Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Thursday, April 5, 2007
HOMEWORK: Due April 10, 2007
READINGS
1, articles from EAA - pg 226-232, 477- 479 answer Q. 1 and 3
2, Read NY Times article below and write a commentary on this blog or bring to class
Commentary should include author's claim and if the argument (state the argument) works for you and why? Be ready to talk about it in class
April 1, 2007
Ideas & Trends
Being Nice to the Bacon, Before You Bring It Home
By PAUL VITELLO
SOME of my relatives in Sicily are farmers; and the first time I visited them, at 19, I made a habit each morning of visiting the rabbits they kept in a pen near the house. There were a few dozen. They were cute.
One morning, my uncle Paolo, a large and kindly man, came in to tend to business, righting an overturned bucket here, straightening a crate there and deftly scooping up a rabbit with one hand, wedging it under his arm and twisting its neck until dead. It took about five seconds.
Thus was one meat consumer introduced to the culture of meat producers.
When Burger King announced last week that it would favor producers who treated their animals more humanely it was welcome news to animal welfare advocates. But it also served to remind the rest of us that if we are meat eaters, we are slaughterers, too. At least by proxy.
To farmers and ranchers who raise animals for food, the feeding, housing and killing of livestock is an unbroken continuum that delivers a product to people far removed from its production — city folk who work in advertising, or whatever it is that city people do.
Animals are for petting, not killing. Meat, unrelated, is for eating. And never the twain shall meet.
But over the last decade, a slow but steady convergence of these two world views has begun to change the way consumers view their meat, and some producers view their animals.
Temple Grandin, an animal science professor at Colorado State University who is a pioneer in the field of humane cattle handling, said public pressure on meat producers in the last few years has been “building and building to where I feel we’re at a tipping point now.”
When she spoke at last week’s conference on animal care and handling at the annual American Meat Institute meeting in Kansas City, Mo., she said, there were more than 300 people in attendance. “That’s more than we ever had before, and I think it’s a wonderful sign,” she said.
Beginning in the 1990s, animal welfare advocates like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals began virtually force-feeding the consuming public on certain realities of so-called factory farming.
For the sake of production efficiencies and a low-cost food supply, they explained, cows, pigs and poultry are often condemned to sunless, sometimes squalid lives, only to die with needless cruelty. These advocates led protests against the largest hamburger chains, beneficiaries of the factory system.
After initial resistance, in 2001 the chains agreed to some improvements. McDonald’s and Burger King imposed some guidelines for their meat and egg suppliers: extra water, wing-room and fresh air for egg-laying hens; mandatory electric-shock stunning of pigs and cattle before slaughter.
Last week, Burger King went further. In an agreement that PETA and other advocates called “a historic advance,” it said it would favor suppliers who did not confine their chickens and pigs in cages and crates, and who used gas rather than electric shock to knock out chickens before slaughter.
Perhaps this is more than you want to know about the life and death of the creatures who made that ham and eggs on your plate possible. But by most indicators, many Americans are increasingly interested in asking. From niche-market beginnings, “free-range” and other humanely raised animal products have been embraced by many major grocery retailers, including Wal-Mart.
Retailers clearly see advantages in appealing to the demographic of kinder and gentler meat-eaters, according to Ron Paul, president of Technomic, a Chicago-based research and consulting firm for food suppliers. “There is a growing realization that the humane movement is a long-term movement,” he said. “It’s not going to go away.”
Among meat producers, the new ethos seems partly understandable and partly not. “There is obviously a great deal of emotion and publicity surrounding the issue right now,” said Janet M. Riley, spokeswoman for the American Meat Institute. “From our perspective, handling animals humanely gives you a better quality product.”
More than 80 law schools now offer an “animal law” course that deals in some way with the question of humane treatment and slaughter of livestock, said Paul Waldau, director of the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine. He teaches such a course every other year at Harvard Law School.
It might seem hypocritical to address the quality of life of a creature being raised exclusively to be killed for food. Mr. Waldau, who has degrees in law, religion and philosophy, said that the issue was not meat eating per se, but one’s responsibility for one’s choices as a consumer. Whether to eat the meat of animals treated abysmally during their lifetimes or to buy so-called blood diamonds or clothing made in sweatshops, become parallel questions, he said.
Both Mr. Waldau and Ms. Grandin see the animal welfare movement in the context of 50 years of American political evolution, and the profound shift of attitudes that accompanied the civil rights and women’s movements.
Tell that to my friend, the rabbit. In Sicily, the episode of many years ago ended with me in what might be called the gray zone of slaughter: I held the hind legs of the little rabbit while my uncle slipped its skin off in virtually one piece, like a pair of Dr. Dentons.
As I remember, it was cooked in a stew. We ate it with crusty bread that night. It tasted like chicken. And it was very good.
Home
1, articles from EAA - pg 226-232, 477- 479 answer Q. 1 and 3
2, Read NY Times article below and write a commentary on this blog or bring to class
Commentary should include author's claim and if the argument (state the argument) works for you and why? Be ready to talk about it in class
April 1, 2007
Ideas & Trends
Being Nice to the Bacon, Before You Bring It Home
By PAUL VITELLO
SOME of my relatives in Sicily are farmers; and the first time I visited them, at 19, I made a habit each morning of visiting the rabbits they kept in a pen near the house. There were a few dozen. They were cute.
One morning, my uncle Paolo, a large and kindly man, came in to tend to business, righting an overturned bucket here, straightening a crate there and deftly scooping up a rabbit with one hand, wedging it under his arm and twisting its neck until dead. It took about five seconds.
Thus was one meat consumer introduced to the culture of meat producers.
When Burger King announced last week that it would favor producers who treated their animals more humanely it was welcome news to animal welfare advocates. But it also served to remind the rest of us that if we are meat eaters, we are slaughterers, too. At least by proxy.
To farmers and ranchers who raise animals for food, the feeding, housing and killing of livestock is an unbroken continuum that delivers a product to people far removed from its production — city folk who work in advertising, or whatever it is that city people do.
Animals are for petting, not killing. Meat, unrelated, is for eating. And never the twain shall meet.
But over the last decade, a slow but steady convergence of these two world views has begun to change the way consumers view their meat, and some producers view their animals.
Temple Grandin, an animal science professor at Colorado State University who is a pioneer in the field of humane cattle handling, said public pressure on meat producers in the last few years has been “building and building to where I feel we’re at a tipping point now.”
When she spoke at last week’s conference on animal care and handling at the annual American Meat Institute meeting in Kansas City, Mo., she said, there were more than 300 people in attendance. “That’s more than we ever had before, and I think it’s a wonderful sign,” she said.
Beginning in the 1990s, animal welfare advocates like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals began virtually force-feeding the consuming public on certain realities of so-called factory farming.
For the sake of production efficiencies and a low-cost food supply, they explained, cows, pigs and poultry are often condemned to sunless, sometimes squalid lives, only to die with needless cruelty. These advocates led protests against the largest hamburger chains, beneficiaries of the factory system.
After initial resistance, in 2001 the chains agreed to some improvements. McDonald’s and Burger King imposed some guidelines for their meat and egg suppliers: extra water, wing-room and fresh air for egg-laying hens; mandatory electric-shock stunning of pigs and cattle before slaughter.
Last week, Burger King went further. In an agreement that PETA and other advocates called “a historic advance,” it said it would favor suppliers who did not confine their chickens and pigs in cages and crates, and who used gas rather than electric shock to knock out chickens before slaughter.
Perhaps this is more than you want to know about the life and death of the creatures who made that ham and eggs on your plate possible. But by most indicators, many Americans are increasingly interested in asking. From niche-market beginnings, “free-range” and other humanely raised animal products have been embraced by many major grocery retailers, including Wal-Mart.
Retailers clearly see advantages in appealing to the demographic of kinder and gentler meat-eaters, according to Ron Paul, president of Technomic, a Chicago-based research and consulting firm for food suppliers. “There is a growing realization that the humane movement is a long-term movement,” he said. “It’s not going to go away.”
Among meat producers, the new ethos seems partly understandable and partly not. “There is obviously a great deal of emotion and publicity surrounding the issue right now,” said Janet M. Riley, spokeswoman for the American Meat Institute. “From our perspective, handling animals humanely gives you a better quality product.”
More than 80 law schools now offer an “animal law” course that deals in some way with the question of humane treatment and slaughter of livestock, said Paul Waldau, director of the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine. He teaches such a course every other year at Harvard Law School.
It might seem hypocritical to address the quality of life of a creature being raised exclusively to be killed for food. Mr. Waldau, who has degrees in law, religion and philosophy, said that the issue was not meat eating per se, but one’s responsibility for one’s choices as a consumer. Whether to eat the meat of animals treated abysmally during their lifetimes or to buy so-called blood diamonds or clothing made in sweatshops, become parallel questions, he said.
