When Beyoncé released her leading singles “TEXAS HOLD ’EM” and “16 CARRIAGES,” discourse surrounding her entry into the country genre quickly erupted. Many supported her leap into a style that has historically been linked to discrimination against Black artists. In fact, she herself faced censorship for her performance of her country song “Daddy Lessons” (2016) at the 2016 Country […]
Ali Eckstein can be reached aeckstein@wesleyan.edu.
Who do the movies truly belong to? The question was on my mind as I watched the 96th Academy Awards on Sunday, March 10. The themes of this year’s most prominent films included similar questions about possession and ownership of the narrative, and it felt like the structure of this year’s glitzy awards shows posed similar queries. […]
She’s back and gutsier than ever: Olivia Rodrigo has returned to her sophomore album with four new songs to create the deluxe edition of GUTS, titled GUTS (spilled). Released on March 22, 2024, the album features the original twelve songs from GUTS’ initial release in 2023 alongside five new songs. GUTS (spilled) was announced mid-concert during […]
After the success of his 2023 album Unreal Unearth, Irish singer-songwriter Hozier released Unheard, an EP of four songs that did not make the original album. These new additions round out Hozier’s modern retelling of Dante’s “Inferno,” with each song representing a layer of hell. Originally teased in a TikTok featuring the artist sketching a skeleton […]
Ali Eckstein can be reached at aeckstein@wesleyan.edu.
“Small Mouth Sounds,” the creative component of Nina Jakobson’s ’24 senior theater thesis, follows six participants on a five-day silent retreat as they struggle to find their true selves, guided by their unseen meditation leader (Leo Kaplan ’26). Jakobson stumbled upon the script last spring when her friend Kieran Gettel-Gilmartin ’25, an actor in the […]
There was an undeniably electric energy in the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism on Wednesday, Feb. 28, during the inaugural meeting of the Wesleyan Review of Books. 18 students from all grades gathered to discuss the magazine, led by Emmett Gardner ’26. Gardner, inspired by the New York Review of Books and the London Review […]
“What Comes Next?”—a staged reading of a play written by Senica Slaton ’26 and produced by the SHADES Theater Collective—was read in Russell House on Saturday, Feb. 24 at 2 p.m. The play follows five Black and Latina girls in mid-1960s Montgomery, Alabama as they live out their teenage years, confront the culture of racism […]
Writer and editor Gabrielle Bruney ’14 visited campus for the Ask Me Anything writer’s series on Tuesday, Feb. 20. The series is co-hosted by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism and the Gordon Career Center, focusing on alumni and their careers as writers, editors, and creators. Bruney has written about television, film, music, […]