Tag: writing

How a Tetanus Shot Turned Me Into Hamlet

Chronic injuries make cowards of us all. The moment something snaps, pinches, or throbs, we become amateur radiologists, WebMD addicts, and midnight correspondents to our favorite AI oracle. Two days ago, I was diagnosed with left rotator cuff syndrome and left biceps tendinopathy. The ultrasound is five weeks away, a kind of orthopedic oracle reading, to determine whether the gods demand surgery. I followed the physical therapist’s rehab routine like a monk honoring scripture, only to feel soreness not just in the injured shoulder, but the good one as well. Suddenly, I was a man with two defective meat hooks, staring down the possibility of losing the ability to open a jar or button a shirt. Too little rehab, my shoulder would ossify into frozen stone; too much rehab, the tendons would “retract,” that satanic verb whispered in dark orthopedic circles—also leading to surgery. The tightrope was killing me. I imagined myself as a doomed invalid, a useless patriarch who had to ask his teenage daughters to help him put on socks.

This morning I drove to the Honda dealership, handed over the keys, and walked home for my “workout,” earbuds piping KCRW’s Left, Right & Center into my ears. As I trudged past the familiar storefronts on Hawthorne Boulevard and spotted that the Chinese restaurant had been replaced by an IHOP, a revelation struck: the soreness in my right shoulder wasn’t from rehab. It was from the tetanus shot I’d gotten the same day as my diagnosis. The universe wasn’t collapsing—just my sense of proportion. In an instant I went from doomed cripple to idiot hypochondriac, humbled by the absurdity of my own catastrophizing.

To add insult to ego, I’d been treating this like a heroic ordeal. At Thanksgiving, my brother-in-law mentioned his own rotator cuff—65% torn, surgery, sling, brutal rehab—and he endured it without turning it into a Greek tragedy. Meanwhile, I recorded a video describing my plight and dozens of fellow sufferers flooded the comments with horror stories of two-year recoveries, cortisone injections, and pain that made sleep a myth. So now I’m trying to regain perspective, to tighten my armor and “gird up thy loins like a man,” as the biblical thunderbolt commands.

Easier said than done.

November 28, 2025
The Rotator Cuff, the Honda Dealership, and the Human Soul
Life has a way of mocking our plans. You stride in with a neat blueprint, and the universe responds by flinging marbles under your feet. My shoulder rehab, for instance, was supposed to be a disciplined, daily ritual: the holy grail of recovering from a torn rotator cuff. Instead, after one enthusiastic session, both shoulders flared with the kind of throbbing soreness reserved for muscles resurrected from the dead (though after walking home from Honda, it occurred to me that my right shoulder soreness is probably the result of a tetanus shot). So much for the doctor’s handouts of broomstick rotations and wall flexions. Today, the new fitness plan is modest: drop off the Honda for service, walk two miles home, and declare that my workout. Tomorrow: to be determined by the whims of my tendons and sore muscles.

Teaching is no different. I’ve written my entire Spring 2026 curriculum, but then I read about humanities professor Alan Jacobs—our pedagogical monk—who has ditched computers entirely. Students handwrite every assignment in composition books; they read photocopied essays with wide margins, scribbling annotations in ink. According to Jacobs, with screens removed and the “LLM demons” exorcised, students rediscover themselves as human beings. They think again. They care again. I can see the appeal. They’re no longer NPCs feeding essays into the AI maw.

But then I remembered who I am. I’m not a parchment-and-fountain-pen professor any more than I’m a pure vegan. I am a creature of convenience, pragmatism, and modern constraints. My students live in a world of laptops, apps, and algorithms; teaching them only quills and notebooks would be like handing a medieval knight a lightsaber and insisting he fight with a broomstick. I will honor authenticity another way—through the power of my prompts, the relevance of my themes, and the personal narratives that force students to confront their own thoughts rather than outsource them. My job is to balance the human soul with the tools of the age, not to bury myself—and my students—in nostalgia cosplay.
November 28, 2025
Thanksgiving Heart Attack

Thanksgiving Day, 2025. My wife and twin daughters were applying their final cosmetic and sartorial flourishes before we drove to Los Alamitos for the obligatory family pageant, and I had a half-hour window of solitude. I sat at my Yamaha piano, eager to play a song I’d written years ago—“The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz”—a melancholic tribute to a Monkees episode that shattered my five-year-old psyche. In it, Micky pumps iron to steal a blonde beach goddess from a sun-bleached bodybuilder, only to discover she has evolved into a Proust-reading aesthete and now prefers intellectuals who collect first editions. It was my first lesson in the absurdity of desire: you can train, sweat, and transform yourself into a bronze Adonis only to watch beauty run away with a man who hides behind Remembrance of Things Past. That moment was my first crack in the façade of childhood—when I faintly understood life might be crueler and more ambiguous than birthday cake and Saturday morning cartoons.

