Identify one or more themes in the Ehrenreich reading, and find a newspaper article from the past week that contains one or more of these themes. Post a link on the blog with a brief note on the thematic connection you see between the reading and the article.

What type of tone does Straub recommend you take when responding to another student’s work?

How, according to Straub, do you decide what to comment on?

How is Tanizaki’s aesthetic critique also a political critique? In other words, how does what he says about beauty connect to what he says about power?

What are some ways that, according to Tanizaki, traditional Japanese aesthetics (concepts of beauty) differ from those of the West?

What does Alexandrova say about the word “dialectic?” Do we have any words in English that operate similarly: words that justify things without being totally comprehensible?

Why does Alexandrova say Soviet women want to get married?

What are the three most helpful suggestions, from your perspective, offered by Anne Lamont in “Shitty First Drafts”?

Why is Iowa so important, politically? How, according to this article, do various political candidates  engage with it on a symbolic level?

What are the legal complexities involved in legislating rules to control fertilizer run-off? What are some of the ecological effects of this nitrogen going into the water?

How does the political rhetoric in Iowa connect or not connect with the major economic and ecological issues at stake in the state? What are some of the rhetorical tools Manning uses to construct his argument about Iowa’s “problem”?