Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the coolest senior of them all?
Coolest as in kindest. As in a shoulder to cry on. As in just all around a good hang. At Penn, our definitions of accomplishments and coolness can get distorted. Ego of the Week is all about bringing a voice to real people, not their resumes.
Nominate your favorite seniors to give them a chance to share their story with the rest of campus.
18 The Gospel According to Alpha
A horror movie for anyone who grew up seeing suffering as atonement
31 Selling Souls or Selling Records?
From Little Richard to Lil Nas X, why can’t we stop accusing artists of devil worship?
Turning peer pressure into support through art and education 5 7
Goodbye Free Will, Hello Fortune Tellers A week of living superstition
Ego of the Month: Sydney Liu
42 Care or Control?
The ethical dilemma behind Philadelphia’s involuntary commitment bill
Alas Poor Yorick, His Head Has Gone Missing!
10 13 The Emperor Has No Code
Artificial intelligence startups like Cluely and Series are making a big bet on marketing, Gen–Z style.
Afternoons at the Prado With Goya’s Black Paintings
The paintings are dark, fascinating, twisted, and scarily real—we want to both turn away and look forever.
ON THE COVER Midterms meet the mystical. Spooky season is here and so are all the little rituals that keep us feeling lucky (or safe).
By Dana Bahng
Notes From A Paranoid Editor–In–Chief
I woke up with a start at the beginning of this summer. I had dreamt that a human–sized pig saved my life and then looked me in the eyes to say: “Please don’t eat me and my friends.”
Thus began the summer I turned kosher. I grew up in a family full of superstitions—though I’ll admit the lines between superstition and religion are difficult to cleanly draw. My family was never one for dogma, but they would take any and every precaution against the unknown forces of the universe. To this day, I never let my feet touch a book, and I try to avoid stepping over people’s legs to get around them. I’ve even adopted my own superstitions—like avoiding pork at any cost even though I grew up in a Hindu family that eats beef.
Personally, I find comfort in my superstitions, especially at college. When everything in life feels a little bit out of control, it’s nice to imagine that my lucky shirt might just give me a slight edge on my exam or the sardines in my BLT will grant me good favor as I enter the graduate school application process. Betting on luck has never hurt anyone.
This issue digs into all things spooky and superstitious. Focus beat Sadie Daniel examines the ethics of casual jogs in The Woodlands Cemetery. Print Managing Editor Jules Lingenfelter investigates a missing skull that was rumored to be in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts at Penn. And our Film & TV section is excited to announce the best horror movies to watch this Halloween season.
It can be embarrassing to admit you still abide by superstition—akin to admitting that you’re scared of the dark in your twentysomethings. After all, we’re supposed to be rational, listening to science rather than the imaginary boogeymen in our closets. But, still it’s hard not to believe in the unknown at times.
My mom got my astrology chart as a kid,
but she didn’t tell me until I graduated. I laughed at the entire premise, finding it silly and misguided. But I reread it recently while working on this issue. Let me tell you, “Nitin” was onto something. Somehow he managed to read that I would get into a long–term relationship with a woman at the start of my junior year of college, that I would end up in a career in mass media, and that I would be drawn to leadership positions, where at my worst I could be a pushy and aggressive leader. Somehow my career at Street has answered all of those predictions. Call it luck. Call it karma. Call it a coincidence. However you want to explain it, there’s got to be something there.
SSSF,
EXECUTIVE BOARD
Norah Rami, editor–in–chief rami@34st.com
Jules Lingenfelter, print managing editor
lingenfelter@34st.com
Nishanth Bhargava, digital managing editor bhargava@34st.com
Fiona Herzog, assignments editor herzog@34st.com
Insia Haque, Design editor haque@34st.com
EDITORS
Asha Chawla and Garv Mehdiratta, Copy
Samantha Hsiung, deputy assignments
Bobby McCann and Chloe Norman, Features
Sarah Leonard, Focus
Kate Cho, Style
Anissa T. Ly, Ego
Sophia Mirabal, Music
Logan Yuhas, Arts
Liana Seale, Film & TV
Jackson Ford, Street Multimedia
Arina Axinia, Street Social Media
Makayla Wu, Design
Cassidy Whaley, Social Media
THIS ISSUE
Deputy Design Editors
Kate Ahn, Dana Bahng, Annelise Do Design Associates
Arti Jain, Jess Cook, Chenyao Liu, Andy Mei, Alex Nagler, Julia Wang
STAFF
Features Writers
Ben Binday, Diemmy Dang, Ella Sohn, Ethan Sun, Jo Kelly
Focus Beats
Betsy Barnard, Maddy Brunson, Anthony Danh, Sadie Daniel, Kayley Kang, Richard Paget,
Vasanna Persaud
Style Beats
Mariam Ali, Alex Gomez, Jack Lamey, Sofia Latrille, Jordan Millar, Alex Nagler, Addison Saji
Music Beats
Mira Agarwal, Ananya Karthik, Kyunghwan Lim, Amber Urena, Srikar Venkatesan, Emily Whitehead, Jason Zhao
Julia Girgenti, Susannah Hughes, Matthew Jeong, Sophia Leong, Demi Xihluke Marhule, Chenyao Liu, Henry Metz, Jackson Zuercher Ego Beats
Aenaviah Amna, Jiwoo Lee, Eva Lititskaia, Christine Oh, Talia Shapiro
Staff Writers
Melody Cao, Joy Chu, Sofia Galperin, Laura Gao, Constantine Gay–Afendulis, Leo Huang, Sierra Huang, Anjali Kalanidhi, Emma Katz, Digit Kim, Sayan Naik, Kayla Owusu, Cassidy Robles, Ariadna Rodriguez, Jessica Tobes, Megan Tu, Joshua Wangia, Damya Woodall
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The land on which the office of The Daily Pennsylvanian stands is a part of the homeland and territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. We affirm Indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the DP and the University of Pennsylvania more accountable to the needs of Indigenous people.
CONTACTING 34 th STREET MAGAZINE
If you have questions, comments, complaints or letters to the editor, email Norah Rami, Editor–in–Chief, at rami@34st.com You can also call us at (215) 422–4640.
If there’s anything that setting my fantasy football lineup has taught me, it’s that making your own choices can be incredibly painful.
The real world is no different. As much as we like to talk about our love of freedom and autonomy, living with the consequences of our own actions is often far too difficult. When someone else makes the decisions for us, it’s easy to point the finger when things go wrong. When we make a choice without much thought, we can shrug off failure as a byproduct of neglect. But when things go wrong with those big choices—the ones we agonize over night after night, the ones we vacillate on for weeks or months before finally committing to
something, anything—who do we really have to blame but ourselves?
It’s no wonder that, for centuries, our ancestors turned to religion as a structuring force. It offered them an explanation for the things that went wrong, an explanation that seemed too absolute to doubt and too powerful to really resist. It’s also no wonder that once the Luciferian forces of “science” burned that safety blanket, we’ve turned to increasingly bizarre systems of meaning to fill the vacuum left in its absence. From reading the motion of the planets to asking ChatGPT what to choose, we’ve found a cornucopia of ways to absolve ourselves of responsibility for our decisions. Call it clinging to an illusory certainty in the midst of all the world’s chaos.
It’s easy to dismiss these methods out of hand as coping mechanisms. But maybe the mystics are onto something. Could there really be an order to it all? Something invisible to the human eye but accessible by other means, something waiting to be discovered beneath our feet? Only one way to find out. For a week, I decided to take a break from my life, placing my choices in the hands of a different teller of fate each day. And I rated them all for your convenience, just in case you ever decide to give up your free will, too.
Tuesday, Sept. 16: Magic 8 Ball
Talking to a Magic 8 Ball is like asking your wife what she wants for dinner—she’ll never give you a straight answer.
The first thing I do after opening my eyes is open my phone to a Magic 8 Ball website. As my nimble fingers dodge ads about “Superfoods To Prevent Bloating” and how “John Travolta Is Unrecognizable at His Age,” I press on the face of the Magic 8 Ball to ask if I should go to work that day.
“Outlook not so good.”
Should I get out of bed at all?
“Ask again later.”
This general uncertainty would come to be a motif throughout the day, with the Magic 8 Ball refusing to answer simple questions about doing homework or going to class. The only thing it seemed to be sure of was that I wasn’t allowed to eat—when asked whether I should eat breakfast or lunch, the Magic 8 Ball gave its first firm “No,” depriving me of much–
needed energy for most of the day.
Even worse, while it eventually allowed me to show up for work, the Ball said that I wasn’t allowed to use public transportation for the day. Instead, I had to make the 45–minute trek each way between campus and City Hall. By 2 p.m., with an empty stomach and aching feet, I didn’t need to ask the Magic 8 Ball whether I should go to class or not—I didn’t have the calories in me to stay awake for it. Thankfully, the Ball decided to take pity on me when it mattered most, graciously allowing me to eat dinner.
Fate was a cruel master that day. I asked myself how anyone could possibly live like this. I had to remind myself that no one else is stupid enough to follow a Magic 8 Ball’s advice to the letter.
Rating: 2/10. Maybe if you’re on a diet.
Wednesday, Sept. 17: Horoscope
I’ve never really understood how to read a horoscope. Is it supposed to predict my day? Am I supposed to follow its vague proclamations as guiding principles? This confusion wasn’t cleared up by the fact that every horoscope I read (I’m a Gemini, by the way) seemed to offer contradictory advice. One site said to embrace the energy and enthusiasm I felt today to take on new challenges. Another said to keep cool and think carefully before I acted. A third made an ominous proclamation about “problems at my workplace.”
I knew the last one was bullshit—I don’t work Wednesdays. The contradiction between the other two, though, posed a problem for me. I ended up siding with the second fortune and taking it slow for the day, partially because that horoscope was the only one that offered any explanation for its words. And it was a pretty convincing explanation at that—apparently, my ruler Mercury was stirring emotions in my private fourth house. Predictably, the rest of the day was pretty blasé.
Rating: 5/10. Didn’t make my life worse, I guess.
Thursday, Sept. 18: Flipping a Coin
I scrounged around the house and went with the first piece of change I found—a North Dakota state quarter. The system was simple—heads I do something, tails I don’t. Almost immediately, the coin set itself apart from the Magic 8 Ball, allowing me to eat breakfast in the morn-
ing and take the trolley to work. Even better, when I went to lunch with the rest of my office, the coin allowed me to order a Diet Coke alongside my burger. For the first time this week, things were looking up for me.
Sure, I had to walk back home, but I was allowed to go to class, do some of my homework, and even do my laundry. I looked down once more at George Washington’s face, cast in copper and nickel. He almost seemed to be smiling.
Rating: 9/10. My first good day in a while—I needed this.
Friday, Sept. 19: Tarot
Nestled between ads for an “Am I Gay?” quiz and an article titled “Why Men Love Good Women” (debatable) was a set of three virtual cards for me to turn over, revealing my fate. The website promised that “This card was chosen by the Universe specially for you today.” From that sentence alone, my expectations were high: When was the last time a website was wrong? In quick succession, I drew the Four of Pentacles, symbolizing financial security; the Eight of Cups, warning me of a great change; and the Ace of Pentacles, telling me that I would slowly become aware of my contributions and value.
With my financial security guaranteed, I started making some purchases that I had been putting off for a while—a new pair of shoes (I only own one pair at a time), a fire escape ladder, groceries, you get it. It was only after the fact that I realized how great an amount this all came out to—a rather substantial reduction in my bank account. And I suppose that in some roundabout way, all of this made me become aware of the value of my labor.
Rating: 7/10. Predicted the day well enough. Probably a useful lesson to learn.
It’s easy to be contrarian and argue that mysticism is misunderstood or deserves to be taken a little more seriously. Sometimes, though, you just have to admit that the haters are right. While only one “superstition” actively made my life worse, none made me feel any better about the choices I made—after all, while the coin and the Magic 8 Ball nominally made the decisions I lived by, it was ultimately up to me to abide by their proclamations. With God out of the picture, maybe all we have is ourselves. k
Can you distinguish between house sparrows and song sparrows? Neither can I, but Sydney Liu (C ’26) can. As we are sitting at the Biopond, taking a break from the hustle and bustle of Locust Walk, Sydney helps me to identify birds hopping around us. She is a member of Penn’s premier bird–watching club, UPenn Quackers, where she has the opportunity to engage in a leisurely activity she enjoys. While she originally enrolled into the College of Arts and Sciences with interests in computer science and animation, Sydney later switched to the pre–med track. Then, she pivoted once again to embrace her true passion—teaching, which she discovered via one of the most notorious classes at Penn—CIS 1600.
How would you describe your extracurricular experience at Penn?
Something that I’ve been thinking a lot about is that a lot of my activities feel a little bit “unserious.” For example, when you talk to other seniors, they say: “I am the president of this pre–health preprofessional club,” “I am a consulting VP,” and so on. All these activities are extremely cool, but when these people ask me about my activities I reply with “I sew plushies and draw buzzards.” I think it feels unserious, but at the same time, there is something important about doing things as you want to do them. And there is no real value to whether something is serious or not serious. Moreover, that is something that I am learning about in education. Because I look really young—I think—I am trying to take myself more seriously while I am doing all these things.
