They Got USC

I don’t read the Preface of a book. I always want to start reading Chapter 1 immediately because I want to jump straight into the story; the context surrounding it will eventually seep in as I go through the pages. However, when I picked up Chuck Collins’ “Born on Third Base,” I stumbled upon the Preface as I was getting to chapter 1. “Have you ever lived in a mobile home,” it read. “Not me. Until the age of 24…” I hadn’t even finished that sentence when Collins grabbed my attention. What happened? How was the transition from living in a house to a mobile home? I had read the back summary beforehand to see what this book was about, and already, Collins had painted a clear image in my mind of what the transition from being part of the 1% to joining the rest of the 99%. In both the Preface and the Introduction, Collins had detailed everything necessary for this subject matter. For someone who does not know much about economics, I understood everything that he was talking about becau...

All of us in this class had our own personal reasons for why we wanted to attend USC. Perhaps it was because of the school spirit that permeates the campus, even when there are barely any students around. Maybe it was because of the huge emphasis that’s put on our college football team (which is why yesterday’s loss was such a downer). I, myself have various reasons as to why I wanted to come here, but one of the biggest factors in my decision to deem this my dream school was because of LA itself. Even though I generally enjoyed my time at UCSB last year, one of my biggest problems with my time there was that the campus was isolated from the rest of Santa Barbara. One thing I love about USC’s campus is that it is surrounded by the rest of the city. I actually like that I have to constantly depend on going to the Village because it makes my fewer trips to Figueroa much more meaningful. The architecture and city life in that area evokes a unique sense of character, even if it’s ...

As I continue to read “My Life on the Road,” I think one other way in which it is much better than “Growing a Farmer” is that Gloria Steinem knows that this book is intended to be targeted to a wide audience, so she includes interesting aspects about her various accounts such as her trip to India. Using word choices like “dormitory on wheels” or “kebabs and chapatis,” Steinem simultaneously provided a visualization of what she was seeing with how she could describe it and used Indian terms to bring the essence of the culture to whoever reads this part of the book. I liked her discussion of viewing her past differently after her second trip to India. I appreciate the small sense of closure that she brings to a small section, as she prepares to talk about the next topic within a larger chapter. I found it coincidental that her next section was talking about the March on Washington, as I am covering this era in my GE class “Black Social Movements in the US.” I was instantly grabbed ...

As I started reading Gloria Steinem’s “My Life on the Road,” I was already enjoying the book more than “Growing a Farmer.” I still found moments in which I would check the number of pages to see if I was almost done with a chapter. But then again, this book has seven chapters spanning about 250 pages. And even then, I still found myself reading the book at a more consistent pace. One comment I left on a random blog was that I believe that nonfiction books can work if they present their story through an interesting narrative or structure. If the book tells a story instead of giving very specific information, I think it can work, and this is exactly how “My Life on the Road” was. Part of this reasoning is because Steinem doesn’t prolong on a topic as long as Timmermesiter does. I could follow her narrative, as she went through the topics that she discussed. She did mention vital parts, but she didn’t intricately go through every detail, leaving readers with enough information to un...

Well, seeing how I ended up writing my article about “The Lion King” remake, I thought it’d be fitting (or convenient) if I just wrote this random blog on the other article idea about young successful people. I actually have vague knowledge of Rich Chigga, so I guess this random blog could be all about Ralph Sepe Jr. Why not? I first discovered ralphthemoviemaker during this year’s Oscar nominations. He had done a collaboration video with young filmmaker Bobby Burns in which they reacted to the nominations (the means in which they did this are intentionally left out in this blog to avoid ruining anything). This kind of humor carried over when I started binging his other videos. He falls in the category of content creators who can sell a bad movie to viewers who will want to watch it to see how bad it is. Part of how he does this is through certain memes or characters that he associates with each film. He can turn a meaningless line like “They got T” into a meme and have his fan...