Arts & Culture | Conversatori

Curating Nostalgia in Uncertain Times

Modern art museums are embracing nostalgia as a response to cultural uncertainty, generational shifts, and emotional fatigue. By looking backward, they offer comfort, accessibility, and a way to engage difficult histories without alienating audiences. Nostalgia isn’t a retreat from innovation—it’s a strategy for reconnecting people to art, memory, and meaning in unstable times. You’ll hear this topic surface the way most art conversations do now: casually, over coffee, after someone mentions a museum exhibit that felt “weirdly comforting,” or when a friend posts photos of an installation that looks suspiciously like a childhood bedroom circa 1997. Modern art museums’ fascination with nostalgia comes up because people are noticing a pattern—retro fonts, archival photos, analog tech, and emotionally warm references replacing the cold futurism museums once prized. It’s not just an aesthetic trend; it’s a cultural mood shift you can feel even if you don’t have a

Elizabeth Cochran

Ballet’s Revival into the New Golden Age

After years of digital isolation and social chaos, modern audiences are rediscovering a profound need for the escapism and order found in classical ballet. This "New Golden Age" reflects a psychological shift away from gritty realism toward the pursuit of symmetry, physical excellence, and transcendent beauty. By blending traditional grandeur with modern inclusivity, the ballet world is seeing a historic surge in relevance and attendance. For decades, the world of contemporary dance seemed locked in a cycle of deconstruction. Choreographers favored raw, industrial aesthetics, often stripping away the "veneer" of classical grace to showcase grit, anxiety, and the harsh realities of the human condition. While intellectually stimulating, this era often left the traditional grandeur of ballet gathering dust in the wings. However, a widely remarked upon shift has occurred in the wake of the global pandemic. We are witnessing a resurgence—a "New Golden Age"—where audiences are…

Elizabeth Cochran

Holiday Etiquette 2025: How to Be All-Inclusive and Culturally Aware

Holiday Etiquette 2025 emphasizes inclusivity through awareness, language, and thoughtful consideration of diverse cultural and religious traditions—all important things to remind loved ones of in conversation. Rather than mastering every custom, the goal is to create spaces—social, professional, and digital—where no one feels assumed, pressured, or erased. In a pluralistic world, good holiday manners are less about what you celebrate and more about how you make others feel. The modern holiday season is not a single story told in tinsel and evergreen. It’s a collage—of Christmas and Hanukkah, Diwali and Kwanzaa, Lunar New Year anticipation, Eid memories, secular celebrations, and people who simply enjoy the time off—and it is in good taste to sit down with family members and discuss inclusive etiquette to avoid faux pas. Holiday etiquette in 2025 starts with recognizing that not everyone is celebrating the same thing, or celebrating at all, and that this difference is not a…

Amanda Hicok

Inside the White House Christmas: What This Year’s Decor Really Says About American Politics

If there’s a concluding line in all of this, it’s that White House holiday décor will always be two things at once: a sincere attempt at tradition and a carefully choreographed piece of public storytelling. The 2025 theme tries to wrap both together—comfort and commemoration, spectacle and home—leaving the public to decide which thread feels truer. Walk the virtual tour, look at the ornaments, and you’ll find craft, contradiction, and the comfortable politics of a house trying to feel like a home. 2025 — A general view of multiple Christmas trees in the Grand Foyer and Blue Room, captured during the 2025 advance tour. Photo credit: Ron Sachs / CNP / INSTARimages via Reuters.

Amanda Hicok

Is Cancel Culture Helpful or Harmful?

Cancel culture can drive accountability and amplify marginalized voices, but it also risks disproportionate backlash and mob mentality. Its effects on mental health, power dynamics, and redemption complicate its moral clarity. In the end, its value depends on whether society wields it thoughtfully or impulsively. Cancel culture is the online and real-world practice of publicly calling out—and often boycotting—people or organizations for behavior considered offensive, harmful, or unacceptable. The culture has become the digital equivalent of a courtroom where everyone’s guilty until proven innocent—or at least until the trending hashtag dies down. Social media gives ordinary people the power to hold celebrities, corporations, and even neighbors accountable in ways that weren’t possible before. There’s a certain thrill in seeing someone finally face consequences for years of careless or harmful behavior.