Sydney Liu
Turning
peer pressure into support through art and education
BY EVA LITITSKAIA
Photos by Farah Syed, courtesy of Sydney Liu this interview has been edited and condensed for clarity
Why did bird–watching catch your attention and what is your main takeaway from it?
Honestly, I didn’t get into bird–watching until very recently. Thus, I would say I am more of an amateur, but I have a couple of friends who are really into bird–watching. Ironically, I met one of them during a physics lab because we had the same specific yellow backpack. Still, I’ve always really been into nature and getting out. I grew up in the suburbs of Connecticut, so I just enjoyed nature. Biopond made me realize that I was missing having that piece in my life now that I was in the city. So I felt that bird–watching was a nice community to just get outside and meet down–to–earth people. Additionally, I think a lot of my experiences at Penn created a feeling that I needed to shape myself into a certain way. I found that a lot of the clubs had high barriers to access, whereas the bird–watching one with an open membership felt really approachable.
How did you uncover your passion for teaching?
I’ve always enjoyed working and helping friends with their homework, but I didn’t really realize that I was really into teaching until a little bit later. I first started getting into it during my freshman year. I had taken one computer science class—CIS 1600—which is more of a
math class and felt very hard to me. Still, I had this opportunity to be a teaching assistant for this class later, so I applied for it, and I didn’t think I would get it because of the imposter syndrome and negative reputation around 1600. I ended up getting the position, and I believe that really helped me, because I had a hard experience with the class.
Because of its strict collaboration policy, it is hard for people to communicate and study together for this content. So, I was happy to be there for other students and empathize with their feelings and emotions arising from this class. I had a student write me a little post–it note at the end of my office–hours semester, where she thanked me for helping her throughout the journey. That totally changed my perspective, sparking my interest in further pursuing education. It made me feel that I was giving back in some way, when I am settled in a really competitive environment where everyone is just all for themselves. So, this became a remarkable point for me, and I ended up doing more assisting–related things.
How did family affect the way you make decisions about your future career?
I have a twin brother, he is really smart, good at math, and going to work at Amazon as
a software engineer. I am really proud of him. Having a twin who I am close with but who always was ahead of me made me feel constantly behind. This was a big experience that shaped my life, feeling always behind academically, intellectually. So I wanted to teach because I feel that a lot of students feel the similar kind of pressure when they compare themselves to other people, similar to the way that I compared myself to my twin, and to help students get out of that mentality and not feel that way.
Along with this, when I realized that I like helping people in general, my Asian parents suggested that I become a doctor. Still, I understood that at least I didn’t want to do the computer graphics program anymore as I didn’t enjoy being on a computer all the time. I tried the more medical route, thinking that I would go on to medicine. Nonetheless, over time, I fully realized that teaching was what I truly enjoy so that is what I've been pursuing since.
As you shape the lives of your students in some way, how did teaching affect you?
I feel a lot more authentic to myself. I think at Penn, I have experienced a lot of feeling like I have to be something that I am not. Like in this interview, I am always really sensitive about questions about my Penn experience, in the
sense that I was working all the time and just didn’t really have a whole lot of free time to myself. In my family, there was a lot of pressure on what careers that I should go into because of the feeling that when you get to Penn, you have to deliver this return on investment. So if you go into teaching, the question is whether I am wasting this opportunity I’ve been granted and the money and resources that were put into me just to go down an easier route. That was hard. In addition to that, there is also a lot of pressure at Penn to become a leader of some kind of club or to have your Google Calendar completely booked. Thus, I pressured myself to do that a lot early on, but I think now I do what I want to do. For example, I watch birds and I teach, and I feel that this has helped me retain authenticity. Being in teaching makes me feel more connected to others; for example, I really enjoyed being a PennArts leader and helping orient the freshmen through the arts. It’s fun because I believe that teaching can be both creative and intellectual—in terms of math, science and other matters that I've been doing—but also creative in terms of PennArts.
How do you see the interaction between art and education?
This is something I am really thinking about right now. I am in the SNF Paideia Program. They give you a lot of flexibility for what you can do for your project at the end, and I am hoping to do a project on art and how it facilitates dialogue and community building. For example, I made one comic for a class in the program called “Testimony: Life–Writing as a Dialogue” with Sarah Ropp. I created this comic about how I felt as a freshman throughout the burnout culture. It is a really broad metaphor: It is meant to be not specific to me, so I used different sorts of flowers to illustrate the feelings. I ended up sharing this comic with the freshmen in PennArts. I felt that it was really special for me, as it allowed me to be vulnerable and create a piece that other people can also relate to. It helped start a conversation and a connection.
Additionally, I think that arts can help make teaching feel more fun. This summer, I worked at Choate Summer Programs, which is at a boarding school in Connecticut. I was teaching neuroscience for middle schoolers and biology for high schoolers. I got to try a lot of different things. For example, I had
students model the stages of mitosis with clay. This was nice as I feel teaching can sometimes be really dry and boring for both pupils and me, so it was good to have the opportunity to try different things with them and let them apply their own personalities and creativity.
Another example of collaboration between art and education is the UnEarthed Magazine. I joined it pretty early as a freshman. That year, I was so overwhelmed by classes that I was not super involved with other clubs. But I’ve always enjoyed making magazine spreads and things like that. So, it has been really fun to be part of a team where I collaborate with a writer to come up with the vision of the text. We also do distribution events, when we go to different schools and share our magazines. It is really rewarding to see the kids get excited about it.
As both a PennArts pre–orientation leader and a past participant, how has your vision of Penn changed since freshman year?
The program is meant to incorporate both the visual and the performing branches of art. I am more of a visual artist, so I can’t dance and sing, while other people can. So it is really fun, because you have this community of people who
are trying new things. I don’t know if the program or people necessarily changed as much, because I don’t remember it. Still, to be honest, I changed a lot because of it. In my freshman year, I was really shy. I didn’t want to dance and to do any of those things. Now, as a leader, I help other shy students to feel more comfortable in those spaces, which makes me feel really nice.
Even though I took the leadership position only this year, and it was a last minute decision, I am really glad I did it, because I met a lot of good, genuine, and awesome people. I started doing PennArts as a freshman, as a participant. The pre–orientation program was my first introduction to Penn, and I wanted to end my years the way I started. I really enjoyed the idea of having the full–circle experience and having this community that I am connected to now. Both this year and my freshman year, we had lots of similar activities—for example, we do this puzzle activity where you draw a puzzle piece, and then everyone has to put it together without words. They end up displayed in the Platt Performing Arts Center. Seeing the same activity you did happen for another group of students was really nostalgic. You can even see the puzzle of my freshman year. I think it is exciting to see the evolution of these puzzles over time. k
One subject to teach? Physics
Best studying technique? Sitting in the David Rittenhouse Laboratory library
Favorite visual artist?
There are two types of people at Penn… Slow and fast people
And you are? Slow
Favorite bird? Catbird
Carol Marine
The Emperor Has No Code
Artificial intelligence startups like Cluely and Series are making a big bet on marketing, Gen–Z style.
BY ETHAN SUN
Graphic by Insia Haque
Cluely’s company onboarding package includes the following: a work laptop, ID, house keys, a five–motif Van Cleef, a corporate Hinge premium subscription, 74 servings of whey protein, and five honey packs. “Put it in your coffee next time,” Chief Marketing Officer Daniel Min (W ‘25) advises on the company’s official TikTok page. “Trust me, it tastes great.
If the swag bag doesn’t clue you into the kind of startup this is, its social media will: On any given scroll, you may see Min jokingly pressure his interns to hit their weekly dating quotas or come across their fursuit–clad mascot (Clue the Fox) body–slam Cluely co–founder Roy Lee.
The company, which is developing a real–time, artificial intelligence assistant to help you “cheat on everything,” raised $15 million in its most recent investment round—a feat that its
investors directly attribute to the company’s digital footprint. And while it may be one of the startup world’s most prominent viral darlings, it’s not alone.
As this generation of tech hopefuls launch their various AI–powered companies (and there are plenty), it seems they are aging into a very different scene. Gone are the days of nerds building PCs in their garage—the new industry leaders are, God help us, influencers.
Or, as Min might prefer, “content creators.” Better yet, “creatives.” The 21–year–old CMO graduated from Penn just this spring, finishing up summer classes while entering his new role as chief of marketing. Min previously appeared on Street’s pages fresh from a growth internship at RecruitU but reneged on his return offer this June to join Cluely.
Since then, he’s focused on developing Clue-
ly’s marketing operations, which, rather than product, have always been the company’s beating heart. In a fiercely competitive attention economy, Cluely is trying to grow its “mindshare” through three primary formats: “Black Mirror–type” launch videos, borderline–offensive viral stunts, and brain–rot user generated content.
Lee became infamous earlier this year for using Cluely’s predecessor, InterviewCoder, to cheat on Big Tech job interviews. Since then, he’s gotten lap dances at the Cluely HQ (which triples as a living space, workplace, and content house) and thrown a Y Combinator after–party that got shut down due to a mass influx of uninvited guests. Or, as Lee puts it, because “Cluely’s aura is just too strong.” Later this month, however, the Cluely team plans to make up for the early cancelation by hosting a $1.5 million rave.
These antics are all designed to inflame, excite, and ultimately goad Cluely’s impressionable audience into bringing up the company’s name in casual conversation. Whether you love it or hate it, if you’re talking about Cluely, they’ve won.
This viral strategy has paid off, but not without (or perhaps by) generating significant backlash. In his YouTube videos since joining Cluely, Min speaks about the many negative comments he’s received, whether from strangers on the internet or even his Penn admissions interviewer, who told Min that the company’s reputation would ruin his “Wharton pedigree.”
Across San Francisco and the tech community, criticisms about Cluely’s product and its team members abound. Depending on who you ask, its AI agent is either an existential threat, allowing unqualified individuals to
sneak past job interviews, or an easily replicable “GPT wrapper” which has used irresponsible marketing to bloat its valuation, only hastening its inevitable downfall.
But perhaps they’re hating the player for simply playing the game. In today’s tech landscape, Cluely may have found a winning strategy. As companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google compete to create the most powerful, humanlike AI model, they’ve often ignored the more tailored use cases of AI, such as making class curricula, autogenerating social media posts, and about anything else an imaginative–enough twentysomething could come up with.
This has left a bounty of low–hanging fruit for young tech founders. With the models already built, these individuals only need to act as “AI–powered” middlemen. They take the customer’s needs, engineer them into prompts
ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, and communicate the output back to their customer. The programming is relatively simple, and with this low barrier of entry has come a deluge of Gen–Z entrepreneurs looking to build the world’s next Big Tech company (or at least get acquired by one).
Just as with its product, Cluely’s marketing meets its young, chronically online audience where they’re at: low–lift, minimal effort. Min tells Street that despite the criticism he’s faced, he has “no concern about the branding.” In fact, he sees it as the key behind their success. “We would not have raised $15 million if our branding was not out of pocket,” he says. “Cluely is all about taking big bets on things. … I just paid $100,000 for billboards, and that’s literally just to run an experiment.” The experiment in question is currently suspended over Times
for
Square, with eight austere white billboards reading, “hi i’m roy i’m 21 / this was very expensive / pls buy my thing / cluely.com.”
This isn’t Min’s first rodeo, either. In his junior summer, he launched socials for RecruitU, a startup designed to help college students recruit to various business jobs. After growing the company’s Instagram and TikTok pages to a combined 134,000 followers, he found the work agreeable enough to continue into the school year. Once a run–of–the–mill finance kid, Min began to enjoy small–time social media fame and was ready to commit to the role post–grad.
That’s when Lee, who had recently launched Cluely, DMed him with a job offer. “The only thing I was indexing for,” Min says, “was ‘Do I see myself being best friends with these people?’” After meeting Lee and grabbing dessert with the team, he decided the answer was yes.
Since then, the TikToker–turned–marketing whiz has been hard at work procuring Cluely’s most valuable resource—content creators. These creators live just across the street from Cluely HQ, where the company pays for all their housing. Min’s hiring process was shockingly organic.
Shortly after Min joined, creator Remy Zee (who is best known for his “you have big eyes, small face” TikTok video) began working at the company. Then, Min called his former New York roommate and fellow creator, Mino Lee. The two had planned to work in New York post–grad, but after Min told his friend about Cluely, Lee decided to join him. From there, they recruited their mutual friends Prosper, Armon, Tulio, and Aaron (“A. Drizzy”). Just like that, Min had his team of content creators who could leverage their “algo–pull” to bring in a large, loyal audience that would hopefully form Cluely’s userbase.
In a competitive market where programming talent is not always the highest priority, Cluely is just one company among a whole batch that has learned to rely on social media for success. Another such example is Series.so, led by Yale University students and co–founders Sean Hargrow and Nathaneo Johnson, the latter of whom has taken point on Series’ newest project: Love Island for startup interns. Hold for gasps (or sighs).
At least that’s how Series branded its Hamptons–based reality TV show, creatively titled The
Series, to audiences last month. What was supposed to be Series’ remote internship program turned into this ambitious marketing strategy. “I didn’t even watch Love Island,” Johnson confesses. “The idea came from putting growth interns in a house in New York, and now we’re just televising it.”
Whatever the inspiration, the company’s initial posts on TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn have done numbers with the United States’ most chronically online preprofessionals. According to Forbes, the show is “part hackathon, part influencer house, and part startup growth stunt.” It features 12 Series interns who will compete in challenges and gradually be eliminated based on who brings in the lowest number of new users, with the winner earning a whopping $100,000.
