PHOTO: DENISE APPLEWHITE/OFFICE OF COMMUNICATIONS
Michael Lewis ’82, the author of such best-sellers as Liar’s Poker and The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, is one of the country’s most respected business writers. Michael Scott (played by Steve Carell), manager of the Dunder Mifflin paper company for seven years on the hit TV show The Office, is a fool. Lewis delivered this year’s Baccalaureate address. Carell addressed seniors on Class Day. Given the upside-down nature of current economic news, it might be hard to distinguish trenchant financial analysis from raw parody. Here, then, are sayings and writings by Lewis and the fictional Scott. See if you can tell whose words they are. (Answers below.)
(Answers: Lewis quotes: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9. Scott quotes: 1, 7, 8, 10.)
“Senior year has been a lesson in contradictions — at once a victory lap and a mad sprint to the finish, a last opportunity to try something for the first time and an endless stream of doing things for the last time.”
— Class Day speaker Spencer Gaffney ’12
“If certain aspects of Princeton are disappointing, I’ll say this: Perhaps these disappointments — grade deflation, constant comparison to your incredible peers, one-ply toilet paper — are the reason we become halfway decent at anything. They make us stronger ... .”
— Class Day speaker Clayton Raithel ’12
“A society requires citizens who are steeped in history, literature, languages, culture, and scientific and technological ideas from ancient times to the present day. They need to be curious about the world, broadly well-informed, independent of mind, and able to understand and sympathize with what Woodrow Wilson referred to as ‘the other.’”
— President Tilghman, in her Commencement address
“Think of your Princeton transcript as your fingerprint: Nobody else has the same one, and your complete list of classes — including that random one that you took senior year because it looked like fun — helps define your unique intellectual identity.”
— Valedictorian Nathaniel Fleming ’12
“We will come together again and again at Reunions, so that we may rejoice in Bacchus bringing sweet memories.”
— Salutatorian Elizabeth Butterworth ’12, translated from the Latin