Books, Movies, and Plays
Here at Concord Academy, we are very proud of our performing artists. With two mainstage productions a year, a new building in progress, a lively...
Last school year, Whiteboard Girl ’26, the individual who created whiteboard art in the hallway of first floor labs, certainly made a name for herself...
The Illuminae Files by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff is a young adult science fiction novel that follows the main characters, Kady Grant and Ezra Mason. At the start of the story, the two are living on the planet Kar...
While many Concord Academy students are involved in the arts, it is rare for disparate art disciplines to collaborate on an interdisciplinary project. When the opportunity does arise, it is a great learning experience of whic...
In recent weeks, construction has begun on Concord Academy’s ambitious West Campus project, which includes the addition of the new performing arts building dubbed the Centennial Arts Center, or CAC. The CAC and its constructi...
The 2014 movie, Whiplash, is a piece of cinema that almost everyone can agree is worth watching. It boasts a very talented cast: most notably, the main character, Miles Teller, as well as Andrew Neiman and J.K Simmon...
Whether one is a diehard theater kid, a mild musical enjoyer, or a tolerator at most, Alexander Hamilton is now a household name. This is arguably due to Hamilton, the 2015 hip-hop rap musical. While most may only se...
Until recently, I have never been a big fan of science fiction stories. Oftentimes, they follow the same basic storyline without much variation. Our young protagonist and their battle-hardened mentor set off across the cosmos...
The Oscars has announced this year’s nominations. While many prominent film creators are eagerly awaiting the results, which will be broadcasted live on March 12, there are many masterpieces that have been overlooked. My awar...
The body as neither altar nor afterthought; the spirit as neither savior nor specimen. These are the relations that define much of Leila Chatti’s debut poetry collection, Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), in which ...
The Banshees of Inshirin is simple on the surface. Set on a remote Irish island, it is the story of a dull-but-kind man, Pádraic (Colin Farrell), whose best friend, Colm (Brendan Gleeson) su...
I have read many books. Most of them are forgettable—fun at the time, but not very meaningful to me. Others stay with me. Orbiting Jupiter is in the second category. Its beauty is in its simplicity. I have never forg...
On Wednesday, January 11, the Concord Academy community was treated with the work from the students in the film program during the fall semester. Projects from Intro to Film, Intro to Animation, and Intermediate Animation wer...
Over CA’s winter break, many found themselves glued to the TV as the twists and turns of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery played out before them. Without any spoilers, the basic plot is as follows: a powerful tech t...
On Friday, January 13, from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., What’s On Your Mind (WOYM), a student-run playwriting club, held a play festival in the Performing Arts Center. This event featured eleven five to ten minute plays written a...
When someone hears the claim that “we live in a simulation,” they would probably picture the kind of simulation that is portrayed in The Matrix or Rick and Morty: an ultra-advanced form of digitalized virtua...
”We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.”
Peter Weir’s smart and stunning The Truman Show is not just a simple movie, it is one of those in...
As shadows clad in flowing suits and beaked masks emerged from a stage pitched into darkness only interrupted by vibrant lights, audience members quietened in anticipation for the Concord Academy Dance Project: Dark Befor...
China implements strict censorship which impedes the creation of otherwise preeminent artworks. The film industry, in particular, is encroached on extensively in this way. Any scene that may be interpreted as politically infl...
When I first watched The Sixth Sense, a horror thriller released in 1999, the twist at the end of the film was shocking to me. It was also the only logical explanation for the inexplicable moments throughout the film...
“History has failed us, but no matter.” Min Jin Lee opens Pachinko with a puzzlingly simple statement that ultimately encapsulates the powerful five-generation saga that unfolds within the book’s pages.
The new gallery spaces are about to open up for students and faculty members across the hallways in the main building. A variety of visual art forms such as photography, painting, drawing will be displayed.
Trigger Warning: Suicide is mentioned in this article.
How does a...
Have you ever had the urge to learn how to fight… safely? Concord Academy’s Stage Combat Workshops gave CA students just this opportunity. Spread over two weekends, these workshops allowed both the general community and those...
There comes a point in time every year when some interaction or social media scrolling will prompt the reaction: “Wait, the Emmys are tonight?” This year that day was September 12. At 8:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time the acade...
“Where is Jessica Hyde?”
