The US Represented Weekly Update

Hello USR members and guests,

It’s great to touch bases with you again, and we hope you’ve enjoyed our recent postings. It’s been a fairly busy week. McKenzie Bartels‘ “She Fixed Things” shows how important a young cat can be in a family’s life. Magnolia Cook’s “Becoming a Better Person” explains that happiness is our own responsibility and no one else’s. In Eric Stephenson’s “Home Inside,” Gillian Graham’s discovery that she was adopted inspires a journey that leads to a new awareness of family and self. Sami Kear’s “Pageant Brain” describes what it’s like to be a contestant in the Miss Teen Beauty Pageant. In “MOOCs: A Necessary Academic Innovation in a Global Economy,” Daneal Liller points out that the American Academy must embrace innovative online education in order to keep pace in an increasingly competitive world. In “It’s All about the Bees,” Devon Berry explains that the disturbing collapse of bee colonies in America is due largely to the dominance of monoculture farms and the pesticides used to maintain them. In Whatever, Michel Houellebecq offers an interesting analogy that speaks to primate behavior. Shasta Bedard’s “Helen Simmons, Electroconvulsive Therapy, and the Damage Done” discusses how an unproven and poorly conceived medical treatment harmed a good woman and her family. Amie Sharp’s “Cutting Down the Old Growth” captures the transition into spring in vivid detail. In this week’s installment of Emily Badovinac’s novel Deep Red, on a snowy highway in Colorado, Marlo’s subduer, Jack, reflects on how he came to be in this reality and his role in it. In “Gabriel García Márquez and the Solitude of Imagination,” we honor a great writer who just passed away by republishing a passage from his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude.

As always, keep being who you are, and we’ll talk to you soon.

Best!
The USR Staff