Amanda Hicok

Holiday Etiquette in 2025: What’s Actually Rude Now?

Holiday etiquette in 2025 revolves around respecting people’s time, energy, and boundaries rather than following old formalities. From RSVPs and photo consent to thoughtful gifts and emotional presence, the new rules are grounded in simple consideration. If you want to stay polite this season, be aware, be intentional, and show up with kindness (and maybe a bottle of wine). If the holidays once felt like a polite choreography—napkin rings, hostess gifts, predictable small talk—2025 has turned them into a social escape room with new rules every year. We’re all navigating shifting expectations, unspoken boundaries, and the quiet panic of trying not to offend anyone while also remembering who’s vegan now. The good news? The bar has moved from perfection to simple awareness.

Amanda Hicok

When Museum Experiences Are Designed for Instagram

Instagram museums are designed with photo-taking in mind, rendering each cultural space into a curated backdrop idealized for social media visibility. These spaces speak to a larger cultural turn toward experiences that prioritize aesthetics, identity performance, and sharability over any appeal to depth or contemplation. In the end, the trend shows a modern culture that prizes first what can be captured, posted, and admired online. Once upon a time, museums were dimly lit sanctuaries where you tiptoed, whispered, and spent a suspicious amount of time staring at oil paintings you didn't totally understand. Today, however, the rise of the "Instagram museum" has flipped that script: now experiences are built not for contemplation, but for documentation—carefully engineered for perfect lighting, maximum color saturation, and instant virality. We've moved from absorbing culture to curating it.

Amanda Hicok

The Lost Intimacy of Pre-Digital Communication

Prior to the digital era, communication had an emotional weight to it because it required effort, time, and physical presence—from handwritten letters to ritualized phone calls. Instant messaging has now replaced the anticipation and intimacy of such communication with efficiency and abundance, making us connected at all times but seldom touched. And we can only hope to recover that lost depth by re-introducing intention and slowness into how we communicate, valuing words as acts of care rather than convenience.

Amanda Hicok

The Play Instinct: Why Adults Still Need to Pretend

Playing doesn't disappear in adulthood: it evolves into imagination, creativity, and social performance. Pretending lets adults rehearse courage, empathy, and innovation without real-world risk. The ability to play isn't childish; it's the secret architecture of resilience, invention, and emotional depth. We tend to think of play as something we grow out of, an activity confined to sandboxes, stuffed animals, and recess. But the impulse to play doesn't disappear with age; it just camouflages itself in adult disguises. The very impulse that led us to create worlds with blocks evolves into decorating homes, trying on identities in digital worlds, or getting lost in fantasy novels and weekend hobbies. Beneath the veneer of adulthood, the human imagination never stops asking the same question it did in childhood: What if?

Amanda Hicok

Why We're Drawn to What Disturbs Us

This essay explores the human penchant for discomfort-from disturbing art to tragic media. It does so by showing that unease acts like a mirror to truth, empathy, and growth that comfort suppresses. In a world obsessed with ease, discomfort is one of the last authentic experiences that keeps us emotionally and morally awake. Humans have an uncanny attraction to discomfort. We click on true crime documentaries, devour dystopian novels, and hang around tragic news headlines, as though some invisible hand compels us to do so. The paradox behind this—our fascination with what unsettles us—reveals something deep about our psychology: we seek disturbance for reasons not limited to feeling fear but to feeling alive. Discomfort is the shock that reminds us our emotions are still intact in an age dulled by convenience.

Amanda Hicok

The New Grammar of Global Romance

Globalization has remade love as felt and expressed, mixing languages, cultures, and emotional norms into a living global language of love. Technology facilitates cross-border intimacy but also transmits and markets it. Multilingual love encourages empathy, imagination, and self-understanding amidst misunderstandings and cultural incompatibilities. Ultimately, globalization makes romance an act of translation—testimony that love, as language, never stops evolving. In an age where dating sites come equipped with translators and "I love you" can be sent time zones apart, love is global. The age-old struggle of understanding one another in love has become an entirely new ball game—no longer just emotional but linguistic, cultural, and computational. Globalization has not merely made us diverse in whom we love, but in how we declare it. From emoji flirtations to blended slang born of multilingual couples, modern romance is a petri dish of linguistic change.

