Ministry of Cool

After a five-year break and a bandmate shuffle, The Shins sound recharged and revitalized on their newest release Port of Morrow. The band has rediscovered its playful side with a fresh batch of songs that resemble their first two full-lengths, Oh, Inverted World and Chutes Too Narrow, but offer a new spin with a slower, more methodical approach.

In an age where people have more friends online than in real life, the pressure to look good is ever-present in every medium. Thanks to the magic of technology, people can look as good as they want. All it takes is the click of a button.

Suzanne Collins created a futuristic, dystopian world not so different than our own in her trilogy, The Hunger Games, which has just been turned into a huge Hollywood blockbuster. She incorporated many of the problems we are facing today within our country.

You laugh. You cry. You drool at the dreamy actors and actresses. If you’re me, you enjoy the company of Ben and Jerry, two of the most dependable men I know, and then you wish the heart-warming romantic comedy you spent the last two hours watching could one day be a reality.

Huxley creates a society so preoccupied with pleasure and trivial distractions that they ultimately ignore the greater issues surrounding them.
Huxley’s dystopia seems to be echoed in today’s world. As a society, we have just about everything we need to achieve happiness. We have the latest gadgets, we have houses, and the perfect pets. However, these material items are distracting us from larger scale issues.

When you’re 17 and planning your first international vacation without your parents, alongside your best gal pal, your priorities generally lie in three areas: boys with accents, getting lost, and boys with accents helping you when you get lost.

Shangri-La, Iram of the Pillars, and Atlantis are famous utopias that people have yearned to find. Some have succeeded in discovering these perfect societies by turning to videogames.

Review of ‘Undun’ by The Roots, Released December 2011

With the Academy Award season just behind us, it is clear which picture has swept the hearts of America. To the dismay of many teen super fans, I’m not referring to the final installment of the Harry Potter franchise. Rather, the film that has all the critics, including this one, talking is Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist, starring French actor, Jean Dujardin and Argentinian-French actress Berenice Bejo.

Poverty, alcoholism, and parental negligence; sounds more like the plot of a depressing lifetime movie than of Showtime’s latest breakout dramedy. On TV’s Shameless, the Gallagher family accepts these issues as simply the way things are. And they do so with good humor.