This is not a question. It is a threat. A promise. A clue. It is an invitation into a tangled web of mystery and hidden stories and conspiracy. It ...
Franchise films are omnipresent. I am certainly guilty of occasionally binging Marvel movies myself. However, the industry has come to a point where these franchise films, mass-produced by giant corporations, are pushing cine...
On Sunday, September 11, Concord Academy hosted the Concord Chamber Music Society’s (CCMS) first in-person performance back since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The performance, featuring world-class musicians David ...
At the beginning of the summer, I was wandering around my town’s bookstore in search of a book that would fit some very particular criteria: The book needed to be small and lightweight while still having a hardcover so that i...
Multiverses are hard to deliver, and they are not exactly my cup of tea. Characters lose true agency; their growth and development arcs are diminished, and the metaphorical concept once marked by infinite possibilities begins...
In the final months leading up to summer of 2022, Will Liu ’24 made a spectacular entrance into the realm of experimental rock. “The Happiness Incident,” Will’s debut album containing nine meticulously crafted songs, is avail...
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
So begins Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice...
With nearly seventy cumulative visual and performing arts offerings, the Concord Academy arts program gives students the opportunity to learn at all levels. Concord Academy’s talented staff of arts teachers create fun and eng...
The Arts Council at Concord Academy consists of 6 students chosen by faculty members from the Performing and Visual arts departments, and members of the current year’s council. The 2022-2023 Arts Council will consist of 3 jun...
On the weekend of April 30, Concord Academy's Performing Arts Department showcased another masterful performance with its spring mainstage, The Cradle Will Rock.
W...
My older sister is excellent at picking out books. So in March, when she handed me the 2020 book Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies, I decided to give i...
This May, the bustling spring performing arts season at Concord Academy continues the celebration of student-driven productions through Directors’ Workshop. As CA’s highest level theater course, this semester-long opportunity...
The House is a cozy kind of creepy. Unlike conventional horror films, The House relies much less on cheap jump scares, rather giving you nightmares through pure psychological horror. This is no ordinary feat...
Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, published in 1988, is a novel about the experience of Elaine Risley, who goes back to her hometown Toronto and confronts (or rather, is haunted by) memories of her family, her childhood b...
A few years ago, I stumbled upon Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam, Jr. while browsing a local bookstore. As someone who likes science and astrophysics, the title intrigued me and I was sold after reading the blurb on the ...
As audience members ascended the central stairway of the Student Health and Athletic Center (SHAC) Saturday, February 26, evening, warmly-lit fairy lights hovering over the balcony illuminated their presence, transforming the...
“It is a restless moment. She has kept her head lowered … to give him a chance to come closer. But he could not, for lack of courage. She turns and walks away.” These are the starting words of the cinematic masterpiece that i...
The current pandemic has had a tremendous impact on musicians, but none have been affected more than wind instrument players. In the fall, wind ensembles were able to practice outdoors where masking was not enforced. After mu...
Mon Oncle is a 1958 French comedy film by Jacques Tati. It was the first of Tati’s films to be released in color and is almost entirely without dialogue. The plot follows an old-fashioned, eccentric, and charismatic ...
At the beginning of each spring semester, the Visual Arts Department at Concord Academy extends an invitation to the campus community for the Fall Art Show, a celebration of student artworks produced during studio courses fro...
On Friday the fourth, the February Chamber Music Concert was held in the chapel. The concert was a success, with Concord Academy students, faculty members, and parents filling the audience seats. Several student ensembles had...
Louise Glück’s 2014 poetry collection Faithful and Virtuous Night starts with a poem called “parable” that introduces the narrator’s understanding of aging and its effects on two seemingly different people. She...
Let’s get crafty! In this video series, I will be teaching you how to knit one of my favorite scarves. In each video, I will cover one of the basics of knitting. In this first episode, you will learn how to cast on and use th...
Concord Academy’s winter mainstage, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, provided the community with a fast-moving and gripping production like no other before. This story, chronicled by Moisés Kaufman, ...
The Third Pole by Mark Synnott is a gripping story of mystery and discovery on the top of the world. Synnott tells the harrowing story of his own and others’ adventures on Mount Everest in 2019, going into detail abo...
One Saturday night, while browsing Amazon Prime Video for a movie to watch, I stumbled across Three Identical Strangers, and knew right away that I had to watch it.
