The main message of the text is that Gen Z’s fear of being “cringe” – their need to appear ironically detached and effortlessly cool – is a self-imposed prison that stops them from living sincerely. Burnard argues that both millennials and Gen Z are equally “cringe”, and that Gen Z would be freer and happier if they stopped policing earnestness and embraced their own uncoolness, because “to be cringe is to be free”.

Burnard reinforces her message through a strikingly informal, colloquial register saturated with generational slang and neologisms. Words like “cheugy”, “aura-farming” and “skibidi toilet” perform the very fluency in internet culture she describes, letting her speak to Gen Z as an insider rather than a critic. This authentic voice makes her argument feel like friendly advice instead of a lecture.

Her first-person perspective and self-deprecating humour build credibility (ethos). By calling herself a “zillennial” and a “generational fence-sitter with a foot in both camps”, and admitting she has “partaken in bullying millennials”, she positions herself as a fair-minded mediator in the “sibling rivalry” – an extended metaphor that frames the generations as squabbling siblings and lowers the stakes of the conflict.

Burnard also relies on metaphor and hyperbole to dramatise her point. Gen Z are the “apex predator of the internet”, weighed down by the “heavy shackles of irony culture”, trapped in “a prison of their own making”. This imagery of imprisonment makes the abstract idea of social self-consciousness feel physical and urgent. A pointed contrast deepens the critique: the millennial internet was “awesome” – “cats in space” and “chaotically creative” Vines – whereas Gen Z “inherited AI slop, fascist influencers and megalomaniac tech overlords”.

Finally, the essay ends with the ironic aphorism “To be cringe is to be free. Live, laugh, love.” By reclaiming a phrase Gen Z would dismiss as maximally “cheugy”, Burnard enacts her own message: embracing cringe is liberating.

When I first read about “Sonny”, the AI-powered “wellbeing companion” from Sonar Mental Health, my reaction was a mixture of relief and unease. On one hand, the article makes a genuinely compelling case that a chatbot is better than nothing. With the national average at one counselor for every 376 students – and 17% of high schools having no counselor at all – many struggling teenagers currently have no one to turn to. If Sonny helps a lonely student in a rural, low-income district feel heard at two in the morning, that is a real good.

I am also reassured that Sonny is not a pure AI. The article stresses that trained humans “are always in the mix”, reviewing chats and editing the AI’s suggested replies, and that Sonar immediately notifies parents, schools and police if a student mentions wanting to hurt themselves. That safety net matters.

Still, I would not want a bot to replace human counselors. The article itself notes that chatbots have made headlines for “hallucinating or dispensing dangerous advice”. More fundamentally, a machine that has “learned to talk in teenspeak” to sound like “a cool older sibling” is performing empathy, not feeling it. A teenager in crisis deserves a person who can truly understand them, not one human quietly monitoring “15 to 25 chats at a time”.

My view, then, is that Sonny should be a bridge, not a destination. It is an acceptable stopgap where no counselor exists, but the real solution is to fund enough human counselors – not to normalise outsourcing children’s mental health to an algorithm.

The True Cost of Cheap Clothes

Few industries illustrate the tension between convenience and consequence as sharply as fast fashion. A T-shirt that costs a few kroner and a pair of jeans that go out of style within a season feel harmless, even fun. Yet, as Rashmila Maiti’s article makes clear, the real price of these clothes is paid elsewhere – in poisoned rivers, exhausted resources and a throwaway culture that is difficult to reverse. Reflecting on fast fashion means looking past the price tag to the environmental, social and psychological consequences hidden inside every cheap garment.

The most striking consequences are environmental. Maiti points out that the fashion industry is “the second-largest consumer industry of water”, requiring “about 700 gallons to produce one cotton shirt and 2,000 gallons of water to produce a pair of jeans”. In a world where clean water is increasingly scarce, using thousands of litres to make a single garment we may wear only a handful of times is difficult to justify. The pollution is just as alarming: textile dyeing is described as “the world’s second-largest polluter of water”, with leftover dye “dumped into ditches, streams or rivers”. The consequence is not abstract – it is contaminated drinking water and dead ecosystems for the communities living near textile factories.

