Arts

Arts

‘I Want Your Sex’ is a call for Gen Z to touch grass, and each other

By Noah Goldstein | April 28

Has Gregg Araki ever truly been a provocateur, or is he just a breezy, sex-positive activist stuck in an important filmmaker’s body? The anarchic energy of his early work points to the former, but his latest, despite its provocative title “I Want Your Sex,” suggests he may have evolved into something closer to the latter — if there’s a difference between them at all.

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Columns

The Bigger Picture: How ‘The Drama’ missed its bigger picture

By Linda Huang | April 24

The new A24 film “The Drama” (2026), directed by Kristoffer Borgli and starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, looks good on paper: It has a likable cast, great humor, engagement with social issues and a theme that extends beyond the generic plots romantic comedies often embody. All in all, “The Drama” seems to check many of the boxes that would typically appeal to viewers. Yet after watching it, I was left completely unfulfilled.

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Columns

An Everyday Art Tour: Living history

By Sophie Herron | April 23

Tufts alumnus Henry Cooke (A’79, AG’84), founder of Historical Costume Services, discovered his passion for history while trying to bolster his college application. Cooke worked throughout high school to pay for college, which didn’t leave him much time for extracurriculars. Because of his interest in history, his school counselor suggested he join a newly-formed minuteman reenactment group. 

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Arts

Christopher Golden explains why every word has to be yours

By Sarin Chaimattayompol | April 22

Ray Bradbury once wrote, “You fail only if you stop writing.” The best writing advice is simply to write but, as generative AI has risen, it has soured many people’s taste for putting pen to paper and turning imagination into story. Author Christopher Golden (LA’89) stands firmly against the AI trend.

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Arts

Dead, sexy and disgusting: Media’s take on the female body

By Spring LaRose | April 17

Whose body is more polarizing than that of Sydney Sweeney? The “Euphoria” actress and entrepreneur has strategically capitalized on her looks through infamous, sexualized ad campaigns with Dr. Squatch and American Eagle. She has become the bane of feminists’ existence and the apple of the conservative eye.

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Arts

‘The Drama’ lacks proper dignity in favor of uncomfortable discourse

By Makens Joseph | April 16

The most recent A24 film, “The Drama” (2026), a romantic comedy written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, features notable co-stars Zendaya and Robert Pattinson. After a pre-wedding dinner, a group of friends plays a game revealing the worst thing they’ve ever done, leading Emma (Zendaya) to reveal a shocking incident from her past. It’s a bombshell to everyone — especially her fiancé Charlie (Pattinson) — when Emma nervously admits she had planned a mass shooting when she was a teenager. This revelation becomes the hurdle blocking their path to marriage as both try their hardest to work through it.

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Arts

Losing parts of a whole

By Isadora Alexis | April 14

Massachusetts-based artist Diana Zipeto’s recent additions to her “Fatherland/s” series begin with an invitation.

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Arts

A Friday at the Boston Progressive Jazz Festival

By Noah Goldstein | April 10

Boston is, and has for a long time been, a city of nascent artistic talents. Taking the Berklee College of Music alone, which graduates around 1,300 students each year, one would assume that a vibrant and expansive music scene would naturally follow. But, as it turns out, this assumption proves to be at best a half-truth. For as long as Boston has been a city teeming with the talents of clear-eyed and full-hearted college bands, it has likewise been the site of continuous struggle for performance and practice spaces, with most acts being confined to DIY basement shows or backyard gatherings.

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Columns

The Bigger Picture: Nostalgia for a life never lived

By Linda Huang | April 9

I haven’t ugly cried from watching a movie in a very long time, but something about sad Chinese drama movies always makes it impossible for me to hold back my tears. And that was my activity last Tuesday night: alone in my room, crying about emotions that I couldn’t pinpoint in the moment.

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Arts

The decline in reading comprehension

By Claire LeCates | April 8

When asked what I’m studying, I normally shrug and noncommittally say “English.” I want to make it clear that I’m aware it’s a somewhat romantic pursuit, set apart from the new standard of preprofessional studies and STEM obsessions that have spread throughout the undergraduate world. It’s easy to interrogate myself and try to identify the point of studying English literature. I find myself searching for an answer that feels like it’s moving further and further away in an increasingly artificial world. 

