Eli Saslow’s “After Newtown shooting, mourning  parents enter into the lonely quiet” is about the long and taxing road the families of the deceased individuals of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting have to go through, specifically Mark and Jackie Barden. This essay appeals largely to pathos, alternating between the long and seemingly inconsequential road of trying to reform gun laws, to the grieving Barden family and how the parents are suffering and broken without their son. The way Saslow integrates the political aspect of the gun reform through the experience of the Bardens, as well as how Saslow then alternates back to the home lives and inner struggles of the Barden family, readers can empathize with the Bardens and feel frustrated themselves for what happened to Daniel and all the victims of that school shooting. Longform readers ranked this among the Best of the Year because it was a relatively current event at the time, it gave readers a glimpse into the inner lives of the grieving families, and it also remained non-extreme on the topic of gun reform. Many individuals feel very strongly one way or the other about the 2nd amendment, in that there should be a lot of gun control or no gun control. Instead, Saslow focuses on how the Barden’s want “gun responsibility,” which is a less volatile middle-ground. Also, this whole essay is really about humanity, grief, love, and loss, which is something every human being can relate to, and feel for.

David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” is effective through his ability to capture the audience in an unexpected journey. Firstly, Wallace opens with setting. He puts the reader into the geographical location of the event the essay is focused on and gives readers the sense of grandeur surrounding it. The words, “enormous, pungent, and extremely” are attention grabbers from line one. He commercializes the event with a website link and lobster-related items one can find and purchase at such an event, but then dives into the scientific information about the lobster, including proper nomenclature and the origins of the word lobster. From the first few paragraphs of the text, I expected this whole essay to be about the festival and how lobster is the main attraction. I was surprised to read factual information amongst the topic of a lobster festival, and that surprise kept me engaged. Wallace also supplies readers with historical research on lobsters, such as how poor people and prisoners used to eat it. Back then, it was considered “cruel and unusual” (55) punishment to feed inmates lobster more than once a week, which I still can’t get over because lobster is very expensive now and usually boujee people like to brag about eating such foods. Wallace writes (in reference to current day), “In the U.S. pop-food imagination, lobster is now the seafood analog to steak…” (55). Seeing how the times have changed, how attitudes have changed, about lobsters is rather interesting.

Wallace is able to create such a captivating essay because it’s so strange. The reader thinks it will go in one direction, and then it branches off into another. I didn’t know there was so much to write about on the topic of lobsters. After the historical and scientific facets of the lobster are addressed, Wallace goes back to creating a setting at the MLF, but this time in a different light. Wallace writes about the festival as an annoyance: too many people, not enough room, and everybody is squished together. In fact, Wallace describes these attributes of the festival to be “irksome little downers” (55), and points out that “the Maine Lobster Festival really is is a mid-level country fair with a culinary hook, and in this respect it’s not unlike [other festivals]…” (55). This was unexpected, as I thought this whole essay was going to be about celebrating the festival.

Wallace then returns to facts—why we eat lobsters in the summer, how they’re caught, how long they live, hard versus soft shell, how it relates to the economy, but inserts a conversational tone to keep the reader interested. Wallace writes, “Chitinous arthropods grow by molting, rather the way people have to buy bigger clothes as they age and gain weight” (56). He says certain statements in the way people might converse with one another. Wallace then goes into another aspect of this new lobster world, and addresses readers directly through second person. He writes about how to prepare lobsters and by addressing the reader, it feels as though one is following a recipe of sorts. Wallace sets up the whole essay in such a way that the reader would not expect the whole point of it to be a reflection on the morality in cooking lobsters alive. Maybe Wallace didn’t know what the point of the essay was until he got to it, either.

The reason this essay is so captivating is that it’s unexpected. I didn’t expect Wallace to contemplate the morality of cooking lobsters alive, or to end on that note, or to go into the neuroscience of brains and how they perceive pain. At the end, Wallace writes, “I’m not trying to give you a PETA-like screed here—at least I don’t think so. I’m trying, rather, to work out and articulate some of the troubling questions that arise amid all the laughter and saltation and community pride of the Maine Lobster Festival” (64). Wallace reveals (I think to himself and the readers at the same time) that the purpose of this journey was to “articulate” some issues Wallace has with this strange lobster world, as it is not all fun and pleasant—there are deeper reflections to be made on it.

