Originally from California, 20-year-old Isella began releasing music in 2020, her style spanning alternative pop, indie, poetry and rock. She gained popularity online in 2023 by posting short-form videos of her breakout song “Hot Gum” — which currently has over 16 million streams on Spotify. The following year, Isella’s music extended well beyond her online fanbase when she opened for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour at Wembley Stadium in London in 2024. Only a month later, she released her EP, “I Can Be Your Mother,” and headlined a five-show tour through California.

A vital factor in the provocative and disconcerting psychological and emotional impact of Isella’s songwriting is her ingenious wordplay, which masterfully strips complex stories of the hypocrisies in the world into its most raw and brutal form. Exemplifying how she settles her songs amidst the discomfort of confrontation with reality, her song “All of Human Knowledge Made Us Dumb” explores individuals’ fleeting attention to real world connections after prolonged exposure to the vastness and ever-racing pace of technology.

Following her performance of this song in London, Isella told NME, “I’m walking around in a sea of phones while singing about technology.” After experiencing this hypocrisy live, she now leans into it further by curating a forced perspective for her viewers.

In recent shows, Isella has asked the crowd to hold up their phone flashlights while she walks through, making direct physical contact with audience members. Commenters, who only watched videos of this experience online, criticized the audience for experiencing their connection with her through their phone as she sang a warning against technology’s grasp on society. Others, however, noticed the intended irony she fostered to situate her viewers within the discomfort of their reality.

Underscoring her unsettling lyrics and messaging, Isella’s graphic aesthetic develops her themes behind her thought-provoking messaging. She played around with the visual of pregnancy for her 2024 EP, “I Can Be Your Mother,” depicting Isella with a baby bump on her back as though carrying the weight of a career. With the pregnancy on her back, the imagery feels inherently discomforting while calling out the burden of society’s demands of women that she addresses throughout the album.

To make these songs, Isella said she draws creative inspiration from poets like Margaret Atwood, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, ’90s alternative rock and her classical violin training. She described how she begins with poetry, later adding musical backing, or she starts with the production and adds phrases from past free writes to create the lyrics. Being a producer herself, her beats are forceful and diverse even within a single song.

In combination with the underlying beats, Isella incorporates piano, guitar and violin into her songs, using four separate instruments in her recent live shows — the latter of which sometimes functioning as a piercing siren between sections of a song.

In her live performances, Isella builds on the unsettling nature of her songs by adding heavy gasps, choking sounds and screams between lyrics. In the same vein, Isella’s quick-paced, frantic movements while performing live mirror the desperation in her lyrics. She traverses the entirety of the stage and climbs surrounding fixtures, striking dynamic imagery — even leaning over the barriers into the crowd and making contact with the faces of audience members. With the combination of these elements, Isella’s fervent stage presence befits her unnerving aesthetic and remains unmatched.

Touring since 2021, Isella started out performing in Australia, winning Musician of the Year at the 2022 Gold Coast Music Awards. In the following two years, Isella opened for Melanie Martinez, Tom Odell and Swift before starting her first world tour, You’ll Understand, Dick., in April 2025.

Isella is set to release her next EP, “I’m Camera,” on May 23. With Isella’s new EP coming soon and her popularity rising, her creative journey into the unsettling hypocrisy of the modern world is only just getting started.

Once I got to class, I could articulate exactly what I wanted. I wanted an “innie” to take the exam for me.

The idea of an “innie” and its opposite, an “outie,” comes from the hit Apple TV sci-fi show “Severance.” In the series, the sinister Lumon Industries has invented a medical procedure known as “severance” that splits the minds of its employees into two. The outie lives their life as usual, except that when they descend the Lumon elevator to the severed floor, they immediately leave it and go home.

At work, their innie takes over, a version of themselves whose entire life is in the office — when they go up the elevator, they immediately walk out onto the severed floor. The procedure is sold as the ultimate solution to work-life balance by creating one person who works and one who doesn’t.

In the show, the innies are described as mere extensions of their outies and are told very little about the outside world. But the characters that we follow, the Macrodata Refinement team, complicate and eventually destroy the notion that innies are the same as their outies by having their own personalities, motivations, loves and desires. The narrative on severance that both the innies and outies hear is a lie, but they cannot communicate for much of the series, as intense surveillance by Lumon prevents information sharing and solidarity between the severed halves.