Halfway through the song, I felt a stabbing pressure in my left chest—an alarm bell that whispered, “heart attack.” It was the kind of pain you ignore for twenty seconds until the fear gets loud. Maybe it was simple anxiety: I am sixty-four, three semesters from retirement, and just endured Sam Harris complimenting Christian fundamentalist Doug Wilson for possessing the courage of his biblical barbarities. As an agnostic torn between admiration and nausea, I crave certainty the way addicts crave relapse—but God gives me ambiguity, Paul gives me guilt, and the afterlife gives me indigestion.

Ethics don’t spare me, either. I eat yogurt and whey protein while pretending I don’t hear the screams behind factory-farmed supply chains. My “plant-leaning” diet is a moral performance piece—vegan cosplay with a dairy chaser. Every spoonful tastes like cognitive dissonance.

The day before, a sports doctor diagnosed my left shoulder with rotator cuff syndrome and biceps tendinopathy. She promised I might avoid surgery if I did her rehab exercises. She printed out eleven medieval torture movements, most of which lit my shoulder up like a Roman candle. Should I push through the pain, I wondered, or was I already guilty of kettlebell blasphemy—retracting the tendon until I doomed myself to the orthopedic gulag?

So I sat there, convinced the pain in my chest was an omen. But when my wife stepped into the living room and asked me—without ceremony—whether her boots matched her dress, the pain evaporated. The piano, the Monkees, Sam Harris, Paul, vegan sins, and torn tendons all vanished. Her question grounded me. It was the kind of mundane interruption that reminds you the world is still here, indifferent to your melodramas. My imaginary heart attack surrendered to domestic reality.

November 27, 2025
Does AI Destroy or Redefine Learning?

Argumentative Essay Prompt: The Effects of AI on Education (1,700 words)

Artificial intelligence has raised alarm bells in education. Critics argue that students now rely so heavily on AI tools that they are becoming users rather than thinkers—outsourcing curiosity, creativity, and problem-solving to machines. In this view, the classroom is slowly deteriorating into a culture of passivity, distraction, and what some call a form of “communal stupidity.”

In his Atlantic essay “My Students Use AI. So What?” linguist and educator John McWhorter challenges this narrative. Instead of treating AI as a threat to intelligence, he examines the everyday media consumption of his tween daughters. They spend little time reading traditional books, yet their time online exposes them to sophisticated humor, stylized language, and clever cultural references. Rather than dulling their minds, McWhorter argues, certain forms of media sharpen them—and occasionally reach the level of genuine artistic expression.

McWhorter anticipates objections. Books demand imagination, concentration, and patience. He does not deny this. But he asks whether we have elevated books into unquestioned sacred objects. Human creativity has always existed in visual, auditory, and performative arts—not exclusively on the printed page.

Like many educators, McWhorter also acknowledges that schooling must adapt. Just as no teacher today would demand students calculate square roots without a calculator, he recognizes that assigning a formulaic five-paragraph essay invites AI to automate it. Teaching must evolve, not retreat. He concludes that educators and parents must create new forms of engagement that work within the technological environment students actually inhabit.

Is McWhorter persuasive? In a 1,700-word argumentative essay, defend, refute, or complicate his central claim that AI is not inherently corrosive to thinking, and that education must evolve rather than resist technological realities. Your essay should:
• Make a clear, debatable thesis about AI’s influence on learning, creativity, and critical thinking.
• Analyze how McWhorter defines intelligence, skill, and engagement in digital environments.
• Include a counterargument–rebuttal section in which you address why some technologies may be so disruptive that adapting to them becomes impossible—or whether that fear misunderstands how students actually learn.
• Use evidence from McWhorter and at least two additional credible sources.
• Include a Works Cited page in MLA format with at least four sources total.