Elizabeth Royte takes advantage of the Medium platform to make a more effective essay in that she knows that she will have a niche audience reading about her topic (people interested in consumption, waste, sex, and/or environmental issues) and she can also utlize pictures to supplement her writing and bring readers along with her journey—not just in words, but visually. Medium is also for people to write about anything they want, opposed to writing for a big publishing company like New York Times that would only want to hear about the environmental implications that waste-dumping in parks causes and perhaps about the moral values having sex in public infringes upon when a) it’s a public place, and b) children are around. Royte can make it her essay and not an essay written for a specific audience (though a specific audience might be reading this article). 

Furthermore, the Medium platform allows for creativity and the feeling of being on a journey of discovery. Opposed to starting from beginning, middle, and end of Royte’s journey being interested in cleaning up waste, Royte jumps around. She starts with her days of running in the park and she ends with running in the park with her daughter, but in the middle she writes about being part of a litter mob, then contextualizes how she joined the group, while also throwing in some memories, conversations, and remembrances such as writing about a magazine story she wrote years prior and connects it to present day. She also uses dialogue to make the reader feel like it’s a story, a narrative. She writes about the conversation between her, Marie, and Stephanie, as well as a conversation between her and a man sitting on a log in the park while she cleans around his feet. This connects readers to the essay more and brings it to life, so to speak.

Also, this platform allows Royte to ask questions throughout the piece that reflect how her journey has made her think about her chosen topic. For example, Royte asks herself, “What did that make me, then? A half-assed voyeur, a passive collector of data only partially understood.” She finds her own place within this narrative of waste, consumption, and sex, which allows her to think further about who she is. She comes to realizations about herself and why garbage is so important to her: “For me, garbage is more of a medium, a portal into other people’s lives: what they consume and discard, of course, but also how they interpret disposal laws and customs, and how they relate to the wider world.” By showing readers her thought process about garbage throughout the essay, Royte is able to show readers her perspective and for me, I did understand what she was saying here about how people’s garbage reflects something about the individual or society. You won’t see me picking up nasty trash or used condoms anywhere, but to each their own. Also, she writes, “I was, by now, wondering if our interest in these objects revealed more about us than they revealed about their users. Certainly these artifacts, and the scenarios they brought to mind, kindled in me no sexual excitement.” This platform allows Royte a certain fluidity within her thoughts, in that she can ponder, come to conclusions, and then ponder again, which makes for an interesting read, and an effective essay.

2 stylistic elements:

• Audio inserts of recognizable voices (like Tyson) that use certain ear-catching techniques (speck, speck, speck).
  • The audio inserts of what the people were talking about, such as Mozart’s music when they were talking about his music. Also, the audio inserts in the beginning, with Tyson and Sagan, added another layer to the podcast, as listeners get a glimpse of the voice of the person who will be discussed or who will talk later. 
    • We might be able to insert audio clips from well-known ghost hunters or even the ghostbusters movie, though I’m not an expert of copyrights so maybe not. 
  • They also use sounds in reference to what they’re talking about, like when they talk about death at one point they play a clip of a man screaming, which is something we might be able to do with ghost stories. 
    • This was a good idea, as we could insert creepy sounds, like wind howling or the “ooooooo” sound that is stereotypical of ghosts while telling a ghost story from Arcadia’s legends. 
• The use of creating a narrative and appealing to pathos to connect the audience to the content. 
  • For instance, the audio clip of Gandhi and how it relates to the Salt March was told through a narrative. The man told listeners about what happened and included his own experience reacting to the picture and the clip of Gandhi, as well as how the people who participated in that march felt in response to a government tax. 
    • It’s important to make people care by appealing to pathos. The podcast kept me interested through these personal narratives, whether it was about someone else or a personal story, like Ann Druyan’s experiences with Sagan. Ghost stories are present in every culture and there are certain stories from Arcadia’s history that involve children that we could play on people’s emotions with to connect them to the content. 

