Contacting My Op-ed Writer

Dear Emily,
hello! my name is Tori Pinna and I am a senior at Roncalli High School in Indianapolis, Indiana.  For my AP English class, we had to select an Op-ed writer, follow their articles, and blog about them. For my latest blog, i read your article, The Medical Revolution, and was asked to state your claim, concession, and reasoning. I was just wondering, do you have a personal connection to this issue, such as a relative or friend suffering from Parkinson's Disease? Also, I was wondering if you have heard of any updated cures or advances? As a final question, I was wondering if you have any articles you would recommend me to read? thanks!
  -Tori

Contacting my Op-Ed writer was actually very easy. I simply went to WWW.slate.com, clicked on her name, and next to all of her articles was a direct link to her email address. Unfortunately, i have not yet received a response from Emily Yoffe. However, if i do i will be sure to post it on here! i have learned that it can be very easy to contact a celebrity or program one is interested in. the sky is the limit!

The Medical Revolution

"Where are the cures promised by stem cells, gene therapy, and the human genome?"

http://www.slate.com/id/2264401/

Claim:"The disappointments are so acute in part because the promises have been so big". 
Concession: There really isn't a concession, they essay in its entirety speaks only of the ways in which the doctors have given many people false hope for cures and treatments for diseases.  

• "Over the past two decades, we've been told that a new age of molecular medicine—using gene therapy, stem cells, and the knowledge gleaned from unlocking the human genome—would bring us medical miracles."

-As an example of this, she speaks of Dr. J. William Langston, a Parkinson's disease researcher. In 1999, he promised people that they would have a cure within five to ten years. After many years of findings, he realized that there would be no cure in his lifetime. 
-they felt that the "field of regenerative medicine seemed poised to make it possible for doctors to put healthy tissue in a damaged brain, reversing the destruction caused by the disease."

• "Adding to the frustration is an endless stream of laboratory animals that are always getting healed... But humans keep experiencing suffering and death. Why? What explains the tremendous mismatch between expectation and reality? Are the cures really coming, just more slowly than expected? Or have scientists fundamentally misled us, and themselves, about the potential of new medical technologies?"
• "The New York Times recently pointed out that 10 years after the first draft of the human genome was announced, the hoped-for ability to identify the genetic causes of our major killers such as cancer and heart disease has been mostly a bust."

My Claim: I agree with Emily Yoffe; i believe it is unfair of scientist to give people who go to bed praying for a cure every night a false chance for a cure. Scientists need to have solid proof of their findings and give people a realistic report of the findings, rather than tell people what they wish to hear.

Seeking- the human's new greatest desire

"How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous".

http://www.slate.com/id/2224932/

This is an article of Emily Yoffe from Slate Magazine. She is trying to stress that we are an information-crazed generation. Internet information sites such as Google and Twitter have created an insatiable sense of searching in human beings. Yoffe is able to give us a better understanding of the situation by backing up her information from an experiment done on rats in the 1950's. Just as people of the twenty-first century are addicted to gaining information, rats who had an electrode inserted in their brains constantly were stimulating shocks until they collapsed. No, we are not overloading our brains until they burst, but we are addicted to the constant access to an instant gratification of knowledge. In addition to this comparison Yoffe also uses strategies such as onomatopoeia to get her point across. When she states "While we tap, tap away at our search engines, it appears we are stimulating the same system in our brains that scientists accidentally discovered more than 50 years ago when probing rat skulls", she magnifies the severity of our addiction to computers and how information today is simply one click away. Although she is posing a serious problem with society, i do not believe she is very concerned with changing people. I feel that she is simply making people aware of their addictive behavior.

She Persuades her audience in the following ways:

• "people will neglect almost everything—their personal hygiene, their family commitments—in order to keep getting that buzz."
• the use of rhetorical questions such as "Ever find yourself sitting down at the computer just for a second to find out what other movie you saw that actress in, only to look up and realize the search has led to an hour of Googling?" to make us think about our addiction to this stimulation.
• "our constant Internet scrolling is remodeling our brains to make it nearly impossible for us to give sustained attention to a long piece of writing".

 

Emily Yoffe- Slate Magazing

Emily Yoffe A.K.A Dear Prudence

Emily yoffe is an op-ed writer for Slate Magazine. She also has written for The New York Times, The Oprah Magazine, and The Washington Post. She writes an advice column for slate magazine called Dear Prudence. She is also referred to as "the human guinea pig" because she is known for trying new and bizarre experiences her readers suggest to her, and then blogging about it. She has attempted everything from nude modeling for an art class to hypnosis. In 2007, Yoffe wrote a book What the Dog Did: Tales from a Formerly Reluctant Dog Owner. This book was named best book of the year by Dogwise. It was also chosen as the Best General Interest Dog Book by the Dog Writers Association of America. In addition to writing, Emily Yoffe also contribute to the NPR show Day to Day.