Have you ever been catfished? Has the Internet opened up your
social life, or has it enclosed you in a tight circle of people you already
know? Adrian Chen examines social life and social media in this February 2013
essay from New Inquiry.
Apply for an MBA program
with a tweet-sized essay? Sounds easy! But don’t get too excited. University of
Iowa’s Tippie School of Management initiated that innovative idea two years
ago—and they’ve already abandoned it. Alison Damast filed this report in
Bloomberg BusinessWeek in November 2012.
What’s the best part of the
Super Bowl? The game or the ads? Stephen Marche argues for the ads, and he wants
them to get more respect. This column, from Esquire
magazine, appeared just before the Super Bowl in February 2012.
Unless you’ve been living in a kingdom far, far away from any media, you are probably aware that this month marks the centennial of the sinking of the Titanic on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. In this April 2012 article from The New Yorker, author and critic Daniel Mendelsohn attempts to explain why the Titanic continues to be the focus of intense popular and scholarly interest.
“We’ll be right back after these weddings, er, messages, from our sponsors.” Have you ever noticed that love and marriage-related themes appear in commercials for tires or cat food, or other seemingly mundane items? Bella DePaulo has, and posits a theory as to why. A professor of psychology and blogger, DePaulo has studied and written extensively about various aspects of single life. She is the principal contributor to the website Single at Heart, where this article appeared in March 2012.
Muhammad Ali? Oh yeah, he was a great boxer, right? Said a lot of outrageous stuff. Boasted a lot. Dave Zirin remembers more and adds to the story. Zirin is sports editor for The Nation and author of several books about the political history of sports. This article was published in the Los Angeles Times in January 2012.
Many of us have intense and intimate relationships with our media sources, and we enjoy the sensation of the world at our fingertips. How many corporations mediate our access to that world? Do you know? Should we care? The blogger known as Frugal Dad argues that we should, and he expresses alarm that our media experiences are in increasingly fewer hands; his infographic was published in November 2011 on the Frugal Dad blog.
Despite all of the hype that Facebook receives, including the success of the film that tells its story, some college-age people—Facebook’s bullseye demographic—are consciously rejecting the site. Jenna Wortham is a technology reporter for the New York Times, where this article was first published in December 2011.
While it seems safe to say that every person in the United States has been hurt in some way by the current economic situation, there is plenty of diversity in our approach to economic problems. Sociologist David S. Meyer looks at the Occupy movement and the reactions to it through the lens of blame assignment. This article was posted on October 20, 2011, on the blog Politics Outdoors, which covers protests and demonstrations of all types.
Did you “like” or rate something online today? Do you ever get tired of being asked to review products, restaurants, movies, and so on? In this essay from Wired, Chris Colin assesses assessments and reviews reviews. Colin is author of What Really Happened to the Class of ’93 and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Wired, Smithsonian, and other publications.
New readings posted monthly, on the same issues that are covered in “They Say / I Say” with Readings—and with a space where readers can comment, and join the conversation.
