Defund police and schools. Redirect the money to black families and communities.

I understand that part of Black Lives Matter means White Privilege Matters. Which is to say that justice requires white people to face our fears about giving up institutionalized advantages. If you are white and you’re not scared then you have no idea how much has to change the U.S. to function like black lives […]

Asking for advice is hard because accepting reality is hard

Recently someone in my writing class hired a lawyer to tell me she wants a refund for the class. The lawyer sent an email to me requesting $25,000 in damages for his client. I sent this email in response: Dear Sir. I don’t give refunds for the class. I do not say anywhere that I […]

Emails my mom sent from her NYC co-op

I stopped talking with my mom a few years ago. She might not have noticed at first. My brothers have all cut her off at times as well. But my mom is pragmatic. She knows she and my dad were terrible parents. She apologizes and by all accounts, she is a much more enjoyable person […]

Autism or ADHD? The answer will surprise you.

Recently a flurry of articles about academic overachievers appeared in scientific journals. Specifically, the research found that people with a diagnosis of autism were more frequently high achievers in school. And people diagnosed with ADHD were more frequently low achievers in school. A paper published last week in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders […]

This is a great time to make a career change

I learned about bouncing back from the diet industry. This is not surprising. All the best research about personal development comes from the diet industry because there’s so much money to be made if you can figure out how to help people lose weight. One study that I have never forgotten is that if you […]

I was calm until I read about colleges staying closed until September 2022

Each night before I go to sleep, I lay in bed torturing myself with the day’s news. I know we are not supposed to do that, but there are very few vices I can fully engage in when we have five people living in a 1000-square-foot apartment. Screen-time news right before bed is a vice […]

It’s time for Seder, which is Zeder, in our modern-day-plague ravaged Passover

Last week I received a very long email with instructions for Zeder. This year millions of Jews around the world will log into Zoom, and try to continue a 2000-year tradition of not changing the tradition. We will recall plagues of past like infestation of locusts and raining frogs and we’ll silently scoff that Egypt […]

What it’s like to be a single parent who has coronavirus.

I knew something was wrong the day my son lay in bed in an emergency room waiting for his MRI to come back. A nurse entered his room and said, “Has your son been outside the country recently?” I did a double-take. “It’s pretty late to be asking that, isn’t it?” “Ma’am, yes or no?” […]

Schools are closed. Kids are home. What’s the long-term impact of that?

Sometime in February, it was clear that the US was headed toward crisis, and every day we don’t take major action would make the crisis geometrically worse. Suburban schools closed first. The last school districts to close are bigger cities, because they had to figure out how to get breakfast and lunch to the kids […]

https://blog.penelopetrunk.com/cdn/communist-manifesto.jpg

I had this idea that coronavirus would be heaven for me because I’ve been working from home with my kids circling all day long for ten years. This should be my time to shine. I was looking forward to when schools closed down. I wanted all the parents to ask each other: How are you […]

© 2023 Penelope Trunk