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The Way We Were, Homagama, Dallas, TX (2026)

10/16/2026

Vinayana Khurana was born with cerebral palsy in New Delhi, India. The condition made writing difficult and movement challenging. Everyday actions — picking up a pen, turning pages, typing on a keyboard — required effort that, for Vinayana, could not always be achieved the conventional way.
So she found unconventional ones.
When her father brought home a computer, she discovered a way forward. Unable to use the keyboard with her hands as others did, she began pressing the keys with her nose. It was slow. It was physically demanding. And it worked.
She typed that way for years. Over time, the strain caused serious back pain, and she had to adapt again. She began dictating her work to her mother. Later, she began using her phone — whatever combination of methods was available, she used.
Through all of it, she kept studying.
Vinayana earned a master's degree in English Literature from the University of Delhi. She then completed an MPhil in English Literature at the same institution — reportedly submitting her entire dissertation from her phone.
She returned to Delhi University not as a student but as a guest lecturer at the Non-Collegiate Women's Education Board, teaching English Literature to students who did not yet know what their teacher had navigated to stand in that room.
She is also a published writer and poet, a life coach, and a disability inclusion activist. She has written for platforms including Youth ki Awaaz and Love Matters India. She has spoken at national conferences on accessibility and inclusion. She has been featured on All India Radio.
And she has said something that deserves to be heard precisely as she said it.
"I'm a woman with cerebral palsy, but that is not my identity."
Not a disabled person who overcame the odds. A writer, teacher, poet, and advocate who happens to have cerebral palsy. The distinction is hers. She made it deliberately.
The girl who typed with her nose grew up to teach at one of India's most prestigious universities. Both facts are true. Neither one is the whole story — and she would be the first to say so.

10/16/2026

On 27 May 1992, a mortar shell struck a queue of people waiting to buy bread on Vase Miskina Street in Sarajevo. Twenty-two people were killed.
The following day, Vedran Smailović — who had been principal cellist with the Sarajevo Opera — put on the formal evening dress he would have worn to a concert. He carried his cello and a plastic chair to the site of the explosion. He sat down in the crater and played.
He came back the next day, and the next. For 22 consecutive days — one for each person killed — he returned to the ruins and played.
The piece he was most often photographed playing was Albinoni's Adagio in G minor.
Sarajevo was under siege. The city would remain surrounded from April 1992 to February 1996 — nearly four years of sustained shelling and sniper fire that made being visible and stationary in the open a genuine risk of death. Smailović kept playing throughout: at funerals, in the rubble of bombed buildings, in the street.
He left Sarajevo in 1993 and settled in Northern Ireland, where he has continued to perform.
In the years since, he has given interviews, and in them he has been consistently clear about one thing: he does not want the story told the way it usually is. He has objected to being called brave. He has pointed out that his neighbours standing in water queues faced the same danger he did. He has objected to the novels, songs, and compositions written about him without his consent or involvement, arguing that they displace his own account with someone else's version of it.
His account is simpler.
He was a musician in a city being destroyed. Music was the thing he had. He used it.
The 22 days in the crater became one of the most recognisable images of the Siege of Sarajevo — not because of anything Smailović claimed for the act, but because of what others saw in it: a man in evening dress, alone in a bomb crater, playing for people who could no longer hear him.
He has never called it heroism. He has called it music.
Given that he has asked for his own account to be the one that circulates, this is it: Vedran Smailović played his cello in Sarajevo because he was a cellist, and that was what he had to give.

