This course will introduce students to the climate crisis and how journalists tell its stories. The topic subsumes traditional beats-politics, science, business-energy, and its urgency stress-tests the boundaries between activism and journalism. Students will reverse-engineer classic environmental texts, translate scientific reports, and, in their own work, link climate to individual lives. Through readings, discussion, guest speakers, newsroom visits, and writing assignments, students will learn to report on climate and write about it at a professional level.

In this course, students will read, observe, and reflect upon how media representations of mental illness and those who treat it have fed stigma. They'll come to understand the pernicious effects of the stories we tell on real people with real problems that require real help. They'll also read and create work that sets the record straight, learning techniques for insightful and compassionate reporting, informed and inclusive research, and storytelling that's both artful and accurate.

Challenging the Narrative: Covering Race is a course that explores how journalism can reinforce or dispel stereotypes about minority groups in the United States. In this course, we will trace the history of concepts that we consider to be fixed-such as race, terrorism, and enemy aliens; interrogate how these ideas have evolved over time; and consider how journalists might approach these concepts in their own work.

This seminar will focus on refugee crises and human rights issues at a time of extreme turmoil, as the world reckons with geopolitical and social upheavals and a war in Europe. A fall-break trip to Berlin, Germany, will give students the opportunity to report from the field. The course will combine fundamentals of journalism and narrative reporting with historical studies and data and analysis of immigration policy and the prosecution of crimes against humanity. Students will investigate the impact of migration and universal jurisdiction while producing original reporting in various journalistic forms, including news, profiles and features.

In this course, students will learn the fundamentals of audio journalism from pitch to broadcast. This will include, but will not be limited to, how to: generate story ideas, get good tape, audio editing, script writing for the ear, story structure, scoring, and marketing. At completion, students will have developed a portfolio of work and newsroom experience.

American law protects racist hate speech, pornography, and (much) lying. Other countries permit more restrictions on harmful speech, should we? Or will that undermine truth-seeking, political competition, and other values? Should speech be regulated instead by social norms, social media companies, and universities? Is "cancel culture" a problem? And what should we - as political communities and universities - honor and memorialize? How should we balance recognition of heritage and inclusion of people from diverse cultures and historically marginalized groups? Seminars will include debates. Active weekly participation required of all.

This course will teach STEM & non-STEM majors how to write about research in STEM fields with clarity and a bit of flair. Goal will be to learn to convey technical topics to non-experts in a compelling, enjoyable way while staying true to the underlying facts, context and concepts. We'll do this through readings, class discussion, encounters with professional writers and journalists of all sorts, across several different media. Most important of all, students will practice what they learn in frequent writing assignments that will be critiqued extensively by an experienced science journalist.