Your goal is not to simply summarize McWhorter, but to weigh his claims against reality. Does AI open new modes of literacy, or does it train us into passive consumption? What does responsible adaptation look like, and where do we draw the line between embracing tools and surrendering agency?

Building Block 1: Introduction Paragraph:

Write a 300-word paragraph describing a non-book activity—such as a specific YouTube channel, a TikTok creator, an online gaming stream, or a subreddit—that entertains you while also requiring real engagement and intellectual effort. Do not speak in broad generalities; focus on one example. Describe what drew you to that content and what makes it more than passive consumption. If you choose a subreddit, explain how it operates: Do members debate technical details, challenge arguments, post layered memes that reference politics or philosophy, or analyze social behavior that demands you understand context and nuance? If you choose a video or stream, describe how its pacing, humor, visual cues, or language force you to track patterns, notice subtle callbacks, or recognize sarcasm and satire. Show how your brain works to interpret signals, anticipate moves, decode cultural references, or evaluate whether the creator is being sincere, ironic, or manipulative. Explain how this activity cultivates cognitive skills—pattern recognition, strategic thinking, language sensitivity, humor literacy, or cultural analysis—that are not identical to reading but still intellectually substantial. Then connect your experience to John McWhorter’s argument in “My Students Use AI. So What?” by explaining how your engagement challenges the assumption that screen-based media turns young people into passive consumers. McWhorter claims that digital content can sharpen minds by exposing viewers to stylized language, comedic timing, and creative expression; show how your chosen activity illustrates (or complicates) this point. Conclude by reflecting on whether the skills you are developing—whether from decoding layered Reddit discussions or following complex video essays—are simply different from the skills cultivated by books, or whether they offer alternative paths to intelligence that schools and parents should take seriously.

Building Block 2: Conclusion

Write a 250-word conclusion in which you step back from your argument and explain what your thesis reveals about the broader social implications of online entertainment. Do not summarize your paper. Instead, reflect on how your analysis has changed the way you think about digital media and your own habits as a viewer, gamer, or participant. Explain how your chosen example—whether a subreddit, a content creator, a gaming channel, or another digital space—demonstrates that online entertainment is not automatically a form of distraction or intellectual decay. Discuss how interacting with this media has trained you to interpret tone, decode humor or irony, follow complex narratives, or understand cultural signals that are easy to miss if you are not paying attention. Then consider what this means for society: If students are learning language, timing, persuasion, and nuance in digital environments, how should teachers, parents, and institutions respond? Should they continue to treat online entertainment as a threat to literacy, or as an alternate path to it? Draw a connection between your growth as a thinker and the larger question of where intelligence is cultivated in the 21st century. End your paragraph with a reflection on how your relationship to digital media has changed: Do you now view certain forms of online entertainment as trivial distractions, or as unexpected arenas where people practice rhetorical agility, cultural awareness, and cognitive skill?

November 26, 2025
The Cult of the Desktop Shrine

There is a particular species of human for whom a new computer is not a tool — it’s a religious conversion. The desktop isn’t a workspace; it’s a cockpit for a future self, the glamorous avatar of the writer, artist, or content sorcerer they imagine they will become. People like this do not simply buy machines. They curate private shrines. A desk becomes an escape pod: LED lights humming like temple candles, two monitors glowing like stained-glass windows, and the mechanical keyboard serving as a holy relic. Once seated, the outside world ceases to exist — or so the fantasy goes — until an eBay tab opens and suddenly a $2,500 dive watch begs for attention, or a pair of ergonomic walking shoes on sale becomes a spiritual priority. Sacredness is delicate; it collapses at the first whiff of retail dopamine.

I speak as one of these zealots. I live in a small home with a wife and two teenage daughters, so I protect the illusion of solitude with the devotion of a medieval monk. My desktop setup has become my monastery. For seven years, I have sat beside the same computer: a 15.6-inch Acer Predator Triton 500 with an RTX 2080, perched like a retired fighter pilot on a wooden pedestal. Beside it stands a 27-inch Asus Designo 4K monitor. My keyboard is an Asus Rog Strix Scope II fitted with “quiet snow” switches — though I still regret not choosing switches that click like a typewriter possessed by Bukowski.

