What My Drawing Looked like

Evil-Cruel




Innocent-Good


Mask to hide behind

Ending-Candide

As I finished reading Candide, I found Voltaire a very effective writer. At first I didn´t understand his satire, but as the book went on I adapted. I found it a very creative and entertaing way to portray his message about optimism and passim. His common place of using human natures typical behaviors helped me connect with the book. I found it very interesting how he compared society and its ideals throughout the book.

In the last chapters after all the suffering Candide has gone through, he finally has an optimistic life after all. Voltaire’s use of vividness really helped me out when reading. I could imagine every scene, since he used appropriate descriptive words for each scene.

I found the final passage of the book a very good one to end it. It was a very strong ending, with a very true message.

¨You are perfectly right, said Pangloss; for when man was put into the Garden of Eden, he was put there to dress it and to keep it, to work in fact which proves that man was not born to an easy life. ….Let’s work without speculating, said Martin; it’s the only way to make life bearable. The entire household agreed to this admirable plan, and each began to exercise his talents. That is very well put, said Candide, but we must go and work our garden.¨ (Candide pg.143-144)

The message I got from Voltaire was that being rich doesn’t symbolize happiness. As we saw in chapter 30 it mentions all those noble men, who had it all and ended up getting killed. I love the ending how Candide finally teaches Pangloss something. Candide teaches Pangloss that in order to have a better world each must do it´s own contribution and work for it, because improvement only comes from work, not from doing nothing like all those noble men. They really didn´t accomplish much, because since they had it all they didn´t work to improve.

Drawing

As I read Chapter 20-25 I found the end of chapter 21 very impacting. It is a conversation between Candide and Martin, where Candide asks Martin, ¨ Do you think, said Candide that men have always massacred each other, as they do today, that they have always been false, cozening, faithless, ungrateful, thieving, weak, inconstant , mean-spirited, envious, greedy, drunken, miserly, ambitious, bloody, slanderous, debauched, fanatic, hypocritical and stupid?”And Martin replies, “Do you think said Martin, that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they could find them?”(Candide 96) When Candide responds ¨Of course I do¨ Martin then proves his point by saying that if the rest of the animals’ don´t change why men would be any different and actually change. Candide then defends his point of view by saying that humans have free will.

I believe humans do have free will, yet, humans are very evil. I have found that many people who appear to be your best friends actually backstab you and betray you. I do agree that we have free will, yet many don´t use it how it´s supposed to be.

Therefore, for my drawing I drew a Mardi gras mask over a baby face and another image which is a face of a witch behind the mask as well. The mask and the baby represents ¨good¨ and innocence for it has a smile on it and the witch is a symbol of evil. Depending on the situation in our daily life we change the face, yet we always have the mask on. For our environment makes us act differently accordingly.

I think my drawing perfectly describes society and human nature, because sometime in our life we have backstabbed or been backstabbed by someone you cared about and never expected. Many times in society we act as someone we are not either if it is to fit in, harm someone, or reach a goal. That is why there is a saying that says trust no one but yourself. We live in a very dangerous evil world full of hypocrisy and two faced people. Danger surrounds us, even though it sometimes looks pretty harmless. It´s reality and something we face in our daily lives and through time learn how to handle it.

I liked how Voltaire made fun of this cruel human behavior, because it alerts the reader to be aware of hurting others and of being hurt. It also makes the reader reflect upon own personal experiences and analyze them.


* DRAWNG IS IN MY NOTEBOOK-I Don´t have a scanner sorry.

Satirical Essay

The Greatest Sport Created


Are you tired of feeling ugly? Not having enough money? Simply being fat? Are you tired of eating your money and flushing it down the toilet? The solution is all in the new sport created: Anorexia. It is proven that food is the cause of world poverty. With the money you waste on food yearly, you could buy 100 Mercedes. So, do you prefer to have 100 Mercedes parked in your garage or have a big fat belly and no money in your wallet? By playing a sport, never before could you help fight world poverty, yet now you can!

This sport has become so popular in such a short period of time that it is now being considered to be played in the next Olympics. It’s an easy sport, which only requires one skill, to follow directions. Playing it is as easy as it sounds: No Eating. That is it, one rule. It can’t get any simpler.

There has now been an anorexic association league created not too long ago, devoted into helping others. If you want to improve your life tremendously, call them NOW! They will give you tips to improve your life 100% guaranteed. Call 1800-Anorexics. They will give you all the information needed to join the team, free of charge. This Anorexic league will promise you drastic changes very rapidly. You may ask yourself why they don’t charge. It’s simple, their passion is to help others making the world a happier and better place.

This sport will only improve your life. It will make you skinnier, prettier, happier and will teach you skills essential to your daily life: following directions. Ever since it was created millions of athletes are in the constant race of fighting to always become better. They do whatever it takes, to reach “success”.

Psychologists have even rated this sport as the drug they had never before found. This is because it not only improves your physical and emotional health, but it triggers motivation. So, if you find life boring and need that inspiration you once had, call them now.

On the other hand do you suffer from not enough attention? Are you depressed and feel useless? This sport will give you the attention you had always dreamed of. The changes will be so noticeable, that people with no doubt, will look at you in surprise, talk about you and even point at you. Who would ever think shutting your mouth was the answer for the attention you were looking for all these years.

Is your name hideous? Are you embarrassed to meet people because of your name? People who practice this sport can refer to themselves as Ana. Playing Anorexia will abolish your worst nightmare. People will now refer to you as Ana instead of your embarrassing name. This is the same case as people who practice syphilis are called Philly. Yet, Ana is a prettier than any other name. It’s short easy and unisex. No need to be ashamed, now you will be part of this proud, prestigious elite team.

What sport can be better than one that is affordable, gains the attention you always wanted, gives life a meaning and motivates you, no need to go the gym or time required to practice and it even saves you money, makes you pretty and happy.

Join the never ending race of being the scrawniest and boniest or simply the prettiest person alive. Being gorgeous is not that difficult. So it’s time for the life you always wanted. Start practicing only practice makes better. The more you practice the better the results.

This new trendy, effective, no time consuming sport has been the solution to millions of problems. No more working out, no more hassles, no more being unhappy or ugly. Start playing and you will become amazed by the feedback. Have a problem? There is an answer: Anorexia.

Connection With N.Y.T Article

When poverty exists it brings many other problems, making society very chaotic. Some consequences of poverty are crime, violence, disease among may others. It is the responsibility of the more privileged to help others in any way possible.

In these chapters we can see how perfect Eldorado is. How the children were playing with gold nuggets, emeralds and rubies. Eldorado is a Utopian world, meaning it doesn´t exists. I can relate this to the real world by dividing the poor and the rich. There are many people specially celebrities who have so much money, that they don´t know what to do with it, yet, it never crosses their mind to help the most needy. Maybe they are greedy or maybe they simply don´t want anything to do with people from other social classes because they could be affected. Just as in Eldorado there was enough money to end world poverty, ¨ (pg.75)As they approached they noticed some children, covered with tattered gold brocade, playing at nine pins.¨ In Eldorado there was so much wealth that they didn´t know what to do with it, so it became the children’s toys. Instead of helping the poor these people were in denial of having any contact with the outside world because they thought they would be at risk of destroying their perfect country.

The fortune that Candide takes from Eldorado brings him more problems than advantages. Therefore, I can connect this with an article in The New York Times, which talks about how giving money to the needy can cause more problems than benefits. You may ask yourself why helping others would fail, it never has before yet the truth is as said in the article ¨Failures are buried so as not to discourage donors and evaluations are often done by the organizations themselves.¨

When Candide gives away some money for a few people to accompany him in his voyage, he realizes There are so many miserable people in the world that giving away a little bit of money does nothing to reduce this overall misery. Is this maybe why people are discourage to help out? In the article the same idea is mentioned, ¨Economists find no correlation between countries that received aid and those that grew quickly. This may be true but I find it, true to an extent, because we all have to help out to see the difference. As an old saying goes one person can´t do everything, but we all do something. If only a few help out the change isn´t going to be so noticeable.

I find that in today’s society people are very selfish and greedy and only care about themselves. They don’t want to talk to someone who is no of their same class, and discriminate others because of the money. As seen with Eldorado. I find this totally unacceptable, for it is not a persons fault to be in the conditions they are in. For, instead of setting them apart from us, we should try to help them, because I find helping others brings at least to me gives me great satisfaction.
If we don´t all work together, we are never going to reach that Utopian world we all want. It obvious we are never going to have a perfect world, but if we work hard it could be close to perfect.

Riches enough to end world poverty lie untouched on the ground. Its residents refuse to initiate any contact with the outside world because they know that such contact would destroy their perfect country. After some time there, even Candide wants to return immediately to the deeply flawed world outside. The Eldorado “pebbles” will only be of value to him in the outside world. The jewels that make Eldorado beautiful serve to inspire greed and ambition in Candide, whose only previous interests have been survival and his love for Cunégonde.


