Second
Thoughts
A home for personal meditations, critiques of art and literature, politics, sketches, and deconstructions that dive beneath the surface of thought. Experiment with form here, relate with current events, read and talk about a book you’ve never read or perhaps want to read, and criticize something, anything, everything.
Last Week’s Highlights
Don’t worry, No One’s Paying Any Attention Anyways
Expanded internet access and the ubiquity of smartphones have turned us into a society of glancers and scrollers; the potential to get ahead on messages or promote our work or enrich our knowledge buzzes frantically from our pockets at all hours. With such effortless access to so dazzling a breadth of resources, the compulsion to partake is consuming. Not picking up the phone means squandering an opportunity for self-improvement.
Computers can’t make Art—but you can
In 2026, this element of spontaneity and unmediated experience feels almost unfathomable. Instead of living through something, we’ve shifted into a society that constantly comments on what it means to live. Social media feeds are saturated with articles and think-pieces about how ‘phones are ruining our lives’ and how ‘being offline is the new cool’. The internet has a problem with constantly seeking the validation of everyone whilst simultaneously wanting to detach itself entirely.
Walking the Runway Through the Ruins of Journalism
That world no longer exists in the same way, and The Devil Wears Prada 2 is clearly aware of this. The film gestures repeatedly toward the instability of modern journalism through references to mass firings, evolving media, and the declining readership of publications like Runway. Yet these acknowledgments remain a bit weightless. The sequel never fully dramatizes the emotional, cultural, or economic devastation of this collapse. Instead, it repeatedly retreats into the familiar rhythms of workplace rivalry and backstabbing.
Why It’s Hard to Feel any Sympathy for the Rich
Over the last decade, inequality in America has transformed from an abstract policy issue into a daily sensory experience. Wealth is no longer hidden behind gates, country clubs, or quarterly earnings reports. It arrives algorithmically, flooding phones for hours a day: private jets, “what I eat in a day” videos filmed inside $20 million kitchens, celebrities discussing the trauma of fame from homes larger than hotels, executives describing layoffs as unfortunate but necessary market corrections while workers launch GoFundMes for insulin or funeral expenses.
DTF: St Louis: Where Middle Aged Malaise Meets Sexual Market Value
The show is gilded in the hallmarks of a murder mystery; it begins with a dead body in an abandoned pool house and then flashes back in time as the police in the present try to piece together alibis and motives. Under that Agatha Christy like coating, though, is a tender, earnest exploration into male friendships that ends in utter heartbreak. It’s not actually a murder mystery. It’s a love story.
Project Hail Mary: “The Most Unbelievable Theme Is Acceptance”
Unexpectedly, Grace finds himself next to an alien spaceship, where all but one of its inhabitants have died trying to also save their planet from the same threat. The ship's sole survivor, a rock-appearing figure Grace calls Rocky, teams up with the scientist to save their planets, launching a journey full of self-discovery, heartbreak, and at the root, a budding friendship that serves as an anchor to the film's ending when a tough choice needs to be made.
Movie Studios Think Your Kids Are Dumb
“Kids’ movies are just ads now” sounds like a lazy complaint until you actually watch what’s being put in front of them. But I have to realistically ask, do we want our kids growing up into critical thinking, emotionally intelligent adults or addicted, consumer driven gambling addicts? Because what Hollywood is creating for children these days is walking a fine line towards the latter and parent’s dollars are the say whether we allow it to continue that route or not.
The Drama of Gun Violence
Charlie’s perspective is similar to Borgli’s as a Norwegian born filmmaker. There’s a distance in this film between the truth of gun violence and the story that’s being told, and that distance does the film a disservice. The nuance and discussion about gun violence has all the subtlety of a child lifting up rocks in the garden to gawk at the squirming bugs underneath. That is to say, Borgoli is using this twist just as a way to say, wow, isn’t this crazy?
The Last Place Aversion Theory
Basically, until there’s a mass recognition of the failed US wage market, there is no chance for reform. Until the hustle culture of American business is recognized for its abuses rather than its procurement of some mythical American Dream, wages will continue to stagnate as prices continue to rise…Last Place Aversion is experienced by those who have, or feel they have, no control over the system that's trapped them. And until a political movement shows promise for a full economic restructure, the American working class will continue as the ball in this economic tennis match.
