Spook City: Based on dispiriting tour, Queen Mary harbors surprisingly few horrors

Los Angeles is supposed to be the City of Stars, but once those stars fade, where do they go? Do they stay behind, forever attached to their final location, spooking guests who dare to enter their domain? Or do they just simply disappear? Each week, Daily Bruin columnist Eli Countryman will set out to discover […]

Second Take: Taylor Swift’s political advocacy engages typically inactive demographic

Nov. 6 – Taylor Swift is ready for it. On Oct. 7, Swift posted on her Instagram, urging her followers to register to vote in the upcoming midterm elections and informing them she would be voting for Democrat Phil Bredesen for the U.S. Senate – a far cry from her apolitical past. Swift joins a […]

Sex, drugs and diamonds: Alumnus’ cutting-edge jewelry caters to celebrity clients

Jason Arasheben crafts jewelry not meant for your grandmother’s eyes. Having founded his store, Jason of Beverly Hills, in 2002, UCLA alumnus Arasheben has become internationally renowned for his outlandish, diamond-embossed jewelry, which often veers into provocative designs unheard of in traditional jewelry-making, featuring themes like sex and drugs, he said. Arasheben’s selective business, now […]

Student musician to shake up genres, instruments in Fowler Out Loud performance

Joseph Aleshaiker was walking along Frenchmen Street, New Orleans, when he got an idea for a song. He then returned home and began to write “Frenchmen Street,” inspired by his experience entering bars along the road, each with different musicians performing different genres. The fourth-year civil engineering student will perform the song as his opener […]

Alumna’s performance art exhibition highlights works of Victor Hugo

“An unspeakable ceiling of shadows; a depth of obscurity that no diver can fathom; a light mingled with the obscurity, a strange somber vanquished light; brightness reduced to powder.” Victor Hugo’s words, found in his work “The Toilers of the Sea,” inspired alumna Darcie Crager to create “Ceiling of Shadows (La voûte des ombres): A […]

Photography exhibit to showcase connections between Israeli and Palestinian women

This post was updated Oct. 25 at 10:42 a.m. Over 100 Israeli and Palestinian women looked directly into one another’s eyes for the first time in their lives during Saskia Keeley’s workshops. Keeley began hosting summer photography workshops for Israeli and Palestinian women in 2016 through a partnership with Roots, an Israeli-Palestinian initiative in the […]

Theater review: ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ impresses with versatile cast and emotionally powerful messages

The national tour of “Dear Evan Hansen” should come with a warning: Bring a box of tissues. The tearjerker follows a high school senior’s struggle with anxiety and suicide. After Evan Hansen’s (Ben Levi Ross) letter to himself ends up in the hands of a school bully, Connor Murphy (Marrick Smith), the letter is mistaken […]