2025-2026 vol. 2, no. 3

Featured Issue

Volume 2, Issue 3—Summer 2026

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This Summer Semester 2026 issue contains analyses of youth sports, steroids, audiobooks, and Gilmore Girls. This is the first summer issue for the journal!

Articles

The Evolution of Youth Sports: Capitalism and Play Collide

Joe Lanese

ABSTRACT: Today’s youth sports culture is not what it once was. Youth sports have undergone significant changes in recent decades, evolving from a more relaxed local recreational league style to intense, pay-to-play club and travel teams. In this essay, through the studies of Chris Knoester and Chris Bjork, I will identify societal and cultural factors that have contributed to the state of youth sports today. I will also explore the modern business side of youth sports through the research of Karlsson et al. and show how value is exchanged with clients in this new transactional era of youth sports as a service. Interestingly, I apply Donald Winnicott's theory on playing to help answer my question "Do modern day youth sports provide a therapeutic space to play, or a toxic environment?" What do you think? My answer might surprise you.

Whatever It Takes: The Enhanced Push for Physical Perfection

Sean Shadrick

ABSTRACT: In a world where fitness and wellness has taken center stage in the national media, social media and social circles around the country with GLP1 ads to get you from obese to skinny as fast as possible, obsessions over tracking your steps to maintain a healthy weight, and the glorification of the "fit body" once again; one crowd in particular goes to the extreme unlike anyone else to achieve the body they want, and they'll even risk death to achieve it. When it comes to body builders specifically, I argue that outside influences such as social media, fitness podcasts, other body builder types around the gym having better physiques, and the glorification of enhanced gym-goers and fitness influencers being considered more attractive and living more successful lives, has a greater impact on the reason why people decide to use steroids more than internal factors. With my first academic source, Zhang Wenbo and Zhang Yan contribute an overview of all things steroid use including the positive and negative aspects. Willem de Ronde and Diederik L. Smit provide a detailed breakdown of what typical steroid cycles entail and how to recover from them after you stop taking them, with a lot of this evidence being based on ten years of treating steroid using patients. On one hand you have internal motivating factors such as feeling like you're not good enough, but on the other hand those feelings could be caused by external factors such as not being happy with the way you look and trying to keep up with those around you.

The Rise of Audiobooks: Listening vs. Reading

Iris C. Gomez

ABSTRACT: The growing popularity of audiobooks has increased online discussions about reading vs. listening to books, and what the difference is between the two as it relates to how we process and retain information. Is the growing popularity only attributed to cultural adaptation or is there more here? This paper will review the differences between reading and listening to a book, specifically talking about accessibility and content retention, what has contributed to the growth in popularity of audiobooks, and analyze Donald Winnicott's theory of transitional phenomena, applying it to the audiobook experience. I'm going to draw on psychological research from Mia Floriani and Maria Snelling to examine the cognitive, cultural, and psychological differences between reading and listening to an audiobook, while also using Donald Winnicott's theory of transitional phenomena to analyze how audiobooks can be a part of that space in the way they help us use our imagination and take us back to our childhood memories of comfort. Although the popularity of audiobooks is mostly attributed to cultural adaptation and possibly the ability to multi-task while reading, I'd argue that audiobooks provide a transitional phenomenon which feels comforting, contributing to the increase in popularity of audiobooks.

Rory Gilmore and Her Libido as a Result of Golden Child Syndrome

Emily Cabigting

Abstract
ABSTRACT: Golden child syndrome in a single-child household is where the family dynamic consists of the child being the sole recipient of expectations and validation from family members, which can clearly be seen in the show Gilmore Girls. Rory Gilmore experiences the phenomenon, “Golden Child Syndrome,” exponentially so because her grandparents, Emily and Richard, begin to feed into this golden child theory with her mother Lorelai, both the grandparents and mother look to Rory as Lorelai's "do-over." To further expand on Rory's struggles due to being the golden child, I will engage with gender-studies student McKenna Ahlgren's The Rise and Fall of Gilmore Girls' Feminist Legacy, as she explains how the feminist aspect of Rory’s mother and grandmother affect her life choices. Additionally, I will add to the ideas of From Emily to Loralei to Rory: A Qualitative Textual Analysis of Scripts from Gilmore Girls for Real-World Application, where philosophy student Erin McCann examines how the relationship between Emily and Lorelai affects their expectations and relationship with Rory, as well as psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's "Libidinal Types" to analyze Rory's libidinal type to explain her tendencies of her feeding into being the golden child. My interpretations of the show Gilmore Girls include the idea that Rory Gilmore's downfall and stress result from her need to live up to her mom's and grandparents' expectations.

Contact Information

Editor: Michael Simmons, Ph.D.
michael.simmons@canyons.edu