Thank you to the 1,330 teenagers who participated in the eighth week of our 10-week Summer Reading Contest, and congratulations to Maya Nylund, our winner, as well as to our many runners-up and honorable mentions.

Scroll down to take a look at the variety of topics — from 3-D guns to emojis, student protests and virtual reality — that caught the eyes of our participants this week.

And please remember to always check the top of our contest announcement to find the right place to participate, any week from now until Aug. 24.

Winner

Maya Nylund from Surrey, England, chose an article headlined “A World Tour of Fake Places That Fool the Eye” and wrote:

While preparing to transfer to my third school in three years, I was overwhelmed by a sense of floating between parallel realities. The child of an expat family, my adolescence has fragmented across continents. In each place I live, I leave a version of myself molded by geographical context. As a result, vestiges of my person are bound to cities oceans away: distinct realities so far apart they feel mutually exclusive. I also experienced this feeling reading about Potemkin villages: architectural facades often simulating faraway places, like a Harlem in western Sweden. Photos of fake conflict-zones far from any foreign fire reminded me of how contingent our internal realities are upon our physical realities, and how discordant these realities can be. As I struggle to reconcile the truths of my past selves, it strikes me that the experience of third-culture kids shares some ground with unreal places. Like us, they are at odds with their surroundings, as anomalous aesthetically as we are culturally. Like our old homes, they seem insulated from the societies in which they are situated. And, like my sense of universe-hopping, the actuality of a Potemkin village is false. Wallpaper curls on the edge of a fake brick, you’re visited by friends from what you thought was a different world; the pines behind your cardboard Harlem make sense, and the sequence of your life is laid out in lopsided unity.

Runners-Up

bengal11Delyse082202 on “Emmett Till Sign Is Hit With Bullets Again, 35 Days After Being Replaced”

bengal11Khadiza022301 on “Violence Intensifies as Student Protests Spread in Bangladesh”