Amanda Hicok

The Afterlife of Ancient Myths in Pop Culture

Ancient myths don’t fade; they mutate into new forms across comics, films, games, and memes. Pop culture reshapes gods, monsters, and heroes into accessible archetypes while still preserving their core themes of identity, fate, and transcendence. Their afterlife shows that myths remain vital because they can be endlessly remixed without ever losing their power. There’s a peculiar immortality reserved for myths. While empires have crumbled and languages slipped into extinction, stories of capricious gods, heroic mortals, and vengeful monsters keep finding new breath. Ancient myths do not stay buried in dusty tomes; they rise, again and again, reborn in comics, blockbusters, video games, and even memes. Pop culture, with its ravenous appetite for familiar yet malleable material, thrives on these myths’ elasticity. They are ancient, but never outdated.

Amanda Hicok

From Track to Trend

Athletic wear has jogged far past the gym, sprinting into brunches, offices, and even luxury runways. What started as sweat-wicking practicality now doubles as social signaling, wellness branding, and status symbol. In the end, leggings and sneakers prove that fashion’s true finish line is comfort—dressed up just enough to look intentional. Athletic wear used to live strictly in locker rooms and gyms, its purpose as straightforward as a stopwatch: stretch, breathe, wick sweat, repeat. Yet in recent decades, sneakers have walked far beyond the treadmill, yoga pants have strolled into brunch, and track jackets have slipped effortlessly into office attire. The boundary between performance and polish has blurred so thoroughly that what once screamed “team practice” now whispers “street style.”

Amanda Hicok

Digital Collage: How Social Media Is Rewriting Visual Art

Digital collage has become the defining visual language of social media, thriving on speed, accessibility, and the endless archive of online images. It blurs boundaries between art and content, while raising fresh debates about ownership, authorship, and authenticity. Both a tool for protest and a marketing aesthetic, collage reflects our fragmented digital lives, where the scroll itself feels like an infinite artwork. In this way, social media hasn’t just hosted collage—it has transformed how we see, share, and make art. The art of collage has always thrived on remixing—taking fragments from one context and fusing them into another. In the analog days, this meant scissors, glue, and a keen eye for composition. Today, that same instinct lives online, but with far sharper tools: Photoshop, Canva, Instagram filters, TikTok edits. Digital collage, once a niche practice for graphic designers, has become the unofficial aesthetic of social media, where the cut-and-paste impulse has…

Amanda Hicok

Living the Exhibit

Experiential museums are transforming cultural spaces from hushed galleries into immersive environments where visitors can step inside the art itself. Fueled by technology, social media, and a growing desire for shared experiences, they blur the lines between education, entertainment, and spectacle. While critics question their seriousness, their popularity shows a cultural shift toward valuing sensation, play, and memory as much as tradition. Einsgoeins, Mobile-App-for-interactive-Installations, CC BY-SA 4.0

Amanda Hicok

The Lost Art of Marginalia

Marginalia, the practice of writing notes in the margins of books, once transformed reading into a conversation between author, text, and reader. Its decline reflects our fast-paced, digital-first culture, where efficiency trumps intimacy. Yet traces of marginalia persist in used books, academic studies, and even digital annotation platforms, reminding us of its enduring value. To revive marginalia is to reclaim reading as an active, personal, and communal art. Once upon a time, books were not pristine objects meant to be displayed in untouched perfection. They were living, breathing companions. Readers scrawled notes, circled phrases, drew arrows, and sometimes even argued with the author in the margins. These handwritten interventions—known as marginalia—were more than annotations; they were dialogues across time. A book without marks was incomplete, like a conversation that never left the throat.

