Hannah Hecht's Blog

If there’s one thing that the previous generation will never be able to understand about us, it’s video games. Actually, let me make that more specific. Maybe they can see the appeal in dressing up like a Rambo-esque soldier and taking out a bunch of Nazis. Maybe they can understand edging toward that next level in Candy Crush or farming out that final square of corn to pay for your new barn in Farmville. Maybe they even can get why you would pretend to be Eli Manning taking on his older brother Peyton and the Denver Broncos in Madden.

But, the thing that they really won’t get is why the majority of people who play Pokemon are in the age range of 19 -24.

And I get it. On the surface, Pokemon is pretty much about screaming at your giant mutant fire-breathing lizard to make to attack and kill a 10-year-old’s one-foot tall electric mouse.

Looks like a fair fight to me. (Image credit: http://www.theanimegallery.com/data/thumbs/790px/0158/tAG_158093.jpg)

And, on a deeper level, it’s… Actually, it’s still about forcing your gargantuan mutant dragon to fry a kid’s sparky rodent to the core. But isn’t that a dream come true?

Let’s try it this way. You wake up one morning and go downstairs. It appears that you have grown a couple of feet shorter and have lost the effects of puberty. Congrats! You’re ten. Darn it. Your mom is making breakfast. She tells you that you’re running late for a meeting with a local biologist. You run to the lab, conveniently located right next door, and the man inside introduces himself as Professor [insert tree name here] the region’s foremost Pokemon researcher. He then offers you a choice of three adorable monsters: a fire lizard, a water turtle, or a grass dinosaur. How adorable. Or maybe a grass gecko, a flaming chicken, or a water salamander? How about water otter, a fire pig, and a grass snake? Or maybe a fire fox, an Internet Explorer, and a Google Chrome? (Just kidding, browser joke.)

Nope, I think I’m going to turn you down, Professor, and play Old Maid with my grandma instead. Image: http://cdn.bulbagarden.net/upload/thumb/b/b7/Kalos_starters_XY_anime.png/250px-Kalos_starters_XY_anime.png

Anyway, you pick your adorable little demon and go back home. Your mom is very impressed and proud of you. In fact, she decides that you are responsible enough to leave the house, take your little Buttlicker (you have the ability to customize your Pokemon names), and go on a backpacking expedition across the entire country. By yourself. With no supervision. Actually, I think your mom might call you like four times.

On this journey, you will amass an army of lovable monsters, train them until they evolve into more badass versions of themselves, develop a strategy that will make you completely unstoppable, uncover the mystery of legendary Pokemon with the ability to bend space and time, take down a terrorist organization, and defeat the gym leader in each town to eventually become the Pokemon Champion. You’ll most likely find yourself inside a volcano at some point too. And, maybe, just maybe, you’ll fall in love. Just kidding again, I mean really, you’re only ten-years-old!

And did I mention that there are 718 of them for you to catch? Image: http://cdn3.whatculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/493pokemons.jpg

Okay, so I may not yet have inspired anyone to go buy a $200 Nintendo 3DS console and a copy of Pokemon Y (although, if you’re interested, I would recommend the $100 2DS console and Pokemon X), but Pokemon games are very popular among college students. And Nintendo knows their market. The most recent Pokemon games, the aforementioned X and Y, cater to older players in a host of different ways. The games offer an ever-increasingly complex battling system that dives deep beneath the surface rock-paper-scissors interface (water beats fire, fire beats grass, grass beats water). 718 pokemon of 18 different types can learn 617 moves and hold 60 different items, resulting in an almost-infinite number of battle strategies. The newest games even allow for internet connectivity, so you can trade, battle, and chat with friends and players all over the world. There are even professional competitive Pokemon players who compete in international tournaments.

