Last week at Starbucks, the employee taking my order didn’t ask for my name. Instead, he looked down at the credit card I’d just given him, and after a moment’s pause, wrote the name he found onto...

I think I realized for the first time that I was overweight when I was eight years old. I was not a child who paid much attention to the shape of people’s bodies until around then. Before this unfortunate...

Our family used to have a dog. Sometimes, I almost forget what he looked like, what he sounded like, or even what he smelled like. It has been five years since a change of jobs and an impending move to...

Last year, my older brother graduated from law school. I don’t remember if he’d secured a job by then. Knowing him, my guess would have to be that he had. Anyway, early on a Friday morning, my parents...

At my freshman NSO welcome session, I told people that I was from Princeton, New Jersey — even though I hadn’t lived there in close to two years. To be fair, it was half-true. I was as “from Princeton”...