As a teenager growing up in the suburbs of Washington, I ritually watched the Sunday-morning political talk shows with my family. We parsed and argued and jeered at the screen as national figures delivered careful, poll-tested talking points.

Right after college, after growing up in the United States, I moved to India, broadly telling the story of how an old and stagnant country was suddenly waking up. And I came home, back to America, in 2009 after telling that story and writing a book about that.

To have come of age during and after the global financial crisis of 2008 is to belong to a generation often unable to do what an American could once expect, and to do what was once expected: Get a job, pay off student loans, and find a place of your own.

Birthright citizenship in America is part of something larger: The American longing to sever from history, to be a place of new beginnings.

I knew that life itself was this journey, and I've always seen it as a kind of school in that we're meant to have fun, and we're meant to grow, and we're meant to evolve and learn to be better humans and how to love each other better and how to love ourselves and become a part of a community of love on this planet.

College on for sure... I'm scared to say it cause it sounds like a family movie, but if my kid was 7, 8, 9 I would take her to this quickly and gladly!

I have been blessed in my career and I was able to afford the extra procedures and everything to have my children. Does that make me a better mother than someone who cannot afford it? No, of course not.

I spent a lot of time thinking that I was some kind of foundling, that I had been a changeling, that I had been found under a bush somewhere, and that I couldn't possibly be kin - but the more I live, the more I feel absolutely like I come out of my family. I'm a sort of strange natural progression.