Here at Morningside, the Pokemon tradition is alive and flourishing. A Facebook group dubbed the “Morningside Pokemon Fan Club” has 74 members and is still growing. Last year, a campus Pokemon group met up a few times to talk about the newly-release X and Y and organize pokemon battles. Members still post on the Facebook page from time to time to discuss the upcoming Pokemon AlphaSapphire and OmegaRuby (release date: November 21, 2014) or to talk about ways to obtain rare pokemon.

Michael Andrlik and Josh Karel are two Morningside seniors who started playing Pokemon games as young kids and haven’t yet stopped.

“I put in about 240 hours in the first three weeks [after the newest game came out],” said Andrlik.

INSERT MORE STORY HERE.

1. Last week, we learned about Edith Wharton, had a class discussion about The Touchstone, and watched the first half of the Hollywood production of Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. I enjoyed the biographical information about Wharton, especially because she had such an interesting life. She was born Edith Jones of “Keeping up with the Joneses” in New York in 1862, which meant that she lived a life of privilege. Her first book was a nonfiction piece about (and named) The Decoration of Houses. This makes sense with her later writing, since she really likes to focus on the architectural and interior design details in her works, although I noticed it more last semester in Summer. She married Teddy Wharton, who ended up having an affair in London, soliciting New York prostitutes, and embezzling all of the money that Wharton made through her carefully constructed public image. The book The Touchstone, her second published work, featured a man feeling guilty about selling a famous author’s love letters. I enjoyed our discussion and it helped me understand the book with more depth. The movie that we watched focused on a man’s affair with his wife’s cousin, a European countess who was treated badly by her husband. We’re going to finish the movie this week.

2. We read Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather for this week. In the book, Bartley Alexander, a prominent Boston architect has an affair with Hilda Burgoyne, a London-based British actress. He feels guilty about the affair, but has trouble deciding whether to break off the relationship with Hilda or to break it off with his wife, Winifred. While he’s working on his bridge in London and trying to decide which woman he wants to end the relationship with, his bridge collapses and he dies.

When the narrative begins, there is a lot on emphasis on Alexander’s feeling of entrapment. He thinks that his success (especially with that iconic Canadian bridge) has only brought him more obligations, although he had hoped that it would bring him freedom. Later on, he finds that freedom in London and with Hilda. I particularly enjoyed the very colorful depiction of London, partially because I have been there before and knew all of the places that Cather was talking about. Boston was much more dreary. Similarly, although Alexander obviously loved his wife, Winifred was painted much more as an everyday person in an everyday city. Hilda was exotic, expressive, and artistic.

The more literal bridge between his two lives consists of the awful, almost week-long journey from the U.S. to London. The journey first seems adventurous and exciting, but grows to be excruciatingly long and painful. The more figurative bridge between his two lives similarly starts off strong, as he confidently balances the two relationships. However, as the years go on, it takes a beating, and he realizes that he will not be able to maintain his two lives much longer. Just as the London bridge (or maybe the bridge in London) starts to collapse, his internal bridge is also collapsing. He cannot make a decision between the two women, and the issue remains unresolved when he dies at the end.

3. Most of the article “Alexander’s Bridge: The Other First Novel” by Loretta Wasserman mainly argues that despite critics’ and Cather’s own dismissal of her early novel, it is actually a strong and interesting novel that ought to be studied by Cather scholars and critics alike. I was really interested to learn that Cather tried to completely disregard this book. I haven’t previously read anything by Cather, but after reading the secondary reading, I think I understand her much better. Apparently, she ultimately decided to portray the American experience through Midwestern prairie-life narratives, but this work is completely different. I also thought that it was interesting that Cather, although she would later deny it, briefly considered becoming an expatriate. The central conflict in Alexander’s Bridge, the need to choose between the Boston woman and the London woman could kind of reflect Cather’s own conflicted feelings. To her (or at least to Alexander), London was flashy and exciting while the U.S. was much more customary. Eventually, America triumphed as the setting of her fiction, but this novel shows that she was, at one point, perhaps as fascinated with Europe as her expatriate contemporaries. The article says, and I quite agree, that her painting of London was much more exciting and colorful than her one of the U.S. I would be interested to read one of her more traditional works to contrast it with Alexander’s Bridge.

