You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.

I've been trying to write. I also spent a lot of time on different campuses, in conversation, helping other writers. That's what I do: I teach them writing.

It's never the changes we want that change everything.

[Donald] Trump is taking America's dirty laundry to the center stage. Everything he does, the rest of the country already does really well: victimize immigrants, poor people, women.

Instead of finding himself in nerd heaven—where every nerd gets fifty-eight virgins to role-play with—he woke up in Robert Wood Johnson with two broken legs and a separated shoulder, feeling like, well, he'd jumped off the New Brunswick train bridge.

I guess it's true what they say: if you wait long enough everything changes.

That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.