The Donna Reed Show

The concept of the American Family has captured the imagination of both the right and left. No matter which side you lean toward, and no matter how great the divide is in our country, everyone shares the deep suspicion that something is going wildly wrong. Strangely, sociologists, professional and armchair, also agree. There are large numbers of articles proclaiming the family to be a relic of the past, exploring the loneliness epidemic, and the tendency of the young to see romance as unattainable, turning to apps and platforms to find sexual partners. Everyone agrees we have reached an impasse or cultural catastrophe if you are inclined that way. But what kind of impasse is it and how long has it been going on? Perhaps, rather unsurprisingly, mass media (especially in the form of the sitcom) has quietly whispered the awful truth for years, which is, many people are looking to escape the family without saying so, and that we are in the midst of a quiet revolution.

AYESHA EROTICA CITY

coming to a town near you

By Gabrielle Kedziora

Let’s use our imaginations, shall we? You’re dancing at the hottest nightclub in town. The room is vast and you’d never know by that matte black paint hiding the nasty sticky stains. Neon lights flutter over the sea of drunkards, making them look like faceless yet seductive sirens. The puppet-master DJ commands the crowd as they swish into the next track smoothly, and you hear, “I stood on the corner and shook my shit. Now I'm finna give y'all another hit.” High-pitched girly screams pierce the room; the floor rumbles as everyone prepares to throw some ass. It's kind of like an IUD insertion, there's long buildup before it snaps into place.

THE GLASS BEDROOM

grief and social media

by Lauren Herrala

Old fashioned mourning

If you want to understand a society, pay attention to how it mourns. Our collective response to death says everything about what we value and prioritize in life. Navigating grief in American society has historically been characterized by cultural notions of public and private. As the internet becomes an established part of contemporary life and social media further entangles with our definition of authentic community, public and private space have been completely redefined. This shift in our approach to socialization has massive implications for how we address loss. Social media’s thirst for engagement threatens to reduce our experience of death to mere performance art.

OVERWHELMED WITH REVERENCE

a review of Immanuel Wilkins' Blues Blood

by Alyssa Bardge

An album as wild as its cover

On October 11th, 2024, Immanuel Wilkins released his third studio album, Blues Blood, a multilayered 57-minute suite co-produced by Meshell Ndegeocello. With stunning musical and compositional technique, Wilkins masterfully and gracefully explores collective and personal memories within Black diasporic communities. He employs his regular quartet, consisting of Micah Thomas on piano, Rick Rosato on bass, and Kweku Sumbry on drums, along with four featured vocalists (June McDoom, Ganayva, Yaw Agyeman, and Cécile McLorin-Salvant) who push the album past conventional experimental, free-form compositions. Wilkins places both his quartet and the singers in a community of equals and no one voice, including Wilkins’, takes precedence. That’s one of the many brilliant aspects of the album. It is as if the whole experience is one long conversation, a connective tissue to bloodlines past, present, and yet to be discovered.

SPAIN'S GREAT RAPPER IS NOT YOUR ORDINARY RAPPER

or the brilliance of Kase O's El Circulo

By Maximilian Ruiz

Not your average rapper

Rap music is often underestimated as an art form, and rarely considered a literary one. While not every urban lyricist is a poetic genius, there are a wide array of rap artists known to use language at a masterful level. I would argue that they can go toe to toe with world-renowned poets. The philosophical depth of the questions they tackle, as well as their ability to translate those ideas into complex rhythmic and literary forms is spectacular. Though we have a tendency to associate rap with American artists and to some extent the English, the first great rapper I heard was Spanish. And without a doubt, the best way to describe Kase O’s music is literature at its most complex and potent.

ARTIST, THIEF, OR PROGRAMMER

Gene Kogan and the problem of labor

By Alicia "Ace" Hodrick

Gene Kogan in the Gene Kogan Style

Gene Kogan is a self-proclaimed artist working in programming and AI technology. He creates installations and video loops. He’s not a gallery artist and releases most of his work through talks and lectures in which he explains his process as an AI Artist. If that feels a bit circular, it is. Various sites across the web label him an AI artist, or an artist who uses AI creatively and he was featured in Artnet's 2018 “most influential trailblazers” working in the intersection of AI and art. In other words, he has a presence, though his website has little information about his personal life and so in some ways, well, not much of a presence. We do know that he previously worked as a programmer before labeling himself an artist. Or as he likes to put it, “Engineer turned Artist." Not surprisingly, he sells many of his “Artworks” on Opensea.io, a site for NFTs and cryptocurrency.

