Listening to Dissect always reminds me that much of the music we listen to is a bricolage of beats, sounds, and lyrics of music. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that: standing on the shoulders of giants is a given in any field. Furthermore, sampling builds upon culture and creates conversation with past artists and producers.…

Side note, if you’ve ever wondered what the official, linguistic name for the syntactic, repetitive phenomenon in the title is (i.e. mad mad), it’s called contrastive focus reduplication release the kraken 🦑 Much of being able to control your temper comes from not really having anything to be angry about. Sure, there are people who…

I’ve been slowly but surely making my way through the latest season of Stranger Things (no spoilies!). When watching the show, which is set in the ’80s, I think about the things they choose as cultural references: Eggo Waffles, Kate Bush, Ted Bundy. Things they would understand, and things that we, the modern-day viewers would…

I recently started reading non-fiction again: OMCA’s Hella Feminist exhibit motivated me to pick up some feminist prose, the most important component of the Kat Stratford trifecta. I started with some blog posts from the Crunk Feminist Collective, which gave me a good introduction to some of the authors, what they wrote about, and which…

(title inspiration here, if you’re curious) This week I watched The Dark Knight, one of my favorite superhero movies. DC hasn’t really put out a good movie since they stopped their Christopher Nolan collabs, and Heath Ledger’s Joker was one of the best supervillain performances I’ve seen in my short time here on Earth. Joker…

The title has nothing to do with the blog post, which, unlike this sentence, is going to be short and to the point. I just was resisting the urge to re-watch all nine seasons of Seinfeld for the second time in a year. The post also happens to be about art. I didn’t get much…

For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Caste System. Of course, I always knew that caste is an oppressive system that has and continues to exist in India. Though there was a caste-discrimination California lawsuit relatively recently, I wasn’t really aware of how caste manifested in the US. This is…

In Math Without Numbers, author Milo Beckman wrote the following about abstract math: “we don’t have to constrain ourselves to this arbitrary world we happen to live in.” Beckman, a mathematician and über-genius, likens math to a language: a way of describing the world, communicating ideas, and solving problems. Abstract math is a way more…

I’m always surprised when people confidently say: “I don’t believe in aliens.” Agnosticism, I get; but how can you be so confident that something doesn’t exist? Just because they haven’t arrived yet doesn’t mean they aren’t out there… There’s a few reasons why I believe in aliens, but I won’t try and prove they exist.…

The title is one of the taglines for Night at the Museum, one of my favorite film franchises. I’m actually partial to the sequel, Battle of the Smithsonian, which is comedy gold. Anyone saying otherwise should be muted, blocked, or otherwise removed from your life immediately. I recently watched Night at the Museum because I…