Both Mr. Waldau and Ms. Grandin see the animal welfare movement in the context of 50 years of American political evolution, and the profound shift of attitudes that accompanied the civil rights and women’s movements.
Tell that to my friend, the rabbit. In Sicily, the episode of many years ago ended with me in what might be called the gray zone of slaughter: I held the hind legs of the little rabbit while my uncle slipped its skin off in virtually one piece, like a pair of Dr. Dentons.
As I remember, it was cooked in a stew. We ate it with crusty bread that night. It tasted like chicken. And it was very good.
Home
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Week of MARCH 26, 2007
1, THERE WILL BE NO CLASS THIS WEEK BUT STUDENTS
WILL MEET INDIVIDUALLY FOR CONFERENCES.
Patterson Hall, Room 429, at scheduled time. Please
bring all work to the meeting (unless I have it already)
HOMEWORK: DUE April 3, 2007
1, READING
Ch.10 pages, (170 - 204) In EAA, Ch.4 in TSIS
ALSO --for Documenting Sources (CITATION)
there are good examples in EAC, pg 424- 442
2, Post your weekly blog entry.
3, Comment on NY times article below. Answer the
questions - a, What is the author's claim? Do you agree
with this claim? Use quotes to support your comment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/opinion/25gilbert.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
March 25, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Compassionate Commercialism
By DANIEL GILBERT
Cambridge, Mass.
IN an advertising campaign that began last week, Nissan left 20,000 sets of keys in bars, stadiums, concert halls and other public venues. Each key ring has a tag that says: “If found, please do not return. My next generation Nissan Altima has Intelligent Key with push-button ignition, and I no longer need these.”
This campaign is clever, but not particularly original.
It was 1997, and the man who was crouched on the sidewalk at 68th and Broadway in New York City was one of the most pathetic souls I’d ever seen. His limbs were twisted in what appeared to be arthritic agony and tears were streaming down his face. “Please,” he whimpered. “Please, somebody help me.”
Most passers-by did what they were named for, but my wife and I stopped. The man looked up. “Please,” he sobbed. “I just want to go home.” My hand needed no guidance from my brain as it reached into my wallet and extracted $10. “Thank you,” he said as I handed him the money. “Thank you so much.” My wife and I mumbled some embarrassed words and walked on.
We hadn’t gone a block when she tugged my sleeve. “Maybe we should have gotten him into a cab,” she said. “He could barely stand up. He might need help. We should go back to see.” My wife is the patron saint of lost kittens and there is no arguing, so we went back to see. And what we saw was our horribly crippled friend walking briskly and happily up 68th Street, opening the door to a late-model car, getting in and driving away after what was apparently a short day of theatrical work.
I know two things now that I didn’t know then.
First, I now know that my hand did what human hands were designed to do. Research suggests that we are hard-wired with a strong and intuitive moral impulse — an urge to help others that is every bit as basic as the selfish urges that get all the press. Infants as young as 18 months will spontaneously comfort those who appear distressed and help those who are having difficulty retrieving or balancing objects. Chimpanzees will do the same, though not so reliably, which has led scientists to speculate about the precise point in our evolutionary history at which we became the “hypercooperative” species that out-nices the rest.
The second thing I know now that I didn’t know then is that this was the most damaging crime I had ever experienced. Like most residents of large cities, I’d been a victim before — of burglary once, of vandalism several times. But this was different. The burglars and vandals had taken advantage of my forgetfulness (“Why didn’t I double lock the door?”) and taught me to be better.
But the actor on 68th Street had taken advantage of my helpfulness and taught me to be worse. The hand that had automatically reached for my wallet had been slapped, and once slapped was twice shy. I’ve never again given money to a stranger without scrutinizing him for the signs that distinguish suffering from its imitation. And because I don’t know what those signs are, I typically just walk by.
Now corporate America has taken a lesson from the guild of shameless grifters. Nissan’s plan to leave those 20,000 sets of keys in public venues is every bit as crafty as the fraudulent performance that a decade ago left me with holes in both my pocketbook and soul. There is no selfish reason to bend down and pick up a key ring, but Nissan knows that we will bend without thinking because the impulse to help is bred into our marrow. Our best instinct will be awakened by a key ring and then punished by a commercial. Like rubes throughout the ages, we will be lured by a false cry of distress and quickly cured of our innocence and compassion.
We are used to commercial tricks that play on our fears. The official-looking letter marked “Verification Audit” is actually a magazine subscription renewal form; the credit card company’s ominous call to “discuss your account” is actually an attempt to sell new services.
Should we now get used to commercial tricks that play on our humanity? How would we feel about a device planted in trash bins that screams “I’m stuck!” until the lid is opened, at which point it continues, “Stuck in a dead end job, that is — and if you are too, then let us show you how to make millions in real estate with no money down”? Is it O.K. to send a thousand doleful puppies into the streets with tags that say: “Thanks for checking. And speaking of checking, our bank charges no monthly fees”?
What happens to us when greed masquerades as need, when cries for help become casting calls for chumps, when our most noble actions make us patsies? “You put an idea out there and seed it,” said the president of the advertising agency that came up with Nissan’s key ring ploy. “And people carry it for you.” Indeed they do. The idea being seeded and carried in this case is that the world cries wolf, that our moral impulse betrays us and that smart people should keep on walking.
Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is the author of “Stumbling on Happiness.”
WILL MEET INDIVIDUALLY FOR CONFERENCES.
Patterson Hall, Room 429, at scheduled time. Please
bring all work to the meeting (unless I have it already)
HOMEWORK: DUE April 3, 2007
1, READING
Ch.10 pages, (170 - 204) In EAA, Ch.4 in TSIS
ALSO --for Documenting Sources (CITATION)
there are good examples in EAC, pg 424- 442
2, Post your weekly blog entry.
3, Comment on NY times article below. Answer the
questions - a, What is the author's claim? Do you agree
with this claim? Use quotes to support your comment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/opinion/25gilbert.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
March 25, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Compassionate Commercialism
By DANIEL GILBERT
Cambridge, Mass.
IN an advertising campaign that began last week, Nissan left 20,000 sets of keys in bars, stadiums, concert halls and other public venues. Each key ring has a tag that says: “If found, please do not return. My next generation Nissan Altima has Intelligent Key with push-button ignition, and I no longer need these.”
This campaign is clever, but not particularly original.
It was 1997, and the man who was crouched on the sidewalk at 68th and Broadway in New York City was one of the most pathetic souls I’d ever seen. His limbs were twisted in what appeared to be arthritic agony and tears were streaming down his face. “Please,” he whimpered. “Please, somebody help me.”
Most passers-by did what they were named for, but my wife and I stopped. The man looked up. “Please,” he sobbed. “I just want to go home.” My hand needed no guidance from my brain as it reached into my wallet and extracted $10. “Thank you,” he said as I handed him the money. “Thank you so much.” My wife and I mumbled some embarrassed words and walked on.
We hadn’t gone a block when she tugged my sleeve. “Maybe we should have gotten him into a cab,” she said. “He could barely stand up. He might need help. We should go back to see.” My wife is the patron saint of lost kittens and there is no arguing, so we went back to see. And what we saw was our horribly crippled friend walking briskly and happily up 68th Street, opening the door to a late-model car, getting in and driving away after what was apparently a short day of theatrical work.
I know two things now that I didn’t know then.
First, I now know that my hand did what human hands were designed to do. Research suggests that we are hard-wired with a strong and intuitive moral impulse — an urge to help others that is every bit as basic as the selfish urges that get all the press. Infants as young as 18 months will spontaneously comfort those who appear distressed and help those who are having difficulty retrieving or balancing objects. Chimpanzees will do the same, though not so reliably, which has led scientists to speculate about the precise point in our evolutionary history at which we became the “hypercooperative” species that out-nices the rest.
The second thing I know now that I didn’t know then is that this was the most damaging crime I had ever experienced. Like most residents of large cities, I’d been a victim before — of burglary once, of vandalism several times. But this was different. The burglars and vandals had taken advantage of my forgetfulness (“Why didn’t I double lock the door?”) and taught me to be better.
But the actor on 68th Street had taken advantage of my helpfulness and taught me to be worse. The hand that had automatically reached for my wallet had been slapped, and once slapped was twice shy. I’ve never again given money to a stranger without scrutinizing him for the signs that distinguish suffering from its imitation. And because I don’t know what those signs are, I typically just walk by.
Now corporate America has taken a lesson from the guild of shameless grifters. Nissan’s plan to leave those 20,000 sets of keys in public venues is every bit as crafty as the fraudulent performance that a decade ago left me with holes in both my pocketbook and soul. There is no selfish reason to bend down and pick up a key ring, but Nissan knows that we will bend without thinking because the impulse to help is bred into our marrow. Our best instinct will be awakened by a key ring and then punished by a commercial. Like rubes throughout the ages, we will be lured by a false cry of distress and quickly cured of our innocence and compassion.