N.Y.T Article

Crossroads
How Can We Help the World’s Poor?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The number of bleeding hearts has soared exponentially over the last decade. Celebrities embraced Africa, while conservatives went from showing disdain for humanitarian aid (“money down a rat hole”) to displaying leadership in the fight against AIDS and malaria. Compassion became contagious and then it became consensus.

Yet all the wringing hands never quite clasped. Just as the bleeding hearts seemed victorious, they divided in a ferocious intellectual debate about how best to help poor people around the world. One group, led by Bono and the indefatigable Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, argues that the crucial need is for more money. After all, aid for development is quite modest: for every $100 in national income, we Americans donate just 18 cents in “official development assistance” to poor countries. Sweden donates five times as much. Sachs’s book “The End of Poverty” is the bible of this camp.

The rival camp, led by William Easterly of New York University, argues that more money doesn’t necessarily help, and may hurt. Easterly, whose powerful and provocative book “The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good” appeared in 2006, is still rocking the world of do-gooders. His book was a direct assault on Sachs’s, and it has been influential because, frankly, much of his critique rings true, even among aid workers.

Easterly has been joined this year by Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist who wrote “Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa.” Moyo attracted attention in part because of the novelty of an African denouncing aid to Africa, and her book has set off another wave of bitter, personal feuding between the two camps. Few people fight as savagely as humanitarians.

The Easterly/Moyo camp notes that anybody who has traveled in Africa has seen aid projects that have failed, undermined self-reliance and entrepreneurship, even harmed people. Economists find no correlation between countries that received aid and those that grew quickly. Indeed, the great economic successes in modern times (mostly in Asia) often received little aid.

It’s also clear that doing good is harder than it looks. For example, abundant evidence suggests that education can be transformative in a poor country, so donors often pay for schools. But building a school is expensive and can line the pockets of corrupt officials. And in my reporting I’ve found that the big truancy problem in poor countries typically involves not students but teachers: I remember one rural Indian school where the teachers appeared only once or twice a year to administer standardized tests. To make sure that the students didn’t do embarrassingly badly on those exams, the teachers wrote all the answers on the blackboard. The critics can cite similar unexpected difficulties in almost every nook of the aid universe.

If Sachs represents the Hegelian thesis and Easterly the antithesis, we now have hope of seeing an emerging synthesis. It would acknowledge the shortcomings of aid, but also note some grand successes. For example, the number of children dying each year before the age of 5 has dropped by three million worldwide since 1990, largely because of foreign aid. Yes, aid often fails — but more than balancing the failures is quite a triumph: one child’s life saved every 11 seconds (according to my calculations from United Nations statistics).

Moreover, pragmatic donors are figuring out creative ways to overcome the obstacles. Take education. Given the problems with school-building programs, donors have turned to other strategies to increase the number of students, and these are often much more cost-effective: (1) Deworm children. This costs about 50 cents per child per year and reduces absenteeism from anemia, sickness and malnutrition. A Kenya study found, in effect, that it is only one twenty-fifth as expensive to increase school attendance by deworming students as by constructing schools. (2) Bribe parents. One of the most successful antipoverty initiatives is Oportunidades in Mexico, which pays impoverished mothers a monthly stipend if their kids attend school regularly. Oportunidades has raised high school enrollment in some rural areas by 85 percent.

I don’t mean to imply that building brick-and-mortar schools is an outmoded idea. My wife and I built a school in Cambodia, through American Assistance for Cambodia, because we were able to establish that teachers do show up there, that the bottleneck in rural Cambodia is school construction, and that our donation would be highly leveraged. Likewise, Greg Mortenson’s famous school-building efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan, described in his superb book, “Three Cups of Tea” (written with David Oliver Relin), makes a huge difference on the ground. The point is to be relentlessly empirical.

One of the challenges with the empirical approach is that aid organizations typically claim that every project succeeds. Failures are buried so as not to discourage donors, and evaluations are often done by the organizations themselves — ensuring that every intervention is above average. Yet recently there has been a revolution in evaluation, led by economists at the Poverty Action Lab at M.I.T. They have designed rigorous studies to see what actually works. The idea is to introduce new aid initiatives randomly in some areas and not in others, and to measure how much change occurred and at what cost. This approach is expensive but gives a much clearer sense of which interventions are most cost-effective.

The upshot is that we can now see that there are many aid programs that work very well. We don’t need to distract ourselves with theoretical questions about aid, so long as we can focus on deworming children and bribing parents. The new synthesis should embrace specific interventions that all sides agree have merit, while also borrowing from an important insight of the aid critics: trade is usually preferable to aid.

I was recently in Liberia, a fragile African democracy struggling to rebuild. It is chock-full of aid groups rushing around in white S.U.V.’s doing wonderful work. But it also needs factories to employ people, build skills and pay salaries and taxes. Americans are horrified by sweatshops, but nothing would help Liberia more than if China moved some of its sweatshops there, so that Liberians could make sandals and T-shirts.

Paul Collier, an Oxford University economist who exemplifies the emerging synthesis in his brilliant book “The Bottom Billion,” has lately argued that the best way to rescue Haiti is for America to encourage a local textile manufacturing industry, which could export to the United States, creating jobs and a larger tax base.

As these ideas spread, we’re seeing more aid organizations that blur the boundary with business, pursuing what’s called a double bottom line: profits but also a social return. For example, the New York-based Acumen Fund is a cross between a venture capital operation and an aid group: it invests “patient capital,” accepting below-market returns and offering management help in a Tanzanian company that makes antimalaria bed nets, for instance, and in a hospital company in India that offers a for-profit model to fight maternal mortality. The founder of Acumen Fund, Jacqueline Novogratz, recently published a memoir, “The Blue Sweater,” that argues for this kind of approach.

In the 1960s, there were grand intellectual debates about whether capitalism was heroic or evil; today we simply worry about how to make it work. At last, we may be doing the same with foreign aid.

Nicholas D. Kristof is an Op-Ed columnist at The Times and the author, with Sheryl WuDunn, of “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.”

Writing A Research Paper

The main elements for writing a research paper are, “research, critical thinking, source evaluation, organization, and composition.” A research paper includes many sources, it is choosing a topic to investigate and learn more about. Yet, it is not an informative paper,” The goal of a research paper is not to inform the reader what others have to say about a topic, but to draw on what others have to say about a topic and engage the sources in order to thoughtfully offer a unique perspective on the issue at hand.”It requires you to analyze the information found and interpret it in a unique way. There are two types of research papers: analytical and argumentative. In an argumentative research paper the topic must be controversial, having two different points of views. In an analytical research paper, is a question in which the researcher has taken no side-objective.

When you choosing a topic, one should begging brainstorming ideas down. This is a helpful way which =exposes patterns and main ideas, to help you conclude your topic. Yet, you must also take into account what audience you are going to write about. This will help you determine the tone and diction you will use in your research paper. Yet, the writing standards are not all to it, “one must not only pay particular attention to the genre, topic, and audience, but must also become skilled in researching, outlining, drafting, and revising.” These are skills many don’t take into consideration, but are very important and useful when writing a research paper.

Writing a research paper is not impossible or hard, it just takes time practice and basic skills.

Wikipedia

When I searched love in Wikipedia a very complete definition and description of love showed up. I never thought I would find so much on love. Yet, I found many different topics all related to love. I liked how Wikipedia divided love into these sections. I found the information very well organized, but I believe in some areas there was not enough information. It lacked information in some of the cultural love views and in some of the religious views. I would add more information and be more specific, so it would be easier to understand and more useful.

While searching volleyball in Wikipedia I found it clearly explains the game very clearly. It also focuses on indoor volleyball, yet does metions other types of volleyball and has links to find more information about that topic. I found this links very useful and very helpful, for you don’t have to do another search, but while reading you can open another window directly. It is very well divided into sections covering everything in volleyball from techniques to rules to the history of volleyball.

When I searched Facebook I found a lot of information on it, yet Facebook I believe is such a huge site, that I felt like there was information missing. Also I thought it should have a quick friendly user explanation of how to use Facebook. I found it great how they at least warn you the information may not e up to date, “This article may need to be updated. Please update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information, and remove this template when finished. Please see the talk page for more information. (November 2009)”

Interpreting, Conecting, Analyzing

While reading I did some investigation and found out that Voltaire’s uses the Oreillons as a criticism towards Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s was another French Enlightment thinker who believed, that humans were naturally good and that institutions of human civilization like property, business and so forth corrupt this goodness. He came to call man “noble savage”. Yet, Voltaire’s thought all the opposite, he refers to the Oreillons as men filled with prejudice and brutality as the people from the Old World. They killed people on their religious beliefs, “He’s a Jesuit! He’s a Jesuit. We shall have our revenge and enjoy a good meal. We’ll have Jesuit for dinner!” not to mention the practice of cannibalism. I agree more with Voltaire’s view point, for to me it is more realistic. We have to accept human nature, and deal with reality evilness does exist.

