Literature Deep Dive

Social media plays a more and more dominant aspect of everyone's lives, and is becoming very common among young children. With young children being exposed to social media, it raises the question of whether social media should be so easily accessible to the youth, as it is today. I think there is room to debate on either side of this question. It is inevitable that the age of children who have social media will continue to decrease. However, there are several pros and cons to this. First, I'll discuss the positives social media can have on children's lives. One of the benefits is that online platforms can help kids extend their social lives beyond their in-person interactions. Social media can be a good way for kids to feel more comfortable making connections with others and forming new friendships. This can be a positive thing--however, only a certain extent, as it's also important for kids to learn how to make friends without technology. Online platforms also open doo...

Election day was on Tuesday, so for this post I’ll talk about voting for a third-party candidate. I’d like to say going into this that I am writing this with an extremely democratic viewpoint. I know that this is an argumentative prompt, but I just want to throw out that I will not be looking at this through a moderate lens. To answer the question, I do believe that voting for a third-party candidate means throwing away your vote. I believe that especially in the case of the 2020 election, voting for a third-party candidate is completely throwing away your vote. I believe that in this past election, voting for a third-party candidate was just a masked way to vote for Donald Trump.  In 2000, republican George H. W. Bush was running against democrat Al Gore. However, Ralph Nader ran for the green party. Gore won the popular vote by a million, but Bush won the presidency. Nader got three million votes, and if you replace all of the Nader votes with Gore votes, he would have won the pr...

   I often find the relevance of Shakespeare being debated, and whether he's even worth our time. I'm not going to ramble on and on about how amazing Shakespeare is, or try to convince you to adore the man with all your heart. Instead, I'm going to focus on a song that I've had sprinting back and forth in my head the past few days: "God, I Hate Shakespeare" from Something Rotten!.        Towards the beginning of the song are the lines, "I just don't get it / How a mediocre actor from a measly little town / Is suddenly the brightest jewel in England's royal crown?" I did a bit of research, finding that William Shakespeare was born in a town called Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England. Fun fact, he was born during an outbreak of the plague in 1564, though the town survived it. By that time, there was a grammar school (elementary school) in his town, so he was able to go. Shakespeare learned Latin and English, while many other just as ta...

As I’m sure many of you already know due to Dr. Radnitzers recent email, a new law has been put in place that students are able to take up to five mental health days. First of all; what exactly is a mental health day? A mental health day is essentially a “sick day,” but used for taking care of your mental health when you feel particularly stressed, anxious, depressed, etc. This new law brought up a question; is it a good thing that mental health days are being given to students? Especially in these times, with the ongoing pandemic, I believe mental health days will prove to be very beneficial. With the state of our current school year, there are several challenges that students are facing. Some are struggling with the new transition to in-person learning, and school may be a major trigger for anxious feelings towards academics overall. Along with the pressure of in-person learning, some students might just be overwhelmed with work. Being in sports or other extracurriculars means they ...

     I'm sure you've all heard of the saying, 'You only live once.' And I'm also sure you've heard that time seems to go faster as you get older. Well, these are both, at least in some way, true. Time, or at least our subjective perception of it does seem to go faster. Not due to lightspeed time dilation or anything fancy, but simply because the older we get, the fewer new experiences we have. If you think back through your memories, I'm sure you'll find that many more seem to fall from when you were younger, experiencing so many new things. But, the older we get, the more stable things become and the more the days start to blend together. I'm sure that especially during covid, you felt everything meld together into some amalgamate memory. Well, how can we stop dying so fast?      The answer is simple: Do more. You only get one life, and you shouldn't spend it obsessing over grades and higher-paying jobs. Find a balance that works for you. Be wil...

  *DISCLAIMER* I mention abuse and stalking in the fourth paragraph Do child stars have it rough? I’m not sure. I’m fascinated by the question, though, so when I saw it was a prompt I was excited to do it. You have tons of examples of child stars talking about their bad experiences––Alyson Stoner, who played Isabella on Phineas and Ferb , Britney (who I’ll talk about more later), the Glee kids––I couldn’t name all of the cases if I tried, so I’ll stop there. Thinking about it, and what they’ve said about their mistreatment, they definitely did have it rough. I suppose I already have an answer, then. Because of this, I’m going to switch the question a bit so that I can talk more about it.  Do we pity the child stars? We’ve already established that they have it rough, so do we pity them? Keeping in mind that I have no idea what child stardom is like, I feel like when they’re past a certain age when they start, we don’t have to pity them. On Nirvana’s Nevermind , there’s a pic...

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach      I started reading Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach today (10/4) after deciding to take a rare dive into the nonfiction section of the library. I’m only about one chapter into the book, butI still feel like there’s enough for me to discuss in a short blog post. *Spoilers for first chapter* Basically, the first chapter is set in a surgical lab, where there are rows of heads for practicing face lifts. Roach discusses how she was brought in as a guest to observe, and tells about her experience meeting some of the surgeons. She also explains how there has to be a separation in someone’s mind between a person and a cadaver. Roach says that a cadaver is just a dead body, and whoever inhabited said body is not there anymore. I’ve wondered for a while how people who work with dead bodies are able to continue focusing on their job despite the fact that there are, well, dead bodies. Roach expre...