At a small school like Morningside, it’s really easy to think that everyone knows everything about all the people on campus. By the end of the year, most people get to the point where they recognize every single person that they see every day in their classes, in the caf, and on the way across campus.

This morning, I went up to someone who I don’t really know in the cafeteria and struck up a conversation. At first, she looked a little taken aback, but when I explained that I was working on an assignment, she relaxed. My target was Alyssa Nehring,18-year-old freshman education major. She wore a glossy, pink Under Armour sweatshirt, athletic shorts, and purple Asics. Her hair was wet from the walk from Dimmitt in a downpour, and her eyes were a little lined, as were most people’s at 7:15 A.M. on a Monday.

When I walked up, Alyssa’s friends at her table were talking about traveling. One student, Michael, was telling everyone about how his parents were going to take a road trip to California.

“That would just be terrible,” Alyssa said.

Another student, a senior boy with long brunette (if I can ever use this word for men) hair, said that he would do the same thing to avoid riding on a plane.

Somehow the conversation shifted, and I ended up learning a few things about Alyssa. She was a lifeguard over the past summer in her small hometown of Humbolt, Iowa, but it was pretty boring, and she never had to save anyone. She also has one kidney that doesn’t work very well.

“My two kidneys pretty much work together to equal one,” she said, “The doctor told me that one kidney can put out about 93% effort, while the other one only does about 7%.”

A nursing student at the table assured everyone that people’s bodies can work pretty well with just one kidney. And, I guess that was my whole scavenger hunt conversation.

The article that I used for this exercise is “Who Wins in the Name Game,” by Cody C. Delistraty from The Atlantic. The lead features the writer at a party in Paris. A French girl exchanges a few flirty looks with him, then comes over to talk. He tells her that his name is Cody, and she tries to pronounce it without much success. She is pretty much turned off to him then, and the “nut graf” explains that “the ability to pronounce someone’s name is directly related to how close you feel to that person.” Delistraty then launches into an article about how our names affect the schools we can get into, the jobs we can get, and how long it takes us to get promoted.

I thought that the lead was incredibly effective. As a 21-year-old, middle-class, white reader, the lead put me into a position where I could see a fairly common-place name, Cody, as a liability. The writer was able to set a scene in probably fewer than 50 words, and I immediately was able to know what the article was going to be about. It grabbed my attention because it set up the writer as a character, a kind of underdog who couldn’t get something that he wanted. I especially liked how the writer came back to the initial anecdote at the end. Apparently, the woman’s name was “Edwige” (cough Hedwig), which both the writer and I found to be funny. The ending anecdote wrapped up the whole story very nicely, and, together, the beginning and end put me in both the position of the discriminator and the person discriminated against.

You could rewrite the lead a few different ways, although I really like this one the way that it is. You could start off with some sort of word association game, by maybe listing off a bunch of names and allowing the reader to let their first impressions fly through their heads. You could start off with some sort of anecdote about a person with a weird name (although that seems to be what the author kind of did). I’ve seen similar stories a couple of times where the writer talks about how he changed the name on his resume from his first name (Kelly or Brook or something) to his more-masculine middle name and instantly got more interviews.

Here is my alternative lead:

What’s in a name? Despite Juliet’s famous assertion that “that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” names actually can play a huge role in predetermining the schools we get into, the jobs we apply for, where we get hired, the people we date. They can even influence the cities we live in, the people we befriend, and the products we buy.

1. Last week, our readings focused on the importance of literary recovery. The one by Blouin focused on the difference between history and the archive. Because of limited data, history and the archive used to be the same thing. Now, there is more information to draw on, so the narrative that we refer to as “history” cannot possibly include everything in the archive. That’s why the job of the archivist (and why literary recovery) is so important. The archivist has to go back into the past and expand the narrative of history by adding in more pieces of information that may have originally been left out.