BAD BUNNY'S BAILE INoVIDABLE de 2026

why BB's Super Bowl performance will be a touchdown for human beings

By Rose Dominguez

Is it a power move? Is it a good combo? Considering that he refused to tour the U.S out of fear that ICE would pose a threat to his audiences. And so Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance may very well be both historic and controversial, even more so than previous controversial Superbowls such as Janet Jackson’s Costume Mishap in 2004, or Beyonce’s Anti-America in 2016, and Kendrick Lamar’s Superbowl Performance in 2025.

THE INCREDIBLE HUMANITY OF BRUTALISM

San Francisco's St. Mary's Cathedral

By Lesly Gonzalez

A Brutalist Beauty

No matter what one’s religious beliefs are, the loss of a church is devastating. In under sixty years, the Catholic community of San Francisco lost two cathedrals. The first, the Cathedral of Saint Mary’s, was damaged in the 1906 earthquake, although it was repaired and continued to welcome congregants. The second larger cathedral, located at the corner of Van Ness Avenue and O’Farrell Street, was destroyed by a fire on September 7th, 1962. The damage was too extensive to repair, and that may have prompted Archbishop Joseph McGueken to dream of a new kind of cathedral, one that was of the times, but yet not: “It is my feeling that we should rebuild on the same site … a modern, contemporary design, but not what people call modernistic.”

THE REAL CALL OF DUTY

games and propaganda and fun

by Drew Acosta

Starting from the very beginning of human history, humanity has found a crazy number of ways to entertain itself. And so, it shouldn't be surprising that games have evolved over the centuries, and that in the last moment of the 20th century and the very beginning of the 21st century, we’re seeing a true revolution in what a game can be. Of course, the revolution begins with the arcade, as a public space for people to gather and play. Then the next evolution comes in the form of gaming consoles, like the perfectly named Game Boy. These two moments reinvented the gaming world, solidifying the importance of socializing, the need for community, and a place for players to play.

YOU ARE A BRAND, NOT AN ARTIST

a polemic against the branded artist

By Cara Juan

The Missing Craft

I’ve come to believe that thinking in extremes—whether positive or negative—is often a dangerous and limiting mindset. Extremity, no matter how well-intentioned, closes off thinking, and even loving something too much can make a person unwilling to accept criticism. In the arts, this kind of “all-or-nothing” thinking creates so-called “geniuses,” artists who dedicate themselves entirely to one style or vision until nobody knows who they are outside of that niche. It’s an old archetype and it has value, but the principle behind it is impossible for artists of our era to realize. The days of old masters devoting lifetimes to studying portraits, hands, and feet are long gone, and the modern artist now faces a frightening trade off: dedication or decimation. So, forget being an authentic artist, in this economy even the tech bros are barely scraping by.

THE UTOPIA OF THE OUTSIDERS

the triumph of the WNBA

By Posy DiPaolo

If you’ve never seen Paige Buecker on a Tik Tok feed, you need to stop what you’re doing, go on online, and watch the pure poetry that is Paige. I know I could barely believe what I was seeing the first time I saw her; she was still in college at UConn and like all pure Buecker compilations, she was controlling the court as if it were her personal orchestra. Her hair was slicked back in a tight ponytail, her posture was aggressive as she pushed her shoulders forward to make a Bueker defense-wall. She spread her limbs as far as they would go and stayed low to the ground making her impossible to move or get by. Confident, yes. I could feel that from the screen, but it was more than that. I felt her anger. I felt her drive. I felt her grace. The way she dribbled was like she was dancing on the court. I don’t even wanna mention, even though I am, the way she can shoot from anywhere she stands on that court. It was just a 30-second clip, but I was hooked. I fell in love with her in a bad way; Buecker was all I could think about.

FOUR HORRIFIC SCENES

the perverse logic of gothic cinema

by Katelyn Laisure

It’s every parent’s nightmare. A young girl falls into an icy pond. Each second that she’s under the water feels like an hour. It’s agonizing. When her father finally plunges into the icy depths, we can feel the cold seize him; his every stroke is an act of desperation, fighting against the water's cold weight. Time collapses around him; the brutal reality of the situation dawns on him and us. As he emerges from the water, his daughter’s limp body in his arms, he unleashes a cathartic roar, a horrifying and primal scream that cuts through the air like a knife. It's monstrous, bone-chilling, and symbolizes the torment of a loss so profound his soul has shattered. We know this wound will never heal and in a way the audience never heals from watching the opening scene of Nicholas Roeg’s 1972 shocker, Don’t Look Now, starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie.

