by sara felsenstein
What music have you been listening to lately? I seriously need to revamp my music collection, so I tend to listen to the same good songs over and over…and over. Here are four songs that have been on shameless repeat on my iPod/iPhone over the past week…
The approach of another new year begs the question: is it time to give up our print subscriptions? Check out my first blog post for Notre Dame Magazine below!
PUBLISHED: OCTOBER 18, 2012 POSTED IN: ALUMNI BLOGS, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY & CULTURE 
I remember one morning as a 10-year-old I was up early, reading a book by the living room window. A black car slowed before our house, the window rolled down and a package was thrust onto our driveway. I paused for a moment before running outside to retrieve the paper, thrilled that I’d actually seen the man who delivers The New York Times. My excitement was a mere step below seeing Santa or the Tooth Fairy. The paper’s magic was still preserved — I didn’t know where exactly they came from — but I was one step closer to solving the mystery.
That was 12 years ago. Twelve years ago, we had barely purchased our first bulky Dell, much less consider taking the morning news from a backlit screen. Twelve years ago, we still had dial-up Internet, woefully barren email inboxes and asked Jeeves instead of Googling.
A lot has changed in 12 years. That’s why my mom recently sat my dad down at the kitchen table to bring up a two-word, volatile phrase in my household: digital subscription.
“Bruce,” she said, “Don’t you think it’s about time we get a digital subscription to The Times?”
I knew where this conversation would end even before it started. My dad shook his head and sighed.
“Sally, please. We’ve talked about this. It’s really not that much cheaper. We’re just not getting one.”
My mom protested, laying down her arguments. That we read the news on the NYTimes.com each day, pretty much only reading the physical paper on car trips. That it’s a heck of a lot of recycling and wasted paper for a low percentage of use. That the most functional purpose of the paper at this point is not the paper itself but the blue plastic bag it arrives in, which we collect and use for doggie waste receptacles.
“It’s an unnecessary expense,” my mom argued.
“We’re keeping the subscription,” my dad said, and that was that.
While it wasn’t my place to weigh in on this discussion, partly because I’m not paying for the subscription but mostly because I read news online 95 percent of the time, I was privately relieved at my dad’s decision.
As a member of the digital age, I spend most of my day working and socializing in the online sphere. But with The Times, I wasn’t ready to go digital. Somehow, making my life both wireless and paperless feels less like moving forward and more like giving in.
I tried to determine why I am so attached to print newspapers when reading news online is more convenient for my lifestyle. I guess I’m nostalgic for “old times,” remembering the excitement I felt as a kid when “I read an article Mom!” or picked up the morning paper and the ink was still wet. Even at a young age, I had a basic understanding of what amazes me today — that all of these stories were compiled, researched, written, packaged and delivered — in the span of one day.
That sense of a day’s entirety is lost on the homepage of a website. The NYTimes.com constantly updates and changes its top stories throughout the day. I rarely do it, but I want the possibility of reading from cover to cover, the satisfaction of tackling the news without the nagging feeling that some bold headline appeared just as I looked away.
The scope of The Times website is infinite — between all of the articles, archives, photo galleries, timelines and podcasts, I can never read enough, be on top of the news enough. Sometimes, this wealth of information and visual stimulation is exactly what I’m looking for. But I do find myself flitting from headline to headline and am much more committed to a story when I read it in print.
Those are my reasons for being conflicted. Of course, my dad has his own.
With the click of “submit,” so goes another year, another print subscription. Yes, we’re essentially buying the paper for the off-chance that we go on a car trip, that we want to read in bed, that the Internet goes out, but for now, that’s good enough.
I’ve decided The New York Times and the NYTimes.com are not interchangeable.
This article was published first in Notre Dame Magazine.
I stumbled across this Tumblr during my daily traversing through the Internet, and was caught by the bright colors and the interesting blog title, “Bookfessions.” I love blogs that combine good, simple design with a really clear purpose. This blog is all about “confessions and/or thoughts of a book lover, bibliophile, book addict, reader, lover of literature, nerd.” The author also accepts submissions from readers.
Below are a few of the “bookfessions” I can particularly relate to. Which are your favorite?
1. Cities
2. Being with friends and family
3. The first spark of a new idea
4. A good book
5. A warm, bold cup of coffee in a ceramic mug
6. Running in cool mist in early fall
7. Delicious, spicy Mediterranean food
8. Finding interest in a brand new thing
9. A bottle of wine and great company to share it with
10. Interviewing someone who’s unexpectedly inspiring
Fiction is both a personal form of expression and way of commenting on events that affect the population at large. Fiction should strive for beauty because it can — so many other forms of writing do not offer that freedom. My fiction writing is not rebellious nor is it experimental but it is definitely influenced by the fast-paced writing forms of the online world.
My work makes use of two opposing writing styles and constantly displays a tension between them: the succinct phrases characteristic of journalistic writing and the metaphoric imagery characteristic of poetry. I like to approach fiction methodically — as I would in journalism, but with feeling — as I would in poetry. My fiction is based off these two types of writing, yet falls somewhere in between them.
When composing fiction, I strive for five main characteristics:
My writing is generally traditional. I love writing in the vignette style in particular because it allows me to incorporate poetic phrases naturally into fiction. Vignettes give me the opportunity both to create the beauty that I strive for and to comment on a single issue from a number of different perspectives.
