My Substack

We’re all trying to get through this very hard, very weird, very devastating time. Give the money, help the people, sew the masks: I want to do it all, and I feel overwhelmed most days trying to figure out what to do. I have been able to identify one…

My mom has been trying to get rid of stuff. She is 85 and still lives in the house where I grew up. Though she has no plans to move from the house anytime soon, she’s doing this sly thing of making us take stuff home with us when we visit. A few weeks…

When I’m not writing essays about how I realized my daily glass of wine wasn’t so great, stories about teenage YouTubers, or books about honesty, I help hospitals figure out their web content. I spent a few days last week with the marketing team of…

Do you have distinct parts of yourself that get into long and tedious arguments? I do. Right now, it’s the “ambitious” part of me and the “have some perspective” part of me. The ambitious part of me fundamentally believes that I’m on a path…

When you walk into a bookstore and your daughter sees the book she’s been seeing on the desk in your office for weeks, actually there in the bookstore, part of a display that contains other books that are clearly real books, and finally gets that you…