“People will put Bernie Sanders anywhere but the White House,” tweeted seemingly half of the Twitter-verse following President Biden’s inauguration on January 20th. Some joked that the inauguration was being live-tweeted like an award show, with users conjuring up memes within seconds of even the most mundane moments on the big day. Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who attempted a run for president during both the 2016 and 2020 election cycles, became the definitive star of the event. The current Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee drew all eyes to him as he plopped down in a folding…

I don’t know how to feel about this.

Decades upon decades of slashes, jump scares, and found footage have exhausted the horror genre with every gruesome shot, haunting villain, and twist and turn imaginable. Tusk, a 2014 film written and directed by comic book aficionado and podcast nerd Kevin Smith, is an innovative scare in an oversaturated market. Perhaps innovative gives the film too much credit, but Tusk grapples with a new kind of fear. Spoilers lie ahead, so proceed at your own risk.

Tusk hatched from an episode of SModcast, Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier’s over-ten-year-old podcast, where the…

Kanye West positioned himself as a polarizing icon in mainstream media the moment he entered the music industry in the late 1990s; he’s managed to hold the twenty-first century’s eyes captive throughout his career. To some, he is a genius, a messiah of music whose talents stretch to all corners of the Earth, a revolutionary rapper whose impact on the genre has been unforgettable; to others, he is an egotistical joke, a wannabe president roped into the Kardashian clan in pursuit of attention, a perpetrator of promoting ignorance and Trump-ism. …

“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…