Meredith Pollack - Feature RJ

A new feature article by Janny Scott of New York Times Magazine is an in depth look at the mother of President Barack Obama, Stanley Ann Dunham. The article opened in a very standard feature style, but not by honing in on a moment or interview with the subject, but rather a photograph. Since this is a very long profile, it is understandable that the introduction describing the photograph went on for quite a long time. The photo opened each paragraph for the first page, and then the reporter went off in some very clever directions. She went on to describe all the aspects of her. The best part was when the reporter described the way other people saw her, whose points of view were completely off.
The reporter also used Obama’s memoir “Dreams From My Father” as a reference for her article. Most of the meat of the article is really just retelling events that also included Obama’s mother, but it is quite eye opening at the same time. It focuses on her time in Indonesia and her teaching of worldliness to her son.
I think the timeliness of this feature is very interesting, because the American citizenship of Barack Obama is always a hot topic that seems to resurface every few months. The reporter highlights the falseness of these rumors, and alludes to the irony that having a worldly president isn’t preferred by the American people. However, all in all, this feature article lacked an edge that could have made it a little more interesting to read.

The second feature that really caught my eye was from the Washington Post, called Commando Performance by Laura Wexler. It started off very well, offering a profile of a student at a liberal arts college north of Baltimore. This student was one man in a big on campus game called Humans vs. Zombies. When he described the game, it reminded me of an old game that I played in high school, and is actually very popular in schools across the country. I was intrigued that a reporter had ventured in on a week long school game. Unfortunately, this was not the turn that the article took. It mostly focused on the intimate dramas of this one schools student activity, and it became some personal to that story that it wasn’t relateable to the audience.The meat of this article was a lot of “he said” “she said” and it didn’t really go anywhere else except the one student spotlight. This feature should have branched out and shone light on every possible aspect of the story.