In our modern-day world, individuals tend to exhibit empathy by responding reactively rather than proactively to tragic circumstances, as the aftermath of a tragedy can bring public attention to the suffering of many individuals. If individuals were more proactive than reactive in facing global challenges, empathy would likely propagate with greater ease. In the brief argumentative and thought-provoking essay “Is Empathy Overrated” by Canadian-American psychology professor Paul Bloom, he asserts, “Imagine learning that a faulty vaccine has caused Rebecca Smith, an adorable eight-year-old, to get extremely sick. If you watch her suffering and listen to her and her family, the empathy will flow, and you’ll want to act. But suppose…

1.) Respond, in your own words, and referencing your own experiences, to the validity of Gay’s question: “What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another?”  Gay references this particular quote to display how certain content moments might also harbor a sense of sorrow. To illustrate, if an individual is transitioning from high school to college, there could be joy in that instance of fostering one’s own self-actualization and self-sufficiency in college, but there could also be sorrow in leaving their home world behind. There can be a sense of familiarity and belonging in one’s home world, which is why it may be anxiety-provoking to abandon everything and…

1.) Who is Adrian Chen? and how does his background/areas of expertise help inform you about his perspective as it relates to this article?  Adrian Chen is characterized as a widely known American blogger and formal staff writer at the New Yorker. Born in New York and at 39 years of age, Chen attended Wesleyan University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. Chen’s expertise strength areas involve his thorough and extensive research on social media, technological trends and data, and how it affects society’s standards and how individuals interact with each other. Overall, the apprehension and preoccupation in which Chen expresses toward the media and the…