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Reflections: The Cultural Role of the Vampire
Creatures of the night, stalking through stone-brick towns, clinging to trees, watching through windows. The story of the vampire is universal, shifting between different themes and appearances to adapt to each culture and era. "Vampire" is a broad term with only one true requirement: the consumption of blood. Other supernatural abilities usually accompany this trait, but they are negotiable. The blood never is. Early iterations of what we now call vampires appear across the
Brandy Sumner
19 minutes ago3 min read


CA High Schoolers: Do College Classes. You Won't Regret It.
Two people I knew in high school earned Associate's Degrees before they ever received their diplomas. Today, one is at UCLA and the other at UC Berkeley, each on track to graduate at least a year ahead of their classmates. Neither spent a dollar on most of their credits. Both were admitted as first-years. This path offers a cheaper, fast-track through college than AP tests. It gives you a significant and directly transferable credit boost while making your college application
Nyk Klymenko
4 days ago4 min read


Collector’s Edition: A Return to Popularity for Physical Media
Records are flying off the shelves at thrift stores. Printed polaroids are taped to bedroom walls. Zines line the aisles of local bookstores. Gen Z has developed a genuine appreciation for physical media, a sensibility that felt lost in the early days of the internet and digital downloads. The old desire for efficiency has been replaced with something different: a need for tangible, personal memory. Today's teenagers and young adults want something they can hold, not just scr
Brandy Sumner
5 days ago2 min read


NPR Is Losing Half a Billion Dollars in Federal Funding. That Should Scare You Even If You Never Listen.
Public media is not just background noise. It is the news infrastructure that serves places no one else will.
Jiannie Romaine
6 days ago2 min read


What the U.S.-Iran Conflict Is Actually Costing You
Gas is $4.55 a gallon. The Pentagon has spent $25 billion in nine weeks. And the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world's oil moves, is still closed.
Jeannie Romain
May 182 min read


Gen Z Is Making Smoking Cool Again. That Is Worth Taking Seriously.
It is not just an aesthetic. The cigarette is back as a prop, a statement, and a cultural signal, and the reasons why tell you something real about this moment.
Jeannie Romain
May 162 min read


Smith College, Title IX, and the Question Nobody Is Asking Loudly Enough
The Trump administration opened a civil rights investigation into a private women's college for admitting trans women. Legal experts are baffled. The implications go far beyond one campus.
Triston Grant
May 152 min read


Trump Is Primarying His Own Party. What That Tells You About the Midterms.
Seven Republican state senators in Indiana voted against Trump's redistricting push. Now $7 million in outside spending is trying to end their careers. This is what political loyalty looks like in 2026.
Alexia Anderson
May 142 min read


Someone Tried to Assassinate the President at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. The Press Freedom Questions Nobody Is Asking.
Cole Allen walked into the most press-saturated room in Washington with a shotgun and two pistols. The story everyone covered was the shooting. The story fewer people covered is what it means for journalism.
Xavier Willis
May 132 min read


The Voting Rights Act Just Took Its Most Serious Hit in a Generation.
The Supreme Court struck down Louisiana's majority-Black district as an 'unconstitutional racial gerrymander.' The timing, right before the midterms, is not accidental.
Triston Grant
May 122 min read


Unsubtle: Film and TV in the Age of Mobile Devices
Streaming was supposed to give us more. More stories, more voices, more risk. What it gave us instead was an industry that decided its audience couldn't be trusted. In the era of mobile devices and fractured attention, the way people consume media has shifted fundamentally, and the writing of film and TV has followed. Stories feel flat. Characters explain themselves out loud rather than through the quiet work of performance. Subtlety, it seems, has been declared a liability.
Brandy Sumner
May 112 min read


You Don’t Drink Coffee. You Adjust to Capitalism.
You Were Never Supposed to Feel This Tired There is a kind of exhaustion that feels less like a bad night and more like a pattern. You wake up tired, move through the day tired, and instead of asking why, you correct it. The correction is almost automatic. Coffee. What is striking is not that coffee works, but that we rarely question why we need it to work at all. The fatigue is treated as normal. The solution is treated as routine. That is where the story begins. Capitalism
Triston Grant
May 84 min read


Markiplier
Markiplier in an interview in NYC. The Beginning of His Journey On March 6, 2012, a college dropout from the University of Cincinnati named Mark Edward Fischbach launched his first YouTube channel. The channel name "Markiplier" is a portmanteau of Mark and multiplier. He originally planned to upload comedy sketches and action videos, but it was his lifelong love of gaming that drove his growth. His first breakout series was "Amnesia: The Dark Descent," which earned him roughl
Simai Kang
May 72 min read


The Giant Leap: Why the Moon Landing Still Matters Decades Later
In the summer of 1969, the Earth felt like a very small place. While the world below was tangled in political unrest and social change, three men were sitting on top of a controlled explosion, waiting to be hurled into the dark. When the Apollo 11 mission successfully touched down on the lunar surface, it did more than win a race. It proved that the limits of human achievement are only as small as our imagination and our willingness to take massive risks. A Decade of Desperat
Marianna Pou
May 63 min read


ICE Has Gone Too Far
ICE, otherwise known as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was established to protect communities. That purpose has been catastrophically abandoned. In recent months, ICE has not simply been detaining undocumented immigrants. It has been abusing detainees, separating children from their families, shooting innocent bystanders, and setting records for deaths in custody. This is not enforcement. It is terror. A Pattern of Violence In October 2025, ICE shot U.S. citizen Ma
Kat Gran
May 52 min read


SCOTUS Devastates Minority Representation
On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled on Louisiana v. Callais. The 6-to-3 decision, drawn largely along partisan lines, dismantled a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, dealing a significant blow to minority representation in Congress. The case turned on the application of Section 2 of the VRA, the Gingles Test, and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Louisiana v. Callais, a group of non-African American voters sue
Nyk Klymenko
May 43 min read


A Republican California?
It is statistically unlikely. California has 10.37 million registered Democrats and 5.78 million registered Republicans; Democrats overwhelmingly dominate the state. Yet somehow, two frontrunner Republicans have led the California governor polls while a Democratic base remains split among four likely candidates. There are multiple reasons why Republicans are optimistic about this race: the top-two primary system, Democratic division, and a string of ongoing controversy. Had t
Nyk Klymenko
Apr 302 min read


AI Ethics: Why Moral Frameworks Matter in the Age of Intelligent Machines
Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant concept. It is woven into how we search, how we study, how we work, and increasingly, how we feel. And as AI grows more capable and more present in our everyday lives, one question becomes impossible to ignore: is it behaving responsibly? The Basics AI ethics is a set of moral principles designed to guide the development and use of artificial intelligence toward outcomes that are fair, safe, and beneficial. What was once a purely
Simai Kang
Apr 293 min read


Why the New Generation Is Struggling to Find Work
A Different Job Market Than Before For many young people today, finding a job is not as simple as it was for previous generations. In the past, a high school or college graduate could step relatively quickly into a stable position. The path into the workforce was worn and familiar. That path no longer exists in the same form. The job market is more competitive, more credentialed, and far less forgiving of people who are just getting started. Entry-level jobs routinely require
Marianna Pou
Apr 283 min read


Good News to Brighten Your Day
It can feel, at times, like there is no escape from it. You open the news and the first thing you encounter is a disaster, a tragedy, or a crisis unfolding somewhere in the world. That feeling is not a personal failure or an overreaction. It reflects something real about how information reaches us: bad news travels faster, earns more clicks, and commands more attention. But that is not the whole story. The same week that brought coverage of an attempted school shooting in Okl
Kat Gran
Apr 273 min read
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