“Sometimes it feels like I can’t die, ’cause I was never alive,” raps Juice WRLD, nee Jarad Higgins, whose untimely passing ripped through the music industry exactly one year ago. His first posthumous album Legends Never Die, released in April of 2020, arrived over a year after his last full length LP Death Race for Love. Packed with features from previous collaborators like Halsey and Trippie Redd, the album features sixteen tracks — some of which had previously leaked to streaming platforms while Juice WRLD was still alive.

Legends Never Die is bookended with soulful, staticy pre-recorded messages from the…

How the Internet Reformed Reactionary Humor in 2020

As Election Night stretched across four endless days, teenagers and 20-somethings dashed to the internet to meme their hearts out over a night riddled with anxiety. Jokes about Nevada taking its sweet, sweet time to count ballots as the state grew increasingly crucial to the race; the “Chartthrobs” of CNN, MSNBC, and NBC, like Steve Kornacki and John King, who tirelessly tapped on interactive boards for the four days straight of counting; and the nation’s collective obsessed with refreshing The New York Times and fivethirtyeight.com, populated Twitter and Tik Tok. The fear of a second Trump presidency permeated throughout the…

On Apr. 8, 2020, Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont, more affectionately known as Bernie, officially dropped out of the presidential race. Following a slew of victories in the early primaries, such as winning California, and narrowly losing by a singular delegate at the Iowa caucus to Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Bernie appeared to be defeating the odds. A Democratic-socialist was in serious contention to be the Democratic party’s 2020 presidential candidate. America was finally “feeling the Bern” that had been swelling since his original run for the White House in 2016. March’s Super Tuesday brought this momentum to a halt as…

Despite the criticisms generally aimed at astrology, the practice has skyrocketed to mainstream popularity with the rise of apps like co-star and the Pattern. Yet, many still consider horoscopes, astrological analysis, and the general zodiac as tools for teenage girls to predict their love lives or a means for women in mid-life crises to explain their failures. The question of “what’s your sign?” is often met with an eye-roll even in 2020, when several national polls estimate nearly a third of the United States believes in astrology in some capacity. …

I’m getting scared.

I consider myself to be the last person in a room to make an argument against the Internet and its endless terrain. Yet, the age of information, and misinformation, may destroy everything I hold near and dear about the world wide web. It’s too easy to receive bad news. I willingly select to expect a minimum of two emails a day from the New York Times chronicling everything that went, or is going, wrong. I wake up, I read my morning briefing, sometimes followed by more specific updates on subjects such as the ongoing coronavirus pandemic or…

“That’s not just a dollar. It’s Mr. Krabs’ first dollar! His most prized possession! And we got paint on it!” shouts a frantic Spongebob, racing against the clock to remove a small smudge of paint from his boss’ proudest monetary feat. Patrick, who, as an unemployed starfish living beneath a rock does not experience the burdens of capitalism, does not understand the sponge’s anxious reaction. He calmly reasons that the two could “just stick any old dollar bill up on the wall, no one would even know the difference!” as they move to escape the crab’s wrath. He escapes the…

In a world where bars held their doors wide open, strangers clustered in crowds, and brushing hands with someone on the street didn’t induce an instant flinch, Megan Thee Stallion appeared as a shining beacon. The Houston rapper leaped onto the scene in 2016 before picking up traction with the release of her mixtape Tina Snow in 2018. Her next break out arose in the summer of 2019 which would soon become “Hot Girl Summer”–named after a tweet from 2018. …

Revisiting the Saw franchise sixteen years after its debut.

It’s time to talk about Saw. The films have captured my heart for a number of years now and a comprehensive article breaking down the highlights and flaws of Saw is long overdue.

Critics point to the Saw franchise as nothing more than torture porn for sadistic fans of gore. One could argue that the bloody, twisted traps that brutally murder (mostly) innocent people make the film unwatchable for some. Saw ostracizes a chunk of the population with its brutal horror, but simultaneously creates a niche for the sick, twisted, and/or…