The one by Lautner was a historical overview of how minorities and women were systematically left out of the canon in the 1920’s. The professionalization of the study of literature, the privileging of masculine qualities in literature, and the need to compete with the already-established British canon all contributed to this phenomenon.

The article by O’Brien talked about how Willa Cather gained status as a canonical writer in the 20’s, only to lose it in the 30’s. I talked about that in an earlier WordPress post, so I’ll skip this one.

The final article by Bass focused on the idea of hypertext and the new function of the internet which allows author to upload the context along with the story. This article kind of confused me, since it talked about the internet in very primitive terms.

2. The book that we read for today was The Touchstone by Edith Wharton. Before I started the novella, I was really expecting to hate it. Last semester, I read Wharton’s Summer in Women and Literature, and it was one of my least favorite readings. Summer was a love story which gave some insight into women’s roles in the 1920’s, but I thought that the characters lacked depth and that the whole narrative was kind of hazy. To my surprise, I really enjoyed The Touchstone. The characters felt three-dimensional, and I found it to be engaging.

The Touchstone told the story of a man, Glennard, who decides to sell his correspondence with the late Margaret Aubyn, a famous author. Before her death, Aubyn was in love with Glennard, but Glennard never returned the feelings. Aubyn eventually moved to Europe and exchanged hundreds of letters with him.  Glennard decides to sell the letters to Mr. Flamel, who works at a publishing company and publishes them. The book becomes a bestseller, and Glennard has to live with the immense guilt that comes with selling someone else’s private words. His wife, Alexa Trent, knows he supplied the letters, but doesn’t let him know that she knows. The whole situation puts a huge strain on Glennard’s life and marriage.

At the end of the book, Glennard feels terrible about having sold the letters. Alexa explains to him that in feeling that immense remorse, he has become a better man than the man who originally sold the letters.

“’Don’t you see,’ she went on, as his eyes hung on her, ‘that that’s the gift you can’t escape from, the debt you’re pledged to acquit? Don’t you see that you’ve never before been what she thought you, and that now, so wonderfully, she’s made you into the man she loved? THAT’S worth suffering for, worth dying for, to a woman—that’s the gift she would have wished to give.’”

In the end, the touchstone (a flint-like stone used to test the purity of gold and silver by the streak left when rubbed) refers to Glennard’s selling the letters. At first, the fact that he allowed the letters to be published marked him as a bad and impure man. Only a bad person would sell someone else’s private words and reap the profits. But, then, his sin ends up bringing out the best in him, through his remorse.

3. The secondary text, “Publicity and Authorship in The Touchstone, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Woman” by Mark A. Eaton, explains how the novella reflects Wharton’s (or at least, the author-function Wharton’s) view on the publishing industry. It begins by explaining that an author’s personality, or author function, is both more and less than the person herself. Instead, the personality has to be carefully cultivated in order to sell books. The same could probably be extended to modern-day celebrities such as music artists and actors. Because the general public feels as if they know celebrities (although they really just know the author-function version of the celebrity), they feel entitled to knowing everything about the celebrities’ private lives. The Touchstone is an exploration of that idea. The Touchstone also goes into immense detail about various marketing strategies that allow authors to sell both themselves and their books. Books are marketed much more by popular appeal than by their content. This made sense to me, mainly because people like to have read (or seen or listened to) things that their peers have read, mainly so that they have mutual things to talk about. Wharton seems to suggest that people ought to spend their time doing other things that gossiping about the private lives of celebrities.

To start off this first journal of the semester, I guess I’ll introduce myself by saying that I am a senior majoring in English because I want to eventually work as an editor for a publishing company. I really enjoy messing around with sentence structure and grammar, along with basic story elements, so I think a career in publishing would be a lot of fun. Over the past three years, I’ve had a lot of fun with literary criticism, and I look forward to doing some more of it in this class. For me, criticism makes literature much more than just a story. It can allow the literature to tell you ultimate truths about society or culture or socioeconomics or a historical moment, that the author may have never intended. My main goal for this semester is to learn more about archival research, and to bring to the surface a deserving, but understudied, text. I guess my past experience has mainly dealt with works firmly inside the established literary canon, so it will be cool to study writing that is closer to the fringes. Plus, such literature will probably illuminate other whole facets of life that the canonical texts gloss over.

