About a month ago I got a stack of catalogues from Restoration Hardware in the mail. My first thought was that I had purchased so much at Restoration Hardware in the past year that I am now one of their top customers. I thought about my friend Maria, who teaches people how to choose a color for […]
Black people should not wear hoodies. That’s one way to deal with the problem of people shooting black people. Maybe not the best. Who even knows. I have a friend who is white, married to a black guy and they have two sons, who, as you can guess, count as black in this country. Even […]
The secret to the success of this blog is that instead of showing you how perfect my life is, I show myself drinking in the morning, before work. My husband is always worrying that I make us look bad, so he makes up rules like how I can’t write about our sex life, and then I violate […]
After about a decade of doing research on happiness, I realize that my favorite research comes from university labs that use self-reported data. Most of our happiness lab research is based on self-reported data about who feels happy. Which means, maybe, that I am my own lab. I can self-report just as well as anyone else. So here is […]
I lived in New York City for ten years. I had a 500 square foot rent-stablized apartment in Park Slope. Every week I lived there someone asked me to tell them if I’m planning to move. To squeeze into 500 square feet with my husband, we put our winter clothes in storage. Then our books. When our son was […]
This is a guest post by Cassie Boorn. She works with me at Quistic, and she blogs at cassieboorn.com. We are packing up our trunk outside of a friend’s house when he approaches the car. It was late at night. We’d spent all day at a funeral. We were so distracted that we didn’t even see him walking towards […]
I intuitively knew to hide my kids when I started having them, because I had already had a rip-roaring career where I steered clear of women who doted on their kids. (It’s always women, even today.) The kids were annoying to me. I couldn’t understand why the women would lose focus on their jobs to […]
First of all you’d be surprised how many meetings I attend given that I live on a farm and I hate to leave. And, to be honest, every time I’ve written advice about how to handle yourself in a meeting, I’ve actually written about how not to handle yourself. Like, how to gross out investors. […]
I am at O’Hare flying to Pittsburgh to give a speech. I try to never give speeches. Actually I try to never leave my house. Because I think I will regret any time I spend away from my kids. Well, definitely I will. Here’s how I know: Because I chose to live in abject poverty […]
We are at the dining room table eating dinner and my eight-year-old son who is dying to have a girlfriend tells us, “Taylor Swift said she’s only going to date guys who have sisters because they understand women better. Is that true? I think I need a sister.” I say, “I read that, too.” Matthew […]