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(07/17/25 10:27pm)
Visit a tourist destination, attend a local concert, or dine at any trendy restaurant, and the same ritual plays out: Dozens, if not hundreds, of photos and videos are taken. Some are destined for an Instagram post or TikTok video while others will live quietly in the depths of a camera roll, occasionally visited during random late–night scrolls. In a culture dominated by phone usage and social media platforms, the urge to document is practically automatic. While this compulsion exists, though, a counter–revolution urges people to be in the moment, put away the phone, and experience a moment without documenting it.
(07/09/25 6:19pm)
As someone who lives in New York, I am lucky to have Broadway so close to me—it’s really only a 40–minute Long Island Rail Road train ride away. So, when I won lottery tickets to see Maybe Happy Ending over winter break, I jumped at the chance. Alas, I entered the theater knowing only that it’s a love story about robots, not expecting to leave heartbroken and reflect upon my previous perspectives on love—specifically why we choose to love when we know there is only a short amount of time that we spend on Earth.
(07/01/25 3:49am)
Min Jin Lee’s debut novel Free Food for Millionaires paints a portrait of a Korean American community in New York from 1993 to 1997, centering on a recent Princeton University graduate named Casey Han and beginning with the line “Competence can be a curse.”
(04/04/25 12:23am)
In the underground level of SPIN Philadelphia, artists gather before their canvases—some trembling as they go over their supplies, others taking pictures with loved ones, and a few glancing at their inspiration images one last time. The atmosphere is tense, yet electric. Each competitor has just 20 minutes to transform a blank canvas into a finished painting, all while dozens of spectators wander the room, watching their every brushstroke. At the end of each round, the audience votes, and after three rounds, a winner is crowned.
(04/28/25 6:40pm)
Photography is, in one sense, a limitless medium that demands no specific space to practice. In any given location, smartphones effortlessly capture the fleeting moments of the day. Staged: Studio Photographs from the Collection aims for something different. In contrast to the non– fabricated nature of our visual world—where photographers are unable to meticulously sculpt every component of their desired shot—this exhibition showcases objects and portraits of figures photographed exclusively in the studio where the artist takes full control.
(05/22/25 9:19pm)
Tucked away in a gallery of her own in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Christina Ramberg’s A Retrospective is a masterclass in interrogating perceptions of women. As a part of the Chicago Imagists, her paintings encapsulate the pop culture styles of the late 1960s and draw inspiration from an eclectic range of sources, including flea market dolls, thrift store paintings, and dumpster mannequins that the artist has scavenged for. Leaving faces almost entirely out of her work, Ramberg establishes a mysterious sensuality with focus on hairstyles, hands, midriffs, and shoes, which the artist distorts to encapsulate the sinister expectations placed upon femininity.
(04/09/25 7:17pm)
The climate change apocalypse in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower is frighteningly tangible. Written in 1993, the novel is presented as a series of journal entries beginning in 2024, which tell the story of Lauren Oya Olamina as she navigates a particularly tumultuous period of American history. Journalists will come to describe this era as “accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises,” literally coining it “the Apocalypse” (or “Pox” for short).
Our parable opens on a bleak image of Robledo, Calif., Lauren’s relatively affluent neighborhood. “Relatively” does a lot of work here, as the residents of this Los Angeles suburb scratch out a living behind a massive wall meant to keep out the hungry, crazy “street poor.” In the Pox, fresh water is a treasured commodity, crime is a given, and jobs are nigh impossible to come by. Still, the residents of Robledo cling onto their old lives, dreaming of a return to the good old days even as the nation descends further into anarchy. Families lend each other resources, temporary shelter, and neighborly gossip. All the while, news of pyromania–inducing drugs and growing instability reach the townspeople, who continue to compartmentalize the issue as an outside problem.
Meanwhile, we learn that Lauren has been putting together plans for the inevitable collapse of Robledo. We even learn through her journals of the religion she has started to develop, coined “Earthseed.” Each chapter is prefaced by a passage from Lauren’s self–written holy texts. The daughter of a pastor, Lauren chafes under the antiquated rituals and expectations of her father’s faith, instead turning to Change as her God, the dominant power in her universe. At 15 years old, she is already writing passages that refine her vague belief in Change to a holy text, which teaches her future disciples to navigate the Pox without becoming complacent, myopic, or nostalgic.
When outsiders inevitably raze her neighborhood, Lauren must brave a world she has prepared her whole life for but never properly known. What’s more, she must do so while hiding a secret: She is afflicted by “hyperempathy,” feeling the sensations, both pain and pleasure, of any living person she sees. While hyperempathy may seem initially like a unique power, it means that as part of the street poor, she must act ruthlessly—killing, rather than wounding, any assailants.
A striking feature of the Pox is its normalcy. Butler does not sell us a romanticized view of apocalypse, with joyous last hurrahs, agrarian lifestyles, or rugged–yet–principled survivalists. Her America is filled with the industrial complexes, desperate behaviors, and politics that make the Pox a believable period of history. At chain supermarkets, Lauren must buy such unglamorous things as water purification tablets and tampons (under armed guard, of course). On the road, she must join a growing wave of street poor on the journey north, in blind search of greener pastures without the drugs or droughts of Los Angeles. And in the outlying hills, Lauren must band together with her small group of survivors to fend off wild dogs, criminals, and the odd cannibal.
