Author Archives: Riley Dankovich

Dickens’ death was an absolute sensation. I mean, he potentially died from the stress of reenacting a violent death scene! Thinking about his death at the end of this course, I have also been thinking to the extents other artists … Continue reading →

As a society, we are steeped in instant, or nearly instant, gratification. You want a pizza? You can press buttons on your phone, and without leaving your house, pizza appears. What fascinates me, then, is that we still watch serial … Continue reading →

Advertising, however intelligent Google is, can be confusing. I was reading an article this morning from the website of The New Yorker. It is an article written by award-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, in Italian, and translated into English, about her … Continue reading →

Our recent conversations about our final projects and current social problems has me thinking about what Dickens would say of the 21st century, both of the continuation of the problems he attempted to tackle, and the new ones that he … Continue reading →

Over Thanksgiving break, I went shopping on Black Friday, though only for a couple of hours, in a smaller city. There was no rush, but there was lots of advertising, and lots of sales. I ended up at Ulta, the … Continue reading →

Home for Thanksgiving, I find myself watching much for TV than I usually do. My parents have local news running in the background almost all morning, and as most local news stations do, they have local businesses and organizations on … Continue reading →

Recently in class, we spent a good deal of time discussing the sensation of looking at something that cannot look back at you, whether it is the bodies of the dead turned from subject to object, or characters in novels … Continue reading →

Alongside thinking about how we are advertised to, as consumers, it might be valuable to also look at how we advertise outward. Currently, laptops are the current source of how people consume much of the advertisements they see; ads before … Continue reading →

For an hour and a half tonight, I sat in a great room in the Kissam Center listening to a jazz concert that quickly turned into a jam session. It began as a scheduled event with three blair students, playing … Continue reading →

Despite Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton being a novel about the plight of the working poor, Gaskell, or rather, her narrator, spends rather a lot of time identifying with the middle and upper class. Gaskell’s preface ends with her denying any … Continue reading →