Spires and Gargoyles – April 2014

Spires

Welcome back from Spring Break! With any luck, you spent your entire break on a remote, tropical island and were not stuck in time, trapped in a ululating hellscape woven between moments, because, well, Spring Break Forever®.

While you were away, Tiger managed to incur the wrath of the Office of Sustainability when one of our members was caught stealing all of the pens from the Frist Greenspace display, but we are making every effort to get back on the good side of this valuable source of funding. Editor Kevin Shi sought to appease the office by offering them a 5’ by 7’ pile of peat moss he named “Pete Moss,” but the offer was evidently rejected when the Department of Public Safety was called and Kevin was forced to take a leave of absence to reevaluate his priorities after making such a terrible pun.

After this olive branch was rebuffed, we tried instituting a number of “green” initiatives, starting with printing this issue on recycled paper. As it turns out, recycled paper costs real greenbacks, so we settled on calling this issue “It’s Not Easy Being Evergreen” and retiring our coal-burning digital camera, which emitted so much soot that the pictures didn’t come out great anyway. Our editors also cut several pages of “red content,” the term we in the industry use to refer to “pages we can’t pay for because we are broke.”

While applying these environmental austerity measures to Tiger, I became inspired to make my own lifestyle more sustainable. For instance, over Spring Break, I kept the lights in my room off to save power, and I did very little aside from sleeping and weeping in an effort to save my own energy. I also did not leave my room all week to save the heat that would escape if I opened the door, and I have taken to the concept of “emotional recycling” by texting my ex-girlfriend several times each day. But enough about me.

This issue is all about the color green, which means you’ll find environmentalism and so much more inside these hallowed pages. We’ve packed this full-color issue to the brim with articles about money, marijuana, and other green things that were laying around Tiger writers’ rooms when the article deadline passed without so much as a single submission. There is also a ton of great green content on our website tigermag.com, including contributions from members of ENV346: The Environment Can Be Funny, a real class whose name alone is an argument against Princeton’s $41,820 tuition.

In truth, though, both Tiger and the class have the same aim, and that’s to teach through humor. If you can’t learn something from this issue—whether it’s how to reduce your carbon footprint, how to tell if your teen is using weed, or even the difference between jungle and forest green—you can go fuck yourself.

Lovingly,

AJS ’15