When Amazon Prime Video compared a fan’s engagement ring to Belly’s from “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” the reaction was immediate and sharp. This incident is not just a mistake. It reflects a deeper tension in modern brand marketing.
For centuries, the East and West have existed as what seem to be distinct entities — so different in culture and ideology that the art they produced reflected those stark differences. While Western art focused extensively on perspective and individual expressionism, East Asian art maintained its historical lineage of searching for “essence” in life and depicting the philosophical ideas of Buddhism and Daoism. However, as suited to the adventurous spirit of the great explorers, cultural exchange between the two was an inevitable historical product that brought excitement and revolution.
Across the United States, Asian American communities come together to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival. This past year, Philadelphia’s Chinatown marked its 30th Mid-Autumn Festival with a full day of festivities, including Cantonese opera performances, mooncake eating contests and a lantern parade.
On Oct. 3, Taylor Swift released her 12th studio album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” reflecting on the difficulties and triumphs of a life full of fame and love. In just over a week, the album has generated buzz for many different reasons — a main one being the multitude of versions of the album that have been released.
R.F. Kuang has never shied away from ambitious storytelling. From the imperial critique of “Babel” to the literary satire of “Yellowface,” her novels combine social insight with a uniquely creative narrative. In “Katabasis,” she turns her attention to a new and rather audacious terrain: the world of academia itself, imagined as a literal underworld. What does she come up with this time? A darkly funny, rather unsettling meditation on ambition, power and the cost of striving for academic recognition.
We’re seeing more and more fake people in our lives, from AI interviewers to social media scammers to automated customer service agents. And now, potentially, we’ll see them on the big screen.
“Every day is awesome” for Rodney Eason, director of horticulture and landscape at the Arnold Arboretum. Purchased by Harvard in 1872, the land was converted into a park by the father of American landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the founding director of the Arboretum, Charles Sprague Sargent. Today, the Arboretum is a living museum, a research institution and one of the nine public parks that form Boston’s Emerald Necklace.
A new cinematic canon may very well be emerging. Films like “One Battle After Another,” “Civil War” and “Eddington” have all painted unique yet not dissimilar portraits of a discordant, extremism-prone America — a vision that seems increasingly resonant under Donald Trump’s second term. Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia,” a paranoid pressure cooker of a thriller that’s as weird as any of the Greek director’s previous works, is yet another film that shares this vision.
Comedy isn’t always easy to laugh about these days. From “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” being briefly pulled off the air by ABC after Kimmel’s controversial remarks following the assasination of right-wing political figure Charlie Kirk, to “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” being canceled by CBS days after Colbert’s criticism of a multi-billion dollar merger with SkyDance Media that required approval from the Federal Communications Commission, it has never seemed more dangerous to be a comedian on a national stage.
An amusing, largely unsupported statistic circulates every year around May: Crime rates, supposedly, drop on Mother’s Day. Quite obviously, mothers are too busy with flowers and gifts to embark on their usual spree of robbery and arson. Alternatively, some suggest it’s because everyone — mothers, children and even hardened criminals — collectively decides to behave for 24 hours out of reverence. Whatever the reason for the widespread circulation of this myth, it’s telling of how we’ve learned to compartmentalize affection into a singular commercialized holiday — and how the performance of love has replaced its practice.
Tucked into Somerville’s Union Square, Bow Market is proof that good things really do come in small spaces. Part open-air mall, part food court, part art experiment, it’s built inside a converted storage building. What started in 2018 as a vision to turn an underused lot into something better has since grown into a thriving center for over 30 small, local businesses — many of them artist, chef or independently-owned. Their motto is simple: “Small is beautiful, with the belief that the small businesses run by individuals in a community are beautiful.”
“High Fidelity” by Nick Hornby is a book about the music-obsessed — about the kinds of guys who spend their free time making desert-island mix tapes. The main character, Rob, spends hours reorganizing his record collection based on different themes and aesthetics. I’ve decided to start the column that Rob wishes he could have had. I’ll review new albums, write about some of my favorite albums with upcoming anniversaries and, most importantly, I’ll make lists.
No event unites Americans like one that provokes fear. A prominent historical example of this came on the morning of Jan. 13, 2018, when thousands of Hawaiians received a harrowing message: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” As we know now, this was simply a false alarm — no such missile existed, and everything was fine.
On Oct. 1, Jane Fonda helped relaunch the Committee for the First Amendment, standing alongside many members of the entertainment industry in an open letter condemning the federal government for being “engaged in a coordinated campaign to silence critics in the government, the media, the judiciary, academia, and the entertainment industry.”
Situated among the Boston MFA’s proud Asian collection is a dimly lit exhibition hall whose inconspicuous presence belies the crowds of visitors frequenting its displays. To protect the fragility of the Xuan paper and silk scrolls, as well as to ensure the ink doesn’t fade, each work is spotlighted under a single warm light. However, these soft beige and brown illuminations do not dull the vibrancy of Qi’s colors nor detract from the eccentricity of his brushstrokes.
In these times of turbulent change in our government, our communities and our homes, why does it continue to matter so fervently what is seen in our institutions? Why is it important for these familiar institutions to evolve now?
The 24-hour musical: where silence on the Cohen Auditorium stage is rewarded with raucous laughter and applause from the audience. We’re not in some polished, rehearsed Kansas anymore — we have landed in a raucous, occasionally ad-libbed Oz.
In the late hours of Nov. 5, 2024, former Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, called with news that put a decisive and devastating cap on her past 107 days: “I don’t think you’re going to get there.”
To accurately describe the scene of something as modern as the new Paul Thomas Anderson film, it’s necessary to tap the rewind button to early leftist, revolutionary politics. During the ’70s, we heard rallying cries, people holding onto any form of comfort so as to make the bad times less trying. In Gil-Scott Heron’s 1971’s black liberation anthem, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” he exclaims, “Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction will no longer be so damn relevant.” The metaphor here hinges on Heron citing these 1960s television programs (“Green Acres,” “Beverly Hillbillies”), and their themes — rooted in hoisting wealth and perseverance in white America — as no longer relevant. These people, and their glorified existence, are still living beneath the corrupt government. While “One Battle After Another” takes Heron’s comedic jabs at the 1960s government, it contrarily applies it under the dome of a Trumpist agenda. The movie turns into something beaming with dimension and intelligence while also delivering those laughworthy moments via outrageous allusion and mockery, much akin to Heron.
Recently, strolling down Broadway has felt more like scrolling through Netflix. Names like Daniel Craig, Keanu Reeves, Sarah Paulson, Eddie Redmayne, Kieran Culkin, Elle Fanning, Daniel Radcliffe, Rachel McAdams, Lola Tung, Nick Jonas and countless others have all been written in Broadway’s flashing lights over the past few years. MTA subway advertisements urge commuters not to miss Steve Carell in “Uncle Vanya” or George Clooney in “Good Night, and Good Luck” while Sandra Oh waltzes around the stage of a star-studded Shakespeare in the Park production for those lucky enough to possess coveted tickets.
