anna hilbert

One of 2016s “best of” according to Longform was an essay written by Wesley Morris called The Last Taboo and after reading it I certainly understand why. This piece of writing comes from a place of obviously well thought-out questioning and personal experience, which really makes reading it feel investigative almost while also being very personal and full of pathos. It’s an exploration of a very simple idea: Black men’s penises, but Morris looks at the reaction to them rather than the men themselves. He explores sexuality in himself as a black man, he talks about films and the unspoken rules about race and nudity. Morris knew that racism is engrained in a lot of close-minded people and to approach a very specific facet of racism, hidden in pop culture may be the way to get the fact that people of color still aren’t treated with respect into the back of everyone’s mind. He uses strong examples throughout the essay that readers could not deny and is able to unravel a very specific effect of racism into an exploration of historical racism, fetishization, and dehumanization. 

It took me two tries to read David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster, don’t get me wrong, it’s not that it wasn’t captivating, I just realized that longform writing about lobster ethics mixed with general anxiety about the current atmosphere makes for a confusing philosophical combination. Finally I dedicated my afternoon to sitting down and really reading it, which for me means reading it out loud to myself. Sounds neurotic but it helps me with tone, and Wallace’s writing is full of voice and tone. He writes like he talks, full of interjections and moral ramblings, which are two of my favorite things in a writer. He was able to turn an assignment into a very long essay that really caught my attention and made me think about myself, the culture I surround myself with and my morals. I’m familiar with a lot of David Foster Wallace’s writing like Infinite Jest, so I knew that this wasn’t just going to be a surface level article about Maine Lobster Festival, and I knew that his endnotes and footnotes weren’t just technical “cover my ass”, so I read them all (sometimes twice because god this man could write). 

At the beginning he does start off the description of the Maine Lobster Festival in a crazy descriptive way, a la travel brochure, but the further you read on the more personal and philosophical the content gets. He begins to talk about the festival as an event, not being advertised, summarised or demonized, but in reference to life. He zooms out the audience’s lens and forces them to look at not only the festival, but fishing practices, gatherings and cuisine from an anthropological and  epistemological point of view. His writing is so similar to fat books on moral philosophy that I read when I went through my Immanuel Kant phase. Wallace writes like he’s barely staying in the lines of his subject, he’s able to track so far off from his assigned topic of the MLF, and entertain the reader with crazy ethical questions while also completing his assigned work. He asks his reader to think which, most writers covering events don’t do, about the way they go about cuisine and the moral involvement in meat eating. As a vegetarian, whose family is WILDLY from crab-eating Maryland, some of these questions I was far too familiar with. Actually, you could hardly call me a vegetarian, as I do eat shrimp, crab and lobster, but not fish so I’m not a pescatarian either. I’m just a good old Maryland vegetarian, whose family holds a Crab Fest every year. When Wallace talks about the moral responsibility of cooking lobster I was so captivated, as this was a topic that I had grown up with. I have been the one to pry struggling crab claws off the corners of barrels into boiling water and have often asked the same questions Wallace asks to my parents. “Can they feel pain?” The only difference was that my parents also had Kant phases so they would tell me “yes and we have to take responsibility for their pain”. So to be someone from a very similar background as the culture that Wallace delves into, I was extremely captivated. 

The first time I read The Remains of the Night, I was focused purely on the written content, her writing was personal and illustrative, and really allowed me to envision the sights and scenes that she talked about. I have a hard time concentrating when reading at length, so when articles or essays include visual elements, I usually find them distracting, causing my mind to wander onto other topics, yet Route is able to include photographs and media in a way that ADDS to her narrative. I find that a lot of online writing today includes photos or visuals just to expand their media outreach in an ingenuine marketing or aesthetic way. Royte includes photographs of the places she talks about in the same area she writes about it, naturally drawing my eyes to the photo and then back to her writing. It was very easy to concentrate! This also might be because I’m extremely bored of lounging around my house all day and I’m desperate for cognitive stimulation, but truly her visuals don’t seem intrusive. The main photo behind the title and byline sets the scene for the majority of her article. The picture is the main focus, the title is secondary. Route wants to use her photos to show (obviously) where and what she’s talking about and she picked a great header image to do so. She then embeds the image of goutweed to further our image, as readers, of the setting that she’s trying to relay. Similarly, she includes small PSA style visuals with statistics from institutes like International Society for Sexual Medicine, which usually would set me off into a deep-dive of sexual medicine information but her use was completely non-distracting and added an element of formality to the more personal narrative Royte was creating. She placed the information where they made sense to accompany her writing, the only visual I thought was potentially unnecessary and was distracting was the study done by the Journal of Sexual Medicine reporting on the “unique sexual behaviors of gay men” it didn’t really add anything to the topic of sex trash and public sex other than developing a parallel narrative of gay culture and expectations in the gay community surrounding sex and hookups. Her collections of pictures of sex trash and other her and her litter mob’s “finds” really added to the reality of the topic. To show used condoms, lube and makeshift sex toys really forces me as a reader to acknowledge the reality of public sex and the resulting environmental impact. This had never been something I had thought about before other than a laugh here and there while finding used condoms on hikes or at my brother’s baseball games.  Overall I would say Royte’s use of Medium’s mechanics allowed her to organize her writing in a way that segmented her narrative into a easy understandable direction and her visual elements added to her writing instead of distracting the reader and creating a visual presence intended only for aesthetic purposes. 

