This guy said I charge too much for coaching, then he showed up to my door

There are some people I’ve been coaching since they were in high school. Usually their parents pay for the first few sessions and then I get overinvested in the kid. So I have to stop and ask myself: “Does this family have $30,000 for me to coach the kid for a year?” Sometimes the answer […]

The Barbie Movie crushes the Chief.com pyramid scheme

I was an early adopter of a bad attitude toward Chief — as soon as they announced they’re “a network of 2000 female executives on their way up.” I don’t think there are 2000 women in all of corporate America who want to climb up the ranks to be CEO.

Fangirl swoon: Agent 86 left a comment

Below is a comment from my last post about the Wikipedia editor who kept trolls from deleting my page. I know you have no reason to believe this, but I’m Agent 86. I haven’t followed your blog or been on Wikipedia in years. In fact, not trying to be rude, I had forgotten about you […]

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?” […]

Dooce was my secret coworker for 20+ years: grappling with the death of Heather Armstrong

John Gallagher wrote his dissertation about how people with a large following online relate to comments from their audience. Over many years he interviewed people who were top Redditors, top Amazon reviewers, and he interviewed Heather and me.

Revelation: Parenting is a social skill too

This is a picture of indomitable me: Look at the Cartier watch. I bought it with the stock sale from my first startup. It felt like money was falling from the sky, so ten grand for a watch was nothing. We walked through Central Park every day to get to the top nursery school for […]

How to stop having transactional friends

I’m going to stop being so transactional. This means that I’m not going to be as pissy as usual when your comments don’t come as frequently as they used to. Well. Hold on. Right now I spend half my time reading science journals and I can’t help pausing when I see a paper about social […]

Vaginal rejuvination, feminism, dog whistle, dog whistle

The first time I heard about vaginal rejuvenation surgery was at a brunch when I was in my late 30s. I love brunch because it feels Jewish. After I typed this I googled it to make sure I wasn’t crazy. And it turns out that while there is no causation, there is correlation: the more […]

Autism research that fixes your life

My Autism Workshop runs Dec. 3, 4, 5, 6 from 8-9pm Eastern. The cost is $150 now and $195 after Thanksgiving weekend. You should join. People say to me, “Why does it matter if I have autism or not?” The answer is you can transform your life by using what we know about autism to […]

If autism means genius why do I stay in bed?

I kept this picture to remind myself that when I don’t want to get out of bed and I do anyway, I’m glad I did. The picture doesn’t inspire me, so I’m putting it here to remind us all that tricks for self-discipline that work for most people do not work for people with autism. […]

© 2023 Penelope Trunk