The Craft of Popularization course at University of Baltimore is described as follows: “Writing for a lay audience about subjects that are technically or scientifically challenging or normally fall within the province of the scholar and specialist or otherwise inhibit instant understanding.”
Focusing on audience, clarity, and sensitivity, I wrote essays about religion, politics, and other typically controversial subjects to fulfill course requirements.
Belief in the otherworldly preys on the frailties of the human condition: fear of death, uncertainty of the future, and desire to ascribe order and meaning to a chaotic world. It’s reassuring to believe that our day-to-day lives aren’t random and our loved ones don’t cease to exist when they die. It’s comforting to think we exert more control over the universe than we do, whether through positive thinking or tempting fate. Like following through when you throw a baseball, it’s not clear how the motion of your arm affects the ball’s trajectory after it’s already left your hand, and yet it does.
Instead of letting the thoughts pass away so that I might return to the present moment, I clung to them and labeled them in order to return to them in this space. The straight-backed rattan chairs squeak with the least bit of movement. The black razorback tank top clings to the perfectly tanned skin of the woman sitting in front of me. Tara’s voice is deep and earthy as she asks us to visualize a wide-open sky with the curve of a smile. A valley in the heart of West Virginia was where I last saw an endless expanse of blue dotted with puffy cotton clouds. As I tried to superimpose a smile on that image, I realized it was already there.
Ted Turner is the root of all evil. The eccentric media mogul was a household name when I was growing up in Atlanta, long before the Braves baseball stadium bore his moniker and long before the Braves were a team worth mentioning. But Turner saw their worth, and he purchased the team so he could broadcast all their games on his TBS television station. He turned TBS into the first super-station, broadcasting content nationwide via satellite, and his next media venture would change the world as we know it: 24-hour news.
Lauren B. Lentini 