For our in-class writing assignment, we were tasked to describe the experience of tasting a certain food item. I chose to taste a Pirouline, a “Dark Chocolate, creme filled wafer.”, as the packaging proclaims.

The Pirouline looks like a long wafer roll, filled with chocolate. When I took the first bite, the wafer was tasteless but added a crunchy texture to the bite right away. After biting through the wafer, the chocolate cream was in stark contrast to the crunchy wafer, soft and creamy with a distinct dark chocolate taste.

What was interesting to me was, that while the wafer gave the distinctive texture of the initial crunch, it did not provide any flavor and while the chocolate did not give me any textural impressions, it provided all the flavor. So, for the food to provide the full experience of texture and taste both of these components are necessary, even thougheach of them only provides one distinct facet.

While writing my news article “The Case Antonio Brown”, the part of the process that I put the most effort in was writing a good and concise lead and then to be as complete as possible with my information throughout the article. The part that I should have put a little more effort into was to find good quotes from other new articles that would have enriched my story.

The most difficult part of writing this article was to strike the balance between being concise and featuring all the information relevant to the story. I think this is the biggest challenge of news writing in general because stories should be short but also as complete as possible.

The biggest problem was to strike exactly that balance but I think I was fairly successful at reporting all the relevant events without having the article be too long. 

Tasked with collecting a creatively bent paper clip and a musical recommendation from people around the Morningside campus, I set out on the quest to collect these items and hopefully meet some new people while doing that.

First, I encountered Kevin, a fellow Morningside student, who was studying on a bench next to one of the main paths on campus. I decided to ask him for a musical recommendation, mainly because there were no paperclips around to be bend. When I approached Kevin and asked him what song he would really want me to listen to, he reacted a little surprised and did not know what to say right away. After I explained it was for a class and not just a random question, Kevin opened up a little bit and told me that I should definitely listen to “Give it all” by Rise Against, a rock band. When I asked him if Rock is his favorite music genre, he replied: “Yes, I listen mostly to rock and punk.”

Happy that I found such a good musical recommendation, I proceeded to walk to the Lincoln Center, in hopes of acquiring a creatively bend paper clip. When I arrived at the building I first visited the business office administrator to acquire a paper clip. I then found Jason Hahlbeck, who was studying at one of the tables in the lobby and asked him to bend the paper clip. The result was a cool looking knot-ish object, shown below, that describes his “brain after a business law class.”

The Vox article “The next global pandemic could kill millions of us. Experts say we’re really not prepared.” shines a light on a report conducted by the Independent Preparedness Monitoring Board, which states that there is a growing threat of a global pandemic of disease and that the world is overall ill-prepared to prevent or stop such a pandemic.

The report states multiple reasons for this state of unpreparedness, for example many of the things that make our lives easier on a daily basis like the ease of global travel would actually help to spread a disease around around the globe in the matter of hours. Paired with emerging social trends like not vaccinating children, these factors create a threat of global pandemics that could kill millions, according to the article.

The article is aimed at people that are unaware of the threat that pandemics pose to the world and does a good job informing about that threat and the basic concepts of diseases and how they spread.

The author does a decent job at staying objective but falls into subjectivity when talking about the severity of the threat and the wisdom of the report, which shows some preoccupancy of the author. This is understandable, given the seriousness of the matter, but takes away some of the validity of the article.

An article in the New York Times, called “E.P.A. to Roll Back Regulations on Methane, a Potent Greenhouse Gas” talks about efforts made by the Environmental Protection Agency to deregulate the emission of methane gases, which is a known greenhouse gas coming from oil wells, pipelines and other facilities in the oil and gas industry. In the light of all the awareness brought to climate change and environmental problems, this article seemed very newsworthy to me, as it shows that the US continues to reduce their efforts to combat climate change, while most of the world is trying to up their efforts.

The article does a good job staying objective and presents the facts of the matter as well as quoting both sources supporting the role back as well as sources condemning it. It also briefly talks about the role of oil and gas companies in this issue and states that most of those companies actually do not support the rollback. This is an interesting aspect in my opinion since the rollback on methane regulations is a result of Trump’s executive order to eliminate regulations that hold back growth in those oil and gas industries.

The high volume of information and lengthy nature of the article aims at an older audience that has enough interest and prior knowledge to value all the extra information.

Link to the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/climate/epa-methane-greenhouse-gas.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage