Seduce Any Woman response

That was really dumb.

I like Men's Health for some things. I use a workout that I found in there (The Spartacus Workout) on a semi-regular basis to mix things up at the gym. I think the Eat This, Not That column is interesting. But when it veers into sex and courtship it almost always gets annoying. This article said very little but put that very little in the mouths of experts to make it sound good and insulted me as a reader.

The intro that served as the lead was tame and clearly only there because they needed a lead and not because it contained anything inspired. The sections were neatly laid out and clearly subdivided, but their content was terrible, so the neat organization is basically moot.

I really, really hope my how-to comes out better than this.

Story 2 outline

Fanzine how-to/historical retrospective

-Intro
1. Assemble your team
2. Pick your focus
3. Set up interviews/contacts
4. Put the zine together
5. Print and distribute

Pearls Before Breakfast response

The Washington Post – the source of "The Peekaboo Paradox," my favorite story from the first part of the semester – continues to be nothing short of awe-inspiring. I absolutely LOVED "Pearls Before Breakfast," the sorta-profile, actually-study-of-all-human-beings piece on Joshua Bell's incognito violin performance in Washington. This article was thought-provoking and brilliant at every turn and I have practically no criticisms of it, and the ones I have are petty. Gene Weingarten knocked this one out of the park.

From the lead, I was gripped. It gives a little bit away without revealing the whole picture, but it manages to do so in a way that isn't just annoyingly cryptic, something some articles that try this method are guilty of doing. It kept me intrigued while it revealed pieces of the picture. It even got to the nut graf – paragraph three, by my estimation – before it revealed who the violinist was. And you know what? It didn't matter to me. I was so sold on the article that I was willing to let it take me wherever it wanted to, even considering its rather mammoth length, which, far from bothering me, left me wanting even more.

Structurally, I liked how it was broken into segments based on different people from the video and the ways they reacted to Bell's performance. It kept the sections brief and the reading interesting and varied, and I think the structure was a big contributor to how short the story felt even when it was actually quite long. Not much to say other than that the author used structure to his advantage in a big way.

If I have any complaint, it's that the ending is a little forced and even borderline promotional. There didn't need to be some tie-up to this story about Bell, because the story isn't about Bell. I don't care that he's coming back to the States to accept an award, because this story is more about the way people react to staggering works of genius (sorry, I know Bell wouldn't approve) when they're out of context, not about this particular violinist. Such a minor complaint, though. I absolutely loved this story.

The Courage of Detroit response

Okay, maybe I'm missing something, but I thought this article was basically a trainwreck. I like stories about tortured sports franchises and about standing fast in support of your hometown and all that jazz, but the writer inserted himself into the story so much that this was just a painful reading experience.

I thought the anecdote about getting Barry Sanders, Steve Yzerman, Cecil Fielder and Joe Dumars together was cool, but then it spiraled into a commentary about how players from other cities wouldn't be so humble together. Umm, really? Evidence? The chip on the writer's shoulder as a Detroit resident was so prevalent and annoying that the piece suffered under its own weight.

Structurally, I thought the lead was promising, and when the author started bringing in the "we" and "our" bits I thought he would keep it up for a couple paragraphs at most, and that it would be effective as a result. Instead, the entire thing was done in this kind of overdramatized, us-against-the-world love letter format. There was parallel structure throughout the piece, at the very least, but it wasn't particularly engaging and actually enraged me.

Interestingly, there was an article done by ESPN after LeBron left Cleveland that was similar in tone and subject but infinitely better. Here's the link if you haven't read it: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=101201/Cleveland

Interview questions - Story 2

Since all of my sources are at some level involved in the production of extreme music fanzines, and since this is a how-to and I'd like to gather insights from all of my sources on similar topics, I can ask them basically the same across the board. Here are some that I'm thinking about using:

1) What was the height of fanzine relevance? Are we anywhere near that today?
2) Why do people continue to make print fanzines in the age of the Internet?
3) What are the technical and physical considerations that one must take when publishing a fanzine? Paper, printing press, distribution, writers, contact with bands, etc.
4) Fanzines are the most democratic form of music journalism, eliminating the idea that it has to be done by "real journalists." Who do you think that style appeals to, and why do you think it appeals to them?
5) How narrow of a focus does a fanzine need? Is it dictated solely by the personal tastes of the person publishing it?
6) Why has fanzine culture gravitated toward extreme and underground forms of music? Is it sheer necessity, or do you feel that those bands that fanzines cover share a certain ethic with the zines themselves?
7) The people at a magazine like Terrorizer or Decibel are obviously fans of the music that they cover. What makes your publication a fanzine and theirs not one?
8) What is the process of securing paper and a publisher/press? Does that come before or after the collection of content?
9) How do you get in touch with bands? For those who published zines before the Internet, how was reaching bands different then?
10) Are there legal or copyright issues in interviewing bands and publishing the material alongside photos without a company behind you?
11) How do bands react to being approached for fanzine interviews? Do they differentiate between doing press for a zine with a tiny circulation and an article that's going to show up on one of the major metal sites, for example?
12) (For the zine publishers whose works have been compiled through Bazillion Points) What was it like going through a for-profit publishing house when the ethos of fanzines was so fiercely DIY? How did you decide that granting them permission to publish your zines was the right choice?

