Upon entering the musical spotlight in 2016, nobody would have guessed that Pizzera & Jaus would join the ranks of those considered the best Austropop artists of all time.

Starting out with individual careers in cabaret, Paul Pizzera and Otto Jaus formed their musical duo in 2015 after meeting each other during a cigarette break at a comedy event. This meeting in retrospect couldn’t have been more fitting to their personas.

The duo’s breakthrough came in 2016 with the release of the song “Jedermann” – the title being a German word that is even less commonly used than its English translation “all and sundry.” Since then, Pizzera & Jaus have released more than 20 songs of which 18 have stayed in the Austrian top 40 for several weeks.

All of their songs can be best categorized under the genre of Austropop. Austropop is a genre of music that mostly incorporates elements of pop and rock. Added to this are more traditional folk elements such as the occasional yodeling as well as lyrics in different Austrian dialects that touch upon all kinds of different topics but mainly focus on the artists’ experiences with their home country.

In true Austropop style, Pizzera & Jaus’ lyrics most often poke fun at Austrian society, its contemporary culture, and its political faux pas. The music duo’s most recent song “Die Gedanken san frei/Thoughts are free” throws a sarcastic punch at the recent political scandals of Austria’s governing party which have threatened the expression of freedom and the press.

Songs like “Tuansackl/Hipster Gym Bag” make fun of modern trends among the younger generations such as fake eyeglasses and hipster gym bags while others like “Dialekts mi” remind the listener to cherish their unique dialects.

When they are not mocking failed political figures, the duo’s lyrics either celebrate the Austrian way of life or bring across the joy, sadness, and anger that are part of relationships and human connection. Most of the songs turn out melancholic, but the lyrics always include a healthy measure of realism to which most Austrians can deeply relate with their own life experiences.

What sets Pizzera & Jaus apart from other Austrian artists is that all of their songs share a unique kind of energy. If the songs are sad, they are so in a deep, moving way. If they are intended to be funny, dialect and wordplay unite in a way that makes the songs small pieces of cabaret themselves. And if they are supposed to be motivational, their lyrics, beats, and melodies hold the power to make the listener feel like they can achieve anything.

While there are clear themes determinable in regard to lyrics, the same is not the case regarding their music itself. Pizzera & Jaus draw their melodies from a variety of genres. From pop, over blues, to rap and a-cappella, the duo has experimented with many different musical elements and instruments. As a result, until the listener starts the song, the musical genre of Pizzera & Jaus’ newly released music usually remains a mystery.

Arguably, the quality of singing back in 2016 was an aspect of the duo’s career that they could improve on. As their most recent a-cappella renditions of their songs show, however, Pizzera & Jaus have taken advantage of the past six years and learned a thing or two about hitting high notes.

The result of these six years of experimenting and improvement: modern music that Austrians proudly call Austropop and can relate to in every instance of their lives.

Setting foot into the Dimmitt piano room for the first time is like entering an isolated little bubble far away from the otherwise busy buzz of the residence hall. There is nobody in here and the room is dark. As I turn the light on, the door closes behind me which intensifies the deafening silence of the room and makes me think that its walls are soundproof.

Because it is such a small space and doesn’t have any windows, the air in the room smells old and stagnant. I can also slightly make out the smell of the paper of note sheets.

Visually, there is not much to the room. The walls are of a dirty white tone, and the room is not particularly big. It only offers enough space for the piano and a chair. The chair shows some signs of wear and tear and the floor features scratches from where the chair has been pulled back and forth.

The piano itself looks like it is past its prime years which makes me think that it has been used by many students. The keys that once used to shine in a brilliant white tone are now slightly yellow and feature shallow scratches from fingernails. Pressing down on a key solidifies my first impression of how long the piano has been in this room. I’ve only briefly been musically trained but even to me, the piano sounds slightly out of tune. The sound of the piano nevertheless fills the tiny space, and it is easy to imagine how many memories of musical joy must have been created in this room.

Stephen King’s short story is sadly relatable for those dealing with a case of Alzheimer’s in their family – until it isn’t. Telling the tale of a day of a man with the brain-altering sickness, King still manages to bring some violence and gore into this story that is unlike most other of his tales of horror. The story keeps the readers’ attention until the end but leaves them behind with a feeling of confusion, led by the question – why Batman and Robin?

The story begins with an innocent day out and about of a man and his father with Alzheimer’s, leading the viewers through moments of grief, bonding, and the instincts of a father that break through the brain fog of Alzheimer’s.

I believe in following rules. That may make me, a 22-year-old college student sound boring but by the end of this essay, I think you will see my point.

I first really realized I had this belief while sitting in a smelly locker room. My soccer team and I were getting yelled at for half an hour because one of my teammates broke one of the team’s rules. This is not exactly what I’d call a fun afternoon and I would have very much liked to use that time differently. Annoyed, I thought, “How hard is it to follow one simple rule?!”

