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Our America: Confessions of a Young Invincible

May 6, 2017 - By Emily Wojcik

In 2010, I was thirty-one years old, running twenty-five miles per week, doing yoga twice a week, and eating a vegetarian diet. My blood pressure was 110/60, I weighed 135 pounds, I took multivitamins and omega-3s, I flossed daily. I was so healthy I was smug about it—I’d never even broken a bone. I was invincible.

One day, I tripped over nothing when I was running. It kept happening but I kept running. “Clumsy,” I thought, but I was an athlete. I ran through it. And then I fell in the most epic way: head-first down a hill, in front of crowds of people, at the end of an annual 5K race—bruised face, skinned knees and hands, twisted ankle. I couldn't figure out why, except that my knee buckled. Weird.

A year of physical therapy later, I...

OUR AMERICA: Bursting the Bubble

March 10, 2017 - By Emily Wojcik

My response to the 2016 US Presidential election was by no means unusual—shock, sadness, rage. I suspect that I was not the only woman to feel attacked, as if someone had run up behind me and slammed a baseball bat into my head. The election of President Trump felt like a sharp reminder that the complacency I’d grown into during the previous administration was misplaced.

As the stepparent of three proudly political women, the daughter of a feminist, an alumna of a women’s college, and the spouse of a man who teaches at that same school, I at least came by that complacency honestly. I live in one of those “liberal bubbles” that came under such attack in the days post-election, a predominantly white city that boasts a crosswalk painted in the rainbow...

OUR AMERICA: Reading Horatio Alger in Karachi

March 2, 2017 - By Aatif Rashid

My dad immigrated to the U.S. from Pakistan in 1973, at the age of 17. He’d long dreamed of this country, and as a teenager in Karachi he used to ride the bus to the U.S. Embassy after school and read American books in the library there, everything from John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage to the novels of Horatio Alger, those earnest rags-to-riches stories of young boys rising to middle class fame and fortune. His own life actually turned out not too unlike that of one of Alger’s protagonists: he washed dishes at a restaurant while studying engineering at San Jose State, then worked his way through various jobs and promotions, and eventually achieved a very comfortable middle class life in the San Francisco Bay Area working for a U.S. defense contractor. No...

Our America: The Blessing of Liberty

February 22, 2017 - By Daniel Nevarez Araujo

Language is alive. Diachronic linguistics has taught us that words often change meaning over time. In a 2014 piece written for TED^[1], language historian Anne Curzan notes how words like “nice” and “silly” actually meant the opposite of what they mean in our current usage. Nice meant “silly, foolish, simple,” while silly meant “worthy or blessed.” One particular combination of words that has evidently changed drastically over time, too, is The United States of America. Initially this nomenclature apparently meant nation, freedom, liberty, as well as many other philosophical and practical concepts which would guide a people to define themselves as members of a democratic...

Our America: Overcoming Fear—Lessons from the McCarthy Era

February 13, 2017 - By Jules Chametzky

Late in the afternoon of January 13, 1954, less than a year after my marriage to Anne Halley, with a two-month-old son at home in our apartment, I was sitting in my half of an office in Folwell Hall, a teaching assistant at the University of Minnesota, when the phone rang. It was a reporter from the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, an African American named Carl Rowen who was to go on to renown and a modicum of fame in later years. He informed me that I had been “named” as a Communist by a woman from Minneapolis—a former Communist at twenty-three, testifying before a U.S. Senate committee. Did I have anything to say, except that I had a certain lurch in my stomach? I bade the reporter goodbye and hurried home to Anne to tell her the news.

The next day the...