The Nass was founded in 1979 as an outlet for alternative, creative, and journalistic pieces. Below are a series of short essays by members of the magazine’s upper masthead that meditate on counterculture and the role of alternative publications on college campuses.
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When thinking about the role of counterculture, there are a series of preliminary definitional questions: What is the culture under consideration? What does it mean to be against that culture? Who is responsible for countering it? When we—readers and writers of alternative magazines as well as current college students at elite universities more broadly—think of the recent history of countercultural movements, we may trace a heritage that goes back to at least the 1960s and 1970s: think the Stonewall riots, or protests against the Vietnam War and for racial liberation. At that time, young people, especially college students, were the agents; traditional frameworks of identity, family, race, sexuality, and art constituted the culture; the mainstream was challenged through political acts of questioning, resistance, revolution, and experimentation.
In many ways, members of today’s alternative spaces on college campuses represent the successes of this previous generation. In the aggregate, we are more likely to accept more diverse gender identities and sexualities than any generation before us; we are more critical of unjust hierarchies that cut along racial, economic, and gendered lines. Advancing from countercultural foundations that have become mainstream, young people have carved out new frontiers in the fight for transgender rights, climate justice, and a free Palestine.
In response to these frontiers, conservative movements and institutions are attempting to recast the definitions of counterculture. They seek to change the parameters of what it means to be alternative, casting people on the right as principal agents and attacking the foundations of the “traditional” alternative movement rooted in previous generations of struggle. The ideology of this “counter” is reactionary, advocating a return to older forms of hierarchy. We can look to the “manosphere” that enshrines a cult of masculinity to suppress gender equality or to pundits demonizing efforts to promote racial justice as “wokeism” as examples of this trend. The contested realignment of dominant counterculture prompts a second series of questions. What becomes of the counterculturalist who identifies with the tradition I have touched on above? How does their responsibility change when they must now defend the (imperfect) progress of previous generations while also fighting for a more expansive set of issues? Is it possible to defend this progress without losing one’s identity as a counterculturalist?
I lack the space here to offer definitive answers. However, I raise them because I believe they will be important to grapple with in the coming years for anyone drawn to the “tradition” of counterculture, especially as the half-generation below us—13- to-17-year old Gen Z-ers—becomes more swayed by the conservative cultural movement that seems to be gaining strength today. Data shows that this group of 13-to 17-year-olds is less liberal than us. They are more trusting of religious institutions than us. Demonstrating the connection between culture and politics, they are less politically engaged than us and less supportive of the Democratic Party. It is too early to draw definitive conclusions from these facts. However, they caution that expecting the next generation to fully embrace the cultural progressivism fostered in alternative spaces like the ones we inhabit on college campuses may be overly optimistic. It is our responsibility as readers and creators of these alternative spaces to contest the central definitional questions of counterculture and find compelling answers to provide for the sub-generation that is soon to take our place.
- Alex Norbrook
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To be alternative, to be the counterculture, to be an independent magazine on a university campus is to occupy a space that can be combative. To exist for the sole purpose of acting against the norm or mainstream might be interpreted as antagonistic, unrelenting, or juvenile. To produce a magazine consisting of whatever the daily newspaper is not writing might seem like a goal with the wrong motivations. These are all fair judgments. However, these judgments misunderstand the intentions of the counterculture.
The mainstream cannot exist without the counterculture, just as the primary cannot exist without the alternative—without contrast, there is no conversation. We observe from a different vantage point and with a different intention: perhaps not to inform, but to inquire. Not to portray, but to question, to investigate. Magazines like the Nassau Weekly and the Harvard Independent serve a different, distinct purpose. They are not simply reactionary; they are responsive.
- Sasha Rotko
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One is the loneliest number. Most everyone on the Nass thinks they are One—a singular, unique perspective cutting through the hivemind that dominates this campus. Some Ones are more justified in that belief than others, but at a certain point, even the mere belief in Oneness morphs into being One. I certainly came to campus as a freshman with a boldly defined sense of Oneness. I joined the Nass early on, hoping that there I would find other Ones. My inkling feeling was correct: there, Oneness abounded.
One is a strange number. When Ones fill up a room or magazine, the inclination is not to add. Rather, Ones coexist. If the Nass has a perspective at all, it is that it is an amalgamation of radically different ones. No two pages in the Nass will look the same, just like the faces that fill Bloomberg Hall 044 (well…maybe not all the faces). However similar the faces may look, the minds inside them have taken shape in distinct ways. We take on a multitude of forms. Some Ones have a serif, others a slight squiggle in their shaft; some are One squared, others need erasing (we can answer for those).
One can be a lonely number. The intrinsic interiority of being One makes its façade unassuming. It can sometimes appear as a vector, an L, or something else entirely. But Oneness comes with a finely tuned radar. There is a perpetual knowledge that other Ones walk among you. They may even be convening in the Nass room Mondays and Thursdays at 5:00 p.m. Once a One knows who they are, they’ll be able to spot others in an instant.
- Ellie Diamond
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In a 1941 pamphlet, George Orwell wrote, “Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.” He recognized that schools, the birthplaces of dominant culture, can also be the institutions that restrict forward thinking and change. Any of us—as if I can speak for any “us”—who hesitate before naming our university affiliation to others, do so understanding that we exist in establishments that uphold “culture” in its most outdated sense. To stay here, hoping that we will learn enough to then go out and make a significant change—significant enough to offset our complicity in staying here—is uncomfortable.
Magazines and independent publications necessarily work at a slower pace. The time from submission to editing to publication requires that stories imagine every catastrophe has already occurred, that individual narratives can exist outside of their immediate temporal context. Catastrophes have occurred, and they continue to. The act of conscious and alternative publication becomes a constraint that forces us to step back from information vomit and attempt to approach serious issues outside of the institutionally imposed flow of time.
The Nassau Weekly was born on the playing fields of Princeton. As such, we must keep up an actively oppositional stance (rather than assuming inaction is sufficient) if we want to resist the historical attitudes that our campus upholds. We don’t pretend to counteract our University’s culture entirely, nor do we presume that you all do. But we do try to assert some mutual discomfort, a shared understanding that catastrophes occur on every scale and deserve recognition. We intend to expand and distort before culture ever reaches us. We intend to always be a little “off,” and once we’ve become too normal, we hope that you’ll take us out back and cut us up into something new.
- Frankie Solinsky Duryea
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Frankie Solinsky Duryea (rs5750@princeton.edu) and Alex Norbrook (an4725@princeton.edu) are Co-Editors-in-Chief of the Nassau Weekly at Princeton. Ellie Diamond (ed7627@princeton.edu) is the Publisher, and Sasha Rotko (sr1771@princeton.edu) is Co-Managing Editor.