Narratively

I was a wide-eyed scholarship kid among daughters of the rich and famous. I expected academic rigor and supportive sisterhood—not humiliating midnight raids. But the most shocking thing to everyone else was when I stood up for myself.

As an Indonesian adoptee in Sweden, I was alarmed when my new stepbrother started dabbling in white supremacy. I didn’t realize how far it had gone until I was lying in a dark field, getting kicked in the chest with a steel-toed boot.

I have learned all the stories my father was too protective of me to share, parsed the conflicting histories and studied the maps. Now I can finally recreate our family’s lost home, in a once small village in Palestine.

I was 13 when my father was killed right before my eyes. Two weeks later, while everyone in our small town obsessed over his grizzly death, I embarked on a new horror: 8th grade.

As a disillusioned cub reporter, I jumped at the bizarro job of a lifetime: editor-in-chief of Playboy Russia when nouveau riche Moscow was a hedonistic playground of sex, drugs, and early-stage capitalism — until Putin’s rise brought my reign to...

I woke up one morning in my mid-thirties and suddenly couldn’t see. I vowed if I ever got my vision back I would live life differently — I had no idea that would mean flying down highways twice the speed limit with a colorful crew in the dead of...

Our wealthy California school had a hookup game where boys “drafted” girls, then tracked their sex acts. A decade later, my classmates still debate whether “FSL” was harmless teenage hijinks or a symptom of toxic rot in our elite enclave.

I fell 20 feet out of a redwood tree and when I came to, my memory was shattered and a man I’d broken things off with was telling everyone we were together. Then I found out why.

I was an 18-year-old father who couldn’t be there for his baby. I know, you’ve heard this one before. How about this part? Twelve years later Krystasia’s mom walked away and never came back.