Troy has always been the ideal place to live. It’s not a large city, but close enough to one to not be estranged from popular entertainment. It’s not farmland either, but it’s not difficult to drive a half hour to an apple orchard, if you really wanted to.  There isn’t an overbearing homogeneity in the population, yet for the amount of racial differences, resulting conflicts are surprisingly few. The weather can get nasty sometimes, but Troy residents can always expect sunny days. There’s no smog, so you can see the sky. The school district is stellar. The people are kind.

  Yet, recently, a murder occurred in Troy, in the neighborhood in which I once lived, in which I once played.

I first heard it being discussed among students in my computer science class. “Did you hear about the murder?” one asked another. I took it to be just another murder that occurred somewhere in the world. I ignored it.

“I live down the street from them,” the other said. I jolted.

In retrospect, I wonder why I reacted so differently when I learned it had occurred in my own community. I’ve heard a few versions of the story, but one fact remains glaringly clear: two young children have been left motherless, and that makes my heart ache. Yet I know for a fact that if this woman had been murdered anywhere else, my brow would not be furrowed as harshly as it is now.

After I learned the entire story from the students sitting behind me, the first one spoke again. “You know, this just bumped Troy down so many places in the safest cities ranking.” It reflected badly on the esteemed safety of Troy, just like the white man who raped his foster daughter on Sherman Alexie’s reservation reflected badly on the morals of the Indian community. Yet both are outliers, inaccurate representations of the respective community and the people in it. Troy is not a city full of murderers any more than the Indian reservation is a community full of rapists and boys who “start drinking real young.”

At least we have mayor Slater asserting that the murder was “not a reflection of the community,” and nobody’s going to believe that Troy is suddenly a terrible place because this murder happened. For Alexie’s reservation, however, there’s nobody to dispel the false perceptions.

Everybody knows about Apple, innovative tech giant and builder of the world’s most popular device – and, most recently, defender of the common people’s privacy in the Apple vs. the FBI case. Stuart Carlson’s political cartoon aptly portrays many aspects of the situation, many of which the common citizen is probably not aware of.

In the political cartoon, Apple is seen being forced by the FBI to unlock the “backdoor,” a word which, in everyday English, is used to describe something secretive and devious.  Both Apple and the FBI have neutral faces and regular sized bodies – both see their respective sides as the responsible and right thing to do, and both have their reasons. In any case, they both have good intentions.

The giant, almost superhuman people leering behind Apple and the FBI, however, definitely do not. With their eager smiles and tense body positions, hackers and repressive regimes look almost like children in standing in front of a candy shop. And they might as well be. If Apple really hacked the iPhone, that would open up the code to the rest of the world – not excluding people who shouldn’t be able to. If hackers, repressive regimes, cyber criminals, etc. are enabled access to that code, their power would be immense – much larger than what Apple and the FBI would be able to handle.  

The title, “Pandora’s iPhone”, also gives a little insight to the disastrous consequences Apple’s hacking the terrorist’s iPhone could have. After all, this political cartoon is alluding to Pandora’s release of all of mankind’s evils, achieved just by opening a little box she was told she shouldn’t. If Apple were to unlocked “Pandora’s iPhone,” they would be unleashing the power to all sorts of evils. 

I thought I had last week’s bird flock compare and contrast essay in the bag. I compared and contrasted, like the prompt had asked me to, I got rather in depth in terms of the philosophy of the pieces, and I had time for a relatively decent “future implications” conclusion paragraph. Apparently, I did not have it in the bag. A high scoring essay would have focused on contrasting, and my philosophy wasn’t exactly wrong, it just wasn’t right. I didn’t pick up on the biggest difference – Audubon was a scientist, while Dillard was a writer.

Still, I’m going to defend myself. Audubon just wrote so beautifully, relating the flock of birds to “the coils of a gigantic serpent” (line 42) – how was I supposed to pick up on the fact that he was an ornithologist (other than through the article source, which I (shamefully) admit that I missed)? He had me deceived. In context, that’s about the highest compliment he’ll ever get from me. I have no outstanding interest in his 19^th century writing or his bird studies, but I do have an extraordinary interest in his 19^th century writing and his bird studies, the perfect mix of art and science.

Let me explain. I’ve had a passion for the fine arts since a relatively young age; I’m not one of those prodigy children about which articles are sometimes shared on Facebook, but I like to think that I do have some above average skill in drawing and painting. I’ve invested a lot of time into my art, but my parents would rather I have a steady career as an engineer (I have Asian parents – surprise!). It’s not that they’re forcing a future on me – I have developed an interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) from my science and math classes, an obsession over modern mobile devices, and participation in the robotics team. Having equal interests in art and STEM, I decided, over the course of high school, to integrate the two. In terms of current career goals, I’m thinking human-computer interaction, which combines computer science and design. Point is: I love interdisciplinary integration.

I feel like interdisciplinary work is a relatively new concept, especially STEAM (STEM plus art), as its components are traditionally seen as clashing. So it’s nice to see that John James Audubon had already caught on more than a century and a half ago, using absolutely beautiful language to describe his scientific observations of a flock of birds’ “undulating and angular lines” (line 37), which would seem to clash with each other, but somehow actually works – just like science and art. Also, he’s a painter, so instant connection right there.

Jason Stacy, who wrote about the connection between history and English in “Strangers Across The Hall”, puts it nicely: “the two disciplines are not so estranged as they might seem” (page 66). It’s not just history and English, though, but any two, or three, or even a greater number of disciplines. In today’s globalized world, everything’s connected. In my case, it’s STEM and art. The walk down the never-ending hallway, down a flight of stairs, and through a connector hallway may not be as easy as Stacy’s mere stroll across the hallway, but I think I’ll manage.

There is so much violence appearing in the world today: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, terrorist attacks all around the world, and even harsh invectives thrown among American politicians, making everyone in the United States hot for humility as their government becomes the laughingstock of the world. It seems that the philosophies of people like Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Cesar Chavez, famous proponents of nonviolence, have been forgotten, despite their obvious success; prospects are only going to become grimmer hereafter. In an article commemorating Dr. King and alluding to Gandhi, Chavez uses artful rhetoric to support nonviolence. By explaining that violence will lead to either destruction or demoralization (lines 19-21), and appealing to people’s religious nature, Chavez effectively convinces the farm workers, and anybody after him who is fighting for a cause, that “nonviolence is more powerful than violence” (lines 12-13).

Sometimes people feel detached from the horrible events occurring all around them; ironically, the mass media of modern days contributes to that. Every day, so much news about war updates and shootings and politics is spread around that people have become numb to them – they’re just another part of daily life. And the fact that this information is often viewed among the videos of cats and haikus about refrigerators on the internet makes it even more difficult for people to differentiate heavier topics. There is a lack of realization that violence is too prevalent in the world, and so there is no motivation for change. This may have been the case in the 1970’s, when Cesar Chavez wrote this article, but there is no doubt that this is definitely the case in the world now, and Chavez’s same article is needed for the same purpose it was first written for – to remind about the power of nonviolence.