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To me, the hardest part of reading is starting and ending, which is why I decided to read Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Beginning this novel is hard, but no harder than starting a short story, and with 800 pages, the...
The lights dimmed in Concord Academy’s Performing Arts Center as a huddling group dressed in grey tones readied to give a show. It was the late evening of Friday, December 3, and CA’s What’s On Your Mind (WOYM) Playwriting Pr...
After a year-and-a-half-long hiatus, the Concord Academy Dance Project made its triumphant return to the studio. Last year’s edited videos were certainly entertaining, but witnessing each dancer imbue the stage into pure emot...
Wes Anderson’s latest movie, The French Dispatch, opened October 22 in selected theaters across the US after premiering at Cannes. The acclaimed director of The Royal Tenenbaums and Fantastic Mr. Fox
This fall, Andrew Stevens has launched a monster movie night film series, in tandem with his elective English class, “Monsters in Literature.” The series, like the class, explores a variety of different monsters and their dif...
In Fredrik Backman’s novel Anxious People, a bank robbery gone wrong forces the perpetrator to flee into an apartment open house, turning the home viewing into a hostage crisis. Per the title, the hostages are anxiou...
At its best, Dave Chappelle’s standup is as good as comedy can get. Both hilarious and insightful, Chappelle established his place at the top of the stand-up ladder with his Netflix specials. The specials were extremely contr...
No Time To Die was finally released in the United States on October 8, 2021, and marked Daniel Craig’s final contribution to the long-running series of James Bond. After three release date changes due to COVID-19, th...
On Friday, October 8th, the Performing Arts Department presented the annual showcase: Works in Progress. The show has historically taken place on family weekend in the PAC after a community dinner in the SHAC. This year the e...
Fall is in the air at Concord Academy: the trees are changing color, students are clad in their flannels and light jackets, and people are beginning to enjoy their pumpkin spice lattes. Speaking of pumpkins, let’s get crafty!...
As the college application season continues, many seniors interested in the visual arts have begun to look into their art supplements and portfolios. Whether it’s going to an art school, or taking a visual arts minor or certi...
Before I first stumbled upon The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell by Robert Dugoni, I had only the vaguest idea of what ocular albinism was. I knew little beyond the words ocular, meaning related to the eyes, and albin...
The Card Counter, written and directed by Paul Schrader, was released on September 10th, 2021. Schrader is widely known for creating intense films such as Taxi Driver and First Reformed. The protago...
I had never heard of Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, until I signed for Jonathan Wertheim’s ‘Why Comics?” class, where the book served as the main text of the second STAC. Before I started reading it, I had...
On May 7, following students’ first week of STAC 6, the Concord Academy community was treated with a virtual music concert, showcasing the diverse range of works that students in the Performing Arts Department have been rehea...
The unprecedented circumstances of the pandemic have taken a toll on the performing arts community. However, the CA community has been doing an excellent job of optimizing the situation. This spring, CA students and faculty m...
CAFE, Concord Academy Fashion Enthusiasts, is a club led by Carter Wood ’22 and Zoe Perlis ’22. This year, the club has produced an online magazine called Hue. The online magazine ha...
The Student Arts Council is an official school council, with its members selected by the art department faculty from a pool of applicants. Different from the art club, which provides a space for artists to delve into various ...
Emma Benardete ’21, the dramaturg for both shows in Concord Academy’s advanced elective Directors’ Workshop, is here to discuss the course and introduce The Mad Ones and Proof. Let’...
On Wednesday, February 10th, Concord Academy held the Fall Art Show, exhibiting students’ art pieces for their peers, teachers, and parents to see. What does this opportunity mean for student artists? Today, Roger Ge 21’, a ...
You may have already heard the title Friday Night Lights before. After all, it is the title of both a movie and an NBC television series that ran from the mid to late 2000s. But both projects took their name from, an...
“Do I look welcoming to you?” This is how Fran Lebowitz would respond to you if you are a tourist who’s standing on the street, holding a map, and asking her the directions to Times Square. The brilliant humorist is featured ...
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Concord Academy has always been a school built on both academics and arts. However, during the...
THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE 1991 FILM The Silence of the Lambs
Hello, Cla...