NO SMALL PARTS

long live the liberation of high school thespians

By Chloe Vuillermoz

Each spring, my high school theatre troupe hosted an award show and we’d hand out gold-painted rocks to the winners. These were The Stonys. We followed the lead of every award show, aping the professionals in the slyest ways possible: Best Lead Actress (highly contentious); Best One-Act Play (usually obvious); and of course Best Chorus Member (both incredibly tender and the biggest slam). I got that last one senior year after playing “The Three Boobed Lady” in the musical Sideshow. I probably won the award for my overall commitment to being there, but I should have won for standing on the back platform after the finale of each show, weeping alongside the rest of the cast. Even if my tears were invisible to the audience, I was committed. I earned that award. In exchange for my teenage mountain of devotion, I got a fist-sized rock.

PUERTO RICO DREAMS BEAUTIFUL MYTHS

Taino culture and children's literature

By Rodolfo Lopez

Children books traverse a vast expanse of experience: adventure stories, simple picture books, easy-to-read fables, religious parables, pop-up books whose lessons literally jump off the page at the child. And Puerto Rican children’s books are no different, except that they all come from Puerto Rico and share the concerns of an island culture aware that its neighbors to the North, South, and West are on land and more powerful. Our myths, legends, lullabies, and folk songs share a cultural focus on nature and survival. These stories are often the result of trying to explain the origin of the things. It’s not just about telling an engaging story, but about transmitting the beauty and logic of an entire culture.

YE, A BEAUTIFUL DARK TWISTED LEGACY

Or, how the artist's life reflects the rhythms of his work

By Lewi Thute

The debate over separating art from the artist has persisted for centuries, gaining even greater significance in today’s social and cultural climate of cancellation. No single artist, or personality, has put this argument to the test more than Ye, formally known as Kanye West. His career and life are interlocked in a crazy duet and has become increasingly unstable as each chapter of his life progresses. Due to this, many current and long-time fans defensively argue that we must separate Ye from his art to preserve his incredible work. I say, no. Ye’s life is his art and to try to separate the two is to strip his art of all meaning, no matter how problematic his behavior is.

GREATNESS

the art of greatness in art is not what you think

By Devon Eckert

Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is often hailed as the greatest painting in the world, attracting 20,000 eager visitors every day. But if we look at the painting itself, it’s hard to argue that it’s objectively the greatest artwork ever created. In fact, the Mona Lisa is a technically proficient portrait, but not without its limitations. It’s not particularly large and quite pedestrian in its use of color, composition, and subject matter. Nothing sets it apart from countless other Renaissance works. So why has it become the most famous painting in the world?

SKIN STORIES
a brief history of tattoos in art and life

By Lily Marylander

The Illustrated Man (1969)

In today’s day and age, I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t have a tattoo. They are symbols of creativity, self-expression, commitment to one’s identity, and strength, and now of course, there is a certain “cool” factor. They have come a long way from being ceremonial for ancient societies to sailors marking their life at sea, to symbolizing gang involvement, to declaring a person punk and alternative, and finally today to being mostly ornamental and even achieving the status of fine art with gallery and museum shows. In 1969 The Illustrated Man came out in theaters and Rod Steiger was covered head to toe with a full bodysuit of tattoos. The public was shocked and intrigued and the film and imagery were marked as sci-fi, horror, and about as far from normal as you could get. Today you can see people with full bodysuits buying heirloom tomatoes at Safeway. Why have tattoos been so historically controversial? When did they make the shift into the popular public sphere? And why is it now considered normal and extremely accessible for anyone to sport a small infinity sign on the wrist to a full bodysuit? These questions and their answers intrigue me, so let us sink the needle in and start sketching out a plausible history.

THE HYBRID LIFE OF THE MEXICAN SOUL

or that's a lot of culture for one mind

By Renata Blanco

Sometimes I feel as if I only have fragments of Mexico in my soul, bits and pieces of ideas, beliefs, visions all playing around in my mind. And then I think, well, that’s what it means to be Mexican. When I was young, as an only child and grandchild, I was extremely spoiled. Every October for my birthday I would ask my grandmother for Pan de Muerto (Day of the Dead bread). I share with many Mexicans, the troubling trait of undoing the line between death and birth. As my grandmother would explain, Pan de Muerto is a piece of culinary magic, a traditional dish born of wildly different cultures, a combination of ingredients from everywhere that somehow becomes in our crazy nation, just bread. I’m not sure whether to honor it or cry.