After reading Jay Rosen’s article, I was able to reflect on Rosen’s advice to new journalists. He advises beginner journalists to become knowledgeable and reliable within a niche interest and to become an expert on a specified interest or topic. This way you can attract an audience of people who have very little other resources. This advice of narrowing your scope is easy to compare to the work my group and I have been doing on our podcast project called ‘Pigment of Your Imagination’. For this assignment, we, as a group of four, are tasked with creating and recording a podcast, so the question of ‘what’s something we all can talk about?’ came up extensively while planning our theme and topic. Without even knowing we followed Rosen’s advice, each of us dedicated ourselves to a specific topic that our podcast would cover and we would get deep into it. We placed ourselves into small niches of our overarching topic and assigned the task of becoming mini experts about each topic. With each of us knowing “everything” about our “something” it’s much easier to have an interesting, in depth and broad conversation about a topic, something an audience would enjoy consuming. Our topic being color seems broad, but each of our niches collectively bundle together to create a coherent and interesting subject of conversation that wouldn’t exist without our individual research.  We could simply just interview people about how they look and regard color in our world, but without a niche, the podcast we would make would end up being boring and directionless. By knowing everything about one facet of color’s role in our world, we offer up the chance for education, comparison and discussion between our group members which ultimately will attract an audience as it’s lively and specific enough to be considered a new thought. Presenting yourself as a beckon of knowledge about one specific thing makes you reliable, and an audience will more likely trust your content.

What were some of its stylistic qualities?

• Despite the dark topic, the humour used in You’re Wrong About: Kitty Genovese  is extremely helpful in moving along the conversation. Both Mike and Sarah are very quick witted and it aids in defusing the massive amount of information they’re presenting their audience with. While talking about the treatment of LGBT and other New Yorkers by the NYPD in the 50s-60s, they remain humorously enraged by the actions of the police force, strengthening their connection to the audience, while also exposing a narrative often overlooked. 
• In Serial’s, “The Alibi,” is also about a super dark topic: murder. The difference is, they don’t really use humor to make things less intense. Instead, the speaker keeps a very serious and intrigued tone throughout the entirety of the segment which aids the audience in wanting more of the story than what is being told. 
• In Every Little Thing’s “Winnie the Pooh”, the humor and topic kept the discussion light hearted while also maintaining intrigue. I really appreciated the family aspect of the origin of the topic and how the hosts always circled back to that when seeking their answers. 
• The 99%’s “Heyoon” uses an heir of mystery to tell the story of a sculpture nicknamed “Heyoon” in Southern Michigan. The podcast as a whole uses this sense of mystery to intrigue the listener so that the listener wants to know what happens in the story. 

How did it use research? 

