Week in Review

Notable O.E.P. Stories for the Week Ending in November 18, 2012

 Ever wonder how we react to reading the successes of our brilliant alums? The diversity of thought and opinion is simply flabbergasting!  We guarantee, a perusal of the op-ed articles published by our opinionists is this jaw-dropping. And for this reason we encourage you…Nay. We dare you to read them.

Kelly Pope

Professor of accounting, Kelly Pope will be joining 20 other faculty as part of The OpEd Project’s Public Voices Fellowship at DePaul University. She also took the Chicago “Write to Change the World” public seminar in October. Shortly after, she published an astounding Forbes article on Rita Crundwell, a white-collar criminal who embezzled approximately $53 million dollars. Rita’s Countdown to Court is Pope’s pondering on Crundwell’s court date.

Jaime Dominguez

A Public Voices Fellow at Northwestern University, Jaime Dominguez put into practice his expertise as a political scientist by penning this piece on the Latino voter turnout during our most recent election, and the implications this carries for President Obama’s second term in office. As he argues in his Huffington Post op-ed,  A Sleeping Giant No More, “America is becoming more diverse, as this election has made clear. Latinos are the fastest-growing component of this rapid transformation. There could be no better time for President Obama to take immigration reform to the Congress, and give Latino voters a glimpse of the future.”

Dr. Lori Freedman

Sociologist and author of, ‘Willing and Unable: Doctors’ Constraints in Abortion Care’, Lori Freedman also publishes in The Huffington Post “It Could Happen Here”, an article on the recent death of Savita Halappanavar. She questions whether this kind of tragedy could happen in the U.S.?

Week in Review

Notable O.E.P. Stories for the Week Ending in October 21, 2012

On the day of their last convening, The OpEd Project’s Fordham University Public Voices Fellows were asked to write why it is that they do what they do. Out of all of the snapshots, the one posted above is my favorite. It reads: “Because I realized what mattered most to me, didn’t matter to most people. I wanted to change that.” Find out what matters to this week’s featured writers, and why it should matter to you.

	With her bold statement – “The GOP candidate’s wife seems to think that contraception isn’t an economic issue. That’s because she doesn’t have to worry about how another child could make it harder to pay her bills” – Atima Omara-Alwala takes back the discussion on contraception in her article Ann Romney: Contraception IS about the Economy for Women’s eNews.
	Summer Loving: BYFI’s LGBT Journey is a moving story that orbits around the experiences of coming out, feeling affirmed and supported as LGBT or queer in the Jewish community. Idik Klein writes for eJewish Philanthropy
	Tressie McMillan Cottom,  Emory Public Voices Fellow,  persuades that “Criminalizing individuals for a criminal inequality in the structure of public education is inefficient, unproductive, and immoral.” Them’s That Got Shall Have: Criminalizing Parents who Steal Free Education is her Huffington Post article, and it’s getting a lot of e-traffick.
	One of the OpEd Project leaders, Sharon Lerner, writes on the timely subject of Romney, single moms and gun violence for Parent. We highly recommend you read her article Investigating the Single Mom-Gun Violence Connection before voting!
	“From Ricky Martin to characters such as Santana Lopez on Glee, gay and lesbian Latinos are no longer invisible,” argues Chicago OpEd alum Veronica Arreola. How Latinos Have Changed Their Attitude To Homosexuality is available to read on The Guardian.

- Claudia Garcia-Rojas, Social Media Fellow

Week in Review

Notable O.E.P. Stories for the Week Ending in October 14, 2012

It’s true! Can you ask for better inspiration to write? If you can, then let the successes of these opinionists compel you to voice your thoughts.

	NBC invited Anat Shenker-Osorio author of Don’t Buy It: The Trouble With Talking Nonsense About the Economy to talk about the way media and politicians use metaphor to describe the economy.
	April Allen, TWU fellow, was featured in Al Jazeera on what the NFL referee lockout tells us about education. Allen is also the Executive Director of KIPP DFW, a college-prep charter school focused on preparing students from underserved communities for success in college and in life.
	For Jane Austen Weekly in the Huffington Post, Susan Celia Greenfield returns with a smart snapshot of Elizabeth Bennet’s Brain Scan.
	Nicholas Tampio cogently asks: “What can history teach us about stopping religious warfare?” In his Huffington Post op-ed How To Stop Religious Warfare he argues that two lessons from the Enlightenment remain timely. Find out what those are.
	We All Fall Down: A Lesson in Resiliency highlights Michelle Baker’s viewpoint that sometimes parents can overshadow their children’s efforts by not giving them the space to be resilient. What do you think?
	Chicago OpEd alum and philanthropist-extraordinaire, Lisa Dietlin believes that acts of philanthropy should be strategic and transformational. Dietlin appeared on NBC to discuss The Charitable Side of the Bank of America Chicago Marathon.
	Of the 10, 000 firefighters in New York City, only 28 of them are female. The OpEd Project’s former Junior Fellow, Ravenna Koenig, expounds the reasons attributed to such a wide gender-gap. Her article New York’s Firefighting Women was published by The Women’s Media Center.
	Chloe Bird doesn’t hesitate to discuss why California Improves on the Affordable Care Act by Letting RNs Dispense Birth Control. Bird says that “a new study by the Guttmacher Institute confirms that a majority of women report that contraception has had a significant impact on their lives.” You can learn how in her Ms. Magazine write-up.

