Writing
Favorite blog posts
- Security theatre comes to Scripps - An exercise in gonzo journalism documenting the Scripps College administration's response to a bomb threat.
- Dr. McGonigal, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Gay Mechanics, parts zero, one, and two - A series of posts on applying game mechanics to web applications and other non-game objects written for the OpenHatch blog.
- A night with Bill Keller - Recap and criticism of a talk given by the executive editor of the New York Times on old versus new media.
- The strange irony of Janteloven - For some reason, this has been the most-linked/most-visited post on Little Green River. It's about Danish culture and growing up in Minnesota, written during my semester in Copenhagen.
Papers
- Sweding: Practice, Theory, Law - Discusses sweding both in and outside the context of the film Be Kind Rewind and how it intersects with fan theory and intellectual property "piracy". Final paper for my Spring '08 Culture of the Copy class.
- Orsborne v. Massachusetts - Mock Supreme Court opinion reversing Reynolds v. United States and finding a right to plural marriages. More importantly, it quotes John Donne's "The Canonization," one of my favorite poems. For my Spring '08 Civil Liberties and Fundamental Rights class.
- The Ivy Kingmakers: Corporate Power Politics and Discrimination in Harvard College Admissions - Research paper analyzing the history of Harvard admissions policies (specifically the 1949 challenge to Harvard's Jewish quota and the rise of affirmative action) within the lens of corporate political economy and arguing that the change in admissions policy can be explained by Harvard/the Ivy League growing into a manager-controlled hegemony-seeking institution. The paper's unfortunately pretty dependent on one book, The Chosen by Jerome Karabel, but everything he says seems to be corroborated elsewhere...so oh well. For my Spring '07 Power Elite class.
- Corporate Interests and User Rights: The Creation of Copyright Policy in the EU - Term paper about why Big Media interests take such precedence in European Union copyright legislation as opposed to consumers' rights (looking particularly at the European Union Copyright Directive), and how this imbalance could change in the future. For my Fall '06 European Politics class.
- Photojournalism and the Internet: Competition, Collaboration, Convergence - Research paper on, well, photojournalism and the Internet, including discussion of the London bombings, Flickr, Dog Poop Girl, and many other phenomena. For my Fall '06 European News Media in Transition class.
- The Next Stage: The Role of The Satanic Verses in the Evolution of British Muslim Activism - What the title said. A research paper, framed by Sir Iqbal Sacranie's valedictorian speech, on changes in British Muslim activism before and after the Rushdie affair. For my Fall '06 Muslims in the West class.
- Faith, Community, and Kierkegaard: Beyond Slaughtered Sons and Lonely Prophets - Term paper focusing on Fear and Trembling and Kierkegaard's understanding of faith overall. Discusses first the "reasonableness" of faith, then whether it makes any sense to share one's faith with others in a religious community (ie a bible study group, or a church). For my Fall '06 Kierkegaard and Meaning in Life class.
- "And God Said...": Ethics Versus the Divine in Fear and Trembling - Essay on the crux of Fear and Trembling: the freaking scary nature of true faith and what that means for ethics and religion. For my Fall '06 Kierkegaard and Meaning in Life class.
- It's Hip to Be a Square: Remedying A's Historical Alienation in Either/Or - Paper about Wilhelm's attempts in Either/Or to save an aesthetic from depressed nihilism through the Power of Marriage! Or something. For my Fall '06 Kierkegaard and Meaning in Life class.
- Romantic Conviction and Hinted Doubts in "The Concept of Irony" - Essay explaining Kierkegaard's understanding of the ironic lifestyle and the pros and cons thereof. For my Fall '06 Kierkegaard and Meaning in Life class.
- Consuming the Protest: Exoticism and Guilt in American Protest Literature - Analysis of how protest can easily fall prey to poseurism, looking at poetry by Chrystos, Native Son by Richard Wright, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" by Audre Lorde, and punk rock. For my Spring '06 American Protest Literature class.
