Arts

Arts

How protein became commodified

By Annika Pillai | November 20

Protein is everywhere now — or at least, the word is. When you walk into a grocery store, it almost feels like half the aisle is trying to convince you that you’re one scoop away from collapsing from malnutrition. There’s protein cereal, protein pasta, protein donuts, protein Pop-Tarts, protein chips, protein soda and even protein water, which sounds like a product that shouldn’t exist. The implication is constant: without added effort, you’re probably falling short. Yet many doctors and nutritionists say the average American already consumes more than enough protein. So why is it suddenly everywhere?

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Columns

High Fidelity: Geese takes on Boston

By Kasra Salehi | November 20

Something is happening here. The crowd knows it too. Many of them paid exorbitant ticket prices to be at the venue of just over 900 people, packed wall to wall. It seemed everyone felt as if they were early to the party for something special. Take the guy next to me, who turned to his friend and said “this must be what it was like to see the Pixies in the ’80s.”

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Arts

The return of the girl-group

By Lea Epstein | November 19

For the first time in nearly a decade, girl groups are returning to the Western mainstream with a velocity that feels long overdue. Watching FLO revive R&B’s legacy of stacked harmonies and technical vocal runs feels strangely comforting, almost like witnessing a tradition being carried forward rather than revived. Katseye’s rapid rise, along with two Grammy nominations, suggests that genuine pop excitement still exists outside the churn of algorithmic hype. From a distance, it looks like a Renaissance. Up close, it feels like something deeper — a cultural correction that many of us have been waiting for without realizing it.

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Columns

Evanescence and the Beautiful Foolishness of Things: ‘The Great Wave’ beyond the print

By Isabella Jin | November 18

In the last column, we explored how Hokusai’s “The Great Wave” incorporated Western techniques and came to symbolize artistic exchange between East and West. In this article, we will examine how the print evolved into a global phenomenon, becoming the foremost cultural motif of Japan and East Asia.

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Arts

Top recruiter: How the military uses entertainment as a recruiting tool

By Claire LeCates | November 17

Many of those who settled into the red-cushioned seats at their go-to movie theaters in 2022, armed with buttered popcorn or slushies, would have been met with an ad for the U.S. Air Force between movie trailers for upcoming blockbusters. In came the droning of a fighter jet and a cinematic shot of it swooping around mountaintops and through arid plains spotted with cacti. The advertisement barely shows any faces under the helmets, possibly to encourage viewers to imagine themselves in the cockpit. The command to “aim high” lingers on the screen at the end of the ad, followed by the URL of the Air Force website.

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Arts

Splitting up seasons is destroying television

By Lauren Arnold | November 14

There have been many eras in the world of television. In the 2000s, weekly releases reigned supreme. On specific weeknights, shows would air their new episodes live. These weren’t just any shows; the most popular series often adhered to this schedule — think “Lost,” “The Big Bang Theory” and “Gilmore Girls.” Amid real-life pressures from school and work, these new episodes were a constant every week — something to look forward to.

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Arts

In ‘George’s Yard Sale,’ Somerville becomes a portrait of change

By Noah Goldstein | November 13

Sometime in the spring of 2025, Ray Feinleib found himself in a tough situation. Needing only one more course to complete a bachelor’s degree in film and media studies at Tufts in the twilight of his academic career, Feinleib had chosen to take “Advanced Documentary.” Yet, on the weekend before spring break, with the class’ final project’s due date set for the first week back, he found himself with nothing.

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Arts

Indigo De Souza stands still in the noise

By Jake Ren | November 13

Before singing her fifth song, “Be Like the Water,” given it was a week before Halloween, Indigo De Souza recounted a recent visit to a haunted house. She realized that the good thing about a haunted house is that you can always just close your eyes; the ghosts and demons aren’t allowed to touch you, and if you stand real still, you won’t touch them either. So, in the haunted house, she stood very still and closed her eyes. This song is about that, she said, slightly unsure about how much sense the story made.

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Arts

What Reddit’s ‘snark’ pages can tell us about the fate of journalism

By Annika Pillai | November 13

In May, The New York Times ran a story about a young influencer with Stage 4 cancer who’d become the fixation of a Reddit ‘snark’ community. The subreddit’s members didn’t believe she was sick. They combed through her Instagram posts and created timelines tracking her hospital visits and medical details. They called it research. When the Times confirmed her diagnosis with her doctor and reached out to Reddit for a comment on its inaction, the platform banned the forum. By then, though, its members had already produced something that looked unsettlingly like journalism.

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Arts

‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ delivers next to nothing, nowhere

By Jaden Gardiola | November 12

The most unfortunate thing about “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” is that the film, fundamentally, does everything right. The plot is trackable, director Scott Cooper doesn’t make any jaw-dropping choices and stars Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong turn in strong performances as the titular rock star and his manager, respectively. What results is a product that is thoroughly predictable, unimaginative and set firmly in simplicity.

