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...