COMM 337: assignment sheet for 3rd and 4th analytical papers - due Tuesday, Nov. 1

From our syllabus in COMM 337: "Students will create a web Log (blog) and write analyses professional writing of 1,000 words each of: (a) a newspaper feature story, (b) a magazine feature, (c) a piece of public affairs reporting and (d) an opinion or op-ed piece on the blog."

Your last analytical assignment will combine assignments (a) and (b) into one 1,500-word analysis of two of the articles included in Michael Lewis' new book "Boomerang" about the ongoing crisis in European and U.S. financial markets. (If you feel cheated out of the opportunity to write 2,000 words, don't despair! You can go over the 1,500 word limit.) Lewis is a contributing editor of Vanity Fair magazine, and the stories he based the book on are available on line. I will link them below. I am also linking to an earlier draft of the assignment sheet with links and background on Lewis.

Your assignment -

"Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World" is about a series of interrelated financial crises that began in the United States in 2008, spread to Europe and now appears to be headed our way again - i.e. the "boomerang" in the title. The Vanity Fair articles are on Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and - California, and Lewis refers to them as a "financial disaster tour."

Lewis' shtick is to report like a travel writer, with lots of description and generalizations about the culture in the country he visits. This leaves him open to charges of stereotyping - do the Irish always enjoy suffering, are the Germans always obsessed with cleanliness and order? - but the book has gotten mostly very positive reviews. For example, infuential book critic Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times says he "actually makes topics like European sovereign debt, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank not only comprehensible but also fascinating — even, or especially, to readers who rarely open the business pages or watch CNBC." So you can get a taste of Lewis' travel writing, and the international scoope of the crisis, I want you to analyze his piece on California and one other. You can pick the one that's most interesting to you.

As you read the stories, be thinking about Donald Murry's "little green book that won't go away" (it hasn't gone away yet), and be sure to discuss these points in your analysis of Lewis' articles:

• What does Murray mean by "craft?" How does Lewis use the craftsmanship and techniques of a professional reporter to research and write these stories?
  
• How does "craft" differ from "art" in the context of Murray's story? How do the two segments of "Boomerang" that you read stack up as art? As craftsmanship?
  
• What is the relationship between the craft of reporting and of writing as Lewis plies his trade? What would Don Murray think of him as a reporter? As a writer? How important is reporting to Lewis' story?

The stories -

As a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, Lewis has a profile page with a good bio and links to his articles including the following:

• "Wall Street on the Tundra," March 3, 2009. Lewis' account of financial wheeling and dealing in Iceland, where men are men and women are ... well, Lewis has some interesting ideas about gender roles, but recently elected women are cleaning up the financial and political mess left by the wheeler-dealers.
  
• "Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds," Sept. 6, 2010. Lewis visits an ancient Greek Orthodox monastery as well as financial centers like Athens where the government's indebtedness is bringing down the banks and threatens to bring down the euro. Greek readers have been particularly insulted by Lewis' generalizations.
  
• "When Irish Eyes Are Crying," March 2011. In Ireland, it's the other way around: The banks brought down one government and threaten another. Not on Lewis' profile page but you can find it by clicking here. Lewis peddles some stereotypes about the Irish - do they really enjoy feeling guilty? - but he talks with some brilliant economists including Morgan Kelly of University College Dublin.
  
• "It’s the Economy, Dummkopf!" Aug. 20, 2011. Lewis' take on Germany. If you outgrew your taste for bathroom humor when you left seventh grade behind, you might want to read another article instead. But Lewis' financial analysis is, as usual, better grounded than his pop sociology (or pop cultural anthropology). And Germany, at least for the moment, is the key to what happens to the euro.
  
• "California and Bust," Sept. 29, 2011. This is the one I am assigning. In interviews with former Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger and officials in the bankrupt city of Vallejo, Lewis suggests a "fiscal armageddon" is coming to America. Are Americans really "conditioned to grab as much as they could without thinking about the long-term consequences?"

There are blurbs on the Vanity Fair profile page to help you choose one of the European stories.

Some more background -

To help get you started ...

An interview (4 min 29 sec) with Charlie Rose of Bloomberg TV



An Oct. 9 interview (7 min 9 sec) on GPS, Fareed Zakeria's show on CNN ...



Other sources. An NPR interview and other sources I used to prepare this assignment are linked to message board on my old SCI faculty website. The links to my faculty page are broken now, but the board is still there.