Aileen McGraw

2020 and beyond, the stories we tell are critical to our communities, businesses, and world. This essay celebrates what I've learned from 11 storytellers leading strong companies and change.

7 startup founders taught me how to rewrite my rulebook for wellness through technology, transparency, and community. Grateful that #WeWorkLabs brings this innovation into everyday conversation. I can't wait to see and support the success of these entrepreneurs: Kistein Monkhouse, MPA, My Le Goel, Michele Mehl, Tiana M. Duncan, Rachael Kim, Carrie Roberts, and Liselle Pires.

How the CEO of Colombo Cooperative uses digital and social media to create a movement, scale a business, and deliver #realtalk like a best friend.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be a storytelling case study for years to come. Here's how she rocks social media and vulnerability to move her audiences to action.

Meet the team using mixed reality for cancer research.

This is the first chapter in Making Mixed Reality, a series celebrating the passionate community creating apps and experiences with Windows Mixed Reality. Here, developer and designer Lucas Rizzotto he shares how he got started building mixed reality, as well as some tips for spatial sound.

Women rock storytelling style, and I shared my go-to how-to for contagiously social content with Create + Cultivate, a platform for female entrepreneurs in the digital space.

Wamuhu Waweru remaps what it means to collect and travel, and I loved sharing her story in majestic disorder Issue 6.

"By Hand" is a Fall 2015 Chickpea feature that Keara and I co-authored to trace plant-based food pathways and identities. It's my favorite editorial-illustration collaboration thus far!

Here are my go-to spots for cruelty-free cuisine in Chicago.

Northwestern conversations span the gauntlet, but I wish more students asked each other about how we pay for college. Here's why.

Why don't I eat meat? So I know and own the difference between don’t, can’t, won’t.

When the Library of Congress opened the Rosa Parks Collection to researchers, it unfroze the frame of that iconic bus ride to unveil a leader whose fight for freedom amplifies injustice today.

I reviewed Eleni Sikelianos' genre-defying essay-memoir-invention You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek). My review takes on this work's brave and beautiful fusion of writer, character and reader.

In North by Northwestern's Year in Media wrap up, I covered why Azealia Banks conquered 2014: she didn’t apologize. Instead, she put any demand for “sorry” on the media and society that paint her as angry.

Kelley Mullarkey travels the world, but her style stays rooted in Chicago. To celebrate majestic disorder’s third issue and her holiday homecoming, she shared her new and go-to local favorites.

Kelley Mullarkey, publisher and editor-in-cheif of majestic disorder, obsesses over what she calls the "global nomad." majestic disorder has a growing international print circulation of 5,000 sold in over 25 countries and an online readership of 75,000, yet Mullarkey writes to reach a niche. I asked her: "Where are you trying to go?"

NU changed my mind; or rather, it changed the words I live by.

Northwestern makes it incredibly difficult for low-income students to be the "proper kind" of busy.

We cannot trick-or-treat for cultural respect like we can a king-size candy bar.

A vegan nook lookbook. Personal space creates a powerful environment, and during fall, a distinct opportunity to embrace and simply live in a season of change emerges. The place, people and food vary, but across the board, our nooks are where we feel comfortable, proud and confident as vegans.

Welcome to our modern imagination: a sort of modern-day Twilight Zone, another dimension where we do not know who or exactly what, why or how we know.

They call Cochabamba, Bolivia "The City of Eternal Spring." Last summer, my choice to study abroad in Cochabamba truly involved me in an eternal spring. My experience brought fresh ideas into bloom, grew global relationships and showed me the power that local communities hold.

Something more than higher tuition and fees gets added to the equation when taking on class identity within private higher education.

The first in a series of monologues from some of Evanston's most interesting personalities that you may have seen or even met but never really talked to. These interviewers, however, did, and then pulled themselves out of the final equation completely, letting their subjects' words shine.

I covered the Block Museum lifting the veil on the artist and the museum with incoming Kaplan Artist in Residence Kader Attia. In early March, the French-Algerian artist visited Northwestern and the Block.