At the heights of the pandemic, my friends and I got together to prepare brown bag meals for a local homeless shelter in the D.C. area. On our way to delivering the meals, we passed through a low-income community and the local highschool there. I was appalled at the condition in which the school grounds...
**By Isabel Mathew** It was a hot pandemic day and business was bustling at the local Creamery where I held a summer job. The Creamery had just announced another price hike—the third within a short span of two years. That afternoon, the other employees and I wondered why the flow of customers hadn’t decreased despite...
**By Isabel Mathew** For as long as I could remember, the models I had seen on TV and in magazines were slender, mostly white, and tall. I didn’t see my ethnicity, as a person of Indian origins, or even the body types of most of the people I know represented much on the colorful spreads...
**By Isabel Mathew** Was it all in my head? As a five-year-old, I used to take long 10-hour drives with my family from Bangalore, India, to visit my grandparents in Kerala, the southernmost state of India. Meandering through the highways connecting the two states, I would often gaze up at the starry sky and wonder...
*By Nathaniel Mathew* With 235,000 deaths and 9.6 million cases of infection in mid-autumn of 2020, the US stood disempowered before the rising rates of Covid-19 infection across the nation (1). Several factors contributed to the rise in infections across the U.S. such as ill-preparedness to combat the infection, slow defense strategies, insufficient education among the...
*By Nathaniel Mathew* The year was 1883. It was to be the event of the year, maybe even of the century. The Vanderbilt’s had just moved into their Fifth Avenue French Chateau style home and decided to throw a party to get to know the elite of New York. Ornately dressed man servants personally delivered...
