My absolute favorite song off the tape was Killing Me Softly. Listening to it, I felt as if I was all grown up, sitting in the audience at a small café. I was the person he sang about, who comes undone by the lovelorn songs of a soulful troubadour. I sang out with abandon, the windows down, drowning out city noises. Strumming my pain with his fingers, singing my life with his words, killing me softly with his song, killing me softly. My mother continued to drive as I sang my little girl heart out all the way back to Queens.

A few summers ago, my husband and I traveled to Florence and Lucca in Tuscany. It was everything I hoped it would be. Until it wasn’t. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

“Who is permitted to write and be published? Whose stories are seen as important and elevated?”

Given Khakpour’s gifts as a writer and her candor about her health struggles, an issue to which I relate, I’ve eagerly anticipated her upcoming memoir, Sick, and I’m glad to have had the opportunity to talk with her about it.

Annapurna takes notice of her son and granddaughter, and they make their way to the end of the aisle. Karthik hugs his mother. He feels her falter and lean into him. She feels more fragile to him than a year ago. When he lets go, she holds his face and kisses his cheek. Then, Annapurna turns to Akhila and before she can move to hug her, Annapurna grabs both of her granddaughter’s arms and pushes her back, her wide-set eyes searching for, and then finding their match in Akhila’s face.

Kavita Das recalls learning to self-advocate as a patient with a cleft palate — and as a child in a family full of doctors.

The experiences of passing chronicled in We Wear the Mask offer a prism through which to understand the numerous ways we all pass in our personal and professional lives.

Whatever the framing or nomenclature, there is no doubt this country is embroiled in an imperative and visceral moral struggle for the very human rights its founding documents hold “unalienable.” Given this real struggle, can we justify our continued engagement in an ideological culture war?

Ultimately, to truly move forward as a nation, we must embrace shared ideals shaped by the crucible of a true and shared understanding of our nation’s history, an understanding that acknowledges not just our triumphant moments, but moments when we fell gravely short of upholding these ideals. And to arrive at this shared understanding of our nation’s true history, we must revisit our classrooms, where many of us first learned about American history, albeit a version which often was incomplete and incongruent. We must follow the trail of the red ink of revisionist history that fills many of our textbooks, classrooms, and consequently, our own understanding of our national identity.

Just after graduate school, writer Mimi Lok worked on a project that validated her belief in the power of storytelling. A volunteer researcher and interviewer for an anthology called “Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives,” Lok collected the stories of refugees. “It was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, and was a chance, at last, to really ‘go deep’ with people’s stories in a way I couldn’t before,” Lok told NBC News.

When non-Indians ask me if I had an arranged marriage, I sometimes slyly reply: “in a sense.”. I’m an Indian American born and raised in the United States, married to someone who grew up in India. But it was our mutual friend, a white woman from Oregon — not our families — who played matchmaker. When I explain this to them, I know it is not the answer they expected.

A central conflict in Lucky Boy—the loss of parental rights by immigrants held in US detention centers—was at the heart of “Shattered Families,” a 2011 report I helped push out into the world when I worked at Race Forward, a racial justice organization.

"What is especially telling about this data is the stark contrast between the race and class of unvaccinated and undervaccinated children. It underscores dual narratives: one of choice, one of circumstance. It also begs the question: would this movement have been allowed to grow, endangering the lives of all children, if it was largely populated by poor families of color rather than driven by middle-class white families? Would its members have been generously perceived as misguided but well-intentioned rather than misinformed and dangerous? Ultimately, these individuals working to undermine the protection offered by vaccinations to our nation’s children have been protected by their own race and class privilege—benefiting from another type of herd immunity."

Lion has received several award nominations including Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe nominations for Best Actor and Best Actress for Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman. Kidman gives a tempered yet heart wrenching performance as Saroo’s adoptive mother, and Patel eschews the over-earnestness seen in some of his previous roles to give his most nuanced performance to date. But the most powerful performance in the movie comes from Sunny Pawar, the eight-year-old Indian child actor who plays young Saroo, navigating his way through a harrowing journey that takes him halfway around the globe.

This strain of denialism might not as be as nihilistic as the one afflicting the far right, but it still constitutes a refusal to accept reality. Unlike the denialism of the right, which employs crutches like religion, the denialism of the left is characterized by a type of hyper-rationalism, which relies on selectively curated facts. And this strain of denialism helped lose Democrats this election and is the cause of liberals’ shock over this loss.

Anoushka Shankar is not new to performing her father's compositions. But, because the piece includes several interludes of improvised sitar solo, there's opportunity to make it her own. "Having played it for a few years, in the beginning I really focused on improvising and 'what would my father have done' in order to try and be true to the piece," she said. "Now, I don't do 'what would my father have done' so much as feel confident that I know that, and ask how I can bring myself into it."