Subversive Surrealism: From Breton to Teletubbies
It makes sense that work geared toward the very young would be more surreal, as children (especially preverbal children) engage with the world in a pretty surreal way. To the very young, concepts we take for granted, like cause and effect and object permanence, are unfounded. The makers of Teletubbies worked hard to craft a show that approached scenarios in a way that felt natural to toddlers. What the show lacked in rationality, it made up for in aural and visual play. Like the whimsically amorphous figures painted by surrealist Joan Miro, the teletubbies and crew drift stochastically through their liminal environment, abiding by a logic typically restricted to our dreams.
You’ll Be Back
Upon Trump’s re-election, Hamilton’s “You’ll Be Back” has resurfaced in online political discourse, often repurposed, with many reminiscent parallels to an America defined by its instability and cultural divisions. In some cases, particularly in British commentary, the song is used to frame the United States as returning to a kind of historical pattern – echoing the language of colonial dependence and political disorder that once defined the relationship between Britain and its former colonies.
13 Going on 30? More Like 30 Going on 13
The recent talk of a reboot has brought the premise back into conversation, and with it, the cultural promise the film once rested on — that adulthood meant stepping into a world of possibility. Back then, the plotline read as charmingly impatient rather than anomalous, because adulthood was still imagined as a phase of life when things settled into place: independence, confidence, an apartment with matching furniture, a career that paid the bills, and a love that had finally sorted itself out. But now, that assumption feels a bit out of touch.
The Joke isn’t Funny Anymore
In the 21st century, loneliness is no longer defined by physical isolation, but by a constant proximity to others that never quite becomes connection. Young adults are increasingly raised in environments where social life is mediated through screens, where ‘connection’ is abundant but rarely reciprocal. The result is not just isolation, but a distortion of what it means to be valued. Emerging online figures like Clavicular are less anomalies than early indicators of what prolonged digital isolation can produce.
Bruce Springsteen’s Americana
There is something that I hold so dearly about the version of America that I can find in Springsteen's music. A world of working class struggle, an acknowledgment of the pain and suffering inflicted on the men and women of this country, but a celebration of it nonetheless. A real, true love for America and the people who put the hard work into making it run. It’s something I feel the need to protect and to guard from those who want to destroy the very thing his music holds dear.
An Age-Old Attraction
After its debut season, Netflix quickly announced it would be renewing the show, prompting the question, what is it about this show that deserves another season? Age of Attraction wants to claim that it’s a progressive experiment, testing to see if age is just a number while simultaneously empowering people to date outside of the rigid boxes of what society says is appropriate.
A (Very Polluted) River Runs Through It
While the list of dangerously polluted waterways in the U.S. is extensive, few have captured the American imagination quite like Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. Sometimes frothy, sometimes covered in a nacreous scrim that one imagines peeling off like skin over scalded milk, the 1.8 mile canal’s infamous water is a wellspring of dark humor and incredulous facts.
Lessons Learned from Edward Crankshaw’s ‘Gestapo’
There’s a particular history lesson from school that has stuck in my mind. Imagine a 1930s Germany, still reeling from its losses during the first World War. Then imagine a political party, led by a radical politician that finally breaks through the family radio. He promises redemption for your failing country, massive economic and political gains. Finally, someone to enact real change, someone “finally able to finally do something active and bold to rehabilitate [your] shabby life.” All he needs is your vote.
Marty Supremely Annoying
It never feels like Marty is in true danger. There is always the impression that he’ll work his way out of the corner he is backed into, and in the end, that’s exactly what happens. The emotional beats of the story fall short without any real tension. Marty makes one stupid, egotistical decision after another, realizes he’s in a bad situation, then gets up and gets himself out of it. Over and over again.
What One Unmuted Call Said About Segregation in NYC
One Black eighth grader was in the middle of pleading against her school's potential closure when Allyson Friedmans’ voice, unmuted on the call, boomed through. “They’re too dumb to know they’re in a bad school,” said Friedman, an associate professor of biological sciences at CUNY Hunter College, where 11.5% of the undergraduate students are Black. “I mean, apparently Martin Luther King said it, like if you train a Black person well enough, they'll know to use the back, you don't have to tell them anymore."
Day 501: When I Realized I Was Both Tom and Summer
From time to time, someone decides to resurrect the same debate about 500 Days of Summer (2009): was Summer the villain, or was Tom simply delusional? The response to that question rarely changes. Summer is perceived as a cold, evasive witch who purposely misleads poor Tom, while Tom is defended as a romantic, perhaps naive, but well-intentioned good guy. The framing of that narrative is quite unsurprising, almost expected, because it provides the natural urge to assign fault cleanly; a way to make sense of a dramatic, romantic split by assigning one person the role of the wrongdoer and the other the role of the one wronged.