As the show continues, we get a greater sense of the true intentions of Lumon. We are originally told the technology is less than a decade old, but we learn that it is likely much older. And while severance is presented as used solely by some Lumon employees for a refined work-life balance, Lumon clearly has different goals.

This turns even more eerie when we meet Gabby Arteta, wife of a Lumon-supporting senator who has severed herself to avoid the pain of childbirth. Indeed, as the series continues, the severance process only gets more sinister, and Lumon appears to be seeking a kind of global control.

The show’s theme is that severance is dangerous because it forces an unwilling person, the innie, to work only so the outie can avoid their labor. But what makes it so compelling is that many of us can relate to a desire to not work, making severance seem, while sinister, a desirable method to escape an inescapable part of life.

We do little things to lessen work and make our lives easier, whether we plug essays into ChatGPT or put off studying to engage in things we enjoy more. It is a universal desire to want more for less and to try accomplishing our goals by doing as little work as possible. We want the results of our labor without having to work for it.

As individuals become increasingly alienated from their labor, going from farming the food they eat to manufacturing items they might use to merely inputting text into online databases, we are less connected and have less access to the fruits of our labor, which we increasingly cannot access in our daily lives.

So why wouldn’t you want an escape? Why not take the route that lets you leave the office as soon as you enter and still get paid? Members of the MDR team all have different reasons for getting severed, but all experience missing eight hours of their day before leaving the elevator from the severed floor. But the issue is that this doesn’t solve the character’s alienation and instead forces someone else to perform their labor, and the only way for an innie to quit is to essentially kill themselves since their existence is tied to the severed floor.

But in that escape, you lose much more than just eight hours. It warps your perspective — when your work is easy and you can get away with the bare minimum, any increased hardship or difficulty seems insurmountable. Just as social media warps our idea of what real life is actually like, getting away with the bare minimum, whether through severance or just by not doing your readings, makes actual work seem all the harder.

This is where I’d like to return to my midterm. As I opened the question booklet, I still hoped that by some miracle, I’d open my eyes to a completed test in front of me and bypass taking it. But because this is real life, I didn’t.

Evidently, the exam wasn’t as bad as I thought. It certainly didn’t breeze by, but it wasn’t the arduous task I’d built up in my mind. It was difficult, but it also helped me make connections between topics that I hadn’t thought of before and reminded me of areas that I needed to improve.

But what would I think of the exam if I had been severed and assigned an “innie” to the task? I would still see an impossible task and I would not know my actual strengths and weaknesses, just my perceptions of them. I would not have grown and evolved but remained stagnant and unable to advance my understanding of the subject.

So, the next time you are typing in ChatGPT to give you answers or even just to provide you an easy way to start your paper — or you find yourself in the “Severance” universe and are seriously considering the procedure — pause.

You will not learn from your dependence on technology. It will only leave you as you were, insecure about your abilities and skills. Instead, rely on yourself and the myriad resources you have around you — talk to your friends, go to student support offices or consult online resources created before ChatGPT. Don’t avoid intellectual labor or difficult experiences — they shape who you are.

When I say “at the club,” I do not mean it in a literal sense. Originally coined by an X user surprised that the mother from the “Berenstain Bears” was only 27, it spread as a shorthand way to say that a fictional character or figure wasn’t living out their youth. Instead of being at the aforementioned club, they were raising a family or stressed out about their job, occupied by expectations meant for a later age.

For real people, the “club” is your hobbies, your hangouts, the places that you make your own with your friends. It can be an actual club or a pottery class or book club. What it definitely isn’t is bed-rotting — the act of scrolling in bed for hours at a time.

Let me backtrack to the recent trends I mentioned earlier. While bed-rotting is a term that encapsulates much of the negative cultural trends in recent years, it includes a variety of impulses that people seem to be gravitating toward more and more. Instead of trying to make friends in the real world, you scroll. Instead of hacking away at an essay, you stick it into ChatGPT and make some edits to make it seem more “you.” Instead of writing, reading, laughing, crying, painting, dreaming, drinking or eating, you consume, one eye on a Netflix original and the other on your phone.