Series, which claims to be “the first AI social
Gone are the days of nerds building PCs in their garage—the new industry leaders are, God help us, influencers.
network,” has a tamer reputation than Cluely: less brain–rot content, more serious announcements, and an aim to disrupt but not necessarily scandalize. Comparing itself to Facebook, this social network claims to be doing better. “We’ll be looking back and saying Harvard did it wrong in ’04, and Yale did it right in 2025,” Hargrow told the Yale Daily News this past April.
The startup was born from the founders’ desire for more accessible and organic networking experiences. In the pair’s podcast, they interviewed entrepreneurs and discovered that they could often trace back an interviewee’s success to “having the right connection at the right time.” As Johnson tells Street, their subsequent efforts to “digitize a superconnector” resulted in Series, a software which uses a team of AI agents on Messenger to connect people based on their needs—perhaps an entrepreneur with a prod-
uct designer or a writer with a publicist.
The question is: Will Series’ TV venture pay off? Johnson is certainly willing to find out. “An entrepreneur, at minimum, is someone who’s taking a risk,” he says. And Johnson believes he’s paved the way for other startups to follow this trend toward flashy marketing.
“I’ll just sound crazy, right?” he says. “But I think we’ve definitely been a huge part of that change.” Johnson claims that, increasingly, startup launch videos are “very controversial as well, and that’s because they’re trying to copy and paste the method that supposedly works.” Regardless of who started it, this trend is here to stay. From Cluely touting aphrodisiacs in HR packages to Series launching Love Island for growth interns, college tech entrepreneurs are adopting an irreverent social media strategy that meets their Gen–Z peers where they’re at. In any case, Min is settling well into his role at Cluely. But for what it’s worth, he’s got his own reservations about the company. When it comes to the company’s viral distribution strategy, he wishes they would focus less on metrics.
“People [in San Francisco] are too results oriented,” he says, evidently frustrated by the city’s dearth of visionaries. “For a creative to really flourish, you want to literally tell them there’s no expectations.”
That’s right. In this new market of high controversy and higher stakes, Min is perhaps the only one looking out for the creators. After being inundated with tech buzzwords and conversations about “agentic AIs,” Min decided to host his own party this past July—for creatives only.
“San Francisco is the LEAST creative city I’ve ever lived in,” one of his recent LinkedIn posts reads. “I’m taking a stand to make SF creative again.” To RSVP for Min’s Topgolf social, you had to “NOT be a startup founder” and “NOT be making content exclusively for the sake of growing a startup.”
One day, Min plans to be “the greatest creative in the world.” He continues, “When you think about startup marketing, or how do we build a cool brand … I want people to be like, ‘Oh, look at Daniel’s channel.’” And whether headed for fame or failure, a growing new guard of startups seem to be following Min’s unorthodox advice.
Let’s just hope they lay off the honey packs. k
Afternoons at the Prado With Goya’s Black Paintings
The
paintings
are dark, fascinating, twisted, and scarily real—we want to both turn away and look forever.
BY SARAH LEONARD
Two Old Men Eating (1820-1823) and Saturn Devouring His Son (1820-1823), Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (Photo Courtesy of the Museo Nacional del Prado)
Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings sit in a dim room at the far southern end of the Museo del Prado, across the museum from the stern gaze of his likeness in bronze at the main entrance. After walking through grand halls of romantic historical paintings and light–filled salons of sculpture, entering this small, grey room feels a little like walking through a portal. Suddenly, you’re faced with walls of twisting greys and blacks, the brightest color being the
crimson blood spouting from the severed head and wrist of the child in Saturn Devouring His Son. The most widely known painting in the collection, it depicts the Roman titan Saturn consuming his infant son after hearing a prophecy that he would be overthrown by one of his male offspring. Upstairs, Peter Paul Rubens’ interpretation of this same scene hangs; in this one, Saturn is golden and muscular, his face twisted with rage as his teeth peel into the skin of his
howling child. Goya splits from this idealized, all–powerful representation of the god: his Saturn is gray and emaciated. His expression is fearful, deranged, and desperate; he seems almost mortal.
The piece is perpetually surrounded by visitors. No matter what time you visit, it’s hard to have a solitary moment with it. Almost as interesting as the actual painting, however, are the reactions of those in front of it. It’s a sort of
test for viewers to see where their gaze will fall: Will they look away from the gore, instead admiring the frenzied technique and strangely disproportionate limbs? Or can they stomach looking directly into the maddened, bulging eyes of Saturn as he devours his son?
I found that my own gaze varied day to day. Sometimes, I was one of the brave ones, maintaining eye contact; other days, my stomach would twist and my eyes would wander away. Some days, there would be too many competing eyes around me and I would surrender, turning instead to the paintings on either side.
The Prado became almost a second home to me when I was studying in Madrid. Any afternoon I was unburdened with homework, I would go and slide my student ID and driver’s license across the ticket desk to evade the dozens of euros I would have had to pay otherwise (I have a wad of student admission tickets waiting to go in my scrapbook as proof). The beautiful thing about a museum as monumental as the Prado is that you can first get physically lost, stumbling into rooms and hallways you’ve never seen before, and then lose yourself again admiring the new paintings you discover. But every time, no matter where I ended up, I would make sure I was in that darkened salon with Goya at least once.
Goya and his wife, Josefa Bayeu, only saw one of their seven children survive into adulthood. Only decades after becoming a father did Goya paint his scene of twisted parenthood directly onto the walls of the Quinta del Sordo, his house on the outskirts of Madrid. Literally translated as “villa of the deaf one,” the property was purchased in 1819 by the aging and hearing–impaired Goya, who sought to isolate himself from the Spanish court he had been disillusioned with for so long. Here, he painted freely, and here the scenes of the Black Paintings sprouted in oil, with the estate’s walls themselves serving as his canvas. There is debate about Goya’s mental and physical state at the time of their creation: Some attribute the twisted faces and otherworldly figures to severe mental illness or sickness–induced delusion. Whatever the cause, Goya exhibits an early kind of automatic painting, forgoing any rigid plans and changing his mind as he worked. Later art movements would expand on his initial innovations: The Impressionists
would improvise to spontaneously capture light, the Surrealists to capture the subcon scious.
This is the funny thing about many of Goya’s paintings: The things we feel we’re meant to be afraid of—the witches, the flying demons, the he–goats—are often more fascinating than anything else. It’s when Goya paints the hu man experience that he disturbs and horrifies us the most: the firing squad scene in The Third of May 1808 and the rape, decapitation, and execution in The Disasters of War. The paintings that disturb me the most are a blue–sky pas toral scene and a swimming dog, both with brighter palettes than the rest of the set: With Cudgels, which features two young men about to beat each other to death with clubs, and The Dog, which depicts a sorry–looking canine almost submerged in a rising wave of sand–colored water.
Many frame the Black Paintings as evidence of Goya’s descent into madness; as products of an aging, solitary, and declining mind. But there is evidence that the artist was actually very sober in his older years, though likely a bit depressed. And he wasn’t alone in the house: Leocadia Zorrilla, recently separated from her husband, served as his housekeeper and companion. Her young daughter, Rosario Weiss Zorrilla, was his protégé. The artist might not have completed his works as lonely as one might think—he may have even painted them while trailed by his fascinated pupil.
In any case, it seems a bit of a discredit to cast these works as simple products of madness. Goya painted many horrors throughout the latter half of his career—but they were the horrors he witnessed in the world around him, not just those inside his mind. The twisted faces and distorted bodies they feature could be due to Goya’s adoption of a freer style of painting, one that departed from the rigidity of his earlier court portraits. But even if they were painted during a period of mental instability, that doesn’t detract from their power, their importance in the trajectory of art history, and their application to the human experience. There are few clearer–minded displays of fear and desperation than in the eyes of Goya’s Saturn, of hatred than in the faces of his two young men with clubs, or of tearful hopelessness than in the eyes of his drowning dog. k
34TH STREET PRESENTS
The AccordingGospel to Alpha
A horror movie for anyone who grew up seeing suffering as atonement
by kate cho illustration by insia haque
Julia Ducournau has redefined body horror. She makes films about what happens when belief collapses and all that’s left is the body—hurt, grotesque, unrecognizable, still trying to mean something. Her breakout films Raw (2016) and Titane (2021), which turned her into a critic’s darling, obliterate the boundary between flesh and metal, motherhood and monstrosity. They’re some of the most emotionally destabilizing films I’ve ever seen. Her third feature Alpha (2025) follows the titular young girl (Mélissa Boros) caught in the emotional wreckage of a mysterious affliction known as the red wind—an illness that petrifies the body, marbles the skin, and silences speech. Alpha’s uncle Amine (Tahar Rahim), a recovering heroin addict, is already deep in its grip. Her mother (Golshifteh Farahani), a healthcare worker on the front lines who is already barely holding it together managing single motherhood and trying to support her brother’s sobriety, is consumed by the possibility that Alpha is next after her daughter tattoos an “A” on her arm with a dirty needle at a house party. In the absence of answers, Alpha watches her mother turn caretaking into obsession and grief into ritual. The dread of Alpha’s impending diagnosis is unrelenting throughout the film, and ambiguity is its own curse. That’s what makes Alpha such a fantastic horror movie—not gore or violence, but the overwhelming fear of watching someone you love turn into a ghost in front of you and not knowing if you’re joining them. This is not similar to Titane (2021)—which I
still consider one of the best films of all time, full stop. Alpha trades in something subtler but just as devastating. The body horror is still there— gorgeous, grotesque, grotesquely gorgeous—but it’s quieter now, like something sacred that no one wants to name aloud. It’s less transformative, but more painfully enduring.
Premiering at Cannes Film Festival 2025 under high expectations, Alpha stunned me with what it dared to withhold. As someone who loves Titane like it’s scripture, I didn’t expect something softer, sadder, more suffocating. But that’s exactly what Alpha is. Where Titane detonates the body into spectacle, Alpha lets it calcify into myth. It’s a film about spiritual trauma itself, whereas Titane is about the performance of it—not the church kind, but the kind that lives in families, in cultures, and in superstition that pretends not to be religious at all.
Alpha’s extended family—French Muslims—talk about the disease in hushed tones, like it’s not just an illness but a sort of possession. They talk about djinns, unseen forces, and something that’s been sent eerily like a biblical plague. And no one ever says it outright, but it all feels familiar: the whispers around people who are “touched,” the way we explain away pain when we can’t name it, the mythologizing of suffering in the absence of care.
It’s tempting to look at the red wind in Alpha and label it as “post–pandemic cinema,” to frame it as an AIDS metaphor or a nod to long COVID–19, long grief, long silence. But that’s too neat. Alpha isn’t trying to educate you about viruses; it’s trying to smother you with what it feels like to be cursed. Catholicism is full of saints of lost causes—coins buried upside down to sell houses, black veils over mirrors, novenas whispered on loop for forgiveness that doesn’t come. We burn candles for impossible things. We carry relics. We cross ourselves before we say something awful. No one calls it superstition. We call it devotion. But what’s the real difference?
The Tame Impala “Let It Happen” needle drop comes at a moment when Alpha is actively doing the opposite. She’s running—physically, emotionally, spiritually—from a party and from the gnawing fear that something irreversible has already happened. Her uncle is missing. She knows he’s using again. Her mother is unraveling. The red wind might already be in her blood. And
there’s no one left to say anything reassuring.
Cultural understandings of illness, fate, and spirit—whether rooted in folklore, animism, or ancestral traditions—don’t disappear when Abrahamic religions enter the picture. They adapt. They hide inside religious language. They blur. And what emerges is often a hybrid moral framework into which suffering is always read, even if not fully understood.
Superstitions often carry the logic of preexisting cosmologies—ideas about balance, curses, protection, or spiritual contamination—but they get filtered through the rigid binaries of sin and purity that monotheistic religions enforce. Especially in Catholic and Islamic households, where ritual plays a central role, this mix can create a system where the body becomes a site of judgment. Something touched you. Something was sent. Something went wrong.
Alpha is gorgeously shot. The lighting feels biblical—chiaroscuro like Caravaggio, but softer and sadder. Every detail—the marbled skin, the cracked lips, the weight of the body as it petrifies—feels sculpted by someone who has seen pain up close and still wanted to make it beautiful. Ducournau’s world is as much about texture as it is about tone. You feel the disease in your own joints.
Rahim, who plays Alpha’s uncle Amine, lost 44 pounds for the role, all while promoting a different film, a Charles Aznavour biopic that couldn’t be more tonally distant. His diet during
We burn candles for impossible things. We carry relics. We cross ourselves before we say something awful. No one calls it superstition. We call it devotion. But what’s the real difference?
that time was brutal and ritualistic: specific quantities of cherry tomatoes and pistachios, consumed at set times. He described them not as food, but as a kind of controlled fixation. A substitute for a fix. And accordingly, his performance never slips into cliché or aestheticized addiction. He doesn’t act like a man who’s high. He acts like someone already turning to stone. Rahim has described Amine not simply as an addict, but as a “fallen angel who’s had his wings cut off.” The metaphor fits—this is a character suspended in grief and guilt but still tethered to the living. “He still has a mission,” Rahim says. “It’s about freeing Alpha.” Whether or not the film grants that freedom is unclear. But his presence—fragile, decaying, strangely tender—is
impossible to look away from.
