By March of 2018, Haley Anderson was a 22-year-old nursing student at Binghamton University. She had a part-time job at an on-campus coffee shop, a full-time job lined up at a Long Island emergency room in her home town, and was set to graduate in May.

Anderson was, by all accounts, a perfectly nice, compassionate, caring person. “She would’ve made an amazing nurse,” her friends said. “She wanted to make people happy, that’s what she always did. She wanted to get out of here and do something, make something of herself.”

The year before, she’d had a strained relationship with…

This Is Us

When I was around eight or nine years old, my brother and I asked my mom for advice on how to blow a bubble when chewing gum. All our other friends were able to do it, but we just couldn’t quite figure out the movement you needed to do with your tongue. My mom looked at us and said, with some sadness in her voice, “Unfortunately, you’ll probably never be able to blow a bubble.”

Like so much of my childhood, my memory of this moment is hazy. I remember exactly what she said, but not how we responded to…

When it comes to diversity in writing, the rule I’ve always followed is simple: you can write a POV character who is of a different race/gender/sexuality than yourself, just so long as the focus of the story isn’t about those aspects. If you’re white and want to have a black main protagonist, don’t make the story about what it’s like to be black. Have that be a secondary aspect to whatever the story’s about. Such as Anansi Boys by white author Neil Gaiman: the story centers around a black family, but the main plot centers around magic, fatherhood and brotherhood…

I had a friend in elementary school who would always tell us about how his uncle died on 9/11. He would describe the memory of his mother crying on the phone, having just heard the news, and then of her sitting him down and explaining how his uncle wouldn’t be coming around anymore. A couple years later, he clarified that although his uncle did die, he doesn’t actually remember anything from that day. A couple more years later, he admitted that there was no dead uncle.

By the time he admitted the full truth it wasn’t much of a surprise…

You wouldn’t get a ton of pushback if you made the claim that some of the ads that air during NFL games, when they’re not clumsily trying to play shallow tributes to social justice movements, have a bit of a sexist vibe to them. There were the GoDaddy ads of the late 2000s and early 2010s, the Miller Light catfight commercial, and that weird Mr. Clean ad where the woman gets aggressively turned on by sight of her husband doing basic household chores.

It is pretty clear that most of these ads are catering to a male demographic, and on…

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House from 2007–2011 and then again from 2019 on, is a liberal and Democratic icon. For the left, not so much. Late last year, prominent leftist voices — such as Briahna Joy Gray, Jimmy Dore, and Kyle Kulinski — called on House progressives to hold off on voting for Pelosi to retain the speakership, despite Pelosi facing no real competition for the role, until she calls for a floor vote on Medicare for All.

But some on the left disagreed with this strategy, including Pelosi’s colleague, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. For one thing, a vote on Medicare…

I was 16 when I got my first job at a McDonald’s in upstate New York. It was the fall of 2014; I was paid $8 an hour. It was around this time that I started thinking of my purchases in terms of time. A gallon of milk was around $3, slightly less than half an hour of labor. The cost of the average meal at McDonald’s was around $7, meaning that when a customer ordered a large Big Mac meal, they were spending what would take me just under an hour to earn. …

Fiona knows how to talk to the police. Step one, of course, is to tell them she wasn’t in the room when it happened. Tell them she was upstairs in a room directly above her kitchen ceiling. Tell them she had no idea there was anything amiss until she walked downstairs to find her boyfriend on the kitchen floor, blood gushing out of his forehead and stretching out into long red lines between the metal tiles.

“So, you didn’t hear any noise?” the officer asks. “You didn’t hear anyone walk in or out the front door? No screams, no nothing?”

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