MCJ

“What Do We Owe Her Now?” (Washington Post, 2018, 9,475 words)

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I read this quite a while ago, and it stuck with me so much so that I read it again. It is devastating, by the way, in case anybody didn't land on this one. Elizabeth Bruenig's five part multimedia feature for the Washington Post profiles a woman named Amber Wyatt who reported her rape by two popular boys in high school and was subsequently ridiculed by her hometown and denied her day in court by the authorities. Bruenig went to school with Wyatt but did not know her well. I remember being reminded of Sharp Objects, the Gillian Flynn novel, where the main character is asked to return to her hometown to report on a series of missing and murdered young women, and I was even more jarred reading this considering this was a real woman's life completely ruined by people who didn't believe her.

MCJ

“‘Tiny House Hunters’ and the Shrinking American Dream” (Curbed, 1704 words)

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(This has been sitting in a Google doc since literally February. Sorry. Ah.)

Roxane Gay contributed here to Curbed, a publication owned by the Vox Media group, in a piece denoting the experience of watching HGTV’s Tiny House Hunters (a program that I happen to love) and becoming increasingly frustrated not just with the repeated demands and the American obsession with the McMansion but then also laments the same sort of issue I have when I watch those shows: why are you looking for a tiny house when you want a lot of space? Now, it’s recently sort of occurred to me that “tiny homes” are like gentrified mobile homes, and the shrinking of the American Dream that Gay points out here is rather evident. These are people who are clearly looking for some beautiful thing to own, but the budget just isn’t there.

assignments

Kate’s Draft (I can’t find my edited one, so this is the original draft)

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“I
have never heard someone be that disrespectful to me. You are so
unprofessional. How dare you speak to me like that?”

When
Mia Kashuba, a junior and Arcadia University resident assistant, left a meeting
with Taryn Foy, assistant director of residence life and Mia’s supervisor, to
clarify a decision made on her behalf and without compensation or consent, Foy
followed her out of the office and publicly berated her. It was the final
straw, and she quit her job on the spot. After
the Spring 2019 semester, a quarter of the student staff members working as
Resident Assistants (RAs) and Commuter Assistants (CAs) decided they would not
be returning to or reapplying for their positions.

Kate’s Gallery

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(I didn't get to photograph a couple of the RAs I'm looking to get in the next couple of days, so I will add those as they come.)

Resident Assistants are tasked with decorating an entire hall, including their own door. Rosa Talley, 3rd year RA for Knight Hall 2nd floor, decorated hers with a collection of decor from all of her past residence halls.RAs are tasked with keeping residents informed about campus resources and events as well as decorating bulletin boards. Knight Hall 2nd Floor's Resource Board includes a number of flyers for support groups.Commuter Assistants are not assigned to a certain set of students but rather the entire population of the universities commuters. Commuter Assistant Bianca was tasked with decorating a bulletin board introducing herself.Unlike Resident Assistants, who have their own bedrooms and spaces to work, commuter assistants have a designated "office space" located in the commuter lounge, behind an unused bin.Resident assistants at Arcadia are tasked with managing dozens of students' residential lives and are only given a slight discount on their room and board. Photographed here is the "birthday wall" in Knight Hall 2nd Floor, with some two dozen names.

MCJ

“How Elizabeth Holmes’ House of Cards Came Tumbling Down” (Vanity Fair, 5119 words.)

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Nick Bilton wrote this piece for Vanity Fair in 2016, two years prior to the publication of John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies of a Silicon Valley Startup (which I must confess that I have yet to finish, but I am getting there.) It’s a piece which clearly profiles a now-famously delusional person, whose story rose to prominence again in the last year or two as the stories of other delusional scammers became the subjects of different stories much like this one. Bilton here profiles the things which are now widely known about Holmes: her jarringly deep voice, her obsession with Steve Jobs and subsequent affinity for black turtlenecks, undisclosed and professionally inappropriate relationship with an important employee. 

He also does well to shed light on many other things which have become well known details surrounding the massive and criminal decline of Theranos. Holmes dropped out of Stanford without having received her degree but having shared her idea for a patent: a device which would run thousands of tests on a pinprick’s worth of blood, tests able to determine a wide variety of future medical decisions a patient might make. Bilton does a great job of making sure that the reader knows that while this might be a good idea in theory, there’s absolutely no way that it worked. Holmes put people in harm’s way and swindled a massive amount of money out of a lot of prominent people (and a lot of people just looking to invest some of their savings into a Silicon Valley startup.)I think there’s a lot of potential steals to be found here.

MCJ

You’re Wrong About… Anna Nicole Smith

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Maybe this is cheating, since I’ve been a regular listener of You’re Wrong About for about a year (or whenever I went down the rabbit hole of retrospective reading/listening concerning Monica Lewinsky--and their episode about her is wonderful,) but my favorite episode of YWA was re-released over Valentines’ Day weekend, and I decided to give it one more listen. I knew it was a piece of content that had really given me a new perspective on a situation in our popular culture, and I wanted to revisit that. The “Anna Nicole Smith” episode was one of the first YWAs that I ever listened to. Having been 9(?) when Smith died, it wasn’t a situation with which I was particularly familiar outside of having seen her face on the cover of magazines after she died. This particular episode brings into perspective a lot of the things we don’t think about often when the name Anna Nicole Smith comes to mind--”If they made some prestige Anna Nicole Smith documentary on Netflix today, it would win a thousand Emmys next year.” is one of my favorite statements in this episode, and it seems to be true.