The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/category/arts/)
This week, President Biden signed a bipartisan military aid bill that would send $26bn to Israel. The day after, the Coalition for Mutual Liberation claimed a portion of our campus’ Arts Quad as a pro-Palestinian liberated zone, in solidarity with other encampments at universities across the nation. Will it matter?
This assortment of songs remind me of summer and the weeks leading up to summer. I put these songs together because I wanted to capture the warmer, freer, more exciting days ahead. Some songs remind me of a luxurious summer nap with the windows open, and others sound like a techno beach-side dance club.
Justin Bieber, Daniel Caesar and Giveon: Peaches
This song brings me right back to my high school senior spring. A lot was still closed down because of the pandemic, but whenever the weather hit 60 degrees I would head to the beach after school. Plus, Giveon’s verse in this song really scratches my brain in the right way.
I was depressed in Chicago when I did the interview. I sat bleary-eyed in front of my computer screen trying, and so desperately failing, to look as animated as possible. The position was as an assistant for a high school journalism program at an Ivy League university. My job would be to invite speakers from the journalism industry, coordinate travel and lunches, shepherd the students around campus and ultimately scaffold the program from conception to execution. “What stories have you been following in the news?” the interviewers asked.
Girlhood. It’s a terrain as complex as it is universal marked by its commodification, demonization and idolization. In its essence lies a social and biological experience more fraught than any other. Recently, my reflections explored the politics of girlhood — essays laden with dense jargon, lamenting the systems that uphold its persistent scrutiny and sexualization. And while not dismissing the relevance of this discourse, in the midst of it, I found myself losing sight of its fundamentals.
I thought I was done with horror movies, but Immaculate had me hooked from the first scene. The viewer is lifted over the rolling pastures of the Italian countryside and plopped within the iron fences of a Roman Catholic convent. Right from the beginning, I felt a sense of entrapment and dread. After Sister Mary’s (Simona Tabasco) attempted escape rife with emotional agony, the viewer is literally pulled right back into the convent. The scene cuts to black, and we meet Sister Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney), a wide-eyed American nun invited to join the convent. From there, I elected to watch the rest of the movie through my fingers.
It is the long awaited time of year again: Spring has technically sprung, according to the schedule of the equinoxes.
The following playlist is meant to capture the fleeting hope that comes with spring. It is light at first, short lived yet giddy before the heaviness of summer begins to set in and temperaments become relaxed.
It’s hard to find big-time concerts in Upstate New York, so when I noticed that pop sensation Olivia Rodrigo’s arrival to New York City was perfectly timed to line up with Cornell’s spring break, I jumped at the chance to get tickets. I have been a fan of Rodrigo since her Disney Channel days, and attended her first tour in 2022, so I was ecstatic to have the opportunity to see her again.
Rodrigo’s Guts World Tour celebrates the release of her second studio album, Guts. The album, which was released in September 2023, contains 12 eclectic tracks. Some are slow heartbreak tunes like much of her first album, Sour, while others are more upbeat with a punk-rock like sound to them. Rodrigo’s fan base has definitely expanded since her first tour, with most audience members dressing in her signature look of a short skirt, leather jacket and knee-high boots. Before Rodrigo came on, the show was opened by The Breeders, a 1990s alternative rock group fronted by Kim Deal. To me, the band seemed like an interesting choice, as most of the concert attendees were teenagers or young adults born long after the band’s peak.
On March 14, 2024 the American Library Association published a report highlighting a dramatic 92% increase in efforts to ban and censor books across the nation in 2023. Censorship attempts have risen consistently in the past years with each year topping the previous for the number of titles challenged. These trends reflect a growing battle pitting libraries and booksellers against those wishing to silence diverse voices. These attempts are rooted in individuals feeling threatened by progressive ideas that challenge the inequality entrenched in society. These attempts are appalling. The insecurity conservative minds feel passes on these troubling beliefs to children because they never see the books that would allow them to form their own opinion, causing the cycle of inequality to continue.
I’ve always liked watching movies alone; I haven’t had trouble going to the theaters alone since before I turned 18. But for a time earlier this year, I’d never done it quite so much, or in quite such a specific way.
Phoebe Bridgers and Annie Hall (with their little meta-textual trivia bits) occupy a bizarre place in my mind: vestiges of that last relationship not fully unlocked for me until it was over.
Wendy Williams is a former daytime talk show host, infamous for being unabashedly controversial. Her show ran for almost 14 years before abruptly ending in June 2022 due to concerns about her health, leaving fans of the show with many questions about Wendy’s wellbeing, whereabouts and the future of her career. In February, Lifetime released a four-part docuseries called Where is Wendy Williams? which attempts to answer some of these questions.
