After traveling to dozens of cities, I’ve developed a curiosity for the names of various city bike shares. If you’re not familiar with bike shares, they are public bicycle rental programs that allow you to pick up a bike from one station and return it to another. When I lived in New York, I had … Continue reading Good and Boring Bike Share Names
Like much of Orwell's writing, Homage to Catalonia demonstrates timeless and transferable lessons; it’s not just a book about the Spanish Civil War. Homage shows us, in any era, how real-world propaganda can have serious political consequences. In particular, how subtle word choices often power propaganda. By studying Homage we can observe how Orwell spots … Continue reading Defensive Propaganda: How George Orwell Deconstructs Word Choice in Homage to Catalonia
Note: I originally wrote this essay for a class at NYU on visual persuasion in the fall of 2021. In the 1960 United States presidential election, then-Senator John F. Kennedy faced a unique challenge in his campaign. Much of the American electorate felt content with the calm, economically prosperous Eisenhower era, which Kennedy’s opponent Richard … Continue reading Augustus at Prima Porta: Visual Persuasion From The Master Marketer of Rome
This year, I read the classic book Rhetoric by the Ancient Greek intellectual Aristotle. This is the foundational text for persuasion and rhetoric. It has the whole “logos, pathos, ethos” thing that we learned in middle school. But there was one concept that Aristotle mentions at length, which he called enthymemes… Which explains ALL of … Continue reading Aristotle, Enthymemes, And The Secret Formula of Spongebob Memes