Author Archives: Despina Durand

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About Despina Durand

part-time goth, full-time critic

Performing citizenship

I’m in line at the elementary school. I am, whenever its snaking brings me to the door, going to perform my citizen’s right; I pay taxes and in return, I vote to decide where and how that money is spent. This is the most basic definition of citizenship, as I understand it, the people sustain the government with taxes and in return the government provides them with services; education, roads, security (laws, judges, police officers, armies), to name a few. The republic allows us to then contribute by voting, we are allowed to decide how the government will be run, by electing those who are running it. In theory. Today, before going to vote, I read a piece in Harper’s Magazine about fraud in the voting system. (It made waiting for the election results very stressful.) Continue reading

Aggregation! Research! Context! Oh my! (Adventures at WMUA pt. 2)

I’m still feeling proud of myself. Wednesday, at 5:30pm on WMUA, I read two stories that I had done some more significant research for. They weren’t proper reporting: I didn’t get any interviews, I didn’t find the lead and hunt it down. But I drew from multiple sources, and came to some good conclusions. I did some things that the places I first encountered the ideas didn’t do (not particularly complex additions, but that’s alright).
The first story was one about what the possible effects of climate change may have been on the creation of Hurricane Sandy. [Pro tip: don’t try and understand all of meteorology in an afternoon. It will not go well.] Continue reading

Radio Reinventions (Adventures at WMUA pt 1)

It turns out that I joined the WMUA news team just as big changes were beginning to get put in place. It just so happens that up until this year, the news you may have heard on WMUA was the journalistic equivalent of a chop shop. The stories were put together from bits and pieces of the New York Times, the Gazette, al-Jazeera… The attributions were fishy, and the licensing non-existent. It was, in short, Very Bad Journalistic Practice. Continue reading

And then suddenly, business news! (Quartz)

I’m new to reading the newspaper. I’m new to watching the news on TV. I’m new to The Daily Show and periodicals. I’m particularly new to business news. We don’t get any of the business oriented newspapers at my house, and I wouldn’t even look at the front page of the business section of the New York Times, because I was positive, as someone who has the privilege to dismiss the value of money, that the economy was full of statistics and lies and other unpleasant things. (I’m not entirely sure that assessment was wrong, however…) Continue reading

60 Minutes: Drinking Age

I’m still new to the news. If I was an inconsistent reader of the newspaper, and thus new to things like the coverage of political speeches, it has nothing on my alienation from TV news. No one watches the news in my house, we only read it. So it was sort of weird to sit through a news broadcast. I’m used to the cinematic nature of documentaries, TV shows and other kinds of movies; not the everything-in-focus camerawork of the news. It’s rude to tar everyone in TV news with the same brush, but it’s never been held in high regard in my house. Continue reading