Pizza, Priorities, and Aretaic Ethics

On a sunset stroll along the Ocean City boardwalk in the heat of summer, the same scene unfolds as always: Teenage boys and girls ride their bikes and their skateboards in packs, yelling over the crowds. Young parents scramble to keep track of their young children, who jostle one another, sprinting through small groups of friends and family in the miles-long crowd. Among the jewelry stores, mini golf courses, and tee shirt shops, Manco & Manco stands alone in its old-timey, carnivalian glare.

To locals and tourists alike, this 60-year-old pizzeria is forever legendary for serving the best slice on the South Shore. Just take a look inside the restaurant, and you’ll see an ever-present variety of patrons that surpasses generational bounds. Many gaze at the pizza as it enters and exits the oven, from dough to delicacy, before it is speedily sliced and shuttled to patrons lounging at the tables, sitting at the bar, and standing in line for take-out.

At Manco & Manco, pizza is an art.

On Arbitrarily Unjust Athletic Arbitration

For many athletes, sports are a haven for passion and resilience, an institution for unending personal growth and accomplishing goals. They inculcate leadership, while forcing players to rely on one another for success, and they allow individuals to engulf themselves in a tightly knit community, instigating powerful, lifelong friendships. But, ultimately, amid the tears of defeat and the throat-scratching screams of success, they propagate a single commandment—follow the rules, or be penalized—given that the obvious imperative for all sporting events is that they must be fair and equal for all participants. Thus, officials, without a doubt, must be impartial.

Shot-By-Shot Analysis: Silver Linings Playbook and Pulp Fiction

Part One: Chosen Scenes and Analysis Framework

For the two scenes I analyze, I present one scene from each of the two films, Silver Linings Playbook and Pulp Fiction. They both demonstrate characters participating in a similarly designed scene: two characters—Pat (Bradley Cooper) and Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), in Silver Linings Playbook, and Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer), with the waitress (Laura Lovelace), in Pulp Fiction—sitting across from each other at a diner, familiarizing themselves with the personal details of one another, as well as better understanding each other’s own personal philosophies.

On California and Climate Change Policy

If anything is eminently clear from Roger Karapin’s book, Political Opportunities for Climate Policy: California, New York and the Federal Government, it is that the government of California presents magnificent methods of rallying together its populace and industrial community around climate change, toward dramatically reducing harmful emissions into the atmosphere in both the short- and long-term. Any doubt of this can be resolved in the knowledge that targets for reductions include a “29% reduction from the business-as-usual scenario, and a 32% cut in per-capita emissions over 1990-2020” (32), an era in which emissions across the world have often increased.

At-Risk Communities and Climate Justice

Whereas it is critical to dismantle theoretical claims about long-term anthropogenic climate change damaging everyone without discrimination that discount the realities about short-term global warming, there are a number of very real and tangible avenues that communities of color, such as that of Gulfport, Mississippi, and small developing countries, including the Maldives, can pursue to effect substantial change and curb the treacherous effects of climate change in their areas. These go beyond emphasizing to other communities and national leaders the sociocultural significance of maintaining their lands—such as by detailing the religious rites and rituals that have taken place in the waters of Turkey Creek, as Derrick Evans chooses to do in many interviews and publications, and by Mohamed Nasheed’s explanations that climate change, in the business-as-usual scenario, will wipe out his nation, leaving its residents climate refugees and speakers of a soon-to-be lost language.