Here’s the problem: the machine refuses to die. It doesn’t slow down, wheeze, or show symptoms of electronic mortality. It handles everything I throw at it. This stubborn longevity has become an accusation. If I truly mattered — if I were a world-crushing content creator — surely I would need M4 silicon or a Windows Ultra 9. But here I am, a humble i7 and RTX 2080 carrying my entire life on its back like a mule. The message is humiliating: you produce so little that even an elderly predator laptop barely notices your existence. I am not a digital gladiator. I am an NPC.

One half of me wants to honor the Acer’s absurd durability. I want to see how long it lasts: eight years? Ten? Will it run until I am eighty and my daughters sell it on Facebook Marketplace to a grad student writing her dissertation? The other half of me yearns for a new identity — a fresh cockpit. I fantasize about a Lenovo ThinkPad P16, a machine with the aesthetic of a NATO command center. In my imagination I would sit before it, efficient and unstoppable, a productivity samurai. Then I read about thermals, swollen batteries, and the corporate decay of ThinkPad build quality, and the fantasy curdles.

Mini PCs tempt me, too — elegant little cubes promising freedom from laptop fan noise. But then I scroll deeper and learn about overheating, BIOS drama, firmware rituals, and mysterious Windows gremlins that exist only for people who try to “optimize.” This is when I confront the truth: Windows PCs are for people fluent in Linux, the jiu-jitsu masters of tech. These individuals have tattoos of penguins on their forearms and spend weekends customizing drivers the way normal people mow their lawns. They don’t “use computers.” They tame them.

I am not that creature. I am a man who gets nervous updating his router. This leaves me with one path: the Mac Mini. Not because I am enlightened, but because the walls of Apple’s walled garden keep me from accidentally burning the place down. Windows is a vast golf course stretching to the horizon. MacOS is miniature golf: enclosed, guarded, brightly colored obstacles that keep your ball out of the swamp. I must accept who I am — a timid, high-functioning idiot — and pick the putter.

And yet, when people complain about laptops dying after three years, I can raise a hand and say: “Seven years. RTX 2080. Still alive.” It is not greatness, but it is a kind of glory.

November 25, 2025
The Monster in the Ravine and the Moon Over the Suburbs

Last night I dreamed I was wandering through a house I didn’t recognize. The world outside was pitch black. A small family dog pressed its nose to the sliding glass door and barked toward the backyard, desperate to escape. I opened the door and watched the little creature trot behind the bushes to relieve itself. That’s when a monster rose out of the ravine—some hulking mastiff with the skull of a bull, as if a guard dog from the underworld had crawled up to inspect the living. It ignored the pet and fixed its gaze on me. Without hesitation, it entered the house and began to contort into different shapes of malice. At first, I trembled. Then anger boiled in me like a furnace. This thing wasn’t just ugly; it was the source of suffering and rot in the world. I begged God to purify me so I could destroy it, but heaven stayed silent. What I received instead was a strange consolation: a feeling that at least my rage was righteous, and that I still knew where my moral compass pointed.

Eventually the creature disappeared and daylight arrived. I made a long trek back toward what I understood to be “home.” Across the street, my neighbors were ecstatic, pointing skyward. Hovering above their house was a massive white dome—like a camper shell the size of a Costco, a fallen moon with decorative crenellations. Soon crowds formed. It was a city attraction, a spectacle engineered to “bring excitement.” Snowflakes—artificial, slow-motion confetti—drifted through the air. People gasped, laughed, and posed for photos, thrilled by the distraction.

The beast was gone, but the problem of evil remained unsolved. In its place, my city embraced pageantry, gimmicks, and civic cheerleading. I touched my aching left shoulder, the one crippled by a three-month rotator cuff tear, and wondered what I would become—a broken man, a burden, a questionable member of society. Fake snow drifted onto the jubilant crowd, and their rosy smiles suggested that change, or at least the illusion of it, was already underway.

November 25, 2025
Heroes and Living Dead: What Douglass and Chekhov’s Nikolai Teach Us About the Meaning of a Good Life
College Essay Prompt

We often assume that the pursuit of freedom and happiness is a universal human impulse, shared across eras, cultures, and personal histories. Yet the paths individuals take toward those goals can be radically different, and those differences reveal whether one’s concept of happiness liberates or destroys. Few figures illustrate this divide more clearly than Frederick Douglass and Nikolai Ivanovitch from Anton Chekhov’s short story “Gooseberries.” Douglass’s character and trajectory embody a moral code that turns hardship into purpose: through literacy, community, courage, and a refusal to internalize oppression, he transforms enslavement into a platform for human dignity—not only for himself, but for others. By contrast, Nikolai pursues a narrow, adolescent fantasy of happiness, one built not on self-growth or empathy but on domination, comfort, and the myth of personal entitlement. His life becomes a grotesque parody of fulfillment—an existence of empty pleasures, self-deception, parasitic dependence, and spiritual decay beneath the veneer of material abundance.

