Stories Between

I’m Kaila, a senior at Avon High School in Connecticut, where I’m in a few clubs and play sports. I write about people, and what they do to the societies they build.
 

The Stories Between is my column. I pick each subject, do the reporting myself, and try to trace every claim back to a primary source instead of somebody else’s account of it: academic journals, federal data, court testimony and the occasional afternoon spent confirming that a number everyone repeats came from somewhere.
 

The name is about the gaps. The facts of a thing are usually available to anyone willing to look them up. Harder to find is who was left out of the record, what the official version skips, and why something that looks sudden turns out to have been happening for years.
 

I’m a first-generation immigrant, which is usually where the questions start. Where they go has surprised me. I’ve written about collapsing humanities enrollment, and about how elected governments hollow out democracies without ever canceling an election. Those two have almost nothing to do with each other, which is sort of the point. I don’t have a beat. I read about whatever I can’t stop reading about until I understand it.