Farahani, as Alpha’s mother, gives a performance that anchors the entire film. There is no villain in this story, but her character comes closest to embodying a kind of theological horror: a woman who keeps someone alive because she doesn’t know how to let him go. Farahani won the Excellence Award at the Locarno Film Festival for this role, and it’s obvious why. She doesn’t cry often in the film, but when she does, the expression in her eyes is uncanny—pain layered with anger, faith twisted by exhaustion. It feels like religious art, like depictions of the Virgin Mary’s grief. Not the sanitized Mary of Christmas cards, but the Mary of Mater Dolorosa paintings, the Mary who watches her son
die and cannot stop it. Her devotion is inescapable, even violent. But it’s real. And it feels inherited, like this is what she was taught love should look like. That too becomes a kind of superstition.
There’s no catharsis in Alpha, which is fitting for a disease movie. Everyone is trying so hard to keep each other alive—through rituals, through obsession, through stories on what the red wind is and isn’t. But nothing is healed, the fog never lifts, and love never stops asking too much. I don’t think Ducournau is interested in resolution anyway; she’s more interested in what it costs to stay. I left the theater thinking about all the things we call devotion when we don’t know what else to do with our grief. k
Alas Poor Yorick, His Head Has Gone Missing!
The search for John ‘Pop’ Reed’s skull
by jules lingenfelter
illustration by insia haque
Alas Poor Yorick” slashes across the page of the March 31, 1941 edition of the Appleton Post–Crescent. “John Reed of Philadelphia realized his life’s ambition to appear on the stage after he was in the grave!”
The “fun fact” was one of several compiled in one of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” cartoons—the rather tame original version of the franchise consisting of illustrated curations of strange facts that newspapers could reprint. Alongside a two–headed beet and an 11–year–old girl who tap dances on her head appears Reed’s own bizarre last wish: He bequeathed his head to be used in productions of Hamlet. “Reed’s skull was used for 16 years!” the comic shouts.
The skull of John Reed is the stuff of legends: It’s a weird factoid, a local legend, and a part of the history of the Walnut Street Theatre—the oldest theater in the United States. But for all the energy spent on did–you–know–ing this piece of lore, the location of the skull is a murky topic at best. So how exactly does a very real artifact seemingly get lost in time? Worse yet, what happens when a man’s head goes missing?
According to his obituary in The New York Times, John Reed was born in Philadelphia in 1808. He began his career at age 16 at the Walnut Street Theatre, where he worked until 1880. He would continue to be connected with the theater until his death in July 1891. Reed had a beloved reputation at the theater, and was affectionately known as “Old ‘Pop’ Reed.” Though his specific role varies by report—stagehand, gaslighter, and prop master—he was, notably, never an actor onstage, despite his love for the art.
When Reed died in 1891, his will expressed a rather specific request: “My head to be separate from my body immediately after my death; the latter to be buried in a grave; the former duly macerated and prepared to be brought to the theatre where I served all my life, and to be employed to represent the skull of Yorick.” And thus it was done. Reed had secured his legacy as the titular “fellow of infinite jest” in Shakespeare’s Danish tragedy.
Reed’s bequeathal of his skull to the Walnut Street Theatre may appear as an odd, one–off instance, but there’s a rather long–running line of people dying to be cast as the departed jester. In a statement emailed to Street, Shakespearean scholar and curator of research services at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts Alica Meyer wrote, “It seems to have been relatively common for nineteenth–century tragedians to use human skulls in their portrayal of Hamlet, especially if they were appearing in a high–profile production of the play.” Multiple libraries and museums contain artifacts, either of the actual skulls used as props or of photographs of actors holding real skulls.
John “Pop” Reed isn’t even the only man to supposedly give his skull to the Walnut Street Theatre. As the story goes, Junuis Brutus Booth was willed the skull of a horse thief named Fontaine. As legend has it, Booth and Fontaine spent a night in jail together, and Fontaine later bequeathed his skull in the hopes of appearing on the stage as his final act. The skull was signed by different renditions of Hamlet as well, and even once by one of the gravedigger’s actors.
The tradition has carried on into at least the late 20th century. In 1955, Juan Potomachi
bequeathed his skull to the Teatro Dramatico in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and in 1995, actor Jonathan Hartman attempted the same for the Royal Shakespeare Company. But, as in life, Hartman was rejected from the RSC. However, the RSC’s 2008 production of Hamlet, starring David Tennant, did use the skull of André Tchaikowsky, a now–deceased concert pianist and composer. Just this past year, Tennant himself offered up his skull to be used in future productions when his time comes, though he’s doubtful he could secure the role, legally speaking.
While John Reed may be far from the only one to audition from beyond the grave, his story has gained significant notoriety, having been published and republished many a time in the years since his death. And with this consistent retelling, like a massive game of telephone, the details of his story have become warped.
Reed’s postburial request resurfaced throughout the 20th century, becoming a fun factoid for newspapers to report on—though more emphasis is placed on the “fun” than the “fact.” In the 1889 edition of Charles Dickens’ All The Year Round, a weekly literary magazine circulated in the United Kingdom, two sentences are dedicated to the story of Reed. In a 1909 article entitled “Odd Burial Requests,” the New York Tribune reprinted Reed’s clipped will and wrote that “love of the stage has led many a man and woman to strange actions.” “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” comic appeared in multiple newspapers across the country, but strangely reported that the skull was destroyed after a fire in the Walnut Street Theatre in 1890—a year before Reed even passed.
What actually happened to the skull after Reed’s death is difficult to determine. Supposedly, after it was removed from the body, the skull was used in multiple productions of Hamlet. Bernard Havard, current president and producing artistic director of the Walnut Street Theatre, explains that “the skull was used many times by the actors in Hamlet and the staff. The star performer who played Hamlet would inscribe his signature on the skull.”
But the skull has to have gone missing at some point, because multiple sources report it having been “found,” though they can’t entirely agree on what happened. The theater changed
So how exactly does a very real artifact seemingly get lost in time? Worse yet, what happens when a man’s head goes missing?
hands multiple times, and in 1920 was signed over to millionaire James P. Beaury. As a means of modernizing the theater, the interior was rebuilt and the stage enlarged, leading to the discovery of a back room with old props. According to Andrew Davis’ book America’s Longest Run: A History of the Walnut Street Theatre, alongside filled costume trunks from the 19th century and the diary of famous 19th century actor Junius Brutus Booth—the father of Edwin and John Wilkes Booth—“workmen discovered a skull that had been carefully packed away. It was assumed to be that of ‘Pop’ Reed.”
Twenty years later, on May 14, 1941, Variety published, “[Reed’s] Skull disappeared about 25 years ago and was located among the effects of an attache of the Academy of Music.” The article claims that the skull had been given to him from “a friend.”
Later that same year, The New York Times reported a similar story, although it claimed the skull had been located in the Academy of Music and returned to the theater. The article ends, “John Reed’s skull lies safely in the place where he wished it, awaiting the next Hamlet, who, if perchance he be old enough, can truly say, ‘Alas! Poor Yorick!—I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.’”
The status of Reed’s skull in the late 20th century again becomes murky, with rumors floating around that it was acquired by Van Pelt–Dietrich Library. An article from 2009, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the theater’s opening in 1809, states as such: “Reed’s skull—long retired and now residing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Van Pelt Library—was autographed by actors who performed with the macabre prop.”
“How they got that skull? I have no idea,”
Havard says. “Whether it was taken from the Walnut or somebody gave it to them.”
According to Havard and the Walnut Street Theatre, Van Pelt has had the skull since it was rediscovered back in the 1920s. Havard also claims that about 25 years ago, the library was allowed to display the skull for a short period of time, but that Van Pelt ultimately took it back into its archive out of preservation concerns.
“He obviously had very strong feelings about wanting to stay at the theater for as long as eternity,” Havard says. “And he nearly got his wish, except now he resides in the library instead of the theater. Which is a shame, really.”
The Kislak Center does, in fact, have a skull in its repertoire. It was a skull reportedly used in productions of Hamlet. It was a skull that, as records indicate, was loaned out to the Walnut Street Theatre decades ago for a production of Hamlet. It bears the names of many famous actors who once played the Bard’s Sweet Prince, including Edwin Booth and Edwin Forrest, both of whom were stars of Walnut Street Theatre, alongside international performers like Edmund Kean and William Macready.
But it is not the skull of John “Pop” Reed.
“There are records documenting this skull going back to the 1830s—so long before John Reed died. In the 1870s, it passed into the care of Horace Howard Furness, a Shakespeare scholar who produced editions of Shakespeare’s plays in a series called The New Variorum to Shakespeare,” Meyer writes in her statement to Street. “Furness had the human skull because of its association with nineteenth–century productions of Hamlet. Still, the skull is not exclusively associated with the Walnut Street Theatre, but rather his broader interest in Shakespeare.”
The skull was bequeathed to the University in 1931 by Furness’ son, Horace Howard Furness Jr. It was a part of Furness’ massive collection of artifacts, including a pair of cursed gloves supposed to be Shakespeare’s, and over 3,000 playbills. The identity and origin of the skull is not currently known.
For the foreseeable future, the skull will reside at the Kislak Center. “We are continuing to conduct archival research with re-
positories at Penn and beyond to illuminate the earlier history, before the Furness family acquired it,” Meyer writes. “Until its origins are better understood, the skull remains under the care of the library. It is restricted to genuine scholarly inquiry that honors the deceased and extends the Kislak Center’s respect for the person whose remains are safeguarded here.”
In Act 5, Scene 1 of Hamlet, the Prince postulates the identities of the skulls surrounding him in the kingdom’s graveyard. A lawyer, perhaps? Or a politician? A courier? Struck by his own potential madness and a thirst for avenging his father, Hamlet encounters the skull of the beloved court jester, whom he remembers fondly. “Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs?” Hamlet mourns. “Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chapfallen?” The safe world that Hamlet has grown up in is gone, and a man he once loved is nothing but only a faceless, unrecognizable skull.
“My head to be separate from my body immediately after my death; the latter to be buried in a grave; the former duly macerated and prepared to be brought to the theatre where I served all my life, and to be employed to represent the skull of Yorick.”
John Reed lived his life at Walnut Street Theatre and gave his death to it as well. The real–life details of what happened to his skull, whose Hamlet he accompanied, and where it resides now, are difficult to parse through. But regardless of the facts, Reed’s life has lived on
in legend. He’s established himself as a part of the Walnut Street Theatre’s history and gained notoriety across the world and across two centuries. Though he may have never graced the stage while alive, his son Roland Lewis Reed became an actor and comedian, gaining
fame within the city of Philadelphia, and his granddaughter Florence Reed was a starlet of the silver screen. And though the theater no longer can claim his skull, it has continued on his name with the Pop Reed Society to honor those who give their life to the stage. k
One An’s One–Man Act
This magician finally reveals his secrets.
by jules lingenfelter and anissa t. ly
photos by justin paul abenoja and edited by insia haque
From his pocket, One An (C ’27) takes out a deck of cards, each one bearing either a black–and–white or colored image. He asks me to shuffle the deck, pick a card, then spread the rest face up in front of him. He looks at the cards for just three seconds before I gather the deck, turn it over, face down, and hand it back to him. He splits the deck into four groups. I don’t realize what he is doing until he turns each section of cards over—he’s sorting the cards by color and the object they depict. After a quick perusal, One proceeds to name which card I took out of the deck, explaining that it is just a trick of practiced memorization. Though he makes the trick seem simple in its execution, it’s hard not to be impressed.
One is majoring in logic, information and computation, submatriculating in computer science, and minoring in digital media design. He is a certified numbers obsessive. At the present, he is working on what he describes as “step index logical relations for big step semantics.” In other words, he is asking if he can understand a computer program’s behavior by how many steps it takes to evaluate something. “That would be the really annoying nerd answer,” he laughs.
But not all numbers are as rational and objective as one might think. One treats math as a slightly rigid form of storytelling. “I have this philosophical position that mathematics is just a formal version of creative writing,” he explains. It’s this interpretive framework that seems to unify One’s love of magic and his passion for mathematics. For him, the irrational and the rational go hand in hand. For the things that we cannot seem to explain—the magic of the world—there is always an answer.
Take mentalists and mind readers—the likes of which were once an inspiration for One. He explains that many are “only applied psychologists.” Or think of superstitions. “First of all, I love superstitions. I think they’re so fun,” he says.
While he may not believe in them himself, he sometimes questions what it means to believe in anything at all. “I do think it’s [about] the practice of it, so I think in that way, superstitions are very real,” he says. “But is the act itself somehow causing it? No.”
It should be no surprise that card tricks are One’s bread and butter. According to him, they’re simply the mathematics of magic. One picked up trickery relatively early in life, first learning the basics of the art during his youth in Korea. “I would say Korea has a good magic culture,” he sayss and mentions the elementary school magic club where he first cut his teeth.
His dive into the deep end of sorcery truly began the moment he stepped into a Korean magic store. “The first time I was there, I was in a trance. There are people shuffling cards crazy, and people who knew how to cheat in cards. Then the dealer showed me a trick,” he says enthusiastically, “and I was like, ‘well, that’s fucking crazy.’” Since then, there’s hardly been a day when he hasn’t gone without touching a deck of cards. “I think the maximum I found was two days,” he says with a grin.
