myself against the back wall behind a 700W subwoofer, whose peak volume is barely lower than that of a »