Author Archive

From Sleepless in Seattle to Almost Famous, Hollywood has been romanticizing the journalism profession forever. Here are just a few examples.

I propose we bring back the newsies. I’ll start by screaming headlines from this week’s newspaper around campus and see what happens.

Although Harry Potter is a fictional and perhaps dorky way to make a connection to international media, the Potter Watch comparison does hold truth. In many ways, the fictional radio broadcast is akin to the international blogs that fill the voids left by mainstream media in censored countries.

How the war in Afghanistan is designed to be perpetual By Isabel Braverman “It’s not a matter of whether the war is real or not: Victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.” This quote appears at the end of Fahrenheit 9/11, and although Michael [...]

Bedlam Productions, 2010 By Isabel Braverman In these times of bipartisan journalism seeing a piece of honest journalistic work is rare. It is even rarer to see it make an impact. However, Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s film Restrepo accomplishes both.  The film follows a group of soldiers in the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan, [...]

Music as the voice of a generation By Isabel Braverman How did John Lennon’s “give peace a chance” turn into Lupe Fiasco’s “I really think the War on Terror is a bunch of bullshit?” Protest songs have been around for ages, but the message remains the same. Generation Y, our generation, is called lazy, technologically [...]

The unhealthy ways companies sell us their drugs By Isabel Braverman Everyone knows the shtick—you go to the doctor’s office, talk for 20 minutes about what is ailing you, the doctor gives you a prescription and you go to the pharmacy to pick it up. No one ever questions this age-old practice, yet there is [...]

The politics of medical marijuana cafes By Isabel Braverman In a typical morning at Ganja Gourmet, owner Steve Horowitz whips up some lasagna… with pot sprinkled in. Ganja Gourmet, located in Denver, Colo., is the first ever restaurant in the U.S. to serve food with medical marijuana as a main ingredient. Medical marijuana has been [...]

The evolution of waiting on the road to waiting on Craigslist By Isabel Braverman Gone are the days of Kerouac-inspired hitchhiking frenzies and hippies driving VW vans, picking up teenage stragglers destined for San Francisco. In place of this we now have hitchhiking horror stories and a color-coded security system. If it is true that [...]