1Although, this of course raises the question of “what is an essay.” To which there is no good answer, and to which there are many good answers.1a, 1b, 1c, 1d, 1e
1aA good essay is like a lonely cat: it rubs up against everything, until it finds something warm.
1b Or a good essay is like Thomas Edison, playing with filaments until something lights him up.
1c Or a good essay is like an unremembered injury, which seems to throb only until its cause is remembered.
1d Or a good essay is like your mom.1d†
1d† Or a good essay is really like your mom: warm and loving an comforting, but resolutely insistent that you own your shortcomings.
1e Or a good essay is like a writer with no paper and no shoes: too many footnotes.
Working with the tutors at the Writing Center I coordinate this week, we came across the perpetual and exhausting question of what to do about student writers who come to us for help, but then immediately get defensive of their writing. I’ve worked with a lot of these students myself, both as a tutor and in workshop. We talked about the issue as a tutorial problem—how do we facilitate a productive session in that context?—but since then, I’ve started thinking about it from a writerly perspective. What do I do when I realize that I am that writer?
Being offered with due regard to
gaming
delivered on
I have to say that I find this summary of a brief in Schwarzenegger v. EMA almost soulcrushingly depressing. It’s not so much that the case is before the Supreme Court—which, I suppose, it was bound to be sooner or later. It’s not so much that an array of people with a mean age of 64.4 is making a decision about the impact on minors of a medium that did not meaningfully exist when any of them were minors.1 It’s not that the name on the lawsuit is, unselfconsciously and with no apparent sense of irony, thisguy.2, 3 These things irk me, to be sure, but what really bothers me is the degree of medium blindness at play in this conversation. In short, the mechanisms by which we evaluate the content of one medium don’t necessarily translate to another, and it’s hazardous to assume that they do.
