Coming home!

My babies are coming! Tomorrow, we drive up to New Haven to fetch Maria plus 3 tons of dirty laundry, and then Elizabeth will drive home after class on Wednesday.

Thanksgiving break is well-known as a crisis time, especially for families with freshmen coming home for the first time.  Counseling centers often run programs for students to prepare them for conflicts when the folks at home don’t like the new hairdo or the new religion (or lack thereof) or the new politics or the new career plan. Newspapers run stories about parents coping with their returning freshmen wanting to keep dormitory-style hours and engage in dormitory-style behavior. More traumatic, of course, are the families who are dealing with genuine and serious heartbreak, like parents’ divorce or student failure.

To be honest, Ben and I made the adjustment to being empty nesters pretty easily.  We read more, eat when we want, and there’s never any drama. The only commitment on my schedule at home is to watch Stewart and Colbert every evening.

All that will go out the window next week.  When I come down in the morning, the sink will be filled with dirty dishes. There will be empty Diet Coke cans on every surface. Sweaty gym clothes will be found lying on the bathroom floor in front of the shower. My favorite chair will be off limits, to me.

I can’t wait.

Gigi

Sweatshirt sweatshop no more

The New York Times reports that the campus-based anti-sweatshop movement has persuaded one of the country’s leading sportswear companies, Russell Athletic, to agree to rehire 1,200 workers in Honduras who lost their jobs when Russell closed their factory soon after the workers had unionized.

So it seems that sometimes the good guys do win. And that today’s college students can get it together to protest about something other than alcohol restrictions. And speaking of which, the Times also reports that some colleges, including the University of Minnesota, are starting to bar from football games students who’ve failed breathalyzer tests.

Uh-oh. Better beef up campus security: this will not stand!

—Ben

Sarah Palin

I just heard on NPR that having those two words on your website increases traffic by 50 percent.

I would also like to say sex, New Moon, Oprah, Nascar, World of Warcraft, and Miley Cyrus.

Sarah Palin Sarah Palin Sarah Palin Sarah Palin

—Ben

Crazy college essay topics

CNN reports ten off-beat college admissions essay topics. These are pretty cool, though I’m sure I’d find them annoying if I had to write them myself.

1. How do you feel about Wednesday? (University of Chicago, 2002)

2. What outrages you? (Wake Forest, 2009)

3. Write a haiku, limerick, or short poem that best represents you. (NYU, 2009)

4. In the year 2050, a movie is being made of your life. Please tell us the name of your movie and briefly summarize the story line. (NYU, 2009)

5. What is college for? (Hampshire College, 2009)

6. Are we alone? (Tufts, 2009)

7. Make a bold prediction about something in the year 2020 that no one else has made a bold prediction about. (University of Virginia, 1999)

8. Write a short story using one of the following titles: a.) House of Cards, b.)The Poor Sport, c.) Drama at the Prom, d.) Election Night, 2044, e.) The Getaway. (Tufts, 2009)

9. How did you get caught? (Or not caught, as the case may be.) (Chicago, 2009)

10. You have just completed your 300-page autobiography. Please submit Page 217. (UPenn, 2009)

Life imitates art imitates life?

Out of the darkness come six beats of wood against metal. Eight more progressively louder beats and the stage lights come on, revealing 13 percussionists and dancers. Philippe Celestin stands in the middle, dressed in the sweatpants he wears to soccer practice, powerfully drumming on two overturned trash cans. The capacity crowd erupts.

Philippe Celestin gathers the ball with his left foot in full stride. At full speed, he makes two touches with his right foot. He throws his whole body to the left and with his right foot quickly taps the ball to the right. One hard strike and the ball rockets into the back of the net. The capacity crowd erupts.

Phillppe, whose father is a native of Haiti, grew up with two passions: soccer and dance. He went to college at an elite liberal arts institution that allowed him to pursue both at a high level.

But then the inevitable happened.

His soccer team had an NCAA tournament game scheduled … at the same time as a stomp performance! What do to do? His teammates depended on him, yet the demands of art were just as strong.

Wait—didn’t I already see this movie, only instead of stomp it was ballet and instead of soccer it was, I don’t know, video games or something? Indeed it is an eternal myth, evoked in “The Jazz Singer,” where Al Jolson had to choose between sacred songs and hot jazz, and Clifford Odets’ “Golden Boy,” where the poor Italian-American youth could please his parents by playing the violin or pursue his own prizefighting passion?

Who could forget "Don't Forget 127th Street"?

(By the way, one of the great cultural experiences of my youth was seeing the Broadway musical version of “GB,” starring Sammy Davis Jr., with a book by Odets and William Gibson, and with a great score by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, post “Bye Bye Birdie.” Free advice to any producer looking for a musical to revive: revive this one, and put Fiddy Cent in the lead.)