OJ Slaughter is a Black Queer artist who uses photography as their preferred medium of expression. Their work has been included in many prominent magazines including Vogue Italia, Time Magazine, and Boston Art Re...
The coronavirus pandemic has changed Concord Academy’s courses drastically. Visual arts classes are among the ones that had to change the most. Before the pandemic, visual arts classes at CA required lots of in-person interac...
2020 was an odd year for movies. Cinemas closed; festivals were canceled; an entire world of film shifted virtual. Almost every anticipated production to be released in 2020 was halted, such as Wes Anderson’s The French D...
One rarely finds a book review of a reference book. The review industry holds a stigma against them, as the modern conception of “reference book” has been pervaded by the dread of classrooms: textbooks. Though I hold no love ...
Citizen Kane is one of the most important and influential films in American history. Whether you find its story exhilarating to watch or are bored to death by it (I tend to belong to the latter group), its use of dee...
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CA’s fashion club CAFE has in recent months created its website, HUE. CAFE’s Co-Head, Carter Wood ’22, described HUE as a platform used to explore CA’s style and to lead discussions about th...
In previous years at Concord Academy, there would be countless performing arts productions, ranging from music performances in the chapel, mainstage productions in the PAC, to Dance Project shows in the dance studio. However,...
Despite the current circumstances brought by the pandemic, the Concord Academy Performing Arts Department is still putting on a Winter Mainstage performance. Zachary Tung ’22, who plays a role in the upcoming...
As customers nowadays fight for food and toilet paper in grocery stores all over the world, the Spanish sci-fi movie The Platform illustrates a much darker truth lurking beneath the phenomenon of resource distributio...
This time last year, the cast and crew of A Midsummer Night’s Dream were deep in production. Due to COVID-19, Concord Academy’s long standing tradition of a fall and winter mainstage was altered. This year, the perfo...
On October 31, 2020, Sir Sean Connery was found dead in Nassau in the Bahamas. After struggling with dementia for years, the 90-year old actor passed away in his sleep. The Scottish actor was famed for being the first of many...
The 2016 movie American Honey follows Star, played by Sasha Lane, and a band of teens as they travel the United States selling magazine subscriptions door to door. Directed by Andrea Arnold, the seemingly pointless m...
With the holiday season approaching quickly, I want to share some of my grandmother’s favorite recipes. She sent me two of her signature recipes, which she makes for our family every year. Both of them were published in B...
This October, Concord Academy Fashion Enthusiasts (CAFE) released their inaugural publication, Hue. The online fashion magazine is devoted to trend analysis, sustainability, and the multidimensionality of fashion. CA...
As some students and faculty members return to campus, many people are wondering what is going to happen with clubs and affinity groups. One such club is the Chameleon, Concord Academy’s literary magazine. It’s responsible fo...
August 20th marked the reopening of movie theaters in various states across the U.S. Theaters initially played it safe, showing almost exclusively classic films, like Grease and The Empire Strikes Back. Then...
In an era with rapid economic and technological growths, many of us have never witnessed, or even been able to imagine, events like the epidemics recorded in historical documents. That all changed this year when the horror of...
On Saturday, October 24, Concord Academy had an Arts Day, an on-campus event for community members to participate in various art and crafts stations including pumpkin carving, pumpkin and rock painting, mural painting, and si...
This quick and easy snacking cake is perfect for autumnal weather, and for using up all the beautiful fall apples you may have on hand. This cake is perfect for dessert, a morning snack, or for recreating the Break Cake rush....
Horror terrifies me. I try to avoid it at almost any cost, yet time after time I find myself returning to my bookshelf to sneak another Stephen King novel. The concepts within the books freak me out, but the writing itself is...
Gish Jen, the acclaimed author of six published books and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, visited the Concord Public Library on Thursday, October 26, to speak at the Concord Festival of Authors.
On the weekend of November 17 and 18, the Concord Academy Performing Arts department staged performances of the Fall Mainstage, Urinetown. Urinetown, a 2001 Tony-winning musical, centers around a town in which the right to us...
Boston may be known for its incredible food and world-renowned educational institutes, but it has also become a vibrant fashion hub. One of many ways the fashion industry has started to flourish in this city was the 2017 Bost...
It is difficult to fully define a culture and its language through one medium; its literature provides only an academic standpoint on a culture, while its music usually doesn’t touch on every aspect of it. Film, however, is a...