Talking about story tops

In my class today, we talked about the top of feature stories -- the anecdotes and the nut.  Here are the nut graphs I talked about.

Boston Phoenix: "Children of the Revolution," Dec. 9, 1999

..."People used to laugh," he says. "Now they know what you're talking about. It's gotten to the point where more people know about us than not."

Screen Shot 2021-03-24 at 5.47.35 PM"Us" is the Student Underground collective, a group of about 15 BU students who last year turned a photocopied handout into a kicky little newspaper devoted to left-wing activism and pop culture. Like the rest of the staff, Feder is smart and passionate. He's also tired. The Underground is put out between classes, jobs, term papers, meetings, parties, and protest rallies. Reporting on issues from Kenmore Square to Kosovo, the staff pull all-nighters in a windowless church basement across the river. They never know how they're going to pay for their next issue.

The new three-story Harpswell Foundation Dormitory for University Women is named for a town in Maine. But it's on an unpaved street in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, populated with fried fish vendors, motorbike taxis, and roaming chickens.Globe layout

The name is a nod to the building's founder and chief supporter, Alan Lightman, the MIT physicist and celebrated author. Lightman, a soft-spoken, deep-thinking Southerner who summers on a quiet island near Harpswell, said he now spends about a third of his time running the dorm for rural women he built in Cambodia. While working on another aid project there in 2003, Lightman learned that a lack of secure housing prevents many village women from going to college. All the schools are in the gritty capital, and few offer dormitories. Lightman saw a clear solution. He raised money, bought a piece of land, hired contractors, and built a dorm.

Now, he is "Dad" to more than 30 women. Until the dorm opened about a year ago, they faced lives as rice farmers, tour guides, or possibly brides in arranged marriages. Now they want to work for the government, earn PhDs, and study overseas.

"As unexpected as it was to find myself on the other side of the planet in the culture I knew nothing about, I felt like I could make a difference," Lightman said. "It wasn't a lost cause. This is something that was not beyond my reach."

 

 

Online instruction, unsung heroes and more

I was quoted twice this week in BU publications.

In a story in the Freep on the challenge of online teaching

Screen Shot 2021-03-16 at 3.12.47 PMAs the one year anniversary of the transition to online teaching approaches, Boston University faculty are reflecting on the mental and emotional impacts of their new teaching styles.

Screen Shot 2021-03-16 at 3.15.39 PM

 

And, I nominated my boss as an unsung hero of the BU pandemic for a BU Today story.

Kate designed and taught a series of lectures that allowed all students taking COM 201 to meet in person once a week. Every Saturday in the fall semester, she taught three, one-hour in-person classes in a row in the GSU. This semester she does the same thing at Morse Auditorium.

Someone from a group called BU Parents United added this comment

Faculty deserve a medal for all they were asked to handle with little support from BU in terms of at least lessening the well being challenges of students who were both LFA and in person. Many faculty felt the impact of stress and struggles emotionally for themselves and their students. We look back and wonder why simultaneously more support for wellbeing and mental health was not given despite pleas from all areas – parents, students, staff while still maintaining safety for all.

To every BU faculty member – enormous thanks for your sacrifices and resilience. And to each of you who asked how our terriers were feeling and reached out / thank you for remembering they were human beings struggling like you

 

 

 

#Lungcancer is no longer a death sentence. But only half of patients are alive after a year.

Twenty years ago, I wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

They are among the most unfortunate and least pitied of cancer victims.
First, they must face the fact that their diagnosis is almost always a death sentence. Then, in most cases, they have to come to terms with the reality that they brought the cancer on themselves by smoking cigarettes.

Each year, about 160,000 people die from the disease in the United States, more than any other cancer, yet, unlike other cancers, there are few groups for lung cancer patients who want to share stories and few advocates pushing for research breakthroughs.

Much has changed since then. New drugs and surgery have contributed to making lung cancer curable. At lease two groups now advocate for lung cancer patients. The push for lung cancer screening that triggered my reporting has led to a test for heavy smokers that can lead to a cure.

Still, fewer than 20 percent of cases are found early and only half of people diagnosed with the disease are alive after a year, according numbers from the National Institutes of Health.

The shocking lung cancer death of health writer Sharon Begley was a reminder of the shifting patterns of lung cancer. More women, more non-smokers. Here's the story she left us withScreenshot 2021-01-26 161102

 

 

More from me, from way back then. Still covering the lung cancer beat.

The Boston Globe: Are lung cancer victims second class citizens? The debate over lung cancer screening. July 11, 2000

Los Angeles Times: Lung cancer gender gap emerges and impacts younger women, including many non-smokers,  March 26, 2001

 

 

 

 

Why do they call it spring semester?

Welcome spring 2021 class.

I know the semester ends in the spring, but it starts in the dead of  deep winter.  It does give us something to look forward to.

Not sure how I'll be using this blog this semester, but know that you can set up your own if you want via BU. https://blogs.bu.edu/

It's a handy place to display your work. Blogging itself has faded but not disappeared, but this will teach you how to use WordPress. Although know that free WordPress uses a block editing system. I'm still not used to it, but I don't blog much anymore.

Screenshot 2021-01-25 122844

If you don’t get these jokes, you will when you finish CO201

Seven Bar Jokes  Involving Grammar  and Punctuation.

BY Eric K. Auld
- - - -
1. A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves. 
2. A dangling modifier walks into a bar. After finishing a drink, the bartender asks it to leave.
3. A question mark walks into a bar?
4. Two quotation marks “walk into” a bar.
5. A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to drink.
6. The bar was walked into by the passive voice.
7. Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They drink. They leave.

Here’s how to post your edited midterm. Write a good headline here as well.

