TOW #6 - The Strangers in Your Brain

What accounts for the extraordinary wiring of the human mind? - Rebekka Dunlap

     This week, I've decided to pick something different by reading a scientific article. The author, Kelly Clancy, only has one article on The New Yorker but has written many others, all published on her website (www.kellybclancy.com) and on the topic of the brain and its complexities. In this essay, she writes about a new discovery in the genome of neurons, cells that make up brains: each cell has a slightly different genome. In order to explain this discovery and convey the significance of it to a wider audience, Clancy uses personification and allusion throughout her essay.
     In her first paragraph, it is essential for her to clearly explain and define technical terms that she will need to use in order to explain the research later in the essay. She defines transposons as “wandering snippets of DNA that hide in genomes, copying and pasting themselves at random” and “unsung heroes of natural selection.” In science class, biology in particular, every teacher that I’ve had has compared the activities of the topic of discussion, whether it be atoms or organelles, to human activities because it helps people understand the function and/or reasoning behind each reaction and action. Clancy employs this technique in her careful placement of personification in order to help her reader, who most likely isn’t very well versed in biology, better understand the extremely technical subject of the essay.
     Also in her first paragraph but not limited to it, Clancy alludes to Darwin and Darwinian evolution. These references are understandable by everyone that’s ever been to school, since no one is able to escape the lessons about finches and the Galapagos islands that are typical of every biology class. In her first paragraph, Clancy writes “Without [mutations], there would be no novelty and no change; the slow-churning Darwinian search algorithm would stop.” Here, Clancy assumes that the reader knows Darwin’s theory of evolution, a correct assumption, and does not bother explaining it. Later on, Clancy compares the different types of beaks of Darwin’s finches to different types of neurons with different genomes. Again, she assumes the reader will automatically catch on and in doing so effectively explains the phenomenon through the comparison, aiding the reader’s understanding of an esoteric topic.
     Although Clancy’s use of personification and allusion help a very general audience with little understanding of higher biology or neurology understand the new discovery much more deeply than it would’ve through reading a scientific paper, this essays is also very interesting to those who do know a little about biology but are not so fully immersed into the scientific community, such as myself. Even after having taken AP Biology, I did not know what a transposon was. It was interesting to read something new that we hadn’t learned about in school and to read the little asides the Clancy had written in parenthesis that went into more detail and biology than the rest of the article. Overall, Clancy’s essay was effective in capturing the attention of the audience no matter what the background and explaining the content and importance of this scientific discovery.

TOW #5 - HONY

     Brandon Stanton, the man behind the popular blog called Humans of New York (HONY), began his blog as an amateur photographer. Although he’s still not technically a “professional”, his photography blog has become so popular that it is now his profession. On his blog, Brandon posts pictures of random people on the street with quotes that come from short interviews and conversations. For this particular picture, Brandon frames the picture in a way that showcases the subject’s handicap and chooses a short caption in order to create pathos in the viewer and remind people to always look on the bright side.

Humans of New York - posted July 1, 2014

     The first thing a person would see as they scrolled through their Facebook or Instagram feed is the subject’s missing arm. This immediately creates pathos in the viewer by blatantly making it clear that the man in handicapped and reminding him or her that, in most cases, no matter what other struggles he or she has had, he or she at least still has two arms. The bag held up behind the man’s head suggests that he is hardworking and doesn’t let his handicap get in the way of that. His face is partially hidden by his hat, and he doesn’t look like he’s posing particularly for the photo. This makes him seem humble, creating more pathos. Just by looking at the photo, before the viewer reads anything, the man in the picture has already make an impression on the viewer that he doesn’t let his handicap bother him.
     This idea is then further enforced as the reader glances at the short caption. Straight and to the point, like a six (eight, in this case) word story, the man affirms what the reader can infer just by looking at his portrait. “No struggles,” he says. Again, the viewer admires the man in the picture for being so strong and not letting his handicap or anything else bother him, reminding the viewer not to worry so much about the little things.

TOW #4 - The Omnivore’s Dilemma (IRB)

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading my independent reading book: Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In his book, the Pollan has a clear introduction and takes his audience’s point of view into consideration by using humor in order to further and almost revolutionize the reader’s understanding of the food industry and the way we eat. I saw an abundance of strong prose in the introduction and less so in body chapters because it gets much more technical as Pollan explains different aspects of the food we eat. Pollan starts his book with a question: “What should we eat?” (1). The rest of the book is basically a really involved answer to this question. Then, on pages 7-8 Pollan spends a paragraph on each of the sections of the book, explaining the purpose of each. This clear, explicit “road map” as it has been called by so many teachers may be viewed as primitive and basic, like those structured essays and thesis statements we’ve been taught to write since middle and elementary school, but in this case it benefits the reader. After all, the purpose of the book is to answer a simple question and to do so in an easily understood way so that it might make an impact on a very wide audience. Then Pollan moves on to the actual body of the book, and we, the readers, learn a whole lot about corn. Keeping his audience in mind is important in this section because Pollan spends quite some pages on the biology of corn. To those who aren’t scientifically inclined, C-4 plants and F-1 and F-2 generations have no meaning. Since I took AP Biology last year, I was familiar with all of these concepts, and it was interesting to observe how one might break it down for those unfamiliar with biology. I love the way Pollan explains the plant’s stomata dilemma: “Every time a stoma [plural stomata] opens to admit carbon dioxide previous molecules of water escape. It’s as though every time you opened your mouth to eat you lost a quantity of blood” (21). I’d never thought about it that way before, but I love how the comparison instantly makes sense. This is definitely something I will make note of because I often struggle with explaining concepts with which I am already familiar to people who have had no previous exposure. Pollan also makes other comparisons that might make one giggle, establishing ethos for him and keeping the reader interested. For example, he writes “So that’s us: processed corn, walking” (23). All in all, I had a great time reading Pollan’s book and have learned a lot, not only about corn but also about prose. I can’t wait to keep reading!

