Category Archives: News

Beginning around this time last year, I started listening to a lot of podcasts. While thinking about the role advertising plays in our daily lives, I decided to focus on the role advertising plays in podcasts. Podcasts are always episodic … Continue reading →

Over the break, I saw a Walmart commercial selling “consumer items.”  These items are aimed at a target audience of consumers rather than users because the items Walmart advertised are seasonal and not reusable. The goal of the commercial was … 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 →

Holidays have long been associated with feasting throughout the world. Christmas in particular is thematically a time of abundance and celebration that centers around food. Aside from a central Christmas meal, the giving of food as gifts is a common … Continue reading →

In a recent essay by Emily Nussbaum in the New Yorker, Nussbaum tracks how advertising fits in with television and how, as the television viewer has become increasingly able to bypass commercials, the television business model has changed. Nussbaum writes, … Continue reading →

In Oliver Twist, Dickens’ two main female characters are essentially foils of each other–the chaste Rose and the prostitute Nancy. Clearly, this says a lot about how women were valued in the mid-18th century. Rose, who, despite her uncertain heritage, … 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 →

After reading two of Charles Dickens’ novels and seeing the format in which they were originally published, it is clear that his writing and advertising went closely hand-in-hand. Dickens was perhaps not the first author to capitalize on the financial … Continue reading →

Hard Times deals with divorce in an interesting way in relation to its time period. Victorian marriage laws made divorce next to impossible, as it required an act of Parliament, something extraordinarily expensive to achieve. In 1854, Caroline Norton wrote … Continue reading →

  In Oliver Twist, the relationship between Nancy and Rose Maylie signifies the relationship between prostitution and the middle class in Victorian England. Nancy, a woman seen as “a disgrace to her sex” (Dickens 331), encounters Rose’s initial kindness with … Continue reading →