• Both Mike and Sarah are journalists, so the way they conduct research is investigative. Their discussion uses the research they gather to make connections intuitively as the discussion is about a highly disorganized and falsified event and most substantial facts are rarely recorded accurately. They collected interviews, newspaper pieces and biographical research about Kitty Genovese to gather raw information to then turn into realistic explanations of her death. The research they do also goes beyond what is considered part of the actual case, they take historical and societal research from past research and apply it to the Kitty Genovese story. This includes their research into LGBT culture during Kitty’s life and at the time of her death, and historical treatment of LGBT New Yorkers, like Kitty. They also do research into the NYC police and political treatment of crime during Kitty’s death, which was constantly neglected due to the sensationalized role of the `bystanders”. They also do research that took into account the media’s ulterior motives reporting on a black man murdering a white woman during the 60s.They took a very human viewpoint when doing their research. They acknowledge the erasure of other non-white women being murdered by the smae man, Kitty’s lesbian identity and the real context of Kitty’s death. By acknowledging the forgotten human effects of the crime they are also able to inform the audience about what has happened because of this sensationalized story and the protections that were attempted afterwards. 
• Likewise, in Serials, “The Alibi,” the presenter adds in a lot of interviews that helps with the mystery of who killed Hae Min Lee. She started off with talking to the accused man’s friend, but after talking to him, she is torn with what to believe. She also talks to the accused murderer, Adnan Syed, to hear his side of the story, unfortunately, he doesn’t give her very accurate information, as similar to the research in, “You’re Wrong About: Kitty Genovese.” Everytime the speaker was giving research to the audience, it followed the story of what happened next, or the next piece of evidence she was getting. Although it really helped her get nowhere, she had a purpose for it all and as the audience it makes you want to keep listening to know what happens next from people who lived through this story.  
• Every Little Thing organized their research in a very logical way. Since they were discussing the age of Winnie the Pooh, they first visited a man who is a professional age guesser (lol if that’s an official occupation, I don’t know), then when he wasn’t sure they went to a bear expert to gather more information, and when they came up short they finally went to a Winnie the Pooh expert who provided the host’s with the answers they needed. Even though the bulk of this episode was research focused, it was extremely entertaining and light-hearted. I feel like most people have always wondered how old Winnie the Pooh is and the answer was right in front of us the whole time.
• “Heyoon” uses interviews and news clips, and personal testimonies as its primary form of research. Host Adam Goldman uses the interview with Peter Hayden, the property Heyoon was on, to show the creation of Heyoon and its purpose. The podcast also uses clips of audio with some of narrator Alex Goldman’s friends who also explored Heyoon in their teen years. Both forms of research were used to explain the personal side of something that was very important in several people’s lives.

How was it organized? 

• Mike and Sarah focused very heavily on Kitty Genovese’s life which makes sense, as they are trying to explain the reality of her death. Like I said before they present the story outside of the original sensationalized story and introduce Kitty, not as a metaphor for human apathy, but as a person. Because of this, alot of the podcast is focused on Kitty’s role in her own death and the surrounding context of the time, rather than the people failing to save her. The amount of pointed questions they ask each other also plays into the organization, their ability to remain humorous while still moving the story forward is aided by the constant questions the hosts ask each other. This separates the topics being discussed into sections almost like a question and answer, while also keeping the conversation sounding organic and less lecturing. 
• The speaker in, Serials, “The Alibi,” organizes her content mostly in chronological order. She takes the accuser and hears his side of the story. Hears his friend’s story, then fills in the missing pieces from other alibi’s that fit in. the entire podcast, the presenter is going from person to person trying to hear the many sides to the story to figure out if Adnan Syed is in fact, innocent. 
• Every Little Thing took a straight-forward approach to their organization. The hosts first introduced why they were discussing the topic: a family argument over the age of Winnie the Pooh. They then reached out to three experts in different fields who they believed could help them find their answer. These experts were a professional age guesser, a bear expert and a Winnie the Pooh expert. When the hosts came to a dead end in their research, they moved onto the next thing. 
• “Heyoon”  is organized to frame the story in a very personal light, as the sculpture has played a large part in many teenage coming-of-age stories in the small town of Ann Arbor. The podcast starts off with the personal testimonies, and then slowly moves into the narrator’s background, and then introduces the interviews with the structure’s co-creators, Peter Hayden and Joseph Kinnebrew.

How did it tell its story? 

• A large majority of the research and organization is formatted in such a way that Kitty’s death is not the main concept, but instead the consequences of the society in which Kitty’s life and death happened. It’s very interesting and held my attention very well because of how invested in Kitty’s life. 
• The majority of Serials, “The Alibi,” is focused around the death of Hae Min Lee and if Adnan Syed is the one who actually murdered her. In comparison to, “You’re Wrong About: Kitty Genovese,” they don’t talk too much about Hae or Adnan’s life all too much, only with what happened, trying to fill the pieces of who actually killed her. It kept me very interested the entire time and made me want to keep listening to the rest of the series. 
• Every Little Thing is very focused on the specific topic of each episode due to its length. Each episode is typically under 30 minutes so there is little to no room to deviate from the topic at hand. The episode began with the host’s hypothesis about the age of Winnie the Pooh and then from there got the opinion of experts who gave them conflicting feedback, until they found the answer in the primary source, the books by A.A. Milne. The episode was conducted in exclusively interviews which made the audience feel part of the process. 
• In the 25-minute podcast, “Heyoon” tells the story about a mysterious spaceship-like structure in southern Michigan. It uses the structure of personal testimony followed by interviews to emphasize the effect of a symbolic structure. 

I just listened to Megan Tan’s first episode of her podcast called Millennial. Megan Tan is able to lay out her show as an introduction into her own life. She creates a story that people in their 20s could relate to, and that’s her target audience: Millennials.  It was emotional yet hopeful and intriguing from a human perspective. She has a life, and she represents it as real and dynamic, which appeals to the general desire to relate and be involved in other people’s lives. She keeps her ending ambiguous and introduces important people in her life almost as if they’re characters we could become invested in. To be completely honest, I even got roped in and listened to the next episode. She’s very raw and honest, yet the podcast is produced so well it doesn’t seem too raw and unprofessional.

