Spoilers Ahead: Riverdale Season 2 is a Soap Opera for a Younger Audience
In this new season, Riverdale’s soapy plot and neon-lit diner is su used with violence and vigilantism.
Inside Rush
In my mind, fanny packs have always fallen into the realm of the unthinkable. Grouped with the likes of socks with sandals, crocs, and parachute pants, they were one of those social taboos that needed no explanation. And yet, one recent Saturday night, much to my own surprise (disgust?) I found myself standing at a pregame, in semi-formal attire, drink in hand, with a flaming orange sack strapped around my waist.
Getting Lucky
It’s 5:37 a.m. and I’m straggling through the slums in neon orange short-shorts I reserve for nights like these, nights like last night, along with the first shirt I saw on the ground which I couldn’t really see in the dark of his room but it’s large and now the sunrise has revealed it to be a tee shirt from some leadership conference or some shit and I think This is ironic because I was totally leading last night if you know what I mean and then I’m like is that even irony or am I just awesome?
12 Years a Slave
Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is tense and unflinching. Its relentless intensity and graphic brutality has been the defining feature in the media, but it is also an essential part of the film and the primary reason it could become the most important portrait of American slavery yet on camera.
The New American
It’s difficult for me to avoid skepticism when commercials are overly sentimental about their own brands. “It’s time to become better versions of ourselves,” narrates a deep, persuasive and compelling voice which overlays the empty airport powering to life.
Mariachi at the Met
Saturday mornings always give rise to endless possibilities. A few Saturdays ago, a friend and I decided to profit from the day by heading to New York City for the 6th annual “¡Fiesta! Celebrating Hispanic and Latin Cultures” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a day of cultural festivities featuring live folk dance performances and various workshops and activities in the large indoor halls and courtyards of the museum.
The Wolf Speaks
The genealogy of nominative determinism begins with my ambivalent attitude toward this series of articles. Whenever the Nassau Weekly name column would come up in casual conversation, I would exclaim that there could be nothing potentially interesting in a piece truly about the writer’s name. After all, I thought, what would have to be true for an article about your name to be interesting?
I Think Therefore I Am Tolerant
Recently, a friend was telling me how a certain musical artist had entranced him with her talent—until he found out she was very religious and thanks God for her success. My friend considers himself liberal and advocates for the rights of women, racial minorities, and the LGBT community—yet, for him, religion elicits a “bad taste in [his] mouth.”
Slam Dunk
Lily Gellman, a freshman, is one of fifty students who auditioned for Ellipses, Princeton’s slam poetry team, this fall. Gellman, who became involved in spoken word during her senior year of high school, hoped to continue to hone her passion for spoken word at Princeton and was excited to discover a slam team on campus.
Shades of Grades
In my pompous English private high school, the importance of excelling in yearly exams was impressed upon us from age 13. I remember on my first day of physics class in the equivalent of freshman year, the teacher stood gravely in front of us and uttered the words: “Last year, all 23 of my students received A*s. Do not be my first A.” A* was the equivalent of an A+—the highest grade you could get.
The Low Is What I Came For
Heart of stone, rind so tough it’s crazy / that’s why they call me the avocado, baby. Shouted alternately by a cheerleading squad and lead singer, this hook appropriately announces the return of Los Campesionos! in the single “Avocado, Baby” from their new album No Blues. It’s a little bit ridiculous, catchy and self-deprecating, and classic Campesinos.
Greek Life
In the past month I’ve read loads of Greek classics. It was a really depressing month filled with people killing their kids, kids killing their parents, people marrying their parents, people stabbing other people in their eyes or at least stabbing themselves in their eyes. It seems like these things were so common in ancient Greece that sacrificial infanticide became unimportant enough that Homer left it out of why the Achaeans won the Trojan War.
Fears, Beers, and Freshman Year
“Excuse me, do you have an extra cigarette?” I asked a woman outside New York Penn Station on my way home from Reunions in June. As I inhaled, the previous nine months began to transform from life to memory, things that were happening to things that had happened, becoming things that had happened to me rather than things I had made happen.
Fear Itself
I never sleep well when I am home. This is usually due to physical—not mental—distress: in eighth grade I inherited a three-quarter sized bedframe from the eighteenth century, a Sharpless heirloom that my grandparents wanted to get rid of. Rare is the vendor in this century that sells a mattress fit to its arcane proportions, so my parents threw two futons on it and told me it was temporary.