Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
I have a photograph of myself from about seven years ago that someone took without asking. I'm laughing at something, I'm in a pub in Glasgow, my hair is doing something ungovernable. It's a version o...
Read article →There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from performing a version of yourself you never quite agreed to. Many women know it well — the quiet pressure to be soft without being weak, nurturi...
Read article →Something is shifting in how men talk about who they are. Not universally, and not without resistance, but in therapy offices, online forums, and conversations between friends that would have been unt...
Read article →The first time I was asked which box I belonged in, I was seven years old. It was a school form, and the options were girl and boy, and I remember sitting with the pencil over the paper for long enoug...
Read article →Sexual fluidity is one of those concepts that sounds simple until you sit with it. The idea that desire can shift, expand, or settle differently across the course of a life challenges the cultural sto...
Read article →Most people who have a work spouse don't call it that at first. It emerges in conversation with a partner or a friend, who notices before the person does: you mention this colleague constantly, you li...
Read article →I didn't expect teaching to do what it did to me. I became a journalist because I wanted to report and write, and the teaching role arrived sideways — a mentorship here, a formal class there, eventual...
Read article →When my dog died, I took four days off work. I told almost no one why. There is a specific kind of grief that exists in the social space where people are not sure whether to take you seriously, and lo...
Read article →There is a version of being single that the culture describes with barely concealed pity — the provisional state, the waiting room before real life begins. And then there is the actual experience of l...
Read article →We underestimate our friends in a very specific way. We recognize that they affect our mood, that they can be supportive or draining, that their presence makes difficult things easier. What we tend to...
Read article →Something happened to the way we talk about parenting somewhere in the last two decades. The discourse escalated until parenthood became not just a role but an identity so total that people began disa...
Read article →I remember the exact moment I first heard this question asked honestly. A woman in my therapy group, married for nineteen years, said quietly: "I've been someone's wife for so long that I genuinely do...
Read article →The conversation I keep having with caregivers goes like this. I ask: "When did you last do something that was purely for you — not for rest so you could take better care of them, not for your own hea...
Read article →There is a moment many people experience in their forties or fifties when they walk into a room and forget why, or lose a word mid-sentence that they have used ten thousand times, and a cold thread of...
Read article →There is a particular quality of disorientation that arrives when someone in a codependent relationship finally begins to emerge. It is not relief, or not only relief. It is a vertiginous blankness —...
Read article →Legacy is a word I approached with some suspicion for a long time. It felt like a word for people who had statues planned. For the historically significant, the professionally prominent, the people wh...
Read article →Becoming a grandparent changed something fundamental in how I understood myself. I had spent decades in therapy offices listening to people describe identity crises — the midlife unraveling, the retir...
Read article →Nobody told me this was going to be the hard part. I thought the hard part was going to be the logistics — the medical appointments, the financial paperwork, the navigating of a healthcare system that...
Read article →There is a moment I return to often in clinical work, not because it was dramatic but because it was so quiet. A patient in her early sixties, a woman who had spent her career in public health and who...
Read article →When people talk about aging in place, the conversation almost always turns practical within seconds. Grab bars, ramps, meal delivery, medication management. These are important, but they are downstre...
Read article →The question of whether people become wiser as they age is one that the research literature has approached with considerably more rigor than the popular imagination would suggest. We have a cultural s...
Read article →One of the most persistent myths about moral development is that it ends somewhere around adolescence — that by the time you are a full adult, your ethical commitments are basically fixed and what rem...
Read article →The calls usually start the same way. A friend texts me to talk, which I know means something is wrong because she texts me to chat and calls me to talk. I pick up and she says: I think something is h...
Read article →I did not expect to cry during a mushroom trip. I am a journalist. I cover things. I maintain a certain observational distance that I have always thought of as professional but that, in retrospect, wa...
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