By the time the gate agent announced that Japan Airlines Flight 67 would begin boarding in thirty minutes, Gate B17 had already metastasized into a fully operational economic hierarchy—status jockeying, strategic pre-positioning,

My friend's (let's call him Gallant) junk drawer contained exactly three items: a screwdriver, a pair of scissors, and a notepad. When I asked him about this unconventional interpretation

My calculator broke during a seventh-grade math test.1 The screen flickered, numbers vanished, and I sat frozen, unable to compute basic multiplication—a state of technological abandonment which, in retrospect, seems almost

It's a cold January Inauguration Day afternoon, the kind of cold that seems scientifically calibrated to remind you that winter is less a season and more an annual endurance test, and

My friend's grandmother kept twenty-five identical butter dishes in her kitchen cabinet – a detail I fixated on during the summer of 1982 when my parents shipped me off to suburban Milwaukee