For this assignment, you can write about anything you'd like, but you need to think about building an argument/making a case and supporting it.

The expectation is that you then use the very same approach for a topic of your own choosing. You are to both inform and convince your reader - yours truly (and perhaps your peers) - that your rating makes sense. You should think about your own personal experience and feelings towards your topic, but you will also be expected to support your rating via research/references to authority.

In terms of the actual writing of your review, you should be using the various methods of development, stylistic choices, and methods of persuasion (I hope you've heard of some of these already). You can take an informative approach, a humorous approach, or perhaps a humble, more emotional approach - the choice is yours. We will also be using the writing and peer editing processes during this unit. using John Green'sThe Anthropocene Reviewedand his rating process as a framework. i have attached a copy of his work but remember that is is only a fram for you to take an idea. you have to write a story of yourown story

o JOHN GREEN geography and everything else that comes between us. Todd and I have both floated down through the decadeshe's a doctor nowbut the courses of our lives were shaped by those moments we shared upstream. As Maya Jasanoff wrote, "A river is nature's plotline: [t carries you from here to there\" Or from there to here, at least, Ourside, the world continues. The river, even overflowing its banks, still meanders. I glance from my laptop screen to the river, then back to the screen, and then to the river. For no reason | know, a memory co- alesces: After the Academic Decathlon competition in Newark was over, we ended up with our Zimas on the roof of that hotelTodd and me and a couple of our teammates. It was late at night and New York Ciry glowed pink in the distance. We were the sixth best Academic Decath- lon team in the nation, we were getting just the right amount of uriliy out of our Zimas, and we loved each other. Rivers keep going, and we keep going, and there is no way back to the roof of that hotel. But the memory still holds me together. I give the Academic Decathlon four and a half stars. SUNSETS WHAT ARE WE TO DO about the clichd beaury of an ostentatious sun- set? Should we cut it with menace, as Roberto Bolafio did so brilliantly, writing, \"The sky at sunset looked like a carnivorous flower\"? Should we lean in to the inherent sentimentality, as Kerouac does in On the Road when he writes, \"Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tan- gerine groves and long melon fields . . . the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries"? Or perhaps we should turn to mysticism, as Anna Akhmatova did when she wrote that in the face of a beautiful sunset, I canrtor tell if the day is ending, or the wotld, or if the secret of secrets is inside me again. A good sunset always steals the words from me, renders all my thoughts as gauzy and soft as the light itself. I'll admit, though, that when Lsee the sun sink below a distant horizon as the yellows and oranges and pinks flood the sky, | usnally think, \"This looks photashopped\" When [ see the natural world at its most spectacular, my general impression is that more than anything, it looks fake. The Anthropocene Reviewed 97 96 JOHN GREEN I'm reminded that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centu People ask me all the time if I believe in God. I tell them that I'm ries, tourists would travel around with darkened, slightly convex mirrors Episcopalian, or that I go to church, but they don't care about that. They called Claude glasses. If you turned yourself away from a magnificent only want to know if I believe in God, and I can't answer them, because landscape and looked instead at the landscape's reflection in the Claude I don't know how to deal with the question's in. Do I believe in God? glass, it was said to appear more "picturesque." Named after seventeenth- I believe around God. But I can only believe in what I am in-sunlight century French landscape painter Claude Lorrain, the glass not only and shadow, oxygen and carbon dioxide, solar systems and galaxies. framed the scene but also simplified its tonal range, making reality look But now we're already swimming in sentimental waters; I've meta- like a painting. Thomas Gray wrote that only through the Claude glass phorized the sunset. First, it was photoshopped. Now, it's divine. And could he "see the sun set in all its glory." neither of these ways of looking at a sunset will suffice. e. e. cummings has a sunset poem that goes, The thing about the sun, of course, is that you can't look directly at who are you, little i it-not when you're outside, and not when you're trying to describe its beauty. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes, "We have really (five or six years old) only that one light, one source for all power, and yet we must turn away peering from some high from it by universal decree. Nobody here on the planet seems aware of this strange, powerful taboo, that we all walk around carefully averting window;at the gold our faces this way and that, lest our eyes be blasted forever." In all those senses, the sun is godlike. As T. S. Eliot put it, light is the visible reminder of the Invisible Light. Like a god, the sun has fearsome of november sunset and wondrous power. And like a god, the sun is difficult or even danger- ous to look at directly. In the Book of Exodus, God says, "You cannot (and feeling: that if day see my face, for no one may see me and live." No wonder that Christian has to become night writers have for centuries been punning on Jesus as being both Son and Sun. The Gospel according to John refers to Jesus as "the Light" so many this is a beautiful way) times that it gets annoying. And there are gods of sunlight everywhere It's a good poem, but it only works because cummings situates the there are gods, from the Egyptian Ra to the Greek Helios to the Aztec Nanahuatzin, who sacrificed himself by leaping into a bonfire so that he observation in childhood, when one is presumably too innocent to have could become the shining sun. It all makes a kind of sense: I don't just yet realized how lame it is to write about sunsets. And yet, a good sunset is beautiful, and better still, universally so. Our distant ancestors didn't need the light of that star to survive; I am in many ways a product of its light, which is basically how I feel about God. eat like us or travel like us. Their relationship to ideas as fundamental98 JOHN GREEN The Anthropocene Reviewed 99 as time was different from ours. They measured time not primarily in a puppy then, and in the early evenings he would contract a case of the hours or seconds but mostly in relationship to solar cycles-how close it zoomies. He ran in delighted circles around us, yipping and jumping was to sunset, or to daybreak, or to midwinter. But every human who has lived for more than a few years on this planet has seen a beautiful at nothing in particular, and then after a while, he'd get tired, and he'd run over to me and lie down. And then he would do something abso- sunset and paused to spend one of the last moments of the day grateful for, and overwhelmed by, the light. lutely extraordinary: He would roll over onto his back, and present his soft belly. I always marveled at the courage of that, his ability to be so So how might we celebrate a sunset without being mawkish or sac- charine? Maybe state it in cold facts. Here's what happens: Before a absolutely vulnerable to us. He offered us the place ribs don't protect, trusting that we weren't going to bite or stab him. It's hard to trust the bearn of sunlight gets to your eyes, it has many, many interactions with molecules that cause the so-called scattering of light. Different wave- world like that, to show it your belly. There's something deep within me, something intensely fragile, that is terrified of turning itself to the world. lengths are sent off in different directions when interacting with, say, oxygen or nitrogen in the atmosphere. But at sunset, the light travels I'm scared to even write this down, because I worry that having through the atmosphere longer before it reaches us, so that much of the confessed this fragility, you now know where to punch. I know that if blue and purple has been scattered away, leaving the sky to our eyes rich I'm hit where I am earnest, I will never recover. in reds and pinks and oranges. As the artist Tacita Dean put it, "Color is It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is a fiction of light." somehow disrespectful to the many horrors that also surround us. But mostly, I think I'm just scared that if I show the world my belly, it will I think it's helpful to know how sunsets work. I don't buy the ro- devour me. And so I wear the armor of cynicism, and hide behind the mantic notion that scientific understanding somehow robs the universe of its beauty, but I still can't find language to describe how breathtakingly great walls of irony, and only glimpse beauty with my back turned to it, beautiful sunsets are-not breathtakingly, actually, but breath-givingly through the Claude glass. beautiful. All I can say is that sometimes when the world is between But I want to be earnest, even if it's embarrassing. The photographer day and night, I'm stopped cold by its splendor, and I feel my absurd Alec Soth has said, "To me, the most beautiful thing is vulnerability." I smallness. You'd think that would be sad, but it isn't. It only makes me would go a step further and argue that you cannot see the beauty which grateful. Toni Morrison once wrote, "At some point in life, the world's is enough unless you make yourself vulnerable to it. And so I try to turn toward that scattered light, belly out, and I tell beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even myself: This doesn't look like a picture. And it doesn't look like a god. remember it. It is enough." So what can we say of the cliched beauty of sunsets? Perhaps only that they are enough. It is a sunset, and it is beautiful, and this whole thing you've been doing where nothing gets five stars because nothing is perfect? That's bullshit. So much is perfect. Starting with this. I give sunsets five stars. My dog, Willy, died a few years ago, but one of my great memories of him is watching him play in the front yard of our house at dusk. He was