Beyond simple sleight of hand, One also finds himself immersed in the world of card matching and gamblers’ techniques. “I’m really into gambling history; I think this is a fascinating thing that people don’t know about,” he says. He explains that gamblers used to use physical tools to allow them to eject extra cards and cheat the system to maximize their returns. But when casinos caught on, cheaters had to switch to mental tools. It was out of pure necessity that counting cards first took off, challenging gamblers to memorize vast swaths of information quickly and efficiently.
Drawing on the traditions of generations of gamblers before him, One shows me just how easy it can be to cheat the system. He places the deck in front of me, and turns over the
top card—the ace of hearts. He puts it back on top of the stack, then turns the top card over again—suddenly, it’s become the seven of clubs.
When he was ten, One’s family moved to Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands. Though he was separated from the magic culture he grew up in, he continued his one–man act, occasionally performing in restaurants and casinos. Outside of his school, he also managed a magic club, which included both magicians and jugglers—some of whom continue to practice the craft today.
Now at Penn, One is working to get a magic club started, with mixed success. Six–and–a–half credits, mathematical research, and teaching assistant work are a lot for One to juggle (no pun intended) alongside his work in magic. For now, he’s carrying on the operation on his own, with the hope that more people will express interest in joining in the near future. In the meantime, he’s embarked on a solo tour of sorts—this year, he had the chance to perform a knife–swallowing routine at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts and another set at the Kelly Writers House.
But One’s passion for math extends beyond research and magic. Beyond the realm of logic and rules, he also views math through a human lens, focusing on expanding access to education in mathematics. “If I were to do something else besides magic or research, it would probably be math education,” he remarks. But he also believes that making math education accessible is bound to take some work. “The U.S. math [education] system is such a fucking mess,” he says. He argues against math as an inherent aptitude, instead claiming that what passes for natural intelligence is more often than not a function of the ideas one is exposed to. “I don’t really believe in mathematical aptitude anymore,” he says,
Just as One strives to make math accessible to all, he also strives to forge an emotional connection between magician and audience.
also adding, “I’m a very big advocate against the idea of mathematical gifts.” It’s a big part of why he serves as a TA for Math 1400, and why he’s joining Princeton’s Prison Teaching Initiative to help tutor inmates in New Jersey’s South Woods State Prison. The program connects incarcerated students with tutors to help pass classes as they pursue their associate degrees, allowing One to help bridge the gap in access to math education.
Just as One strives to make math accessible to all, he also strives to forge an emotional connection between magician and audience. “I think magic is the theatrics of impossibility,” he says. A magic performance is more than just showing off a cool trick and leaving the audience won-
dering how it was performed—it is, fundamentally, an exercise in storytelling. He cites a show from Danish magician Rune Klan as particularly impactful. In the show Barnløs—which translates to “childless”—Klan shares the story of his journey to fatherhood, meditating on his struggles with infertility and unsuccessful adoption attempts. “He somehow conveyed things that mean something to him through magic,” One says.
One admires the ability to bring that seriousness to the art of magic and how the performance had “a narrative. It’s not just number after number after number.” He hopes to take what he has learned and create a show with meaning behind it. Eventually, he hopes to compete
at the World Championship of Magic hosted by the prestigious International Federation of Magical Societies.
But for now, One is taking his math and magic one step at a time. In a world where algorithms and storytelling blur, where computation and spectacle may be combined, One walks a line as he forges connections between his seemingly disparate passions. Whether it is a magic performance or a logic problem, the end goal is building a structure that resonates with the audience.
“I’m of the belief that math is actually extremely artsy,” he laughs. “So artists should not look at me and be like, ‘Oh my god, that’s the mathematician.’” k
The Revival of the Nation’s First Public Parks
Philadelphia’s historic cemeteries uphold their legacies as parks for both the living and the dead.
by sadie daniel
It’s warm and green. Twentysomethings speed by on bikes, and families snack on picnic blankets. Elderly couples walk their dogs together, holding hands. Though some people are quiet, most are silent. This isn’t Fairmount Park or FDR Park, but The Woodlands Cemetery, where the living and the dead have learned the art of cohabitation: The deceased are taking their final rest while the living rejoice around them. Just five miles north of here, Philadelphia residents engage in similar activities at Laurel Hill Cemetery.
Major cemeteries like The Woodlands and Laurel Hill were the first public parks in the United States, providing green space for city folk to dwell in with the dead and creating an escape from the loud and busy streets of the industrial 19th century. Completed in 1836—three decades before Fairmount Park—Laurel Hill was the only space for early Philadelphians to access public recreation. Just four years later, The Woodlands was built. Mid–century suburbanization changed this: Millions flocked to the green and spacious suburbs, sterile from the grit of the city. Businesses, religious institutions, cemeteries, and funeral homes soon followed. Laurel Hill expanded west to Bala Cynwyd, Pa. from its Philadelphia location, and city cemeteries like Laurel Hill East and The Woodlands experienced mass disinvestment. This was “the impetus for the creation of The Friends of Laurel Hill,” Nancy Goldenberg—who received a Master of City Planning from Penn in 1980 and is CEO of the nonprofit—says.
Goldenberg explains that Laurel Hill’s revival began in the mid–1970s when a local historian proclaimed the space far too historic to be left to waste. He subsequently began leading tours of the grounds to raise awareness of what, in 1998, became the first cemetery in the United States designated as a National Historic Landmark. Laurel Hill has gained a lot of momentum since then, hosting over 100 public programs just last year. From Civil War tours to visits to Adrian Balboa’s fake tomb, these tours bring in tourists from across the nation, and plans for the United States’ 250th anniversary are underway.
This past summer, continuing in an annual tradition, Laurel Hill hosted death–themed
photos by sadie daniel and tracie van auken, courtesy of friends of laurel hill
“Death is the most important thing to remember when you’re alive.”
movie nights, showing everything from The Rocky Horror Picture Show to David Lynch’s famed Eraserhead and lively food and art markets. A post from @wooder_ice on Instagram back in July about the events produced comments full of controversy, with many excited to attend the screenings and others upset about the cemetery where their loved ones reside being used as a social space. Goldenberg, however, has rarely felt pushback. “The people that have loved ones buried here have told me they love to see people in the cemetery using it and visiting. … It’s sort of a celebration of life,” she says. “One of the greatest fears I had was welcoming all these
people into the cemetery and then, would it be trashed? Would it be graffitied? No, just the opposite. People are very conscientious. Their behavior changes. … And we have experienced people that really respect being in a cemetery.”
One such person, found not in Laurel Hill but reading in The Woodlands, is Egypt, who didn’t provide a last name. After moving to 42nd Street back in June, she now routinely visits the cemetery at least once a week. She “had mixed feelings at first” about using the cemetery as her neighborhood park, but, “trying not to be coarse, they’re dead,” she says. And she’s not alone in this: “It’s a nice community space. I would have never thought of this as like a third space for people to gather in. But I see people all the time. Like, I see people will come over to this bench and they’ll do something like a meetup, or they’ll have a play date with kids. I’ve seen people have weddings here, parties here,” she explains.
Her interest in the cemetery stems not just
from a need for a nice green space to relax and do yoga, but also from her critiques of the United States’ relationship to death. “People really turn their face away from death,” she says. “There’s a lot of fear around not just death, but growing older and losing your vitality or your youth. I feel like America is so youth centered. They’re so obsessed with that specific 16–to–21 time period, and they just don’t want to think about life after that.”
This fear keeps people away from cemeteries, she says, and has grown a culture of shame around our dead. We shun them, and do our best to keep the worlds of the living and the dead separate. But “death is the most important thing to remember when you’re alive,” Egypt argues. “There has to be some knowledge and acceptance that it’s gonna end, so that you can fully want to live your life.”
“Realize it’s temporary,” she says. She argues that the American careerist obsession is where our shame around death and our dead comes from. “I think that’s what keeps people in this loop where they just kind of
have a ‘work–to–die’ mentality, where they’re putting their head down for 60 years. I feel like that ties into Americans’ general shame around death,” Egypt says. “I feel like you’re gonna have to come to a place where you either don’t think about death at all, or you accept death and you realize you can’t waste your entire life doing something that you fucking hate.” When we get too close to the dead, be it cycling by or reading a book near their grave, we’re struck with the facts of life that we run from. And so by spending time in the cemetery, we’re allowed to sit in our mortality, make peace with it, and celebrate the lives that surround us.
Egypt balances her moral reservations surrounding recreation in cities of the dead by going around and reading the tombstones of those she’s spending time with. “It’s really interesting to just acknowledge how much I don’t know. Everybody who has a headstone here had a life,” she says. “At some point they were important people. You can see it on their headstones with the messages:
people who loved them, people who cared about them, people who leave flowers for their graves.”
While growing up in New Orleans, I experienced a similar feeling around death. My friends and I would play in cemeteries, drinking strawberry smoothies at a small cafe in the city’s St. Patrick Cemetery. Death is far from a taboo there, nor is spending time with the city’s quietest residents. To New Orleanians, play and fun is a way to respect the dead, rather than just solace and mourning. As Goldenberg says, it’s a way of celebrating life.
“Our mission is to provide a place of beauty and peace, for eternal rest, for recreation and for civic value, and at the same time, preserve our history and ensure our relevance for future generations,” Goldenberg says. Laurel Hill is used by nearby residents as their local park, with opportunities for biking, picnicking, sitting and reading, or even watching movies. Laurel Hill is also a sanctuary for local wildlife: Sustainability and environmental protection make up
some of its other core values.
Laurel Hill’s programming extends beyond its summer movie nights and tours, though. “We are in the death industry, and so we focus on programs that help people with the grieving process,” Goldenberg says. “We have death cafes, and we have a horticulture series where there’s therapeutic horticulture, and even the movies that we
When we get too close to the dead, be it cycling by or reading a book near their grave, we’re struck with the facts of life that we run from.
do show have themes about death. … We have a book club where we’ll read books that deal with death or deal with nature.” One of its most anticipated events occurred just last month on Sept. 20: Market of the Macabre, an arts and crafts market with over 100 vendors. Many of the products sold are handmade and deal with death, incorporating bones and feathers into their works.
The Woodlands hosts a variety of events as well. From marathon relays to September’s Karaoke in the Cemetery: A Night of Grief Karaoke—hosted by interdisciplinary artist Leigh Davis as a part of her long–term work in art and public grief—the cemetery invites the public to use the space for both recreation and the grieving process. Intentionally opposite in spirit, Davis is hosting her Karaoke in the Cemetery event in some of the East Coast’s most famous cemeteries. She hosts these events with the intention of creating space for public and vocal grief. “I like the mixture of two things that don’t really belong; like karaoke and a cemetery are pretty much opposite. But that’s what makes it, I think, the right fit, because cemeteries are usually really quiet, and I really want this project to be about sound and noise and people expressing [themselves] openly.” She believes that in the modern era, in which we at times struggle to congregate in person, hosting events like this in public spaces is key to building community.
Davis’ work coincides with a larger
movement of collective grief and changing sentiments around the public use of cemeteries. “Because there’s been so much mass death,” she says, “I think people are more aware of death in our culture as being a huge weight that people carry. I think there’s a lot of growth that needs to happen around repressing death. So a lot of my work is about how to basically release some of the grief people have.” By creating space for people to sing and dance their grief, she feels that her work connects to the celebrations of life that both our ancestors and modern cultures like that of New Orleans participate in. Karaoke in the Cemetery is therefore a way of returning to “what we used to do” in cemetery spaces, mirroring the active return to public recreation occurring in these same places.
The grief felt in these events isn’t just personal, though. People sing and scream out collective grief for the transgender community and for Palestine and Gaza. “I just feel like everyone [has] such a different take,” Davis says about the grief process. “There was a lot of political grief mixed with individual grief.” The presence of politics in these public grieving events is not shocking, as public spaces like parks, including cemeteries, have always been intertwined with protest and politics.
Laurel Hill, too, actively works to make death less of a taboo. When asked about a moment that particularly represented the mission of the cemetery, Goldenberg re-
members a pair of brothers she met several years ago: “There were two brothers who had a big–screen TV hooked up to their car. They were sitting at their father’s grave. They were eating their chicken wings and watching the football game, the Eagles. They were tailgating with their father,” she explains.
The boys’ father was such a Philadelphia Eagles fan that they carved an eagle on his tombstone. Once a year, the two of them come to the cemetery to tailgate the team’s opening game of the season. “And that sums up what we are. We’re a place of comfort to be with your father, who passed away, doing something that you enjoy. You’re recreating having your tailgate and you’re enjoying the game with dad, bringing back those memories. And, you know, this is what we’re all about.”
The Woodlands and The Friends of Laurel Hill create spaces where life can be celebrated and coexist with death. Simultaneously, the cemeteries provide Philadelphians with a green escape from the city, upholding their original secondary function as a public park.
I still avoid going straight home from the cemetery, not wanting to bring any spirits along with me. My mother holds her breath as we drive past graveyards. However, the only ill–spirited experience I’ve had in a cemetery was when I cartwheeled into a red ant pile on an open plot in St. Patrick Cemetery. Maybe karma, maybe just a silly experience for a child playing in a park. That is what cemeteries are, after all. k
Selling Souls or Selling Records?
