**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 of Vogue, Elle, or Cosmopolitan. Though I was faintly aware that this wasn’t healthy or fair, I clued in on its immense impact when I...Read More
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 were. Though I had known for a very long time that school funding is based on property taxes collected from the community, I had only...Read More
**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 the price of a medium scoop being more than our hourly wage. Returning home, the train of thought didn’t leave me. I wondered how much...Read More
**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 aloud why the moon was following us. Four years later, when we relocated to America, my intrigue for the moon grew stronger. Our house on...Read More
*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 public, strained medical resources, and stormy politics of the nation’s leaders (2). While the immediate causes may seem many, the underlying pattern that connects it all...Read More