More will undoubtedly come up as I start to build the backbone for the article but I think these are a good start.

Drinking Games response

The Malcolm Gladwell article we read for today's class was a pretty significant departure from a lot of what we've been reading. While there are quotes that were gathered from reporting, the article reads a lot more like a simplification of an anthropology journal than a true magazine story. Indeed, the sources are all academics, and their work has been (presumably) dumbed down considerably so that average Joe readers of Malcolm Gladwell's website can understand their conclusions. It's a riveting story, but I wouldn't particularly say that that's Gladwell's doing.

The lead is a scene of Professor Dwight Heath, then a Yale graduate student, finding out that he'd be doing his anthropology research in Bolivia. This sets up the first conveniently numbered section of the article, which takes place entirely in Bolivia and back in New Haven while going over research specifically acquired in Bolivia.

The numbered sections make it every easy to pick apart the structure of the article. The second section deals with a reconsideration of the definition of "alcoholism" and the changing research on the effects of booze. The third section deals with different reactions people have to alcohol and how the standard assumptions are likely false. The fourth section draws out the contrast between different societies of drinkers – namely the Bolivian boozers who drink lab-grade alcohol every weekend and the Italian Americans who drink every day in moderation. The fifth section tries to make sense of all the anecdotes and research that have been presented and closes on a somewhat awkward kicker recapping a Coors Light commercial that saddens Gladwell in its simplicity.

While the article is easy to understand and dissect, and gracefully written, I wasn't terribly impressed by the reporting itself. It's one thing to interview experts, and it's another to paraphrase their findings. Gladwell is undoubtedly a genius, but I don't think that necessarily makes him a great journalist.

The End of Men response

The Atlantic's "The End of Men" is one of the longest and most powerful pieces we've read. Not powerful in the same sense as "The Peekaboo Paradox" or "Can You Say Hero?", but merely staggering in its scope, its presentation of facts, and its workmanlike (workwomanlike?) style. It's clearly a trend piece, but it has a lot more oomph than the Gideon Bible piece we read for Tuesday, partly because of its length but more so because of its content.

The lead is both a scene-setting/anecdotal lead but also a historical one. It doesn't put us right there with the sperm racing each other in the present tense, but it provides enough color that the summary is fleshed out enough to be interesting and entertaining. It also lets us meet the cowboy biologist and we really get to know him through the descriptions and quotes we're offered.

The nut graf is a bit ambiguous to me but seems to come in the 8th paragraph, starting with "Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind." This paragraph gets at the broader heart of the matter than any of the anecdotal grafs before it. It explains the broader societal shifts toward a preference for females and, more importantly, why that shift has begun. If I can roll the 9th paragraph in with it, you have pretty much all of the information that the article will expand upon.

The rest of the article's incredible length expands on the trend and points to numerous examples and ways in which women are perhaps the better-off sex in today's world and the world of the future. It intersperses this by taking us into scenes -- the men's support group, the community college, the sorority house -- but it keeps hitting us with more facts and figures as well. It creates an almost exhausting feel, not because the material is boring but because there's just so much overwhelming evidence (at least in this reporter's estimation, we don't hear much from studies done to prove the opposite) that women are the gender of forever and that men need to pull their acts together.

The style remains consistent throughout, but it's worth noting the revisiting of the lead towards the end. At this point in the reporter's arguments, the cowboy rogue seems so radically out of step with the world that his reintroduction, and the reporter calls attention to that. The kicker is as humorous as it is harrowing -- or maybe that's my testosterone speaking.

Gideon Bible response

Newsweek's Gideon Bible piece is easily the shortest story we've read for class thus far, and as such, it lacked a lot of the depth of some of the articles. I thought it was still a pretty good read, even if I have a small criticism.

I understand that this is a trend piece to show that fewer hotels are stocking their classrooms with Bibles, but it would have been nice to get a quote or two from a staunchly religious hotel mogul arguing in favor of keeping Gideon Bibles around. A longer piece would have no excuse not to include a few paragraphs from someone with that viewpoint.

For what it is, though, this is an interesting story, albeit one without much to dissect. The lead is a good, somewhat newsy one, and it does an excellent job of setting up right away what the story will be about. In a sense, the lead also serves as the nut graf and the Colonel Trautman moment all at once. The first paragraph introduces the story, tells what it will primarily be about, and drops a few "shocking facts." It makes sense due to the story's short length, and it's done pretty effectively.