We are used to commercial tricks that play on our fears. The official-looking letter marked “Verification Audit” is actually a magazine subscription renewal form; the credit card company’s ominous call to “discuss your account” is actually an attempt to sell new services.
Should we now get used to commercial tricks that play on our humanity? How would we feel about a device planted in trash bins that screams “I’m stuck!” until the lid is opened, at which point it continues, “Stuck in a dead end job, that is — and if you are too, then let us show you how to make millions in real estate with no money down”? Is it O.K. to send a thousand doleful puppies into the streets with tags that say: “Thanks for checking. And speaking of checking, our bank charges no monthly fees”?
What happens to us when greed masquerades as need, when cries for help become casting calls for chumps, when our most noble actions make us patsies? “You put an idea out there and seed it,” said the president of the advertising agency that came up with Nissan’s key ring ploy. “And people carry it for you.” Indeed they do. The idea being seeded and carried in this case is that the world cries wolf, that our moral impulse betrays us and that smart people should keep on walking.
Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is the author of “Stumbling on Happiness.”
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
HOMEWORK: Due March 22, 2007
1, Please bring a draft of your Research Paper: Part II to class as we'll be doing peer editing.
2, Weekly entry on your blog
2, Weekly entry on your blog
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
HOMEWORK: Due March 20, 2007
1, Final Draft: Rhetorical Analysis
2, Research Paper, Part II (Draft only for peer review)
3,Comment on 2 classmate's blogs (if you haven't yet done so)
Note: (DO NOT COME TO CLASS March 20 unless YOU HAVE THE WORK COMPLETED. Class will not meet Thursday, March 15! Use this time to do research)
4, Read and comment on the NY Times article below (on this blog)
http://nytimes.com/marketing/winatrip/?mkt=tsmmphoto
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/opinion/11kristof.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists%2fNicholas%20D%20Kristof
March 11, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Win a Trip, and See a Different World
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Cast your eyes above and meet Hidaya Abatemam, whom I met last month in a remote area of southern Ethiopia. She is 6 years old and weighs 17 pounds.
Hidaya was starved nearly to death and may well have suffered permanent mental impairment, helping to trap her — and her own children, if she lives that long — in another generation of poverty.
Yet maybe the more interesting question is not why Hidaya is starving but why the world continues to allow 30,000 children like her to die each day of poverty.
Ultimately what is killing girls like her isn’t precisely malnutrition or malaria, but indifference. And that, in turn, arises from our insularity, our inexperience in traveling and living in poor countries, so that we have difficulty empathizing with people like Hidaya.
I often hear comments from readers like: “It’s tragic over there, but we’ve got our own problems that we have to solve first.” Nobody who has held the hand of a starving African child could be that dismissive.
That lack of firsthand experience abroad also helps explain why we are so awful at foreign policy: we just don’t “get” how our actions will be perceived abroad, so time and again — in Vietnam, China, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Latin America — we end up clumsily empowering our enemies.
Part of the problem is that American universities do an execrable job preparing students for global citizenship. A majority of the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day, but the vast majority of American students graduate without ever gaining any insight into how that global majority lives.
According to a Roper/National Geographic poll, 38 percent%
2, Research Paper, Part II (Draft only for peer review)
3,Comment on 2 classmate's blogs (if you haven't yet done so)
Note: (DO NOT COME TO CLASS March 20 unless YOU HAVE THE WORK COMPLETED. Class will not meet Thursday, March 15! Use this time to do research)
4, Read and comment on the NY Times article below (on this blog)
http://nytimes.com/marketing/winatrip/?mkt=tsmmphoto
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/opinion/11kristof.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists%2fNicholas%20D%20Kristof
March 11, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Win a Trip, and See a Different World
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Cast your eyes above and meet Hidaya Abatemam, whom I met last month in a remote area of southern Ethiopia. She is 6 years old and weighs 17 pounds.
Hidaya was starved nearly to death and may well have suffered permanent mental impairment, helping to trap her — and her own children, if she lives that long — in another generation of poverty.
Yet maybe the more interesting question is not why Hidaya is starving but why the world continues to allow 30,000 children like her to die each day of poverty.
Ultimately what is killing girls like her isn’t precisely malnutrition or malaria, but indifference. And that, in turn, arises from our insularity, our inexperience in traveling and living in poor countries, so that we have difficulty empathizing with people like Hidaya.
I often hear comments from readers like: “It’s tragic over there, but we’ve got our own problems that we have to solve first.” Nobody who has held the hand of a starving African child could be that dismissive.
That lack of firsthand experience abroad also helps explain why we are so awful at foreign policy: we just don’t “get” how our actions will be perceived abroad, so time and again — in Vietnam, China, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Latin America — we end up clumsily empowering our enemies.
Part of the problem is that American universities do an execrable job preparing students for global citizenship. A majority of the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day, but the vast majority of American students graduate without ever gaining any insight into how that global majority lives.
According to a Roper/National Geographic poll, 38 percent%
Monday, March 12, 2007
HOMEWORK: Due March 13, 2007
1, Rhetorical analysis
2, Comment on 2 class mates' blogs
3, Review ch.2, They Say, I Say
2, Comment on 2 class mates' blogs
3, Review ch.2, They Say, I Say
Thursday, March 1, 2007
2 New Drugs Offer Options in H.I.V. Fight
February 28, 2007
2 New Drugs Offer Options in H.I.V. Fight
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN and ANDREW POLLACK
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 27 — Two new AIDS drugs, each of which works in a novel way, have proved safe and highly successful in large studies, a development that doctors said here on Tuesday would significantly expand treatment options for patients.
The two drugs, which could be approved for marketing later this year, would add two new classes of drugs to the four that are available to battle H.I.V., the AIDS virus. That would be especially important to tens of thousands of patients in the United States whose treatment is failing because their virus has become resistant to drugs already in use.
“This is really a remarkable development in the field,” Dr. John W. Mellors of the University of Pittsburgh said at a news conference here at the 14th Annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.
Dr. Mellors, who was not involved in the studies but has been a consultant to the manufacturers of the drugs, said he “wouldn’t be going out on a limb” to say the new results were as exciting as those from the mid-1990s, when researchers first discovered that cocktails of drugs could significantly prolong lives.
Dr. Scott Hammer, chief of infectious diseases at Columbia University Medical Center, who also was not involved in the studies but has been a consultant to the manufacturers, agreed that the new drugs “will provide extended years of meaningful survival to patients.”
One drug, maraviroc, was developed by Pfizer, which has already applied for approval to sell it. The Food and Drug Administration has scheduled an advisory committee meeting on April 24 to discuss the application.
The other drug, raltegravir, was developed by Merck, which has said it will apply in the second quarter for approval.
Experts said the new drugs would be used in combination with older drugs. Both drugs stem from scientific findings made a decade or more ago that have peeled back the intricate molecular process used by H.I.V. to infect human immune system cells and to replicate themselves.
While there are now more than 20 approved drugs to treat H.I.V. and AIDS, there are only four different mechanisms by which the drugs work. In many patients, the virus develops resistance to one or more drugs, usually because patients do not take their drugs on time as prescribed.
And if the virus develops resistance to one drug in a class, it often becomes resistant to others in that class and sometimes in other classes. So AIDS experts have said there is an urgent need for drugs that work by new mechanisms.
The two new drugs would represent the first new classes since 2003, when an injectable drug called Fuzeon was approved. They would be the first new classes of oral H.I.V. drugs in a decade.
Merck’s drug works by inhibiting the action of integrase, an enzyme produced by the virus that incorporates the virus’s genetic material into the DNA of a patient’s immune cell. Once incorporated, the viral DNA commandeers the cell to make more copies of the virus.
In two Merck studies involving a total of 700 patients, virus levels dropped to below 50 copies per milliliter of blood, an amount considered undetectable, in about 60 percent of patients who received raltegravir. That compared with about 35 percent of those who received a placebo.
The patients in the two Phase 3 trials, typically the last stage of testing before approval, were resistant to at least one drug in each of three classes of antiretroviral drugs. All the patients also received a combination of older drugs that their doctors deemed to be the most appropriate. The results reported here were after 16 weeks, in a study that is continuing so it is possible that longer-term side effects might yet arise.
Other integrase inhibitors, like one from Gilead Sciences, are also under development. Gilead’s drug is 18 months to 2 years behind Merck’s.
Pfizer’s drug works by blocking a protein on human immune system cells that H.I.V. uses as a portal to enter and infect the cell. It would be the first drug that targets the human body rather than the virus.
The portal, known as CCR5, was discovered in 1996 by several groups of scientists, and there has been a race to develop drugs to block it.
In two Phase 3 studies sponsored by Pfizer involving 1,049 patients, more than 40 percent of patients who received maraviroc had undetectable levels of virus after 24 weeks of a 48-week study. That was about twice the rate of those who received placebo. As in the Merck trials, patients were resistant to three classes of drugs and were receiving an optimized combination of older drugs.
