Before we started as freshman in high school, my class was sent on a weekend trip outside of New York City. It was then that I got to know my best friend and several other people that would leave an impression on me. One of the things I remember well from the trip was laying […]
New Year’s Eve holds a lot of promises. Whether you’re hoping to complete your resolutions and hoping for big changes, or just going about business as usual, January 1st marks the beginning of something. The start of a new calendar year, new bills, new paychecks, another school year, birthdays to celebrate. We are hopeful on December […]
What makes you, you? People tend to compare themselves to others at different stages of their lives. Sometimes these comparisons can help us set goals and find confidence in our identity. You might have seen yourself in a parental figure or a celebrity. But have you ever felt like lion at heart or a graceful […]
It was pretty alarming to read that ISIS destroyed the Temple of Bel in Palmyra, Syria, and killed an archaeologist who had looked after it for 40 years. To be honest, I had never heard of the ancient city of Palmyra. I didn’t know that the Temple of Bel was almost 2000 years old and […]
Two young journalists and a woman they were interviewing were shot on live television on August 26, 2015. I started writing this in anger on a Wednesday night, the same day it happened, and decided to wait before publishing. My gut reaction was strong. I thought about this tragic story obsessively for a few days because […]
A few months after last year’s tax day, my mom told me that she got a call from an abrasive IRS agent saying that my dad owed money on his taxes. This man called their home phone and demanded to speak to my father. He told her that they had not paid the government and […]
When I was about nine or ten years old, my grandmother came to live with us. I had never met her before. For all this time she was a distant relative living with my uncle in Uzbekistan, where we had immigrated from several years before. It wasn’t easy for my parents, both working full-time, to […]
Japan: A place for chopsticks
Here I am sitting on the famous Japanese bullet train (Shinkansen). Just a few weeks ago, I was at home thinking about what exciting things waited for me in this country. Tuesday will conclude two weeks of travel in Japan. While some sights and customs turned out to be what I expected, there’s so much […]
“Twenty-six years ago, you played a game with a little boy down the street. A game with drums.” (Jumanji, 1995) I can remember watching Jumanji as a kid, and getting really into the “horrors” and surprises of the story. Floods! Stampedes! A man trapped in the jungle because of a game! Robin Williams didn’t stand […]
If you’ve lived through what feels like an endless winter haze (like we’ve seen here in the Northeast), the beginning of summer requires a celebration. Even on the sunniest days, it was just too hard to think that a new season was coming, but finally it’s July and the weather is fabulous. The Science of Summer […]