Planet Narnia

Tonight I went with my classmates to Socrates in the City, an event hosted by Eric Metaxas at the Union League Club in Manhattan. The featured speaker was Michael Ward, author of “Planet Narnia.” The lecture was a fascinating glimpse into the book. Ward is a C.S. Lewis aficionado who claims to have discovered the key [...]

Doors in Greenwich Village

We had the day off today, so I went down to the Staten Island Ferry with a friend and we walked back through Greenwich Village. We saw some great doors. Here are a few:

Tunisia beckons near American icon

A few blocks from the American icon of the Empire State Building, foreign culture beckons.
The bright blue awning of the Tunisian Cultural Center, the color of Tunisian skies, ushers the curious into the building. Up a steep flight of stairs and around a sharp corner, a slice of Tunisian culture awaits.
Director Naima Remadi said she [...]

Farmer in the city

We spent most of the day putting together slide shows based on an assignment we had last night. The assignment was to find someone at work in the city and document their job with photos and audio. I tag-teamed with a classmate on this one; I shot the photos and she took the audio. I [...]

Exchanging mountains for Manhattan

Assignment: write a 500-word feature story on the Empire State Building for your hometown newspaper. Pick your own angle.
 
Colorado Springs, Colo.
 
Colorado Springs resident Kelsey Travis exchanged the green, white and granite of Pike’s Peak for the gray marble of the Empire State Building when she enrolled at The King’s College in New York City.
Travis, a [...]

To write a feature

This week I had the disconcerting experience of reporting and writing a feature story in three days in an unknown environment. I’ve written on deadline before, sure, and reported some complicated things in short amounts of time, but the assignment to meet someone new, find a newsworthy angle to them and make it into a [...]

True truth?

 

If truth is one thing to me and another thing to you, how will we choose which is truth? You don’t need to choose. The heart already knows. He didn’t have His Book written to be read by what must elect and choose, but by the heart, not by the wise of the earth because [...]

Hemingway for the Holocaust

Sometimes it only takes ten pages to tell a huge story.
Cynthia Ozick’s story “The Shawl” conveys the grief, pain and drama of the Holocaust in as many pages. Thousands of pages have been written on the subject; Ozick takes ten.
The short sentences and lack of dialogue give the story a Hemingway-esque, detached feel, but one [...]

A theory of everything in 250 words or fewer

I’ve written seven essays this week, and the magical word count is 250. Anything over gets cut. Topics range from literature to reporting to press conferences to someone of influence. The unifying theme seems to be: How much can you say in as little space as possible?
That theme is not confined to student writing assignments. [...]

The power of one

What can one person accomplish? According to Gourevitch’s narrative, “We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families,” a lot.
One man’s assassination started the cascade that led to the Rwandan genocide, and one man’s quick thinking saved a thousand Tutsi lives in the Hotel des Mille Collines.
The book is interspersed [...]