Some experts said they were a bit cautious about maraviroc, in part because it blocks a human protein instead of a viral one, with possible unknown long-term effects. One CCR5 inhibitor that was being developed by GlaxoSmithKline was dropped because it caused liver toxicity, and a second being developed by Schering-Plough appeared to possibly raise the risk of blood cancers.
But in Pfizer’s study there was no increased incidence of cancers. In one study there was a higher rate of death among those who took the drug, but Pfizer said the deaths were not associated with the drug.
Experts are also encouraged that about 1 percent of Caucasians have a particular mutation in both copies of their CCR5 gene that knocks out its function. These people are resistant to H.I.V. infection and apparently live otherwise normal lives.
Yet another issue is that some viruses use a different entry portal called CXCR4. Before getting maraviroc, patients will have to be tested to see which portal their virus uses, which would make the drug an early example of “personalized medicine” tailored to the patient.
The test, which will probably take two weeks for results, was developed by Monogram Biosciences of South San Francisco, Calif. It is expected to cost as much as $1,000, or more.
About 85 percent of newly infected patients have a virus that uses CCR5 while only about half of highly drug-resistant viruses use that portal. There has been some concern that blocking CCR5 would encourage the development of viruses that use the alternative portal — and those viruses seem to be associated with worse outcomes.
But that has not proven so far to be a big problem, according to Edward A. Berger of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who played a key role in the discovery of the two portals.
Government, academic and industry experts said there was no reliable estimate of the number of people who would need one of the new drugs. But the number is declining as more and better AIDS drugs become available.
“The numbers are not what they used to be six years ago,” said Norbert Bischofberger, executive vice president for research and development at Gilead, which makes some widely used AIDS drugs.
Both Merck and Pfizer say they are conducting studies testing their drugs for use as initial treatments. They would not say how much their drugs would cost.
2 New Drugs Offer Options in H.I.V. Fight
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN and ANDREW POLLACK
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 27 — Two new AIDS drugs, each of which works in a novel way, have proved safe and highly successful in large studies, a development that doctors said here on Tuesday would significantly expand treatment options for patients.
The two drugs, which could be approved for marketing later this year, would add two new classes of drugs to the four that are available to battle H.I.V., the AIDS virus. That would be especially important to tens of thousands of patients in the United States whose treatment is failing because their virus has become resistant to drugs already in use.
“This is really a remarkable development in the field,” Dr. John W. Mellors of the University of Pittsburgh said at a news conference here at the 14th Annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.
Dr. Mellors, who was not involved in the studies but has been a consultant to the manufacturers of the drugs, said he “wouldn’t be going out on a limb” to say the new results were as exciting as those from the mid-1990s, when researchers first discovered that cocktails of drugs could significantly prolong lives.
Dr. Scott Hammer, chief of infectious diseases at Columbia University Medical Center, who also was not involved in the studies but has been a consultant to the manufacturers, agreed that the new drugs “will provide extended years of meaningful survival to patients.”
One drug, maraviroc, was developed by Pfizer, which has already applied for approval to sell it. The Food and Drug Administration has scheduled an advisory committee meeting on April 24 to discuss the application.
The other drug, raltegravir, was developed by Merck, which has said it will apply in the second quarter for approval.
Experts said the new drugs would be used in combination with older drugs. Both drugs stem from scientific findings made a decade or more ago that have peeled back the intricate molecular process used by H.I.V. to infect human immune system cells and to replicate themselves.
While there are now more than 20 approved drugs to treat H.I.V. and AIDS, there are only four different mechanisms by which the drugs work. In many patients, the virus develops resistance to one or more drugs, usually because patients do not take their drugs on time as prescribed.
And if the virus develops resistance to one drug in a class, it often becomes resistant to others in that class and sometimes in other classes. So AIDS experts have said there is an urgent need for drugs that work by new mechanisms.
The two new drugs would represent the first new classes since 2003, when an injectable drug called Fuzeon was approved. They would be the first new classes of oral H.I.V. drugs in a decade.
Merck’s drug works by inhibiting the action of integrase, an enzyme produced by the virus that incorporates the virus’s genetic material into the DNA of a patient’s immune cell. Once incorporated, the viral DNA commandeers the cell to make more copies of the virus.
In two Merck studies involving a total of 700 patients, virus levels dropped to below 50 copies per milliliter of blood, an amount considered undetectable, in about 60 percent of patients who received raltegravir. That compared with about 35 percent of those who received a placebo.
The patients in the two Phase 3 trials, typically the last stage of testing before approval, were resistant to at least one drug in each of three classes of antiretroviral drugs. All the patients also received a combination of older drugs that their doctors deemed to be the most appropriate. The results reported here were after 16 weeks, in a study that is continuing so it is possible that longer-term side effects might yet arise.
Other integrase inhibitors, like one from Gilead Sciences, are also under development. Gilead’s drug is 18 months to 2 years behind Merck’s.
Pfizer’s drug works by blocking a protein on human immune system cells that H.I.V. uses as a portal to enter and infect the cell. It would be the first drug that targets the human body rather than the virus.
The portal, known as CCR5, was discovered in 1996 by several groups of scientists, and there has been a race to develop drugs to block it.
In two Phase 3 studies sponsored by Pfizer involving 1,049 patients, more than 40 percent of patients who received maraviroc had undetectable levels of virus after 24 weeks of a 48-week study. That was about twice the rate of those who received placebo. As in the Merck trials, patients were resistant to three classes of drugs and were receiving an optimized combination of older drugs.
Some experts said they were a bit cautious about maraviroc, in part because it blocks a human protein instead of a viral one, with possible unknown long-term effects. One CCR5 inhibitor that was being developed by GlaxoSmithKline was dropped because it caused liver toxicity, and a second being developed by Schering-Plough appeared to possibly raise the risk of blood cancers.
But in Pfizer’s study there was no increased incidence of cancers. In one study there was a higher rate of death among those who took the drug, but Pfizer said the deaths were not associated with the drug.
Experts are also encouraged that about 1 percent of Caucasians have a particular mutation in both copies of their CCR5 gene that knocks out its function. These people are resistant to H.I.V. infection and apparently live otherwise normal lives.
Yet another issue is that some viruses use a different entry portal called CXCR4. Before getting maraviroc, patients will have to be tested to see which portal their virus uses, which would make the drug an early example of “personalized medicine” tailored to the patient.
The test, which will probably take two weeks for results, was developed by Monogram Biosciences of South San Francisco, Calif. It is expected to cost as much as $1,000, or more.
About 85 percent of newly infected patients have a virus that uses CCR5 while only about half of highly drug-resistant viruses use that portal. There has been some concern that blocking CCR5 would encourage the development of viruses that use the alternative portal — and those viruses seem to be associated with worse outcomes.
But that has not proven so far to be a big problem, according to Edward A. Berger of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who played a key role in the discovery of the two portals.
Government, academic and industry experts said there was no reliable estimate of the number of people who would need one of the new drugs. But the number is declining as more and better AIDS drugs become available.
“The numbers are not what they used to be six years ago,” said Norbert Bischofberger, executive vice president for research and development at Gilead, which makes some widely used AIDS drugs.
Both Merck and Pfizer say they are conducting studies testing their drugs for use as initial treatments. They would not say how much their drugs would cost.
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I am going to include funny advertisements each week to make my posts a little more interesting. So, if you don't read what I have to say, atleast you can check in and see some funny commercials and stuff!
Have a great week everyone...
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
psychological effects on sense of community
The Psychological Sense of Community in the Neighborhood
Journal article by David A. Julian, Jack L. Nasar; Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 61, 1995
Journal Article Excerpt
The psychological sense of community in the neighborhood.
by Jack L. Nasar , David A. Julian
Social theorists have decried the lost sense of community in the United States (Keyes 1973; Sarason 1974; Yankelovich 1981; Olson 1982; Dunham 1986; Lyons 1987). They express nostalgia for the interdependence of small town life, rural life or the Greek polis. They blame industrialization, large-scale bureaucracies, the loss of local autonomy, and our culture of mobility, convenience, and privacy for the decline in the sense of community. Politicians use the language of "community" to capture votes. Professionals in planning, architecture, historic preservation, and crime prevention promote the development of a sense of community as a cure for many urban ailments. Advocates of neo-traditional planning and related movements claim their plans will restore a sense of community, which they claim has been lost in traditional suburbs.
While few question the beneficial effects of a psychological sense of community, some object to the emphasis on local community. They see some local communities as exclusionary havens for the privileged, and they fear the focus on community development in neighborhoods may distract attention from the broader political economy.
The professional planners in a local planning agency may wonder at all this talk about "community." What is "community"?(1) Do we have too little or too much community? How can planners identify the effects of their plans and policies on resident practices and perceptions of community?