AGAWAM — With a click . . . click . . . click, the Wicked Cyclone roller coaster car slowly rises 112 feet into nothing but sky. As it levels at the top, riders get a quick view of the Six Flags amusement park and the treetops of Agawam beyond. Then, the car drops at a 64-degree angle, propelling its 24 screaming passengers along a twisting track with two “zero gravity” corkscrew rolls and a turn that banks at an unprecedented 200 degrees.

One of the coasters' overbanks.
One of the coasters' overbanks.

Once the rickety wooden cousin to the park’s steel coasters, the 32-year-old Cyclone has been remade and renamed. Topped with a new type of metal track, the Wicked Cyclone is one of five such wood-steel hybrid coasters in the country. Now, the ride rivals the park’s sleek Bizarro as a favorite of both casual riders and a community of devotees known as coaster enthusiasts.

Chrys Garber now counts herself among them. A full-time mother from nearby East Longmeadow, she stood in the Wicked Cyclone line with her kids on a sunny, late June afternoon. Garber said she’s ridden at least 40 times — pretty much every day since the ride reopened in late May.

“I love it. Oh my gosh,” she said. Garber loves the corkscrew spins, the drop, and the hang time. “I thought it was more scary than Bizarro. This has more adventure from start to finish.”

Riding the Wicked Cyclone with the Go Pro from Tinker Ready on Vimeo.

The network of organizations, websites, and social media feeds produced by coaster fans buzzes with news and reviews of the Wicked Cyclone. American Coaster Enthusiasts, a 40-year-old group that counts more than 5,000 members, held an ERT event (for “exclusive ride time”) at the park in July.

“I’ve never been on a coaster that inverts that only has lap bars,“ Acquafresca wrote. “I haven’t felt that way about a coaster since I first started riding. The experience of just hanging there with nothing over your shoulders is a glorious feeling.”

Some pay for that feeling with their keys, phones, or sunglasses, which, unlike passengers, tend to fly out during the ride.

Nikki Wilson of Middletown, Conn. walked down the ride’s exit ramp seemingly unrattled after riding with her brother. Still, she was wary when she sat down and strapped in. “I didn’t see anything going over my shoulder, and the ride goes upside down,” she said. “So, I was a little nervous, but then I saw the little kids getting on, and I said, I’ve got to get on there too.”Six Flags 2015 RMC Cyclone Coaster Specs_Page_1

One of those kids was Matthew Keegan, 8, of Milford, who marched down the ramp with a slight weave in his step after his first ride. He said he liked it, but hesitated before saying he wasn’t scared. Keegan admitted that he was frightened when the car took its plunge.

“Because you lean forward when you go down the drop,” he said. “It’s just so scary.”

The Wicked Cyclone pulls cars up a 109- foot hill -- the equivalent of a ten story building.

The designer of the original Cyclone would be pleased to hear that. A veteran coaster engineer, the late William Cobb copied the Coney Island Cyclone when he created the new wooden coaster for what was then Riverside Park in 1983. For a family-owned operation, it was a big investment at $2.5 million. With a 96-foot rise, it was one of the biggest of its time.

Cobb wanted it to be one of the scariest too. “I want people to ride my coasters so that when they get over the first hill, they wish they had never gotten on,” Cobb told the Valley Advocate newspaper. “I want them to get off, say they’ll never ride again, and then get right back on the end of the line.”

Not that the old Cyclone wasn’t thrilling. Shilke said he tries to make his revamped rides more exciting than the original. This one offered a challenge.

The Wicked Cyclone pulls cars up a 109- foot hill -- the equivalent of a ten story building.
The Wicked Cyclone pulls cars up a 109- foot hill -- the equivalent of a ten story building.

“Typically, most of the coasters I redo are so boring that anything I do surpasses what was there,” he said on the phone from his Utah workshop. “This was one of the first coasters where the original rise really took advantage of every turn. I had to come up with reverse bank turns and a whole bunch of stuff that I had never done before just to pack as much into this coaster as I could.”

Tim Baldwin of American Coaster Enthusiasts agrees. He said the Agawam Cyclone was one of the last coasters designed by the now-legendary Cobb.

“He really put some wild craziness in it.”

Speaking from the group’s convention in Atlantic City, Baldwin said some of the older wooden coasters are being torn down, and the group has many members who are lamenting the loss of the traditional rides. Baldwin thinks the hybrid is the answer.

“We can’t deny the success the parks have had with these smoother rides,” he said. “You have a wild, out-of-control ride, but it’s glass smooth.”

Riverside Park , 1915. Six Flags is built on the same site.
Riverside Park , 1915. Six Flags is built on the same site.

 

On November 16, protesters gathered at the offices of a Cambridge drug maker. They say people are dying because of insulin price hikes.

The campaign to lower the price of insulin came to Cambridge Massachusetts on Nov. 16.  A small group of protesters gathered in the freezing rain outside the local office of the pharmaceutical giant Sanofi.

Nicole Smith-Holt, protester
Nicole Smith-Holt, protester

They are part of a broad push to bring down the price of insulin, which has jumped in recent years.  The police were there, and the employees had been sent home.  The protesters gathered across the street for about an hour and later ended up at a nearby Starbucks. We talked to them there.

More here from the Globe.

 

Yesterday’s #journalism class assignment: Go cover the #RedSox victory parade live via social media

Class ended at 9:30. Victory parade started a few block away at 11.

Red Sox fan Carrie Casello talks about why she came to the #RedSoxParade today: pic.twitter.com/9rfxizA7DB

— Simone Migliori (@migliori_simone) October 31, 2018


View this post on Instagram

Peddlers are handing out programs for the Red Sox World Serious Victory Parade.

A post shared by EJY (@ecejyavuz) on Oct 31, 2018 at 7:03am PDT