When you meet someone new, one of the first questions you’re asked is an obligatory, “What do you do?”

I know it’s an innocent query, but that question always makes me a little uneasy. What do I do? I do many things.
Of course, the expected response is merely a profession, but answering that way feels limiting. [...]

Every four years, the country, the international media and the students on this campus become absorbed with a presidential election that’s always said to be of monumental import.
As much as the political experts are attesting to the significance of today’s statewide Democratic presidential primary, I can remember being harangued by a number of sources about [...]

At the start of my senior year this past August, I finally relocated to a neighborhood in North Philadelphia more commensurate with all the stereotypes I’d heard about the area before I enrolled here. Ugly. Poor. Dangerous.
Well, maybe not entirely that last part, but after seven months, I still won’t walk home alone after 10 [...]

It’s not unusual to speak to yourself in your head. It might be a bit stranger to do so in a foreign accent. Yet, I can remember choosing my words in my mind using the voice, expressiveness and intonation of an Englishman as a child.
My reasons were naïve and innocent. I desperately wanted to sound [...]