Month: March 2014

by Jessie Roberts

Last week, Teju Cole published a 4,000-word non-fiction essay on immigration, A Piece Of The Wall, entirely on Twitter. In an interview with BuzzFeed, he talked about why he chose to tell the story in tweets:

What made you decide that this specific essay would be best presented in this medium?

Teju Cole: I’ll answer that by saying I didn’t think this essay could be “best” presented in this medium, but I asked the opposite question:

Why does a serious longform investigative piece have to be in print in a major magazine? In various parts of West Africa, there are different iterations of the idea that “white people like paper so much that they even wipe their butts with it.” You know, you spend your life staring at paper, you spend paper money, proof of ownership of everything is on paper, you fill your house with paper, and when you die, the announcement is in the paper.

I love paper too. I love print. But maybe not everything has to be on it. And in the case of Twitter (and, before that, blogging), I just feel so strongly that there’s an audience here, and audience that deserves to be treated with the same seriousness as the paper crowd. …

I’m not getting my hopes up, but the point of writing about these things, and hoping they reach a big audience, has nothing to do with “innovation” or with “writing.” It’s about the hope that more and more people will have their conscience moved about the plight of other human beings. In the case of drones, for example, I think that all the writing and sorrow about it has led to a scaling back of operations: It continues, it’s still awful, but the rate has been scaled back, and this has been in specific response to public criticism. I continue to believe the emperor has a soul.

Earlier this month, Cole assessed (NYT) how Twitter has affected his writing, noting that “being active on Twitter … means that the literary part of my brain — the part that tries to make good sentences — is engaged all the time. My memory is worse than it was a few years ago, but I hope that my ability to write a good sentence has improved.” Follow Cole’s latest tweets here.

by Tracy R. Walsh

Taking a page from Nellie Bly, the psychiatrist who blogs as “Simple Citizen” spent a day as an inpatient at the adolescent Residential Treatment Center where he ordinarily works:

I first learn how boring the morning is, and how many times you get woken up. First they shine a flashlight on you every 15 minutes during the night to make sure you are still in bed, alive, and not hurting yourself or trying to commit suicide. Then the phlebotomist wakes up anyone who needs their blood drawn for labs that have been ordered. (likely by me)

Then we get woken up again by the sound of “med-pass” when all the kids who take morning medications have to go to the nurse one by one, take their pills, swallow, open their mouths and move their tongues all around to show that they really swallowed and didn’t “cheek” the pill. Then it’s shower time. I have to push the button every 25 seconds to keep the hot water coming, and there is no bathroom door or shower door – there are curtains only. The curtains are only held up by Velcro, so you couldn’t use them to hang yourself.

After a day in the facility, he concludes:

I see how residential treatment can help. I also see how it can drive you up the wall, make you want to scream, and leave you overweight and out of shape when you leave after 90 days. I can see how it seems pointless at times. I felt a little bit of the helplessness these kids must feel, and that was even knowing that I wasn’t really locked in there. How would it be to spend 90 days there? How about 180 days like some kids I’ve seen?  Or worse – be told you’re going to Disneyland with a short stop on the way and then find out your parents lied to you and they’ve admitted you to a locked psychiatric facility?  (It’s happened multiple times.)

Dinah Miller praises this type of experiment while noting its limitations:

I don’t believe these experiences are anything like the real thing, nor do I believe they are meant to be. For one thing, the person having them has not gone through the lifetime of events, traumas, distresses that led the inmate or patient to be in those places. Or in the case of the patient, the doctor also is not experiencing both the internal discomfort that comes with the mental illness, or the side effects which come with the medications, or the emotional upheaval that comes from having been left there by their family … Still, I like that these people did this, it’s good that they want to try to understand what their charges are going through. Even if it’s not a complete understanding, it still acknowledges that the condition is different with a willingness to see and understand what the other is going through, for better or for worse.

by Jessie Roberts

Erika Thorkelson worries that camera phones encourage people to document others’ bad behavior rather than attempt to intervene:

Many professional journalists agonize over the ethics of this kind of reporting. Some argue that journalistic objectivity overrides any particular responsibility to act. Photojournalists train themselves to grab their cameras and start shooting before they fully recognize what’s happening around them, believing that documenting the moment does more long-term good than acting to stop it, or at least fulfills a separate but necessary societal obligation. But what happens when everyone with a camera phone sees him or herself as a journalist on a story, when everyone is a fly on the wall?

[This] brings to mind a classic This American Life story from 2007 about a craze for fake newscasts that took over an elementary school [see above video].

Children built elaborate cameras out of construction paper and toilet paper rolls, and began reporting on everything they saw. The school’s principal told Ira Glass that the trend reached its height when he discovered a brutal fight in the schoolyard, one student pummeling the other. Crowding around the fight, students were “breathlessly reporting” on what they saw, turning it into a news story rather than going for help.

Thanks to our phones, most of us carry cameras everywhere we go. Like journalists reporting on our own lives, our experiences become part of a narrative, honed in order to endear us to our various social media connections. We live with our faces angled toward the screens of our various devices, oblivious to the events beyond the viewfinder. Our bodies stilled to reduce shaking and our eyes trained on the screen, our filming—no matter how well-framed or widely shared, no matter how much attention we receive for it afterward—remains passive. We project the control we exert over the image we’re creating onto the experience itself, giving us a false sense of power, when in reality we have done very little.

by Katie Zavadski

Laila Alawa is tired of talking about it:

Ultimately, the issue at hand is not the discussion of being Muslim in America. The problem is the thought surrounding the discussion, an idea that it is not possible to consolidate the two identities – Muslim and American – in our community today. Although it might have been integral to confront in the community initially, it has reached a point where we are continuing still to overemphasize the topic, a decision that overshadows the real issues our community faces, point blank. The overshadowing serves, then, to validate the premise of mutual exclusivity between the two identities, throwing the Muslim American identity of many today into paralysis and confusion, as they suddenly are faced with the need for reconciliation between the two. We push ourselves two steps back by throwing identity into the way of oncoming traffic, and it only serves to harm rather than help us as a community.

Iram Ali disagrees, arguing that the issue is more complicated:

The notion of being Muslim in America is … inherently different from being a Muslim American, not because they identify two different groups of Muslims but because they are simply two different linguistic formations of a similar idea.

Sidelining “Muslim in America” as being problematic only decreases the lexicon for developing our Muslim American narrative. I am a Muslim American, but I can also face issues of being a Muslim in America, which is distinct from a Muslim anywhere else in the world. Acknowledging that Muslims in America have different circumstances from Muslims in other regions will also pave the necessary groundwork for us in other important matters that Alawa mentions, such as mental health or arts development. Muslims in America do not need one cultural identity or a single-mindedness about where to settle down in this globalized world in order for us to be a collective community. Our identity issues, accumulating in this melting pot of different cultures and ideas, are an integral dimension of our Americanness.

(Photo: Muslim-American men greet each other at the annual Eid al-Adha prayer held at the Teaneck Armory in Teaneck, New Jersey. Eid al-Adha, also known as the Feast of the Sacrifice, commemorates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son as an act of obedience to God, who in accordance with tradition then provided a lamb in the boy’s place. By Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)