I VANT TO BE ALONE

or the disappearing woman artist

By Lauren Heine

Converse

To ensure a life of fame, one must do no less than sell one’s soul to the devil. A dangerous deal with never-ending consequences: some immediate and some far into the future. While many celebrities accept their fate, others attempt to negotiate the fine print and squirm out from under the devil’s contract. But ironically enough, the only way out is the way in which they came: a life as a nobody. For many, this is a worthy trade, a life doing what they love in return for little life outside of that. However, the problem is that even the renegotiation of the contract is fraught and difficult to maneuver.

THE AMERICAN DAD WAY

murder, mayhem, and family time on television's best and greatest show ever (without exaggeration)

By Gabrielle Kedziora

What makes something impeccable? Shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park each were wonderful in their own individual ways, but if you’re going to combine innocent childhood cartoon styles with crude toilet humor, questionable sex jokes, and racial insensitivity, you have to do it right! Finally, with American Dad, show runners Seth MacFarlane, Mike Barker and Matt Weitzman do it and truly capture the most enigmatic aspects of our lives. The show follows Stan Smith, a painfully patriotic CIA agent and his family in Langley Falls, Virginia. Standouts in the family are Francine Smith, a ditzy alcoholic housewife, Haley Smith and Jeff Fisher, a stoner hippie and her stoner hippie husband, both who still live at home (freeloaders). The younger son Steve Smith, a horny prepubescent nerd, who sings like a sweet angel. And of course, the lovable “creatures” of the house, Roger a crossdressing alien hiding from the CIA and Klaus a goldfish with the brain of an East German Olympic ski jumper.

THE LEONARD COHEN-ANTHONY BOURDAIN TWIN STORY

two icons find their identity in the same way

By Sara Cruz

I was walking along listening to Leonard Cohen’s “Is This What You Wanted” and I saw Anthony Bourdain’s face. As Cohen sang, “Is this what you wanted? / To live in a house that is haunted by the ghost of you and me?” there he was, not actually of course, but in my mind. Yes, his face, was in my mind. I had recently rewatched Bourdain’s hit television series No Reservations but still, why was I imagining Bourdain singing the whole of Cohen’s album, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, or for that matter Cohen trying some exotic food on the other side of the world. The answer should have come sooner, but I was slowly figuring out, at first unconsciously, and then, as an unmistakable fact, that Cohen and Bourdain are actually and symbolically cultural twins. What a late afternoon epiphany, I had to sit down and catch my breath.

A BAND SO FICTIONAL IT'S REAL

or Damon Albarn's strange experiment in pop

By Morty Tillman

The Gorillaz are a collaborative virtual band founded by Damon Albarn and Jaime Hewlette. But what’s fascinating about them is that they created four fictional characters to represent the band, each with elaborate backstories. We might say the split in the band is between the real-life creators and the fictional band that they themselves have created. And all that might seem a rather simple joke on celebrity, or pop music, or fandom, but the tensions and strange ideas that come from it are far from simple and far from being easy to describe.

GAMERGATE 2.0 AND MORE

one gamer's dissection of a problem

By Iris Chang

Recently, a game called Concord has become a hot topic. As a team-based, first-person shooter developed by Sony over eight years and with a budget of over a hundred of million, it was officially released on the PS5 and Steam platforms on August 23, 2024. To say that the release was a disaster is an understatement. The servers were shut down in under 12 days after it launched with the company handing out hundreds of thousands of refunds. What happened? In the current gaming market, keywords like political correctness, DEI principles, GamerGate 2.0, and “woke” have already sparked widespread discussion. Concord, along with its very short lifespan, has become the focal point of this debate. In order to understand why Concord sparked so much opposition, we must first look at what happened during GamerGate 1.0.

WHAT, WHY, WHO IS COSPLAY

or a few facts about a new form of identity

By Tony Liu

On June 1st, 2024. Under the blazing sun with temperatures reaching 35°C (95 Fahrenheit), I arrived at a slightly remote area in Beijing. As soon as I stepped out of the taxi, I was hit by a wave of heat. Carrying my heavy camera bag, I felt a bit out of place, dressed like an ordinary man amid a sea of red hair, blue hair, purple hair, wigs, wings, masks, all of which must have weighed several pounds. My friend had spent several hundred yuan (close to 100 dollars) to custom-order her wig, and just watching her put it on made me sweat. Where was I?

