34th Street Magazine

Thinkpiece Bare nails are back. Here’s why we should avoid them. When I walk into a room, I immediately look at people’s hands. More specifically, their nails. Even if they don’t know it, everyone’s nails tell a story. Think of Y2K baddies with blinged–out press–ons, or black Sharpie scribbled over nail beds. Maybe it’s a future track star wearing vibrant claws for her first big race, or a new college student proudly repping their school colors on their fingers.

Where do you go to process your sorrow? Some retreat to a cabin in the woods. I wander around the city until my legs get tired. Quavo, meanwhile, splits his time between Louis Vuitton’s Paris headquarters and a yacht off the coast of Miami. This tells you a lot about where his head was at on Qrömelife, the rapper’s third solo album, made with long–time producer Pharrell Williams by his side.

There are fairly few places that students from all 12 Penn schools would call iconic. From the trails near the Biopond, to the spreads of College Green and high rise field, and to the arboretum I stillneed to visit: beyond Ivy League acclaim and its preprofessional culture, Penn’s campus distinguishes itself from most others through its highly integrated greenery.

Arts From the New Yorker to the Met, Patrick Bringley shares ‘All the Beauty in the World’ from the eyes of a museum guard. Imagine you wake up tomorrow morning to two offers in your email inbox. The first is a return offer from your investment banking internship. The second? A guard position at an art museum. Given the choice, no one would opt for the latter, and any hesitation at all would feel like a slight against the status, security, and opportunity such an offer represents.

Arts The strange limits of selling ugliness at mass–market scale I collect Fugglers. I have spent countless dollars on these plushes with human–like teeth, vacant eyes, strange body proportions, and, in most cases, plastic “Butt–on holes” on their backs. For Fugglers, ugliness is not a flaw but the essence of the product.

Review Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s controversial new film stages a climate satire, then turns the spotlight on everyone laughing at it. In its opening act, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s new film seems to check all the boxes for another heavy–handed political satire.

Review Robert Pattinson captivates as Chris Hansen, but the film leaves the ethics of ‘To Catch a Predator’ frustratingly underexplored. Is it okay to do the right things for the wrong reasons? That’s the question stuck in my head after walking out of Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, a dramatization of events surrounding Chris Hansen’s hit vigilante television show To Catch a Predator, whose sole premise is luring potential child predators into decoy houses and siccing the police on them.

I’m convinced that the “casual fan” is a fictional character made up by people who don’t use the internet. As someone who’s probably, no, definitely, been on social media far too long (I made my X account when I was 10), nothing brings out the worst in fans like access to the internet. Fans are fickle. The tides of opinions on artists change quickly. One day, everyone loves you; the next, you’re the subject of a 30–tweet thread explaining why you’re a talentless industry plant—whatever that means.

Review On ‘Popstar,’ the singer turns genre–hopping, sensuality, and self–doubt into an exercise in effortless performance. Tinashe opens Popstar with a meditation on sensory deprivation. On “Sunglasses,” she dons blackout shades and noise–cancelling headphones—just like that, the outside world switches off entirely. The song is an obtuse invitation to borrow those headphones for the next forty–some minutes.

Review DreamWorks’ latest feature is a long overdue celebration of Filipino culture. As one of approximately 4.6 million Filipinos in the United States, it’s strange seeing my culture laid out so unapologetically for public consumption in a mainstream Hollywood production. The feeling is novel, and it doesn’t necessarily feel wrong, more so overdue.