Cacambo saves Candide from being eaten. He speaks with the Oreillons and tells him he is not a Jesuit. Cacambo represents a balance of a man who is neither from the Old or the New world. As everything in excess is bad he is the perfect combination who thinks thoroughly and uses his understanding and experience of both worlds to create his wonderful personality. We can see this, “The Oreillons were impressed by Cacambo’s reasoning.” He eloquently and very diplomatically talked to the Oreillons and saved his friend from being eaten.

LIFE

While reading I came across, “I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life.” This quote really surprised me because being the daughter of the Pope, she shouldn’t say such things, for suicide is a terrible sin for the Catholic Church. It is also very ironic how this old lady refers to people not killing themselves because they “love life”, not because they are resigned or scared of eternal punishment (hell). I think maybe because of all the terrible events that have happened to her, maybe she doesn’t believe in god anymore or in the afterlife. I would completely understand her, for if god is so great, was he in all her suffering. Why didn’t he help her out? What did she do to have to go through all that? These are questions I often ask myself, for If god is so great why does he allow so much suffering and hurt to be caused. If he is so powerful, why doesn’t he help the one who really need it?

The old lady also says, “I should have never of my misfortunes if you had not provoked me a little, and if it were not the custom to pass the time on board ship by telling stories.” Even though the old lady is very pessimistic due to all the events in her life, she does not want anybody to feel sorry for her. By telling her stories she is not looking for sympathy, it is only to cope with the boredom. Yet, her sufferings have influenced greatly who she is. She now sees life as being misery, yet forced to love it.

Dual Message

As I read I found more elements of satire. You would never imagine how the old woman, now a servant, was once a princess. It was very surprising and unexpected to hear her, “My eyes were not always sore and bloodshot, my nose did not always touch my chin, and I have not always been a servant. I am the daughter of Pope Urban X and the Princess of Palestrina.” This case is very ironic to me, I asked myself how someone with so much power and so much wealth can end up being a servant? I also wonder what it feels like for her from being admired by many, respected, and praised to now being a servant: treated harshly and given orders. She says one of her dresses was worth more than all of the magnificence of Westphalia, by using this hyperbole the author emphasizes this old woman’s drastic change. Life is pretty unexpected therefore you must live life fully and not underestimate it, I bet this old lady never ever imagined herself as something less than a princess.

This old woman’s story can be interpreted in two ways. All these events and suffering she has gone through contradict Pangloss optimism. She has lived through the worst of the worst: rape, war, being a servant, being back stabbed and so on. Simply life can't be viewed in an optimistic way, after all.

It can also be viewed as criticism against religion. For, she is the daughter of the Pope, the highest member of the Catholic Church. How in the world does he not protect her and help her when she is suffering? It’s ironic how his wants to help people, and its his job, but when it comes to his own daughter he does nothing about it.

Chapters 6 & 7

While reading chapter six, I found it very ridiculous how, “The University of Coimbra had pronounced that the sight of a few people ceremoniously burned alive before a slow fire was an infallible prescription for preventing earthquakes.” How in the world is burning a person going to stop earthquakes from occurring? Obviously it did not work and towards the end of the chapter, another earthquake occurs.

While reading I detected a false choice fallacy- “The authorities of that country could find no surer means avoiding total ruin than by giving people a magnificent auto-da-fe.” It is saying the government had no other option than to kill these people. This is a complete fallacy and the government didn’t have to kill them, for he killed them and still the problem consisted.

In chapter seven Candide is take care of by an old lady. The strange thing about it is that he doesn’t know her. He keeps asking her, “Who are you?... and what makes you so kind to me?” Yet, she doesn’t reply. If I was Candide, I would start thinking something weird is going on, even more when she says, “Come with me and don’t speak a word.” Candide follows her, not even taking into account she is a stranger and could put in a risk full situation.

MLA

MLA stands for Moder Language Association. It is a standard of used while writing, using English language. It has specific text ciatations, work cited pages, first page format, and section headings. MLA has become very popular used by most people and institutions, it has become a standard for writing in many places.

General Guidelines
Type your paper on a computer and print it out on standard, white 8.5 x 11-inch paper.
Double-space the text of your paper, and use a legible font (e.g. Times New Roman). Whatever font you choose, MLA recommends that the regular and italics type styles contrast enough that they are recognizable one from another. The font size should be 12 pt.
Leave only one space after periods or other punctuation marks (unless otherwise instructed by your instructor).
Set the margins of your document to 1 inch on all sides.
Indent the first line of paragraphs one half-inch from the left margin. MLA recommends that you use the Tab key as opposed to pushing the Space Bar five times.
Create a header that numbers all pages consecutively in the upper right-hand corner, one-half inch from the top and flush with the right margin. (Note: Your instructor may ask that you omit the number on your first page. Always follow your instructor's guidelines.)
Use italics throughout your essay for the titles of longer works and, only when absolutely necessary, providing emphasis.
If you have any endnotes, include them on a separate page before your Works Cited page. Entitle the section Notes (centered, unformatted).
Formatting the First

Vocab Candide

I found it very funny when Pangloss gives his explanation of why syphilis is a positive thing, “It is indispensable in this best of worlds. It is a necessary ingredient. For if Columbus, when visiting the West Indies, had not caught this disease, which poisons the source of generation, which frequently even hinders generation, and is clearly opposed to the great end of Nature, we should have neither chocolate nor cochineal.” I found it very humorous how Pangloss priorities are very ironic. He doesn’t care about this harsh contagious disease, for it weren’t because if it we wouldn’t have chocolate or cochineal. For Pangloss having the disease spreading around is worth it, because now we have chocolate and cochineal. As a saying goes, you don’t miss what you have never had. Pangloss loses and eye and an ear due to syphilis, yet he still believes the disease is important. Can he say anything more ironic?


VOCAB
“She was disemboweled by Burglar soldiers after being ravished as much as a poor woman could bear.”
Disemboweled: remove the entrails of



Ravished: to seize and carry away by force


“This sovereign of hearts and quintessence of our souls.”
Quintessence: the pure, highly concentrated essence of a thing




“They produced these hellish torments by which you see me devoured.”
Hellish: highly unpleasant



“Who was indebted for it to a marchioness.”
Marchioness: A noblewoman ranking above a countess and below a duchess. Also called marquise




“Clearly opposed to the great end of Nature, we should have neither chocolate nor cochineal.”
Cochineal: vivid red




“The sailor rushed straight into the midst of the debris and risked his life searching for money.”
Debris: the scattered remains of something broken or destroyed; rubble or wreckage

One Question: No Answer.

As I began reading “Candide”, as early as the introduction I could connect with Voltaire. In the introduction he uses the rhetorical questions technique. For, with me at least as a reader it was very effective. The question which most impacted me, and I always ask myself he addressed as, “If the creator is good and all-powerful, as we are told he is, could he not have made a better world?” This question will never have an answer for we believe what we are told, yet what if it was all made up like some myths and legends from different cultures.

Even though I do think about this question constantly, never do I need a more urgent answer than when something bad happens. As Voltaire said, “In times of widespread disasters such questioning becomes more general and more urgent.” This is due to the fact that in a moment of desperation, you can’t seem to understand, how someone who supposedly is so good can’t prevent so much harm. I had this feeling Voltaire describes exactly with the September 11 attacks. Millions of questions like his kept draining in my head. How can such good creator, create such harmful beasts? Why do innocent people have to pay the consequences, for what some bastards decided to do? Why does evil exist if we were created by such good creator? I keep repeating the word good to emphasize that apparently he is not that good after all.

I find it really amazing and brilliant how Voltaire came up with these ideas all the way back in 1758, when there was a diminutive portion of the knowledge there is today. I admire him. I nowhere find him tragic, he is just a person who is not scared to face reality, like most are.

Yet, this is a topic that has gone on for centuries with many different opinions and perspectives. The point is no one will ever know the truth of our creator if there is any, but we are left with this uncertainty we must live on with.

SATIRE

Op-Ed Columnist
Once Again, Into the Apocalypse
By GAIL COLLINS
A lot of people are worrying about the world coming to an end in 2012.

Bummer. I thought we’d gotten over all that in 2000.

The question of whether the End of Time will arrive during the holiday shopping season three years hence is already the subject of a veritable library of books. We also have what “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to 2012” claims are almost 600,000 Web sites devoted to worrying about it.

This seems to be the fault of Nostradamus, the Mayan calendar, angst on the left about global warming and angst on the right about the election of Barack Obama. Or the health care bill. Or government bailouts. Or the repositioning of “In God We Trust” on the nation’s coinage.

Really, for ultraconservatives, the last year has been one sign of the apocalypse after the other. Soon, the rivers will run red with Starbucks Raspberry-Flavored Tazo Passion Shaken Iced Tea. Owls will give birth to two-headed frogs who shriek the lyrics to Lady Gaga songs.