Journal article by David A. Julian, Jack L. Nasar; Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 61, 1995
Journal Article Excerpt
The psychological sense of community in the neighborhood.
by Jack L. Nasar , David A. Julian
Social theorists have decried the lost sense of community in the United States (Keyes 1973; Sarason 1974; Yankelovich 1981; Olson 1982; Dunham 1986; Lyons 1987). They express nostalgia for the interdependence of small town life, rural life or the Greek polis. They blame industrialization, large-scale bureaucracies, the loss of local autonomy, and our culture of mobility, convenience, and privacy for the decline in the sense of community. Politicians use the language of "community" to capture votes. Professionals in planning, architecture, historic preservation, and crime prevention promote the development of a sense of community as a cure for many urban ailments. Advocates of neo-traditional planning and related movements claim their plans will restore a sense of community, which they claim has been lost in traditional suburbs.
While few question the beneficial effects of a psychological sense of community, some object to the emphasis on local community. They see some local communities as exclusionary havens for the privileged, and they fear the focus on community development in neighborhoods may distract attention from the broader political economy.
The professional planners in a local planning agency may wonder at all this talk about "community." What is "community"?(1) Do we have too little or too much community? How can planners identify the effects of their plans and policies on resident practices and perceptions of community?
psychological affects on people's sense of community
The Psychological Sense of Community in the Neighborhood
Journal article by David A. Julian, Jack L. Nasar; Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 61, 1995
Journal Article Excerpt
The psychological sense of community in the neighborhood.
by Jack L. Nasar , David A. Julian
Social theorists have decried the lost sense of community in the United States (Keyes 1973; Sarason 1974; Yankelovich 1981; Olson 1982; Dunham 1986; Lyons 1987). They express nostalgia for the interdependence of small town life, rural life or the Greek polis. They blame industrialization, large-scale bureaucracies, the loss of local autonomy, and our culture of mobility, convenience, and privacy for the decline in the sense of community. Politicians use the language of "community" to capture votes. Professionals in planning, architecture, historic preservation, and crime prevention promote the development of a sense of community as a cure for many urban ailments. Advocates of neo-traditional planning and related movements claim their plans will restore a sense of community, which they claim has been lost in traditional suburbs.
While few question the beneficial effects of a psychological sense of community, some object to the emphasis on local community. They see some local communities as exclusionary havens for the privileged, and they fear the focus on community development in neighborhoods may distract attention from the broader political economy.
The professional planners in a local planning agency may wonder at all this talk about "community." What is "community"?(1) Do we have too little or too much community? How can planners identify the effects of their plans and policies on resident practices and perceptions of community?
Journal article by David A. Julian, Jack L. Nasar; Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 61, 1995
Journal Article Excerpt
The psychological sense of community in the neighborhood.
by Jack L. Nasar , David A. Julian
Social theorists have decried the lost sense of community in the United States (Keyes 1973; Sarason 1974; Yankelovich 1981; Olson 1982; Dunham 1986; Lyons 1987). They express nostalgia for the interdependence of small town life, rural life or the Greek polis. They blame industrialization, large-scale bureaucracies, the loss of local autonomy, and our culture of mobility, convenience, and privacy for the decline in the sense of community. Politicians use the language of "community" to capture votes. Professionals in planning, architecture, historic preservation, and crime prevention promote the development of a sense of community as a cure for many urban ailments. Advocates of neo-traditional planning and related movements claim their plans will restore a sense of community, which they claim has been lost in traditional suburbs.
While few question the beneficial effects of a psychological sense of community, some object to the emphasis on local community. They see some local communities as exclusionary havens for the privileged, and they fear the focus on community development in neighborhoods may distract attention from the broader political economy.
The professional planners in a local planning agency may wonder at all this talk about "community." What is "community"?(1) Do we have too little or too much community? How can planners identify the effects of their plans and policies on resident practices and perceptions of community?
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
HOMEWORK: Due March 1, 2007
1, Post an article to your blog and comment on it
2, Read the following articles found in Everything's an Argument
pg 519 (read again and write a commentary), pg 486 "Turning Boys Into Girls",
pg 540 "We Should Relinquish Some Liberty in Exchange for Security," pg 627 "Bad As They Want to Be"
3, Read Chapter 3 in They Say, I Say
2, Read the following articles found in Everything's an Argument
pg 519 (read again and write a commentary), pg 486 "Turning Boys Into Girls",
pg 540 "We Should Relinquish Some Liberty in Exchange for Security," pg 627 "Bad As They Want to Be"
3, Read Chapter 3 in They Say, I Say
Monday, February 26, 2007
Britney's Meltdown
Posted at 11:01 AM ET, 02/20/2007
Parsing Britney's Meltdown
A bald Britney. (AFP/Getty Images) Photo Gallery: Britney's Changing Look
Unless you spent the long weekend in a sensory deprivation chamber, you know Britney Spears -- in full view of a horde of photographers -- wandered into a neighborhood hair salon in California on Friday night and proceeded to shave her head. Images of a bald Britney have been burned into our retinas, joining Michael Jackson's balcony baby dangle, Tom Cruise's couch jumping and Mel Gibson's mug shot in the celebrity meltdown hall of fame.
Mothers who once accompanied teenyboppers to Spears's concerts are faced with the daunting task of turning this trainwreck into a life lesson. Grown men who slavered over the post-Disney/pre-preggo Brit just a couple of years ago have now dropped her from their top five. And the AARP crowd -- more accustomed to stars who self-destruct the old-fashioned way -- are risking whiplash with the amount of "what is this world coming to?" head-shaking going on.
Spears's Web site is no help. Suddenly, the pop tart -- who has a habit of baring her soul online -- has no cryptic poetry, no uncomfortable TMI "feelings" to share, no finger pointing for her recent slide into the deep end. The now familiar gilt-frame -- that as recently as December relayed to us Britney's oops-I-did-it apology for her lost weekend (well, week really) with Paris Hilton -- remains empty, containing only a one-line placeholder to let us know that something will be there sometime in the future.
And, thus far, Spears is -- for better or for worse -- shunning Matt Lauer and the rest of the newshounds (Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Oprah) no doubt jockeying to land a very special interview with her.
In fact, the last word we had directly from Spears was that December Web message (linked above), the one where Britney dismissed her extreme partying as merely making up for lost time and vowing to work hard in the new year on her image and music. I guess that didn't quite work out for her.
I've had my fun with Britney here (this piece's co-authoress recently commented: "If only we'd included "shave your head, we'd be sitting pretty right about now") and, truth be told, will probably continue to do so -- there's just something about a fallen pop princess shaving her head that defies being taken too seriously. Of course, this recent episode certainly qualifies as one of the biggest red flags I've ever seen, but to quote someone who once got to the point much quicker than I did: If we didn't laugh, we'd cry.
Still, my heart aches for this woman who grew up (or, more accurately, failed to grow up) in the spotlight, pushed on stage and into an early sexuality -- taught that looks equal talent. At 25 (so young) she's past her pop prime, a mother of two, divorcing and scorned by the public that once embraced her.
Nothing like shaving one's head, spontaneous tattoos and hard partying to deface one's self image.
It's hard not to draw parallels to Anna Nicole Smith -- another blonde bombshell who came unglued publicly and perished before finding help. A former assistant recently said she hopes Britney hits bottom soon and gets that help so she can return to her former, ambitious self.
Me, I hope she gets the help she needs to find out who she really is.
Parsing Britney's Meltdown
A bald Britney. (AFP/Getty Images) Photo Gallery: Britney's Changing Look
Unless you spent the long weekend in a sensory deprivation chamber, you know Britney Spears -- in full view of a horde of photographers -- wandered into a neighborhood hair salon in California on Friday night and proceeded to shave her head. Images of a bald Britney have been burned into our retinas, joining Michael Jackson's balcony baby dangle, Tom Cruise's couch jumping and Mel Gibson's mug shot in the celebrity meltdown hall of fame.
Mothers who once accompanied teenyboppers to Spears's concerts are faced with the daunting task of turning this trainwreck into a life lesson. Grown men who slavered over the post-Disney/pre-preggo Brit just a couple of years ago have now dropped her from their top five. And the AARP crowd -- more accustomed to stars who self-destruct the old-fashioned way -- are risking whiplash with the amount of "what is this world coming to?" head-shaking going on.
Spears's Web site is no help. Suddenly, the pop tart -- who has a habit of baring her soul online -- has no cryptic poetry, no uncomfortable TMI "feelings" to share, no finger pointing for her recent slide into the deep end. The now familiar gilt-frame -- that as recently as December relayed to us Britney's oops-I-did-it apology for her lost weekend (well, week really) with Paris Hilton -- remains empty, containing only a one-line placeholder to let us know that something will be there sometime in the future.
