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Riya, Week #5 - What Really is "American" Food?

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When someone says “American food”, what comes to mind? The answer is typically pizza, hamburgers, french fries, hot dogs, or mac and cheese. However, have these foods actually originated in America, or are they just a part of American culture? Pizza originated in Italy, french fries in France/Belguim, mac and cheese in Europe, hot dogs in Germany, and hamburgers also have roots in Germany. These are just a few of the many “American” foods that didn’t actually originate in America. That’s not to say that America did not invent any culturally significant foods, because we certainly have! America has invented potato chips, banana splits, and THE chocolate chip cookie. Image Credit: Baking A Moment If you think about it, many foods in America weren’t created here but are still such a big part of our culture. This illustrates how American cuisine has been influenced by foods from all around the world, creating a mix of traditions. And as America has come to love these foods so much, we have...
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Maxwell Week #5: What's That I Hear?

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I’m not usually one for TV shows and movies, but there is one show that I discovered a few years ago and have never missed an episode of. That show is Dark Winds , which premiered in 2022, but is set in the 1970’s based off of Tony Hillerman’s crime novels on the Navajo reservation in the American Southwest. It centers around the tribal police solving dangerous cases but also dedicates substantial time toward exploring the main characters’ use of the Navajo language as a tool to gather valuable information on the job.     Photo credit: AMC I liked being the center of attention in elementary school, where classmates would come to me asking how English words could be translated and how it would sound in my second language. Most of them at that point had never met someone that could carry anything other than an English conversation, so it naturally piqued their interest to have a chance to hear something different. The big point for them was really the aural part of this: t...
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Riddhi Charan Week #5: The Double Standard of Accents

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  Week 5: The Double Standard of Accents – 10/21/2026 [9:49] Back when I just moved to America, I had a really heavy Indian accent and was made fun of. There was another girl with the same situation as me—immigrating from Spain, however being treated much better than I was, even with the Spanish accent as people thought it was maybe cool.  This made me wonder why people did not like my unique of an accent and why a Spanish accent is seen as more acceptable. Is it because of the way the American media represents us? The way TV Shows portray Indians as stereotypically as they could and represent them as ‘comedians’ when it's really just to make fun of them indirectly. For example, in a kids show called “Hey Jessie”, Ravi, who represents Indian culture, has a deep accent. Luke, who is white himself, sees a guy with an Italian accent getting all the girls and says “Guys with the accent gets them all” however then looks at Ravi and adds “Well, some”.  ...
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Pavan, Week #5 - Amerinited Amerates Amerof America

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Have you ever been to the Gulf of Mexico or Lake Ontario? I hear that they’re beautiful and astonishing places, but according to Google Maps, you can’t visit them. If you live in America and try to view these places by scrolling to their locations, different names appear. You see the Gulf of America and Lake America. Sure, you can still search for their old names manually, but isn’t discovering places by exploring a map part of the fun? In the past year or so, Trump has and continues to call for the change in names of famous locations across America, even if they border other countries as well. Many believe that this is just his way of distracting Americans from other issues. However, he might actually believe that this is beneficial. Who knows? It certainly doesn’t seem like a pressing issue to me, especially when America has much larger issues on its plate, like the fact that the national debt has surpassed $40 trillion. Just the other day, Trump, once again, called for the renaming...
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Arya, Week #5 - The Evolution of the Bay

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I’ve realized I’ve been analyzing a lot of things, unlike some of you who have been getting personal, or at the very least reading someone else getting personal–and that’s inspired me! This is between my dad and me: how we look nothing alike (only my mom disagrees, of course), and how we’ve been treated the same despite this distinction.  Not trying to spill my dads secrets or anything, but being a first-generation half Asian boy in the 1970s made him anything but American. Like him and the three other non-Asians here at the time, he was harassed verbally and physically, and was assumed to be Chinese because no one could even attempt to tell the difference back then. Slurs were just regular words because of the economic recession that led to the intense hate of Asians . Whenever someone looked at him, they would immediately think “ This guy’s not American. ” Especially being Korean in a time post-Korean war, there was a certain type of silence around his seemingly unknown ethnic...
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Anirudh Week 5: The Accent that Doesn’t Exist

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Image credit: Joshua Katz, via Business Insider Growing up, I used to watch a lot of movies and TV shows, and most of them centered around characters from the U.S. I’d watch characters with a “Southern” accent, characters with a “New Jersey” accent, and even those with a “Midwestern” accent. Yet as weird as it seemed, I nor anyone around me seemed to have one of those accents. They just sounded like the boring NPR reporters that would come up on the TV after my parents switched the channels. What I did not know was that this feeling was not unique to me. In truth, the idea of an accent is a matter of recognizing differences in speech relative to your own. And the concept of Standard American English complicates this further. Even though it’s recognized as a standard for formal or institutional writing, we tend to assume that means it lacks any features and is built upon unmarked pronunciation.  Separating institutional formalities from our understanding of a linguistic baseline is...
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Kan—Week 5: The Biggest Protest Song of the 2010s

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When the modern, Tik-Tok-brainrotted child thinks of Kendrick Lamar, they often refer to a Black man grinning eerily at the screen, often screaming “mustard” or being paired with mangoes. However, that was not the case back in the 2010s, when Kendrick Lamar rose into the ranks of hip-hop, cementing himself as one of the greatest rappers in the genre. His influence during this era hardly extended to just music, though—no better song illustrates that than “Alright.” Released as track 7 on his sophomore album To Pimp a Butterfly , “Alright” sees Kendrick Lamar reflecting on his past struggles and announcing his assurance in how, despite the oppression of black people, they are going to be “alright.” In this case, being “alright” does not mean complacency with the current state of race in America; rather, a determination that the US will be able to change its racist ways and move towards a better society. However, without a movement, the message of this track remained a wishful hope by the...
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