When Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheimer’s documentary, You Can See Everything, ended, my theater was filled with the electric buzz of dozens of recliner movie seats slowly closing. We spectators who had trekked out on a Sunday evening were caught in a pall, a sort of “what the fuck did I just see” type of silence. 

I’ve noticed something interesting when watching people discover that A Different World is a reboot. Some younger viewers, upon learning that the Netflix series is based on an original that aired decades before they were born, dismiss it as another example of Hollywood running out of ideas. “Everything is a reboot now,” they say. “Nothing is original anymore.”

Where do we draw the line between exploitation and being informed? True Crime content online has become a bastion of modern online entertainment. Covering infamous cases, serial killers, or unsolved mysteries can propel a creator into stardom, with millions of views being acquired every night. But as much as there is love for the new era of true crime, there is a lot of criticism also—is it right to tell true crime stories the way we do? The desecration of human individuals is witnessed once more by everyone who hears their story again, further violating victims in their final moments. But we can also learn from these moments, so where does true crime stop being educational and transition into absent entertainment? 

I was about six the first time I read Bunnicula, a children’s story by Deborah and James Howe. It was a mystery book that centered around a bunny that the family cat was suspicious of. Each scene of that silent, white rabbit, with unusually sharp fangs made me more and more unsettled. By the time I was supposed to go to bed, I was convinced that this vampire-like bunny was going to hop into my room and suck me dry the same way it drained all those fruits and vegetables. 

A deep dive of Carol J. Adams “The Sexual Politics of Meat” and artists that explore the interconnectedness of human and animal life

As a horror aficionado, I have to admit that I struggle to watch alien horror movies. I don’t love the—often terrible—CGI when the alien is revealed in all its weird, usually pale and oddly skinny glory. But more than that, I cringe in the anticipation of what has become akin to a joke: they’re going to be probed.

In the spring, while writing about the influence of multitasking on content production, I stumbled across a horrific little study. Meant to explore the neural processes associated with media multitasking, the study observed that individuals who tend to spend more time consuming multiple forms of media simultaneously often have “smaller gray matter density.”

There is something almost charming about Maggie when she is in a “big mood.” She is funny and magnetic, full of ideas that seem brilliant (well, mostly to her) because she is so convinced of them. In the opening scenes, she moves through the world with the kind of confidence that can make recklessness look like spontaneity and impulsivity look like freedom. It is easy to understand why people love her, but past the first episode, it is also easy to understand why loving her can become exhausting.

What’s more classic to the horror movie genre than scream queens, final girls, calls coming from inside the house, or bloody murders? Remaking all of them. No other film genre sees such blatant repetition as horror. Classic, popular horror monsters get pulled like taffy and stretched across prequels, sequels, remakes, reboots, and reimaginings with little regard to canon or past lore. While this fad is never-ending in horror, the early 2000s saw the biggest boom in horror movie remakes.

While, yes, if you asked someone to replicate a Rothko painting, they probably could get close to the original work, but the true meaning of abstract art doesn’t lie in technique.