And, thus far, Spears is -- for better or for worse -- shunning Matt Lauer and the rest of the newshounds (Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Oprah) no doubt jockeying to land a very special interview with her.
In fact, the last word we had directly from Spears was that December Web message (linked above), the one where Britney dismissed her extreme partying as merely making up for lost time and vowing to work hard in the new year on her image and music. I guess that didn't quite work out for her.
I've had my fun with Britney here (this piece's co-authoress recently commented: "If only we'd included "shave your head, we'd be sitting pretty right about now") and, truth be told, will probably continue to do so -- there's just something about a fallen pop princess shaving her head that defies being taken too seriously. Of course, this recent episode certainly qualifies as one of the biggest red flags I've ever seen, but to quote someone who once got to the point much quicker than I did: If we didn't laugh, we'd cry.
Still, my heart aches for this woman who grew up (or, more accurately, failed to grow up) in the spotlight, pushed on stage and into an early sexuality -- taught that looks equal talent. At 25 (so young) she's past her pop prime, a mother of two, divorcing and scorned by the public that once embraced her.
Nothing like shaving one's head, spontaneous tattoos and hard partying to deface one's self image.
It's hard not to draw parallels to Anna Nicole Smith -- another blonde bombshell who came unglued publicly and perished before finding help. A former assistant recently said she hopes Britney hits bottom soon and gets that help so she can return to her former, ambitious self.
Me, I hope she gets the help she needs to find out who she really is.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
There will be no class on Thurs. Feb 22!!
Use this time to work on research for your final paper.
Homework due Feb 27
1, Create your blog. Then post one argumentative article (the topic can be your research topic or another that interests you) from a reputable source and write a comment about it, stating the argument, both sides and your opinion on it.
2, Write a one page summary, outling your research topic. Explain both sides of the argument and state your opinion. If it's helpful you can use the template I distributed in class called Template for Academic Argument . It is also found in your text They Say, I Say
3, Readings: Read Chapter 14 (285-98); Rhetorical Analysis, Chapter Eighteen, “What Counts as Evidence.” (367-82). Make notes on what you've read and be ready to talk about it.
Use this time to work on research for your final paper.
Homework due Feb 27
1, Create your blog. Then post one argumentative article (the topic can be your research topic or another that interests you) from a reputable source and write a comment about it, stating the argument, both sides and your opinion on it.
2, Write a one page summary, outling your research topic. Explain both sides of the argument and state your opinion. If it's helpful you can use the template I distributed in class called Template for Academic Argument . It is also found in your text They Say, I Say
3, Readings: Read Chapter 14 (285-98); Rhetorical Analysis, Chapter Eighteen, “What Counts as Evidence.” (367-82). Make notes on what you've read and be ready to talk about it.
There will be no class on Thurs. Feb 22!!
Use this time to work on research for your final paper.
Homework due Feb 27
1, Create your blog. Then post one argumentative article of your choosing (the topic can be your research topic or another that interests you) from a reputable source and write a comment about it, stating the argument, both sides and your opinion on it.
2, Write a one page summary, outling your research topic. Explain both sides of the argument and state your opinion. If it's helpful you can use the template I distributed in class called Template for Academic Argument . It is also found in your text They Say, I Say
3, Readings: Read Chapter 14 (285-98); Rhetorical Analysis, Chapter Eighteen, “What Counts as Evidence.” (367-82). Make notes on what you've read and be ready to talk about it.
Use this time to work on research for your final paper.
Homework due Feb 27
1, Create your blog. Then post one argumentative article of your choosing (the topic can be your research topic or another that interests you) from a reputable source and write a comment about it, stating the argument, both sides and your opinion on it.
2, Write a one page summary, outling your research topic. Explain both sides of the argument and state your opinion. If it's helpful you can use the template I distributed in class called Template for Academic Argument . It is also found in your text They Say, I Say
3, Readings: Read Chapter 14 (285-98); Rhetorical Analysis, Chapter Eighteen, “What Counts as Evidence.” (367-82). Make notes on what you've read and be ready to talk about it.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
CLASS FEb 20th MEET AT THE LIBRARY!!!
We'll have class in the library on Tuesday where one of the reference afficionados will show us around. It'll be fun. You'll also get your next assignment! See you then.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Field Trip To the Library
Thursday's class will take place at the library.
MEET ME AT THE MAIN ENTRANCE
AT 9:40AM
MEET ME AT THE MAIN ENTRANCE
AT 9:40AM
HOMEWORK: Due Feb 20, 2007
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
HOMEWORK: Due Feb 20, 2007
1, Create your own blog. Go to http://www.blogger.com/start and it will take you through the steps to make your own blog. Invite me to your blog lgcupolo@memphis.edu(Your task then, each week will be to post an article from an on-line magazine, newspaper, academic source, etc and write a paragraph commenting on what you've read)
2, Read Ch.14 pg 285-298,and Ch. 9, pg. 147-166, and be ready to talk about what you've read in class on Tuesday
HOMEWORK: Due Feb 20, 2007
1, Create your own blog. Go to http://www.blogger.com/start and it will take you through the steps to make your own blog. Invite me to your blog lgcupolo@memphis.edu(Your task then, each week will be to post an article from an on-line magazine, newspaper, academic source, etc and write a paragraph commenting on what you've read)
2, Read Ch.14 pg 285-298,and Ch. 9, pg. 147-166, and be ready to talk about what you've read in class on Tuesday
Thursday, February 8, 2007
Homework: Due February 13
Homework: Due February 13
1, DUE: Final draft of Ad Analysis (make sure to attach your ad)
2, Read “Turning Boys into Girls” ( 486); “We Should Relinquish Some Liberty in Exchange for Security” (540); and write a paragraph responding to each article
3, Read the following NYTimes article "Africa, at the Cineplex" and make a comment about what you've read on this blog. DO NOT summarize what the article is about, we've all read it. What do you think about what this article is saying? How does it make you feel?
February 4, 2007
Film Fatigue
Africa, at the Cineplex
By MANOHLA DARGIS
American children used to connect with their deprived African counterparts mostly by cleaning their plates. Today, those same children have a dizzying variety of ways of reaching out to the continent and its inhabitants: they can shop at the Gap, mind Bono, listen to Kanye West, read Dave Eggers and watch an Oscar-nominated film or two, like “Blood Diamond” or “The Last King of Scotland,” and, while flipping through their favorite magazine, contemplate the AIDS awareness ad campaign in which celebrities like Richard Gere and Gwyneth Paltrow, faces daubed with paint, declare “I am African.”
Well, really, aren’t we all? The new African awareness isn’t just deeply, appreciably earnest; it’s personal, too. Angelina Jolie, the head of the new class of celebrity missionaries, not only adopted an Ethiopian girl, but has also poured money into Namibian maternity wards. The same goes for Oprah Winfrey, who founded a girls’ school in South Africa, and the rapper Jay-Z, who last year traveled the world, including parts of Africa, for “The Diary of Jay-Z: Water for Life,” a documentary. The diary was the product of a rather unusual collaboration, as signaled on a Web page for the United Nations: “The United Nations, MTV and Jay-Z team up to raise attention of the world water crisis.”
If you didn’t know about the documentary or the United Nations-initiated Water for Life campaign, you are probably not alone. The humanitarian crises in Africa are overwhelming, but they’re also now such a familiar fixture in our 24/7 news-and-entertainment spin cycle that it can be hard to keep up. Yet if the bad news out of Africa never seems to end, neither do the pop-cultural responses.
IN 1984, that response to African tragedy seemed purely seasonal, exemplified by the hit single on behalf of Ethiopian famine relief, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” For the last few years or so, every week seems to bring another documentary, another song, another ad campaign, another press conference, another celebrity sighting.
And why not? As George Clooney, a supple manipulator of the media, explained after embarking on a high-profile effort to bring attention to the Darfur region of Sudan, “If you’re going to be famous and have cameras follow you around, you might as well go where the cameras will do some good.” Last April, Mr. Clooney and his father, Nick, visited refugee camps in the Sudan, and the son subsequently joined Senators Sam Brownback and Barack Obama at a news conference where he passionately urged that greater international attention be paid to the crisis. It was a tough sell, even for the Sexiest Man Alive, who at one point also admitted that it was hard to capture people’s attention because, as he put it, “We have tragedy fatigue on television.”
I know what he means. It’s hard enough to keep track of the globe-trotting Ms. Jolie, who has done more good in the world than most of the housebound pundits who poke fun at her. My problem is that I have almost bottomed out when it comes to films about Africa. Not the real deal, like the films of the great Senegalese-born auteur Ousmane Sembène, whose 1966 drama “Black Girl” is a classic of postcolonial cinema, and whose 2004 film, “Moolaadé,” manages to tackle the issue of female genital mutilation and critique patriarchic Islam in one entertaining package (really). My problem, rather, is all those films filled with suffering, struggling black Africans who, for the most part, seem to be on camera to make me feel bad.
