Perhaps the superciliousness of some of my peers was related to this underlying fear.

If the war involved any dignity, it is not deserving of an American audience that will make instantaneous patriotic sap from it. The mawkish standard requires pushback.

I became an opinion columnist and an op-ed editor for the school newspaper, where I penned romantic paeans to the democratizing missions in Iraq and Afghanistan

I was hiking to the top of sun-dappled, bouldery cliffs

This is more or less the pedagogy laid out by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Émile, or On Education, the vade mecum of modern homeschooling

We were closer to civilization but still resisting its pull, circling the outskirts of communities, protected by the dull scrim of suburban anonymity.

I began eating my lunch in the library, under the pretense that I was catching up on homework, not realizing that this simple act of independence would damn me to full social opprobrium

Something lugubrious and ardent. He’s feeling awfully hard done by and sorry for himself

No time to change or to titivate much. She feels plain, narrow, slips up to put on lipstick.

his Islamophobic comments that gave succor to Hindutva