10/16/2026

In 1994, Tony Cicoria was an orthopaedic surgeon in upstate New York. He was at a lakeside pavilion in Albany after a family gathering, using a payphone, when a thunderstorm moved in.
Lightning struck the phone line. He was thrown backwards. His heart stopped.
A nurse — who happened to be waiting behind him to use the phone — recognised what was happening and began CPR. She kept him alive until the ambulance arrived.
He recovered over the following weeks. There were some early memory and concentration problems that resolved. By most measures, the same man came back.
Then something else started.
He developed an intense and persistent desire to listen to piano music. It was entirely new — he had no particular feeling for music before the lightning strike. He bought recordings and played them constantly. Then he wanted to play, which he could not. He had taken a few piano lessons as a child and not touched an instrument since.
He acquired a piano and taught himself, practising before dawn and late into the evenings around his surgical schedule — alongside his work, not instead of it.
Then the music began arriving on its own.
Compositions he had never heard would begin playing in his head, fully formed, unbidden. They arrived with enough insistence that he needed to capture them. He taught himself musical notation so that he could write them down.
He has since performed publicly. He has composed and recorded original work, including a piece he has titled The Lightning Sonata. He continued practising surgery.
Neurologists have not dismissed what happened to him. Oliver Sacks — the neurologist and writer — met Cicoria and wrote about his case at length in his 2007 book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. The phenomenon — sudden musical acquisition following neurological trauma — appears elsewhere in the scientific literature, though it remains poorly understood.
Brain scans showed no obvious abnormality. No structural change that would explain the transformation has been identified. The mechanism remains unestablished.
Tony Cicoria has said he does not want it explained.
A bolt of lightning stopped his heart. A nurse standing in line kept him alive. He recovered, and then music that did not belong to him before began arriving in his mind, fully formed, and he learned to write it down.
The neuroscience does not have an account for it. He does not require one.

10/16/2026

Sofía Jirau was born on March 23, 1997, in Puerto Rico. From early childhood, she had one clear ambition — to become a model. In an industry historically built on a very narrow idea of who belongs on a runway, she arrived with a motto and a mission.
"Sin Límites." No Limits.
She began her modelling career in 2019, with support from the Puerto Rican Down Syndrome Foundation, which connected her with INprende, an organisation that offers entrepreneurship education and professional development. She was building more than a portfolio. She was building a case.
In February 2020, Sofía walked at New York Fashion Week — one of the few models with Down syndrome to have done so. She was 22 years old.
Two years later, the call came that made history.
On Valentine's Day 2022, Victoria's Secret announced its Love Cloud Collection. Sofía Jirau appeared alongside 17 other women in a campaign celebrating diverse backgrounds, ages, skin tones, and body types — including the brand's first openly transgender model. Sofía was 24 years old, and she was the first model with Down syndrome in the brand's history.
"I can finally tell you my big secret," she wrote on Instagram. "I am Victoria's Secret's first model with Down syndrome!"
She added her life motto and signature phrase: "Alavett!" — meaning "I love it."
The "Sin Límites" movement — No Limits — is also the name of Sofía's global campaign to raise awareness about what people with Down syndrome can accomplish, addressing specific barriers including employment, independent housing, and inclusive education. She is also the founder of Alavett, her own brand.
"I will say to every person in my community who has Down syndrome: you can find a job," she has said.
The industry she entered had spent decades presenting one version of beauty to the world. Sofía Jirau walked New York Fashion Week at 22 and Victoria's Secret at 24, and in doing so reached an audience that had rarely, if ever, seen itself reflected in those spaces.
Sin Límites. No Limits. Not a motto she invented for an Instagram caption. A fact she demonstrated, one runway at a time.

