The column that launched my career was also erasing me

My mom recently mailed me a stack of magazines from my first job as a columnist. As I was flipping through them I saw something I hadn’t realized at the time: the magazine was rewriting who I was.

You can see it happening on the pages. My bio changes. The illustrations change. The column itself changes. At one point, after I had the baby, the managing editor told me I should start writing for women’s magazines. In another issue my bio calls me a “former” executive, as if my career were already over.

At the time I didn’t notice any of it. Now I can’t unsee it. So I’ve laid out the pages along with what I see now when I read them. Read more

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Everyone’s using AI to write. Stop pretending you’re not.

We are way past professors using AI to write their papers. Now professors feed a set of papers into AI and ask where the gap is in the logic so they can write a paper to fill it. When submitting, AI tells them who will likely be reviewing the paper for publication so they can strategically cite that person’s work. Spoiler: it’s working.

And really, why does this matter? Academic papers were never known for stellar writing anyway. Read more

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The Karen Read trial is a blueprint for challenging corrupt power

For the past 30 days, millions of people have watched the Karen Read trial live. I tuned in three weeks ago on a whim. At this point, I’m relieved the closing arguments are tomorrow because I’ve even changed the dog-walk schedule to accommodate voire dire.

At first, I kept watching because I could imagine myself as Karen Read.

She was a financial analyst and former professor dating a cop named John O’Keefe in Canton, an insular Boston suburb full of peopple in law enforcement. Karen’s in her forties with no kids, and she loved John’s kids. If I squint, I can see that being my life. Especially the part about how she didn’t know the townies disliked her. Read more

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Love letter to Wikipedia Editor Agent 86

Y is home from college for the rest of the summer and tells me he wants a job. So I tell him my server has 25 years of posts on it and I lost some, so I need him to go on the Wayback Machine and find them.

“What did you lose?”

“My hypertexts.”

“What?”

“Hypertexts are stories that deconstruct patriarchal tropes of self-discovery and I’m famous for writing them.”

“If you were really famous, you’d have a much longer Wikipedia page.” Read more

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Read this quick. I’m breaking news about Harry and Meghan!

Read this quick. I’m breaking news about Harry and Meghan!Why is no one wondering why Netflix paid so much money for Harry and Megan’s documentary? I’m surprised. It seems so obvious to me, so I haven’t said anything, but it’s one day before the show starts and I have to say it now so everyone knows I was right.

Before I tell you what’s in the Netflix movie, I want to acknowledge that I have a history of being incompetent at breaking news. For example, Alexis Ohanian accidentally told me that he sold Reddit before he told anyone else. I didn’t realize how big it was and I broke the news, buried in paragraph five of an umpteenth blog post about how to manage your career. Then I had no idea why it was catapulted to the top post on Reddit.

Read more

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Kobe Bryant confessed to rape. That’s part of his story.

As we sat down to dinner last night, my son said, “Look. Kobe died.”

I looked at the phone screen. My first thought was: he was so young and oh my gosh his daughter. My next thought was: the rape.

I have never stopped thinking about the night Kobe raped a 19-year-old woman while she was working at his hotel. Read more

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Be the writer you’ve always wanted to be: A one-year course with Penelope

writing course

Unlimited editing for a full year! Plus weekly videos and emails from me and many opportunities to receive feedback from the whole group. The course is $1550.

Sign up now!

Writers work best with an external deadline. We don’t realize it, but our definition of a successful writer means someone has attained external deadlines: Journalists have an editor, authors have a publication date, comedy writers have a showtime, publicists have a boss. Read more

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Online course: Write great blog posts that go viral

This is really the course I’d like to teach every day of my life. But for now, I’m teaching it only four days: May 2 -5 each night for one hour, from 7pm to 8pm Eastern. All videos will be available on demand if you can’t come to the live session. The cost is $195.

Sign up now. 

One of the best methods for figuring out what you should be doing with your life is to think about times you have totally loved what you were doing. One of my favorite jobs was giving lectures about writing at Brown, Harvard, Boston University, and University of Paris. Read more

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Shortcuts to Common New Year’s Resolutions

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One reason I have achieved so much in my own career is that I’ve taken shortcuts. For example, I played professional beach volleyball without learning how to play indoor sixes very well—I can really only play doubles, which is what people play on the sand. But it allowed me to skip a lot of years of indoor volleyball training and still play pro.

I’m always fascinated by people who find shortcuts. Tim Ferriss is a shortcut taker, but he totally annoys me because he pretends his shortcuts don’t mean he still had to do hard work. One of the reasons I was initially attracted to the Farmer is that he is good at knowing what shortcuts to take and he values hard work.

Just last week, in fact, he moved his pigs to a new barn, where they will be able to mix with the cattle herd. It’s not something anyone in our area does, but he had a hunch it would work, and now he manages one herd instead of two. I love that I’m learning the rules of farming by watching the Farmer cut corners.

In lists of the most common New Year’s resolutions, most are career-related. So I thought I’d take a look at the most common things people tell me they want to do, and I’d tell you shortcuts to getting to that goal. Because I’m pretty good at learning the rules and then figuring out how to work around them. This still means you have to do some hard work, of course, but it’s a smarter way to spend your energy and still get to what you want. Read more

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How to pitch a blogger

Melissa is back. She stole my purse.

But first, before she stole my purse, she opened my mail.

I walked into the kitchen and I said, “Hey, you opened my mail.”

“No I didn't.

“What's this? What's this opened envelope that is addressed to me?”

“Oh. That? I didn't think you counted that as mail.”

“What does it count as?”

“I knew it was from an author. I could just tell from the expensive stationary. So I thought it was like getting a book in the mail from a publisher. And you told me I could open those if I was looking for something to read.”

“No. It's mail.”

“No. It's not. Look. It's from Jon Acuff.”

Read more

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