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Hi everyone! My name is Isaac Ahrens. I am a first-year student and adult learner here at UIC, majoring in English with a particular interest in critical literacy, and equity and justice in education, all of which might lead to a minor/double major in Sociology, or maybe something else entirely — time will tell! I am really excited to be joining the blogging team at UIC Radio this year. It was a pleasure to meet Sean and Caleb at my interview and discuss my writing, and I am stoked that they thought it sounded interesting and coherent enough to share on UIC Radio’s platform!

My goal with this blog is to connect with others in this modern age of constant media consumption, and take some time to digest pop culture and “compost” some of what I (and hopefully you, if I am doing my job right) have been consuming lately into some more or less fully formed thoughts. I chose the name “Composting Brainrot” for this blog because I wanted something a little catchy and cheeky, but the full truth is that almost everything I write about will (probably) not be what we consider to be classic “brainrot”.

While I was overthinking what to title my blog, I decided to do a little digging into the term (read: I opened Wikipedia) and learned that the first recorded use of the term “brain-rot” was by Henry David Thoreau in 1854 in his book Walden. He writes:

“While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

Ayşe Müge Yazgan, a researcher and linguist, suggests that in this book, Thoreau attempts to proselytize for a minimal life in communion with nature and to dissuade readers from a consumptive, highly materialist relationship to life. (More can be read on this here, if you're especially interested.)

None of us can know what Thoreau would define as “brain-rot” in the present moment, but if I had to guess, I would say that even the most pretentious among us are plagued by brain-rot by his standard. All of this is to say that I will be writing with the mindset that everything, from generative AI images of kittens in the military to award-winning films, hyperpop to classical music, and Renaissance paintings to contemporary art, can be consumed and considered as “brainrot” if you engage thoughtlessly enough, and I aspire to turn that “rot” into something more coherent, and treat all media as an opportunity for reflection. I will attempt to cover a wide scope of media: new and old movies and television, music from the past and present, art in the form of photography, paintings, and memes, and literary works ranging anywhere from those of the great American novelist Toni Morrison, philosophers like Michel Foucault, and maybe some more modern masterpieces, such as Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry.

A little bit about me to give some context about how my perspective is informed: I am turning 30 years old on October 12th, which means I ride the cusp of millennial and Gen Z, and, more importantly, I am a Libra. I am a queer man, sometimes “a they” when I feel like it. I enjoy constantly interrogating what it means to be “painfully American”. I am very open and honest about my mental health (I boldened this to treat it as a potential trigger warning). Besides writing, I enjoy photography, collage, and other mixed media art. I listen to a lot of music and, at times, can be found on the dance floor past 3 am. (If someone out there is afraid of getting older, let me be an example: 30 is not too old to shut the club down, if you believe in yourself.)

My parents were both Vietnam War veterans, raised in relative poverty on farms in the Southern U.S., but thankfully, I was raised in a small town near Elgin, IL, which is anywhere from 30 to 120 minutes outside of Chicago. Once I graduated from high school and had not received the scholarships everyone had told me I ought to receive, I realized I was not going to college, so instead I misbehaved for 5 years before moving to upstate New York to live with a guy I had met on the internet (long story short, for drama) so we could spend a year traveling the U.S. in a Toyota Corolla. We briefly moved back to Chicago proper (Logan Square and Edgewater, for inquiring minds), but proceeded to flee to Denver, CO at the height of the pandemic. I moved back to the Chicago suburbs in 2024 single, broke, and lost. Now, I am very proud and very stoked to have started school at UIC, and I am excited to be moving into a house with some nerdy queer punks in Pilsen. (Lo siento a la comunidad, pero estoy estudiando español, y espero poder dar algo a mi maravillosa comunidad nueva. ¡Voy a probar no ser parte del problema!)

Perhaps I overshared, but hopefully some of it will prove to be useful to anyone joining me on this blogging journey. I believe it is critical that we aim to understand the author's perspective when engaging with any art. To give an example, the incomprehensible and deranged 2003 film The Room becomes even more confounding when you learn that at the time of filming, nobody really knew anything about Tommy Wiseau, to the point where people working on the movie thought they might have found themselves in the middle of a money laundering scheme. A bunch of confused, broke actors and creatives took a leap of faith and found themselves working with a mysterious, bizarre man, and together they made one of the most iconic movies of all time, for better or worse. The mystery surrounding Tommy Wiseau lends to the experience of watching The Room, and inspired me to promptly watch The Disaster Artist, a biographical dramedy, directed by James Franco and written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, about the making of The Room, adapted from a memoir written by one of the actors. If I didn't care to learn anything about Tommy Wiseau, my experience would have stopped at watching The Room and thinking, "What the hell did I just watch?" Instead, I gained a bit of insight into a cultural moment and dabbled in some recreational armchair psychology. Behind every incredibly bizarre, "bad" piece of art is a person who could not help but make it.

