What we learned from 9/11 about quitting work after life-altering events

A majority of people in the US are considering quitting their jobs right now according to the New York Times. This is obvious to me because in the months after the towers fell, my world was my recovery support groups — and in my groups, the conversations were all about who is going back to […]

The three types of independence everybody needs

I treat my freezer like a savings account. As a single parent with an unstable income, I know that when there’s an emergency I’ll use rent money, camp money, or even food money to solve the problem. But no matter what the emergency is, I can’t pay for it with frozen broccoli, so with food […]

Introducing my new puppy: Tali

I decided that as a responsible parent I should wait to get a new dog until my oldest son leaves for college. It’s his last summer at home. We don’t need more tumult. I waited until after college applications were done on January 15 and then I answered an ad on Craigslist for a puppy […]

We don’t talk about Israel in my family so I have to talk about it here

Everyone in my family holds a different view about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I used to track my site traffic like Google was my fortune teller. The top three countries for my audience were always US, UK, and Australia. The next few countries changed a lot, but often Israel was number four. My family is so […]

Divorce showdown Bezos vs Gates which is saddest

Marriage with kids is co-parenting and ironically, divorce with kids is co-parenting: same decisions, same values, same uneven emotional investment. Going through a divorce just to co-parent from different homes wastes so much time and energy that some people argue courts should not intervene in post-divorce parenting decisions, which would legally call a spade a […]

Gender fluidity and Autism open gates of power for women

  US scientists are scared to talk about differences between male and female brains, probably because it will get them fired. The loudest voices say there cannot be male and female brains because there are women and men who think in similar ways.

What I’ve been hiding

I’ve been hiding so much that the only way I could sort it out was with a list; a list of things I thought were too awful to write.

How to tell if your friends have autism. The Christmas card edition

Let’s time travel back to the pre-Internet days of 1975. Long-distance phone calls were $1 per minute, so people received most of their communications via US mail, and Christmas cards were so important that the average number of families on a list was 300. That year, two sociology professors from Brigham Young University sent 600 […]

Underrated career tools: Reddit, rants, and letters to your mom

My son supposedly writes a story every day. We didn’t start this way. We started when he was supposed to write essays to practice for the European AP history test and instead, he wrote essays about how the topic is inherently racist and imperialist and we probably need another French Revolution.

Adults changing careers should follow advice for students applying to college 

The number of high school seniors applying to MIT this year is 60% above last year. That means there are 12,000 more applicants. Harvard’s applications are up 30%. Duke is up 20%. Most Ivy League schools are up 20% at least.

© 2023 Penelope Trunk