Readings

In addition to the book we are reading, The Transition to College Writing, your reading material will be texts that you identify as relevant to areas of struggle and improvement that you would like to explore, which will help you analyze your own experience for Paper Topics.

Here are some articles. I will help you find others as you share the topics you'd like to explore:

The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone
The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans
What 10,000 Steps Will Really Get You
The Consumerist Church of Fitness Classes
Eat Food. All the Time. Mostly Junk.
Can You Cure Chronic Lateness?
"Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?"
"How to Sleep"
"How Kids Learn Resilience"

Check out these articles related to college and writing: Coming soon! Death to High School English
Office Hours
The Ivy League, Mental Illness, and the Meaning of Life
Spirit Guides
The Rise of the Helicopter Teacher
Why Teach English?
Inescapably, You're Judged By Your Language
The Perfect Essay
In College, Nurturing Matters
My Little Bag of Writing Tricks
Young Minds in Critical Condition
The Streamlined Life
The Value of College: It's Not Just Correlation
College, the Great Unleveler
Class, Cost and College

You are free to choose a significant magazine article or a book (non-fiction or fiction) that has been particularly important to you and that deals with a serious issue that pertains to your life. I will need to approve your choice ahead of time if you do not choose one of the articles below:

• "How America Lost Its Mind"
• "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?"
• "Why DO Women Bully Each Other at Work?"
• "Innocence Is Irrelevant"
• "The Smartphone Psychiatrist"
• "How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration"
• "What's Wrong With the Democrats?"
• "How to Deal With North Korea"
• "When Your Child Is a Psychopath"
• "My Family's Slave"
• "How to Trick People Into Saving Money"
• "How Online Shopping Makes Suckers of Us All"
• "Alec Baldwin Gets Under Trump's Skin"
• "What Your Therapist Doesn’t Know"
• "Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women?"
• "Containing Trump"
• "How to Build an Autocracy"
• "In Defense of Facts"
• "How to Sleep"
• "My President Was Black"
• "How Casinos Enable Gambling Addicts"
• "China's Great Leap Backward"
• "War Goes Viral"
• "The Binge Breaker"
• "How American Outlawed Adolescence"
• "The World Is a Thriving Slaughterhouse"
• "What O. J. Simpson Means to Me"
• "How Helicopter Parenting Can Cause Binge Drinking"
• "The Original Underclass"
• "Is America Any Safer?"
• "The War on Stupid People"
• "The Republican Party’s White Strategy"
• "How American Politics Went Insane"
• "There's No Such Thing as Free Will"
• "How Kids Learn Resilience"
• "The False Promise of DNA Testing"
• "The Mind of Donald Trump"
• "Payday Lending: Will Anything Better Replace It?"
• "The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans"
• "A Free-Market Plan to Save the American West From Drought"
• "The Math Revolution"
• "How America Is Putting Itself Back Together"
• "The Talking Cure"
• "The Virologist"
• "The Big Kill"
• "Revenue Streams"
• "The Obama Brief"
• "The Solace Oblivion"
• "The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids"
• "Can Hobby Lobby Buy the Bible?"
• "Why America Is Moving Left"
• "The Great Republican Revolt"
• "Why Primo Levi Survives"
• "The Equalizer: Bill de Blasio vs. Inequality"
• "Hollywood on the Yellow Sea"
• "The Silicon Valley Suicides"
• "The Exemplary Narcissism of Snoopy"
• "Playing Defense Against the Drones"
• "If You’re Not Paranoid, You’re Crazy"
• "Why I Put My Wife’s Career First"
• "How an 18th-Century Philosopher Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis"
• "Can DNA Evidence Solve a 30-Year-Old Crime?"
• "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration"
• "The Neoliberal Arts"
• "The Coddling of the American Mind"
• "That's Not Funny!"
• "What If Everything You Knew About Disciplining Kids Was Wrong?"
• "Letter to My Son"
• "Prison Born"
• "A World Without Work"
• "How Indie Rock Changed the World"
• "Why It Pays to Be a Jerk"
• "The Execution of Clayton Lockett"
• "Will Pope Francis Break the Church?"
• "The Man Who Couldn't Stop Giving"
• "Outside Shooter"
• "The Disintegration of the World"
• "Can Bankers Behave?"
• "The Upwardly Mobile Barista"