SO! For this first post, I mostly wanted to give a little introduction of myself and an idea of what I'm going for with this whole thing. I want to explore a lot of big concepts that I have identified through pattern recognition, and at times, I may seem a little bit like this iconic picture of Charlie from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia:

(It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, S4E10, “Sweet Dee Has a Heart Attack”, 2008, pulled from IMDb)

In my interview for this blogging position, I referred to a piece I wrote in 2025 that I titled “Against Love, or All About It?”, subtitled “meandering musings on love, codependency, relationships, inspired by recent media and other literature”. That post was over 6,000 words long for no good reason. In it, I used four main pieces of media — the books All About Love by bell hooks and Against Love by Laura Kipnis, the body horror film Together (2025) directed by Michael Shanks, and the limited series Too Much (2025, Netflix) created by Lena Dunham (of Girls fame) and her husband, Luis Felber — to explore what I felt like had been a “trending theme” for a while: the multi-faceted nature of “love”, the ways it can become toxic, codependency, the spectrum of relationships, dating while mentally ill, and so on. This is just an example of the sort of writing I enjoy doing and plan to do with this blog! A lot of brain-picking and investigating what the art and media we are consuming say about us as we live through these “trying times.” If I were to revisit the piece now, I might include Obsession (2025, but released in the U.S. in 2026), directed by Curry Barker, to make it more relevant. (It turns out, Together was not as popular as I expected it to be.)

Obsession had a huge impact this year, even if we’re just looking at the numbers. On July 6th, it became the highest-grossing film with a budget under $1 million since 1973 (unadjusted for inflation), and by August 23rd, it surpassed box office records set by the Academy Award-winning movie Sinners (2025) and Disney-Pixar’s Elemental (2023) for being the highest-grossing live-action and English-language original film of the 2020s. Not only were people impressed that Obsession was written, directed, and edited by a man who turned 27 just this past week, but the reception to Obsession was unprecedented in the horror genre.

In addition to all of this, the release of Obsession was perfectly timed with another movie from a young creator, Backrooms. The near-synchronous release of these movies created a similar energy to the 2023 releases Barbie and Oppenheimer, which, for those who don't know, became a cultural phenomenon with its own Wikipedia Page, “Barbenheimer.” There is an important distinction, though. The well-timed release of Obsession and Backrooms was not “counter-programming” like Barbenheimer; the two movies shared many important similarities. Obviously, both were of the horror genre. Though they had vastly different subjects, I would argue that both explored how men treat women (of course, Obsession clearly focuses on the topic much more). They both had young directors and teams, employed practical effects, and were original concepts. Together, these films were an important cultural moment of 2026.

For years, and I mean decades, really, people have been begging for horror to be taken seriously. One would have thought that the international success of Parasite in 2019 (now recognized as one of the best movies of all time, with so many accolades that the list has its own Wikipedia page), which also had a well-timed release, near-enough to the release of Midsommar (2019), would have shown that not only does the horror genre rely on a wide spectrum of elements (most would argue Parasite is not a horror film, and I'm inclined to agree, but Bong Joon Ho is a master of genre-mixing, and if not horror, it is certainly still frightening), the genre has massive story-telling power. Still, as of 2026, less than 10 horror films have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and The Silence of the Lambs is the only one of those to have won the award — and, personally, I would make the same argument about The Silence of the Lambs that is made about Parasite, that it utilizes horror elements, but is really a thriller more than a horror movie. In nearly 100 years of Academy Awards ceremonies, fewer than 30 horror movies have been nominated for any awards, and very few of the actors involved in them have won awards.

I wonder, though, would Thoreau have considered the 1897 Irish novel Dracula brain-rot? Could we spend some time making connections between the 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, and the Transcendentalist literature movement that he was such a large part of? If a novel like Frankenstein can survive over 200 years and several film adaptations, surely we could consider that horror can be "good art" (more on the idea of "good art" to come, probably several times over). So why have some of the most iconic movies ever made been discarded by the Academy, one of the most important, if not the most important, global institutions in film?

I write all of this to say: I believe it is time for us to investigate our relationship with media, and how we consume it. It is time to discard the idea of "brainrot" and replace it with a healthier, well-rounded perspective on what art is: a product of cultural and social development, a piece of human history — even art that goes undisplayed, and, yes! Even bad art! I hope some people will join me on this journey. I look forward to reaching out to the student body to find out what others have been watching, reading, and listening to, and I hope that together we can break down some of these things and turn them into fertilizer for the mind, rather than just letting all of these ideas accumulate and rot away.

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for more, and please feel free to follow my Instagram @composting.brainrot for more casual content. Have a good weekend!