In my own opinion, Jonah Lehrer’s plagiarism is the most distasteful as his plagiarism is not only unoriginal and inaccurate, but consists of completely made up quotes. To create false information, depend on unreliable sources and completely ignore quoting sources is ridiculous coming from a professional writer trusted with the large audience that The New Yorker holds. Even looking past the fake quotes, the “self plagiarism”, though not as morally wrong as plagiarizing from someone else, still reflects extremely poorly on the quality of Lehrer’s writing ability.  He was hired for his ability to write and represent The New Yorker honestly, and to write a book using false information is completely unprofessional. Not to say that some plagiarism okay, because it’s not, but when it’s paraphrased from a reliable unquoted source like Zakaria, it’s the least objectionable form of plagiarism. Chris Anderson on the other hand seems like a case of just pure irresponsibility, it doesn’t come off as malicious it just seems lazy.

Several dead ends Kine ran into: 

1. Kine found a picture of a Hans Jordi in the newspaper clipping from a class and contacted the teacher yet she didn’t know any information to help Kine. 
2. Kine went to the Culinary Association Meeting to meet with Hans Jordi at the advice of Chef Rene, but he was not there. Instead, Chef Rene sets up a meeting at his own house for Kine to meet Hans.
3.  Bob Bland turned out to not be Bob Six. 

Additional things Kine learned in pursuit of her mystery:

1. The art teacher offered to teach her how to draw a horizon. 
2.  She learned about the CEO of Continental Airlines from 1936 to 1980 also known as Bob Six 
3. She attended a meeting for the Culinary Association of Arizona exploring the culinary world she never would have 

Although an extremely complicated topic, I found myself quite interested in This American Life’s podcast The Giant Pool of Money. I think my interest was held by the way the topic was structured, like a chronological story. They included outside people who had first hand experience of the housing crisis and Wall Street turmoil, but they didn’t include them as expert witnesses or bland interviewee’s, they were characters. The story begins by literally placing you into the story with audio from the Ritz Carlton, creating 4D experience. Both Adam Davidson and Alex Blumberg explain each facet of the housing crisis and even go into detail about simple investment terms, and even better, they explain each term in a slow, almost suspenseful way. The research they have is not only extremely crucial to the story but it’s also the driving force. It’s not presented as extra information for the nerd listeners it’s presented as a story for the masses. All the quantitative data isn’t parroted like it’s being read off of a cue card, it’s simplified and contextualized as the main point. The atmosphere the hosts created, alongside the sound editing, music and sound effects, it’s a Hollywood production, it has the same driving force as a documentary. Everything line is delivered specifically for listeners, even something as simple as there being two men named Mike’s involved in one discussion, was acknowledged as confusing and explained. It differs greatly with the Fast Fashion Podcast, as that podcast felt like listening in to a conversation between two experts. I thought both were interesting, but the research in Fast Fashion was considerably more “parroted” than This American Life who was able to include research within a story and present it like they themselves understood it, therefore making it more easily relatable for their listeners. 

Rebecca Onion writes her Slate article as a linear piece of history with its sources being easily accessible but not prioritized. She writes it in a confined, almost purely informational structure, starting with the origins of the chicken feed fabric and ending with its societal meaning. The information is given neutral historical tone, and an academic journal is the primary source for the article. Onion’s academic tone addresses the audience as impersonal students. Onion’s article is short enough to get her point across and for her point to be easily understood. It ends up sounding like a portion of a high school history textbook, which doesn’t sound interesting, but because of its easy reading level and the fact that it is short, accessible print on the web makes its audience quite varied. When the audience is this varied keeping the sources simple makes sense. This differs entirely from the “Stuff Mom Never Told You” episode focused on Fast Fashion. Both hosts intent is to entertain their listeners for an hour. This means that the academic tone needs to be switched out for something a bit more entertaining. Cristen and Caroline bring a conversational tone to their information, presenting sources not as proof of knowledge but more so an addition to an unfolding conversation. The podcast’s use of sources is far far more expansive Onion’s article, but it makes sense as their episode topic is also expansive. They move throughout topics with intention, while maintaining a casual tone. Because it’s a podcast the audience tends to be more involved,  in fact Cristen and Caroline both deliver sources as if their educating each other, not even the audience. The audience isn’t assaulted with sources and facts, they get information while listening to two interesting women talk about a topic. The fact that they are extremely relatable storytellers also allows for the audience to receive gallons of facts without getting overwhelmed or bored, they sound interesting and relatable, therefore the information seems more appealing.