10/16/2026

In August 1983, 18-year-old Robert DuBoise was arrested in Tampa, Florida, in connection with the r**e and murder of 19-year-old Barbara Grams. He had nothing to do with her death. He would spend the next 37 years of his life in prison for it anyway.
His conviction rested on two forms of evidence that have since been widely discredited. A forensic dentist testified that a bite mark found on the victim matched DuBoise's teeth — analysis the expert would later admit was never reliable enough to identify a specific individual. A jailhouse informant separately testified that DuBoise had confessed while in custody. What the jury was never told was that prosecutors had reduced the informant's own sentence to time served just two months after he testified. That undisclosed benefit would have fundamentally undermined his credibility had jurors known about it.
DuBoise was sentenced to death. His sentence was later reduced to life imprisonment.
He remained incarcerated for another 25 years after that, until 2018, when the Innocence Project helped persuade prosecutors to take a second look at his case. DNA technology unavailable at the time of his original trial pointed to two entirely different men — Amos Robinson and Abron Scott, both already serving life sentences for a separate killing. Neither had any connection to DuBoise. Both had left evidence at the scene of Grams' death that he had not.
In September 2020, Robert DuBoise walked out of Hardee County Correctional Institute. He had been behind bars for 37 years. He became the 30th person exonerated from Florida's death row, according to the Innocence Project of Florida.
Presiding over his exoneration, Judge Christopher Nash spoke to him directly in the courtroom.
"This court has failed you for 37 years."
DuBoise subsequently brought a civil suit against the city of Tampa, represented by the Human Rights Defense Center and the Chicago-based civil rights firm Loevy & Loevy. On February 15, 2024, the Tampa City Council voted unanimously to approve a $14 million settlement, to be paid out over three years. Tampa's Chief of Police, Lee Bercaw, issued a statement acknowledging the case and noting that improvements in training and technology had since strengthened the department's investigative practices.
Robert DuBoise was arrested at 18. He was wrongfully convicted. He served 37 years before DNA evidence cleared his name. He was exonerated at 55. He settled his lawsuit at 59.
Now in his early 60s, he has been clear that the settlement, however significant, only partially accounts for what was taken from him.
"Money, houses, cars, none of that stuff can ever restore what I lost," he said.
And he has been equally clear about what he intends to do with the years that remain.
"I don't want to waste my time with bitterness and pity parties."
Thirty-seven years. A conviction built on bite mark science that had never been reliable and a witness whose motive to testify was hidden from the jury. And at the end of it — a man who refuses to let those 37 years be the only thing anyone remembers about him.

10/16/2026

In late 2025, AARP's Movies for Grownups asked Linda Hamilton a simple question: you've said you want to own your age. What does that mean?
Hamilton, then 69, had just joined the cast of Netflix's Stranger Things for its final season — returning to sci-fi nearly 35 years after Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the film that made her one of the most iconic action figures in cinema history. She had spent her career doing her own stunts, training her body to degrees that most actors decades younger would not attempt. And she had quietly, consistently refused to alter her face.
Her answer:
"I do not spend a moment trying to look younger on any level, ever. I have just completely surrendered to the fact that this is the face that I've earned. And it tells me so much."
She kept going.
"I don't chase beauty, and I don't chase longevity particularly. I've always said that rigidifying is what kills us — the rigid thoughts and the sort of not moving. I've tried very hard in my life to stay as fluid as possible."
And then she told a story about her daughter, who was about six years old when she told Hamilton she was beautiful — because, the child said, "her face is filled with joy." Hamilton said she has used that as her definition of beauty since.
"I work on the joy."
Hamilton is now 70, living in New Orleans, far from the industry she has worked in for four decades. She became a grandmother recently. Five years ago, her twin sister Leslie died — a loss, she said, that pushed her to finally start doing the things she had been postponing. She started jumping horses again, after a 40-year gap.
She has been publicly clear about not surgically altering her face since at least a 2019 essay in Glamour. In 2025, she was still making the same point, but with something quieter added to it.
"I fully inhabit myself in a way that I never did when I was younger."
The woman who played Sarah Connor — one of cinema's most physically formidable characters — has made a decision that, in Hollywood, still reads as quietly radical: she kept the face she lived in.
And she says it tells her more than a younger one ever could.

10/16/2026

On July 19, 2026, at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, Ferran Torres came off the bench, received a headed pass from Nico Williams, and fired the ball past Argentina's goalkeeper in the 106th minute. Final score: Spain 1, Argentina 0. Spain were world champions for the second time in their history.
"It was a dream come true," Torres said after the final whistle. "It was the best moment in my life."
He also said this: "I think in the end the goal came from 47 million people, not just those of us who are here."
His nickname on the pitch is El Tiburón — The Shark. An instinct in front of goal that defies the pressure of the moment. But the story of Ferran Torres that most people who follow him closely already know is not the one that ends in a World Cup final.
Torres grew up in Valencia, Spain, surrounded by dogs from his earliest years. When his childhood dog Rex died, he had Rex's name and the date he received him tattooed on his arm. He then surprised his sister Arantxa with the same tattoo — a shared symbol of a bond that had formed around one animal. Arantxa went further: she had Rex's face tattooed on her back.
"I surprised my sister with the tattoo so she could also have that tattoo as a symbol of our bond, to also be united for that dog that left such an imprint," Torres said.
That imprint became something active. Torres has used his platform — built across years at Manchester City, FC Barcelona, and the Spanish national team — to raise awareness about the global stray dog crisis. Together with Arantxa, he has helped rescue stray dogs, covered veterinary costs, and worked to find them safe homes. He adopted his own dog Milo in 2021, alongside other rescue pets.
He also became the first ever "champion" of the Wild at Heart Foundation — an organisation founded by Nikki Tibbles in 2015 that has reduced stray dog populations worldwide through sterilisation, rescue, and rehoming programmes.
"It's all about raising awareness," Tibbles said of the partnership. "The fact that he has a rescue dog and has chosen a rescue dog... helps enormously."
A man who scores the winning goal in a World Cup final in the 106th minute, under the full weight of a nation's expectation — and whose quieter life involves covering vet bills for animals no one else will help. Both things are true of the same person.
On the pitch, he fights for trophies. Off the pitch, he fights for the voiceless.