These faces, weeping and smiling by turns, show up in fiction and documentary films, in big-budget Hollywood fare like “Blood Diamond” and more modest studio offerings like “The Last King of Scotland.” In the old Tarzan days, of course, Johnny Weissmuller yodeled across a back-lot jungle while black extras ran amok in feathered headdress borrowed from the cowboys-and-Indians department. In that Hollywood, Africa was an extension of the studio lot (often it was the studio lot), the setting for thrilling adventures, big-game safaris and the occasional bloody conflict with native peoples. Mostly, though, Africa was the exotic backdrop for white characters, who paid about as much attention to its black populace as they did to the black populace back home.
These days, black African characters in American-produced films generally serve more than a decorative function; some of them actually speak lines and share serious screen time with the white stars. Now and again, as in “Hotel Rwanda” and “Sometimes in April,” two films from 2004 and 2005 about the Rwandan genocide, the stars themselves are actually black, if not African, and their characters help drive the narrative. In the case of the HBO film “Sometimes in April,” the director is also black, the Haitian-born Raoul Peck. In both “April” and “Hotel Rwanda,” the white characters are peripheral, just as they were during the genocide; in each, the victims and the victimizers are black, but so, too, are the heroes.
New films tend to be smarter about race if not necessarily its representation. One of the truths about the movies is that, no matter how high-minded a director or how earnest his intentions, what he puts in front of his camera usually talks louder and more honestly than anything he himself might say. The director and the screenwriter may be on the same resolute page, with nicely composed speeches about Africa, the West and how something, finally, must be done. But the black faces on the screen — the babies with the swollen bellies and pipe-cleaner limbs, and the legless men crawling alongside them — tend to tell a different story, one of hopelessness and despair that all too often feels as immutable as the earth.
This sense of immutability, that the violence and the hunger are persistent, almost eternal and natural, infects too many films about Africa. There is a long tradition of victim documentaries, films about the wretched of the earth from Welsh and Appalachian mining towns, South African shantytowns and New York City homeless shelters. By turns touristic and voyeuristic, these films habitually follow a reassuringly familiar trajectory. They evade unpleasant truths about history, power and ideology in favor of heroic stories about individual resistance and triumph that wouldn’t be out of place in a studio potboiler. As any Hollywood producer knows, real life can be a total bummer, which is why a Lost Boy of Sudan newly transplanted to America makes a better commercial bet than one who didn’t make it out of Africa.
Most American films about Africa mean well, at least those without Bruce Willis, and even openly commercial studio fare like “Blood Diamond” wears its bleeding, thudding heart on its sleeve. But what, exactly, are we meant to do with all their images, I wonder? Like “The Constant Gardener” and “Catch a Fire,” two other thrillers set in Africa, “Blood Diamond” was designed to make money, not instigate change. Watching Leonardo DiCaprio share the screen with genuine handless black Africans or Ralph Fiennes’s gardener learn a lesson in postcolonial realpolitik while I munch my popcorn doesn’t rouse me to action; it stirs horror, pity, sometimes repulsion, sentiments that linger uneasily until the action starts up again to sweep away that empathy with another explosion, gunfight or rousing chase.
It is exhausting having your conscience pricked so regularly. It may also be counterproductive to the stated aims of the people who make these films. It’s an article of faith that social-issue movies are worthwhile, important, even brave, as people in Hollywood like to insist. But it is naïve to think that these films, including a fair share of the documentaries, are being made on behalf of Africa and its people; they are made for us. They provide us a night’s entertainment and perhaps, for a couple of hours, they may make us think outside the multiplex box. They serve as balm for our media-saturated, fatigued hearts and minds. Like one of those Gap (Product) RED cashmere sweaters, they temporarily wrap us in their fuzzy goodness, shielding us from the chilling world outside.
1, DUE: Final draft of Ad Analysis (make sure to attach your ad)
2, Read “Turning Boys into Girls” ( 486); “We Should Relinquish Some Liberty in Exchange for Security” (540); and write a paragraph responding to each article
3, Read the following NYTimes article "Africa, at the Cineplex" and make a comment about what you've read on this blog. DO NOT summarize what the article is about, we've all read it. What do you think about what this article is saying? How does it make you feel?
February 4, 2007
Film Fatigue
Africa, at the Cineplex
By MANOHLA DARGIS
American children used to connect with their deprived African counterparts mostly by cleaning their plates. Today, those same children have a dizzying variety of ways of reaching out to the continent and its inhabitants: they can shop at the Gap, mind Bono, listen to Kanye West, read Dave Eggers and watch an Oscar-nominated film or two, like “Blood Diamond” or “The Last King of Scotland,” and, while flipping through their favorite magazine, contemplate the AIDS awareness ad campaign in which celebrities like Richard Gere and Gwyneth Paltrow, faces daubed with paint, declare “I am African.”
Well, really, aren’t we all? The new African awareness isn’t just deeply, appreciably earnest; it’s personal, too. Angelina Jolie, the head of the new class of celebrity missionaries, not only adopted an Ethiopian girl, but has also poured money into Namibian maternity wards. The same goes for Oprah Winfrey, who founded a girls’ school in South Africa, and the rapper Jay-Z, who last year traveled the world, including parts of Africa, for “The Diary of Jay-Z: Water for Life,” a documentary. The diary was the product of a rather unusual collaboration, as signaled on a Web page for the United Nations: “The United Nations, MTV and Jay-Z team up to raise attention of the world water crisis.”
If you didn’t know about the documentary or the United Nations-initiated Water for Life campaign, you are probably not alone. The humanitarian crises in Africa are overwhelming, but they’re also now such a familiar fixture in our 24/7 news-and-entertainment spin cycle that it can be hard to keep up. Yet if the bad news out of Africa never seems to end, neither do the pop-cultural responses.
IN 1984, that response to African tragedy seemed purely seasonal, exemplified by the hit single on behalf of Ethiopian famine relief, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” For the last few years or so, every week seems to bring another documentary, another song, another ad campaign, another press conference, another celebrity sighting.
And why not? As George Clooney, a supple manipulator of the media, explained after embarking on a high-profile effort to bring attention to the Darfur region of Sudan, “If you’re going to be famous and have cameras follow you around, you might as well go where the cameras will do some good.” Last April, Mr. Clooney and his father, Nick, visited refugee camps in the Sudan, and the son subsequently joined Senators Sam Brownback and Barack Obama at a news conference where he passionately urged that greater international attention be paid to the crisis. It was a tough sell, even for the Sexiest Man Alive, who at one point also admitted that it was hard to capture people’s attention because, as he put it, “We have tragedy fatigue on television.”
I know what he means. It’s hard enough to keep track of the globe-trotting Ms. Jolie, who has done more good in the world than most of the housebound pundits who poke fun at her. My problem is that I have almost bottomed out when it comes to films about Africa. Not the real deal, like the films of the great Senegalese-born auteur Ousmane Sembène, whose 1966 drama “Black Girl” is a classic of postcolonial cinema, and whose 2004 film, “Moolaadé,” manages to tackle the issue of female genital mutilation and critique patriarchic Islam in one entertaining package (really). My problem, rather, is all those films filled with suffering, struggling black Africans who, for the most part, seem to be on camera to make me feel bad.
These faces, weeping and smiling by turns, show up in fiction and documentary films, in big-budget Hollywood fare like “Blood Diamond” and more modest studio offerings like “The Last King of Scotland.” In the old Tarzan days, of course, Johnny Weissmuller yodeled across a back-lot jungle while black extras ran amok in feathered headdress borrowed from the cowboys-and-Indians department. In that Hollywood, Africa was an extension of the studio lot (often it was the studio lot), the setting for thrilling adventures, big-game safaris and the occasional bloody conflict with native peoples. Mostly, though, Africa was the exotic backdrop for white characters, who paid about as much attention to its black populace as they did to the black populace back home.
These days, black African characters in American-produced films generally serve more than a decorative function; some of them actually speak lines and share serious screen time with the white stars. Now and again, as in “Hotel Rwanda” and “Sometimes in April,” two films from 2004 and 2005 about the Rwandan genocide, the stars themselves are actually black, if not African, and their characters help drive the narrative. In the case of the HBO film “Sometimes in April,” the director is also black, the Haitian-born Raoul Peck. In both “April” and “Hotel Rwanda,” the white characters are peripheral, just as they were during the genocide; in each, the victims and the victimizers are black, but so, too, are the heroes.
New films tend to be smarter about race if not necessarily its representation. One of the truths about the movies is that, no matter how high-minded a director or how earnest his intentions, what he puts in front of his camera usually talks louder and more honestly than anything he himself might say. The director and the screenwriter may be on the same resolute page, with nicely composed speeches about Africa, the West and how something, finally, must be done. But the black faces on the screen — the babies with the swollen bellies and pipe-cleaner limbs, and the legless men crawling alongside them — tend to tell a different story, one of hopelessness and despair that all too often feels as immutable as the earth.