From Little Richard to Lil Nas X, why can’t we stop accusing artists of devil worship?
by amber urena
illustrations by kate ahn
Iwould like to start this article off by thanking Beyoncé and every other artist who has been accused of devil worship or being part of some occult group of elites whose main intent is to rule the world through mind control. For as long as music has been around, listeners have loved to imagine the person behind the songs as part of a satanic cabal, trying to snatch your soul for the sake of retaining relevancy. In the 1950s, with the rise of rock ‘n’ roll, performers like Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and Chuck Berry were victims of this moral panic, accused of “corrupting” young people with their provocative lyrics on race and sexuality. This “Satanic Panic” would resurface in the 1980s with heavy metal. This time, the perpetrators were Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath—even Michael Jackson was the subject of rumor and fetishized speculation, accused of selling his soul for fame.
Over time, we’ve come to laugh at ourselves for ever seriously seeing legends like Elvis or the Prince of Darkness as devil worshipers. We consider ourselves “above” throwing successful artists under the bus. However, the witch hunt is alive and well, just repackaged for our time. Instead of whispers among parents in the neighborhood, everyone can now take part in this witch hunt, loudly accusing artists online. The Michael Jackson urban myth may have
faded, but you’ll still find some in The Weeknd’s comments section, begging him to “find Jesus,” despite the explicit spiritual nature of his recent releases. After all this time, why do we keep running back to the comforting fiction that singers are aligned with the shadows?
The victims of satanic panic, both past and present, share a common thread: They are subversive, provocative, or just unsettling in their time. Little Richard was a Black man in the United States before the Civil Rights Era, bringing a Black–pioneered music genre to the forefront of entertainment while performing in ways considered “effeminate” by mainstream audiences. But what made him most threatening wasn’t his music—it was his identity and refusal to conform. He was seen as transgressive, so much so that white–owned radio stations refused to play his hit song “Tutti Frutti” despite airing covers sung by white artists. The case is similar with Lil Nas X, currently, where the majority of the outrage surrounding his music has nothing to do with the songs themselves, most of which are quite polished and safe for radio. Instead, the issue is with who he is. His number one hit, “Old Town Road,” was pulled from country charts and radio, claiming its trap elements made the song not “country enough,” while Billboard and radio stations would later come to allow Morgan Wallen, a white country–trap singer, to chart on the Country Hot 100 and receive air time regardless.
Satanic accusations don’t pop out of nowhere—it makes sense how major social and political upheavals also influence the volume of Satanism allegations. How could the paranoia of McCarthyism in the ’50s—when Americans were encouraged to spy on their neighbors and suspect hidden motives everywhere—not spill over into music, a visible cultural stage? Logically, many people projected their insecurities onto prominent figures, manifesting as accusations of demonic corruption. In the ’80s, people were already on edge about the occult, thanks to over 12,000 unsubstantiated cases of satanic ritual abuse coming up around this time. Heavy metal rockers just so happened to be easy scapegoats, because their darker, heavier music was an easy symbol for cultural fear.
It’s really easy, even comforting, to deflect our own fears and insecurities about the changing state of the world onto people we don’t know—
especially celebrities. That instinct hasn’t gone away. We continue to resurrect satanic panic when tensions rise. Following the arrest of Sean “Diddy” Combs, online edits of J. Cole’s “She Knows” surfaced, implying that Beyoncé is a devil worshipper given the collapse and deaths of other high–profile figures associated with his alleged crimes. Or maybe she’s simply
a successful Black woman in the music industry, and we’re not sure how to process our discomfort with a powerful producer allegedly tied to sex trafficking. Lil Nas X isn’t a Satanist—he’s just a gay, Black man in rap, a genre long steeped in hypermasculinity and homophobia. Doja Cat isn’t a part of a cabal; she’s a biracial woman
choosing self–expression in an increasingly conservative climate. It is becoming more and more evident that “devil worshipper” is just a label attributed to successful artists who unsettle us during bad times. But this accusation isn’t without its pushback.
While society may try to push artists out with sinister allegations, many just choose to address it in their artistry instead. Beyoncé, who has fought such accusations her entire career, made her stance in her hit single “Formation,” singing, “Y’all haters corny with that / Illuminati mess,” and “You know you that bitch / When you ’cause all this conversation.” Doja Cat put out a darker, edgier concept album, Scarlet, around the time it was alleged she had sold her soul, appearing in her “Demons” music video dressed as, well, a demon. In her lead single “Paint The Town Red,” she likens her loyalty to creative vision over fame and likability as a kind of soul–sell, bragging she’s so “bad,” “the devil,” and a “demon lord.”
The Weeknd similarly leans into satanic allegations, using dark imagery in live shows, music videos, and lyrics. He folds these accusations into his broader creative vision, which often revolves around resisting—or giving in to—temptation. The ultimate example, though, is Lil Nas X. As a Black, gay man, he uses the outrage and moral panic surrounding his identity to draw attention to his music, pole dancing on the devil in his hit “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” music video. All of these artists have been able to rise above these negative conversations and channel them into their art. Some have gone further, delivering direct commentary about the controversies that surround them and their place in society.
As absurd and sometimes downright offensive Satan–worship allegations can be, it’s a common symptom of our inability to channel societal confusion into something more constructive. We take out our frustration on anyone who refuses to fall into line, especially if those in marginalized communities, whose identity—already scrutinized—might make them an even easier target. Although our energy should be redirected elsewhere, these accusations have been transformed into integral parts of many artists’ discography and image, which, in a way, is used to ease our discomfort. Some may say it’s heaven–sent—or maybe fallen. k
Barbarian
(Zach Cregger, 2022)
Don’t Know What To Watch This Halloween? Street’s Got You Covered
Ten movies to keep you looking over your shoulder this fall by 34th street magazine
illustrated by chenyao liu and julia wang
As the weather starts to get marginally cooler, it’s never too early to start preparing for Halloween. Here are ten of Street’s favorite horror flicks to take the guesswork out of celebrating spooky season.
Zach Cregger’s Barbarian is what happens when you book an Airbnb, and the worst–case scenario isn’t bedbugs or weak WiFi, but a labyrinth of pure nightmare fuel lurking below the surface. The setup is gorgeously ordinary: A woman arrives at a rental and finds a stranger already staying there, but every moment after is a lesson in escalating dread and bad decisions made under fluorescent lighting. This is a film that genuinely gnaws on your fear of
Scream
(Wes Craven, 1996)
You want a gory slasher, you want Courteney Cox in an endless cycle of neon suits, you want crazy homoerotic tension between a young F.P. (Skeet Ulrich) from Riverdale and Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) from Scooby–Doo. Add to that a healthy dose of self–referential charm that literally created the meta horror genre, and you’ve got Wes Craven’s Scream. Starring Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott, a high schooler still reeling from her mother’s murder, the film follows a series of mysterious slaughters in her little town of Woodsboro, Calif. The franchise shows us in no uncertain terms that the figure behind the mask isn’t always the hysterical madman we’re inclined to blame— sometimes it’s a boyfriend, a best friend, or even a brother. Scream is more pop–culture classic at this point than true horror, but its warnings are clear: Trust no one, and don’t answer the phone.
— Liana Seale, Film & TV editor
strangers, safe spaces, and what waits in the dark, sprinting from social awkwardness into the kind of horror that makes you want to burn down the house and never look back. Barbarian’s jumpscares are earned, its tension is suffocating, and the reveal is both sickening and brilliant. It is truly a cautionary tale for anyone who has ever scrolled past a one–star rental review and thought, “How bad could it be?”
— Arina Axinia, Social Media editor
Jessie, “The Whining”
(Season 2, Episode 1)
What do The Shining, Twilight, and Frankenstein all have in common? Beyond just being great works of art, they are, perhaps more importantly, references in Rich Correll’s masterpiece “The Whining” from Disney’s hit series Jessie. This episode was my first exposure to the horror genre, the one that gave me countless childhood nightmares, and it remains a perfect combination of Disney’s cookie–cutter sitcom style with the terrifying thrill of the genre.
After the Ross children hear a gruesome story of a deranged nanny who petrified children on the 13th floor, they begin to suspect that their nanny Jessie (Debby Ryan) might repeat history as she hunts down her own big journalist scoop. Filled with homages to The Shining, including scary identical twins and a hallway spewing with “blood,” this episode strikes the right balance of childhood nostalgia sprinkled with just enough spookiness that makes you want to leave the lights on after watching.
— Jackson Ford, Street Multimedia editor
Titane
(Julia Ducournau, 2021)
This is a recommended first–date watch if you want to trauma bond over car sex and daddy issues. Titane is part body horror, part girlhood nightmare, part wish–fulfillment fantasy of finding someone who really holds you, and it works on every level. If you’ve ever turned pain into a performance or sexualized your trauma to feel in control, this one is for you. Titane is a story about becoming monstrous because the world only understands spectacle, and finding someone who stays anyway. Love without expectation is the most horrifying and holy thing of all. Agathe Rousselle delivers a staggering debut performance, all physicality and suppressed emotion; she barely speaks, and yet you feel everything. Julia Ducournau (who also made Raw and is our Lord and savior) became the second woman ever to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for this because she gets it. This is one of the best films of the 21st century, and more people need to be freaks about it.
— Kate Cho, Style editor
Nope
(Jordan Peele, 2022)
In my opinion, Nope is Jordan Peele’s best project. From deadpan humor to bone–chilling thrills, this film packages its excellence in an entertaining ride. Nope follows horse trainer OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) and fame–seeking sister Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer) who begin to notice mysterious things in the sky, offering them an unexpected opportunity and a “bad miracle.” The two market themselves as direct descendants of the unnamed horse jockey in Eadweard Muybridge’s Horse in Motion, working as the “only Black–owned horse trainers in Hollywood.” Like all of Peele’s films, the themes of exploitation aren’t subtle, though this horror–Western goes above and beyond in its self–conscious deconstruction of the film industry. With a phenomenal supporting cast and blink–and–you’ll–miss–it references to iconic flicks like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Jaws, and even Akira, this genre–blending spectacle raises the bar for original horror and is a must–watch for all my fellow Letterboxd users.
— Chenyao Liu, Film & TV beat
House (Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, 1977)
I spent Halloween my senior year of high school dressed as a hippie watching movies with my film–bro friend. We did a double feature as we usually did—I picked The Shining out of FOMO of never having seen the quintessential horror film and Film Bro picked House to flex his artistic muscles. Despite the fame of The Shining, House was my perfect horror movie that night. Horror is often synonymous with the ugly, but House manages to find beauty in the uncanny. It is scary in the way that Edward Munsch’s The Scream is scary—representing horror but offering enough distance to allow space for observing fear rather than being encompassed by it fully.
— Norah Rami, editor–in–chief
TheBlairWitchProject
(Eduardo Sánchez & Daniel Myrick, 1999)
It doesn’t take much to make a cult classic. I hand you a mic, a camcorder, and a few no–names to fumble compass readings and panic–snot all over the lens—it’s enough to birth one of the most superstitious (or at least, persuasive) films of all time. Three blubbering film students walk into the woods to chase a campfire story, argue themselves into delirium, none come back. I get serious FOMO thinking of its release in theaters, which briefly convinced every twentysomething in the ’90s of two things: First, that this is real and second, that it’s actually possible to get lost in Maryland. I’m not so sure we’ll ever pull that off again, but shaky cam has ballooned into its own industrial complex. Hell, Street could take a retreat to the Poconos with a digicam and a box of Franzia and come back with our own found footage masterpiece.
— Sophia Mirabal, Music editor
AmericanHorrorStory:
Coven
(Ryan Murphy, 2013)
I have always wanted to be part of a coven, but this one is led by Jessica Lange and Sarah Paulson and includes recruits such as Emma Roberts and Evan Peters. And wait for it—not only do they team up with Angela Bassett as Marie LaVeau, a voodoo priestess, but Stevie Nicks also appears as a coven alumna with a beautiful cameo. I will never hear “Rhiannon” or “Seven Wonders” the same. This season is set in New Orleans, and Murphy creates a girl world adorned in black lace, dressed in Balenciaga and Givenchy. American Horror Story’s inspiration of American folklore to create thrill while threading modern Americana into the tapestry of its stories is the kind of masterful world building that makes this show worth watching.
— Anissa T. Ly, Ego editor
TheWailing
(Na Hong–Jin, 2016)
If you’ve ever had a Catholic panic attack in your Korean grandma’s house, this one’s for you. The Wailing is slow–burn religious horror that escalates into a full–blown theological psychosis spiral. Ghosts? Maybe. Demons? Definitely. A shaman who dances so hard he throws up? Absolutely. But the actual horror is watching a father try—and fail—to protect his daughter in a world where truth is slippery and God is looking away. Set in a foggy mountain village, it starts out like a grimy small–town cop drama and ends somewhere be-
tween The Exorcist and a Book of Revelation fever dream. It’s about xenophobia, generational guilt, and what happens when religion becomes performance instead of protection. Also, it’s about a cop who absolutely cannot do his job.
As someone who grew up Korean Catholic, to me, this movie feels like spiritual warfare on screen. Every guilt trip, every quiet fear that you misread a sign from God—it’s all here, festering, and festooned in rotting carcasses.