2 research elements:

• Interview of Ann Druyan 
  • This interview really supplemented the overall podcast episode for many reasons. She had first-hand experience of interacting with Sagan and she had influence over some things that they were talking about in the episode. 
    • We could interview a student at Arcadia to supplement our podcast. 
• Discussion of star Zeta star 
  • One of the hosts mentioned that he looked stuff up to find out the distance between spaces and the time it would take to travel there. They did not state the sources they looked at to give those numbers, but they do say that they did research to talk about that scenario. 
  • They also talk to a professor at Columbia who studies physics and mathematics and had certain specialties relating to knowledge regarding the neverending space of the universe. 
  • Neil Tyson also gave historical context of the heliocentric theory Copernicus presented which was revolutionary. 
    • We have plenty of historical context that we can insert in the podcast episode to give background information on the topic we are discussing.

Jay Rosen’s “When starting from zero in journalism go for a niche site serving a narrow news interest well” applies to how our group works in that we are each researching a specific topic. Our group is researching ghost stories and we originally had this broad view of what we wanted to research, such as the history of ghost stories, but upon our actual beginning of research, realized how broad of a topic that would be. Instead, we found an article from ScienceDirect and thought it would be more effective to parallel the history of ghost stories and ghost story commercialism in Scotland to that of Arcadia. This is a more niche topic that might interest a specific group of people. It also works in that since our podcast audience is Arcadia students, using Scotland as an example works nice because certain students have studied abroad in Scotland, and as Rosen states in his article, the audience might be more knowledgeable on certain things than we are (such as specific ghost stories in Scotland or the commercial tourism there relating to ghosts and the history of the place). 

In regards as to why interviews are not enough, interviews do not placate every need of both the researcher and the audience of that researcher’s platform, to have a well-rounded understanding of a niche topic. For instance, with our group’s project, if we were to only interview one or two Arcadia students regarding any ghost stories or hauntings experienced on campus, that limits the information the researcher collects, and therefore the information they present to their audience. Simply interviewing one or two Arcadia students about ghosts would only speak to those people’s experiences and not the broader area of study. Interviews can, however, provide the researcher with a first-hand account or experience regarding the topic, which may make it more personable to the audience by including an interview of someone who has experienced something in the field. Also, it cannot be all of the research because there are plenty of other sources that can be explored that also may interest certain audience members more than others. Like Rosen said, the audience might know more than the researcher does on some subjects because it is a niche topic. For our podcast, if we were to only use interviews as our form of research, that may provide some value, but audience members would have a lot more to say about the history of ghost stories, and even the ghost stories at Arcadia. 

Outside sources, like the ScienceDirect study, our scholarly articles, as well as other forms of media, provide the niche audience with a much more complete and well-rounded view of the niche topic. Interviews can often be biased, as well, so it’s better to have many different resources available to a researcher to draw upon when presenting the research, whether it’s through a website, a podcast, a television show, a journal article, etc.

Michaela: When I listened to the “How Old is Winnie the Pooh?” episode of Every Little Thing podcast, I noticed some stylistic choices the host used throughout the podcast. For instance, the podcast begins with a question from Annie, a listener, and invites her to not just be a caller, but to be in the audio of the podcast with the host as a guest. Throughout the podcast, there are audio clips of Winnie and other characters from the show version of the franchise dispersed throughout the podcast to pull the listener into the stories. The podcast has little narratives, like Annie telling the story of how this question came up in her family, some background info on Ben’s life, and also simply reading from a narrative—Winnie the Pooh. How do your podcasts differ or compare? 

Justina: I listened to “The Alibi” podcast episode from Serial. The host, Sarah Koenig, introduces herself at the beginning of the podcast as just a curious individual trying to find answers to real-life stories. She is not a detective or a private investigator, just a curious individual who has a lot of free time on her hands. This curiosity lends itself to the podcast as she continues to ask questions and input her beliefs between audio recordings and the testimony she receives from individuals surrounding the case. She almost puts herself in the place of the listeners, asking the questions they would ask then providing answers to them and she has no bias in the case as she is just trying to solve it in her own mind. What about yours, Alex?