Big Bad Scary Corn - activistpost.com
Because it's Halloween month and corn is in everything (has taken over the world)

TOW #3 - The two Mexicos: and the lessons for development

The two Mexicos - The Economist

After telling my father about my weekly TOW’s, he immediately subscribed to The New Yorker and gave me his login information for The Economist, New York Times, and The New Yorker so that I could access these magazines online. Thanks Dad! This week, I’ve taken advantage of this. The image I’ve chosen, which isn’t credited to any artist, was printed as the cover of The Economist on September 19, 2015. The main article of this issue discusses development in Mexico, as the title of the image and the issue suggests. This image is a great example of juxtaposition; there is even a visible line down to middle to show the contrasting sides. On the top, the artist depicts developed Mexico as happy, rich with culture, and industrialized. The latter is shown by the car and city skyline, and the former two are shown by the happy face on the statue and the singing man. On the bottom, the artist depicts undeveloped Mexico as poor and violent. The latter is shown by the man with the gun, the crows, and the gravemarkers. The former is shown by the man on horseback, the rundown statue, and the subpar housing. Originally, I thought the undeveloped Mexico was under water because the sky was more blue. I thought this was interesting because it reminded me of the iceberg metaphor, in which the main message is that there’s a lot more to a person or a thing than people can see. In this situation, undeveloped Mexico would be the part that people usually don’t see, especially American tourists. Aside from all of this great comparison, this picture also leaves the viewer with some unanswered questions. The picture is not nearly detailed enough to replace the article, especially for someone without extensive foreknowledge of the subject. Therefore, a purpose of this picture, other than to show the differences in the two Mexicos, is to entice the reader into opening the magazine so that they might subscribe to it if they hadn’t already or so that they stay interested and continue their subscriptions.

TOW #2 - FEC Implements One-Year Break Between All Presidential Terms As Reprieve For Weary Nation

Satire for dummies - Jerm

It’s been too long since I’ve read some nice satire, and the Onion is the perfect place to slide back in. This article discusses a new one-year break between presidential terms implemented by the Federal Election Committee (FEC) in order to give citizens a break between the drama that surrounds a presidency. Of course, the nature of satire is to ridicule, in this case the US presidential elections, so it is not necessary for the report to be true. I could not find the author of this article, but the author and his or her credibility is not important in this situation because any informed reader would know that the information is inaccurate and heavily exaggerated to create a humorous effect. However, the author does create a sort of “ethos” by citing official organizations, like the FEC, and leaders of those organizations, like FEC chair Ann M. Ravel. As aforementioned, the reader of this article would have to be well informed on how the US government works as well as smart enough to understand that waiting a year between presidencies is completely out of the question because it would leave the world superpower without a leader. To further ridicule and make the article funnier, the author adds quotes from citizens reacting to the “change” made by the FEC. For example, alleged Columbus, OH resident Caroline Helling says, “Seeing all these TV and newspaper reports about whatever the current president just did or might do, hearing months and months of speculation about whether some guy’s gonna run or not—it will be the most amazing thing in the world to have a break from all that. I would love, absolutely love, to stop hearing a candidate’s sound bite on loop in the media, then hearing the other side overreacting and denouncing the sound bite, then seeing all the thinkpieces that come out about the overreaction, then having to go through the same shit all over again the next day.” This appeals to the author’s “ethos” by supporting his earlier statements and “logos” by providing a logical argument for keeping the breaks.

TOW #1 - Learning to Live

My grandmother handed me a magazine this weekend, asking me to please actually read it instead of just putting it away somewhere like I usually do. The magazine was a supplement to the World Journal (世界日报), a Chinese newspaper that all Chinese grandparents at Chinese school read frequently. This supplement, with essays both printed in Chinese and English, is targeted to Chinese-American families getting ready to send their children off to prestigious colleges. All of the essays include some sort of advice and make me feel bad as I read about “kids around my age who rose to face challenges usually more daunting than my own” and have already gone so far in life. Unfortunately, most of the essays are written fairly poorly as well, but that can be forgiven since some of the writers primarily speak Chinese. If I could read Chinese well, then I’m sure I’d love their essays.

A boy yawns while awaiting Hilary Clinton's arrival in Beijing last May - Reuters
...Or maybe he's already feeling the pressure of getting into a good college

Liren Ma, the author of Learning to Live and the child of a Chinese immigrant like me, has something different. On one hand, his prose is coherent and flows well, and it doesn’t seem tentative and unsure like that of other writers of the magazine. On the other hand, his advice isn’t to give back to your parents because of the huge sacrifice they made for you, because that would be giving up on yourself. Instead, one should “remember that everything they did was to give [you] the freedom to one day chase [your] own dreams.” He conveys this message by telling us his story, establishing ethos and pathos with the reader. The former he does by sharing experiences that are relatable to other children of Chinese immigrants. For example, he writes about the pressure he felt from the stories his grandparents would tell him about their childhoods or even other kids his age who are doing much better than him, stories which my grandparents frequently tell me too. He establishes pathos by evoking emotions from these stories. He describes the pressure of the stories, the stress of college applications, and the worry of not living a fulfilling life.

IRB Intro Post #1

The scene from Ratatouille

Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals discusses the way we eat food and aims to change “the way Americans think about the politics, perils, and pleasures of eating.” During the summer between middle and high school, I read Pollan’s other book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, and I enjoyed it a lot. It gave eating a whole different meaning, like that scene from Ratatouille in which Remy teaches his brother Emile to really taste food.