The Compelling Factor

Yesterday, I read NYT's piece on swapped identical twins The Mixed Up Brothers of Bogota. It was a compelling and fascinating read, as the comments on the article attest, and there are so many aspects to consider but I keep coming back to why?

What makes something compelling?

Yes, this article has the dream telenovela-ness to it. The story of identical twins who are switched at birth, in this case creating two sets of fraternal twins, is so good that even Shakespeare embraced it as a plot device in Comedy of Errors. Who doesn't love a good mistaken identity story?

But there is something more. Susan Dominus spends a fair amount of the article talking about the science of twins, or the research related to twins. She brings up ideas of nature and nurture along with current thinking around epigenetics. That ability to connect this personal story to larger ideas of science becomes critical in building an understanding of why this story matters. What are the larger implications, which is the fundamental "so what?" question we often draw on. She does this artfully in the organizational structure of the piece. She starts with discovery, encounter, revelation then moves to science. Then back to the narrative of consequences of those revelations and more narrative. It's a similar structure to what Atul Gawande does in his writing, one that I find appealing. A little bit of narrative makes the informational writing go down.

For me, also, this story is so riveting because there are implications about where the root of our personal successes may lie. As a country built on the post-Enlightenment ideals of rugged individualism, we believe that personal success is related to our own individual resilience and work ethic (which is the same idea that makes it so hard to understand what privilege is). We might believe that there is a genetic component, but we rarely acknowledge the environmental.

Here, then, is a story about four men who are encountering the direct effect of fate, as a Classicist may say, in their lives. Would William be different if he had been raised with his "true" mother (and let's let that sit there for a while, that difficulty in understanding what "true" parenthood and family are) in the city as opposed to the crushing grind of poverty in the country. Doors closed because of his environment while for Carlos they opened.

I can't begin to understand the emotions that this news must have brought. What happens when you are faced with the fact that you've been screwed by "fate"? Does it explain things or make you feel rage or both?

To me, that wondering, the sense of what this all means is precisely what makes for a compelling read.I prefer work that brings up questions, about our place in the world or how things work and what implications might be for further thinking. This article definitely brings all of those wonderings to the fore.

I am now thinking about how I might pair this up with other pieces in order to teach. Obviously the Comedy of Errors connection is ripe. But what else might I use? I wonder if it would be good for something on family? And if so what? I definitely will think about teaching it this year.

Serial

Okay. I absolutely admit it. I'm a Serial addict. I've loved This American Life for years and I'm loving the longer format of Serial. I won't retread all of the ground that the internet has already covered this week about how great this is (see Reddit, Slate, Vox, and pretty much any pop culture blog).

One of the things I am most struck by is that Sarah Koenig's reporting is how her journey maps onto the learning. Without fail, she talks about how she is constantly probing, looking for information that will confirm or debunk what her theories are. She exists in a state of confusion

ETA I originally started this post in November and never finished. Today the last episode of Serial was posted and I am now ready to think about teaching it. Instead of trying to sell you on why you should listen or teach this, I am going to just create a link repository of commentary I want to come back to with my students.

About the Justice System

• Serial's Big Confession My favorite explanation of why this podcast is an indictment of the justice system.
• Matt Thompson weighs in on the Justice System component
• WaPo on how Serial should have gone further in showing what's really wrong with criminal justice

Is Serial Racist?

• The Awl article that started the debate about white privilege and SK's perceived prejudice in journalism.
• The Atlantic pushes back against that claim and addresses is point by point.

Parody

• Sesame Street got into the Serial/Cereal action

Narrative Work

• An opinion piece from the Boston Globe positing why the narrative works so well. In fact, this captures what I was trying to say back in November.
• Linda Holmes on what is really an ending as it pertains to Serial

A benign review NYT Review of the ending.

Slate's podcast about Serial on the ending. Mike Pesca earlier interviewed SK and asked her not to have a lame ending and he weighs in on what he thinks about the ending. I definitely agree that it was a very satisfying ending which is tricky in a serialized nonfiction piece.

Anyhow, if you are so inclined and you have links to think pieces that you think would make good fodder for students, please comment with ideas on other companions to this for my class.

Recommendation: "Will Portland Always Be a Retirement Community for the Young?"

Last week I was scrolling through what felt like the entire internet looking for a bit of entertainment. Does that ever happen to you? You feel like you've read or seen everything that there could possibly be of interest, that perhaps you have actually reached the end of the internet?

While I battled back that sense of boredom and despondency that follows this revelation, I reloaded the New York Times and saw Claire Cain Miller's, "Will Portland Always Be A Retirement Community for the Young?" With tongue planted firmly in cheek, this article examines some of the reasons why Portland is an outlier in how cities have grown and changed in the past couple of decades. (Spoiler alert: there is a surplas of college grads, unlike many other urban areas which actively try to seek the same in order to drive their economies).

What I love about this piece is the artful use of structure to help create Miller's argument. She starts focusing on a personal anecdote, then expands to a city-wide perspective, then to a national one. Then she zooms back in, going back to city-wide then back to personal, ending the first section with a rhetorical question. What I love about those first 6 paragraphs is the elegant and balanced way that such a structure emphasizes the problem, allowing for easy comparison. Often, emerging writers will create a point/counterpoint structure for comparison, but here we have the sense of spiraling, of sort of that medieval interlocking spheres as a way of highlighting how enmeshed the problems are.

The shift in the article occurs when Miller posits, "Portland’s residents may, as the saying goes, want to keep their city weird. But do they want to keep it broke too?" Emerging writers often rely on the crutch of starting with a question. They do so dogmatically and often artlessly often asking something as pat as "Have you ever wondered why...." Here, though, you have a writer in full command of how to use that question to turn the article on its heel as well as to advance her own argument.

The next portion of the writing concerns itself with historical trends, starting with national trends then looking at those relating directly to Portland by comparison. This structure is a more common way of handling comparison, yet it's well done here and definitely emphasizes her point that Portland may be at risk of the "the amenity paradox, [which] refers to cities where the same amenities that attract people end up eroding what made a city desirable in the first place."

The article then ends on a tonal note that is, as the College Board might say, complicated. Throughout the article, there is a sense of gentle mockery that Miller tries to lessen by parenthetical phrases admitting to her own personal experience having lived in Portland. While she uses the stereotypes of "designers and baristas" and "kombucha brewing" as coded language for hipsters, she generally sticks to the psuedo-academic tone that relies on studies, experts and statistics. This use of emotionally distant language slips in the last paragraph where she notes that as economic trends change people will be compelled to move to less cool cities, "the ones that people move to when it’s time to become an adult." The implication, obviously, is that for now Portland is a haven for, as her example shows, 35-year-olds playacting at adulthood while holding decidedly non-adult jobs. In some ways, she seems to buy into an argument that the hipsters she decries would inherently object, that is that adulthood comes with decent and steady incomes, health insurance and a tidy 401K.

Moreover, the last sentence which declares that when such a shift a happens, "Portland will find out who the true believers really are." Again the implication is that those who live in Portland now, who are intent on keeping Portland weird are cult-like, or at the very least, irrational in their devotion.

Definitely a fun article to teach since it is easily accessible while still full of examples of interesting rhetorical moves. Most importantly it might serve as a very nice model for student writing with some patterns that would be easy to replicate.

(As a footnote, as an avid nonfiction reader online, I often find myself reading things that elicit hundreds of comments. There is no quicker way to kill your kind view of humanity than to read comments on the internet. Why is that? And why do I still do it? I do find the comments at NYT and to a lesser extent NPR for the most part thoughtful, but at the end of the day, I still think what is wrong with people?)