Last year, my friend Jesús passed away when he was hit by a car while riding his bike. He was one year older than me …
If you want to serve the people of California, is public office the best place for you? The question came up again …
In March of 2020 I found myself alone (except for my two cats) in a small bungalow in Bloomington, Indiana ...
This was no ordinary internet blackout. For five days, the ninth largest country in the world was a black box.
On the evening of January 5, 2022, we set our respective alarms for 5:30 a.m. We wanted to get the earliest possible updates from our colleagues in Kazakhstan, who had been chronicling three days of demonstrations as they spread from the western oil-producing city of Zhanaozen to other urban centers across the Central Asian nation. Early morning on the East Coast was already late afternoon in Kazakhstan, yet when we woke up, nothing seemed to have changed. Our friends’ Instagram stories were 12 hours old ...
I used to wonder: Is there any place where people will know my name?
I’ve always hated Arvin, my uncommon, easy-to-mangle name. For most of my life I didn’t even know where it came from. When I was a kid I asked my father, who is from India, what my name means. He told me, “beautiful face.”
A skeptical child, I didn’t believe him. A recent Google search confirmed my suspicions, revealing no such translation and no correlation between my name and a predisposition to attractive features. So, not long ago, I asked my father again about the origins of my name. This time he had a different story. The common Indian name, he told me, is Arvind—with a “d.” My parents had decided ...
