COMM 337: Watch this space for your 3rd analyical assignment

UPDATE: Oct. 17. Please see new assignment sheet posted today (Monday, Oct. 17). I am now combining this assignment with the fourth analytical paper. Instead of two separate 1,000-word analyses of feature stories, I will be asking you to write one 1,500-word analysis of two related articles by Michael Lewis. Instead of Oct. 27, it will now be due Monday, Nov. 1. The draft that I posted below, which I am revising to reflect the new assignment, will still give you valuable background that will help you do a better analysis.

It'll be due Thursday, on Oct. 27 Tuesday, Nov 1. That'll give you two weeks. I will post specific questions to The Mackerel Wrapper, but first I want to finish reading the assigned material so I can give you some intelligent questions to think about.

In the meantime, we can read ahead ...

Michael Lewis, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and author of several books about the financial markets, has a new book out titled "Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World Economy." He's promoting it heavily on a book tour, and it's in the news a lot these days. Also, as Paul Williams puts it in The Washington Post Lewis "offer[s] a crash course on understanding the European economic crisis." The American economy, too, for that matter.

Lewis' thesis, if you can call it that, is that the financial crisis that began in 2007 and 2008 is devastating the European economy and is spreading back to where it began in America. "Boomerang" is based on a series of articles linked to his profile page on the Vanity Fair website. I'll get back to them later.

But first, in order to give us some background, here are links to a couple of reviews:

• In a very positive review in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani summarizes Lewis' overall theme as "the utter folly and madness that spread across both sides of the Atlantic during the last decade, as individuals, institutions and entire nations mindlessly embraced instant gratification over long-term planning, the too good to be true over common sense."
  
  
• In a decidedly less friendly blog post on MoJo.com, a self-styled progressive website, Kevin Drum says of the part on Germany, "it's is a great read ... [but] there's practically nothing there." Drum isn't impressed with Lewis' pop sociology, either. "I don't care how many people call his latest piece brilliant, the truth is that it's just lazy."
  
  
• In a generally balanced review in the business magazine Forbes, Kyle Smith of the New York Daily News says Lewis takes some cheap shots but adds, "The most vital writing about finance requires what Lewis has — a sure sense of the absurd." His overall assessment: "... both the details of Lewis’s reportage and the big picture look unanswerable."

For your next analysis, I will assign you to read one of Lewis' articles and analyze how it is reported and written. I don't agree with everything Lewis says, and I don't expect you to either - as long as you back up whatever you say with quotes and/or factual evidence. ...

This next bit is new today (Oct. 17), and it's important. Which is why I'm putting it into boldface. Capice? In addition to the questions about art, craftsmanship and Donald Murry's advice to writing students that I've been asking you to discuss in your other analytical pieces, I want you to focus on the way Lewis makes himself a character in the stories he tells. His articles aren't just about the economy - they're about the way he went about reporting the story, the people he met, how he reacted to them, what they told him. How effective is that technique? Does it add to the story? If so, what does it add? Does it detract? If so, what? Or does it both add and detract? If so, precisely what? Feel free to include your estimation of Lewis as a reporter.