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Columns

Evanescence and the beautiful foolishness of things: The blue-green sky after April rain

By Isabella Jin | April 7

As Boston enters April, though there are hints of warming weather, a more significant change is rain replacing the continuous snow. While we trek through the muddy paths uphill and contemplate whether to bring an umbrella to class, the sky overhead is shifting through different hues. Ancient East Asian potters noticed these nuanced changes and incorporated them into their works. So today we’ll be observing the celadon glaze widely used in East Asian ceramicware, which is reminiscent of the purity of jade and the mistiness of April rain. 

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Columns

An Everyday Art Tour: Something real

By Sophie Herron | April 2

Leatherwork is a relatively new love for Basil Cleveland, president and cofounder of the Boston Leather Guild. He discovered the material around five years ago through a different hobby –– woodworking.

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Columns

The Bigger Picture: ‘Project Hail Mary’

By Linda Huang | April 2

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s “Project Hail Mary” (2026) is one of those films that you enter with high expectations, only to find that it doesn’t meet them in any of the ways you anticipated, yet leaves you just as — if not more — fulfilled in ways you never anticipated.

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Arts

A rave at the end of the world

By Noah Goldstein | March 12

In the eyes of many, attending a rave is one of the ultimate forms of escapism. After all, few settings seem better suited to forgetting oneself than a haze of hallucinogens and EDM. Yet, as most ravers will tell you, the experience is less about losing their consciousness than discovering it.

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Arts

‘LATE’ humanizes gun violence through poignant storytelling

By Evan Kelly | March 12

Seven years ago, writer and lyricist Kathleen Cahill was on a flight when she had the idea to write a musical focusing on the emotional, human effects of a school shooting rather than the politics.

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Columns

An Everyday Art Tour: Design excellence

By Sophie Herron | March 11

Diana Fernandez Bibeau, deputy chief of urban design for the City of Boston, didn’t plan to work in the public sector. She began as an architect and was inspired by American architect Buckminster Fuller’s work around “innovative city making.” This interest led her to landscape architecture and urban design. 

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Arts

‘Undertone’ is sonically inventive and thematically banal

By Spring LaRose | March 10

The podcast is a hot topic among media forms — an infinite, on-demand radio ecosystem of entertainment and indoctrination. Given its rather recent climb into the mainstream, the podcast remains mostly untrodden ground as far as film goes — and that makes it very fertile ground. “Undertone” is a bold experiment with the podcast in film, using it as a conduit of psychological and supernatural terror.

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News

Zara Larsson to headline Spring Fling, GROUPLOVE to open

By Amelia Sammons | March 5

Zara Larsson will headline Spring Fling, the Tufts University Social Collective announced this Thursday. The concert will take place on April 25 at 1:15 p.m. on the Academic Quad.

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Arts

‘Love Story’ Review: JFK Jr., Carolyn Bessette, the story we keep making up

By Sarin Chaimattayompol | March 5

“Love Story” (2026) opens outside a nail salon, where swarms of paparazzi wait to catch a glimpse of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy (Sarah Pidgeon). The camera flashes through the window and reflects onto her freshly painted red nails, but the moment the nail technician finishes, Bessette asks for a neutral shade instead. No mundane moment involving Bessette escaped public intrigue, least of all the heated ones. Bessette and John F. Kennedy Jr.’s (Paul Anthony Kelly) arguments were splashed across magazines while paparazzi camped outside their apartment around the clock. As the season progresses and Bessette grows more entangled with both JFK Jr. and the limelight surrounding him, one begins to see this opening scene as illustrative of a woman being controlled by the public eye, down to the color of her nails.

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Arts

In ‘Vigil,’ George Saunders grieves life on earth

By Claire LeCates | March 3

“What a lovely home I found myself plummeting toward, acquiring, as I fell, arms, hands, legs, feet, all of which, as usual, became more substantial with each passing second.” So begins “Vigil.” Just as we are abruptly dropped into the surreal world of George Saunders’ latest novel, our principal character, Jill Blaine, is dropped onto Earth and into her signature black pumps. 

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