Two-Oh-Two-Seven-Two-Six-Five-Six-Two-Three. This string of numbers was the first I learned—to be recited on command for hypothetical firemen, the school nurse during pollen season, or both—and was delivered each time with a rapidity and enthusiasm that only a four-and-a-half-year-old could muster.

The treatment of animals by our nation’s industries is out of line with the public’s sentiments about animal welfare. As a result, a revolution is taking place in animal law.

I have spent the last three years in a master’s program for English at the University of Massachusetts, which has been simultaneously enriching and frustrating: enriching because I have been equipped with a variety of analytical lenses through which to view the social and historical implications of literary texts, and frustrating because I crave an opportunity to apply my interpretative skills to a discipline with a more immediate social impact.

This may be where I die. A tsunami is heading toward the coast, we don’t know how large it will be or when it will hit, and this daft old woman just made a wrong turn, driving us straight to the water’s edge.

During my final months at Stanford University, I received the same well-intentioned advice from many different people: Don’t pick a job for money or prestige, pick it because it’s what you love to do. I was happy to comply.

Dusk had begun to edge its way across the parking lot, and up to our dented minivan. I leaned against the door until the side of my face pressed against the window, hoping to maximize the remaining light.

After a sleep-depriving round of midterms in our study abroad courses at the University of Cambridge, a friend and I finally embark on our long-awaited visit to Italy.

“What is wrong with you!? These men are killers! They kill for a living, it’s only a matter of time before one of them snaps.

The smile on Byron Halsey’s face on July 9, 2007, was the widest I’d ever seen. Standing on the marble front steps of the Elizabeth, New Jersey, courthouse in which he’d just sat, for what he hoped was the last time, he looked up at the sky and inhaled deeply.

As a child I would often stand in the corridor staring at an old portrait of my mother. I was perplexed not by her youth, but by her stern demeanor and strange attire. In the picture, she wore a black gown and a white collaret connected to two linen bands.

I always thought my inspiration to attend law school would come from my time in the courtroom. I never could have guessed it would come from the backseat of a police cruiser.