But back to Philippe’s story. The thing is, it’s not a story–it’s real, Philippe Celestin is a junior midfielder at Swarthmore College, and the top two paragraphs are from an article about him in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Here is some video of him doing his thangs, which he sees as hardly contradictory but all of a piece. The Inquirer reporter, Sam Lacy, writes:

At early father-son practice sessions, Flaubert Celestin taught his son to dance up and down the field, shaking his hips and moving his whole body with every step. “He taught me to move fluidly and to embrace the rhythm of the game,” Philippe Celestin said.

Which path did Philippe choose this past Friday night? Loyalty to his teammates, or to his muse? I’m not telling—if you want to find out, you’ll have to read the Inquirer article. The only thing I’ll say is (and I’m sure Gigi will agree): Only at Swarthmore.

—Ben

Moral dilemma (with an update about Facebook)

Having a just published a book (Memoir: A History–thanks for asking!) I naturally am interested in getting it reviewed as widely and favorably as possible. That explains my mixed feelings at just getting the following e-mail:

“I enjoyed your book on memoir–hence my pending friend request. I’m reviewing it.” (emphasis added)

So what should I do vis a vis the pending Facebook friend request?

I don’t have time to wait for Randy Cohen, the New York Times Magazine Ethicist, so I am asking you(se).

—Ben

Update, later that same day:

Hellman's makes the best mayonnaise. 'Nuff said...

Thank you for your sage advice (in the Comments, below). What I may not have made clear is, first, my possibly paranoid sense that this person was saying, in effect, “Be my friend or I will rip your book.”

The other thing I did not express is my Facebook ambivalence. The first time I heard about it was four-plus years ago, was when my then-student and now friend Nicole Sarrubbo wrote an article about it for my feature-writing class. Sometime after it migrated from college students to old people, I was friended by someone and I joined. That was where it stood for a while. Eventually, I started getting more involved and actually friended Nicole. I still recall her reply: “Four friends and no picture. Pretty pathetic.”

At this point, I have … well, one of the numerous annoying things about Facebook is its insistence on quantifying, so never mind how many FB friends I have. (I have never been friended by, nor would I ever friend, a current student–so I found it interesting to read today in the Chronicle of Higher Education about an Illinois State prof who requires that his students friend him. Writing that sentence, with its odd verbs, reminds me that the New Oxford American dictionary has just puckishly chosen the even odder verb “unfriend”—used by Andy Cassel in his comment to this post—as its Word of the Year.)  The updates and comments of some of my friends are great–they’ve gotten to be regular and enjoyable part of my day. It’s cool to be friends, even this nonintimate and very particular kind of friend, with Robert Lipsyte, whose New York Times sports columns I devoured as a youth. And I like periodically throwing out my own Larry King-like apercus. (Today, for example, I announced “Rebecca Roberts: The Best ‘Talk of the Nation’ host since Ray Suarez!”)

But other aspects are weird. Some friends, whom I’d like to hear about, never seem to post anything.  Others have set the bar of update-worthiness alarmingly low. Others seem to use Facebook as a forum to mechanically promote their own work on other platforms–and I sometimes wonder if I’m guilty of that myself.

At this point, Facebook is like a room in my house that it feels worthwhile to walk around in once in a while. Definitely don’t want to knock down any walls to expand it. Thus I add to my FB friend roster only (real) friends, or people whose work I know and admire.

Since my future reviewer is in neither group, his request will get no response. Along with everything else, as Chris Yasiejko suggests in his Comment, it’s strange and inappropriate for a reviewer to contact reviewee pre-review. As for his eventual assessment of my book, I’m thinking anything more positive than a hatchet job will be a win.

Hey! Where’s everybody going?

OMG my professor is still talking!

It’s the end of my astronomy class, Galaxies and the Universe–or at least it would seem to be the end. Sounds of laptops closing, zippers being zipped, and general rustling around fill the lecture hall, as the professor keeps talking about cosmological microwave radiation. It’s pretty interesting material, but I can no longer hear, as people have started standing up and doing their end-of-class stretches. It’s 3:44, and the class ends at 3:45.

I can understand the need to indicate via body language that it’s end of class to professors who hold the class 5 to 10 minutes late. But this struck me as a little rude.

Lizy, do people do this at Vassar? And pops, do people do this in your class? Have you ever been interrupted by the slamming shut of textbooks?

–Maria

Teaching journalism, part II

A couple of weeks back, I offered some thoughts on the challenges of teaching journalism in this day and age. I have an essay on some other aspects of the subject in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, as part of an special section on the state of journalism and journalism education. (I’ll comment on the section once I’ve had a chance to read the whole thing!)