These impulses to stay inside and consume media, avoiding the outside world, are usually caused by a sense of dismay at the state of the world that makes them want to just be inside and do nothing, feel nothing. While a single TikTok comment can’t serve as an indictment on the state of the culture, the comment, “I just want to eat, lay in bed, watch my shows and not feel guilty about not wanting to do anything else,” gets close.

We all have those days where we want to do nothing but lay in bed — but ask yourself, “How do I feel after three plus hours scrolling on my phone?” There are days when I will watch the sun set and the sky turn black out of the corner of my eye as I scroll, scroll, scroll, and I’ve never not felt like complete shit afterward. I lose track of time, I wonder what use I got out of the time I spent in my bed and how I could’ve read one of the many books on my shelf or texted my friends to hang out.

But I never think about those things when my eyes are locked on my phone. With something so curated to your interests and dislikes, you become trapped in a world where you are the only real person — everyone and everything else is trying to keep you there to serve you ads and get you to spend money. In the words of TikToker Serena Shahidi, “name a single hobby of yours outside media consumption.” And that is what bed rotting and so much of the culture today fundamentally is — consumption.

The worst part about this constant consumption is how fulfilling it can be. You can be served up exactly what you want and what will keep you on TikTok, X or Instagram for the longest possible time. Yes, it can feel enjoyable or fun sometimes, but it is still an act of consumption that distorts your sense of what the real world actually feels like. When everything online is moderated and controlled, the fact that the real world is awkward, uncomfortable and annoying at times feels like a personal attack. Any sense of vulnerability or cringe feels like a humiliation ritual.

The digital world warps our comfort zones and makes us less tolerant of the little indignities of life. Rather than providing an outlet for life’s challenges, it magnifies them, making it more difficult to sit in the real world with real people who aren’t filtered through digital profiles. The comfort zone social media and slop provide is dangerous and manipulative, all to sell you an escape through consumption that will never satiate your hunger.

Combatting this can’t be a solo mission. The hyper-individualism heightened by social media must be combated by acts of collectivism. You should text your friends to hang out and turn your phone off when they come over. You should go to a meeting for a club you’ve never heard of and introduce yourself.

You have to be the one to reach out, to extend a hand of companionship away from the individualist digital world. Go to the club, make mistakes and regret them the next day, get rejected by someone, go to an event by yourself and make friends there.

High school was a stepping stone, a means of receiving passing grades to get into college. High schoolers spend years enduring late-night study sessions and mental breakdowns, all leading up to that pinnacle moment where they get into their dream school. And now that we have all reached that milestone. What’s next? Do we leave the people we were in high school in the past and start a new life in college, where we can choose new relationships, friends and even a new personality?

In high school, long-lasting relationships were myths and romances were rarely taken seriously. In a world of Snapchat streaks and “he said, she said,” genuine relationships were hard to come by. The gap between high school and college is astronomical, and now, we have the opportunity to form real, meaningful relationships. So I couldn’t help but wonder: Do we follow Carrie’s advice and leave our old selves behind to find whoever we are supposed to become? Do we ever really leave our high school selves behind?

The first time I walked across the Spine, I was excited and nervous to begin a new chapter of my life with the knowledge that I could reinvent myself. But despite the thousands of unfamiliar faces, I couldn’t help but think about the person I was not even a few months ago in a completely different environment. Somehow, that person already felt like a lifetime ago.

When we come to college, we transition from small, 20-person classrooms where participation is encouraged to 400-person classes in Lecture Hall 1. We go from lockers and juggling eight classes each day to barely making it to four classes each week. In a world full of GPAs and Dean’s Lists, it is still equally important to focus on the relationships you make outside of the classroom with the people you find in the massive undergraduate population.

However, in many ways, high school and college are exactly the same. In a world where hook-up culture is encouraged and relationships are still rare, it is almost uncanny how little relationships change between high school and college. We still carry our old friendships and relationships with us, no matter where we go. We still think about those failed Snapchat streaks or fleeting relationships. Deep down, we all hold a piece of who we were before. Can we ever truly leave our high school selves in the past? Can we ever truly start on a clean slate?

Maybe we never really leave our high school selves behind. And maybe it’s vital that in college, we hold on to who we were in the past and the relationships that shaped who we are today. In navigating the turmoils of college, through its ups and downs, the past can shape us instead of holding us back.