Amanda Hicok

Architecture as Social Commentary

Architecture is not just functional but a form of social commentary, shaping and reflecting the values, ideals, and contradictions of its time. From Gothic cathedrals to modernist skyscrapers, from Brutalism to green design, buildings communicate political, cultural, and moral messages. They remind us that every city is not just built but argued into existence, a living dialogue between stone and society. Diliff, Wells Cathedral West Front Exterior, UK - Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0

Amanda Hicok

Fanfiction as Folk Literature

Fanfiction can be understood as a modern form of folk literature, thriving through communal authorship, archetypal storytelling, and participatory performance. Like folktales, it resists singular ownership and evolves through constant retelling across digital village squares. Far from trivial, fanfiction continues humanity’s oldest tradition of collective storytelling in new, democratic forms. Mingle Media TV, Shailene Woodley March 18, 2014, CC BY-SA 2.0 From the book and movie series Divergent.

Amanda Hicok

Meet the Philosopher: Epicurus

Epicurus, often misunderstood as a hedonist, taught that true happiness comes from simplicity, friendship, and freedom from fear. He sought to dissolve humanity’s greatest anxieties—death, the gods, and desire—through reason and moderation. His philosophy remains a timeless reminder that contentment lies not in abundance, but in learning to value less. Agostino Scilla, Agostino Scilla. The philosopher Epicurus, CC BY-SA 4.0

Amanda Hicok

Classic Book — Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote is both a parody of medieval romances and a profound meditation on human imagination. The story follows Alonso Quixano, who rebrands himself as Don Quixote and sets out as a knight-errant with his squire, Sancho Panza, blurring the line between folly and vision. Through satire, metafiction, and unforgettable characters, Cervantes critiques a world that has outgrown chivalry yet still longs for ideals. More than four centuries later, Don Quixote endures as a symbol of both the madness and necessity of dreaming against reality. Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, first published in two parts (1605 and 1615), is often considered the first modern novel. Written in Spain during the waning years of the Golden Age, it follows the misadventures of Alonso Quixano, a middle-aged man who, after reading too many chivalric romances, reinvents himself as the knight-errant Don Quixote de la Mancha. Armed with outdated armor, a scrawny horse named Rocinante, and…

Amanda Hicok

Who is Banksy?

Banksy is an anonymous street artist whose politically charged stenciled works and high-profile stunts have made him a global cultural icon. His refusal to reveal his identity has fueled speculation and myth-making, shifting focus to the power of his art rather than the artist himself. By blending satire, spectacle, and secrecy, Banksy has become less a person than a phenomenon, embodying both rebellion and paradox within the art world. Dominic Robinson from Bristol, UK, Banksy Girl and Heart Balloon (2840632113), CC BY-SA 2.0

Amanda Hicok

Opera’s Comeback

Opera, long dismissed as elitist and outdated, is staging a surprising comeback by embracing technology, contemporary themes, and global audiences. From live HD broadcasts to reimagined productions tackling modern issues, the art form has found new relevance while courting younger, more diverse crowds. Its revival is less about nostalgia and more about proving that opera’s mix of spectacle and raw human emotion remains timeless. Anastasiia Mantach, NOVA OPERA Artists after performance of opera-requiem IYOV in National Opera House of Ukraine, CC BY-SA 2.0

Amanda Hicok

Monuments, Memory, and Meaning

Public monuments are civic narratives cast in stone, bronze, or glass, shaping what societies choose to honor and remember. Their artistry lies in symbolism, scale, and placement, yet their permanence often collides with shifting cultural values. The most enduring monuments are those that remain open to reinterpretation, serving as mirrors of evolving collective memory. Dean Franklin, Dean Franklin - 06.04.03 Mount Rushmore Monument (by-sa), CC BY 2.0

Amanda Hicok

The Death and Rebirth of the Vinyl Record

Vinyl records, once the dominant music format, declined sharply after the rise of CDs and later digital streaming, becoming nearly obsolete by the early 2000s. Their recent revival stems from a cultural craving for tangibility, ritual, and design, alongside a rejection of the frictionless digital experience. Today, vinyl thrives as a niche luxury and statement of identity, blending nostalgia with contemporary marketing. Its rebirth underscores the enduring appeal of formats that demand time, attention, and physical presence. BorisCarter1980, Record cabinet designed to play more vinyl, CC BY-SA 4.0

Amanda Hicok