- Claudia Garcia-Rojas, Social Media Fellow

The Week in Review

Notable O.E.P. Stories for the Week Ending in October 7, 2012

Good morning, indeed! What better way to start your week than with a rightly brewed cup of coffee and a few good reads. We were not able to get some of these success stories to you last week but here they are now. As always, we’re thrilled to engage in good dialogue with our authors and readers. Comment below, let us know what you’re thinking, what your pressing thoughts are. We’d love to hear them!

	Ever hear of public-interest design? John Cary and Courtney E. Martin discuss human-centered approaches to design in their New York Times Sunday Review article Dignifying Designs.
	Alissa Quart argues In “Women Who Hide Their Pregnancies” that for the rich and powerful it is not a “hindrance” but for the average American, it is. What do you think?
	Writopia’s Executive Director –  Rebecca Wallace-Segall – makes “A Passionate, Unapologetic Plea for Creative Writing in Schools” in The Atlantic.
	“Yes, there’s a tragedy on Broadway and it isn’t Electra,” says Indiewire guest writer Aphra Behn. In her cleverly titled article “We Came! We Saw! We Threw Bananas! WE WERE THEATRE!” Behn tells us about speaking out for gender parity in theater.
	Following on the heels of the powerfully moving Undocubus movement, Vanessa Perez’s tremendous Ledger-Enquirer article, “Campus Border”, maintains that “a top university like UGA is supposed to be a greenhouse for new ideas, but it only marginalizes [undocumented] communities by banning their children from campus.” Do you agree?

- Claudia Garcia-Rojas

The Week in Review

Notable O.E.P. Stories for the Week Ending in August 31st, 2012

Ms. Katie O. forwarded an email to me this past week, wherein a solitary link to a recent post from the idea-centric blog Brain Pickings floated, unclicked, waiting to be read. Upon her suggestion I’m including a few image-quotations (see above) from the original post, entitled “How to Be an Explorer of the World.” The book of the same name, written by “guerilla artist and illustrator” Keri Smith, is subtitled Portable Art Life Museum; it’s an avant-garde picture-art book that superimposes handwritten suggestions, of the author and of (un)recognizable and important thinkers, over images of found places, objects, things. In Smith’s own words, as quoted from B.P.:

“I am interested in the idea of taking art…out of the realm of ‘institution’ and into the hands of the individual…A museum is what YOU make it. You decide what goes in it, what is interesting, why it is interesting…It gives the reader permission to create their [sic] own portable (or not portable) show.”

It’s an attractive idea, this self-creation, this disciplining of the individual’s sensing of h/er environment and the acceptance of a notion of life as lived through experience and encounter and, in the remembering (for Smith, in the cataloguing and collaging), as lived through transcription and reference and a soft plagiarism of multiple, previous ontologies. I’ve featured coopted from Zen master/activist Thich Nhat Hanh and early-modern philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein but Smith pulls from multiple and varied sources (she’s adamant about the necessity of footnoting, too). She’s picked a lot of brains for this project, including a welcome poking-and-prodding of her own.

This seems a fine place to begin as we, once again, look back to this week’s O.E.P. successes – not just because our organization works toward intellectual efficacy and legitimacy but also because we too are compiling things. We too are creating our very own “Life Museum.” We collect, we curate, we reflect, we share. This seems a worthwhile tradition to enact. So, on to our recent additions:

	April Alliston‘s recent op-ed for Al-Ja- zeera English excises some important ideological/behavioral/experiential through-lines when considering just to what extent trolling, cyber-bullying, real-life bullying, and general slander coalesce. She also asks questions with seemingly illusive, or simply hard-to- define, answers: what qualifies as hate-speech? As verbal abuse?
	In light of the scandalous remarks of, and still surrounding, Todd Akin, Estelle B. Freedman adopts a much-welcomed calm, critical approach in order to ground the discussion of “legitimate rape” in an historical and socio-political context. More seriously she embodies a discursive posturing toward those whose lives – and bodies – are compro- mised in the current political climate.
	To quote myself (loosely) in a previous post: “When considering the modern socio-political climate, paradox (or, more appropriately termed, hypocrisy) is the rule; Maya Paley justifiably ex- poses Israel’s handling of African refu- gees as in direct contradiction with its similarly dire past.”
	“An anecdote is oxygen that breathes life into a great story of exposition, facts, and data.” We love Michele and truly appreciate her work, both with us and independently of her OpEd pursuits. She has a great illustrated TEDEd video to compliment her ideas about journalism as an opportunity not just for reporting, but for fostering communicative relationships.
	Speaking as a woman and an adherent of Islam, Qanta A. Ahmed provides a particularly honed perspective as to the ramifications of religious fundamental- ism. This “heinous distortion of Islam” seeks to eliminate women’s access to education and, by extension, equal societal (and human) rights – which, Qanta clarifies, contradicts the original teachings of “The Prophet.”

