Vivid shots of the rust-colored ruins of Jewish-Moroccan villages lit up Choi Auditorium Tuesday, Feb. 10 as students gathered to view the documentary "They Were Promised the Sea." The barren images reinforced the emptiness pervading the film's environment and the loss of Morocco’s Jews, who answered the Zionists' call to return to Israel en masse. The documentary follows the story...

Easily overlooked at the busy intersection of Hollywood and Vermont in Los Feliz, architect Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House is a hidden gem within Los Angeles. Located atop Olive Hill in Barnsdall Art Park, the anonymity of the space works for the Wright House, as residents of Los Angeles often visit to seek refuge from the city below. But this...

Short films are short for a reason. They are to cinema what poetry is to literature; rather than delving into a complex narrative, they explore a simple concept in depth. This year's Academy Award nominations for the Live Action Short category represent the best fictional films under 40 minutes from 2014. The British short film "The Phone Call" portrays one...

There is nothing more satisfying than face-to-face smack talk. The rise of online gaming has made it easier than ever to play games with other people, but there will always be a space in gamers' hearts for the local multiplayer experiences we cherished as kids. Good news: local multiplayer is making a comeback. These cheap indie titles will scratch that...

Occidental's campus and its surrounding neighborhood frequently host film crews that turn the suburbs of Los Angeles into places ranging from Chicago ("Parenthood") to Spain ("Arrested Development"). "Togetherness," the latest show in HBO's Sunday night line-up, is both shot and set in Eagle Rock. "Togetherness" centers around a young couple, the Piersons, trying to navigate their way through adulthood as...

Since the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January, the media has been saturated with discussions about Islam's representation in popular culture. With a new exhibit entitled Islamic Art Now, LACMA is joining that conversation, and showing the world how contemporary Islamic artists are pushing the boundaries of what is accepted in the world of Islamic art, from the Middle East and...

This winter break, video games allowed me to spend time with friends from all over the world. Gaming is inherently social; through multi-player games and online platforms, I've shared my hobby with dozens of gamers, both in-person and online. The old perception of gaming as a solitary pursuit seems viciously inaccurate. Some of my most memorable weekends have involved gaming...

Many on Occidental's campus may have witnessed one particular student juggling to his heart's content and unicycling through the Quad. Ian Convy, a first-year who hails from Kingston, Washington, spends his free time honing his circus skills, much to the amazement of other students."I realized [juggling] is a good way to waste some time, a good thing to put some...

My trip to the Rewa district, Madhya Pradesh, is the closest I have ever come to celebrity status. On Monday, my stoic translator and I hopped off an overnight train in Rewa district to continue our work for CGNet Swara, an organization that recently started a mobile-phone based news forum. My mission is to study the forum's usage in the...

As four other students and I walked into the large, stone women’s police station in Dharamshala, we immediately remarked on the smell of fresh paint. The building was clearly old, and resembled what I imagine a medieval dungeon looked like. From the inside and out, nothing indicated the building’s purpose. We walked down a dark, featureless hallway and entered a...