Like Jack Nicholson, Snoop Dogg eventually became a caricature of himself. That may be why he wants to “take it back/to the way it used to be” on his new album Doggumentary. In the process of doing so, Snoop bumps into the main obstacle of hip-hop time travel: The clumsy samples and lo-fi synths of …

Thomas McCarthy, most famous for writing the animated favorite Up, serves as both writer and director of Win Win. Having dually written and directed three prior films, one would imagine he’s on the way to refining his craft. Yet here, he casts white, American, middle-age favorites Paul Giamatti, PC ‘89, DRM ’94.  and Amy Ryan …

Plenty of people are afraid of Generation Y. With our unprecedented levels of designer drugs, bad music, apathy, and Twitter, we are apparently driving the world toward the postmodern apocalypse. I thought filmmaker Gregg Araki, known for making dark and innovative films about queer teenagers (e.g. The Living End and Mysterious Skin), was on our …

We all look for something special in our food, but Jack Linshi, JE ’14, looks for qualities most others don’t. “I like to find food that I can create a gradient of color with,” Linshi tells me. Linshi is no chef. He is an artist. And his materials? Food.
This is not Linshi’s first time experimenting …

Outside of the extraordinarily formal, nearly every other social or media context reserves the bow tie for sending one of two messages. The first is that the wearer is cultivating an intentionally dorky or nerdy image, exemplified by the likes of Pee-wee Herman and Bill Nye. The bow tie serves the same role a pair …

All week, the Environmental Film Festival at Yale (EFFY), now in its third year, has been acting a little like a camera, zooming in and out on the environmental issues of our age. The festival began last Friday with the broadest film possible (Journey of the Universe), then on Monday zoomed in on recyclable materials …

The Asian-American rapper’s place in hip-hop is a confused one. Some groups, like The Notorious M.S.G., resort to humor—M.S.G. has released such tracks as the gangster rap “Chinatown Hustler” and the more soulful “Dim Sum Girl.” Jin, on other hand, plays on his race in the much the same way Eminem plays on being white, …

Red Riding Hood, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, is a dark fantasy loosely based on the well-known fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood. If you recognize the director, then you can guess what the movie is like. Red Riding Hood resembles Hardwicke’s Twilight, both in its plot and in its filming. The same actor even plays …

If it looks like duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. But this axiom does not help figure out the perplexing narrative in Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy. William Shimmell, a renowned British opera baritone in real life, plays James Miller, an English writer who has recently published a …

Mad Men fans left hanging by last season’s finale must grip the cliff’s edge for several months longer than expected. Matthew Weiner, the show’s creator, executive producer, and head writer, finalized rocky negotations with AMC, the show’s network, and Lionsgate, its production company, on Thursday night. AMC and Lionsgate came to their own agreement earlier, …

Rolling Papers begins with a delicate serenade, which cascades from the sweet melody of a piano into the ears of hateful and betrayed members of the Taylor Gang, his crew. A simple yet unmistakable Khalifa “uh” signals the pop star’s presence, and he begins: “And they say all I rap about/Is bitches and champagne/But you …

J. Mascis the character is as infamous as J. Mascis the front man—on the one hand the sleepy, sludgy, stoner, and on the other the virtuosic guitarist with a desiccated drawl. In a time when artists’ self-conscious image manipulation undermines fans’ conception of the real, and the notion of “performance art” undergirds conversations of intent …

This is what the press will tell you about Angles: It’s “the return of rock and roll,” a long-awaited triumph for everyone’s favorite Lower East Siders, and the best album since 2001’s Is This It. This is what the blogs and zines and other four-letter abbreviated-media-format things will tell you: It’s utter shit, a pitiful …

This weekend in the Morse Crescent Theater, Yale’s drag burlesque troupe, the Bad Romantics, will be performing Bad Romance: A Queer Cabaret. The production features a Disney medley (Instead of hairbrushes and jewelry, Ariel’s “who’s its and what’s its” are sex toys, and instead of asking Genie to turn him into a …

We are not here to tell you about oak overtones or violet undertones, syrupy textures or solid bodies. This is a guide to New Haven’s coffee shops written by and for people who know what tastes good and what tastes bad—what tastes like sewage, what tastes like melted plastic, and what tastes like, well, coffee. …

Only this paragraph will make the easy criticisms against Gucci because—unlike he, who “will tell you twice/Because I’m Gucci two times”—I become embarrassed when I repeat myself. His beats all adhere to a dumb formula that was once in the running for the fastest to become hackneyed, until he won—but he’s still running. No turn …

At heart, Noah and the Whale have always been a twee pop group from the suburbs of London. By turns unashamedly saccharine and deliciously melancholy, Noah and the Whale have never really departed from their—frankly, winning—formula; and that’s why Last Night On Earth comes as such a pleasant surprise: In both a divergence and a …

The Joy Formidable’s debut record, The Big Roar, comes on the heels of two EPs, a boatload of singles, and four years of tours and festival shows. The result is that their particular breed of epic, art rock—they’ve been rightly compared to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Breeders—manages to avoid many pitfalls of arena-ready …

Those of you who’ve never made it up Science Hill for a real “Sc” credit (non-gut, not located in LC), are missing out. At the Yale School of Management stands an array of food carts, the most diverse and value-filled lunch locales in New Haven. Sixteen carts have special licenses to vend their typically ethnic …

In the 1980s and 1990s, the World Bank recommended that Bolivia privatize its water system in return for its development loans. The South American country faced enormous socioeconomic inequality, gross corruption, and a massive disparity in the distribution of resources like water.
The World Bank made two points: The Bolivian water system was incredibly corrupt, and …