Alone Newspaper

This project was in collaboration with Elizabeth Nutting, Leo Romero, and Sam Schroeder. Taking an episode from the podcast, This American Life, my group found an episodes that connect back to a topic/observation/theme/idea identified we related to as a group. The episode, How to be Alone, connected with each of us after a few years spent apart from a lot of the world due to the pandemic.

We divided up the sections of the podcast and soon realized that a pattern emerged in the story. We rearranged the stories a little bit to fit our narrative and made a chart explaining the different types of being alone that the podcast brought up. People can be alone by choice, living in a cabin in isolation because it is where they feel fee. People can be alone without a choice, like how the pandemic made many of us separated from the entire world, even neighbors through apartment walls. You could also be together by choice, like many mothers fleeing their home country and traveling to the US fighting to not be separated from their children. Finally, some people are together without a choice, like astronauts in tight quarters in space without the ability to separate from one another.

The last story brought up in the podcast was about a whale which scientist believe to be the loneliest creature on earth. People grabbed onto the story of a whale living all alone and put their own perceptions onto the whale. But what we have learned from another story is that being alone doesn’t have to be lonely.  Maybe the whale made the choice to be alone. Maybe we shouldn’t feel bad for him. Or maybe the other whales are just jerks. The whale carves his way through the entire newspaper letting the perceptions of the stories wash over him. In the end he breaks through.