In a 1,700-word essay, analyze how Douglass’s journey to freedom stands as a model of healthy, ethical happiness while Nikolai’s descent exposes a warped, toxic version of happiness rooted in narcissism and self-indulgence. Your essay should do the following:
1. Compare the moral foundations of Douglass and Nikolai’s pursuits.
  Explain how Douglass’s “Bushido-like” moral code—discipline, responsibility, representation, courage, and community—shapes his identity and empowers those around him. Contrast this with Nikolai’s rejection of accountability, his obsession with land ownership, and his willingness to deplete others—emotionally, financially, and spiritually—to maintain his fantasy of contentment. Discuss how each man’s vision of freedom manifests in their treatment of other people.
2. Analyze the role of community vs. isolation in each character’s development.
  Douglass’s path is paradoxically individual and communal: he cultivates internal strength, but he locates freedom in solidarity—those who teach him to read, abolitionists who elevate his voice, and the enslaved people whose suffering he speaks for. Meanwhile, Nikolai constructs a private empire that excludes others, even the brother who once supported him. Consider how their relationships either amplify or erode their humanity.
3. Examine the symbolic images of transformation and degradation.
  Use key passages from Douglass’s Narrative to show how literacy, speech, political action, and public representation transform him from an enslaved boy into a moral and political leader. Then show how Nikolai’s physical and spiritual decay—his swollen body, the petty rituals of comfort, the stagnant gooseberries—reflect the collapse of his inner self. Avoid plot summary; instead interrogate how each author uses these symbols to define what “freedom” looks like in practice.
4. Discuss how each figure embodies or violates a healthy definition of happiness.
  What does Douglass’s version of happiness require? Effort, growth, sacrifice, connection, and the willingness to uplift others even when it hurts. What does Nikolai’s version require? Exploitation, avoidance of reality, refusal to change, and the delusion that comfort equals fulfillment. Describe how a life built on purpose creates meaning, while a life built on selfish gratification becomes spiritually unlivable.
5. Address at least one counterargument.
  Consider why Nikolai might be appealing to some readers. Isn’t his dream of having a small estate, comfort, and peace understandable? Why might some view Douglass’s path as impossibly heroic—too demanding, too painful, or too noble for the average person? Engage with these viewpoints seriously, and rebut them using evidence from the texts.
6. End with a conclusion that points to broader implications.
  Connect your contrast to the world we live in now. What do Douglass and Nikolai teach us about modern definitions of success, happiness, and the “good life”? Can happiness exist without social responsibility? Does personal freedom become toxic when it is purchased at the expense of others? Ask yourself what moral code has the power to sustain a person—and why some forms of comfort inevitably rot the soul.
Your essay should not merely compare two characters; it should interrogate the meaning behind their choices. You are ultimately making an argument about what counts as real freedom and real happiness. Your goal is to show that the paths we choose do not simply determine the lives we build—they determine the kind of people we become.
November 24, 2025
The Day My Wife Met the Quietest Refugees

Before our twins were even born—more than fifteen years ago—my wife told me a story that still sits in the back of my mind like a ghost that refuses to leave. She and her best friend, A, drove to Long Beach to visit what would soon be A’s new home. She and her partner had bought it a month earlier, but escrow delays, termite fumigation, and bureaucratic nonsense kept the place stuck in a strange limbo: theirs legally, but uninhabitable in practice. The house was technically empty—no furniture, no boxes—just an address waiting for its owners to arrive.

Inside, my wife and A heard voices drifting from somewhere near the kitchen. They followed the sound and found a couple, perhaps in their early fifties, sitting at the counter with steaming cups of bouillon broth. They were calm, unthreatening, even dignified. Two shopping carts stood beside them like faithful dogs, packed with precision: folded clothes, cans of food, hygiene supplies, diabetic needles, prescription bottles—everything arranged with military neatness. My wife used the word squatters, but they looked more like survivors who had finally found a safe harbor.