TIME UNFOLDING

or dance with art and light

By Eason Jiang

Once upon a time. It’s a phrase that we hear our whole lives. It is the witness and recorder of time, the moment we go from listeners to speakers; it is the trigger of the time machine to activate our brains, bringing us back to the unknown period when the story begins. The “time” comes to our ears, like a rewinding tape, like a rolling vinyl record. We hear it, just like the question, can a fish see the water that surrounds it? To us who are wrapped in time, is this concept visible or touchable? Fortunately, we are not fish. We, to some extent, are good at creating objects to which time can attach itself.

LARS VON TRIER BUILDS A FILM THAT DEFIES OUR WORLD

the terror inside The House that Jack Built

By Bert Wang

Some weeks ago on a Saturday night, just after finishing my nighttime routine, I set up my video projector, lay in bed, and somehow knew I was ready to rewatch The House That Jack Built, Lars von Trier’s journey into the serial killer genre. Everything was perfect and then the fire alarm started to ring. As my roommates and I were evacuating the building, we decided to kill time at Timkin Hall and watch The House that Jack Built anyway. After midnight, some film major friends of mine decided to join along as well. This was the first time that I had watched von Trier with a crowd and I began to worry about their reactions. It made me quite nervous, if sweating is a sign of nervousness.

SOCIAL MEDIA'S FUTURE IS?

the human touch will save us on-line

By Sofia Porzio

I was 17 years old when a musician’s agent asked me to make a video on “TikTok”, then a new social media app, to lip sync a song of an artist they were managing. Little did I know that that request would turn into a full-time TikTok career. I have gone from 0 followers to approximately 4.5 million in 2024, becoming a creator who was once just a follower. Whenever I see "think pieces" about social media (generally old media critiques about how harmful it is), they usually come from people outside the creator marketplace—followers of the experience rather than creators or active contributors to it. Due to social media's ever-evolving nature, those critiques tend to miss the medium's complexities and are bad predictors of where social media will take us.

SCP FOUNDATION

the strange site of society, language games, and rules

By Pierce Parker

Figure this Out

What are the rules you play by in your life? Of course, you have to eat, drink, and sleep. Those rules are simple. If you don’t play by them, then you won’t last long. Nearly all of us also play by society’s rules. We dress ourselves, obey traffic laws, get a job to make money, and buy things. After that we have some choices. When you log into your social media of choice to consume and post, you play by a similar, but different set of rules (X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.). When you read a post, you understand what's happening because of the rules. You know the top left shows who posted it, you know underneath is the main image or video, you know underneath that are the creators’ description or thoughts on what they posted, and finally you know under that are comments from other users. These are rules that you follow in order to play in an online game or society.

The Age of Eco Horror

the genre that hasn't quite caught on

By Olivia Meurk

The disaster is here

The environment is changing around us. Everytime I turn on the news it feels like I am just scrolling through a sick apocalyptic catalog of disasters. From local fires to global floods, there is fear and hopelessness and death. And really, I don’t even need to watch the news; my teachers are melancholic and cathartic, they bemoan what the young will have to figure out while prattling on about how it all used to be. My mom apologizes to me for the world that her generation has left to mine. I mean, haven’t you heard? We’re boiling now.

THE FOUR TRUE RULES OF THE REAL-LIFE TERRORIST FILM

a lesson in genre

By Jenny Chen

They're all scary

There’s a whole range of true-life terrorist attack films. Here’s a list: Argo (2012), Hotel Mumbai (2018), Hotel Rwanda (2004), Patriots' Day (2016), World Trade Center (2006), The 15:17 to Paris (2018) and Flight 93 (2006). What’s fascinating about this genre is how the rules of the genre are so stable and are repeated over and over again throughout each film. It doesn’t matter if the attack is in France, India, or the United States; wherever, the same thing happens again and again, which is odd because we tend to think of terrorist attack films as being unique. But they aren’t, they’re as clichéd as love stories. They follow a set of rules that filmmakers repeat over and over again. It’s only because terrorist attack films represent something that feels unique and awful that we think what we’re watching a film that is unique and awful. But that’s not true: these films might be more rigid than love stories, and I'm going to show you how they are.

THE HAUNTING OF OUR IMAGINATIONS

the sudden appearance of liminal space

By Rubi Sanmiguel

What's wrong?