A second consequence is long-term, invisible pollution through microplastics. Because brands rely on synthetic fibres such as “polyester, nylon and acrylic which take hundreds of years to biodegrade”, our clothes keep polluting long after we throw them away. The article cites an IUCN estimate that “35% of all microplastics ... found in the ocean come from the laundering of synthetic textiles”. Every wash sheds plastic that enters the food chain and, ultimately, our own bodies. This is a consequence future generations will inherit whether they buy fast fashion or not.

Fast fashion also drives a culture of overconsumption and waste. Maiti notes that the world now consumes “around 80 billion new pieces of clothing every year, 400% more than the consumption twenty years ago”, while “the average American ... generates 82 pounds of textile waste each year”. The consequence of this cycle is a normalised disposability: clothes are no longer repaired or handed down but discarded, and the energy-intensive production of “plastic fibres into textiles” keeps burning petroleum and releasing acids and particulate matter into the air.

Beyond the environment, fast fashion carries social consequences that the article only hints at but that are worth adding. The same drive for ever-cheaper clothing depends on cheap labour, often in factories with poor safety standards – a reality the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, which killed over 1,100 garment workers, made tragically visible. When a shirt costs less than a cup of coffee, someone, somewhere, is absorbing the true cost.

It would be too simple, however, to end in despair. Maiti also points to solutions, listing “more sustainable fabrics ... wild silk, organic cotton, linen, hemp and lyocell”. Combined with buying less, choosing second-hand, and repairing what we own, these alternatives suggest that the consequences of fast fashion are not inevitable but the result of choices – choices consumers, brands and governments can change.

In conclusion, the consequences of fast fashion ripple outward from a single cheap garment: enormous water use, polluted rivers, oceans full of microplastics, mountains of waste and exploited workers. Recognising these consequences is the first step. The harder, more important step is acting on them – treating clothes as things of value rather than as disposable, and accepting that if fashion is to be sustainable, it can no longer be quite so fast.

The Rooms We Refuse to Leave: Belonging in The Sun Is Also a Star and Brooklyn

To leave home is to lose a version of oneself. In the excerpt from Nicola Yoon’s The Sun Is Also a Star, Natasha faces deportation from the only home she truly recognises, while in Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (adapted into a 2015 film), Eilis Lacey leaves Ireland for a new life in New York. Placed side by side, the two characters reveal that the struggle for belonging is really a struggle over where – and who – we are allowed to be. What separates them is a single, decisive difference: Natasha is being torn from home against her will, while Eilis chooses, painfully, to build a new one.

Natasha’s struggle is dramatised almost entirely through symbolism and setting. While her younger brother Peter has already packed – “virtually all the surfaces are bare” – Natasha’s side of the room “still looks lived-in”. Her books remain on the shelf, her photo with her best friend Bev is still on the desk, and, most tellingly, she “haven’t even taken down my NASA star map poster”. The poster is a powerful symbol: a map that “even has instructions on how to find Polaris and navigate your way by stars in case you get lost”. Natasha, an aspiring scientist who does not “believe in fate”, clings to a rational, American future she has built for herself. Refusing to pack is her quiet act of resistance against a life-changing event she cannot control. Even as she admits “what I’m doing is futile”, she grabs her physics textbook and heads to the immigration office – because to stop fighting would mean accepting that she no longer belongs.

Her struggle is deepened by family tension. Natasha blames her father – “He’s the reason we’re all in this mess” – and observes her mother’s grief in the thickening of her accent, where “every statement is a question”. Belonging, for Natasha, is not only about a country but about a self that is coming apart under pressure.

Eilis in Brooklyn experiences the same wound from the opposite direction. Where Natasha refuses to leave, Eilis boards the ship and is immediately overwhelmed by homesickness so severe it makes her physically ill. Like Natasha, she is caught between two homes: the familiar smallness of Enniscorthy and the frightening opportunity of New York. Her life-changing event is not a single crisis but a slow displacement – learning to belong in a place where, at first, she belongs to no one. When a family tragedy calls her back to Ireland, she is tempted to stay, and the film’s central struggle becomes a question of where home now is. Unlike Natasha, Eilis eventually chooses: she returns to Brooklyn and to the life – and marriage – she has made there.

The comparison is illuminating precisely because of this contrast. Both characters show that belonging is fragile and that a life-changing event exposes it. Natasha’s tragedy is that her belonging is decided for her by a deportation order; the state overrides her carefully built identity. Eilis’s quieter triumph is that, after suffering, she gets to author her own belonging. Yoon uses an unfinished, lived-in room to show a home being ripped away; Brooklyn uses the ache of homesickness to show a home being slowly, deliberately chosen.

In conclusion, Natasha and Eilis are two faces of the same human experience. Whether home is being taken from us or remade elsewhere, both stories insist that belonging is never simply given – it is fought for, mourned and, sometimes, remade. Natasha’s refusal to pack and Eilis’s reluctant boarding of the ship are the same gesture seen from opposite shores: the human need to know, against all upheaval, where we belong.

A Room Made for Living: Identity and Multitude in Danez Smith’s “They/Them”

Danez Smith’s poem “They/Them” is, on its surface, an attempt to explain why the poet uses plural pronouns. Beneath that, however, it is a meditation on how identity – especially gender identity – is not a fixed point but a crowded, living space shaped by language and community. Through an intimate, conversational voice and a series of self-corrections, Smith argues that to be “they” is not to be uncertain but to be full: “i am everyone. i am everything.”

The poem’s structure mirrors the difficulty of self-definition. It is built as a series of attempts, each introduced by a variation of “said”: “said short”, “said with some nuance”, and finally “said shorter”. This framing device presents identity as something the speaker keeps revising, trying on different phrasings the way one might try on clothes. The poem is written in free verse with heavy enjambment, so that thoughts spill across line breaks – “born / in the right body too early or born / at the wrong time” – enacting the sense of a self that cannot be contained by neat lines. The consistent lower-case “i” quietly resists the ego of a capital I, suggesting a self that is humble and permeable rather than fixed and self-important.

Smith’s account of gender relies on original, bodily metaphor. The speaker feels “more like a stud” – a term from Black queer culture for a masculine-presenting person – and describes coming “to masculinity through the women’s gate”, “a daughter who grew into her father”. These images refuse a simple transition narrative; indeed the speaker explicitly rejects easy labels: “not like trans, but like trans or / a transformation without catalyst / or smoke”. The repeated qualifications capture a gender that is real but resistant to tidy definition – a “transformation” that simply is, without a dramatic spark.

Crucially, the poem locates identity in language and community rather than the isolated self. Remembering how a friend, Tommy, loved the phrase “more / tomboy than boy”, the speaker concludes that “that’s what / language does—builds a room made for living”. This is the poem’s central metaphor: words are not mere description but architecture, making a habitable space for selves that society leaves homeless. The speaker then asks, “who have i followed further into myself?” and answers with a list of names – “Cam, Paula, Tommy, Fati, Andrea, Auntie George” – a chosen family “who saved me from a body of silence / by just living their lives in the sun”. Identity, here, is inherited from those who dared to live openly.

The poem’s most striking image is one of communion. If “the soul is a table on which the body sits”, then it is “crowded with the meat and the marrow / and the red, red wine”, surrounded by “too many ghosts to ever rest in isolation”. The Eucharistic echo – body, blood, wine – sanctifies this gathering of the living and the dead, and explains the pronoun: “of course you should address me in the plural.” The speaker is never alone; they carry a whole community, so a singular pronoun would be a lie.

This builds to a deliberately Whitmanesque climax. “i am everyone. i am everything” recalls Walt Whitman’s “I contain multitudes”, planting Smith in a tradition of expansive American selfhood. The final line strips this back to its essence: “said shorter: i am.” The unfinished sentence – and its faint echo of the biblical “I AM” – asserts pure existence. After all the searching for the right words, the simplest and most defiant claim is just to be.

In conclusion, “They/Them” transforms a question about pronouns into a celebration of multiplicity. Through its self-revising structure, its bodily metaphors of gates and transformation, and its imagery of a crowded, sacred table, Smith argues that the self is plural by nature – built by language, peopled by community, and finally affirmed in two words: “i am.”