Phyllis Feng
The trending page on YouTube has always been a cesspool of sensationalist thumbnails and clickbait titles, but recently I dared to visit it again, bracing for the worst — and lo and behold, shouting out at me from the screen at #1, was The ACE Family’s newest video: “THE ACE FAMILY OFFICIAL LABOR AND DELIVERY!!!”
After the disappointing, anti-climactic ending to Game of Thrones, I looked at The Last Kingdom with a leery eye when its title popped up in my Netflix feed. But my reluctance, as it turns out, was unfounded. For those who are unfamiliar with the show, it follows the journey of Uhtred of Bebbanberg from childhood through
We live in a gilded age of fame — or is it a cage? Some would say that we’re soaring on an upward trajectory when it comes to social media and that the latitude of influencers is ever-spreading and ever-ripping, throughout society. We have never been more intimate with each other. We have never had
Trauma porn — it is as distasteful as it sounds. Referring to the “perverse fascination with other people’s misfortune,” trauma porn is a term coined from the darkest bowels of the media, representative of the effects of mass-circulation. Gifted, or perhaps cursed, with the sophisticated networks of communication that cast themselves around the globe, images
Rupi Kaur is the virtual face of contemporary, minimalist poetry. Her debut poetry collection, Milk and Honey, achieved instant success and has become akin to a household staple among the poetry community — her follow-up, The Sun and Her Flowers, was a release as radiantly welcomed by her faithful readers. The poet herself is renowned for
America is its own harshest, most unforgiving critic. Our deeply entrenched divisions aside, beyond our historic prejudices and ideological obstinacies, we are a paradox: at once worshippers of democracy and the civil liberties granted to us, and self-flagellators, prodding every tender place with ruthlessness. I’ve always appreciated this about the American identity, the dual nature
Love. It is an emotion that has been conceptualized for centuries upon centuries, an agonizing, exuberant, profound and inexplicably powerful force. It has been the perpetrator of wars in Greek mythology. It has been written across the sky, in the stars — it has been the embodiment of sin, the parent of purity and even
A cappella, in a nutshell In an era rife with EDM, autotune, “whisperpop,” and other musical paraphernalia, where does a cappella find itself amidst all this cacophony? Literally meaning “without musical accompaniment,” a cappella is music stripped down to its bare bones, piercing through all the technological accessories we have today and manipulating humanity’s most
New year, new me. Months ago in a previous article — “Shane Dawson and Jeffree Star: What Makes This Duo So Dynamic?”— I analyzed the nature of the relationship between these two YouTube celebrities, and, while I always strive to remain impartial, my bias was clearly evident: I painted both YouTubers in a rather favorable
In a truly legendary fashion, Ricky Gervais, 58-year-old comedian and long-time host of the Golden Globes, delivered a ruthless monologue targeted at the elites of the entertainment industry. In it, he addressed a variety of celebrities in a somewhat complimentary tone, such as Al Pacino and Robert Deniro, and others with more withering remarks —
My shyness was, and probably still is, a formidable nemesis, an intractable opponent and overall bane of my existence. To clear the air, let’s first establish the — somewhat ambiguous — difference between shyness and introversion: introversion is a broad term to categorize someone’s personality, indicating that an individual is more attuned to their internal
In Billie Eilish’s recent interview with Vanity Fair, a continuation of a series that memorializes Eilish’s astonishing ascent to fame and her character evolution, she acknowledges criticism of her music: “Like my voice is really soft,” she said, “and it’s not belty and people think I whisper in all my songs my belt
