The other night, I was feeling guilty about how little I had accomplished all week. Almost as if on cue, the Instagram algorithm spearfished my anxiety: An ad for an “AI assistant” appeared. It showed a woman wiping down an already-clean counter in a candlelit kitchen. She was “finally cleaning her house,” she was learning […]

I just turned in the manuscript for my first book. And while no part of writing 100,000 words is easy and breezy, there was one persistently itchy thread that wove itself into the pages of my growing Google Doc, relentlessly stalking me through the paragraphs like the deranged ghost of Clippy. Call it “the Lean […]

I read an essay the other day from a guy who really, really hates the Financial Independence/Retire Early (FI/RE) movement. Jared, who writes the We’re Gonna Get Those Bastards newsletter, did not mince words: “This is the f***ing stupidest thing I have ever heard of in my life.” As a personal finance writer and semi-loyal […]

In the fall of my senior year at my all-girl Catholic high school, we went on a mandated retreat. It was hosted at St. Anne Convent in Melbourne, Kentucky, the location where they shot the movie Rain Man, something they inexplicably reminded us throughout the weekend.  The weekend-long retreat was designed to manufacture vulnerability: We’d […]