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Columns

An everyday art tour: An edible art form

By Sophie Herron | November 12

For pastry chefs Richard Akers-Barrows and Maura Kilpatrick, baking is about imagination.

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Arts

Why Tufts students shouldn’t miss the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s $35 pass

By Makens Joseph | November 10

The Boston Symphony Orchestra is where your next live music adventure can come to life, and it is only about a 40-minute trip from Tufts to Symphony Hall. Many of us are not very familiar with the classical music scene because it is not typically presented as an activity worth attending, but I would advise you to give it a chance. 

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Arts

Printmaking’s global legacy: Preserving Asian traditions and their influence on modern art

By Fiona Hinrichsen | November 7

Printmaking dates back to the Tang Dynasty in China, where it was primarily used for Buddhist texts and illustrations. It then spread widely throughout Asia, notably reaching Japan in the seventh century. Traditionally, Japanese printmakers used mokuhanga, a woodblock printing technique — “moku” meaning wood and “hanga” meaning print. In mokuhanga, a traditional bamboo hand tool called a baren is used to press the ink onto the paper.

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Arts

Bad Bunny is leading a new kind of American revolution

By Noah Goldstein | November 6

It’s fitting that the last lyric of Bad Bunny’s record-breaking 2025 album “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” is “¡Viva!” — or in English, “Long live!” It’s the resounding final exclamation of “LA MuDANZA,” a track that begins as an intimate ballad — a retelling of the tender love story from global superstar Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio of his parents — and then, in a heartbeat, erupts into a raucous, full-throated anthem. Piano, bass, congas, bongos and horns collide, igniting a sound that, as with the 16 tracks before it, channels the soul of Puerto Rico and its people.

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Columns

High Fidelity: Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, 50 years on

By Kasra Salehi | November 6

Almost exactly 50 years ago, Bob Dylan embarked on the first leg of his now-famous Rolling Thunder Revue tour. What commenced was perhaps the most thrilling live collection of songs Dylan would ever produce. The autumn leg of this tour, spanning the northeastern United States and Canada, became forever immortalized through the live album released in 2002, which featured 22 performances from the first leg of the tour. The album serves as a testament to Dylan’s decades-long commitment to reinventing himself and his material and stands alone as a pinnacle of both Dylan’s career and rock music at large.

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Arts

‘Lizard Boy’ upholds and reimagines the hero’s story

By Spring LaRose | November 5

The Roberts Studio Theatre feels like an underground rock club. The stage is set minimally, with panels of graffiti, black boxes, a piano and other musical instruments lit by hazy, colorful lights. The audience is still murmuring when the three characters that make up the cast of “Lizard Boy” casually walk onstage to tune their various instruments. It’s as if a concert is about to start, rather than a musical. The opening display is very intentionally alternative. “Lizard Boy” is a story about an outsider, and the show itself is situated on the boundaries between sci-fi and myth, and between the quirky and the cliché.

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Arts

How social media is shaping political discourse

By Bhavana Etikela | November 4

In the 2024 presidential debate between former President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, it became clear that political discourse in America had fully merged with internet culture. Within minutes of the debate’s broadcast, TikTok and X were flooded with short clips. Biden’s frail voice and empty-eyed stare sparked jokes about him needing “a cough drop,” an energy drink or even Adderall, with one user quipping, “They accidentally injected Biden with ketamine instead of adrenaline.” Memes compared his expressions to a dog caught misbehaving or someone seeing ghosts.

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Arts

Artist Bianca Broxton returns to Medford to remember Belinda Sutton, an enslaved woman, for the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution

By Isadora Alexis | November 4

Sitting in a mildly cramped, dimly lit room, I, along with several other guests from the Medford area, waited with bated breath for School of the Museum of Fine Arts alum Bianca Broxton’s performance. A hush quickly spread throughout the room as Broxton entered dressed in a floor-length gown, white stockings, a white veil covering her face and a white headwrap on her head.

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Arts

‘Palaver’ is a stunning portrait of a relationship on the verge of collapse

By Claire LeCates | November 3

Despite his choice of title, Bryan Washington certainly isn’t palavering in his third standalone novel. The book delivers 336 pages of routine moments conveyed with great momentum. From Jamaica through Houston and Toronto, all the way to Tokyo, “Palaver” gently leads readers through moments that may seem inconsequential individually, but ultimately comprise all the life-altering decisions and important relationships that define us.

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Arts

Through the Looking Glass: What The Good Place tells us about the government shutdown

By Olivia Bye | October 31

No matter where you fall on the ideological spectrum or how you feel about politics, I think we can all agree on one thing: this is certainly not “The Good Place.”

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