10/16/2026

On August 7, 1959, a 29-year-old woman stood at the starting line of the Pikes Peak Marathon in Manitou Springs, Colorado, wearing short shorts, a white blouse tied in a knot, and sneakers from a dime store.
She was not trying to make history. She was trying to sell gym memberships.
Her name was Arlene Pieper, and she owned Arlene's Health Studio, a women's fitness centre in Colorado Springs. She had decided that finishing the Pikes Peak Marathon would be a vivid way to demonstrate what her studio stood for. The marketing plan turned out to be far less remarkable than the day itself.
The Pikes Peak Marathon is one of the toughest races in North America. It begins at approximately 6,320 feet above sea level and climbs 7,815 feet of vertical terrain — rocky switchbacks, loose scree, and thinning air — to the 14,115-foot summit of Pikes Peak, then descends the same mountain. Total distance: 26.2 miles.
Arlene had already tried the race in 1958. She reached the summit and turned back, which disqualified her from that year's finish. She came back in 1959.
Her 9-year-old daughter Kathie came too — and also raced, finishing the ascent to the summit and becoming the youngest competitor to do so as of that year.
Arlene finished the full marathon in a time of 9:50:20. She was the only woman in the race. At the finish line, she said she felt pretty good — a little tired, but not completely exhausted. She returned to Colorado Springs and her health studio. She never ran another marathon. When asked later whether she would ever consider it, she was clear: "Never, never, never."
Life went on. Other women made history in other races: Roberta Gibb at Boston in 1966; Kathrine Switzer, also at Boston, in 1967. Those stories were widely covered. Arlene Pieper's name stayed in the Pikes Peak Marathon's historical records, unread.
For decades, no one made the connection.
It was not until the 2000s that a Pikes Peak Marathon historian, reviewing decades of race archives, realised what the 1959 results showed: a woman had officially finished a sanctioned marathon in the United States eight years before Kathrine Switzer famously ran Boston. He spent years tracking Arlene down. In 2009, he found her.
When race officials reached her and told her what she had done, she was shocked. Fifty years had passed.
In the years that followed, Arlene returned to Pikes Peak as the race's honoured guest and served as official starter. In 2019, on the 60th anniversary of her run, a group of women dressed in white shorts, sleeveless blouses, and headscarves ran up Pikes Peak in her honour.
Arlene Pieper Stine died on February 11, 2021, in Capitola, California. She was 90 years old. Her daughter later fulfilled her wish to have some of her ashes scattered on Pikes Peak.
She had run the race to sell gym memberships. She had stopped at the summit the year before and come back. She finished in dime-store sneakers. And then she went home, opened her studio on Monday, and spent the next fifty years not knowing that she had been first.

