While questions of “identity” may seem very 1990s and pre-Facebook, certain discourses surrounding summer events, like the nomination of now-Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, remind us that questions of “identity,” individual and collective, still remain with us in a globalized age. Valerie Bailey finds that her best friends all share a uniquely common bond, the cultural memory of being ancillary to someone else’s meta-narrative, while Colin Dickey meditates on the study of phrenology and our changing assumptions about identity. Living life in the hyphen, Sheila Espineli explores the complexities of her first visit to the Philippines, the country in which her parents were born, and Cesar Gomez remembers his grandmother and the lessons from her Andean youth that impacted his California childhood. Carrie Hawks’s art work initiates many questions about how we imagine women’s sexuality. Following the death of Michael Jackson, Paloma Ramirez wonders about the future of fame in the age of the internet.