3. Burrata

I came across a video recently called “What You Should Know About Patriarchy,” narrated by writer Amy Allebest. Targeted to teenage girls, Allebest’s video describes various facets of modern womanhood which stem from patriarchy: vanity, people-pleasing, and romantic partners. Unsurprisingly, Allebest cited that one of the biggest regrets older women have about their young selves is caring too much about external opinions (in addition to obsession over appearance). Even though we live in a supposedly feminist world, most girls still go through the same problems as generations ago. Discussing this with me, my friend brought up how she used to pay attention to her appearance and became self-conscious after entering high school. Many women will spend hours in front of the mirror, checking themselves constantly throughout the day. This is not because they are conceited; I would assert that it comes from fear of imperfection. Acintya highlighted in her blog last week that women get criticize...

Imogen Heap: even if you haven’t heard her name, you’ve probably heard her music (or a remake of it). She’s made an undeniable impact on the music industry as a highly prominent songwriter. I recently listened to her most popular album, Speak for Yourself , and I can confidently say that it’s some of the best music ever made—especially the fifth track, “Hide and Seek.” The track includes just two instruments: a vocoder and Heap’s voice. There’s no background noise to detract from the sheer power of the human voice, amplifying its effect on the listener. Heap begins with a feeling of disorientation: “Where are we? / What the hell is going on?” She feels like she’s being “[spun] ‘round,” referencing the daze experienced after “rub[bing her] eyes.” She creates domestic imagery (“circles in the carpet,” “trains and sewing machines”) and contrasts their tranquil mood with the overwhelming panic she feels. Disbelief is a prominent lyrical theme, with the chorus mourning “all those years.” So...

Power, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary , is the “ability to act.” On the most fundamental level, energy enables us to move and function on a daily basis. In modern society, energy is channeled through machines. These machines allow us to live comfortably today.  Technological innovations stem from a better understanding and utilization of energy. For instance, the industrial revolution occurred because we were able to harness the power of steam. As time passed, we moved to coal because it contains more usable energy than steam. With this energy, we were able to create factories to mass produce things, fuel trains and ships, and turn rural places into large cities.  To continue to progress, we moved to fossil fuels and in particular focused on a large amount of coal, oil and natural gas. Since fossil fuels were extremely energy dense, we could build even larger things. The change in energy powered our new innovations of cars, aircraft, leading us to a globalized ec...

  Jaycee Snelson Week 10: Survivor Ever since I was a kid my family and I have always watched the show Survivor . If you have never seen the show, it's where a group of strangers are placed on an island in Fiji where they build connections, compete in challenges, and vote people out until one person eventually wins $10.000. This conflict between connections and strategy leads to many tough choices between keeping connections or voting out a close ally for the sake of your game.  The game comes down to one thing.  The power of choice. Every decision, every action,  all accumulated to create your own unique life path. Even the smallest choice can snowball into a large accomplishment or challenge you must face.  For instance, the choice to write this blog or not could lead to a million possibilities. On the surface the choice seems to only affect my grade. As much as I enjoy writing these blogs every week, as I’m sure most of you guys share similar feelings, I...

Nature is the epitome of diversity. Everywhere, everything is different from one another. All kinds of life as we know it from the land to the seas are different, but we are all connected by one force: the Earth! Of course, everyone in their science classes has heard of the levels of organization: a cell to a tissue to an organism to a community and it reaches all the way to the global level, but as of recently, I’ve come to discover how truly different and fascinating these animals can be from each other.  Power structures often vary among organisms, and I can’t help but wonder why they differ. Why is it necessary to have accommodations for certain species? Don’t they kind of function similarly? As natural selection continues to favor individuals with adaptations based on the environment and conditions, the more that the “peculiar” adaptations somehow… just work. As they reproduce, they create power structures that now pass down from generation to generation. Say wolves, for examp...

“Hood College” (it’s real, search it up) REALLY thought that—through a flier in the mail and an email in my spam inbox—it was going to convince me to pull up and throw $100 at them to get the PRIVILEGE of applying to get the PRIVILEGE of attending…and spending $300 grand. In essence, they want me to pay them to pay them.  I’m sure you’ve all seen that clip of that one movie where some teacher said that the definition of power was to be able to exert influence in someone else’s life/a course of events. I believe it is because of the importance and the prestige WE accord to some colleges (yes, they weren’t born with it) that the colleges appear to have influence over the way in which we conduct our daily lives (stressing about extracurriculars, grades, awards, essays and everything else), which is then, by definition, power over us.  Now, one argument might be that it is because we care so much about our futures (and obviously rightly so) that we gravitate towards colleges with ...

Pride is considered the primary, and often the “father” of the seven deadly sins. It can, in fact, be very deadly. A perfect example of this is my favorite show ever (even though it’s kind of depressing), Weak Hero . Weak Hero focuses on the life of a quiet, loner nerd, Yeon Sieun who finally finds friends in two of his high school classmates through chance encounters. There’s Ahn Suho, a loyal ex-MMA fighter who always sleeps during class and Oh Beomseok, a rich transfer student whose father is an assemblyman. They eat together, fight together, and laugh together, but by the end, Suho’s in a coma, and it’s all Beomseok’s fault. Well, his pride’s at fault. As a child, Beomseok was adopted by an abusive father purely for political publicity and had classmates that beat him up simply because they saw him as a weak target. As a result, Beomseok grows up to be a hypersensitive student with an inferiority complex that finds it difficult to make real friends. While he thought he found two ne...

