women and ambition

“Curious about how does one ‘have it all’? 3 young boys, 2 booming businesses, an incredible creative partnership and new business with your husband... what does hired help look like?” - Joanne

‘All’ isn’t possible, or even desirable. For me, a full, fulfilling life requires plenty of room for living and all the unplanned stuff that inevitably... See more

People who do great work are not necessarily happier than everyone else, but they're happier than they'd be if they didn't. In fact, if you're smart and ambitious, it's dangerous

not

to be productive. People who are smart and ambitious but don't achieve much tend to become bitter.

Tillie Olsen wrote: “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children . . . the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” It was a physical problem, a time problem; it was also a question of selfhood. “The obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential . . . contradicts and must

... See more

Hello newsletter friends, happy to see you. Thanks for your patience as I hobble back to regularly scheduled programming after pretending to feel fine the last three months. It feels like best practice to fake it, but I’m bad at that, so I’d rather say: I’m pregnant and the first three months were very rough on me physically and I wasn’t up for... See more

I’ve spent a lot of time with intelligent and determined women.

What have I noticed? Achieving the vision of ease is ironically arduous. It’s diligence and conscientiousness behind the scenes. Behind glamor is effort . I absorbed early that beauty and competence aren’t heaven-sent but goals to continuously chip away at. Many of us silently believe... See more

True confidence is believing in the validity of your own core desires, which also means identifying what you’re willing to sacrifice and bear for certain conditions to yield fruit. When there are competing needs, true prioritization reveals itself. A woman defining her own career path will learns this across various dimensions.

At some point while I was trying to write a dissertation as a parent of a preschooler and an infant, I attended a workshop from which I remember exactly one thing: Touch Your Project Every Day. We all lead busy lives, one of the organizers explained, and it can be difficult to find long stretches of time to focus and work through such a large and... See more

For a millennium, rivalries between and among Byzantine noble families propelled public life, with the kind of bloody factional maneuvering that makes the Tudors look like the Waltons in comparison.

Though political power was usually a male privilege in Byzantium, a striking feature of the Byzantine tales is the prominence of women as political... See more