8.5 million people live in New York City and nearly 60,500 of those people go to NYU. In 2021, one of them flew 9,400 miles from Kuala Lumpur to get there. Another flew 4,970 miles from Honolulu. Together they traveled more than 14,000 miles to end up in the same library, at the same table, pretending to study. They never really studied. “We would end up just listening to music or scrolling through Spotify together,” Natalya recalls, laughing a little at the memory. The textbooks stayed...

Photos by Dylan Nguyen It’s a Tuesday night at the Cornerstone in Berkeley, California. First in line is a 14 year old kid who brought his mom as a chaperone. The line behind him goes almost to the end of the block. This past Sunday, ezcodylee made his Rolling Loud debut in front of thousands. Two days later, the ceiling is low and the stage is close enough to touch. Max Vukovic, 23, came with his ezcodylee shirt on, listening to the artist long enough to have an opinion about what it means...

buffetboyjohn had never touched a basketball in his life until his mom forced him to try out for the freshman team at West Orange High School. The experience can be defined by one word: “Embarrassing, I deadass embarrassed myself. Basketball was not for me.” West Orange, New Jersey is home to Thomas Edison’s laboratory where he perfected the phonograph in 1887, revolutionizing the way people consumed the wavelengths of sound and creating the commercial music industry we know today. What the...