• "Why Workers Won't Unite"
• "The Science of Near-Death Experiences"
• "The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous"
• "Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?"
• "Should You Bring Your Unborn Baby to Work?"
• "What ISIS Really Wants"
• "Do Human Rights Increase Inequality?"
• "Death Denial"
• "The Celebrity Illusion"
• "The Slow Death of the University"
• "The New Adulthood"
• "Literature and Money"
• "Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe"
• "The Believers"
• "What's Wrong With Public Intellectuals?"
• "The Evolution of Altruism"
• "May You Have My Luck"
• "Why I Miss the Culture Wars"
• "Can the First Amendment Survive the Internet?"
• "The Progressive Case for Reducing Immigration"
• "Teach or Perish"
• "Slavery and Capitalism"
• "Time to Imagine"
• "Is Artificial Intelligence a Threat?"
• "Your Brain on Metaphors"
• "The Shrinking World of Ideas"
• "Speed Kills"
• "The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur"
• "5,200 Days in Space"
• "The Tragedy of the American Military"
• "Why God Will Not Die"
• "The Shazam Effect"
• "The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis"
• "China's Dangerous Game"
• "Doctors Tell All—and It's Bad"
• "The Adultery Arms Race"
• "Why Kids Sext"
• "How Gangs Took Over Prisons"
• "What Happens When We All Live to 100?"
• "How to Talk About Climate Change So People Will Listen"
• "The Future of College?"
• "The Law-School Scam"
• "The Soul of the Research University"
• "Seeds of Doubt"
• "The Believers"
• "What Are You Going to Do With That?"
• "What Ails Elite Education?"
• "The Internet of Words"
• "The Uses of Division"
• "Crime Fiction"
• "What is a Woman?""
• "Why Are All the Cartoon Mothers Dead?"
• "Stone Soup"
• "Wrong Answer"
• "The Sex Amendment"
• "One of a Kind"
• "What's So Funny?"
• "Stones and Bones"
• "Secrets of the Creative Brain"
• "Get Out of Jail, Inc."
• "The Disruption Machine"
• "The Miseducation of America"
• "The Teen Whisperer"
• "The Hillary Show"
• "Fire on the Mountain"
• "The Case for Reparations"
• "Rogue Element"
• "Schooled"
• "The End of Food"
• "The Great Extinction"
• "Segregation Now ..."
• "The Confidence Gap"
• "Capital Man"
• "Is Stop-and-Frisk Worth It?"
• "The War on Reason"
• "Sacred and Profane"
• "The Reckoning"
• "A Star in a Bottle"
• "Cheap Words"
• "A Valuable Reputation"
• "A Botched Operation"
• "How to Escape the Community-College Trap"
• "Jesse Willms, the Dark Lord of the Internet"
• "Death Dust"
• "A Mission Gone Wrong"
• "They're Watching You at Work"
• "The Intelligent Plant"
• "The Big Sleep"
• "The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think"
• "All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines"
• "The Body Electric"
• "Buzzkill"
• "The Boom Towns and Ghost Towns of the New Economy"
• "How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses"
• "Freedom of Information"
• "The Killing Machines"
• "Why Even the Worst Bloggers Are Making Us Smarter"
• "Taken"
• "How Long Can You Wait to Have a Baby?"
• "Home Economics: The Link Between Work-Life Balance and Income Equality"
• "Slow Ideas"
• "The Lyme Wars"
• "The Girl Who Turned to Bone"
• "The Gay Guide to Wedded Bliss"
• "The Prism"
• "What If We Never Run Out of Oil?"
• "Learning to Live With Fossil Fuels"
• "How Not to Die"
• "The Robot Will See You Now"
• "Awakening"
• "The Web's New Monopolists"
• "The Case for More Guns (and More Gun Control)"
• "The Insourcing Boom"
• "The Writing Revolution"
• "Why Kids Should Grade Teachers"
• "Boys on the Side"
• "Why Women Still Can't Have It All"
• "The Perfected Self"

The following magazines have free and interesting reads. If you choose an article that is not on the list above, be sure that it has a similar length and clear it with me first.

• The Atlantic
• Wired Magazine
• The New Yorker
• New York Times Magazine
• Harper's Magazine
• The American Scholar
• Orion Magazine
• "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely"
• "A Million First Dates"
• "The Touch-Screen Generation"
• "How to Stop the Bullies"
• "The Rise and Fall of Charm in American Men"
• "How Junk Food Can End Obesity"
• "Murder by Craigslist"
• "How the NFL Fleeces Taxpayers"
• "The Case Against High-School Sports"
• "My Daughter's Homework Is Killing Me"
• "Inside Google's Driverless Car"
• "Surviving Anxiety"
• "The Dark Power of Fraternities"
• "The Overprotected Kid"
• "Why I Hope to Die at 75"