(04/18/25 4:00am)
One day before spring break, during which I would be headed to New York and Mexico City—two internationally renowned museum cities—I had to make one last pit stop in my home base. Philadelphia is filled with heavy hitters itself, and I was excited to check out a new one: The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University. I wouldn’t just see the typical dinosaur bones and savanna tableaus, but also one of my true loves, fashion, in the museum’s Ecology of Fashion exhibit. Maybe my expectations were too high after hearing “fashion,” but I have never been more offended by a museum before in my life.
(03/02/25 11:54pm)
There’s a problem in the Philly art scene: Emerging artists have few places to show their work. Divided between DIY spaces focused mostly on giving support to their friends and community and established commercial galleries with an already strong roster, it can feel like Philly just isn’t a welcoming city for artists establishing long–lasting careers in the art world.
(03/23/25 4:17pm)
In the pantheon of social media iconography, one big–headed girl stands out: the work of Yoshitomo Nara. Perhaps you don’t recognize his name, but Nara’s work of indifferent cherubic girls, simply drawn dogs, and emphatic text has stamped itself on our teenage and young–adult hearts. He’s everywhere—our profile pictures, our clothes, as designs on nails, on our bodies. Nara’s works are images that move us on a daily basis and exhibit the everyday translation of an internet obsession to a symbol for our personalities and lives. What’s most unique and enduring about Generation Z’s love for Nara is not just in visits to galleries and exhibitions: It’s how he influences our style.
(02/12/25 1:35am)
The beautiful marvel of the Institute of Contemporary Art is its dynamic, flexible space that transforms with each fresh season. The new spring exhibition brings the essence of a laboratory, playground, and open field to both floors of its gallery. Carl Cheng’s exhibition Nature Never Loses opened Jan. 17, a Friday evening of jovial buoyancy and a bright exchange of energy between the gallery’s walls and its guests.
(02/05/25 12:58am)
Tucked behind the brick–and–terra–cotta Venetian entrance of the Fisher Fine Arts Library, the new exhibition After Modernism: Selections from the Neumann Family Collection is finally on view at the Arthur Ross Gallery and will remain on view through March 2.
(02/14/25 5:00am)
What is the price that we pay to live in America? How far will we go to understand and help those that we love, even when they don’t reciprocate love in the way that we need? Rental House by Weike Wang, a Creative Writing professor at Penn, explores these questions by following a couple—Keru and Nate—and their delicate relationships with their family and the world around them.
(02/23/25 7:10pm)
In high school, there was never a more depressing time for me than Saturday nights. Plopping onto my all–too–familiar mattress, I’d brace myself for an hour of creative writing that rarely produced tangible results. In an effort to ignite a spark of inspiration in my writing, I would browse through the Poetry category of the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards gallery to see what other poets my age were writing about. And after months of continually browsing this tab, I came to two conclusions—that “winning” writing was most often about some sort of cultural trauma, and that it was always depressing.
(01/26/25 11:08pm)
Buy bananas for cheap while you can, because tomorrow, just one might cost $6.2 million.
(12/05/24 3:46am)
For just $6 on Venmo, I scored the perfect scrapbook template to capture my "2024 recap". It was a small cardstock booklet of risograph illustrations, a printmaking technique in which 2D stencils are burned into paper. The designs featured elegant yet simple silhouettes of dynamic pottery in shades of violet–blue and taffy–pink, inspired by the artist’s summer spent at a pottery camp in China. The booklet channeled pastel and chill vibes, which I plan to fill with Polaroid photographs of friends and scenery from this year. I spent another $5 on another larger risograph: a print of a round succulent nestled in a lemonade–tinted pot.
(01/26/25 11:25pm)
Inside the gilded halls of the Detroit Opera House last year, one could see a white dude lead his AI girlfriend to suicide from the confines of his VR headset.
(11/22/24 4:01am)
I almost didn’t make it to Love Sent Across Seas. Housed in the Penn Museum, a building that takes up an entire block, I walked to the entrance of the nearby side and was faced with nothing more than shipping entrances. To my chagrin, standing coy and clueless, I met the woman behind the video installation, Dr. Neisha Terry of Stony Brook University, who was also lost, coming from Long Island. A professor, videographer, and incentive behind the VOICE (VocalizED Identity Crafting and Exploration) Lab, I got the privilege to speak with her on my way in, granting a literal behind–the–scenes look into the exhibit.
(11/15/24 5:00am)
Everyone is familiar with the experience of repeating a word with such frequency that it loses all meaning. Where before it had fluidly and unreflectively slipped into our speech, saying it again and again has made it sit uneasily on the tongue, made it strange. It is this experience—of repetition rendering something unfamiliar, and thus creating something new—which perpetually unfolds at the exhibition Begin Again: Repetition in Contemporary Art.
(12/09/24 3:52pm)
On a cool October night in Philadelphia, jazz lovers flooded Zellerbach Theater and hummed with anticipation for Joshua Redman’s long–awaited return. The sound of Redman’s saxophone last enraptured the city more than a decade ago, and the crowd performed as a hive, buzzing with eagerness. As the lights dimmed and the Joshua Redman Group took the stage, a voice from the darkness hollered from the gallery off of stage right, “Come’on Josh, I’ve been waiting a long time!” and without skipping a beat, Redman burst into sheets of sound, commencing that evening’s journey. It was as if Redman acted as a conductor, yelling ‘all aboard!’ before the train pulled out of its station—the audience, or travelers—clamoring for a window seat. As we settled in and examined the passing scenery, one could imagine the collaboration between piano, bass, sax, and drums as different gears of a freight, chuggin’ over the Schuylkill River Viaduct on its way to the first stop: Chicago.
