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Continue reading →: How Imitating Groucho Marx Gave Me Shapely Eyebrows
A childhood prank gone right At the age of eight, I put on a show to cheer up my brother Ben. He, being a rowdy six-year-old, had been sent to his bedroom for bad behavior. I was in the back yard when I observed Ben peering glumly out of his…
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Continue reading →: Salted Bird’s Tail
A new way of birding At my annual pediatric check-up when I was seven, my mother told Dr. Roberts about my fascination with birds. She chortled as she described my repeated attempts to catch one by hand in the yard. Dr. Roberts winked at me and said, “If you sprinkle…
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Continue reading →: Zero Fs for Zero G
A demotivational children’s story When you grow up, kid, you can be anything you want to be. Except for an astronaut. Every child born since humankind first entered space has wished to be in zero G. It is not a unique dream. There are 332,624,742 people in the U.S., of…
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Continue reading →: Robots may be coming for our jobs…
But here’s why they’ll never become our overlords I don’t believe humanity’s future looks like Terminator or The Matrix, where AI takes over and crushes our bones under their feet or farms our fleshy bodies. Here’s why. Case Study #1: Technology is constantly breaking down. Case in point, my microwave…
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Continue reading →: A Name, A Name, My Kingdom for a Name
How I got my name In the late 1970’s, my mother — visibly pregnant with me — was hitchhiking in rural North Carolina. Leading my three-year-old sister Karina by the hand, they climbed into the back of a stranger’s pickup truck. With my father out of town, they couldn’t reasonably…
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Continue reading →: Careers I Once Entertained
The opportunities I passed on Following is a list of fifteen professions I gave serious consideration to, in order of increasing risk of peril, and the reasons why I didn’t pursue them. Nun Why: I like the idea of uniforms. Not the khakis and polo shirts of big box stores,…
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Continue reading →: That Time I Applied to Harvard (Twice)
Life’s painful lessons Remember when I applied to Harvard? Twice? I do. It was a long shot, and yet, my plan seemed foolproof. When I applied in 2006 (and again in 2007), I didn’t do it because I could afford tuition, had impressive extracurricular activities, or even had good GRE…
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Continue reading →: Lost in Lake Charles
How I was foiled by a sugar packet I shivered inside my puffy, gray coat, a hand-me-down from my older sister. I hadn’t expected it to be cold in Louisiana, even in December. My navy blue corduroy pants and purple Puma sneakers weren’t keeping me warm enough, and I wished…

