I had plans to tell you that I’m having a second wind. Or third wind, depending on how old I feel on a given day. I was wondering how I could still be interesting while bragging about all my successes. People don’t want to hear me kvelling about me. There needs to be tension. It’s hard to write a post with an edge when I’m wallowing in my greatness. Read more
Right now the WNBA has two leagues inside one league. The older cohort of players spent their careers going overseas in the off-season just to survive, building the sport when there was no money in it. The newer cohort arrived when Caitlin Clark did — with audiences already built during college and the economics transformed overnight from NIL.
I watch the older players complaining about lack of recognition and no retirement plan, and it makes me want to look away. Because I get why they’re angry but I don’t want to be them. Read more
Screenshot from Ray Dalio’s video on economics
I tutor Art History Girl for six hours a day. It’s a lot of alone time to give up, but empty-nesting in my apartment took a turn for the worst when I agreed that for the last year of school Y could move back to my apartment with the boyfriend.
This year we’re doing AP World History.
During the unit about capitalism we watched cartoon videos that billionaire hedge-funder Ray Dalio made for members of Congress to learn how the economy works. In the videos everyone charges everyone money (“That’s the whole economy! It’s that simple!”) and it nagged at me that the boyfriend is not paying rent. Read more
Book art by Jodi Harvey-Brown
Patty says she’s been reading my writing for a long time and she’s sick of reading about parenting. So I feel like the time is ripe for me to slip in stuff I’d normally leave on the chopping block:
The specialty of Gen X is to see a disintegrating mess and take advantage of it. Think: post-Civil War robber barons and their monopolies. Or the speculating and hustling during the morally precarious roaring 20s. If tearing down institutions is cyclical, so is the resulting opportunistic cynicism.
Gen X created a data frenzy and picked up everything they could get their hands on. But today it’s like we’re at a party where the piñata broke two hours ago; there’s not much more candy to find. Read more
I thought my post yesterday was absolute genius, and I asked myself if I shouldn’t hold off on publishing it so that I could submit it as an op-ed to the New York Times. Or as political analysis to the Atlantic. Instead I posted it here, because immediate feedback is like crack. And then the post bombed. Read more
The only way I find out what people value most about me is by having to sell something. Otherwise I’m just guessing. And I pretty much always guess wrong. Like I thought I was so great at writing about sex, but I only made money writing about careers. Now I understand why careers was more valuable: it’s easier for people to talk about their sex life than their finances, and careers are about money. Read more
Two months before the last day of my last kid at home, I stopped being able to write. For me, nothing feels like it really happened unless I write it down. So I thought: this must be documented. It’s the biggest moment of our life. Or his life. Or something. At least draw a picture. Read more
When I announced I’m doing research about autism at Harvard, people said, Academia requires too much patience! You’ll lose your mind!
Undaunted I came up with a new paper every week for the first year. The papers were awful, but as a writer I didn’t mind writing to learn. So it turned out that my transition to academia was, indeed, an exercise in extreme patience: for my co-authors. Read more
Golden Ladders, installation by Yoko Ono
I’m scared to talk about my job at Harvard because of imposter syndrome. But I know from experience that writing here and talking about myself incessantly is the way to beat it.
