Everything I’ve learned about life and love, I’ve learned through grief. Pregnant and widowed at 28 sideswiped the life I was building, the life I’d thought I’d have. What’s that saying: Make plans and watch God laugh? It’s from the old Yiddish adage “Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht,” meaning, Man plans and God laughs.

This is, for many of us, the dream: unfettered commitment to externalizing our innards without concern for any gaze but our own. Reclaiming one’s time, you could say. But it requires nothing short of a battle.

What are you unwilling to feel?

It’s an entrepreneurial trope, and a tired one, to believe that I should maximize every aspect of launching . Most everybody who's been in my shoes heralds events as the best way to get people in the door, which is another way of saying that events are the best way to make money. Money is important, sure, but I’ve generally found it to be a shitty ... See more

People are too conscious about choosing the ‘right’ thing that signifies their taste level, or who they are as a person.

“And I get it, sometimes I say, ‘What’s the white tee I should buy?’ instead of, ‘This is what I want to spend and here’s what looks good on me.’ Same with ingredients — ‘Here’s what tastes good to me, f**k what anyone else recom... See more

The lesson I learned from this is that it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw th

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As a privileged white woman with progressive politics, I understand the frustration: we are generally good at seeing injustice, and we are generally bad at giving up our own sliver of societal power in order to rectify that injustice. What most reliably moves us to act is personal stakes, and the absence of them makes it easy for us to “move on” fr... See more

Companionship content is the most durable in its closeness to human experience, to being around people . When we search for a YouTube video to watch, we often want the best companion for the next hour and not the most entertaining content.

Here’s the thing when you hang out with writers: We pay attention. We write things down. Much of what I write about are my observations. I always say I don’t have to make things up. I just need to pay attention.