IRB Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Near the end of the book, Mary Roach explores the topics of "alternative funerals" and begins with her visit the the Colorado State University Veterinary Hospital to see how death is dealt with when relatives of the cadavers are removed as a factor. There she explains in detail the Colorado State's method of "tissue digestion" where a human corpse an be reduced to 3% its body weight through pressure heat and lye. The remnants of the corpse are then flushed down through a drain. The detailed explanation of this whole process may make her audience a bit squeamish but Roach seems to have stopped trying to defend the topic of her book whereas in the beginning she felt the need to justify it with science to persuade hesitant readers to continue.  Roach does however, still use a humor to get through heavy  material and this remains her best device throughout the book. Some of her explanations become so dramatic, they are comical and therefore somewhat balance out the extremely gruesome descriptions. In the last chapter, Roach ponders what she will do with her own remains. At first she visits the University of New Mexico Maxwell Museum of Anthropology and contemplates preserving her brain in a jar and shelving it for later students to admire and study or plastinating her body and donating it to future scientifical studies. However, at the end of the book, Roach takes a surprisingly undrastic approach and admits that although she'd love to donate her body to science, she believes it's ultimately right to let her family decide what to do with her body. For the survivors "mourning and moving are hard enough. Why add to the burden?" Through the use of humor and her moderately turned down conclusion, Roach is able to entertain the audience with her witty puns and questions and build up her credibility as a knowledgable and experienced author.

Tow #15 "Remembrance of News Past"

The NYTimes article "Remembrance of News Past" is written by Claudia Hammond, a British author, TV presenter, and BBC World Service radio presenter. Hammond is the author of the books Emotional Rollercoaster and Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception. Both books are about  human psychology and have won her British Psychological Society and Mind Media awards.

In her article, Hammond talks about how exactly people remember events. She explains that we as humans don't remember specific events due to their objective importance, we remember them depending on how we heard, where we were, and what we was happening in our lives at the time. Hammond introduces this theory by asking the readers how many details they remember from the Newtown shootings and Boston Marathon bombing and then how many they will remember in a month or a year from now. By using a significant topic that many people can connect to Hammond captures the readers attention and smoothly transitions into her argument. Next, she presents her evidence by citing statistics and experiments by other psychologists. She proves that in other experiments location and the way you get the information are signifiant in remembering certain events. She cites psychologist John Neil Bohannon's experiment, where he asked college students and alumni from 1942-1945 about Pearl Harbor and found that "if they heard it on the news or read it in a newspaper, they remembered more facts about the event". She also talks about peoples' struggle to remember the timing of an event, an issue that is probably relatable to her audience. This is in fact, a phenomenon called telescoping, where its especially difficult to figure out when events happened because we always think that they happened more recently than they did. She then provides a anecdote of an event in her own life as an example.

By using credible sources and significant events that readers are likely to connect to Hammond is able to write an interesting article that explains the psychology behind remembering the past that informs and entertains her audience.

Tow #14 "Humans Causing Jellyfish Takeover"

The highly credible author of this CNN article, Lisa-ann Gershwin is an acclaimed marine biologist that has been researching jellyfish for more than 20 years and has discovered more than 180 new species. She not only was awarded with a Fulbright Fellowship to study jellyfish blooms and fossil jellyfish, but is also the director of the Australian Marine Stinger Advisory Services and Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean. In this article, Gershwin argues that humans are causing a vast growth in jellyfish populations from our carbon dioxide emissions that are warming as well as polluting the water. In this environment, fish and krill especially are dying but jellyfish are thriving and disrupting the whole ecosystem. Gershwin continues to warn that a small increase in jellyfish may cause no harm but a huge surge that is occurring right now is not only forcing emergency shutdowns of nuclear power plants and destroying fisheries but it has also completely flipped the food chain upside down and are now dominating the fish deprived oceans. After discussing the cause and effects of the jellyfish takeover, Gershwin brings her argument full circle and indicates that all fingers are pointing at us. We caused the problem so isn't it our responsibility to fix it? Answering her string of rhetorical questions, Gershwin reaches out to her audience and demands that we need to invest in research now and slow down the damage occurring rapidly in the world. However, despite the urgency and desperation apparent in her tone, Gershwin ends with the thought that "in all likelihood we will go down in history as the generation that could have saved the ocean but chose not to... It makes me cry, because I fear it is true".   Despite the optimistic talk of others, she gives readers a dose of reality and reflects her disappointment in today's generation itself.

Tow #13 "Are Today's New Surgeons Unprepared?"

For some, capping the number of work hours for employees might seem like a relief. However, for others, particularly surgeons, Pauline W. Chen declares this is not the case. In this New York Times article, Chen, a surgeon, author, and columnist argues that the effects of minimizing the work hours of training significantly impact surgeons' performance and skill.

Chen first starts off with an anecdote to emphasize the importance of time and practice in honing one's skills. She describes an encounter with a friend who had started out like them, as "a lowly resident of the medical center" but returned 10 years later as a dexterous surgeon with refined skills and could easily operations in a single hour that took others three or four. When asked what his secret was, he describes to Chen the hundreds of operations that he had completed over and over again, to the point of familiarity where he could of done the operations with his eyes closed. With her short anecdote of how her friend was able to succeed in his profession only through years and years of experience, Chen effectively sets the background information for her argument.