- Social Determinism and Protest Literature: Can Science Change the World? - Analysis of the use of a social determinist model in Stephen Crane's Maggie and Richard Wright's Native Son, arguing that it tends to force even the most critically-intentioned works to take hegemonic norms for granted. For my Spring '06 American Protest Literature class.
- Internet to Public: "You're the Man Now, Dog!": The YTMND Fad and the Empowerment of Media Consumers - Term paper in which I argue that YTMND empowers consumers and democratizes the media landscape. Really. I LOVE this major. For my Fall '05 Intro to Media Studies class.
- The Medium Versus the Message: Gender Norms in Y: The Last Man - Paper on the Y: The Last Man series and how it challenges gender norms explicitly in its content and yet reaffirms them implicitly in its aesthetics. For my Fall '05 Intro to Media Studies class.
- A Fourth Wave of Something: Democratic Transitions in Iran and the Middle East - Paper arguing, using Iran as a case study, that there are no formulas for governance in the Middle East other than secular illiberal states or Islamic democratic states, and that the few examples to the contrary were stomped out due to their incompatibility with Western economic values. For my Fall '05 Intro to Comparative Politics class.
- Cheer Up, Emo Kid!: Contemporary Rock, the Blues Legacy, and "Streetlamp Blues" - Paper I wrote alongside my final project, original composition Streetlamp Blues. It discusses blues and jazz's relationship to rock music--critiquing jazz critics' elitism and modern rock/emo's self-absorption in that they both fail to be true to rock's roots. It also talks about the influences and ideas that went into my composition. For my Fall '05 Jazzlines class.
- The Importance of Voice: Feminism and Satrapi's Persepolis Series - Term paper analyzing Marjane Satrapi and the Persepolis graphic novels from a feminist perspective, with a bit about comics history and Islamic thought. For my Spring '05 Intro to Women's Studies class.
- The Psychology of Time-Space Compression - Comparison of how Jack from DeLillo's White Noise and Jasmine from Mukherjee's Jasmine respond to the uprootedness of postmodern life--one with bewilderment and despair, the other with convenient amnesia and fatalist acceptance. For my Spring '05 What Is Postmodernism? class.
- The Economics of Beauty in "The Painter of Modern Life" and Pattern Recognition - Term paper of how postmodern capitalism speeds up the pace of aesthetic experience to a tempo sure to cause alienation--and then manages to monetize that alienation as well. For my Fall '04 Core I class.
- "Our" Country: Identity, Exclusion, and the "Nation-State" - Paper on how the concept of nationalism is inherently exclusive and minority-unfriendly. For my Fall '04 Core I class.
- Speaking the Unspeakable: Victorian Sexual Norms' Relation to Class in Forster's Maurice - Paper discussing how Maurice is pretty much the epitome of the unspeakable in Victorian society. One: It depicts homosexuality. Two: The gay character is from the upper class (studies and discussions of lower class sexual deviancy were quite common). Three: The gay relationships portrayed are between equals (rather than the exploitative relationship of prostitute and john). Nearly all relationships of this sort are completely absent from the historical record; they are only given voice through fiction. For my Fall '04 Intro Writing class.
- Male Love, Female Lives: Romantic Traditions in Lahiri's "Sexy" - Paper on the disenfranchising nature of romantic expectations for women in Jhumpa Lahiri's story "Sexy" in her book Interpreter of Maladies. For my Fall '04 Intro Writing class.
- "Seeming" to Survive: Honesty and the Fear of Death in Hamlet's Third Soliloquy - What the title said. Up until college, this was the best paper I'd ever written. I still like it. For my senior year AP World Literature class.
- A Plotting Princess; Female Roles in The Odyssey and Antigone - Paper about the powerful witch/passive princess dichotomy in Western literature and how Antigone is an early and rare example of a female character defying that categorization. For my senior year AP World Literature class.
Creative Writing