This sense of immutability, that the violence and the hunger are persistent, almost eternal and natural, infects too many films about Africa. There is a long tradition of victim documentaries, films about the wretched of the earth from Welsh and Appalachian mining towns, South African shantytowns and New York City homeless shelters. By turns touristic and voyeuristic, these films habitually follow a reassuringly familiar trajectory. They evade unpleasant truths about history, power and ideology in favor of heroic stories about individual resistance and triumph that wouldn’t be out of place in a studio potboiler. As any Hollywood producer knows, real life can be a total bummer, which is why a Lost Boy of Sudan newly transplanted to America makes a better commercial bet than one who didn’t make it out of Africa.
Most American films about Africa mean well, at least those without Bruce Willis, and even openly commercial studio fare like “Blood Diamond” wears its bleeding, thudding heart on its sleeve. But what, exactly, are we meant to do with all their images, I wonder? Like “The Constant Gardener” and “Catch a Fire,” two other thrillers set in Africa, “Blood Diamond” was designed to make money, not instigate change. Watching Leonardo DiCaprio share the screen with genuine handless black Africans or Ralph Fiennes’s gardener learn a lesson in postcolonial realpolitik while I munch my popcorn doesn’t rouse me to action; it stirs horror, pity, sometimes repulsion, sentiments that linger uneasily until the action starts up again to sweep away that empathy with another explosion, gunfight or rousing chase.
It is exhausting having your conscience pricked so regularly. It may also be counterproductive to the stated aims of the people who make these films. It’s an article of faith that social-issue movies are worthwhile, important, even brave, as people in Hollywood like to insist. But it is naïve to think that these films, including a fair share of the documentaries, are being made on behalf of Africa and its people; they are made for us. They provide us a night’s entertainment and perhaps, for a couple of hours, they may make us think outside the multiplex box. They serve as balm for our media-saturated, fatigued hearts and minds. Like one of those Gap (Product) RED cashmere sweaters, they temporarily wrap us in their fuzzy goodness, shielding us from the chilling world outside.
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Homework for Thursday feb 8
1, Due: Ad Analysis
2, Readings, Arguments of Definition Ch. 9 pg 147-166
2, Readings, Arguments of Definition Ch. 9 pg 147-166
Sunday, February 4, 2007
AD ASSIGNMENT: Due Thursday Feb 8
Homework for Tuesday, February 6, 2007
- Readings, “Visual Arguments” (301-14), pages 42-9.
- Five ideas for Research project
- Work on Ad Analysis (see details below)
- AD ASSIGNMENT
Pick one print advertisement (an ad specifically designed for a print source--magazine, newspaper, etc.). It need not have a specific number of words, though it must combine some printed text with a compelling visual image. Attach your ad to your analysis. Your analysis will likely be about 2 – 4 pages,double spaced. - Consider the ad as a mode of persuasion and analyze the techniques that have been used to make it a persuasive piece of discourse. The questions below should guide your analysis:•
- Why does this ad look the way it does? This will require description andexplanation of the ad's design: visual images, colors, etc.; word choices;layout and arrangement, etc.• What assumptions does it make about you?•
- What claim does it make and how does it support that claim?•
- What's this ad really seem to be saying?•
- What story does it tell, if any, about the American culture?Your paper will be evaluated by how thoughtfully and thoroughly you do the following:
- • build an interpretation/analysis of the ad that.
- identifies important verbal aspects of the ad.
- identifies important visual/symbolic aspects of the ad.
- describes the intended rhetorical effect of those aspects on the ad'sdesired audience.
- demonstrate careful proofreading.
- Due: Thursday, February 8, 2007
Sunday, January 28, 2007
HOMEWORK: Due Feb 1, 2007
This is the homework we discussed in class Thursday but just to reiterate:
1, Comment on the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" on this blog, basically your reactions to the movie (see others for example)
2, Write a letter to your Senator or Congressman and urge them to address the crisis that is global warming. Letters should be 1 pg single spaced or2 pages double spaced, typed. I'll collect them Feb. 1
*For the purposes of this class, this is a writing exercise only, but it'd be terrific if you sent out your letters! If you disagree about global warming then this exercise will help you better understand the counter argument.
3, Read page 65 -75, "Arguments from the Heart," and be ready to talk about the ideas presented
4, Come up with 5 possible topics you'd like to write your research paper on.
*NOTE: There will be no class Tues, Jan 30th. See you Thursday!
1, Comment on the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" on this blog, basically your reactions to the movie (see others for example)
2, Write a letter to your Senator or Congressman and urge them to address the crisis that is global warming. Letters should be 1 pg single spaced or2 pages double spaced, typed. I'll collect them Feb. 1
*For the purposes of this class, this is a writing exercise only, but it'd be terrific if you sent out your letters! If you disagree about global warming then this exercise will help you better understand the counter argument.
3, Read page 65 -75, "Arguments from the Heart," and be ready to talk about the ideas presented
4, Come up with 5 possible topics you'd like to write your research paper on.
*NOTE: There will be no class Tues, Jan 30th. See you Thursday!
Monday, January 22, 2007
Assignment: An Inconvenient Truth
1, Write a blog with your reactions to the movie.
2, Write a letter to your Senator or Congressman urging them to address global warming.
Due: Feb 1, 2007 for class only
2, Write a letter to your Senator or Congressman urging them to address global warming.
Due: Feb 1, 2007 for class only
An Inconvenient Truth
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
The Movie:
Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced. If that sounds like a recipe for serious gloom and doom -- think again. From director Davis Guggenheim comes the Sundance Film Festival hit, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, which offers a passionate and inspirational look at one man's fervent crusade to halt global warming's deadly progress in its tracks by exposing the myths and misconceptions that surround it. That man is former Vice President Al Gore, who, in the wake of defeat in the 2000 election, re-set the course of his life to focus on a last-ditch, all-out effort to help save the planet from irrevocable change. In this eye-opening and poignant portrait of Gore and his "traveling global warming show," Gore also proves himself to be one of the most misunderstood characters in modern American public life. Here he is seen as never before in the media - funny, engaging, open and downright on fire about getting the surprisingly stirring truth about what he calls our "planetary emergency" out to ordinary citizens before it's too late. With 2005, the worst storm season ever experienced in America just behind us, it seems we may be reaching a tipping point - and Gore pulls no punches in explaining the dire situation. Interspersed with the bracing facts and future predictions is the story of Gore's personal journey: from an idealistic college student who first saw a massive environmental crisis looming; to a young Senator facing a harrowing family tragedy that altered his perspective, to the man who almost became President but instead returned to the most important cause of his life - convinced that there is still time to make a difference.
With wit, smarts and hope, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH ultimately brings home Gore's persuasive argument that we can no longer afford to view global warming as a political issue - rather, it is the biggest moral challenges facing our global civilization. Paramount Classics and Participant Productions present a film directed by Davis Guggenheim, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH. Featuring Al Gore, the film is produced by Laurie David, Lawrence Bender and Scott Z. Burns. Jeff Skoll and Davis Guggenheim are the executive producers and the co-producer is Leslie Chilcott.
The Movie:
Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced. If that sounds like a recipe for serious gloom and doom -- think again. From director Davis Guggenheim comes the Sundance Film Festival hit, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, which offers a passionate and inspirational look at one man's fervent crusade to halt global warming's deadly progress in its tracks by exposing the myths and misconceptions that surround it. That man is former Vice President Al Gore, who, in the wake of defeat in the 2000 election, re-set the course of his life to focus on a last-ditch, all-out effort to help save the planet from irrevocable change. In this eye-opening and poignant portrait of Gore and his "traveling global warming show," Gore also proves himself to be one of the most misunderstood characters in modern American public life. Here he is seen as never before in the media - funny, engaging, open and downright on fire about getting the surprisingly stirring truth about what he calls our "planetary emergency" out to ordinary citizens before it's too late. With 2005, the worst storm season ever experienced in America just behind us, it seems we may be reaching a tipping point - and Gore pulls no punches in explaining the dire situation. Interspersed with the bracing facts and future predictions is the story of Gore's personal journey: from an idealistic college student who first saw a massive environmental crisis looming; to a young Senator facing a harrowing family tragedy that altered his perspective, to the man who almost became President but instead returned to the most important cause of his life - convinced that there is still time to make a difference.
With wit, smarts and hope, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH ultimately brings home Gore's persuasive argument that we can no longer afford to view global warming as a political issue - rather, it is the biggest moral challenges facing our global civilization. Paramount Classics and Participant Productions present a film directed by Davis Guggenheim, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH. Featuring Al Gore, the film is produced by Laurie David, Lawrence Bender and Scott Z. Burns. Jeff Skoll and Davis Guggenheim are the executive producers and the co-producer is Leslie Chilcott.
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