Jesmyn Ward’s poignant memoir Men We Reaped tackles the interplay between inequality and education in poverty-stricken southern black communities in Mississippi. In recounting the deaths of four childhood friends and her brother Joshua, Ward sheds light on racial, class, and gender inequality honestly. Education both ameliorates and exacerbates inequality in her community – it is a matter of who is receiving quality education and who is not. Throughout the book, Jesmyn Ward does not explicitly place any blame on any individual or event. A sense of helplessness and grief permeates her text, and everyone in the community seems doomed to certain predestined ends. However, she does allude to some larger mechanism and system looming behind this inevitability, which she advocates for changes and societal support with profound emotions.

 The Tempest and The Forbidden Planet emphasize two different perceptions of risk in human attitudes towards technology, or power beyond unaided human ability. In The Tempest, technology first appears threatful and dangerous in the storm initiated by Prospero and then evolves into harmless in epilogue. The power itself is an instrumental means to achieve human ends. The opposite movement happens in The Forbidden Planet, where technology moves from seemingly beneficial to destructive and even fatal. The film seems to the perils to chase technology as ends in itself while forgetting its instrumentality.