The definition of a Liminal Space is not a concrete one, but it builds off of the literal origin of the word liminal: the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage. When we apply the idea of a middle stage to a location, we get places like hallways, airports, and schools, in-between places that we pass through as we travel from place to place. The same concept can also be applied to the self and our experiences of passing through time, such as adolescence, where we’re uncomfortably between childhood and adulthood. We can assign other specific examples of these places such as homes, stores, malls, playgrounds, rural roads, gas stations, hospitals, and other places destinations where we spend small amounts of time. These places are not scary or eerie. They’re normally bustling with customers and employees, other children, people living their day-to-day lives, and it is this day-to-day context which makes them comforting.

Cho Giseok wants to grow up to be an Art Director

The Nostalgia dreams of a great artist

By William Choi

“When I was young, I wanted to be an art director.” It’s a funny statement and even funnier when you think that it comes from South Korean avant-garde photographer, Cho Giseok. I mean what kid dreams of becoming an art director? Born in 1992, he studied Graphic design at Kookmin University; however, he found the practice unsatisfying and, dropped out at the age of 20 to try to become an art director. As he learned more about the field, he started to build skills in many different fields such as set design and photography. “I wanted to create my own images, and I wanted to work through all the processes.”

WHAT A CHARACTER

the Joker is becoming the man

By Jason Chou

It's lonely being the one

The Joker, Batman's iconic nemesis, has transcended the realms of cheap 1940s comic books to become a magnetic figure in contemporary pop culture. He appeared in the first Batman comic book (1946) and was immediately popular, the perfect foil to the strait-laced and bat-tortured hero. Throughout the long history of comic books, it is always the Joker issues that sell the most and command the most money on the collectibles market. Still, that’s just a small corner of the culture industry and, for many years, one that no one took seriously.

FREEDOM

my life in the Red Bull Rampage

By Ben Curtis

Ben (Me!) Hitting A-Line//Whistler, BC

On my bike is where I feel alive. I relish it. I crave it. I obsess about it. Once that front wheel leaves the ground and the adrenaline kicks in, it's all in the balancing, just like life itself. Feeling the pull of gravity, going beyond it, and getting that jolt of nervous energy, I panic and feather the brakes. No wheelie lasts forever, though, it sure feels like it could or at least that you wish it could. Some of us have a compulsion to ride, to embrace the air, explore the unknown, and take the trail that no one else has taken. That’s just the way it goes, like some mutant gene that skips a generation. I vividly remember the first extreme mountain biking film I watched, and boy, was 9-year-old me gripped. I would try to emulate the riders, be the coolest kid, skid madly and jump curbs. I wasn't that good, but I was having fun. What's important is that these films fueled my imagination. I was captivated, but I had no idea why.

A TAXI DRIVER BECOMES A COUNTRY

the Gwangju Uprising as political art

By Uijin Sohn

The uprising

The Gwangju Democracy Movement, also known as the Gwangju Uprising, began as a peaceful protest led by students and citizens calling for democratic reform and an end to military dictatorship, but the protests grew in size and intensity, leading to violent government repression, tragic confrontations and loss of life. The Gwangju Uprising was ultimately instrumental in South Korea's transition to democracy, sparking national outrage and spurring efforts toward greater political freedom and democratic reform. The movement is remembered as a symbol of the struggle for democracy and human rights.

HE SAW IT ALL

the visionary Hideo Kojima

By Riley Kuang

A visionary with glasses

Hideo Kojima once predicted that there would be a huge information system connecting the world in the future, through which people would be connected to each other, but that in the end people with ulterior motives would use it to control access to information. People scoffed at this, until today. Kojima once made a prediction that in the future, wars would become a business, and the system built by wars would only maintain the existence of that system. People scoffed at this, until today. Kojima once predicted a not-too-distant future in which people would huddle in separate worlds and rely solely on couriers to keep them connected. People scoffed at this, until today.

YOU HAVE TO HATE HER

the trickiest misogyny trope on tv

By Maeve Mckinney

Trapped in misogyny

I know that you think you’ve overcome your misogyny, but I’m here to tell you that maybe the old bigotry has a few new tricks, tricks so deep in the culture that you can’t see them and that you can only react to them. Everyone hates when someone gets in the way of what they want and in a number of recent television shows/movies the burden of being the blockade has fallen squarely on the shoulders of female characters. As one redditor put it so eloquently about Skylar White in Breaking Bad, “She's just so perfectly hateable. It's like they spent years developing the most annoying character ever.” It doesn’t matter how big a feminist you are, a woman who gets in the way of the hero is going to inspire hate, your hate, and it all goes out the window when a woman gets in the way of a man’s fun. We literally can’t help ourselves. While the literary trope in itself is not misogynistic, it finds its perfect form in misogyny.

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