The Stories We Tell
People and Nature
The Future
Teens in Media
100

Robin Kimmerer describes an origin story that her native american culture tells about how the world was made. This story is presented in contrast to the Adam and Eve story from the bible.

What is Skywoman Falling

100

In the film "Captain Fantastic," the main characters are pulled out of their alternative lives in the Pacific North Woods because they have to attend this event. They are actually told not to attend, but they come anyway, disrupting the event.

What is their Mom's Funeral

100

The "Spot the Robot" activity in class had you trying to identify which stories were written by this Large Language Model chatbot, which is the upgraded version of its predecessor from last year.

Chat GPT4

100

While Juior takes Penelope to a school dance, he is reluctant to admit or show her this fact about himself and his family.

They are poor

200

The Monomyth and the Universal Story are both names of the same theory, popularized by Joseph Campbell in his 1949 book.

What is The Hero's Journey

200

Carl Sagan had one of the Voyager probes turn around and take a picture of the earth from very very far away. He gave a speech about seeing the earth from this perspective, in which he described Earth in this image as a "________," suspended in a sunbeam. That phrase is now an ocassional rallying cry by environmentalists, who call our planet that in order to remind us of its vulnerability.

What is a "Pale Blue Dot."

200

A black mirror episode, named after this biblical figure, features a protective mother who installs a chip in her daughters head. Like the biblical figure, the chip allows the mother to watch over the child and know where she is and what she's seeing. Unlike the benign title of the episode, the technology turns out to be horrific. This is the name of the episode, the fictional company, and the biblical figure.

What is Arkangel

200

We know the Shame Wizard has defeated Andrew Glauberman when he stops saying "I did a bad thing" and instead says this. 

"I am a bad thing!"

300

Hannah Gadsby's stand-up special, Nanette, is a profound piece in which she describes how her relationship to trauma and to joking about trauma has evolved over time. She uses the example of this famous painter, who people talk about as proof that artists should suffer. Instead, she argues that this painter's greatest art was produces thanks to the fact that he waas medicated and taken care of by psychiatrists and the people around him. The artist famously cut off part of his own ear, and was never financially successful during his life.

Who is Vincent van Gogh

300

Aldo Leopold wrote an essay and gave a speech, mourning the extinction of this species. He described this species as "the lightning that played between two opposing potentials of intolerable intensity." And talks about flocks of millions of them flying over the country. The species is similar to one that lives in cities, but is distinct.

What is the Passenger Pigeon

300

Calliagnosia is a fictional limitation on the brain in Ted Chiang's short story. It prevents you from recognizing this thing.

What is physical beauty?

300

Ocean killed herself live on social media, as Rana Dasgupta described in his long-form article. Her phone only stopped recording when this happened, cutting of the stream and the live comments. 

the EMT turned it off.

400

In Absolutely True Diary, the main character (Junior) is very excited to start learning, but on his first day of high school, he becomes so angry with an object that he throws it across the room, at the teacher. This is the thing that he throws.

What is his Maths Textbook

400

In Absolutely True Diary, Junior is bullied after starting at the white school, and for a while he just tolerates it, but when Roger says something extremely racist to him, he does this in response. The action is normal where he comes from, but completely abnormal at the whit school. The thing that Junior does is

Punch him in the face

400

In Ted Chiang's Liking What You See, there are groups of students who support the adoption of a new technology, and groups that oppose it. The groups that support adopting this technology say that it would get rid of this type of bias and advantage for certain people.

What is "Pretty Privilege"

400

In the film "Mean Girls," the titular group is often reffered to by another name, referring to a material that they might as well be made of.

Plastics


500

In the Hero's Journey, all main characters go through an all-is-lost moment, where they often either almost die or they give up. This famous poem with a latin name, by William Ernest Henley, asserts that despite pain and suffering he knows that he is the "master of his fate" and "captain of his soul." This poem is an argument for how this all is lost moment can make us stronger.

What is Invictus

500

In Thanksgiving from the Master of None show, we follow a woman who grows up and slowly opens up to her family about her love life. She and her closest friend sometimes jokingly refer to her as being from this country, as a joke about her secret. People from this country are called _____, which sounds similar to the character's secret.

What is Lebanese?

500

This man is the director of OpenAI, a company that has developed some powerful LLM (Large Language Model) chatbots. In an article you read, he admitted he does not know what we should do about Artificial online friends. 

Who is Sam Altman?

500

This British high school banned personal phones on campus.

Crookhorn College