TOW #3: The Coddling of the American Mind

The Coddling of the American Mind is an article written for the magazine The Atlantic by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. The article comprehensively describes and analyzes what the authors believe is a growing problem within the United State's collegiate academia: overwhelming hypersensitivity to "microagressions". The authors define microagressions as "anything that can be perceived as discriminatory on virtually any basis" and use common psychological theories to describe how the overzealous condemnation of people for committing microagressions has created a toxic environment within America's universities. The author's establish their credibility early on, describing themselves as "a constitutional lawyer and the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which defends free speech and academic freedom on campus, and has advocated for students and faculty involved in many of the incidents this article describes; [and] a social psychologist who studies the American culture wars". The authors wrote this essay, the cover story for the September 2015 issue of The Atlantic, in response to growing polarization on college campuses as college students accuse fellow students and faculty of minuscule microagressions, such as one case at UCLA where students staged a protest against a professor after he told a student to uncapitalize the word "indigenous" (the student said it offended their ideology). Throughout the text, the authors appeal to logos within the audience (the American public and more specifically college communities) through expertly applying the rhetorical modes of cause and effect and definition. They start each section by defining a term such as trigger warnings, microagression, labeling, and magnification, and then exploring how each term factors into the culture of offense within college circles. This helps appeal to logos as the reader follows a cohesive and reasonable breakdown of the psychological and mental causes for the new trend. For example, the authors define "trigger warnings" by characterizing them as "The idea that words (or smells or any sensory input) can trigger searing memories of past trauma—and intense fear that it may be repeated" and then describing how this has affected the recent college culture by saying "explicit trigger warnings are believed to have originated much more recently, on message boards in the early days of the Internet [...] Search-engine trends indicate that the phrase broke into mainstream use online around 2011, spiked in 2014, and reached an all-time high in 2015. The use of trigger warnings on campus appears to have followed a similar trajectory; seemingly overnight, students at universities across the country have begun demanding that their professors issue warnings before covering material that might evoke a negative emotional response". Through this use of definition and cause-and-effect, the authors effectively appeal to the reader's sense of logos, thus achieiving their purpose of showing the reader how excessive coddling and hypersensitivity in universities is detrimentally affecting the academic freedoms and mental health of students.

TOW #2: New Yorker Visual Text

In an age where it seems that the news is constantly and exhaustively inundated with stories of unjustified police brutality, the above image provides a striking summation of how many American citizens view police. This visual is a cartoon drawn by political cartoonist Art Spiegelman for the respectable New Yorker magazine. The cartoon, which also happened to be the cover art for the issue that it was featured in, was drawn in response to the excessive shooting (41 times) of Amadou Diallo, an innocent unarmed Guinean immigrant, in 1999. The cartoon created waves among The New Yorker's readers, and Spiegelman received many threats for his drawing. The cartoon, whether controversial or not, undoubtedly provides a striking image for its audience: the generally ignorant (or so they seem to the author) American public. The cartoon depicts a police officer preparing to fire his weapon at a shooting gallery that reads "41 shots, 19 cents". Through the cartoon's sugary sweet pop art style and dark subject, Spiegelman is able to completely convey his purpose to the reader. His purpose is to reveal to the unknowing reader a recurring yet unspoken trend among American police officers: the excessive and unnecessary violence that is often reserved for black Americans. He relays this purpose to the reader through a dark metaphor in which the shooting of Diallo is compared to a carnival shooting gallery. This image appeals to pathos in the reader, as the idea of the shooting gallery invokes images of the officer gleefully playing target practice with a person whom they view as subhuman. The metaphor is effective in its goal of painting the officer as the overzealous and violent attacker of an innocent who is depicted as a non-threatening "target". Whether grotesque and immoral or not, this cartoon effectively conveys to the reader its intended message through appealing to emotions of anger and disbelief in its audience. 

TOW #1 Stephen Colbert's Night Vision

In this article, written by James Poniewozik for TIME Magazine, Poniewozik weighs comedian Stephen Colbert's possible effects on the late night T.V. industry as he takes on the role of Late Show host, and also delves deeper into the real Colbert, who often hides behind a cast of colorful caricatures. Initially, this article appears to simply be an entertainment piece to highlight Late Show's new host; instead, what Poniewozik produces at the end is a complex character study on one of America's most iconic, yet somehow equally ambiguous T.V. figures. Poniewozik is an established writer for Time and consistently appears in the magazine's weekly issues. In this article Poniewozik's main goal is to show the reader--generally Americans who watch late night television--a different and more complex side of Colbert than he usually allows the public to see. In order to do this, Poniewozik employs various rhetorical devices to create a humorous but also inquisitive tone. He uses colorful metaphors to convey to the reader who Colbert really is, saying of his role on network TV, "Colbert seems as if he was born inside a television, built from the archetypal idea of what A Guy From T.V. looks like--when he smiles, you half expect a CGI gleam to flash from his teeth with a sound-effects chime ... He's TV's inside man, a guy who can comfortably be given the controls of a network battleship yet cheerfully steer it off the map, humming a chipper little tune" (Poniewozik 90). Through this analogy Poniewozik tells his readers of Colbert's TV facade and avant-garde approach to mass consumer network television, but in a way that invokes pathos and appeals to the reader's sense of humor and whimsy. In addition to this, Poniewozik also explores an inquisitive tone in a series of rhetorical questions aimed at shedding light on the elusive "real Colbert". He poses questions on which persona Colbert will bring to his new role on The Late Show, asking "Which of these hosts will we see in September--the one man repertory of characters? The deliberately clueless interviewer? The political satirist? The genuinely curious mensch?" (Poniewozik 87). Through this exploration, Poniewozik travels with the reader to see who really is Stephen Colbert? Thus, he establishes ethos as he shares the same curiosity with the reader. Through these strategies, Poniewozik effectively serves his purpose of revealing who really is the complex person behind Colbert.

IRB Intro Post #1

For my first IRB I will be reading Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. The topic of my IRB is the origins of the punk movement in the 1970's and the implications of the nihilism and counterculture that were present in the era's punk youth. I chose to read this because I find 70's punk culture very interesting and would like to know more about what caused such a rebellion amongst the troubled youth. Through reading this I hope to learn more about an era and subculture that is rarely brought to light in terms of historical context.