The tone is pretty objective and uncommitted, though the aforementioned omission of any real opposition is problematic. The kicker tries a little too hard to be cute and isn't very effective, but it still fits the content of the story.

Sources for Story 2

Print sources:
Touch and Go: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine '79-'83 (Bazillion Points)
Metalion: The Slayer Mag Diaries (Bazillion Points)
Glorious Times: A Pictorial of the Death Metal Scene 1984-1991 (self-published)

Human sources:
Dayan Weller
Tesco Vee
Dave Stimson
Steve Miller
Jon "Metalion" Kristiansen
Alan Moses
Brian Pattison

All human sources except for Weller are pending response at this point, so alternately, I can radically localize the piece by talking to people involved in the Bloomington scene who I know through friends rather than give the piece its current, historical bent.

Dark matter alternative lead

No one knows what dark matter is, or if it even really exists.

But that hasn't stopped a team of physicists from commandeering a mile-deep hole in the ground left behind by a boarded-up gold mine in South Dakota with the express intention of finding some.

The 50 researchers staked out in Lead, South Dakota (pop. 2,848) comprise the membership of the LUX project, so named for the Large Underground Xenon dark matter detector that is the crux of their operation. LUX is one of ten projects in the world right now searching for dark matter, and its members are driven not just by the usual pride that scientists take in the onward march of knowledge but also by wanting to be first.

Science hasn't settled on just what dark matter is or what it's made of, but the prevailing theory holds that it is composed of WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles, so that's what LUX hunts for in the enormous pit beneath Lead. Of course, there's always the chance that they're wrong.

“If it ends up that dark matter is not made of WIMPs, it will be much more disappointing in a philosophical sense than in a personal sense, in that humankind won’t know what dark matter is,” project co-founder Tom Shutt says. “We’re fully prepared that we might not find it ourselves. But if we as a community don’t find it, that will be awfully disappointing.”

Dark matter article response

"Almost a Mile Below South Dakota, A Race to Find Dark Matter" from Popular Science read a lot like the Apple article in the sense that it took a topic that is difficult for laypeople to understand – namely the concept of dark matter, an unproven physical phenomenon – and successfully communicated it to people not in the field. That's exactly what Popular Science's job is, even implied in its name, so that should come as no surprise. But I always think it's neat when journalism can be used to take something technical and make it not only accessible but engaging for people who wouldn't necessarily be interested in it at face value.

Structurally, "Dark Matter" read a lot more like an extended newspaper feature than most of the articles we've read this semester. The lead is historical, but not particularly scene-setting or "cutesy," like so many of the stories we read get away with. The story then goes through and basically just tells the story of this mining town and its unusual present circumstance. There's no real scenes, and if there's sections, it's just where the writer takes time away from telling the story to provide additional science and background on dark matter. It's an interesting story, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot to say about it from a structural perspective.

Apple article response

"How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong" from Wired is exactly the kind of business story I like: one that barely reads like one. For a year in high school, I subscribed to The Economist and I always flipped right to the section on entrepreneurs doing interesting things. This article takes that premise and disseminates it to an even wider audience, taking a company that most of the Wired target audience is intimately familiar with (Apple) and digging into its inner workings.

It's a borderline profile, too, though it certainly has a much wider cast of characters than a typical profile typically yields. We really get to know the way Apple CEO Steve Jobs works, namely, that he's an asshole but no one cares because he's so good at what he does and inspires so much creativity in his employees. More than being an article about Jobs, though, the piece is a rumination on the Apple business model, why it works, and why even minor disappointments lead to what it terms "post-Macworld depression."

The article isn't terribly critical of Apple, though it does bring up some complaints consumers have. It's a slightly fluffy article that has no shortage of praise for Apple. As a satisfied MacBook Pro and iPod Classic owner, it didn't bug me, but perhaps as a critical reader of magazine stories, it did a little bit. Regardless, the style of the article was all in place and made for an enjoyable, breezy read on two subjects – business and technology – that are rarely enjoyable and breezy.

Story 2 Ideas

I have two plans for my second story, both of which zero in a little bit more on my personal interests than my profile did. I'd like to write a how-to article on starting a fanzine, specifically a metal/hardcore fanzine, using people who have launched their own as sources, and taking a look at the state of the handmade, Xeroxed fanzine in the era of the Internet. The other story I'm interested in writing is about the separation of art and artist. There have been similar articles on some sites I read, usually talking about people like Roman Polanski and Michael Vick. I'd like to take a look at it from the extreme metal perspective, dealing with bands like Arghoslent who believe in genetic racial superiority or Burzum whose sole member has been convicted for murder and arson. Right now, I'm leaning toward the how-to fanzine article as I have some sources lined up already.

If I decided to do a profile instead because these two stories don't come to fruition, I have a subject for that as well: Mr. Chris Davis, my high school English and journalism teacher who also plays in bar bands. It's a fallback, though. My primary interest would lie in the fanzine piece.