Less than 72 hours earlier, in suburban America, I lived in a world of painted lines and traffic signals, where transgressing these boundaries triggered a cascade of social sanctions: horns, gestures, muttered curses.

Consider time travel1. Not the Hollywood variety with its shiny machines and questionable physics, but the kind that happens when you pick up a pen and decide that something - or someone - deserves to

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-

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