Welcome to New York University and to your first-year writing class in the Expository Writing Program! This year’s issue of Mercer Street presents seventeen exceptional essays and two ambitious video essays that were composed by NYU students in their expository writing courses last year. We congratulate these writers and all of last year’s students for their grit and resilience in accomplishing such great work under such trying circumstances during the pandemic, and we hope that their words and thoughts inspire you in your writing!
Mercer Street, as you will see, is an anthology of essays to read both for your curiosity and to learn how other writers make moves that you can learn from and adapt in your own ways. This year, demands for social justice, interrogations of concerns about home, community, and identity, and investigations of social media and its limitations feature prominently in the essays in Mercer Street. When first reading these pieces, you may be struck by how passionately these writers speak about and address the problems in our world. As you slow down and probe more deeply, please also consider how these authors learned to balance inquiry with advocacy so carefully. All these essays go far beyond either being only a manifesto on the one hand or just a report on the writer’s sources on the other. How did they learn to do that?
As you start to think about this skill of balancing thoughtfulness and argument in your work, you might take a look at the way Brooke Nguyen generates a conversation between her sources and her own thinking in “Taking Up Space.” Her professor, Courtney Chatellier, comments on Nguyen’s thoughtful way of moving “from a reflection on a feeling of alienation that accompanies speaking accented English” to devoting careful consideration to the “different ways first- and second-generation immigrants balance the desire to take up space against the temptation ‘to disappear.’” Or, you could ponder how Devashi Vasa selects, analyzes, and synthesizes implications from the various arguments he considers in “The War on People,” his essay examining the current controversy over decriminalizing drugs in the US. As his professor Laura Weinert-Kendt comments, Vasa “force[s] us to pause and re-evaluate our thinking . . . , and to understand the full complexity of [the] issue.” Then, you can find your own moment in an essay that strikes you where the writer develops sustained, patient, and idiosyncratic thinking about complications and implications while also advocating for a clear, bold view.
How did these writers learn to think so deeply? How did they develop their own bold voices when responding to a sea of sources? Stephanie Huang, author of “Art Versus the Artist,” says that she had “previously shied away from including [complicated] evidence in my thought process,” but in her first year at NYU, she learned to allow “myself to dwell in . . . uncertainty” so that she might eventually “arrive at conclusions that were richer.” For Mary Chen, writer of “The ‘I’ in Tribe is Silent,” “it was not easy [to throw] away the oars and [let] the current carry me to wherever my conversation with the texts end[ed] up;” however, she eventually “found myself loving the open-mindedness brought about by beginning without knowing the end.” Other writers echo these sentiments in their reflections included in Mercer Street, and almost all of these essays achieve some kind of fine relation between inquiry and advocacy, exploring complications and new thoughts while still advocating for the writer’s idea of a more just and respectful world. Jamie Lee, in her ending to “The Importance of Uncertainty in Solving The Problem with Everything,” even talks explicitly about the tension she sees between inquiring into complications and nuances and advocating against all that is “flawed” in the “world we have received: sexism, racism, classism, and all other forms of injustice.” Check that out!
In the end, regardless of the belief system you carry with you or what you decide you want to do next at NYU and beyond, we believe that you’ll find dynamic thinkers in every field—scientists, artists, business people, etc.—who’ve learned how to balance inquiry with advocacy in their work. They know how to inquire deeply and change their minds when the evidence suggests something different from their preconceived views, and they also know how to fill up their words with a credible voice of passionate conviction, and because they can do both things well, they are accomplished. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said in his 1936 essay “The Crack Up,” perhaps “The test of a first-rate intelligence [actually] is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
In that spirit, then, we invite you to pause and think and write and revise. Enjoy your first year at NYU! And enjoy writing!
William Morgan
Clinical Professor
Director of the Writing Center
To the Class of 2025 (and other readers of the 2021-2022 edition of Mercer Street),
Compared to the editors who populate New York’s glamourous (and shrinking) literati, the managing editor, who oversees the production process, is a behind-the-scenes figure. We have little involvement in manuscript selection, and, unlike the editor—or, in the case of Mercer Street, the professor—who provides step-by-step encouragement and feedback, we don’t have much contact with writers. Yet, over the course of just a few weeks this summer, the junior editors (Lydia Mason, Hope Rangaswami, and Jules Talbot) and I became intimately acquainted with the writers of these essays through their words and ideas. As you dip in, you’ll note that while each writer takes their own unique approach, they all share a rigorous engagement with their sources.
One of the production staff’s primary responsibilities is fact checking. The junior editors tracked down every text cited in this issue to verify that not only was each quote documented correctly, the claims made on the basis of that quote were supported by the surrounding context, that is, the text as a whole. Most of the time the process goes smoothly and we are able to follow along in the writer’s shoes, tracing their path of discovery. Occasionally, we encountered an impasse: while a claim might sound believable and be beautifully-phrased, if it was based on an inaccurate interpretation of the text, we could not let it stand. To do so would set a poor example of scholarly practice for future students, and more importantly, it would erode the credibility of both Mercer Street and the Expository Writing Program.
The last couple of years have shown us, in hard numbers, just how dangerous doubling down on inaccurate claims can be. Of course, misreading a source in a college essay isn’t remotely morally equivalent to, say, propagating false medical information during a global pandemic, but as writers, we should still care about accuracy. When life gets busy and dozens of deadlines loom, documenting page numbers and formatting a works cited page can easily become afterthoughts. Coming up with a genuinely interesting intellectual problem is hard, complicated work! Toggling between browser tabs, PDFs, and yes, even physical books, it’s easy to lose track of who said what and when, particularly when you’re in hot pursuit of your own great, original idea. You want to be sure, though, that the foundation on which you build that great idea is sound, or the whole thing will collapse. Worse yet, you’ll lose your reader’s trust, and trust of a smart reader is a hard-won thing.
If you’re just joining us at NYU, you’ll no doubt take part in many exciting, and even heated, debates, both inside and outside of the classroom over the next several years. If these debates are worth having, concrete answers won’t come easily. Intelligent people can arrive at different interpretations, but they must first agree on the same set of facts. The junior editors and I can confidently assure you that all of the texts under investigation in these essays have been accurately represented and faithfully documented. How you choose to engage with the writers’ interpretations of those texts is your next intellectual challenge.
Katherine Carlson
Clinical Associate Professor