Hollywood is unleashing a raft of movies about humanity tottering on the edge of extinction. In “2012,” a G-8 summit convenes to discuss the fact that “the world as we know it will soon come to an end.” Actually, I would not be surprised if the participants found this preferable to another round of the Doha trade talks.

The film characters who are best prepared for the planetary calamity had been consulting the ancient Mayan calendar, which runs through more than five millennia and then comes screeching to a halt on Dec. 21, 2012. Some say that for the Mayans, this was just the end of a cycle, like completing a really long year, and that if they’d been able to hang around for a few more centuries they’d simply have issued a new, post-2012 calendar, this time perhaps including some nice pictures of puppies.

Others see more dire forces at work. In “2012,” the crust of the earth starts bouncing around like Tom DeLay in that cha-cha competition. No one can save us, not the black president or the governor of California with an Austrian accent. Certainly the Europeans can’t help, since not even the collapse of every tall building on the planet can get Americans to pay attention to non-American ideas.

Also coming soon to a theater near you are: “The Road” (Viggo Mortensen struggles across a barren landscape after a mysterious cataclysm) and “The Book of Eli” (Denzel Washington guards a book that could save post-apocalypse humanity from Gary Oldman). Obviously, Hollywood has determined that the reason all those Iraq-war-themed movies failed was that the moviegoers felt the scenery wasn’t bleak enough.

I’ve been disappointed that, so far, almost no one has noticed that St. Malachy’s List of the Last Popes has been running out of gas almost as fast as the Mayan calendar. Malachy was an Irish bishop who died in 1148, after allegedly having seen a vision of the future 112 popes who would reign until the end of the world. By this count, the current Benedict XVI would be 111.

Each of the popes gets a little hint as to his identity. For the most part, Malachy cannily chose to keep them general enough (“angelic shepherd”) that it was hard not to hit a lot of home runs. But good luck in figuring out how Benedict is “glory of the olives.”

Keeping things vague, or subject to multiple interpretations, is the real key to apocalyptic predictions. It’s what made Nostradamus a household name. He’d stare at a bowl of water for hours on end, and then come up with something like:

For the merry maid the bright splendor

Will shine no longer, for long will she be without salt.

With merchants, bullies, wolves odious,

All confusion universal monster.

Which is obviously a foretelling of the Sarah Palin book tour.

My own favorite prognosticator, The Amazing Criswell, always got into trouble with specificity, including his prediction that a black rainbow would circle the earth in 1999 and suck out all the oxygen. He lost a lot of credibility even earlier, after he announced that the United States would move its capital to Wichita and that pressures from outer space would turn Denver into jelly. Really, people tend to remember stuff like that.

I’m predicting that by the time we reach 2011, the 2012 Web sites will hit the million mark, not to mention the Twitters of Terror. But we’ve survived end-of-the-world panic many times before.

When I was a kid, the nuns at my school filled us with stories about prophecies of doom, frequently from Our Lady of Fatima. They always revolved around the Communist menace, and we were occasionally sent home on Friday with assurances that the End was coming by Sunday. We were credulous enough not to question why, in that case, there were homework assignments.

In this article the author uses a satire by satirizing the idea that the world is going to end in 2012. While reading this quote, I found it very humorous and vivid, “Really, for ultraconservatives, the last year has been one sign of the apocalypse after the other. Soon, the rivers will run red with Starbucks Raspberry-Flavored Tazo Passion Shaken Iced Tea. Owls will give birth to two-headed frogs who shriek the lyrics to Lady Gaga songs.” By the use of absurdness and hyperbole the authors achieves the satirical tone. Gail Collins used formal register for his article, he uses words such as, disappointed, noticed, multiple, vague and so forth.

I found this article very effective, for it uses evidence to prove his point. I do agree with him, why in the world do people still panic that the world is going to end when it has been said many times before? , “But we’ve survived end-of-the-world panic many times before.” It’s a very funny article, I loved the way it makes fun of those who do believe the world is going to end in 2012.

Being Stuck Between Two Cultures

This memoir can be targeted mainly for Chinese-Americans, who can empathize with it. Those who can share those feelings and emotions of frustration. It is hard to continue following those restrictive traditions while living in The United States Of America, the land of the free. Being Chinese- American must not be easy. They are two extreme cultures, so different that being part of both must be like feeling you don’t belong in either. The sense of lost of identity. We can see these in the book when Kingston feels different from her American classmates and also from her own relatives. She can’t seem to find a place where she belongs, this causes frustration. The crush of cultures and traditions is the main reason. For there are many things which have different meaning depending on the culture. Also since Kingston has never been to China, she doesn’t seem to be able to sort out fiction and nonfiction stories she is told. She is expected to believe what she is told. It must be very frustrating.

I can relate to her a little, but not quite as much for my mom is American and my dad is Colombian. I have a multicultural background, and I have lived in both countries. Yet, I found these two cultures to be quite similar or at least my family’s traditions and I do feel a sense of belonging, for they are not so different.

Women Oppresion In Chinese Culture

In “The Woman Warrior” we can see how each chapter and each story is mainly about a woman that affects Kingston’s life. The whole book depicts the male-dominated society she lives in. This is done through the use of only women in the book, men are intentionally not included. This book shows the power full Chinese traditions. They are educated to and raised to believe they are worthless. As I read a women saying, "Better to have geese than girls". Kingston’s mother is a successful doctor, and yet she can’t stress more the fact that girls are disappointments to their parents, no matter what they accomplish. Kingston’s feels haunted by ghosts of Chinese girls whose parents abandoned them because they wanted sons. We can see it is a very masculine culture, were women and girls are oppressed but they learn to live with it, making it a part of their daily lives. To them it is the right thing to do, for many of us it’s simply absurd. You may ask yourself why they don’t stand up for what they believe, but the truth is most of them believe and practice their culture with no exceptions. This is why Kingston’s fantasy story includes all these admired humans roles, that depict women as very successful and a key tool. In her story women are given the value they deserve nowhere are they undermined. I think she does this because she is not in accordance with her culture, yet she has to follow it unless she leaves home.

"Justice"

November 9, 2009
Editorial
Imprisoning a Child for Life
The United States could be the only nation in the world where a 13-year-old child can be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole, even for crimes that do not include murder. This grim distinction should trouble Americans deeply, as should all of the barbaric sentencing policies for children that this country embraces but that most of the world has abandoned.

The Supreme Court must keep the international standard in mind when it hears arguments on Monday in Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida. The petitioners in both argue that sentencing children to life without the possibility of parole for a nonhomicide violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

The court came down on the right side of this issue in 2005 when it ruled that children who commit crimes before the age of 18 should not be subject to the death penalty. The decision correctly pointed out that juveniles were less culpable because they lacked maturity, were vulnerable to peer pressure and had personalities that were still being formed.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said the practice of executing 16- and 17-year-olds violated the Eighth Amendment, conflicted with “evolving standards of decency” and isolated the United States from the rest of the world.

The Roper decision took scores of juveniles off death row. It also threw a spotlight onto state policies under which young juveniles were increasingly being tried in adult courts and sentenced to adult jails, often for nonviolent crimes.

The practice is even more troubling because it is arbitrary. Children who commit nonviolent crimes like theft and burglary are just as likely to be shipped off to adult courts as children who commit serious violent crimes. And the process is racially freighted, with black and Latino children more likely to be sent to adult courts than white children who commit comparable crimes.

The rush to try more and more children as adults began in the 1980s when the country was gripped by hysteria about an adolescent crime wave that never materialized. Joe Sullivan, the petitioner in Sullivan v. Florida, was sentenced to life without parole in 1989 — when he was just 13 — after a questionable sexual battery conviction. His two older accomplices testified against the younger, mentally impaired boy. They received short sentences, one of them as a juvenile.

The case of Terrance Graham has similar contours. A learning disabled child — born to crack-addicted parents — Mr. Graham was on probation in connection with a burglary committed when he was 16 when he participated in a home invasion. He, too, had older accomplices. He was never convicted of the actual crime but was given life without parole for violating the conditions of his probation.

These were two very troubled children in need of adult supervision and perhaps even time behind bars. But it is insupportable to conclude, as the courts did, that children who committed crimes when they were so young were beyond rehabilitation. The laws under which they were convicted violate current human rights standards and the Constitution.

How can the land of the free, violate an amendment? Ho w can in the land of opportunities be cruel punishment? The opening sentence says it all, “The United States could be the only nation in the world where a 13-year-old child can be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole, even for crimes that do not include murder.” I actually believed the U.S actually gave chance to children under 18, apparently not.

I do believe it violates the Eighteenth Amendment, because sentencing a kid even more when he hasn’t killed anyone is simply cruel. As the article says there are many factors why a kid should not be life sentenced, “they lacked maturity, were vulnerable to peer pressure and had personalities that were still being formed.” Children don’t have enough experience to punish them with such drastic measures. They are in the process of making errors and learning from them, children do have the capability of learning.