No matter if it’s drinking alcohol during a “dry-season” or soccer balls being stolen because somebody didn’t lock up the equipment shed, 99% of the things my team gets reprimanded for are 100% avoidable if everybody had just followed the few simple rules that were put in place to regulate the team and its performance.

This not only applies to sports teams, but also to other social group settings such as school classes, the workforce of a company, or groups as small as three siblings. In these group settings, rules are designed to enable the successful coexistence and cooperation of its members.

An unfortunate side effect of being in a group is that all members often become partially responsible for everybody else’s actions. If one doesn’t follow the rules, suddenly all members are seen as rule breakers and pulled in for a “come-to-Jesus” meeting, as a friend of mine calls the rather intense sessions of reprimand brought upon us by the coaches. The meetings hold the purpose of general and specific deterrence, yet, in my experience, they only ever seem to have the desired effect on those who already follow the rules. The rule-breakers tend to stay exactly that.

What they don’t realize is that the result of their behavior is negative tension brewing within the team. This tension builds up over time and turns into the uncomfortable situations that I and my team find ourselves confronted with on a regular basis. The frustrating part is that most of the drama could have been avoided if everybody adhered to the guidelines.

Overall, my personal philosophy for daily life and especially social settings is to not make life harder for other people. Most people just want to live their life as annoyance-free as possible. I think everybody being mindful of the basic rules of group settings would achieve exactly that.

In the end, I want to mention that I do recognize the need for exceptions. Some rules are simply not reasonable, for example, because they discriminate against some members of the group.

Rules like that are meant to be broken. Please do.

A queue can be an eventful place for those attempting to listen in on conversations. Friends, strangers, and mere acquaintances are confined in the same few square meters, almost being forced to find something to talk about to their peers.

On Sunday night, such a scenario unfolded in the cafeteria. 15-20 people were eagerly awaiting their turn to assemble their own perfect chicken sandwich. In this queue stood a group of soccer girls who began chatting away about the sunburn they had received on their faces from being outside the whole day. One girl asked her friends if her face was red to which she received the mocking answer that her face is always red.

A moment later, another soccer girl walked up to the group. Her face was as red as a lobster and the other soccer girls didn’t fail to notice. The one who had mocked the first girl, now reassured her that her face was at least not as red as the second girl’s. The whole group erupted in laughter.

Looking at my CR articles makes me think that my voice tends to be optimistic. In the past I predominantly wrote about positive things that were happening on campus such as the painted kindness rocks, tower gardens, and the transgender awareness week. Even if the article involves a bad aspect (such as the vandalism done to the Spoonholder bench after it had been painted in the colors of the transgender flag) I emphasize the positive aspects of events. I don’t know how I feel about this discovery because I’m more of a pessimistic person and so now it feels like I’m not being truthful in my articles.

What makes my writing mine is my inability to keep sentences short and my attempt to always connect all of the paragraphs with each other. I wonder if a stranger reading my stories would think that they are written in an odd kind of English and if they would be able to guess that English is not my first language.

On my first try to bring free treats to the people of Morningside, I wrote “Free Snacks!” on the box of Barnum’s animal crackers and placed it on a high table in a Roadman lounge. Then, I observed the unfolding events from a safe distance sitting at another table across the room. This method did not lure many students to take a closer look at the box, but it did create a moment of joy for one stranger. The girl was with her two friends as she spotted the Animal Crackers. After a first hesitant glance in its direction, she pulled one of her friends towards the table and excitedly fished out one of the packages. She then asked her companion, “Do you want one too?” to which the friend replied with “No.” Then, as quickly as they had arrived, they disappeared into another hallway. The last thing I could hear one of them say was, “Are those supposed to be the Barnum animals from the Greatest Showman?”

My second attempt consisted of me bringing some of the crackers to class and handing them to my fellow classmates. Their initial responses consisted of a healthy amount of suspiciousness alongside quite a few questioning looks and disbelieving chuckles. However, after explaining the nature of the snacks, as well as jokingly adding that I hadn’t poisoned them, the classmates who wanted a package gladly accepted them. One of the girls even exclaimed, “Oh my god, I love animal crackers!”

During my last attempt, I was having dinner at the cafeteria with a soccer teammate. At the end of a lively conversation about fiction and nonfiction in journalism, I remembered the snacks in my bag and told her I had a weird question for her. Somewhat confused, my teammate looked at me with curious eyes, expecting me to continue. Without any further warning, I produced a package of animal crackers from my soccer bag and presented them across the table to my teammate along with the question, “Might I interest you in some animal crackers?” My teammate’s eyes lit up with happiness and surprise almost like it was Christmas and I hadn’t pulled the package out of my old smelly soccer bag but Santa Clause’s sack of presents itself. “Yes, actually!” was her enthusiastic answer and so my last package of animal crackers found its way into the hands of a hungry college student.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women

Article: The Other Afghan Women by Anand Gopal

Article Lead:

In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them.

