Category Archives: essay

A Brief History of Journalism

By shelley | Published: 12 Apr 07
“Journalism is storytelling with a purpose. That purpose is to provide people with information they need to understand the world. The first challenge is finding the information that people need to live their lives. The second is to make it meaningful, relevant, and engaging.” The journalistic principle of engagement and relevance means exactly that – […]
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On Tea & Japan

By shelley | Published: 8 Jun 06
“Tea is the ultimate mental and medical remedy and has the ability to make one’s life more full and complete.” ~Rinzai Zen Priest Eisai (1141-1215)7 Originally brought to Japan from China in the early ninth century by Buddhist priests, tea – specifically green tea – was first used as a form of medicine and as […]
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On Photography and Graphic Design

By shelley | Published: 29 Nov 05
The art world, for all its open-minded and revolutionary rhetoric, has not always been accepting of new media. Court painters during the medieval period were considered craftsmen instead of artists. Performance art met with hesitation and distrust. Photography, until fairly recently, was considered more of a craft than an art. The same has been true […]
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On the Outskirts: Marginalized Artists in the 1970s and 1980s

By shelley | Published: 10 May 05
At the start of the 1970s two major groups were setting in motion the beginnings of their respective grand entrances to the art scene, both beginning in Southern California. Women artists and Chicano artists alike had been marginalized by the mainstream art world – but that was about to change. The 1970s brought about social […]
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Performance Art, Pop Art, and Minimalism

By shelley | Published: 7 Apr 05
The period spanning the late 1950s to the end of the 1970s gave rise to many an art movement, most of which were either a direct response to or a continuation of the work of the Abstract Expressionists. Some of these movements included Pop, Assemblage, “Happenings” and other forms of Performance Art, Minimalism, and Process […]
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Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia

By shelley | Published: 24 Mar 05
According to www.dictionary.com, the term globalization means “growth to a global or worldwide scale,” from the root word globalize, which means “to make global or worldwide in scope or application.” This concept was precisely the subject of the Past in Reverse exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art – an exhibition which featured over […]
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Bad Examples From Hollywood

By shelley | Published: 9 Mar 04
Hollywood talks itself up as this great self-aware role-model machine. Myriad famous people are always quipping about being aware of how much influence they wield and trying to set a good example. I’ve noticed, though, that Hollywood is good at perpetuating stereotypes when no one’s looking. I work in the video rental industry so I […]
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It’s in the Wording

By shelley | Published: 17 Feb 04
Recently I’ve begun noticing that sexism isn’t just in the way we act, but in how we make use of our language. There are several examples of phrases that I have come across lately that illustrate our culture’s views of the sexes and the roles proscribed to each. These constructs of language serve primarily to […]
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Radical Notions

By shelley | Published: 16 May 02
I’m sure it’s rather obvious, but I’ll go ahead and say it anyway. I’m a feminist. Wait, where are you going? That’s not as bad a word as it seems. No, really, come back, I won’t bite (hard). Good, now let me start over. I’m a feminist. I believe in the equality of women and […]
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Fence Sitting: Religious or Spiritual Education?

By shelley | Published: 26 Feb 02
For every debate, it seems there’s always someone stuck in the middle, someone who just can’t separate the issues into one black and one white side. When it comes to taking sides between Svi Shapiro and James Moffett, that person is yours truly – to a certain degree, anyway. Shapiro, in his essay A Parent’s […]
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A Parent’s Dilemma: Public vs. Jewish Education

By shelley | Published: 12 Feb 02
The time had come far too soon for the author to decide between public education and Jewish education for his daughter. There is always the danger of one person’s individuality being lost in the grand scale of “moral, ideological, and political considerations,” but a parent cannot ignore the needs of the child just for the […]
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Censorship and a Spiritual Education

By shelley | Published: 8 Feb 02
Morality and religion, which “function through human institutions,” are inherently culturally biased and focus largely on a particular group of people. Spirituality is a connection to the whole, rather than just to one group, and an education in such can achieve generally the same goals as religious teachings, although with more emphasis on plurality than […]
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Opportunity Masking Reality

By shelley | Published: 4 Oct 00
It seems to me that every generation has to have something or another to complain about. Generally speaking, each will gripe about all of the other generations at least once, if not much more frequently. Our parents’ generation talks about everything that our generation is lacking, and our grandparents’ generation is equally negative in regards […]
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On Noam Chomsky

By shelley | Published: 22 May 00
The other day I saw the words CHOMSKY KNOWS scratched into the wall of a toilet stall. This is how word of Noam Chomsky tends to spread: you hear the guy, your life changes and you share the news however you can. (7, 1) While sitting in a café, I saw a young woman walk […]
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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—Nonexistent “Nontagonists”

By shelley | Published: 14 Feb 00
Just as most people are mere carved pieces in the great chess game of existence, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, were basically insignificant in the greater scheme of things. They were really only so until their deaths, though, much like a chess piece which gains so […]
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