Also we can see racism through the article when the author states, “And the process is racially freighted, with black and Latino children more likely to be sent to adult courts than white children who commit comparable crimes.” Isn’t this an equal nation for all? Where is the so called justice? The U.S believes to have the best justice system, but when it comes to applying it, it is the only country that does such inhumane acts.

Time Literary Supplement

While reading Factory Girls TLS book review, I found it very well organized. The author starts off by giving background information of life in China. The author uses a lot of vividness, so it truly impacts the reader, “They live in factory compounds, sleep in crowded dormitories and eat canteen food.” This is just one example of imagery. The author uses a common place when he talks about Addidas, Nike, and Rebook, for they are very popular brands many people buy from. The reader even though it is talking about a foreign country can have a sense of identity and belonging with the article.

While giving a brief taste of what the book is about, the author does very well again using vividness, “She skipped meals in order to take computer classes.” When I read this I could picture how hard life had to be for them, it truly impacted me. Even though the author wrote in formal register, his word choice was very adequate, it was eloquent but easy to understand. The author reveals the perfect amount of information to give the reader a perspective of what the book is generally about.

By the use of real life events, the author gives surprising facts, “The ideal man must be at least 1.7 meters. In China height is often a proxy for status or even class.” Also the author says that some jobs require a minimum height for applicants. When learning about a culture you find many things which seem very “weird”, but they all have a meaning behind it. I wonder what the meaning behind height is. The author uses specific details like this one, which makes the reader live this foreign culture and learn from its diversities.

Ghosts?

Personally, I do believe in ghosts, I have never witnessed to see one, but I’d rather not. I am very scared of that topic and rather not talk about it. While reading this book I could connect with it by how the author describes both perspectives of ghosts. One of them exactly describes me and the other my twin sister.

In the example of the book when the girls were all together and they heard a thump and a creak, “The girls would jump closer together giggling.” I felt a sense of connection with the narrator because I have been there. I reacted exactly the same way.

On the other hand, my twin sister is very “brave” as she thinks of herself that way. She doesn’t really believe in them, just like the mother. As the mother said, “That was somebody who fell asleep reading in bed and dropped her book.” I wish I could think like this, but I can’t I am a very nervous person and thinking it was just a coincidence, simply doesn’t go with my brain.

At the end we will never know if ghosts really do exist. It is a complex topic with millions of unanswered questions and I believe this is what gives me the uncertainty when they are talked about. I rather believe than not believe because what if they do exist? Some people say if you don’t believe they appear to show you they do exist, so I might as well believe for the mean time!

A Collision Of Two Cultures

As we collide with different cultures we think we are normal and the other culture is not, yet they think the same as you do. So in the end what really is normal? I found it very interesting how in this book the mother doesn’t understand why Americans smile in the pictures she says, “What are you laughing at?” In her culture there is no point in smiling for a picture.

Another example of culture and customs is about putting away the straw hat before fall began, “If you want to save your hat for next year, you have to put it away early or else when you’re riding the subway or walking along Fifth Avenue, any stranger can snatch it off your head and put his foot through it.” Someone who doesn’t know about this tradition might become very angry and scared, yet people do it as a tradition, it’s not evil intentions. It is their way of celebrating the change of season.

This is why when you move it is so difficult to adapt. All the customs you were used to have become new ones, and some of which may seem ridiculous to you. There many different cultures, traditions, and customs all over the world this is due to the fact that people believe different things according to the environment that surrounds them and their ancestors.

Imagination: No Limits!

November 3, 2009, 9:30 pm

License to Wonder
In the wake of my column last week about how the faces you make when speaking different languages might affect your mood, several people wrote and accused me of speculating. I admit it! Indeed, I said as much in the piece.

One of my favorite things to do is to take a set of facts and use them to imagine how the world might work. In writing about some of these ideas, my aim is not to be correct — how can I be, when the answer isn’t known? — but to be thought-provoking, to ask questions, to make people wonder.

I mention this because science is usually presented as a body of knowledge — facts to be memorized, equations to be solved, concepts to be understood, discoveries to be applauded. But this approach can give students two misleading impressions.

One is that science is about what we know. One colleague told me that when he was studying science at school, the relentless focus on the known gave him the impression that almost everything had already been discovered. But in fact, science — as the physicist Richard Feynman once wrote — creates an “expanding frontier of ignorance,” where most discoveries lead to more questions. (This frontier — this peering into the unknown — is what I especially like to write about.) Moreover, insofar as science is a body of knowledge, that body is provisional: much of what we thought we knew in the past has turned out to be incomplete, or plain wrong.

The second misconception that comes from this “facts, facts, facts” method of teaching science is the impression that scientific discovery progresses as an orderly, logical “creep”; that each new discovery points more or less unambiguously to the next. But in reality, while some scientific work does involve the plodding, brick-by-brick accumulation of evidence, much of it requires leaps of imagination and daring speculation. (This raises the interesting question of when speculation is more likely to generate productive lines of enquiry than deductive creep. I don’t know the answer — I’d have to speculate.)

Vittorio Luzzati/National Portrait Gallery in London Rosalind Franklin in 1950.
There are plenty of (probably) apocryphal tales about what inspired a great discovery, from Archimedes in his bathtub, to Newton and his apple. But there are also many well-documented accounts of inspiration — or lack of it — in the history of science. Among the most famous is the story of Rosalind Franklin and her non-discovery of the structure of DNA.

Franklin was an expert at getting x-ray diagrams from crystals of molecules. The idea is that the array of spots in the diagram will reveal how the atoms in the crystal are arranged. When Franklin started working on DNA, she obtained superb x-ray diagrams; one of her contemporaries described them as among the most beautiful of any substance ever taken. Indeed, it was from one of her diagrams that James Watson and Francis Crick deduced what the correct structure of DNA must be. (The picture was shown to Watson without Franklin’s knowledge.)

She had the data. Why didn’t she reach the solution? There are several answers to this; but one is that she had a fixed idea about how the problem should be solved. Namely, she wanted to work out the structure using the methods she had been taught. These methods are intricate, abstract, and mathematical, and difficult to use on a molecule as complex as DNA. Watson and Crick, meanwhile, were building physical models of what the diagram suggested the structure should be like — an approach that Franklin scorned. What’s more, their first model was ludicrously wrong, something that Franklin spotted immediately. But they were willing to play; she wasn’t. In other words, she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, adopt a more intuitive, speculative approach.

Our ability to make scientific discoveries is limited in a number of fundamental ways. One is time: it’s hard to do good experiments that last for more than a few weeks. Experiments that run for years are rare; as a result, we know relatively little about long, slow processes. Another constraint is money (no surprise there); a third is ethics (some experiments that would be interesting to do are ethically impossible). Some questions remain uninvestigated because no one stands to profit from the answers. Still others are neglected because they have no obvious bearing on human health or welfare, the areas of research are unfashionable, or the appropriate tools haven’t been invented yet. Some problems are just overwhelmingly complex.

But there’s one way in which we should not be limited: imagination. As Einstein put it, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

This op-ed is written by Olivia Judson, I found it quite interesting because it is a response to many comments people wrote on her op-ed about smiles and language, which I also wrote on. (See blogs below.)

Many readers accuse her of speculating, without any facts. Therefore, she defends herself with a great deal of examples and famous people. She also goes further in to explaining, why science wouldn’t work without speculation. I couldn’t agree more with her, point of view.

Olivia has a great way of putting her thoughts into writing. When I read her articles, I can sympathize very much with her. By making me link with her, she has done the hardest thing a writer must do.

In the world we live in almost everything is a mystery, and as the years go on by all this errors other people obtain questions, until one day someone gets the answer. As Olivia said, “While some scientific work does involve the plodding, brick-by-brick accumulation of evidence, much of it requires leaps of imagination and daring speculation.” There is nothing wrong with speculating, because as a banner in my classroom says success is getting up when you fall. Cowards don’t speculate because they are afraid of being wrong, but the truth is we are all humans and we learn from making mistakes.

In the society we live in mistakes are seen as something negative, but in reality they are positive, for they teach us more than anything can. As long as we learn from our mistakes and don’t repeat them, a mistake is a positive thing.
I loved how Olivia ended her article with a strong quote from Einstein, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” personally I am addicted to quotes. Therefore without speculation, there would be no discoveries!

Subliminal Message, Behind Elections?

November 4, 2009, 3:41 pm

Reading the Election Tea Leaves
By David Brooks and Gail Collins
Steve Helber/The Associated Press Voters at a polling place in Glen Allen, Va., on Tuesday.
David Brooks: Gail, I love elections generally and this one was perfect. It cut through the great illusion of political life. The great illusion is that American politics is divided between people who read The Huffington Post on the one hand and people who listen to Rush and Glenn Beck on the other. We all know intellectually that this is not the case but it’s hard to keep it in mind day to day.

