Weekly Writers Round-Up: Scrooge and the Impact of Industrialization, Internet-breaking Copyright Laws, and the Future of Healthcare

Each week, we’ll be featuring the work of the alumni and current participants of AF’s Writing Fellows Program. A few highlights from the past week are below. For more information on how the program can help launch your career in writing, see here.

If You Thought Scrooge Was Bad, Consider the Victorian Home by Chelsea Follett (Summer 2017) in The American Spectator
We owe many popular Christmas traditions to Victorian England, from carols and decorated trees to gift-giving. These cheerful traditions stand in stark contrast with our recognition of the nightmarish working conditions at the time. In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, for example, the miserly businessman Ebenezer Scrooge exemplifies the alleged spirit of the Victorian age: heartlessness, he maintains, is good for business.

Underneath the veneer of destitution and exploitation of the era, however, things were changing for the better. The unlikely and seldom acknowledged benefactor of the poor in 19th century Britain was the factory…

The EU’s Article 13 Could Ruin the Internet as You Know It by John Kristof (Summer 2018) in Arc Digital
The internet is where old things become new. Spend just a few minutes on popular social publishing sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, or Instagram, and you will find countless examples of everyday people having fun with transformative content. Internet culture made a Rick Astley hit a running joke everyone up to the president was in on. Thousands of people used a single frame from a children’s TV show to comically express frustration. Adoration of video games inspires fans to share their own editions.

Despite the joy countless internet users receive from transformative content, the European Union’s proposed Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market — more specifically Article 13 — threatens to ruin that experience…

Democrats’ ‘Medicare for All’ Idea is Horribly Misleading by Kevin Boyd (Fall 2018) in The American Conservative
It is very likely that the Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 will end up campaigning on something he or she calls “Medicare for all.” And no wonder: a recent poll finds that 70 percent of Americans support “Medicare for all”…