Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
The rules arrived before you could question them. Before you knew that rules were something that could be questioned. By the time you were old enough to notice that certain expectations felt strange o...
Read article →When a patient tells me they've been researching non-binary identity online and wants to understand it better, my first clinical task is to resist the urge to simplify. The popular discourse around no...
Read article →There is a version of femininity that I grew up wearing before I understood I was wearing it. Softness. Accommodation. The particular kind of smallness that passed as modesty. Not asking for too much....
Read article →I've been sitting with this topic for a while before writing about it, because I want to do it carefully. Intersex is a subject that gets discussed with good intentions and frequent imprecision, somet...
Read article →I have photographs on my phone the way other people have photographs of their children. Close-ups of a particular sleeping face. Action shots caught at exactly the right moment. Pictures I've shown st...
Read article →Something has shifted in the conversation around men, and I want to try to get at what it actually is, past the noise and the defensiveness on all sides. The men I know — and this includes people I'd...
Read article →There is a philosophical puzzle lurking inside something as ordinary as friendship: if the people around you shape who you become, do you actually choose your identity, or is it largely assembled for...
Read article →Most people know the term before they know what to do about it. Work spouse. The colleague you tell first when something goes wrong. The person who knows your coffee order and your management frustrat...
Read article →The study that changed how researchers think about sexual fluidity came out of a decade of longitudinal work by psychologist Lisa Diamond at the University of Utah. She followed a group of women who i...
Read article →There is a story we tell about singleness, and it goes like this: you are incomplete, waiting, in transition. The language around it gives it away. You are between relationships. You are still looking...
Read article →You have two selves operating simultaneously in contemporary life. One is documented, curated, legible to others, and subject to the social feedback loops of the platforms where it lives. The other is...
Read article →The binary is everywhere and it is insistent. Male or female. Boy or girl. The checkboxes on forms, the bathroom signs, the pronouns assigned at birth and treated as settled facts, the entire elaborat...
Read article →There's a moment in mentoring that catches you off guard if you aren't paying attention. You're explaining something you've known for years — a process, a perspective, a way through a problem — and so...
Read article →I cover aging for a living, which means I talk to a lot of people in their seventies and eighties who are quietly terrified that they are developing dementia. They forget where they put their keys, or...
Read article →The self is supposed to be a stable thing, a through-line you carry from childhood into adulthood, from relationship to relationship, from version to version of your life. But codependency disrupts th...
Read article →The philosopher who becomes a grandparent for the first time often reports something that surprises them: an emotion they did not expect to have words for. Not the love, which they had anticipated in...
Read article →There is a version of me that existed before I became a wife. She had opinions about where to spend Friday nights, playlists that belonged to her alone, a way of moving through a room that wasn't adju...
Read article →I used to tell myself that caregiving was something I was choosing. That it was an expression of love, which it was, but I used that truth to avoid another one: that I had no idea who I was anymore wh...
Read article →The question hit me sideways at a school pickup line, of all places. Another parent asked what I did for fun and I stood there for a moment that stretched uncomfortably long, genuinely unable to answe...
Read article →I keep a note on my phone that my grandmother gave me before she died. Not her exact words — I wrote them down from memory, so they are probably only approximately right — but something close to what...
Read article →The popular conception of wisdom is slightly patronizing. It imagines an elderly sage — white-haired, serene, unbothered by things that trouble lesser mortals — dispensing pithy truths to those willin...
Read article →The reports do not usually come from outside. That is the first thing advocates in elder abuse prevention want people to understand. The person who notices something wrong is usually already inside th...
Read article →The argument for aging in place is usually made in terms of preference surveys, and the preferences are clear: the overwhelming majority of adults over sixty-five, when asked, say they would prefer to...
Read article →There is a version of therapy that takes your story and helps you function better inside it. And there is another kind of conversation — rarer, stranger, and harder to find — that asks whether the sto...
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