Last class, we pretty much learned the purpose of literary recovery. Recovery involves finding old texts which aren’t considered part of the canon and demonstrating their worth and worthiness. This class will mainly focus on women’s texts, which were largely glossed over or forgotten by history. We spent a lot of time discussing the word “canon.” Pretty much, the canon is the group of texts with which a literarily educated person ought to be familiar in order to participate in educated discussion. It also consists of those texts that are deemed worthy of being taught to high school, undergraduate, and graduate students. When writers of the past are excluded from the canon, their work pretty much loses its readership. When an entire class of authors (on the basis of socioeconomic status, race, gender, etc.) are excluded from the canon, we lose out on a whole facet of human experience. That is why literary recovery is important work.

One of the texts that we read for class today was “Becoming Noncanonical: The Case Against Willa Cather,” by Sharon O’Brien. It was really interesting to see the fluctuations in Willa Cather’s readership across time. Near the beginning of the article, O’Brien explains that while most people see the list of works in the American canon as objective, it simply isn’t. In the past, people would always defend the canon by saying that the books in it are simply the best because they have “stood the test of time,” but they instead have actually stood the test “in which publishers, reviewers, editors, literary critics, and teachers structure the interaction between the text and the reader.” (O’Brien 111). O’Brien offers Cather as a prime example. At their first publishing in the late 1910’s and throughout the 1920’s, Cather’s works were critically and popularly acclaimed. But, then, with the publishing of One of Us, a novel about a soldier in World War I, H.L. Mencken and other critical scholars began to categorize her as a “lady novelist” (114). From that point, her reputation fell and she eventually limited the reproduction of her own books, so to keep students from “hating her” after studying the increasingly negative reviews of her work (121). While I really enjoyed the article, especially as a case study for how women writers were (are?) written out of the canon, there was one part of it that kind of bugged me. On the last page, O’Brien says that “Cather herself did not fully recognize that… we simply do not read writers whose work has not yet been published, evaluated, preserved, and transmitted by social, economic, and literary institutions of some sort” (124). I thought that that whole quote was kind of belittling to Cather. When she made the conscious decision to keep her books from being printed in anthologies and in cheap paperback form to keep them from being read in classes, I highly doubt that she didn’t understand the implications of her actions. From the article, it seemed as if Cather was embarrassed of her work, especially when she wrote to H.L. Mencken, asking him to give her an honest review, especially if it ended up being a bad review. If she really was that embarrassed, either of her work or of its reception, then she kept it from being published so that people wouldn’t “grow up hating her.” She didn’t want to be remembered as another example of a woman whose writing didn’t measure up to men’s writing. If she couldn’t break the curve by being great, then she’d rather not add her name to a long list of “inferior” women’s writers. It seems as if she would rather not be known as a writer at all. I think that the article is being very condescending in saying that Cather didn’t realize that not publishing her work to the masses would keep it from being read by students. Obviously, I don’t really know very much about Cather, but her idea to keep her writing from the masses seemed like a very conscious and personal act.

Another article that we read for this week was “Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary Canon: A Case Study for the Twenties” by Paul Lauter. I found this article particularly interesting because the fluctuations in acceptance of woman writers seemed to coincide pretty well with the fluctuations of acceptance of Willa Cather’s work from the other article. I also though that it was really interesting toward the end where he talked about literary periods, such as “Puritanism,” “The Frontier,” and “Urbanization.” Here, he said that such periods often encompass only the male experience, as the female experience of home life contains more continuities than discontinuities across time. I also thought it was interesting when he talked about how the professionalization of academia ended up completely excluding women. Where before, women’s book clubs helped determine which texts were widely read, the role switched over to professors who were largely male. The readings for today really helped me to understand why literary recovery is important work.