Alex: The podcast I listened to—“Heyoon” from 99% Invisible—starts with a “fake” story wherein the host, Micheal Alex Goldman, and his friends are “off to” heyoon. It’s honestly more of just the storytelling of a place that’s so secluded that only locals know where the location is. Also, the fact that the location of heyoon is never revealed is a great way for people to keep listening. In the beginning, they never really describe what heyoon is, they just keep saying “you have to see this!” 

Michaela: That’s cool. The podcast I listened to utilizes research in that the host uses interviews from people who are experts in their field, though their field may not be scholarly. Ben from the South Florida Fair is considered a professional age guesser since he does get paid to guess people’s ages and is considered to be good at his job. She also refers to professionals like Rae Wynn-Grant, a wildlife ecologist at the American Museum of Natural History, who specializes in bears and she asks about the different factors that determine a bear’s age (like teeth, size, head to body ratio, etc.). An interview of Dr. Sarah Shay who wrote a study on Winnie the Pooh is also included at the end. In terms of organization, the host starts with a question and then explores each source until she finds her answer with Sarah at the end.  

Justina: Similar to Michaela’s podcast host, the host of “The Alibi” also incorporates interviews. The host interviews a lot of people who knew Anon in order to learn more about his character as well as the motive behind his alleged killing. She also digs up transcripts from the court case as well as audio recordings of testimonies made on the stand during the trial, and Sarah even talks to Anon herself in order to try to figure out which party is telling the truth and which party is telling a lie.A lot of the structure of this podcast is: ask a question, talk to a “witness,” or read a transcript, and then add her own personal take on the information that she had learned previously. 

Alex: In “Heyoon,” Alex actually interviews the creator of the structure and finds out what the actual purpose of heyoon is. He also interviews friends from his childhood who have been to heyoon along with him, explaining what/how the place looks like. It was just structured like any other story. It starts about introducing the pavilion, talking about it, and then understanding the actual reason why it was built.

Michaela: What about the narrative? In “How Old is Winnie the Pooh?” the host lets the guests each tell a little narrative about themselves when they are first introduced, and then in the end she literally reads Winnie the Pooh to bring the show to a close.  What about yours, Justina? 

Justina: In “The Alibi,” Sarah introduces the podcast by saying there was a case from 1999 about a murder of a teenage girl. The alleged murderer was her ex-boyfriend Anon, who had a notable reputation for being a “good kid.” He got straight A’s, and was very friendly to everyone, so none of his friends saw it coming that he was a murderer. Sarah does some digging in order to figure out whether he was innocent or what his motive was, but sets the stage for the piece by giving background information of the murder and the alleged murderer. Alex?

Alex: The narrative of the podcast is almost like a movie, honestly, whenever I hear/read something my mind immediately goes into movie form, but, it does without it. It’s most similar to a documentary on something that not many people do and it’s personal because it’s something that he grew up with along with his friends, and Peter Heydon’s perspective as well.

The first episode of Millennial lays out the vision for the show by creating narrative for what is going to follow next. For instance, the narrator begins the show with, well, a narrative focusing on her background history leading up to her moving in with her boyfriend. She shares with listeners her excitement for college in high school, and then how disappointed she was when she returned home to find that home was no longer really home, and she had overromanticized the idea. She plays sad music during certain moments to really put the listener into her head space. She ends the episode by stating that during the moment in her life she is recounting, she is going to move into her boyfriend, and she feels nervous about it. She tells listeners one or two things that are going to happen in the next episode, to keep them interested. She does all of this to give context and then keep the listeners interested enough to see what happens in the next episode.

