"Given the ever-changing nature of the music industry and the fluidity of genres in the age of streaming, it was well past time for Rolling Stone to tabulate a new list. The 2003 list came only four years after 1999, a banner year for the music industry. Financially, 1999 was the peak of the U.S. music industry, with revenue clocking in at $22.4 billion dollars. 1999 also marked the sale of the first portable MP3 players (the iPod later launched in 2001) — and arguably, the beginning of the current fragmentation of the music industry."

"The Latvian Society house itself is cozy and welcoming, so walking into the intentionally eerie, dimly lit theater became the first jarring moment of the show. Dark brown mulch sat on the outside of the path to the seating, and on the mulch sat an empty crib. The mulch encroached on the stage, which had a set of a decrepit living room with a sofa, a chair, cigarette butts littered on the floor, and empty photo frames."

"In addition to the multimedia immersion of the show, Tolokonnikova commanded the audience with remarkable adeptness, and transitioned between drastically different songs in a way that felt like a natural progression of the performance. By interspersing her personal stories into these transitions, she also connected the messages of the show and made the intersections of feminism, protests for equality, and police brutality starkly evident."

"Their bodies had fallen apart and their jaws were beset with incurable necrosis — an illness now known as “radium jaw.” The show reminds us that despite our expectations, we are not guaranteed happy endings. Often, as in the case of the Radium Girls, it is irresponsible to expect anything but endings that make us consider the suffering intrinsic to the human condition."

"My primary issue with “Cats” isn’t the intriguingly appalling character design or even the film’s general lack of palpable direction. What I find most offensive about the film is that the setting makes no sense whatsoever. I’m generally all for artistic license when it comes to altering aspects of the real world for fiction, but the nonsensical setting of “Cats” made me, for the first time, question the outer boundary of my suspension of disbelief."

"While the second act of the play was admittedly slower than the first act, it forced the audience to think about environments to which young students subject themselves in the name of success. The cast and crew seamlessly integrated the plot with Sci 101, and delivered line after line of hilarity that was synonymous with Fransdale academy."