In the second paragraph, Chen addresses the recent problem that has been affecting surgeons all over the U.S. In response to pressure from politicians, unions and sleep experts, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education has worked to limit the number of hours residents are allowed to work.  The recent 2011 limits specifically, have reduced work hours to 80 hours for all in-hospital work. Chen argues that with the number of hours lost, surgeons suffer an impact detrimental to opportunities to perform more operations, especially new trainees who need it the most and are only getting "two maybe three operations each week". Calculating the total hours lost, Chen says that young surgeons-to-be are missing as much as a year's worth of valuable experience. And the results sure show it. After a year or two of training, recent residents have been incapable of "operating or making clinical decisions on the their own. Nearly a third can not perform even the most basic operations like a gallbladder removal on their own". By listing these consequences , Chen convinces the audience that the surgical field is in grave trouble as a result of these working limitations. With hours being cut just as the skills surgeons need to know expanding more than ever before, Chen adamantly urges the hour confining laws to be overturned.

IRB Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Mary Roach introduces the subject of death in a rather interesting manner; she compares being dead as going on a cruise. "These cruises take their passengers to unknown, unimagined places. They give them the chance to do things they would not otherwise get to do"(1). Roach then goes on to justify this heavy topic of using human cadavers for experiments with humor. She describes Cadavers as superheroes and lists a bunch of "abilities" that they possess: the ability to brave fire, withstand falls from buildings, gunshots, and being in six places at once. She then concludes the paragraph with a statement that leaves the audience thinking, "What are shame to waste these powers, to not use them for the betterment of humankind" (3). This thought provoking sentence helps sway audience members who have previously been hesitant about reading a book about corpses and convinces them to keep on reading. Roach continues to clarify her book by stating, "this book is not about death as in dying" (4). Dying is sad and profound because it is the loss of a loved one. She characterizes the dead on the other hand as hulls and just the shell of a person who use to be. By contrasting between death and dying, the audience can see that Roach approaches this subject in a humane matter and they are further able to  understand the position Roach is taking on in her book. Besides the use of humor to approach as touchy subject, Roach also employs the use of perspective to her advantage. Stiff is written in first person and third person as well as both the past and present. When writing about historical events, she uses third person and appears in the past tense, taking on a tone that is less intimate and more objective. Here, her primary focus is to communicate information to the reader, and not necessarily to be humorous. However, when she appears in the first person in the present tense, Roach seems to be "very present" to the reader and establishes humor as well as intimacy and immediacy. By alternating between these two tenses, Roach effectively alternates her tone and mood of her writing to suit the situation.

Tow #12 Kellogg's All-bran Cereal: "Snow White"

During 2008, to advertise one of its slogans "more fruit than before" for their All-bran cereal, Kellogg's brought in none other than the iconic Snow White in one of their advertisements. In it, Snow White is in a setting familiar to most of its audience, a similar wooden cottage to that portrayed in childrens' picture books. Above on a fancy ribbon made of a wooden shaving is the phrase "more fruit than before". Right off the bat, adults should immediately be transported to their childhood memories and children should make the connection to their storybooks. However, what jumps out even before the background is Snow White standing transfixed at the sight, in an overflowing pile of shiny, red apples filling the entire cottage. The advertisement's use of apples references the symbolic image of Snow White and the apple that all audiences are familiar with. In the ad, the pile of apples is so immense that three of the dwarves are even buried underneath them. All the audience can see is their pointed hats sticking out through the heap. The overflowing abundance of the fruit helps illustrate "the extra fruitiness" of the new cereal. The whole image has a sort of fantastical, dreamy feel to it. With the use of humor and symbolism with an iconic character, Kellogg's effectively appeals to pathos in the audience and triggers childhood memories. In addition, in the bottom corner of the ad is a picture of fresh fruit and cereal, boxed and in a bowl. Contrasting from the fantasy- like image above, the photograph brings the audience back to reality as if to say "look, the fruit in our cereal actually is as fresh as it appears!" Through the symbolism of Snow White and the apple, and the contrast of the top and bottom images, Kellogg's ad will raise a chuckle from audiences both young and old. 

Tow #11 "Making a Scene: 11 Performances"

For this years Movies Issue, New York Times Magazine commissioned a group of screenwriters, responsible for some of the best scripts of 2013 to each write a single captivating line of monologue for 11 short films directed by the Oscar winning cinematographer of Saving Private Ryan and  Schindler's List, Janusz Kaminski. These lines were then given to 11 talented actors and actresses to perform. Kaminski describes these short vignettes as "slightly whimsical and off-center. Each short evokes a  particular style and conveys an emotion through the lighting, music and tone that is translated to the audience with the juxtaposition of the setting and diction. The actors' bizarre lines often contrast with the background settings of the scene, creating just the right dose of confusion to peak the interest of the audience. My personal favorite with 'Blue Jasmine' starring Cate Blanchett and written by Andrew Bujalski. The scene opens with dramatic orchestral music with a view of an elegant booth at a restaurant. Then with a 'crunch' the camera zooms in on a fish that has just landed on the plate, followed by the 'zing' of a knife and fork. Just as Blanchett picks up the utensils and is about to cut into the fish, the dramatic music is interrupted by a loud thump as the fish eyeball pops out of the fish and rolls to the plate. Blanchett then simpers at the fish, "show me where the bed is...put a blanket over me... and don't ever... let me see you again." She then proceeds to drape herself across the booth as the dramatic orchestra hits a crescendo and the camera zooms out to juxtapose her with the fish. The allure of these vignettes simply comes from the juxtaposition of the melodramatic scenes and climactic music with the quirky, and out of place lines. It it completely bewildering to the audience and it's genius.