He calls you makhtesh, a word he tells you means the expanse of the universe.

It is the spring of 2007, and I have traded in my solitude for friendship.

I’ve been a plus-size beauty vlogger for the past two years, but I’ve been fat my whole life. Except for the day I was born.

“Go ahead and pee on the floor,” the radiology technician says.

It breaks like this: We hold on tightly, and literally, because we’re young and we’re stupid and because we still want to have hope.

For six days after the operation, everything was blue.

The purple haze of Jupiter surrounds us in its cool-toned glow.

From my desk, I watch her turn the pages. She is meticulous, each touch / feather-light and exact in her dissection.

At age four, I used to secretly squeeze through the cracks in our backyard fence to go and explore the world on the other side.

In the fall of 2012, I moved to Kabul, Afghanistan.

…there is no literary character more similar to the President-elect than Napoleon Bonaparte as depicted by Tolstoy in War and Peace.

The first time I heard about the recording of President-elect Donald Trump bragging about his demeaning treatment of women like it was a badge of honor, I no longer wanted my boyfriend of five years to touch me.

The morning after the election, I agonized about how to talk with my first-year students about the outcome.

I was born like anyone else. Mom and Dad loved me like anyone else’s parents loved them. Like anyone else, after school, ran from skinheads.

The night of the second presidential debate, I called my mother. It wasn’t supposed to be a political call;