I’m Kaila, a senior at Avon High School in Connecticut.

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I’m interested in politics, anthropology, and psychology, which really means I’m interested in people. What they build, what they tolerate, and the marks they leave on the societies they live in.

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The Stories Between is an independent column I founded and publish myself. The name comes from something I keep running into. The facts of a thing are usually available to anyone willing to look them up. What’s harder to find is everything in the gaps: who was left out of the record, what the official version skips, why something that looks sudden turns out to have been happening for years.

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The subjects change more than I expected them to. I’ve written about why humanities enrollment is collapsing, and about how elected governments hollow out democracies without ever cancelling an election. Those two have almost nothing to do with each other, which is sort of the point. I don’t pick a beat. I pick whatever I can’t stop reading about, and then I read about it until I understand it.

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The method stays the same no matter the subject. I choose the question, do the reporting myself, and try to trace every claim back to a primary source instead of to someone else’s coverage of it. That usually means academic journals, federal data, court testimony, and the occasional afternoon spent confirming that a number everyone repeats actually came from somewhere. I get things wrong sometimes. When I do, I’d rather find out early.

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Outside the column, I work on research projects through my school’s UNICEF and Amnesty club. My best friend and I spent months on competitive authoritarianism, reading the literature, building an exhibit, and moderating a public panel for students and community members who argued with us, which was the best part.

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I’ve been writing since before any of this. Poetry, fiction, and an autobiography, I started the year I learned how. Things nobody has read.

 

I’m a first-generation immigrant. Most of my questions start there, and I’m still working out where they go.