Interestingly enough, the Chronicle charges actual cash money for most of its content, so you can’t read the whole article on its site unless you’re a subscriber. I hold the copyright, so I reprint the entire piece below:

I’VE READ THE NEWS TODAY, OH BOY

David Simon did some righteous testifying a few months ago. Speaking before a Senate committee, the author (Homicide), creator/producer (The Wire), and former newspaper reporter (The Baltimore Sun) heaved icy water on the notion that, if and when newspapers meet their maker, journalistic excellence will effortlessly migrate to new platforms on the Web. He was especially pessimistic about the survival of local trench journalism.

“The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning-board hearing,” said Simon, “is the day that I will be confident that we have actually reached some sort of equilibrium.”

“There’s no glory in that kind of journalism, but that is the bedrock,” he added. He predicted that with local coverage dwindling, “the next 10 to 15 years are going to be a halcyon era for corrupt politicians.”

As a citizen, I am deeply interested in the issues Simon raised. And as a journalism professor, I have an additional interest. That is, with the cosmos of journalism shifting before our eyes, I have to decide what to teach my students. My decisions will not be based (in any significant way) on predictions about the fall of print, or the rise of the Web, or the viability of any particular economic model. Neither I nor anyone else has a clue about how the years ahead will play out in this regard. But I do have a basis for predicting the journalistic skills, concepts, and forms that will endure, and that is how I’m making my pedagogical decisions.

Take the genre Simon was talking about: the zoning-board story. He was dead on about its critical importance—and probably also about its near-term bad straits. But precisely because of its importance, and because it’s buttressed by the Constitution, by a long tradition of practice, and by the American DNA, I’m confident that it will eventually find some kind of appropriate forum. And so I continue to include in my classes units on how to cover local meetings.

What about the rest of the newspaper? To address that question, I conducted a thought experiment: I read a recent Sunday edition of my local newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, divided its contents into categories or genres, and decided which will survive and which will die.

Following the optimistic logic of the paragraph before last, I predict the long-term viability of (and will continue to teach the investigative skills demanded by) watchdog journalism exemplified by two front-page Inquirer articles. One laid out systemic problems at the local Veterans Administration hospital. The other, based on interviews with numerous Philadelphia public-school teachers, was about the pressure they felt to pass students, even unqualified ones. Those are examples of what-the-people-need journalism. I would also place in that category lots of other stuff in the Inquirer: reports on politicians’ actions and statements, on criminal and judicial matters, on significant international happenings (the last all picked up from wire services or other newspapers).

Optimism isn’t needed to forecast the survival of what-the-people-want stuff. In the Inquirer, that consists of opinion and commentary pieces, local obituaries, and dispatches about subjects significant numbers of readers are passionate about, or at least interested in: dining in, dining out, sports, entertainment, celebrity gossip, real estate, travel, health, technology, gardening and other “lifestyle” pursuits, and personal finance. The big and steady demand for this suggests to me that it doesn’t require much classroom instruction. Just look at the Internet, which is overflowing with it. Compared with print, the online stuff is generally snarkier, shorter, less factually reliable, less accessible to the noncognoscenti, and less carefully conceived and processed. But the best of it also bears a more authoritative voice and smarter prose. Let’s hope (we’re back in optimism mode) that in coming years, the state of the art will gravitate toward the best and away from the worst of the two worlds.

At the moment, there’s no real place on the Web for leisurely, witty articles like one on the front page of the Inquirer: the food writer Rick Nichols’s fly-on-the-wall description of a pizza-research road trip—with stops at Pepe’s in New Haven and Lucali’s and Franny’s in Brooklyn, among others—taken by the local restaurateur Stephen Starr and his posse. Will the Web develop to accommodate such prose forms? And will I keep teaching them? I say yes to both.

I suppose my thinking here is based on the robustness of art. For the same reason, I see future incarnations of two other stories in the paper, the Metro columnist Daniel Rubin’s deft and touching account of a road trip with his 83-year-old father and the Pulitzer Prize feature writer Michael Vitez’s long account (this is the first of three parts) of a local collegiate swimmer’s recovery from a very bad accident. In any era, excellent narrative about human beings will find a home.

If Snark and Art represent two sorts of newspaper features destined to get out alive, I’ll add a third name: Mabel. The reference is to the “Hey, Mabel” story, named for the tableau of a guy looking up from the paper and calling for the missus to get a load of this. Judging from most-viewed lists on aggregators like Yahoo and Google, the market for this sort of piece, sometimes called a “bright,” is still robust. An example is the top story on Yahoo News as I write, an Associated Press article entitled “Dead Sea Peril: Sinkholes Swallow Up the Unwary.” The Sunday Inquirer has one too, also from the AP: “She’s Hot on the Trail of Nuisance Gators in Florida.” (Funny how the titles of these stories pretty much say it all.)