  Many aspects of my life do not feel like choices I got to make. Born into an academically-driven family and living in the tech bubble which is the Bay Area, everything I pursue (grades, college, extracurriculars) seem like things that are naturally expected of me. As a result, I often forget that I do, in fact, have free will. Although there are several factors to consider when discussing this term in philosophy, for the purposes of this blog, I simply mean “free will” as in the ability to make deliberate choices which affect my future.  I believe that people always have control over their actions at any given moment in time. Admittedly, while this may not be entirely true, operating as if it is is more empowering for me. As a high-schooler, I often try to squeeze myself down one path in hopes of guaranteeing a successful future: a stable income source, fulfilling relationships, and middle class leisure. The truth is that those things can be actually achieved in many ways, n...

In today’s day and age, the most power does not come from authority or brute force. It comes from the ability to decide what people notice and what they ignore.  Power is the notifications on your phone that pulls your attention away before you even choose to look. Power is the algorithm that decides which stories become popular and which ones disappear without notice. Power is the ability of institutions to redirect focus from the unsolved problems to convenient narratives . Our time and attention is limited so the groups that get to control where attention goes are the ones with the most influence in society.  For instance, at our school, this type of power exists. During discussions in school, it is often the person who speaks the most who changes what the class focuses on. Teachers also hold power by emphasizing certain topics over others, affecting the student’s interpretation of what is most important and what to focus on.  Attention based power is more subtle and...

  Jaycee Snelson Week 9: What’s Your Superpower? When I heard that the theme of this quarter's blogs was power my first thought went to the overused icebreaker “If you could have any superpower what would it be” or some variation of it. Whenever I hear it I always wonder if there was a reason behind this question, or more importantly, the answers people give and the psychology behind them. So, I did what every teenager does when they have a question I asked google.  That's where I found the article “ Which Super Power would You Choose?” by Eric Teplitz. In this article, Teplitz briefly covers why the question “Which super power would you choose?” is an important question and what each answer could tell you about the person. He states that these superpowers speak to “our deepest, if often subconscious, desires.” He goes deeper to show how these superpowers give us a sense of ability to overcome the “limitations” we face — whether they are “real or perceived” — and "the poss...

Power. Defined by The Merriam Webster Dictionary as the ability to act or produce an effect, the idea of power has many connotations. Like how fuel can power engines, a leader may also have power over their people. Nowadays, power has received a negative connotation because it has been fed in what many consider “the wrong hands.” Setting her quite… questionable actions aside, I think Azula was so beautifully written because of the amount of complexity in her character. You never really know what she will do next, but only that it will end up badly for you. Throughout the series, we see many different sides of Azula; her notorious evil personality, but also her vulnerable side.  Azula captures Ba Sing Se In the context of both today and in the 2000s (when Avatar was released), we can find many parallels of Azula’s “evil” character to recent political leaders. Kidnapping children? Terrorizing foreign regions? Azula already did it. Her ignorance to human suffering serves as a symbo...

Everything has a good side and a bad side. An angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. Fandoms are no different. Fandoms can be built around music artists, movie universes, sports, and much more. I myself have been part of several fandoms and for the most part, they each have been extremely enjoyable experiences. There’s a sense of community in each of them, comfort found in the fact that there are others like you who admire the same content or qualities that you do. For many individuals, the content they admire helps them escape from reality as well as the problems that they must suffer through in their daily life. Some are even lucky enough to find friendships built off their shared interests. It’s a different kind of experience when you can just ramble on about a random topic that you guys are interested in, and it’s more than just for fun. It makes you feel known, understood, and comfortable.  Take conventions or concerts for an example. At conventions, it’s one of the f...

The first thing that came to my mind when I read the word “power” was the song of the same title by Little Mix. This song has been with me through thick and thin, beginning with all the MCU edits I used to watch in 2020. Seeing my favorite heroine, Natasha Romanoff, fighting off a group of bad guys with nothing but some killer martial arts moves while that song played in the background was life-changing—and still is. So imagine my surprise: one day, I’m scrolling through Instagram Reels (like the procrastinator I am), and I find a video with a caption that reads, “Black Widow pretending she’s a part of the team after doing absolutely nothing.” The background is an image slideshow of the woman herself. I’m not here to start microanalyzing every single fight Natasha’s had in the series—heck, I don’t even remember half of the Marvel movies I’ve watched. Her actual capabilities as a fighter are irrelevant to me—I want to talk about how readily people dismiss her as “weak” compared to her m...

Which came first? The chicken or the egg? Well, chickens hatch from eggs but chickens also lay said eggs. My sister wasted my time on this question today instead of asking the much more important question (how dare she not be contemplating the nuances of political philosophy on a Sunday afternoon): do we have the power or does the government? With the recent “no kings” protests, that’s the first thing that I thought of regarding power. Jean-Jacques Rousseau didn’t have much to say about the chicken, but he wrote a full book “on the social contract” (look at him making integrated quotes easier). According to him (and the theory of the social contract that he created) “man is born free,” but to protect our natural rights, we give some rights away to a government so that said government can protect our other natural rights. For example, in a so-called “state of nature,” there’s no one to stop you from murdering someone else, which is why we give up our right to kill people in exchange for...