“Hey!” Smile, and make sure it shines through your whole face, especially your eyes. People can tell if you’re faking. Assume a nonthreatening position. Don’t cross your arms or look past the subject as if in a hurry. Relax your muscles. Speak in a high voice, with a bit of a lilt. Your sincere happiness should extend all the way to your tone and diction. Be confident, but approachable. “You want a free Coke?”

About half the respondents will respond with a shrug or a mumbled excuse or just keep on walking, as if you were actually offering to the squirrel scurrying up the tree behind them. Some will narrow their eyes. You will see thoughts race through their heads, maybe looking for a catch or listening to the echoes of their moms’ well-rehearsed speeches about taking candy from strangers.

The other half will respond enthusiastically, “Sure!” or even “Free pop? Hell yeah.” They will grab the fuchsia aluminum can of Cherry Coca-Cola from your hand and their faces will light up. As they walk away, many will turn back, “Are you doing an experiment or something?”

“Kind of.”

“Cool.” And, happy to have found the “catch” they will pop the tab make their way to their next lectures.

As any seasoned retail floor worker will tell you, sales is just as much about selling yourself as it is about selling the product. People like to know where their future belongings are coming from, and shopping is just as much an experience in itself as a means to obtain material things. And, as it turns out, giving stuff away for free is no different.

I spent this past summer working the sales floor team at the Sioux City Greatlands Target on Sunnybrook Drive. To say that my heart wasn’t in it would be a gross understatement. Day in and day out, I folded shirts, unpacked boxes, and rolled my eyes at my supervisors’ oft-repeated Target mantras: “Get to know the guests” (because calling them “customers” would be too formal), “We’re inviting them into our home, so have a real conversation,” “Smile at everyone you see,” “Let them know you are eager and willing to help,” and this above all else: “Keep it fast, fun, and friendly.”

I had my own three F’s that probably wouldn’t help us sell any moderately priced goods. I ignored my instructions from the supervisors and allowed our “guests” to keep to themselves. I decided that I would need to be paid more than $8.25 per hour if I was going to be required to stock shelves, fold shirts, and make friends with unwilling strangers.

When the school year began, I shed the noble uniform of red and khaki, walked to the bottom floor of Lewis Hall, and grabbed a case of Coke to give away to strangers and write this story for News and Feature Writing. I scrawled out a sign (“Free Coke,” very original, I know) and set the case out on a table in the entryway of Roadman Hall, a centrally located dorm on the Morningside campus. Then, I removed the cans from the case, put them on the table, and sat in a blocky and uncomfortable chair to watch people take them as they walked by.

And they didn’t. The cans sat untouched as no fewer than 112 people walked by in a span of about forty-five minutes. Some people stopped and looked at the sign but then kept walking. Two kids raced right by on Razor scooters. Eventually, I gave a couple away, offering them to friends and one of my professors, but no one took a can of his or her own volition. It was time to switch strategies.

I grabbed my Cherry Coke, walked outside, and sat on a bench next to a heavily trafficked sidewalk. I put on my best Target smile, probably a better one that I had ever used while working there, and offered the soda to any and all passers-by. Within ten minutes I had given away all the Coke.

There’s probably a lesson in this experience about being a better employee; I think that I can feel my former supervisor scowling at me from across town. I guess that people won’t even take free things, much less buy them, unless there is some person or entity with a smiling face to associate with the product. People are social creatures, and they crave social interaction just as much as they crave caffeinated, carbonated, sugary beverages. Or maybe people are just still scared of whatever is the free-Coke-sitting-on-a-table equivalent of razor blades in Halloween candy bars.