— Kate Cho, Style editor
Black Swan
(Darren Aronofsky, 2010)
is a tragic psychological horror film that traces a burnt–out ballerina’s visceral descent into madness. Unlike traditional horror movies filled with macabre monsters or aggravating friend groups lacking self–preservation instincts, uses relatable themes of mommy issues, misogyny, and corrosive perfectionism to “scare” its viewers into an existential spiral. If you find yourself Gilmore Girls and resonating—perhaps a bit too much—with Rory’s gifted–kid burnout syndrome, offers a chance to delve deeper into the psychological fragmentation that accompanies self–destructive ambition. Through Natalie Portman’s phenomenal performance as Nina Sayers, we see the movie wrestle with conflicting ideals of femininity and men’s expectations for women to embody both the innocent White Swan and sensual Black Swan. A perverse coming of age, the movie challenges the reductive archetypes projected onto women while warning us against the self–sacrifice required to achieve patriarchal standards of perfection.
— Chloe Norman, Features editor
To Dust You Shall Return
Exploring the tension between the impermanence of death and the fragility of life
by jackson ford
photos by jackson ford
When loved ones die, we spend thousands—sometimes hundreds of thousands—on memorials carved from stone. Generation after generation, those stones remain: fading, cracking, and toppling. Their inscriptions slowly erode into silence. For as long as the cemetery lasts, that weathered stone is supposed to carry a legacy. Yet beneath it, in a wooden box, lies a body collapsing into dust, bones, and, curiously, hair.
Hair lingers far past death. Across cultures, hair is sacred, symbolic, and storied. It carries respect, identity, and even the biochemical traces of life. A curl in a locket, strands slipping between fingers, and locks bouncing in sunlight are all reminders that hair is not just matter, but life and memory. Unlike stone, it remains intimate, tactile, and alive with meaning past death.
This essay explores tension—the permanence and stillness we try to impose through monuments against the fragile, chaotic, and very human remnants of a life. To reduce a life to stone feels as though we are showing more awe than empathy.
Each image overlays strands of hair onto statues of death. The result is a fractured narrative: 200–year–old statues made strange and animate, and effigies of death surrounded with traces of life. Through contrast and abstraction, the work destabilizes the certainty of stone, pushing us to ask what truly deserves remembering and whether the mess of life resists being carved into permanence. k
Take It to the Streets What To Do in Philly This Month
Fright nights; Big Thief, Yung Lean, and Bill Nye; apples and scrapples galore
Going to college in Philly, we’re so often bombarded—on social media and in real life—with seemingly endless options of how to spend our free time. So I’m delighted to announce that Street has done the hard part for you: We’ve rounded up what we think are the can’t–miss events for the month in one convenient place. If I’ve done my job right, there’ll be something in here for every one of our readers, no matter what you like to do with your free time.
Jules Lingenfelter, print managing editor
is shipping Yung Gravy (be weary of your moms) and MKTO (of “Classic” fame) straight to University City. More importantly, it’s also highlighting some of Drexel University’s own most talented musicians, Joontoon and Valentinesday. Relive that liminal year of 2020, foray into indie sleaze, and support homegrown artists all in one go.
$25, 6 p.m., 3301 Market St.
Oct. 11: Scrapple and Apple Festival @ Reading Terminal Market
If you love eating apples and sculpting scrapple, this is the event for you! Reading Terminal Market will be offering a multitude of delicacies, from scrapple apple danishes and apple dumplings to apple caramel brûlée lattes and scrapple sundaes. Not to mention, they are hosting the second–ever scrapple sculpting competition.
Prices vary, 10 a.m.–4 p.m., 1136 Arch St.
Oct. 16–19: Evening of Horror @ The Philadelphia Ballet
The Philadelphia Ballet is offering a double feature of Agnes de Mille’s Fall River Legend and Juliano Nunes’ Valley of Death. See the tragic tale of Lizzie Borden and a ghostly masquerade on tip–toe! A hauntingly beautiful night is sure to be had by all those willing to step just a bit off campus.
Tickets start at $61, 240 S. Broad St.
Oct. 16–26: Philadelphia Film Fest @ Philadelphia Film Society
April 5–Oct. 25: Southeast Asian Market @ FDR Park
The last day to enjoy the Southeast Asian Market is quickly approaching. You don’t want to miss what is one of the best food markets in the United States, according to Food & Wine! The Southeast Asian Market has numerous stalls of street food and traditional dishes, plants, jewelry, and more! The market pops up on most Saturdays and Sundays. Some vendors are cash only. Prices vary, 10 a.m.–6 p.m., 1500 Pattison Ave.
Sept. 6–Nov. 2: Pumpkin Land @ Linvilla Orchards
You might know them for their apples, but gourds take center stage at Linvilla Orchards this fall. If neither are your thing, they’ve got hayrides, ponies, face painting, and fishing to keep
you occupied. Just don’t leave without trying one of their apple cider donuts (Clark Park will forgive you!)
Free, 37 W. Knowlton Rd.
Sept. 19–Nov. 8: Halloween Nights @ Eastern State Penitentiary
Every year, the Eastern State Penitentiary opens up its gates late at night for the sole purpose of scaring the daylights out of people. Strobing lights, torturers, executioners, clowns. Oh, and bumping music in case you were looking for a change in venue.
Tickets start at $49, 2027 Fairmount Ave.
Oct. 4: DragonFly @ the Daskalakis Athletic Center
This punch of COVID–19 pandemic throwback
We’d like to dedicate this one to you beloved cinephiles and Letterboxd obsessives. It’s the 34th Philadelphia Film Festival! More than just sharing our namesake (number sake?), this fest brings true cinema to the city. In just ten days, PFS offers over 100 films (that’s at least ten a day, in case you didn’t do the math).
Student tickets $75, times vary, 1412 Chestnut St.
Oct. 17: A Conversation with Bill Nye @ Irvine Auditorium
Penn’s Climate Week ends on a nostalgic note this year with the man who’s probably responsible for most of our elementary science education. Soak up the wisdom as he conversates with our very own Penn professor Michael Mann about the urgency of the climate crisis and how science (and those who believe in it) can take ac-
tion. Bill! Bill! Bill! Science rules!
Free for Penn students, 12 p.m., 3401 Spruce St.
Oct. 18: Yung Lean @ The Fillmore Artists come and go, but you know Yung Lean stays a force to be reckoned with in the cloud rap space. Come be “Forever Young” with Jonatan Leandoer at his Philly show.
Tickets start at $54, 8 p.m., 29 E. Allen St.
Oct. 18: Mac n’ Cheese Crawl @ Manayunk
Apologies to our lactose–intolerant readers, this event is all about the cheese. And the mac, of course. For the first time ever, Manayunk is hosting a Mac n’ Cheese crawl, with over ten restaurants offering a free bowl of oodles of goodness. So pop that Lactaid, put on your comfiest pants, and get crawling.
$21.05, 12–4 p.m., 106 Grape St.
Oct. 22: Big Thief @ The Met
Did you have “Vampire Empire” on repeat after your last failed situationship with that bi girl who can’t make up her mind on what she wants? Yes? No? It doesn’t matter, because Big Thief is coming to Philly either way. These indie icons are hitting the big stage for their latest tour, Somersault Slide 360.
Tickets start at $67.25, 8 p.m., 858 N. Broad St.
Oct. 25: Hidden Gems Tour @ Morris Arboretum
Go beyond the Biopond this fall—all the way to Penn’s official arboretum in Chestnut Hill! This tour takes you on all the highlights of our sister gardens, from sculptures and rare woody plants to a miniature railroad. Sometimes, all you really need to do is slow down and smell the roses. T ickets free with Penn ID, 100 E. Northwestern Ave.
Oct. 30: Choreomania @ The Mutter Museum
There’s nothing like a medieval–inspired dance party at the museum of medical oddities to kick off your Halloweekend. If you can take a break from your dancing mania for a few minutes, enjoy specialty cocktails and rarely seen displays from the vaults. Peasant–core period dress is suggested but not required.
$60, 7 p.m., 19 S. 22nd St.
What’s Street Bumping?
Street’s final attempt to find the song of the summer Graphic by Alex Nagler
Virgin is a Look Inside Lorde's Soul
BY EMILY WHITEHEAD
So, what does it mean to be a virgin when your body has never truly been yours? Lorde doesn’t offer a single answer—she provides a framework. It’s one where identity is unstable, where performance is a matter of survival, and where the body becomes a site of both rupture and return. Across these songs, she doesn’t reclaim virginity as purity but redefines it entirely: as beginning again on her terms. No longer something taken or given, virginity is something messy, defiant, and wholly hers. Virgin isn’t just a portrait of one artist in transition, but a permission slip for the rest of us to be complicated, to shapeshift, to be uncontainable—and still be real.
Sincerely, is a Home Built From Love, Loss, and Light
BY JESSICA COOK
All in all, Sincerely, is a love letter to life itself. A vulnerable and sentimental project, the entire album is written and executive produced by Kali Uchis herself. Though unaware of the impact the project would have on her life, Uchis confessed in an interview that “looking back, everything makes a lot more sense and is exactly what I need to hear right now.” Not every track is exciting on its own—some listeners may be turned off by the album’s repetitive themes and soft, slow tone. When taken as a whole, however, the album reveals itself as something much more profound. Uchis has shared a raw and intimate part of herself, inviting us to feel with her. The album teaches the listener to grieve, to love and, ultimately, to find peace within oneself.
Antigone: Standing Still With Eiko Ishibashi
BY WILL CAI
In Eiko Ishibashi’s writing, the grim nature of Antigone is revealed; its namesake, a Greek character whose death at the hands of injustice only causes further tragedy, becomes fitting. In an interview with Kaput Magazin Ishibashi notes, “I thought the word ‘Antigone’ was a perfect metaphor to connect what happened near me with what is happening far away. We live in a daily struggle. It is the fate of human beings to live in daily conflict in a reality where the two cannot be separated.”
But even still, the album feels hopeful. Lyrics aside, it sounds closer to a wistful Weyes Blood record than anything truly depressing. Ishibashi’s voice remains bright, confident, and earnest throughout. It signals that we can at least find solace in this shared sense of ennui.
What’s Street Streaming?
Reimagining the Uncanny in Sinners
BY JACK LAMEY
Sinners upholds the somewhat formulaic nature of vampire defeat. Resembling preceding vampire flicks, the survivors strategize an attack utilizing cinematic conventions: Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) uses garlic as a repellent, revenants cannot enter indoor spaces without invitation, and coronary penetration with sharp wood can immobilize these creatures. For audiences, Ryan Coogler’s incorporation of urban mythology is predictable. Stack’s (Michael B. Jordan) allies cleverly destroy several of these spirits, while the remaining evaporate at dawn. However, Coogler simultaneously defies conventions encompassing body horror— primarily regarding characterization. Rather than depicting Remmick (Jack O’Connell) and his fleet unidimensionally—as malevolent—Sinners construes these vampires with historical symbolism.
A compilation of mostly non–horror films for our scaredy–cats
Graphic by Andy Mei
Pavements is a Biopic Ready for the Major Leagues
BY NISHANTH BHARGAVA
Unlike documentaries that try to tell the dramatic “true story” of any band, Pavements offers nothing about backstage conflicts or the dramatic flashes of inspiration behind famous songs. Instead, the picture we get of Pavement from both historical footage and interviews with the band today is precisely the picture we expect—a bunch of young, irreverent slackers who made it big doing things their way. The point the film makes is that the depth and emotional appeal of Pavement’s music isn’t defined by the circumstances of its creation, but by the context in which it exists today. Director Alex Ross Perry is brilliant in capturing the band’s dual identity on film—his archival footage showcases the “real” Pavement, cheeky and flippant on stage and screen, while interviews with modern admirers put a spotlight on the Pavement of our collective memory, personifications of a lost ’90s spirit that continues to haunt the indie scene today.
Good Night, and Good Luck: From the Screen to the Stage to the Screen Again
BY SOPHIA LEONG
As we face uncertainty—with public broadcasting channels defunded and news outlets losing press access to the White House—this production, shown to theater attendees and aired for audiences who watched from home, has demonstrated how truth and integrity in journalism are more important than ever. This theatrical adaptation brings a new light and perspective to the film, encouraging ongoing discussions on its themes. This dialogue started almost immediately, with pre– and post–show panels featuring journalists reflecting on the challenges of reporting hard and truthful news, even if it means facing backlash. It is clear after watching the movie and the CNN panels that, at its core, the purpose of bringing Good Night, and Good Luck to the stage is not just to inform audiences about the dangers of government control over media, but also to shed light on what is happening to media outlets right now. Read our reviews in
Care or Control?
The ethical dilemma behind Philadelphia’s involuntary commitment bill
BY CHLOE NORMAN
From a young age, we are taught that rules exist for our own good. Wear a seatbelt. Get vaccinated. Don’t drink and drive. The idea that safety requires legislative intervention, even coercion, is propagated to the public as “tough love.” But where is the line between protection and control? A recently proposed Philadelphia bill tests the law’s bioethical bounds, allowing courts to involuntarily commit individuals suffering from substance abuse. Advocates argue it’s a necessary regulation in a city increasingly overwhelmed by overdoses, while critics contest it’s a blatant violation of medical autonomy disguised as care.
