Rhetoric and Civic Life | Annabelle Yi

copied   Let's imagine you're back in elementary school, and you just finished a box of juice. Your homeroom teacher tells you to throw it out, but you, being a good gold-star-getting kid, decide to recycle your juice box (because recycling saves the environment). You go to the recycling bins and browse the labels: paper, plastic, metal. You move toward the paper bin, since the juice box is mostly paper, right? But no! It has plastic too! You then move towards the plastic bin. But wait! Isn't that shiny bit that seals the opening of the juice box metal? Where do you put it? Where does it go?? When did recycling get so hard??? It used to be so simple, back in the good ol' days. You got a bin and you just put stuff in it, no sorting required. Usually, it was pretty self-explanatory what went where, but with the rise of "extreme" recycling, it's critical you put your trash EXACTLY in the right place, or else you might kill a forest or cause ...

Technology has advanced extremely in these past 20 years - creation of the internet, touchscreens, robot AI, and live video feeds. Visuals have gained higher resolution, have become crisper, cleaner, faster, slimmer. This technology, however, did not originally start off in the hands of the public, but rather the work places of highly trained professionals. Now, everyone has advanced technology at their finger tips. Video calls have existed since the 1850's, mostly used for business and telecommunications. The public didn't get a hold of the technology until a decade later, in the 1860's. However, it didn't gain popularity until a decade after that. The Picturephone was what it was called, back in the day, and that was the first commercially sold product that supported video calls. It was pretty much a TV with a camera hooked up to a phone. Yes. It was boxy. Since then, however, video calls have upgraded from box with boxes to smartphones with cameras, with more expen...

It's pretty much a requirement that all people of importance or leadership position have good public speaking skills. Anyone can write a good speech on paper, but it's the delivery that sells it. A person who knows how to deliver themselves can make any argument or proposition sound amazing. That is why there are only few who have truly great speeches - ones that stick to your brain and recorded in history. I was born on the same day Pearl Harbor happened (December 7th, for those who need to brush up on American History), so I'm biased toward a certain speech that was delivered on the day after in 1941. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his Pearl Harbor Address to Congress with a voice full of conviction and determination.  He opens his address with probably his most iconic line: "Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan"...