As a young writer, social media and online writing inevitably influence my work, since those are things I engage with on a daily basis. Despite most forms of writing being in a state of such rapid change, however, I believe traditional, printed fiction continues to be crucial today. The mind processes ideas differently when work is read on the printed page versus when it is read on a screen, so the printed page is necessary even as the world of digitally published fiction expands. A goal for my future work is to reconcile these two sides of fiction, always keeping in mind how a story will be interpreted differently depending on whether it’s displayed on a digital or traditional background.
Remember this post?
(Actually, I’ll be seriously impressed if you do.) “Classics & Cocktails” was one of my first, written shortly after I turned 21 in Toledo, Ohio last summer. I was bored and lonely in my apartment one day, flipping through some classic literature I’d taken out of the library. I felt like going out, but my fellow interns were working the night shift (we often had opposite schedules) and I had no one to have a drink with.
So naturally, I decided to Google my favorite authors’ favorite drinks and write a post about it.
Classic literature and classic cocktails: what a perfect combination.
Well over a year later, at a book sale at work the other week, I found this gem. Let’s Bring Back: The Cocktail Edition by Lesley M. M. Blume, a journalist and author based in New York City. The cover drew me in initially (isn’t it preettyy?) but the content pushed me to buy it. It’s basically an entire book of classic cocktail recipes, along with humorous anecdotes about each one, bits of history, quotes and poems.
The Chicago Tribune called it “a charming slip of a book…that quite deliciously and convincingly has the romantics among us pining for the ways of the dearly held past.”
Definitely my kind of thing.
In Ms. Blume’s introduction to the book, she writes:
“It’s great fun not only to revisit the stories behind the creation of these cocktails, but also to imagine the millions of narratives caused by drinking them. The following libations caused faces to be slapped, tears to be shed, babies to be made, fox trots and the Twist to be danced, marriage proposals to be uttered (and perhaps rescinded,) and so on.”
She continues, more seriously:
“The people who drank these drinks during the heights of their popularity did so for the same reasons we guzzle today’s trendy cocktails: to celebrate, to escape, to drown sorrows, to feel bigger, to feel glamorous–or feel nothing at all.”
As tongue in cheek as most of the book is, it also touches on the deeper theme of why people drink, why socializing over alcohol has persisted so strongly throughout history.
For now, Let’s Bring Back: The Cocktail Edition is tucked neatly into my bookshelf. But as soon as I have my own apartment in a city, I’m going to make use of this book and hold an epic throwback cocktail party, unapologetically artsy and decidedly literary.
Either that, or I’ll go find a way back to go back to the grandeur of 20s nightlife, Owen Wilson style.
Fictional Cheers, Hemingway.
On the bus home from work this evening, I checked the weather for South Bend and was bummed to find a 50 percent chance of rain forecast for Saturday.
Rain during the 24 hours I’ll be on campus, during the one ND tailgating experience I’ll have until next year, during the one home game I’ll be at this fall after attending all 26 over the past four years? I wasn’t thrilled, to say the least.
But then I thought: let’s bring this back.
The mud, the wet, the win. Let’s bring ’08 back like we never graduated.
Saturday calls for some mucky, mucky Fichigan.
“It’s about shaping you as a person and really getting you prepared for your life after Notre Dame.”
As a junior in high school, I found college touring exhausting. All of the info sessions, tours, scheduled meetings with student representatives– they all blended into one another. I had trouble defining what schools were really like when almost all the admissions literature teemed with vague words like “history,” “tradition,” “opportunity” and “success.” I can’t tell you how many schools I looked into that boasted “completely unique” opportunities for me. Was that even possible? How was I supposed to decide the location of my next four years, and the foundation of the rest of my life, based on a “gut feeling,” a programmed tour of interesting facts and some carefully worded handouts?
Since going to Notre Dame, I’ve always thought the only way to really know a school, to understand what it’s all about, is to be there as a student. Yes, there’s that feeling you get when you first walk on campus as a prospy, when you realize you “know” the school on some basic level. But that feeling grows, changes and transforms when on campus for good. When you discover the major you didn’t know existed or the club you dedicate all your free time to, that feeling seeps into deeper parts of you. It’s no longer a fleeting emotion awakened only when looking up at the Golden Dome for the first time, but something more permanent, cultivated by the things you do on campus and manifested in the relationships you make.
Unfortunately, the wrapped-up-with-a-bow perspective typically handed to prospective students by the admissions office does not and cannot portray what a school is all about. The scope of the student experience– what’s possible over four years– is much too large.
But this new video released this week by the Notre Dame admissions office is different. The video was produced by Philadelphia-based Neighborhood Film Co., a company that “mentors and employs individuals recovering from homelessnesss, mental-illness or addictions through the process of filmmaking.” Not only is it a fresh, modern and interesting work of videography, it both accurately and beautifully portrays the character of the University. Unlike videos I’ve seen in the past, I can’t pass this off as an annoying, overdramatic compilation of clips used by admissions to either play up or play down various aspects of Notre Dame.
Because it doesn’t. It’s not. It’s kind of the real thing.
Watch it.
SKETCHING A STORY 