Partway through my semester abroad, I came to a classic millennial (or Generation Z) conclusion: I was forsaking real, fascinating experiences in order to scroll mindlessly through my Instagram feed or look at memes on Facebook. I realized that when I needed to translate words into Russian for homework, I would forget why I opened […]
Archives for November 2019
Media Without Borders
The phrase ‘media without borders’ describes the environment of the web as a place with poor distinctions between media, entertainment, and thought-provoking work, a situation which produces personal and societal downsides. This is not by accident. To quote author and scholar Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: “Google is a shape-shifter, but each […]
Stanford University’s Quiet Complicity in Chanel Miller’s Sexual Assault
In the arid landscape of Palo Alto, California, nestled between Lomita Court and Jerry House, there stands a lush garden bordered by a shallow stone wall. The flowerbed occupies an easily overlooked corner of the Stanford University campus typically used by students for beer pong and pig roasts. It is a quiet, serene, unassuming space, […]
The Multiverse of Fiction: Defending Fanfiction
Fanfiction gets a bad rep. But it’s so bad that it’s worth $1 billion of good. That’s how much the Fifty Shades franchise, a small project that budding writer E.L. James started as Twilight’s Edward and Bella fanfiction, earned in three years. Fanfiction has been notoriously dismissed as cheap amateur fiction, despite evidence of its […]