Late one afternoon this past August, Shakira heard banging on her front gate. In the Sangin Valley, which is in Helmand Province, in southern Afghanistan, women must not be seen by men who aren’t related to them, and so her nineteen-year-old son, Ahmed, went to the gate. Outside were two men in bandoliers and black turbans, carrying rifles. They were members of the Taliban, who were waging an offensive to wrest the countryside back from the Afghan National Army. One of the men warned, “If you don’t leave immediately, everyone is going to die.”

My thoughts: I couldn’t quite decide if the first sentence after the heading was already the lead or the first paragraph so I assume it’s both. I think the first sentence works more in a hard-news way, by briefly summarizing the topic of the article. The anecdote in the first paragraph is more of a feature lead, meant as a way to draw the reader in.

In my opinion, the anecdote does a good job raising the interest of the reader. There is enough information to understand the who, when, and what but it leaves the reader wondering about why everyone will die if they don’t leave immediately. I think it sets the scene well and gives the reader a sense of the danger of the situation.

My Leads:

The Snappy: Routine in rural Afghanistan: Leave your house or die.

The Magazine: “If you don’t leave immediately, everyone is going to die.” – Last August was not Shakira’s first time being faced with such a statement or the danger that was to follow it. In her 40 years of life, the Afghan woman from the Sangin valley encountered death, violence, and destruction in many different forms and from various sources of aggression. The Soviet Army, local mujahideen factions, American forces, and the Taliban – all had brought some form of violence to Afghanistan and to Shakira’s neighborhood. In this ever-changing power struggle, it had become difficult for Afghans to tell friends from enemies.

The Standard: For many Afghan women living in the country’s conservative rural areas, the Taliban have gone from loathed enemies to restorers of order.

The article I selected: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation-artificial-intelligence/

This feature is about a Canadian guy (Josh) who successfully customized an AI chatbot on the website “Project December” to mimic his late fiancee Jessica. The author not only writes about how the AI helped Josh with his grieving journey but also about Project December itself as well as its creator and its development.

There are several key characters that this story is about:

First, there is Josh Barbeau, the main subject of the story. 33-year-old Josh has been dealing with the death of his fiancee Jessica for the past 8 years and because of that has somewhat isolated himself from the outside world. After trying out random chatbots on “Project December” he decided to create one based on his late fiancee and was positively surprised by the accuracy of the result. The feature includes Josh’s AI story as well as background information on him such as his personality and interests.

Another character is Jessica Pereira. She died in 2012 at the age of 23 from a rare type of liver disease. The author writes about Jessica’s life, death, personality, and interests. The latter two were mainly mentioned to show what Jessica was like so that the reader can get a feeling of whether the transcripts of Josh’s conversation with Jessica’s AI seem genuine.

The third main character in this feature is the creator of “Project December” – Jason Rohrer. The author writes about how he developed the program, what he intended it to do, and how he reacted to hearing about Josh’s story on Reddit.

Regarding the narrative structure of the feature, I thought it was a little too much back and forth. It jumped in between Josh’s, Jessica’s, and Jason’s stories which made it quite confusing at times. I think the author intended to break up the heaviness of Josh’s and Jessica’s story by using this structure which in itself is a reasonable approach. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was so much back and forth that the author forgot what information he had already talked about and mentioned several things several times.

In the end, I think the feature is “about” unusual ways of dealing with grief and the potential of AIs for goodness.

Overall, I do think the story is true. This is because the author received his information from the subjects as well as people close to them. There is a lot of deep information in the article, which for me shows that the author put a lot of time and thought into this feature and wanted it to be an accurate representation of what had happened. The article also includes the original transcripts of Josh’s conversation with the Jessica chatbot.

I chose the NYT story “Mississippi’s Capital Loses Water as a Troubled System Faces a Fresh Crisis” by Rick Rojas. The story was front-page in the paper of August 31, 2022.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/us/mississippi-jackson-water.html

Potential features that could be created out of this story:

1. The troubled story of drinking water in the US
2. The efficiency of home water filters (like Brita)
3. Drinking water quality in the US in comparison with other countries
4. The number 1 question when traveling anywhere in the world: Can I drink the local tap water?
5. Water Quality at Morningside University – what exactly are students drinking?
6. How drinking water can make or break communities
7. Drinking water – an inconspicuous detail of life that we only really start to worry about when it is missing

Overall, the feature I would most like to do is a mix between 2 and 5 or, alternatively, just 7. I think it would be interesting to find out about the quality of drinking water on campus. Maybe I could enlist a biology professor to show me how to test water quality. For 7, it would be interesting to write about what effect it has when tap water suddenly can’t be trusted anymore and what should be done to avoid that happening to communities.