Ask yourself this: What was stopping them before? — At first, I thought the news that men are lining up for vasectomies was a good sign. And then I realized the truth. These men could have gotten a vasectomy at any time, but they did not see a need until Roe was overturned. Let’s break this down. As I’ve written before, women already…

It’s not just for Quentin Tarantino movies anymore — When I was growing up, “fuck” was as bad as it got, and nobody I knew said it very often. The embellished form of it, “motherfucker,” was absolutely out of the question. Saying that word damned you. There was no coming back from that. It was the atomic bomb of…

As a kid, I designed a whole strategy in my secret writing studio — If my parents checked, no light would show under my bedroom door as I worked late into the night. They’d believe I was asleep. But really, I was working in my secret writing studio. Actually, it was just a cleared spot on the floor of my closet with a table…

Or those women ‘girls’? — My wealthy friend, Berlin, is having some work done on her house, and she very kindly offered to buy the workers — all men — some lunch. “I have to let you go. I need to go get these boys some lunch,” she told me. “Why did you call them…

Following up on ‘This Is For All the Kids Who Sucked at Sports’ — It turns out a lot of us developed a hatred of organized sports from being tortured and bullied during our mandatory P.E. classes. My previous piece, This is For All the Kids Who Sucked at Sports, has racked up 64 comments and counting in one day. Wow. This resonated with…

Humiliation on the ball field sticks with you for a long, long time — My inability to throw, catch or run well doesn’t affect my life one bit right now, but it pretty much ruined my childhood. P.E. was an exercise in humiliation every day. I grew up in farm country, and it took several towns to scrape up enough kids to form a school. There were only thirty-nine people in my…

And not for the better — I write and my husband records music, and we’ve noticed the same trend is ruining both spheres: the increasingly frantic need to hook your audience immediately. Here on Medium, if readers click off after less than 30 seconds, the writer is penalized. On Spotify, if someone listens for less than…

You’re more than a target market, you know — What did you do last weekend? What made you decide to go where you went or spend what you spent? Was it a good weekend, with the right mix of relaxation and fun? My husband and I had some friends over for drinks Saturday night, and on Sunday we visited…

I’m not impressed by greedy rich people amassing dirty fortunes and then making a big show of philanthropy — Crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried claimed he wanted to earn a fortune just so he could give it away, as detailed by the Wall Street Journal. How nice, Sam! Now his billions are gone and he’s in a federal jail facing fraud-related charges. The blog 80,000 Hours celebrated Bankman-Fried as a…