Arts

Arts

The politics behind country music’s comeback

By Claire LeCates | October 28

Lately, country music has felt somewhat inescapable. Songs from Morgan Wallen’s new album hold multiple spots on the Billboard Hot 100 while echoes of a country twang have made their way into Sabrina Carpenter’s recent music. Country’s spreading influence is visible in Beyoncé’s Texan homecoming, Noah Kahan’s seemingly overnight fame or the success of Shaboozey’s hit “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” In a 2023 study on popular U.S. radio content, songs falling into the genre of country composed 41% (second highest to the grouped category of rock, alternative and indie) of music on the radio. That’s a percentage even higher than pop. 

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Arts

The Louvre heist and the strange new era of museum crime

By Annika Pillai | October 27

In many ways, the dramatic raid looked like a movie. But what it revealed is less cinematic and more consequential: the shape of museum crime is shifting.

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Arts

A cappella at Tufts hits all the right notes

By Grace Lee | October 23

Over 60 years ago, the Beelzebubs and Jackson Jills set the stage for a cappella excellence at Tufts; today, that tradition has expanded into a thriving community of 10 different groups. All with distinct styles and identities, they can be overwhelming to keep track of, so here’s your guide to all the a cappella groups here at Tufts.

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Arts

R.F. Kuang visits Tufts, discusses fear, form and fairytales

By Annika Pillai | October 23

On Oct. 10, author R. F. Kuang joined the Tufts community for a discussion on writing, identity and the questions that shape her fiction. Hosted by the Asian American Center, the event drew a full audience to Distler Performance Hall, where students eagerly awaited with notebooks and copies of “Babel” and her other works in hand. Over the course of an hour, Kuang spoke warmly about her craft, academia and the delicate balance between critique and care.

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Columns

High Fidelity: Clipse returns home triumphant on ‘Let God Sort Em Out’ tour

By Kasra Salehi | October 23

Pusha T and Malice are on top of the world, and they know it.

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Arts

Has social media marketing gone too far?

By Annika Pillai | October 22

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.

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Columns

Evanescence and the Beautiful Foolishness of Things: Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave’

By Isabella Jin | October 21

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. 

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Arts

Tufts’ Mid-Autumn Festival brings the community together for a night of culture and celebration

By Fiona Hinrichsen | October 20

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.

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Arts

Taylor Swift’s ‘The Life of A Showgirl’ exposes the commercialism of album covers

By Angelica Bazyk | October 17

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.

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Arts

R.F. Kuang’s ‘Katabasis’ exposes the hell of higher learning

By Annika Pillai | October 16

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.

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Arts

AI actor Tilly Norwood makes digital debut

By Sarin Chaimattayompol | October 16

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.  

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Arts

An everyday art tour: The slowest performing art

By Sophie Herron | October 15

“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. 

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Arts

Bugonia’ holds a cracked mirror to the absurdity of contemporary America

By Noah Goldstein | October 14

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. 

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Arts

Josh Johnson is redefining comedy for a divided era

By Olivia Bye | October 14

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.

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Arts

Rethinking Mother's Day

By Lea Epstein | October 10

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.

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Arts

Somerville’s Bow Market finds beauty in the small

By Annika Pillai | October 9

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.”

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Columns

High Fidelity: The 10 best album openers of all time

By Kasra Salehi | October 9

“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.

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Arts

‘A House Of Dynamite’ threatens to blow

By Noah Goldstein | October 8

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.

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Arts

Jane Fonda heads celebrity-organized Committee for the First Amendment

By Max Lerner | October 8

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.”

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Arts

The people’s artist: Qi Baishi

By Isabella Jin | October 7

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.

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