- J. J. Morr

The Week In Review

Notable O.E.P. Stories for the Week Ending in August 24th, 2012

Alex Prager, “Deborah”

Two of our reported successes this week deal with Missouri Representative/Senate candidate Todd Akin’s indefensible (though even this is contested), “folkloric” comments regarding the biological processes informing rape, pregnancy, and female physiology. The remaining two address similarly hot-button topics – men with eating disorders and the United States’ aging prison population, and just what to do with them – in a studied and cool manner that we’ve happily come to expect from our prolific alumni. All timely and utterly necessary appraisals of the various truths of our “now.”

	While a definite stigma persists as to the so-called truths and lived reality of eating disorders, a good portion of the conversation centers upon young girls and women – keeping with many medi- cal, psychoanalytic, and societal “tradi- tions,” it seems. Men have only recently been more fully conceptualized as hav- ing eating disorders; Abby Ellin‘s NYT article testifies on their behalf.
	In her own words: “Little Margaret found her voice this week.” Indeed, and it’s one of subtle irony and insight: PVF Fellow Margaret Martonosi writes candidly about MO Rep. Todd Akin, all the while maintaining a rhetorical/ideo- logical distance indicative of a thinker who’s spent time sitting with her mind, crafting her voice, and enacting close readings. She asks questions – how, why? – and is unafraid to highlight the hypocrisies of Akin’s social proclivities.
	“When Representative Todd Akin said that cases of ‘legitimate rape’ do not result in pregnancy,” muses Susan Celia Greenfield, “he was simply artic- ulating a widely-held medical belief. In second-century Rome that is.” This is an opinion worthy of PBS’s “Need to Know” designation and one, we might all agree, so deserving of attention.
	Can such a thing as “compassionate release” for aging prisoners exist? Perhaps the most notable aspect of Tina Maschi‘s HuffPo article persists as its understated ability to incite inquiry in readers (including myself), doing so by proffering points-of-view that some might consider inconsequential or even inflammatory. But what progress can be made without the willingness to talk, to question, to offer insight? We comm- end Tina for having the tenacity to approach, and critique, this subject.

Because I can’t seem to help myself, and in celebration of his one-hundred-and-ninth birthday this year, I’ll include an excerpt of a clipping from George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Why I Write” (found on Brain Pickings, one of those places online in which I easily and freely become lost, as if in a vortex of ideas). This is also another of those “But I promise you, it relates!”-type moments:

“And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a POLITICAL purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.” (emphasis mine)

- J. J. Morr

The Week in Review

Notable O.E.P. Stories for the Week Ending in August 17th, 2012

The past week has been a particularly successful one for several O.E.P. Alumni and P.V.F. Fellows (I can hardly keep up!), and we couldn’t be happier; all of the insightful and timely articles being produced can only serve to bolster each one of us, especially as success hearkens to work and struggle and resilience. I thought of Steinbeck and feel resolved to quote him here, grom Chapter 14 of Grapes of Wrath:

“Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.”

I wouldn’t necessarily consider myself a “Steinbeck gal” but he so adeptly, and often, offers up to the reader like bits of reassurance about the place and necessity of human work. A favorite blog of mine, Brainpickings, has an entry from March of this year about Steinbeck on writing – it’s wonderful and absolutely relevant for our writerly purposes. But I’ve intro’d enough; onward to our five featured successes for the past week:

	In this most recent article on AlterNet, Leslie Gerwin calls for a shift in ideo- logical preoccupations, namely from a state of “Olympic mania” to one of critique and socio-political awareness. All of this she poses in a North-Amer- ican context, contrasting U.S. health care policy with that of the U.K. – she parses the confluence of xenophobia and U.S. nationalism.
	Seems just yesterday we interviewed Marielle Anzelone for the blog, but of course she’s continued her impressive op-ed writing for the NYT: “Mountain Mint Broke My Heart” is one of those pieces one reads and implicitly under- stands (on an ethical plane) automa- tically. Her article is an entry in a journal; it is a letter of regret about feeling intensely but, happily, never disconnecting.
	Martha Southgate, multiple author and O.E.P. seminar leader, has published another discerning article for the NYT Opinion Pages. She also uses Olympic idealism as a springboard for discuss- ing indwelling societal issues, invoking African American medal-winning swim- mers Cullen Jones and Lia Neal in order to speak about the culture of fear that informs black children’s relationship with swimming – “nearly 70 percent of [them] do not know how to swim.”
	Michele Weldon rightly suggests that we, the long-distance watchers of our Olympic athletes, tend to “think we know them because we have seen them so many times on television.” What can we know about them other than the movements of their bodies or the color of their medals? Michele, on the other hand, knows one of the Olympians personally: a young wrestler named Ellis Coleman.
	Can Pakistani lawmakers undo their nation’s strong blasphemy laws in or- der to lift mandates of religious, po- litical, and personal silence? Qanta A. Ahmed‘s article about the paradoxes that compromise contemporary cele- brations of Pakistan Independence Day offers up a plea for the re-seculariza- tion (or, more curtly, for the actual separation) of church and state affairs.

– J. J. Morr