30% of our group of highly cautious, vaxxed-waxed-and-relaxed women caught the virus, didn’t end up in the hospital, and have no regrets — My close friend and bride-to-be, who I’ll call “Meredith” (all names and identifying details in this story have been changed), postponed her 2020 wedding due to COVID-19, and rescheduled it for this fall. Though Meredith and her fiancé Tim live in a southern state that ranks among the lowest in…

How Naming My Inner Critic Helped Me Outrun Negative Self-Talk — I have a running buddy. Well, not a buddy so much as a frenemy. Well, not a frenemy so much as a nemesis. So, yeah. I have a running nemesis. I prefer to run solo, so the fact that she shows up on almost all my runs is, frankly, intrusive…

Some things are worth the extra effort. — I have a close friend whose life motto (thanks to her awesome dad) is an acronym: DCE. Diligent consistent effort. It’s a beautifully simple mantra that reminds us to commit to putting in the work, no matter what we’re doing, because work is noble, and a job well done is…

It took me a year to fall in love with working from home, but now I’m committed — Those of us in advertising and marketing have officially been working remotely for one calendar year. The Pan-iversary (I’m sorry) has come and gone, and we’re still waking up and dialing into roughly 4,000 meetings a day via Zoom or Teams. Still donning above-the-waist business attire (our cleanest hoodie) and…

We’re in a gossip drought, and everyone is so, so thirsty. — I saw this tweet the other day from comedian and writer Ali Barthwell, and I have never related to anything more acutely: After almost a year of living in pandemia, I find myself craving other people’s minor dramas like a plant craves sunlight. Almost as much as I want to…

Five pieces of advice from a MasterChef finalist on how to get cast on the show. A week after returning from my honeymoon, I took a cab from Brooklyn to a hotel in midtown Manhattan at six in the morning and stood outside in the autumn chill for four hours holding a whole ass lasagna. I, along with a few thousand other hopefuls, was there to…

How I Discovered That White Nationalism Is Alive And Well In The Suburbs — When I was in middle school, I made pocket money by babysitting for the two boys who lived across the street. Their mother, Carina (not her real name), was petite and elvin, with a wasp waist, platinum blonde hair, and a plunging streak of cleavage no shirt could contain. Part…

The emotions of the pandemic hit me late — I remember where I was the night my friend texted me to tell me that “this coronavirus thing” was serious. They said I should have two weeks’ worth of nonperishable groceries on hand. I was in Brooklyn, and I scheduled a food delivery on Amazon Prime from my phone —…

A love letter to a very un-Italian sauce and the woman who invented it. — Growing up, my mom cooked most nights. She cooked much like her mother did: recipes forged in the fires of postwar frugality, molded by the modern convenience of easy-to-prepare packaged goods. By the 1980s, America–and my family–had embraced an astonishing array of foods that allowed one to “cook” while doing…