Related
Room for Debate: What Did the Election Mean?

Gail Collins: I don’t actually think the election tells us much of anything except that New Jersey is a mess, the Republican Party in New York is a mess and the Democrats in Virginia picked a terrible candidate.

But I love the fact that two people can draw entirely different conclusions from them.

David Brooks: I’m sticking to my guns. This election reminded us of a couple truths. One, that there are twice as many conservatives in this country as liberals, and only one-fifth of the people in the country considers themselves liberal. This means that 80 percent of the people are inclined to be skeptical of government and worried by federal haste and exploding debt.

People who are center-right do well when a Democratic president is raising fears and anxieties.
It also reminded us that there are more independents than Democrats or Republicans, and that these independents have been shifting slightly rightward over the past year. They are more skeptical of government than they were when Barack Obama took office. They are more hostile to unions and other interest groups. They are more opposed to greater regulation.

The election reminded us that 2008 has not turned into a realignment. The country is still a bell curve. Moderate Republicans that run calm campaigns can do well, even in Democratic areas like northern Virginia and New Jersey.

It reminded us most satisfyingly that reckless “tea-bag” conservatives, fueled by Sarah Palin types, cannot easily win, even in conservative parts of the country, like upstate New York. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty made a horrible decision in throwing himself in with that lot by endorsing the Conservative candidate in that House race.

All in all, politics is not brain science. The country is center-right. People who are center-right do well when a Democratic president is raising all sorts of fears and anxieties.

Gail Collins: David, you look at the results from Tuesday and deduce that they show Americans are, in general, thoughtful folks who are concerned for their fellow men but suspicious of big government and a bit right of center. In short, you look at the country and see many variations on you.

I would be extremely happy if I thought that the Republican Party would be fielding a large number of David Brookses in different shapes and sizes and genders. So would most American women since as voters they hate nothing more than guys who yell a lot.

New Jersey is a mess, the Republican Party in New York is a mess and the Democrats in Virginia picked a terrible candidate.
The tea-party folks have more yelling guys than any group of Americans this side of professional football fans. You are heartened by their defeat in that upstate Congressional race. Did you know that the last time a Democrat won up there, Ulysses Grant was president? (Have you noticed how many loser presidents we elected before and after Abraham Lincoln? I like to contemplate that every once in a while when I begin to get gloomy about the current state of the electorate. We might have gone for George W. Bush twice, but when it comes to failing upward, even W. can’t hold a candle to Franklin Pierce.)

I digress. While the loonies did not manage to win the actual race, they still feel totally empowered by their ability to destroy a moderate non-yelling Republican woman with a Conservative candidate whose defects included the fact that he did not live in the district and seemed to lack an ability to blink.

They will be back, and their craziness will turn the Democrats crazy, too. While Democrats would not like to lose to a bunch of David Brooks clones, they are totally terrified of letting Congress fall into the hands of a mass of Michele Bachmanns. I can’t totally blame them for feeling that they have the right to do anything, no matter how duplicitous, to fend off that terrible fate.

So the 2010 campaigns are not going to make you happy, and I want you to bask in the glow while you can.

David Brooks: Have I mentioned that I love elections?

After reading this op-ed article, I found it very interesting how the authors’ because there are two, ask each other questions to give us their point of view. It is another creative way to write an op-ed article.

Even though it was an op-ed article it was also a bit informative. It gave the reader information of what happened in the elections and who won, recently.

I was really surprised about how many states, who were always either republican or democrat, have now switched sides. How can we interpret this, are they trying to send us a message? Why this drastic change? For example how it happened in New Jersey. Is there something hidden behind these elections?

As Gail Collins says, “ you look at the results from Tuesday and deduce that they show Americans are, in general, thoughtful folks who are concerned for their fellow men but suspicious of big government and a bit right of center.” Is this a protest against president Obama? From my view point I believe he hasn’t been as successful as how everyone thought he would be, and many Americans are mad, they are waiting for these promises to be made, yet they continue waiting. As stated by David Brooks, “All in all, politics is not brain science. The country is center-right. People who are center-right do well when a Democratic president is raising all sorts of fears and anxieties.” Americans will do something about it if Obama doesn’t get his act together. Americans are so concerned many will even sacrifice their vote, in order to get themselves heard. Obama has had plenty of time, what really is going on? Can he not handle being the president of the United States of America, many ask themselves.

The Woman Warrior

“Vegetables burst out and mixed in acrid torrents.”
Acrid: Unpleasantly sharp, pungent, or bitter to the taste or smell.




“Whenever we did frivolous things, we used up energy; we flew kites.”
Frivolous: not serious in content or attitude or behavior;



“Could such people engender a prodigal aunt?”
Prodigal: a recklessly extravagant consumer



“She stood tractably beside the best rooster.”
Tractably: Easily managed or controlled.


“The fear did not stop but permeated everywhere.”
Permeated: To spread or flow throughout.

"Sinatra With A Cold Is Picasso Without Paint"

This I found this feature article,http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ1003-OCT_SINATRA_rev_#ixzz0Vt9ZMLMl very well written. It amazed me how the author uses very simple events and makes them in a fascinating story. He used specific details and events of Frank Sinatra at the time. This article was written more than 30 years ago (1966), yet it still is read by many. I think this is because the structure the author uses telling what happened. You can hear the same story a million times, but what makes one different from the other is by how it is told. He uses one main tool: vividness.

This article not only gained worldwide recognition, but also created a new way to journalism, “New Journalism -- a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction.” Instead of restating the big highlights of Frank Sinatra’s life, which most of us are familiar with and wouldn’t bother reading. He took something as simple as Frank Sinatra’s cold and developed it into, “one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published.”

In the part where frank is having a conversation with Vincenzo , “Sinatra was silent for a moment, then said, "Yes, but it's very good for her to get her education first, Vicenzo." Shows he is a well rounded man, even though he lives for his music and lives of his music he believes that education comes first no matter what. Education is essential to life. It is pieces as simple as a conversation like this, which build Frank for us.

The author portrays Frank as more than just his songs. His songs have a meaning and were inspired by some outsource in his life. The author analyzes Frank’s life more than just a famous singer. My question is how can this journalist tell Frank Sinatra’s life through something as simple as a cold?

A Language of Smiles
Say “eeee.” Say it again. Go on: “eeee.”

Maybe I’m easy to please, but doing this a few times makes me giggle. “Eeee.”

Actually, I suspect it’s not just me. Saying “eeee” pulls up the corners of the mouth and makes you start to smile. That’s why we say “cheese” to the camera, not “choose” or “chose.” And, I think, it’s why I don’t get the giggles from “aaaa” or “oooo.”

The mere act of smiling is often enough to lift your mood; conversely, the act of frowning can lower it; scowling can make you feel fed up. In other words, the gestures you make with your face can — at least to some extent — influence your emotional state.

(The notion that facial expressions affect mood isn’t new. Edgar Allan Poe used it in his story “The Purloined Letter”: one character reports that when he wishes to know someone’s mind, he attempts to compose his face to mimic the expression of that someone — then waits to see which emotions arise. And the idea was developed, in different ways, by both Charles Darwin and William James. But telling stories and developing arguments is one thing. Showing, experimentally, that making a face can make a mood is harder; it’s only in the past 30 years or so that data have started to accumulate.)

Exactly how frowns and smiles influence mood is a matter of debate. One possibility is classical conditioning. Just as Ivan Pavlov conditioned a dog to associate the sound of a bell with the expectation of food, the argument goes, so humans quickly come to associate smiling with feeling happy. Once the association has been established, smiling is, by itself, enough to generate happy feelings. Another possibility is that different facial gestures have intrinsic properties that make them more or less pleasant, perhaps by altering the way that blood flows to the brain.

But here’s what interests me. As anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language will know, different languages make you move your face in different ways. For instance, some languages contain many sounds that are forward in the mouth; others take place more in the throat. What’s more, the effects that different languages have on the movements of the face are substantial. Babies can tell the difference among languages based on the speaker’s mouth movements alone. So can computers.

Which made me wonder: do some languages contain an intrinsic bias towards pulling happy faces? In other words, do some languages predispose — in a subtle way — their speakers to be merrier than the speakers of other languages?

As far as I can tell, no one has looked at this. (It doesn’t mean no one has; it just means I haven’t been able to find it.) But I did find a smidgen of evidence to suggest the idea’s not crazy. A set of experiments investigating the effects of facial movements on mood used different vowel sounds as a stealthy way to get people to pull different faces. (The idea was to avoid people realizing they were being made to scowl or smile.) The results showed that if you read aloud a passage full of vowels that make you scowl — the German vowel sound ü, for example — you’re likely to find yourself in a worse mood than if you read a story similar in content but without any instances of ü. Similarly, saying ü over and over again generates more feelings of ill will than repeating a or o.

