Literature Deep Dive

      Are hotdogs moral? I'm sure at least one of you has seen the videos of hotdogs being made, a slew of meat and water, being shoved into a plastic-looking tube. It looks disgusting. And if you haven't seen one of those videos, I suggest you watch one before finishing my blog post. It's incredible how efficiently the hotdogs can be made using only a paste of meat and hundreds of casings     Anyways, what I'm trying to get at is that hotdogs are a strange food. And I hope by watching whatever video you did you aren't scared off from eating hotdogs. But, in my opinion, they are actually a wonder food. The thing is, hotdogs are made out of what would normally just be thrown away but are instead packaged into little sausages.  To make any kind of meat you must take the life of another animal. Animals, along with being sentient creatures with complex lives of their own, require immense time and effort to raise. Normally 60 PERCENT of a cow is thrown away. However, by

Up until recently, I held famous people on a pedestal and thought fame was a very desirable concept. However, I have grown to see that fame may not be all that it is expected to be. Personally, I would never want to get famous--mainly due to the issues I would imagine come along with the lifestyle.  The first aspect of celebrities' lives that seems undesirable is how their private lives are (sometimes) exposed to the public, If I were famous, one of my main goals would be to keep certain things in my life out of the public eye. Having your entire life online gives you no privacy and seems stressful. While celebrities should expect to have at least some of their privacy disclosed, I think there are certain lines that should not be crossed when it comes to what the public has access to. For example, some paparazzi can go too far (in my opinion) to get photos that will grasp the most attention, or some interview questions may be digging a bit too much into the celebrity's personal

Is Hollywood Becoming More Diverse? I’m not sure. I’m going to write this post and hopefully figure that out by the conclusion. I’m not at all qualified to talk about this, so please take everything with a grain of salt. I just want to use this to talk about a scenario I find incredibly interesting. In the new Batman movie with Robert Pattinson, Zoё Kravitz stars as Catwoman. Catwomen of the past have been predominantly white, and exceptions to that definitely show up, but I guess that means that Hollywood is getting more diverse, putting a person of color in a role that’s been mostly white actors? However, while race in casting and characters is an incredibly important thing to discuss when asking this question, there’s more to it, and part of that is what I’m examining in this post.  In the movie, Zoё Kravitz has a female roommate, Annika. She constantly refers to Annika as “babe” or “baby.” She intimately holds Annika in their shared apartment at one point. And yet, they’re not a

Puffs : a play narrating the adventures of a group of nobodies at a certain school of magic. In case you couldn’t tell, Puffs is based on the wizarding world of Harry Potter. However, since the Harry Potter franchise is copyrighted and guarded with an iron fist, the creators of Puffs had to avoid using any copyrighted material to retell the story. Instead of focusing on the boy who lived, they focus on another random boy. This boy is named Wayne and he went to Hogwarts with Harry Potter. However, he was sorted into Hufflepuff (the Puffs). The Puffs are known for being clueless and a wee bit airheaded. They aren’t exactly the best at anything. I'm currently in a production of Puffs , hence my decision to talk about the show. From this point on, expect spoilers for both Puffs: Seven Increasingly Eventful Years at a Certain School of Magic and Magic by Matt Cox and the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling (we don’t support her in this post or anywhere else). https://www.amazon.com/P

Recently, I read They Wish They Were Us, by Jessica Goodman. I finished it quite quickly, however by the end I was left feeling somewhat unsatisfied. In this blog post I will be reviewing this novel and giving it a rating at the end. There will be SPOILERS ahead! They Wish They Were Us follows Jill, a senior at an admired prep school in Long Island. She is subject to high academic expectations from her parents as well as a reputation to uphold in her "secret society" called The Players. This exclusive group consists of eight students from each grade who benefit from their status. They are offered study guides made by previous students, answers to tests, material from classes, and pretty much anything they could need to get into top tier colleges. The (intended) main storyline is about Jill's best friend Shaila, a fellow player, and how she was killed as a freshman. Graham was her boyfriend at the time was indicted with her murder, however Jill learns he is likely innocent

      Before we even start, I want to mention that this is my favorite book of all time, so I might be a bit biased.    Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is not the best book I have ever read. It is not the most emotional, or has the best plot out of any book I have ever read. What it does have is a coming of age story that feels truly genuine from a perspective not often explored. Every year, I read this book, and my birthday is in 8 days (if I get this out on the 20th), so I figure I'll make this and reread it after my 6th reading.   Speaking of 6 years of reading, I want to make a quick note of how I read this book in the first place, before we get started. I was on vacation and I was waiting for my mom to come back with the room keys. I grabbed a small black book off of my brother's suitcase, and I was enthralled by the writing and characters. My brother yelled at me a few minutes later for not being mature enough to read it (I was not), but I just took it into th