By the same logic, there would also appear to be a continuing demand for Hey-Mabelish lifestyle/trend pieces, along the lines of grandmas are now getting tattoos, teens are getting off Facebook because their parents are getting on, tweens are having co-ed slumber parties, and so on.

That covers everything in the Sunday Inquirer, right? Wrong. Two articles remain. Both are well reported and well written, and represent venerable genres, but neither has a future, and I’m going to stop teaching them both.

The first appears in the Metro section of the paper and is called “Comics Convention Draws a Colorful Crowd.” The genre here is the scene piece—think the mall on Black Friday, or outside the arena of a Phish concert. The idea is to go to a colorful event, soak up the atmosphere, fill up a notebook, stitch together some quotes, color, and characters, and close with a “kicker”—a pithy quote. The author, Matthew Spolar, has done all that at a fantasy/science-fiction/comic-book exposition called the Wizard World Philadelphia Comic-Con. It is all well done, as I say, but I cannot imagine anyone really caring.

The second story, “Rachel Simon on Homes and Hearts,” is a leisurely profile of a local author with a new memoir coming out. Again, it has all the requisite elements: catchy lede, a “nut graf” (sometimes called a “billboard”) that briefly explains what the story is about and why we should care, well-chosen factoids about the writer and the book, sound-bite-style quotes, and, again, a kicker. And again, it does not scream, “Read me!”

Some other types of features, which don’t happen to be represented in this edition of the Inquirer, are toast as well. The weather story, where, after an day of extreme meteorology, the reporter goes out and gathers some quotes and anecdotes. The anniversary story—commemorating the 50th or 100th birthday of Jell-O, or iceberg lettuce, or whatever. The lame holiday angle—the Christmas piece about the mall-Santa-training academy, the one about sexy outfits on Halloween, the one about unusual jobs on Labor Day.

Generations of journalists have been schooled in the protocols of those genres; they have amused and instructed, in their fashion, for years. I have devoted much time to them in my feature-writing class. But there will be no Congressional hearings bemoaning their demise, nor should there be. They are the kind of thing Marshall McLuhan was talking about when he said, “People don’t actually read newspapers—they step into them every morning like a hot bath.” They will soon be as antique and superfluous as copy paper, glue pots, and symbols like

-30-

—Ben

Procrastination at its finest

This is my I’ve-Been-Working-On-a-Roman-Architecture-Paper-For-Hours face. I just can’t physically do it anymore. Anyone have any tips for how to pump out a paper I’m incredibly bored by? Or tips for how to stop procrastinating by reloading my Facbeook page every 30 seconds and taking pictures of myself on Photobooth?

See the sadness in my eyes??

Cool-ege

I just read an article on Yahoo news about college life in co-ed dorms. Here were some of the findings

A new study finds university students in coed housing are 2.5 times more likely to binge drink every week. And no surprise, they’re also likely to have more sexual partners, the study found. Also, pornography use was higher among students in coed dorms.

I’ve lived in co-ed dorms my entire college career. I don’t binge drink (and don’t know many people who do), don’t sleep around, and don’t watch pornography. Instead, I’ve made friends with the guys on my hall–or totally ignored them. I’ve treated them exactly how I’ve treated the women who have lived on my halls. I found the title of the article to be odd as well. “No Surprise: Coed Dorms Fuel Sex and Drinking.” Never once have I thought, “Wow. A boy lives next door to me. I should drink this entire bottle of wine and watch some porn!” It seems to be implying that us lady-students are so easily influenced by the men in our dorms that we will sleep with them and binge drink. Like we don’t have any agency in our decision making processes and that the only way to protect us is for all the women to live in a cloistered nunnery.

I scrolled down to continue reading the article. I found it to be “no surprise” that the study was co-authored by a professor of “Family Life” at Brigham Young University (by the way, can I trade in my history major for one in “Family Life?”). The whole study seems suspect to me. First, who said sex and porn are necessarily bad? Maybe the students who choose to go to colleges that have co-ed dorms were more likely to have sex or watch porn to begin with. Or maybe schools that are open-minded enough to recognize that men and women (and those who do not conform to the gender binary) can co-exist also have students who are unashamed of the fact that they are sexually active or watch porn.

To close- there is one all-female dorm at Vassar. The women I know who live there (by choice or random assignation) are similar to other Vassar students: Strong, independent, and entirely capable of making their own decisions. And while many of them drink more heavily than the women living in the dorms, have multiple sexual partners, and actively enjoy porn, some choose to abstain from those activities. I seriously doubt that if they happened to live in the co-ed dorms they would change their behaviors.

-Lizy