Commentary Ticker
- Irony In Stone: Ancient Greek Statues Dressed as Modern Hipsters
June 19, 2013 | 9:40 amAfter a day spent wandering around the Louvre in Paris, France, studying the idyllic nude bodies of ancient Greek statues, photographer Léo Caillard got to wondering about the nature of clothing. Each of the statues represented the maximization of human perfection—the human body taken to the extreme. But most people don’t have the ideal Greek [...]
- When in Rome… Make Better Concrete: How An Ancient Mix Beats Today’s Best
June 18, 2013 | 10:40 pmFrom the Hoover Dam and the Burj Khalifa to the Panama Canal, concrete underlies the greatest of modern architectural achievements. But modern concrete, it seems, doesn’t hold a candle to Ancient Rome’s. A little history for you: the Romans were the first to engineer concrete in mass, and it was upon this concrete that they [...]
- Google Wants Balloon Internet for Everybody
June 15, 2013 | 11:06 am“Balloons. That’s right. Balloons,” says the voice of a young girl in a video for Google’s latest endeavor: bringing the world online with massive balloons. The initiative, called Project Loon, comes from Google X, the experimental lab within the company whose sole purpose is to dream up big, borderline insane, ideas. Google X created self-driving [...]
- Watch Researchers Discover a Sunken Egyptian City
June 13, 2013 | 9:36 pmThonis, the legendary port city that served as an entryway to the Egyptian empire, was long considered to be a myth. The tales of its immense power and vast riches conflicted with the evidence of its existence—mainly that there was none. Cities of such grandeur do not typically disappear off the face of the earth. [...]
- “I Am The Nucleus” and Other Bizarre Quotes By Kanye West
June 12, 2013 | 10:06 amKanye West says the darndest things. On his unrelenting quest to become his own species of hip-hop artist, he has established a reputation as irreverent, controversial, and unapologetic. Though he makes time for public grandstanding by claiming a US President “doesn’t care about black people” or interrupting the VMAs, he remains mostly quiet when it [...]
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Drake Graduates from High School
Aubrey Drake Graham, the extraordinarily successful recording artist and actor known as mononymily as Drake, has a net worth estimated to be $25 million. Yet, at 25 years old, he never managed to graduate high school. This is somewhat understandable, as he had to focus on starring in Degrassi: The Next Generation to support his family. Not soon after his graduation (from Degrassi High), he broke out in the recording industry with the So Far Gone EP. From there it was a hop, skip, and jump to superstardom. Approaching his 26th birthday, Drake has now graduated high school (real, Canadian high school), according to his Twitter feed last night.
Of course, it forces us to ask: why? The star system discourages potential celebrities from undergoing the tedium of their average teen years, and it can handsomely rewards those that do (see: Exhibit A, above). Is not the purpose of high school, after all, to gain the skill set to be a successful member of society? Drake accomplished this without school. It is not as though we stop maturing or learning immediately when we quit school—those determined to learn will do so regardless, particularly if they have the financial resources to back them up. I don’t believe an entertainer, particularly, will learn to manage his wealth/stardom any better after completing, e.g., a high school economics class, anyway.
Regardless, kudos to Drake for his accomplishment. Let’s hope he crafts a video as amazing as “HYFR” to celebrate his other rite of adulthood.
FYI, other famous high school non-graduates (of many—and with many reasons for doing so) include: Quentin Tarantino, Richard Branson, Chris Rock, and Andrew Carnegie.