Words: 876 1194 The camera settles on a row of pickup trucks idling in front of a cinderblock wall while a voiceover begins describing durability in a voice that sounds like gravel rolling down a canyon. I watched this Chevrolet Silverado commercial during a playoff game in 2014, sitting on my uncle's couch in Oklahoma where half the driveways held trucks older than me. The ad never showed the interior features or fuel economy. Instead it displayed Silverado beds stacked with bricks and […]
Words: 858 1010 The plastic water bottle rolls across the parking lot, nudging against a storm drain where it will eventually join thousands of others in the ocean. I watched this happen outside my dorm last Tuesday and did nothing, which makes me part of the problem I claim to care about. For three years I have sorted recycling and signed petitions, yet I still see trash accumulating in the creek behind campus and smog settling over the city on windless days. This […]
Words: 1098 1141 During my sophomore media studies midterm, I sat staring at a glossy magazine page showing a silver watch on a man's wrist against a backdrop of mountain peaks. The assignment asked us to explain what the ad meant, but Professor Chen wanted more than that. She circled back to my desk and tapped the image. "Tell me what it means without saying a word," she said. I realized then that advertisements speak a language built from colors, angles, and carefully […]
Words: 1068 964 Eighteen-year-olds should spend a year in uniform before they can vote or enter college. I held this opinion lightly until my roommate Ethan came back from winter break with his cousin Miguel, who had just finished eleven months in the National Guard. We sat in our dorm room in Madison eating leftover pizza while Miguel described building flood barriers in Louisiana and teaching rifle safety to kids who had never left their neighborhood. What struck me was not the heroism […]
Words: 1009 958 Before my grandfather died, I could name every tree in his backyard by touch and tell you which birds sang at dawn. Now I live three states away and cannot remember the last time I stood still long enough to notice either. Last month in my environmental science class at Indiana State, Professor Morris asked us to read "A Secret Lost in the Water" by Roch Carrier, a short story about a father teaching his son to find underground water […]
Words: 865 848 Before Stanley Kowalski tears open her trunk and drags out costume jewelry in front of Stella, Blanche DuBois appears to most audiences as a fragile, possibly delusional woman clinging to old-fashioned manners. After that scene, something shifts. The audience begins to see her not as merely vain or dishonest but as someone fighting desperately to protect the only identity she has left. Tennessee Williams builds Blanche as a character whose passion is not for romance or beauty alone but for […]
Words: 987 1149 The gun barrel gleamed under the artificial jungle light as Eckels stepped off the metal path, his boots crushing a single butterfly beneath him. I first encountered Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" in my sophomore year American Literature class at Arizona State, the same semester I read Gloria Skurzynski's "Nethergrave" for an assignment on technology and reality. Both stories explore how characters escape their dissatisfying lives through alternate realities, but they reach opposite conclusions about whether such escapes offer […]
Words: 771 1121 The pitch competition crowd fell silent when my teammate described mining asteroids for platinum. I watched three judges lean forward, one tapping notes on her tablet. Our business model hung in the air: unmanned probes extracting metals worth billions from a single rock floating past Mars. We lost that night to a recycling app, but I kept thinking about those asteroids. Over the next semester, I researched every commercial space venture I could find and realized that practical solar system […]
Words: 927 902 Rita Dove forces readers into the mind of a dictator who orders mass murder over a word his victims cannot pronounce. "Parsley" splits into two sections that mirror each other like a knife blade and its reflection, both beautiful and deadly. The first half, "The Cane Fields," gives voice to Haitian workers who cannot roll their r's when saying "perejil," the Spanish word for parsley. The second half, "The Palace," enters the thoughts of Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican general who […]
Words: 1038 1106 The climate commissioner stood at the podium last September and said rising temperatures would cost us three percent of global GDP by 2050, so we needed carbon pricing now. My environmental economics professor played the clip, then asked us to write down what argument we had just heard. Half the class wrote that climate action protects the economy. The other half wrote that economic growth justifies environmental policy. Both readings came from identical words, which meant the rhetoric itself was […]