Of course, facial gestures aren’t the whole story of emotions; moreover, languages can potentially influence emotions in many other ways. Different languages have different music — sounds and rhythms — that could also have an emotional impact. The meanings of words may influence moods more than the gestures used to make them. And just as the words a language uses to describe colors affects how speakers of that language perceive those colors, different languages might allow speakers to process particular emotions differently; this, in turn, could feed into a culture, perhaps contributing to a general tendency towards gloom or laughter.

Separating these various factors will be difficult, and the overall impact on mood through the facial gestures of a language may well be small, if indeed it exists at all. Nevertheless, I’d love to know whether some languages, by the contortions they give the mouth, really do have an impact on their speakers’ happiness. If it turns out that there is a language of smiles, I’d like to learn it. In the meantime: have a giggle with “meeeeeee.”

I found this article very interactive, the author created a way so you not only read it, but put yourself in their shoes to better understand his point, “do some languages contain an intrinsic bias towards pulling happy faces? In other words, do some languages predispose — in a subtle way — their speakers to be merrier than the speakers of other languages?” I had never thought about this, yet as he begins his article she says, “Say “eeee.” Say it again. Go on: “eeee.” I automatically did it, and made the connection that by saying “eee” unconsciously you were smiling.
She mainly talks about how, “the gestures you make with your face can — at least to some extent — influence your emotional state.” Since humans in all over the world smile in the same language as they say. We have ever since linked a smile with happiness, it’s a universal symbol.

The author argues that since the different languages, have different vowels and pronunciation, which makes us smile, frown or scowl therefore being part of creating our mood.

Yet, mood has so many factors that it hasn’t been scientifically proven. I find this idea very interesting and valid. Hopefully it can be proven, I would love to know if this really happens! I love how I think so similarly to the author, “I’d love to know whether some languages, by the contortions they give the mouth, really do have an impact on their speakers’ happiness. If it turns out that there is a language of smiles, I’d like to learn it.” I love smiling!

Death

November 2, 2009, 8:25 pm

Happy Ending
By Todd May
In the spring of 2004 I took a flight from my home near Greenville, S.C., to New York to visit my dying step-grandmother. We had been close, and it would be one of the last times I would get to see her. As the flight was about to land, it abruptly ascended and headed toward the Empire State Building. The passengers on the plane became quiet; the aura of 9/11 was hanging in the air.

We flew over the Empire State Building (but too close to the antenna for my comfort) and circled back to La Guardia. As it turned out, a small commuter plane had decided to land without taking account of our aircraft, so the pilot had had to make a quick move. But in those moments when it seemed I was aboard another human missile, I revisited my life. I realized, almost to my surprise, that I would not have traded it in for another life. There had been disappointments, to be sure, but my life appeared to me to have been a meaningful one, a life I did not regret. This is not to say that I was not nearly paralyzed with fear. I was. At the same time, strangely, my life appeared to me as worth having lived.

There are two lessons here. The first, and most obvious one, is that death is terrifying. Here in the United States, we have the technology to defer death, so we often pretend it will never really happen to us. There is always another procedure, always a cure in sight if not in hand. But in our sober moments we recognize that we will indeed die, and that we have precious little control over when it will happen.

The harm of death goes to the heart of who we are as human beings. We are, in essence, forward-looking creatures. We create our lives prospectively. We build relationships, careers, and projects that are not solely of the moment but that have a future in our vision of them. One of the reasons Eastern philosophies have developed techniques to train us to be in the moment is that that is not our natural state. We are pulled toward the future, and see the meaning of what we do now in its light.

Death extinguishes that light. And because we know that we will die, and yet we don’t know when, the darkness that is ultimately ahead of each of us is with us at every moment. There is, we might say, a tunnel at the end of this light. And since we are creatures of the future, the darkness of death offends us in our very being. We may come to terms with it when we grow old, but unless our lives have become a burden to us coming to terms is the best we can hope for.

The second, less obvious lesson of this moment of facing death is that in order for our lives to have a shape, in order that they not become formless, we need to die. This will strike some as counterintuitive, even a little ridiculous. But in order to recognize its truth, we should reflect a bit on what immortality might mean.

Immortality lasts a long time. It is not for nothing that in his story “The Immortal” Jorge Luis Borges pictures the immortal characters as unconcerned with their lives or their surroundings. Once you’ve followed your passion — playing the saxophone, loving men or women, traveling, writing poetry — for, say, 10,000 years, it will likely begin to lose its grip. There may be more to say or to do than anyone can ever accomplish. But each of us develops particular interests, engages in particular pursuits. When we have been at them long enough, we are likely to find ourselves just filling time. In the case of immortality, an inexhaustible period of time.

And when there is always time for everything, there is no urgency for anything. It may well be that life is not long enough. But it is equally true that a life without limits would lose the beauty of its moments. It would become boring, but more deeply it would become shapeless. Just one damn thing after another.

This is the paradox death imposes upon us: it grants us the possibility of a meaningful life even as it takes it away. It gives us the promise of each moment, even as it threatens to steal that moment, or at least reminds us that some time our moments will be gone. It allows each moment to insist upon itself, because there are only a limited number of them. And none of us knows how many.

I prefer to think that the paradox of death is the source not of despair but instead of the limited hope that is allotted to us as human beings. We cannot live forever, to be sure, but neither would we want to. We ought not to mind the fact that we will die, although we really would rather that it not be today. Probably not tomorrow either. But it is precisely because we cannot control when we will die, and know only that we will, that we can look upon our lives with the seriousness they merit. Death takes away from us no more than it has conferred: lives whose significance lies in the fact they are not always with us.

Our happiness lies in being able to inhabit that fact.


Todd May is a professor of philosophy at Clemson University. He is the author 10 books, including “The Philosophy of Foucault” and “Death.”



This essay is the last in the 2009 incarnation of Happy Days. The editors would like to thank the diverse group of contributors and the readers of Happy Days for their many thoughtful, incisive, funny and often moving comments. We hope to resume the project in the future.

This article talks about death. This is a topic which really freaks me out. I try not to think about it, for as stated in the article, “There is always another procedure, always a cure in sight if not in hand.” Many of us suppress this thought by thinking this isn’t going to happen to me, but the truth of the matter is you can die in a matter of seconds. This uncertainty of not knowing when you are going to die is what scares me mostly. I often ask myself, if I die today will I ever see my mom or my dad again? What if the last thing I told a person I love, was not nice? What if they died now and that was the last thing I told them?

Death is a reality someday we all need to face because as said in the article, “It may well be that life is not long enough. But it is equally true that a life without limits would lose the beauty of its moments.” If we knew we weren’t going to die, we wouldn’t do many things. Death is an inspiration in our daily lives. If we had no time limit of being on this earth, we would have enough time to do everything over and over again.

The author ends his article by saying “It gives us the promise of each moment, even as it threatens to steal that moment, or at least reminds us that some time our moments will be gone. It allows each moment to insist upon itself, because there are only a limited number of them. And none of us knows how many.” This is what really scares us, he couldn’t have said it in any other way. I thought I was the only one who felt this way, apparently not.

Even though death is terrifying, this article approaches dying in a positive way. It talks about the cruel reality of dying but gives reasons why we need to die. I found the author had a very interesting angle, while talking about death.

A Child-Birth Book Review

Beth Harrington
features
Child Birthing and the Parental Experience
As someone whose reaction to the idea of having a child is a tepid "maybe I could adopt or become a foster parent -- that way if they turn out bad I can blame it on the biological parents," I approach literature on childbirth and maternity with a blend of skepticism and curiosity. I am eager to find my choice not to reproduce vindicated and yet wonder what it might mean to be converted. Truth be told, consciously choosing not to have a child can leave one feeling excluded, like an outlaw even in contemporary society. How do you get your boyfriend to propose if you can’t use your biological clock as an excuse? What to say to those nagging relatives? Such was the mindset that informed me as I began reading Labor Pains and Birth Stories: Essays on Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Becoming a Parent, an anthology of stories written mostly by moms, but including a few dads, about the process of giving birth. According to editor Jessica Powers, it is the first anthology of its type, which is rather surprising given the prevalence of birth and parenting literature. What transpires is a journey that aims to invite the reader into one of the most crucial experiences of human life, yet at its conclusion leaves the disbelieving reader with more questions and reservations than answers about the passage to parenthood.

In terms of its structure, the book contains twenty-nine stories, plus a brief introduction and conclusion, at a mere two hundred twenty-eight pages long. Thus, these personal accounts average less than eight pages per story. Length does not necessarily correlate with quality and some of the shortest pieces in this collection are striking, while some of the longer pieces seem unfocused. They simply tell the story of a pregnancy and birth and lack a specific perspective or argument needed to distinguish themselves. Reading this collection is oddly similar to the experience of working as staff on a maternity ward. The reader is taken along for birth after birth yet the stories usually end when the infant is taken home from the hospital.