They spoke kindly. They’d been living there for nearly a month, they said. The house sheltered them from the cold; they cooked simple meals, washed, slept. They didn’t pretend it was theirs—only that it was a rare oasis in a city allergic to mercy. My wife described them as being sweet, especially toward one another. More than anything, my wife was moved by their sweetness and tenderness.

Then A told them in a gentle tone that she was the homeowner. The couple apologized, almost embarrassed. The man rolled his cart out first, down the hallway and out through the front door. His companion followed—until she stopped mid-stride, panic rippling across her face. He had forgotten one of his medications. She sprinted back to the kitchen, grabbed the bottle, and hurried after him.

That moment—her urgency, her loyalty, the fragile bond of two people clinging to each other against the world—burned itself into my heart. Even now, whenever I remember it, my eyes well with tears.

November 23, 2025
Camp Flog Gnaw: The Weekend That Broke My Driving Career

Camp Flog Gnaw was a weekend-long bacchanal of sound and sweat for my wife and our twin daughters, two days of music and mayhem baked under the unforgiving Los Angeles sun. My wife braved the trip on Friday and came home looking like a survivor of a maritime disaster, muttering that leaving Dodger Stadium traffic was like trying to escape a collapsing pyramid. She begged me to handle Sunday drop-off and assured me they would Uber home like civilized people. Armed with a “Fast Pass” for the 110 North, I engaged Google Maps, which promptly betrayed me and sent me barreling into downtown—an urban obstacle course specifically engineered to destroy men my age. Pedestrians sprang into the street like feral pigeons, daring me to earn a manslaughter charge. Driverless Waymo cars drifted past me with pastel-lit antennae, cheerful like clown hearses guiding me into the underworld. The lanes themselves seemed painted by committee: solid, dashed, turning, not turning, red, green, “maybe stop,” “maybe don’t”—a psychedelic optical exam administered at 20 mph.

When I finally dropped off my wife and daughters, I whispered a confession to my wife: “I think I’m giving my Accord to you, and the other car to the girls. I’m retiring from the driving game.” They didn’t laugh; they’ve seen cracks in the armor. I’m a high-strung man, and at sixty-four, the neurons don’t fire like they used to. I can still handle a five-mile radius around my house—my personal demilitarized zone—but pull me into the wilds of Los Angeles traffic and I’m ready to hang up my driver’s jersey. Downtown LA isn’t a city. It’s a gladiatorial arena where the young come to dominate, and I say to myself, “This is no country for old men.”

November 23, 2025
Inside the 2026 Spring Semester: Stupidification, Katrina, and the Myth of the Self-Made Man

3 Essay Assignments for my Freshman Composition and Critical Thinking Classes, Spring 2026 Semester

Freshman Composition Class

Essay1: How Black Mirror Imagines the Stupidification of Social Media

This essay prompt asks you to write a 1,700-word argumentative essay analyzing how the Black Mirror episodes “Joan Is Awful” and “Nosedive” portray the digitally intensified “stupidification” Jonathan Haidt describes in “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Your goal is to take a clear, debatable position on whether these episodes exaggerate social-media anxieties or accurately reflect the psychological and social pathologies shaping online life. In a 200–250 word introduction, you must define “stupidification” using Haidt’s key ideas—such as the Babel metaphor, outrage incentives, the collapse of shared reality, identity performance, and tribal signaling—and then connect these concepts to one concrete example from your own life or observations. End your introduction with a focused thesis evaluating how effectively the two episodes illuminate the realities of social-media-driven stupidity.

Essay 2: Hurricane Katrina: Natural Disaster or Man-Made Catastrophe?

This essay prompt asks you to write a 1,700-word argumentative essay on the claim that Hurricane Katrina was less a natural disaster than a national failure. Drawing on the documentaries Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time and Katrina: Come Hell and High Water, along with Clint Smith’s “Twenty Years After the Storm” and Nicholas Lemann’s “Why Hurricane Katrina Was Not a Natural Disaster,” you will analyze how government neglect, weak infrastructure, racial inequity, and media distortion contributed to the catastrophe. These works reveal a fourfold betrayal—red-lining, unprepared institutions, delayed aid, and harmful narratives—that left New Orleans, especially its Black communities, vulnerable and abandoned. Your essay should evaluate how systemic issues of race, class, and policy exacerbated the disaster while also exploring how families, neighborhoods, and cultural identity fostered resilience. Ultimately, you will consider what Katrina teaches us about justice, responsibility, and the human cost of institutional failure.