Once widely understood in the world of film marketing, the phrase “sex sells” seems to no longer be a guarantee. A recent study by the UCLA Center for Scholars and Storytellers found that 47.5 percent of adolescents surveyed said that “sex isn’t needed for the plot of most TV shows and movies.” Amid wider discourse about the presence of sex on screen, many have attempted to understand why Generation Z has begun to cause cultural shifts regarding the acceptance of sex on screen and the impacts of increased negative attitudes regarding the presence of sex in films.

First, this is not the only area in which Gen Z seems to be trending toward what seems to be ambivalence or negativity toward sex. A recent study found that the number of people who had recent casual sex declined between 2007 and 2017, with men going from 38 to 24 percent and women from 31 to 22 percent. With 29.6 percent of adolescents reporting that they look for relatability and circumstances that mirror their own in the films and TV that they watch, perhaps the increasing irrelevance of sex has spurred Gen Z to reject it from the content we watch.

It is not just that the audiences have changed, though. In the wake of the streaming revolution and COVID-19, which upended film releases, studios are often seen as increasingly wary of projects that do not have universal appeal and cannot play to all audiences, limiting the appearance of sex and sexual desire in films in constant quest for PG-13 ratings. Franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which last July has grossed a total of $29.55 billion across its projects, are increasingly massive parts of the cinema landscape, with massive budgets to boot. In the words of Sunny Teich and Raqi Syed for Salon, “astronomical budgets ensure that these kinds of films must target the largest possible global audience and shy away from controversy.” With Marvel movies and other franchise films being “your primary choice if you want to see something on the big screen” according to Martin Scorsese, you’re increasingly unlikely to find films that are explicit about sex and sexual desire on the big screen.

With increasing ambivalence from studios toward projects that do not have existing intellectual property to rely on to guarantee major profits, a victim of the MCU and other franchises has been the theatrically released mid-budget, implicitly adult, film. Defined as films that “don’t have the extravagance of larger-budget movies or the quirky minimalism of independents,” mid-budget films were once box office staples and incredibly influential, with thrillers like “Silence of the Lambs” (1991), dramas like “Whiplash” (2014) and comedies like “Neighbors” (2014) all generating massive returns on their relatively low budgets as compared to today’s top films. Not all showcased explicit sex, but they were nonetheless adult — the kind of films that your parents would watch once you fell asleep. Films that were deeply invested in sex and its dynamic, erotic thrillers such as “Basic Instinct” and “Fatal Attraction,” still had major box office success. While similar films now often appear on streaming services and are less likely to appear solely in theaters, the act of visiting a cinema to watch a film is decidedly different than picking what’s on your Netflix home screen. The longevity of the mid-budget adult film has also shifted, from maintaining their presence in theaters for several weeks to falling into the content abyss of the home screen of streaming services.

It is not only that the avenues for sex to be represented have narrowed with the loss of mid-budget adult film, but the propagation of incredibly sex-negative and censorship-heavy social media platforms that have made anything that openly features sex or sexually suggestive material seem to be out of the norm. Social media platforms are quick to take down sexually suggestive content, with comments like “wanna have sex [followed by an eggplant, water and peach emoji]” and sexual imagery making your Instagram liable for suspension. With fewer avenues to engage in sexually suggestive material, it seems all the more shocking when sex does appear on screen. This potentially repels people from depictions of sex due to their plain irregularity, preventing audiences from seeing how they change the ways that we interact with cinema and how they impact their respective film plots.

But despite warning signs that we could be in the final days for sex in cinema, multiple sexually explicit recent releases such as “Saltburn” tell us differently. The release of films like “Poor Things,” “How to Have Sex” and “May December” led one film expert to claim that this could be the “sexiest awards season in years.” These films all explicitly show and deal with sex, showing the ways in which sex may appear on screen in a shifting cinema landscape. Sex has been reframed “for a contemporary sensibility. It is now often there to shock, amuse or confuse, rather than to titillate or denote romantic love.” Films that deal with the messiness of sexual desire and its intrigue like “Saltburn” have become cultural phenomenons, inspiring as much fan fiction as horrified reaction videos.

The changes that have occurred in the representation of sex on screen are a testament to their survival. Art has never been stagnant and has always changed in response to developments in society and culture. So just as the creation of cinema changed how the arts represent humanity, cinematic representations of sex will no doubt continue to shift in response to the sensibilities of a post-#MeToo, post-Roe and post-streaming world.