10/16/2026

On April 12, 1980, a 21-year-old with curly hair and an artificial leg stood at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in St. John's, Newfoundland. He dipped his prosthetic into the cold water, turned west, and started running.
His name was Terry Fox. He planned to run more than 5,000 miles across Canada — a full marathon every day — to raise money for cancer research. He had one biological leg. He had been training in secret for 18 months. He had never done anything like this before.
Three years earlier, Terry had been an 18-year-old athlete when he felt pain in his right knee. The diagnosis was osteogenic sarcoma — bone cancer. His right leg was amputated above the knee.
While recovering in hospital, he read an article about an amputee who had completed a marathon. He made a decision. He told his family: "I'm going to do something about this. I'm going to run for the others."
He went through 16 months of chemotherapy, watching other patients — including children — fight the same disease around him. As he recovered, he started training, learning to run on a heavy prosthetic. The motion was ungainly: a hop on his good leg, a swing forward of the artificial one, a peculiar lurch that he refined over thousands of hours of practice. By the time he reached St. John's, he was ready.
He called it the Marathon of Hope. His goal: one dollar raised for every Canadian — approximately $24 million. Not for himself. For the people still in those hospital wards.
The first weeks were brutal. Cold rain, highway headwinds, some days raising nothing at all. His stump bled through the padding. But every morning, he put on his prosthetic and ran his 42 kilometres.
As he crossed into Ontario, the country found him. Towns shut down to watch him pass. People lined the highways. Donations surged. The rhythm of his running — the sound of a good leg and an artificial one — became familiar across a nation.
On September 1, 1980, near Thunder Bay, Ontario, Terry woke up struggling to breathe. He ran one mile. Then he stopped. The cancer had returned — this time in his lungs.
At a press conference the following day, tears on his face, he said:
"I just wish people would realize that anything's possible if you try. Dreams are made possible if you try."
He added one more thing: "The Marathon of Hope had better continue without me."
Terry Fox had run 5,373 kilometres — 3,339 miles — in 143 days. He had raised $24.17 million, exactly one dollar for every Canadian alive at the time.
He died on June 28, 1981. He was 22 years old.
The Marathon of Hope did continue without him. The first annual Terry Fox Run was held the following September. It grew across Canada. Then across the world. Today it takes place in more than 60 countries. As of 2026 — the 46th anniversary of the Marathon of Hope — the Terry Fox Foundation confirmed that over $1 billion has been raised for cancer research in his name.
When Terry Fox began running in 1980, only 20 percent of young cancer patients survived. Today that figure is 85 percent.
He saw suffering and decided he would not look away. He ran until he couldn't breathe. And then his dream kept running without him.

10/16/2026

In Buscalan — a village perched in the mountains of Kalinga province in the northern Philippines, reachable only after a long journey by road and foot — a woman born around February 1917 still practises a form of tattooing that has existed for more than a thousand years.
Her name is Apo Whang-Od Oggay, also known as Maria Oggay. She does not have a birth certificate. The most commonly reported date of her birth is February 17, 1917. In October 2026, she is approximately 109 years old.
The art she practises is called batok. It requires no electric machine. The tools are a length of bamboo, a thorn from a calamansi tree, and ink made from soot and water. Each design is applied by hand-tapping — pressing the thorn against the skin, stroke by deliberate stroke, until the pattern takes shape. The designs are not decorative in the modern sense. They have carried meaning among the Kalinga people for centuries: courage, identity, social standing, personal achievement. Historically, men received chest tattoos marking them as warriors; women received their own patterns marking the stages of their lives.
Whang-Od began learning the craft at 16, at her father's side. She became one of the last mambabatoks — practitioners of batok — of her generation. For much of her long life, she was known locally and nowhere else.
That changed in 2009, when American tattoo anthropologist Lars Krutak featured her in the Discovery Channel series Tattoo Hunter. She was already approaching 90. The world started finding its way to Buscalan — a journey of up to 12 hours for many visitors, crossing rice terraces and mountain paths. Today, because of her age, Whang-Od primarily offers a small three-dot design: simpler than the intricate patterns she once created, but applied with the same thorn, the same soot, the same technique unchanged across a century.
In April 2023, at the reported age of 106, she appeared on the cover of Vogue Philippines — becoming the oldest person ever to appear on any edition of Vogue in the magazine's history.
"I will stop once my eyes can no longer see," she has said.
The mambabatok tradition carries a strict cultural rule: it can only be transmitted to blood relatives. Whang-Od has honoured this by training her grandnieces, including Grace Palicas and Elyang Wigan, to carry the craft forward. The tradition will not end when she does.
She has lived through more than a century of history, including the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines during the Second World War, in which she lost the man she loved. She never married. She has no children of her own. She has a village, and students, and a thorn she has been pressing into skin since 1933.
Apo Whang-Od does not have a birth certificate. The documentary evidence of her life exists largely in the lives she has marked with it.

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