Out of Zakaria, Lehrer, and Anderson, Anderson is the worst case of plagiarism. He literally just copy and pasted words from Wikipedia (which is not a credible source anyway and begs the credibility about the research used for his book in the first place), blog posts, and other books. He tried to validate his “mistake” by saying that he could not find a good citation format and intended those plagiarized texts to be in the footnotes. His story seemed to be made up to try to make himself look less bad under public scrutiny. He also plagiarized other people, while Zakaria and Lehrer mostly plagiarized themselves. With Zakaria, plagiarizing Jill Lepore was not okay, especially since it was almost word for word, but in the instances in which he plagiarized himself, I feel less upset about. I still think that plagiarizing oneself is wrong, as writing original content is a struggle that every writer has, but not every writer plagiarizes and they work hard to be better at their craft instead of taking the easy way out. I am not sure if what Lehrer did with Bob Dylan fit under my definition of plagiarism. Typically, I think of plagiarism as someone stealing someone else’s words or ideas with the thief’s intention of getting away with it. Lehrer’s use of lying to people about the quotes he said he got from Dylan’s representatives is most certainly wrong, as he quite literally put words in someone else’s mouth, a person who is dead and cannot speak for themselves any longer. All three men were wrong in what they did and deserved to be reprimanded, but their degrees of plagiarism were different. Anderson plagiarized a bunch of other sources so I would label him as the worst.

3 times Kine ran into a dead end and how she dealt with it:

1. Kine ran into a dead end when she asked Donna about Hans being a chef. Donna responded that she didn’t know because she hated to cook, so Kine had to look elsewhere. She found a food blog that mentioned chef Hans Jordi and gave a description of him and the food he served. Kine wrote to the author and asked about Hans and got more information about him from there. 
2. After speaking to Sadie, she learned that he hadn’t spoken or seen Hans in decades. Kine then went back online and found a message board on wedfoodprose.com that had a post regarding Hans Jordi by a man named Chef Carl. She found Chef Carl and called him to get more information. She learned that they went back many years and started their chef careers together. This didn’t help her, but a comment from Chef Renee on the website did. Robert Bland was a recognizable name to Renee, so Kline followed that lead instead. She learned about the Robert Bland Culinary Competition that might have Robert Bland and Hans Jordi at that upcoming event so she decided to go to Phoenix. 
3. Hans wasn’t at the meeting of culinary chefs where she hoped to meet him. However, Chef Renee calls her over and introduces her to different chefs. He sets up a meeting with her and Hans so that she can finally meet the man she’s been searching for. She finally gets to give him the belt buckle back and he is very excited to have it returned to him. 

3 additional things that Kine learned about:

1. Hans never gave A’s but had compassion for a poor, working class boy. He was a cowboy because of how Sadie saw him in the bar that one night. Kine later learns from Hans that he actually was a cowboy and worked at a ranch. She also learned about Bob Xix and how he was very important to Hans and gave the belt to him as a gift, specially made, but it was stolen during a break in. 
2. She learned that Jimmy Turk found the buckle near the bushes and not in a gutter like Carson had said when he told the story. 
3. Chef Renee is from Ecuador, part of mass migration of European chefs who immigrated to southwest. She also learned about the Culinaries history of serving at fancy resorts to now wherever they could host it.

“The Giant Pool Of Money” differs from the “Fast Fashion” podcast in many ways. Most notably, the interspersion of interviews from people who lived through this financial crisis and was involved in it had interview time in the podcast, which served as a lot of the research. This helped with explanation and credibility in some ways. It also indefinitely helped with keeping the viewers interested. Often times, the hosts would explain what happened in their own words, and then provide listeners with further information from someone who experienced it first hand, like Richard the marine and Clarence Nathan, or Mike Garner and Mike Francis. Hearing an emotional, personal story from Richard helped readers understand the effects of the 2008 financial crisis and how the research they are talking about affected people in real life, such as the case when he had to take money from his kid’s college savings to stay afloat. This also grabs readers attention and keeps them wanting to listen. The experts who spoke in this podcast provided credibility to the research with further explanation of a certain phrase, topic, or event that led to the events of 2008. 

These methods of dispersing research through interviews or in between the interviews to further explain something was more effective for this podcast than sharing facts with listeners in “Fast Fashion.” The chronology of events that the hosts followed made the research easier to follow and the interviews made the podcast more engaging and personal for listeners. In “Fast Fashion,” the topic was less complex in terms of all the different factors and people that had a play in the topic, so the hosts were able to talk about present day issues they, or women they knew, were having and then disperse some historical facts here and there. Since the complexity of the housing crisis and the cost of fashion are quite different, it made sense to present the information to listeners chronologically in “The Giant Pool of Money,” though the “Fast Fashion” podcast may have benefited from this method, as well.