Today’s assignment is to find a news story and come up with five different ways to “give it a different spin” in order to write a feature. The story that I found (here) was a New York Times article about how, amidst highly-circulated images of armed police clashing with protestors in Ferguson, MO, President Obama has ordered a review of the federal government’s current policy that outfits local police forces with military-grade weapons. Here are my story ideas:

1. This might be a bit of a stretch, but it would be really cool to do a feature that followed around police officers or a single police officer in the UK, or somewhere else where the police are unarmed, and focus on how they are able to conduct their business. Maybe it could focus on finding some ideas on how to keep the peace without using force that could be transferable to American police forces.

2. Another story could focus on people who have survived events of police brutality, like the Kent State massacre or some events of the Civil Rights Movement, and focus on their experience in a historical throwback.

3. Maybe it would be cool to see what type of weapons the Sioux City police force are armed with. A feature could talk with the police chief and local policemen to see whether such arms are necessary here in Siouxland. Maybe a story like that could determine  whether lower-grade weapons could be cheaper, but just as effective. It could also determine whether local police forces are given the proper training to operate the equipment. This type of story could be applied to pretty much any community. It just takes the national event and localizes it.

4. Maybe another story could compare the arms and equipment that police use in a huge, sometimes dangerous, city like Chicago to the ones that people would use in a small town. Do they use the same stuff? Do they need the same stuff? Are military grade weapons necessary in places that are almost gang war zones? Are they necessary in sleepy Midwestern towns?

5. My last story idea is probably the most generic. It would be really cool to talk to protestors and police officers from Ferguson and go through their experience so far. It would be really useful for me, as a reader, to have a day-by-day account of why people are doing what they are doing and what it is like to be in the middle of the protests.

Out of all these ideas, I would probably most like to do the first one, just because I am truly curious to know how some law enforcement officers in other countries conduct their business unarmed. Obviously, far fewer citizens in countries like the UK are running around with guns than are in the U.S., but I just wonder whether something similar would work here.

Well, another journalism class means that it’s time to jump back into work on this WordPress blog. It’s been almost two years since my last post, so hopefully I’m not too rusty. For class today, we read a bunch of sections from Telling True Stories which talked about how to write literary journalism and why it is important. The very first reading: “Stories Matter” by Jackie Banaszynski went so far as to call stories the defining element that makes us human (5). Banaszynski said that stories are our enduring soul,  that one enduring element of our being that transcends our bodies, accomplishments, and material goods (4).

I have to agree with Banaszynski’s take on the intrinsic importance of stories to humanity. In a practical sense, stories teach. Stories allow us to learn from other people’s mistakes, so they give those who tell stories an evolutionary advantage. But, on a deeper level, stories allow us to transcend ourselves and become other people, other beings. Consuming written stories can reduce stress,  improve brain function,  and even make us more empathetic, They allow us to become more human. And for all of these reasons people crave stories. We need them just like (although maybe not the the same extent that) we need oxygen, food, and water. We seek them out in conversations, television shows, movies, comics, books, newspapers, and hundreds of different forms of media. We need them because “stories are our soul” (6).

Click here for the story.

Yesterday, a UN treaty came in front of the Senate which would, if passed, would put in place international laws regarding the treatment of people with disabilities. The treaty was modeled entirely after the Americans with Disabilities Act and, in short, would extend persons with disabilities around the world the same rights as they enjoy here in America. Bob Dole, former Republican senator (KS) and candidate for president, spoke in support of the bill.

But it didn’t pass.

Seriously?!

Even the Republican majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said “It is a sad day when we cannot pass a treaty that simply brings the world up to the American standard for protecting people with disabilities because the Republican Party is in thrall to extremists and ideologues,” he said in a statement.”

This story is definitely newsworthy and ought to have more media attention, in my opinion. It brings light to the extremism of the Tea Party and that fact that the Republican Party is a much different party than it was just ten years ago. I loved this quote and I’m really happy that the journalist included it. The article stays objective, while still highlighting the injustice of this vote.

But really, the American people (and the UN) ought to be in an uproar like comedian John Stewart.