In relation to content, first and foremost, it becomes clear that the contributors to Labor Pains and Birth Stories are a fairly homogeneous group. They are middleclass and in stable relationships; for the most part, their pregnancies appear to be expected (according to the American Pregnancy Association nearly half of all pregnancies are unplanned*). Granted, there is one story written by a single mother who is expecting her second child while trying to disentangle herself from an abusive relationship. Another is about a mother living in the Upper East Side struggling to support her daughter whose biracial father is reluctant to contribute to the child’s upbringing while he attempts to pursue an art career. However, descriptions of shelling out twenty thousand for medical treatments for a birth mother in the event of a possible adoption and a couple who spend the days leading up to their child’s birth strolling the beach and watching movies evidence that these authors live in relative economic comfort and privilege.

The contributors are even more drawn together by their preference for alternative, New Age birthing methods. This in itself seems indicative of their socioeconomic status. (One has to wonder how many welfare mothers have access to such diverse treatments or even the resources to gain education about them.) Deliveries are frequently presided over by midwives as opposed to obstetricians at birthing centers or even at home instead of hospitals. The mothers use guided meditation, relaxation tapes, and “hypnobirthing” to help them through labors. There is even one case in which nipple stimulation (known to release the labor-inducing hormone oxytocin) is enlisted to bring on contractions.

Mothers who do not partake of alternative medicine during labor seem to feel compelled to justify their need for modern-day medical care. In her essay, "Don’t Even Bother: The Case Against Childbirth Preparation," Kelly Cunningham-Cousineau responds with nothing but insults to women who claim that childbirth was easy for them: “You are so full of shit. I don’t like you, I don’t trust you, and my kid is not going to play with your kids, you evil, Stepford-wife pods!” She qualifies her difficult labor and reliance on an epidural by informing the reader of her typically high levels of endurance: “I skied in minus-fifteen-degree weather until my nose was frostbitten. I drank a frat boy under the table in a shot contest. I am total chick macho.” She later informs us that “some of the women I know who have had the easiest labors are the biggest wusses with anything else.” Is childbirth the female equivalent of the military service? The long and short of it all is that I am dubious that Labor Pains and Birth Stories depicts the average birth experience of the ordinary woman -- at least in an industrialized nation. What is more, if you are a mother who wants to have an epidural in the event that you go into labor before your elective Caesarean-section is performed at a teaching hospital, this is probably not the book for you.

Caesarian-sections in particular are frowned upon in this book. They are generally reserved only for extreme situations such as that of twins born to a surrogate mother twelve weeks premature and a woman with a malformed uterus. One father goes so far as to label the elective Caesarian “a distortion for the self-pampering many.” Putting aside whether major abdominal surgery can actually be qualified as a self-indulgence, his viewpoint serves as a springboard for some of the controversies that reading this book may trigger. To start with, why are so many of these women determined to give birth sans medical intervention, forsaking in particular the relief of modern-day pain medication?

Natural childbirth instructor Frederica Mathewes-Green addresses the issue in her essay "Granddaddy’s Obstetrics," coincidentally in relation to the high rate of Caesarean deliveries, saying “the female body is designed to give birth, and we all are descended from a long line of birthgiving women.” Fair enough, but we are also descended from a long line of cave dwellers and that does not stop most people, mothers or not, from appreciating the comforts of a house inlaid with bricks or a stucco apartment complex. Additionally, the women who give birth in their homes or in birthing centers staffed by midwives are fully aware that should complications arise they are a mere ambulance ride away from an emergency Caesarean section or induced labor. Such is a far cry from the African mothers referenced in "The Zooming Birth of Jett" who may give birth a dozen times and hope only to live through the experience and for their babies to survive.

There is also the question of whether infants who are the product of natural childbirths actually fare better in the long-term as children and adults than babies born under more standard conditions. If the answer is yes (and even if it is, there is always the possibility that mothers who elect such methods may be more invested in becoming parents and feel more positively about motherhood in general -- causation is not correlation as the old adage states) then the issue of childbirth practices becomes akin to the debate that surrounds abortion rights. To what extent should a mother be expected to sacrifice of her own body for the good of her unborn (or being born) child? While it seems reasonable to expect that parents will make sacrifices for their children and that for women, whose bodies produce these babies, the sacrifices may be physiological, should a woman be expected to endure any amount of discomfort to ensure the most optimal experience for her infant, even if they occur at great cost to her? Can a mother who chooses to "self-indulge" during the birthing process recoup whatever losses her decision about birth incurs with the ones that she makes after the birth? Looking at it from a different view, if an infant’s first moments do majorly impact his or her life development, then what of infant who -- for all their parents’ efforts -- is born blue with the umbilical cord around its neck and must be rushed to another room for oxygen, or premature babies who must spend weeks in neonatal care separated from their mothers? Are we to assume that these children will suffer from some degree of post-traumatic distress or interpersonal difficulty that will follow them throughout their lives?

The women in the book do not ever cite definitive scientific studies showing that birthing outside of the standard hospital-setting ultimately leads to happier, more successful children in the long run. In fact, the reasons most women give for selecting a midwife over an obstetrician have to do with their expectations that the former will give them more individual attention than the latter and focus on their needs as a whole rather than simply their pregnancy. The women who opt for homebirths, in particular, do so because it feels more comfortable for them and thus they believe newborns will benefit in turn. Given the rationale that these birthing experiences are for the benefit of the mothers who request them, is it fair for society (and the contributors of this anthology) to judge these women more favorably than a woman who utilizes the various medical technologies for her own comfort?

It would be easy to conclude an investigation of such topics with a cliché about how women should not judge other women’s choices regarding motherhood or that ultimately a woman should obey her doctor’s counsel. However, I wonder if there is something else going on in all of this meticulous planning and determination to endure that has to do with what the writers of these compositions mostly gloss over. In the era of Dr. Phil and a few decades after John Bradshaw’s books about Toxic Parents, none of these expectant mothers and fathers expresses any notable doubts or misgivings about their ability to care for and nurture a child into adulthood. Occasionally, a contributor will make reference to the knowledge that the anxiety over keeping a child safe is no less immediate after they are born. “We are not out of the woods yet,” Pierre Laroche’s wife remarks in an essay titled, incidentally, "Out of the Woods," but on the whole there is very little discussion of “becoming a parent” -- as the subtitle states -- beyond caring for the needs of an infant. At no point is there any discussion of how these families will juggle raising their children with career responsibilities -- though again, this could be a class issue on the part of the authors. None of these contributors explore grievances with their own parents in juxtaposition to how they shape their confidence in and ability to be a good mother or father. The assumption seems to be that once the baby comes out, as long as it is properly bonded with in the postpartum stages, everything will be okay.

Thus, one cannot help but wonder if the determination of these parents to craft the optimal birth plan represents a test of metaphysical proportions for them. Namely, it is a way to prove to themselves that if they are capable of making the most excruciating sacrifices for their children when they are at their most vulnerable and dependent, then they will continue to do so even as their children grow up and individuate from them. The alternative to a happy, healthy childhood for their posterity is more unbearable for parents than even the longest, most difficult labor without analgesics. Yet the skeptic in me still finds myself wondering if these parents are not focusing too much of their attention on the wrong moments. Whatever experiential gifts these parents have the capacity to give their children at birth represent only the beginning of their life stories.

After reading this book review, I found it very interesting to find a book review about child birth because it’s a topic that interests me. Even though I am only seventeen and I don’t plan to have kids until I’m about twenty seven or older, once I have my life settled down, I am scared of giving birth. All the pain and complications a mother has to go through really freak me out. I love kids and want to have at least two when I grow up, but I just wish I could skip the giving birth scene. I may sound like a coward by saying this but really it scares me. Maybe as I grow up and learn about it by reading books like this one, which gives advice and answer many questions, I can look at giving birth from another perspective, “Labor Pains and Birth Stories: Essays on Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Becoming a Parent, an anthology of stories written mostly by moms, but including a few dads, about the process of giving birth.” I often do ask myself is it easier to be a man or a women? “Is childbirth the female equivalent of the military service?”

I didn’t like the fact that, “Caesarian-sections in particular are frowned upon in this book.” I was born through caesarian section. It wasn’t because I had to but my mom chose to. As the book says the mother should sacrifice, “Namely, it is a way to prove to themselves that if they are capable of making the most excruciating sacrifices for their children when they are at their most vulnerable and dependent, then they will continue to do so even as their children grow up and individuate from them.” I find this statement incorrect, for having a child through natural birth is not a sacrifice it is just complicating yourself and putting your child at risk when you don’t have to. My mom had her first child through natural birth and her arm got stuck coming out and now she can’t turn her wrist. I was born through the c-section and I came out perfectly, my mother didn’t have to go through any pain and now days she does sacrifices for me and a lot. Why put your child at risk and complicate yourself when we have the advances in technology to make everything so much easier. Choosing to suffer doesn’t show your braveness, but the ignorance of the people.
Towards the end of the book review I wasnt to pleased with the book as I started out, while reading the first paragraphs.