Essay 3: The Myth of the Self-Made Man

Many commentators, institutions, and public narratives present Frederick Douglass as the quintessential “self-made man,” using his rise from slavery to argue that personal discipline and individual grit are enough to overcome oppression. Write an essay analyzing why Douglass is framed this way: What political, cultural, or ideological purposes does this simplified narrative serve, and what parts of Douglass’s life and writing does it erase? Then, drawing on one or more of the following—Get Out, Black Panther, The Evolution of the Black Quarterback, and ALLENIV3SON—argue how these works challenge the myth that individual effort alone is sufficient to escape a modern form of the “Sunken Place.” Use evidence from Douglass and your chosen texts, address at least one counterargument, and provide a reasoned rebuttal.

Critical Thinking Class

Essay 1: Shame as Entertainment: The Myth of Moral Fitness in The Biggest Loser

With 70 percent of Americans now overweight or obese, it’s no wonder the nation is obsessed with weight loss. That obsession fuels a vast industry of diets, influencers, and reality shows, none more infamous than The Biggest Loser. The series, which became the subject of the three-part docuseries Fit for TV: The Reality of The Biggest Loser, reveals how television turned the suffering of overweight people into prime-time entertainment. Contestants were pushed, shamed, and humiliated under the guise of “motivation.” The so-called fitness experts preached self-discipline, grit, and moral purity, but what they really offered was a cocktail of cruelty and pseudoscience disguised as inspiration. In a 1,700-word essay, analyze how the abuse documented in Fit for TV exposes the deeper myths behind weight loss culture. Drawing on Fit for TV, Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall’s essay “It’s Not You. It’s the Food,” and Rebecca Johns’s “A Diet Writer’s Regrets,” develop an argument that answers this question:

What is intrinsically abusive about the gospel of self-discipline in weight loss, and how does this ideology blind us to the systemic causes of obesity while offering a hollow sense of meaning through influencers and their heroic panaceas? Your essay must include a counterargument and rebuttal section and a Works Cited page in MLA format with at least three sources.

Essay 2: Ozempification and the Age of De-Skilling

This essay prompt asks you to write a 1,700-word argumentative essay on whether dependence on AI always harms human skill—or whether, in some cases, it can be “bad but worth it.” Drawing on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “The Age of De-Skilling,” you will use his distinctions between corrosive de-skilling, “bad but worth it” de-skilling, and unacceptable forms of de-skilling to evaluate how AI affects our thinking, creativity, and agency. You must take a clear position on whether AI meaningfully frees us for deeper work or mostly dulls our abilities and trains us into passivity. Your essay should distinguish between lazy reliance on AI and intentional collaboration with it, include a counterargument–rebuttal section, and incorporate an example of Ozempification—the growing cultural pattern in which people outsource effort, discipline, or agency to an external system, becoming passive “users” rather than active participants—from a Black Mirror episode such as “Joan Is Awful,” “Nosedive,” or “Smithereens.” You are required to use at least three sources in MLA format, including Appiah.

Essay 3: The Whole Truth About Ultra-Processed Foods

Using Olga Khazan’s “Avoiding Ultra-Processed Foods Is Completely Unrealistic,” Dhruv Khullar’s “Why Is the American Diet So Deadly?” and Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall’s “It’s Not You. It’s the Food” as your central texts, write a 1,700-word argumentative essay analyzing whether ultra-processed foods deserve their reputation as the villain of modern nutrition. Evaluate the claim that the only truly healthy diet is one built exclusively on whole foods.

In your essay, define what counts as “whole,” “processed,” and “ultra-processed,” and analyze how clear or meaningful these categories actually are. Then examine the real-world constraints shaping American diets, including economics, time, geography, marketing, and systemic inequities. How realistic is it for the average eater to avoid ultra-processed foods altogether? What trade-offs—financial, cultural, and practical—shape people’s choices?

As part of your argument, consider how emerging tools like GLP-1 medications or AI-guided meal planning may influence how we define “healthy eating.” Do these tools expand options for overwhelmed consumers, or push us toward a future where food becomes less cultural and more optimized?

Your essay must include one counterargument–rebuttal section and an MLA Works Cited page with at least four sources.

November 21, 2025