Introduced on May 2 by Pennsylvania state Sens. Daniel Laughlin (R–Erie) and Anthony H. Williams (D–Delaware, Philadelphia), the legislation aims to amend the state’s Mental Health Procedures Act by categorizing substance abuse disorder as a mental illness. The bill would allow law enforcement and officials from the city’s Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual Disability Services to mandate an involuntary psychiatric hold of 120 hours for individuals deemed a danger to themselves or others. Beyond the initial hold, such individuals might also be forced to undergo extended involuntary treatment or compulsory outpatient treatment. The bill has been referred to the state Senate Health and Human Services committee and remains under deliberation.
Philadelphia has long been at the center of the United States’ opioid crisis, with Kensington drawing national attention for its open–air drug markets. In 2022, Philadelphia recorded more than 1,413 overdose deaths, marking the highest total in city history. While the death rate declined in 2023, new drugs such as xylazine threaten to exacerbate the crisis. Despite its recent drop, overdose rates reflect the disproportionate impact of substance abuse on Black and Hispanic Philadelphians. Between 2018 to 2022, overdoses rose by 87% among Black Philadelphians and 43% among Hispanic residents, even as they declined among white residents. For many city officials, the scale of devastation justifies involuntary commitment, yet the bill is garnering criticism for its attempt to resolve decades of systemic failure with force rather than compassion.
Comparatively, critics question the political motivations driving the bill. During the election, Parker campaigned on a platform emphasizing “clean and safe streets,” promising to shut down open–air drug markets in Kensington within her first 100 days in office. In January, she issued an executive order establishing the Kensington Wellness Court, which grants police the power to arrest individuals for “quality–of–life” offenses. The policy targets drug users, taking them into custody and offering them a choice between court–ordered treatment or a hefty fine. Her support for the
bill mirrors broken–windows policing, indicating a desire to “clean up the streets” rather than invest in community–led solutions.
Supporters frame the bill as a necessary measure to combat rising rates of addiction. Defending the bill against public backlash, Williams released a statement claiming, “It’s a step along the line that would get someone who has been addicted for some period of time an opportunity to get into recovery, even if they were not in their right mind.” However, there is limited research that proves involuntary treatment ensures long–term outcomes. A 2016 report published in the International Journal of Drug Policy analyzes nine quantitative studies involving various modalities of forced interventions, ranging from locked detox programs to group–based outpatient courses. 33% of the studies find no significant benefit of involuntary commitment, while another 22% report ambiguous or inconclusive results. Retention in coerced programs doesn’t signify sustained recovery.
Research further indicates that involuntary treatment might lead to heightened drug use. Observational data from Massachusetts—one of the few U.S. jurisdictions with legal civil commitment for substance use disorders— finds that individuals subjected to involuntary treatment had twice the rate of fatal overdose compared to those entering voluntarily. Abrupt discharge, reduced opioid tolerance, and inad-
Illustration by Insia Haque
equate follow–up care all contribute to higher overdose risks. Furthermore, forced rehab in the United States is often conducted in a manner that violates basic human rights, offering little more than court–mandated confinement and abstinence–based programming.
Consequently, harm–reduction networks often advocate for a patient–centered care model where individuals retain their inherent right to dignity and autonomy. Internal motivation—not external pressure—fuels sustained recovery. As a result, individuals are more likely to remain in treatment, engage with therapy, and follow through on long–term behavioral changes.
Nicole O’Donnell, program manager at Penn’s Center for Addiction Medicine and Policy, describes the proposal as deeply flawed. “It’s not evidence based,” she explains. “If we are putting people into treatment that don’t want to be in treatment, it can actually cause overdose. … People will [be discharged], and maybe they have been disconnected from their substance of choice for a while, their tolerance decreases, and they overdose the moment they get out.”
Similarly, she warns of the “slippery slope” such policies create: “What’s next? Smoking? Diabetes, if you’re not taking your insulin? It’s a bad policy all the way around.”
Addiction specialists note that the only widely accepted scenario for involuntary treatment
occurs when an individual is suicidal, posing an immediate risk of harm to themselves. O’Donnell points out that applying the same logic to substance abuse is misleading because the majority of individuals using drugs do not meet this criteria.
“If we’re talking about people that do suffer from substance use disorder, we’re not talking about patients that are experiencing psychosis from meth or other drugs. That’s a little bit different,” she says. “People with opiate use disorder or fentanyl addiction are usually stable enough to make decisions. While the choices aren’t great, they’re not incapacitated to the point where they can’t decide for themselves.”
Jeanmarie Perrone, an emergency medicine physician and addiction specialist at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, echoes this sentiment, framing the bill as a bioethical breach.
“In general, we let patients decide if they want to be put on a ventilator, even though they might die,” Perrone says. “And this is a similar scenario where we really trust that patients know what’s best for themselves, and that, in the absence of their own motivation to address their substance use, forcing them is not going to be successful.”
For decades, harm–reduction advocates have worked to replace dehumanizing punishment with evidence–based treatment; however, critics fear that the bill could undo years of progress.
In a statement to Axios, Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Harm Reduction Network Carla Sofronski criticizes the proposal’s pending implementation: “Treating addiction like a criminal or psychiatric issue—rather than a public health concern—perpetuates stigma and ignores the evidence that harm–reduction strategies are most effective at saving lives.”
Another significant concern is further eroding the tenuous line of trust between vulnerable populations and medical professionals. “People will be afraid to seek help,” O’Donnell says. “I’d be afraid that in the emergency room, people won’t ask for help … because they’re afraid that we’re just going to involuntarily commit them.”
Similar patterns are often seen in mental health crises, where fear of involuntary psychiatric holds deter individuals from accessing critical care. Black and Hispanic Philadelphians, who have historically borne the brunt of punitive drug policies, may be especially wary. Forced treatment could adversely deepen preexisting divides, driving individuals away from voluntary services proven to reduce overdose deaths, such as medication–assisted treatment and harm reduction programs.
Additionally, critics attack the structural viability of the bill, pointing out that its implementation would be costly and complex. Philadelphia’s treatment centers are increasingly stretched thin and residential treatment beds
are limited. “The treatment care centers aren’t really equipped to have people there that don’t want to be there,” O’Donnell says. “Where would we put everybody?”
Implementing the bill into existing medical centers would require secure facilities, increased staffing, and longer hospital stays, presenting expensive and logistical challenges that lawmakers have yet to address.
Beyond its dubious logistical feasibility, the bill may detract resources from developing compassionate approaches to care. Contrary to coercion, evidence shows that expanding access to medication for opioid use disorder, such as methadone, consistently reduces mortality by more than 50%. Similarly, peer recovery programs, housing–first initiatives, and harm–reduction services (syringe exchanges, overdose prevention centers, etc.) offer alternative methods of evidence–based treatment.
The United States has already seen progress from these approaches. The slight drop in overdose deaths in 2023 is attributed in part to increased Narcan distribution and other forms of community–based outreach. Critics argue that scaling these efforts, rather than imposing involuntary treatment, would effectively combat Philadelphia’s drug crisis without compromising individuals’ medical autonomy.
The debate over the city’s involuntary treatment bill reflects the country’s broader discourse on combating its overdose epidemic. The outcome of the bill could set a precedent across the country for how cities should respond to mounting addiction crises.
For a city facing increasing pressure to “solve” its drug crisis, the appeal of hard paternalism is understandable. Yet, as decades of failed punitive approaches have shown, the desire to find quick fixes does not justify stripping individuals of bodily autonomy. Like anti–tobacco campaigns and age–restricted alcohol consumption, addiction policy must balance safety with agency. While voluntary, low–barrier treatment empowers individuals to regain control of their health, involuntary commitment risks higher overdose rates, reinforces stigmas, and jeopardizes long–term recovery. Ultimately, the bill presses the city to decide whether it is fastening a seatbelt—or seizing the wheel. k
The Summer I Let a Teen Love Triangle Ruin My
Wednesdays
Jenny Han’s beachy saga has always been about longing; yet, in its final season, it asks something braver: What comes after it?
BY ANANYA KARTHIK
Graphic by Kate Ahn
There’s a scene from The Summer I Turned Pretty’s recent Entertainment Weekly shoot that stays with me, from the
beach where the cast reunites just days after wrapping up the final season. Lola Tung, Gavin Casalegno, and Christopher Briney all
stand in the sun doing the same thing they’ve done for years: pretending not to be pretending. Tung laughs. Casalegno stares. Briney, off
to the side, skips rocks. He waves. They wave back. It’s not scripted, but it might as well be.
TSITP always feels like a memory you can’t quite place. A dream you’re not sure you lived through, or a scene you watched unfold on someone else’s Instagram story.
Now, with Season 3 unspooling weekly on Amazon Prime Video, that dream is finally ending—sort of.
When the show premiered in summer 2022, it was an unexpected hit: a pastel explosion of teen angst and sunlit yearning, perfectly attuned to the post–pandemic hunger for softness. TSITP builds its world on a familiar foundation: one girl, two boys, one beach house. Belly Conklin (Lola Tung), adolescent and aching, returns each summer to Cousins Beach, where the Fisher brothers—moody, magnetic Conrad (Christopher Briney), and affable, eager Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno)—have been constants since her childhood. Throughout the series, the three experience desire, loss, and the illusion of inevitability. There are parties, fireworks, and a debutante ball, but the show’s true driving force is grief—specifically, the death of the Fisher boys’ mother, Susannah Fisher, and the emotional fallout it triggers. Romance may be the bait, but grief is the hook. By Season 2, though, it gets more complicated. The love triangle hardens into camps. Team Conrad. Team Jeremiah. Team Belly, occasionally, if you dare to be annoying on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The show gets moodier, messier, occasionally even a bit better. And then, silence. A SAG–AFTRA strike–delayed finale. A fandom left hovering at the edge of a story that wasn’t finished.
Now, it is. Or, at least, it promises to be. Season 3 picks up two years after the last. Belly’s in college. She’s with Jeremiah, seemingly for good. They’ve made it through the honeymoon phase and into something steadier—they sleep in the same bed, know the little things about each other, and treat forgiveness like a form of love. It’s nice. Which is a problem, because nice is rarely what this show is best at.
When TSITP works, it works because of heartache. It works because of heavy decisions that the show lets linger—choosing a
necklace, turning away, or driving off too soon. Its best scenes are pauses, not climaxes: the spaces between dialogue. The songs that play while no one says anything at all (like during Season 3, Episode 2, with Sufjan Stevens’ “Mystery of Love” humming beneath Belly and Conrad’s comfortable silence at Christmas).
That heartache hasn’t gone away this season; it’s just gotten harder to see. On the surface, things are settled. Belly gets engaged to Jeremiah, but the silences are still there, and they’re heavier than ever. When Conrad walks into a room, the air shifts. He looks at her like he wants to say something, but he never does. Because he can’t. His brother got there first.
The show plays these moments of heartache quietly, but they feel cataclysmic. The triangle isn’t over yet; it’s gone underground. Belly insists she’s chosen, Jeremiah believes her, and Conrad stays on the edges, steady and devastated. He’s not trying to win her back. He’s trying not to lose everything else. That’s what makes this final season interesting. Not in the “who will she pick?” way— though, of course, that debate still churns on social media—but in the way it pivots from fantasy to consequence. This is no longer a show about falling in love as much as it’s about what happens after you already have.
The performances mirror this unraveling. Tung plays Belly with the kind of conviction that only barely masks doubt. She smiles like she’s trying to make herself believe her own words. Casalegno’s Jeremiah has moments of brightness, but there’s a nervous edge to him now, like he knows he’s holding on too tightly. Meanwhile, Briney’s Conrad barely speaks— but when he does, it’s with a restraint that makes you feel how much he’s still carrying. No one is reaching for anyone anymore, but no one’s really letting go either.
This season finally admits that the show was never about choosing between two boys. It’s about what each of them makes her feel: one safe, one alive. Belly’s stuck between the comfort she thinks she should want and the chaos she never stopped wanting. She’ll walk toward the aisle like she’s sure, while everything else in the show—every glance, every silence, every missed opportunity—asks
whether she really is.
That choice is hard. It should be. As show creator Jenny Han says, a good love triangle only works when no outcome feels clean. Someone has to get hurt. Maybe everyone does.
There’s something powerful about how the show sits with that discomfort. It draws out the heartache—letting us watch Belly try to convince herself she’s ready for a supposed lifelong commitment, while everyone around her, including the audience, starts to question her. This isn’t a love story wrapped in a bow as much as it is a slow, painful negotiation with adulthood and its consequences.
TSITP isn’t interested in fairy–tale endings, but in what happens when fantasy runs out— when the ring is on, the dress is picked, and the doubt hasn’t gone anywhere. This season is asking whether wanting is ever enough (while cueing up its Taylor Swift soundtrack, of course), whether choosing someone means you’ve stopped wanting someone else, and whether anyone, at 20, can really tell the difference.
As the season unfolds, the show slows down, almost like it’s bracing for impact. The beach feels emptier. The lighting, a little colder. The characters are older in ways they don’t fully understand yet. And the love story starts to seem less like an open question and more like a wound that hasn’t fully healed.
The story will end where it always does, regardless of who Belly picks: three people, a little sunburned, pretending not to be pretending. With its final season, TSITP veers away from falling in love to ask about staying in love. This season doesn’t offer resolution, but asks us to accept all the little “what–ifs” that come with choosing—the doubt, the quiet, and the consequences of staying. k
As show creator Jenny Han says, a good love triangle only works when no outcome feels clean.
