by Lilly Stewart | Mar 23, 2022 | Culture
HBO’s Euphoria is one of the most highly discussed and popular TV shows currently airing. The cinematography, editing, music, screenwriting, and acting have all been praised to no end—and often for good reason. At the same time, the show has received its fair share of backlash due to the ages of its characters depicted (anywhere from sixteen to eighteen years old—high schoolers) in connection with the glorification of drug use, the oversexualization of underage women characters, and its sensationalized violence.
by Jaclyn Pahl | Feb 23, 2022 | Culture
The newspaper is a fascinating cultural object. The newspaper, in the exceedingly recent past, epitomized the dynamism of modern life. From the time of its invention, mechanized produc-tion was thought to enable the stripping of the senses and the speeding-up of time. The newspaper was an emblem of fast-paced modern life. That the newspaper is now a symbol of the past proves just how fast time has moved. To think of the newspaper now is to think of nostalgia.
by Fiona O'Brien | Feb 9, 2022 | Culture
(TW: Discussion of eating disorders and restrictive eating)
This morning, I woke up at noon. Really, it was an accident; I hadn’t even gone to bed that late. I rolled over to grab my phone off the charger, and for some reason opened TikTok. I would not recommend this to be your first visual interaction in the morning. Immediately, I was served with your typical, bright-pastel, cheery music “Morning in the Life.” A beautiful woman, probably younger than I, waking up at 6am to immediately begin her beachside yoga routine, followed by an extensive skin care routine, lots of lemon water, and a five mile run.
by Una V. | Jan 26, 2022 | Culture, Literature
As I made my way over to The Scribe one autumnal morning, I was struck by the serenity of the scene before me. Even in November, I could still wear my favorite wool coat and sneakers—a rarity for all Torontonians. A few struggling leaves still clung to their branches, while the Danforth was littered with specks of orange and red. A morning without class worked its usual cure on my psyche, leaving me feeling uncharacteristically smug, smiling to myself on the street—like someone who has never heard the word “midterm” or “exam” in their life.
by Manuela Mora Castillo | Jan 19, 2022 | Culture
I’m happy to say that Disney’s Encanto positively surprised me. As a Colombian, I am used to bad representation. From Narcos to the foreign obsession with Pablo Escobar, I don’t expect media accuracy when it comes to my country. As a result, when Disney first announced their production of Encanto, I was skeptical at best. After the Mexican critiques surrounding Coco, and the lack of Colombian writers in the movie, this skepticism morphed into dread over what I thought would be an attempt at taking the fantastic things my country had to offer and fall short in the delivery; I feared that Encanto would become a representation of something I couldn’t recognize. Needless to say, I didn’t have high expectations when I walked in, but on leaving the theater my critiques about representation were almost minimal.
by Fiona O'Brien | Jan 5, 2022 | Culture
How do we distinguish between horror and tragedy? Both feature often graphic depictions of intense human suffering, from gore to rock-bottom misery. Yet, for some reason or another, tragedy elicits our pity while horror elicits our excitement. Our natural, human response to suffering is empathy, but somehow this switch is temporarily turned off as we encounter the horror genre. Perhaps this phenomenon is unexplainable, a mere mystery of human nature; perhaps it is not.
