When I was a kid my parents divided the house into rooms for cleaning. Two kids, two parents, twelve rooms: three rooms each. Nobody did their rooms, so I did them all. With no parents home between 8am and 8pm, I had to do something remarkable to get their attention. Read more
I ran a study at Harvard and published a paper. But my best finding is sitting on Harvard’s server, unpublished. So I’m embarking on a furtive rescue mission. To start, here’s the finding: Read more
The World Cup is in Boston, and I live in the middle of the city, so I spent two weeks surrounded by Scottish people. Boston has a literal law against happy hour and a nightlife notorious for being lame. So it made sense that the Scots, who go to bars the way we go to Starbucks, drank all the beer in the city. There were beer delivery trucks lining the streets to keep up. Read more
Personality type is especially valuable for neurodivergent people because it systematizes things we find difficult to understand intuitively. The problem is that autism and ADHD make us nearly impossible to type correctly — including ourselves. Read more
Quilts from Gees Bend
People email me their result from my personality test, and I can tell from the way they write the email that the test result is wrong. Finally, I realized that a huge percentage of the people who find their way to me are autistic, and autism breaks the Myers Briggs test. It’s like I accidentally ran a fifteen year study on autism and personality type. Read more
Chairs (1970) Tom Berg
This is a guest post from a college senior I coached.
When my parents divorced, my mom more or less kept my younger brother and my dad more or less kept me. We each saw the other parent, but never very much and never for very long. My brother and I only saw one another every other weekend for the better part of four years. Read more
Z tells me the list of things I can never write about — just to be sure I don’t forget. I am surprised he’s doing it at our local coffee shop where anyone could hear. The last one is, “Don’t tell people Nino left us because he didn’t want to raise two autistic kids.”
“Wait. What? You’ve never said that to me before.”
“Forget it. Everyone already knows. I just thought the list needed more things or you wouldn’t remember.” Read more
My first sense that recent college grads are in hell is when I realized the job hunt process is totally broken. Kids use AI to write their resumes, screen ads, and fill out applications. Meanwhile, AI is sorting resumes for companies, and the AI sorters prefer AI-written resumes, so kids are sending out thousands of applications before getting a single interview. Read more
Dance scene from Bande a part by Godard (1964)
When Z was young, I overheard Nino saying he doesn’t like playing Candy Land. And Z said, “Dad, I’m the kid and you’re the dad, so you have to play games that are boring to you because you’re not the kid.” Read more
detail of Lips Open into Certain Gendered Sounds (2016) by Ragnhildur Johanns
List of things my family hates about me:
I lie.
I misconstrue conversations.
I don’t remember what I say.
I exaggerate.
I’m manipulative.
They have all told me this. Read more