People go to marriage counseling because they think their partner doesn’t understand. But your spouse understands you just fine; they just don’t like what they understand. They don’t like that the ...

One of my kids’ credit cards is maxed out. I planned on paying it, and then I didn’t have the money. I’ve never had a steady income. I surprise even myself with the ways I make money now: managing IEP ...

When my kids were young I yelled. Just a little. But then I read that any yelling at all permanently damages kids. I thought: Really? One time? That’s weird. Because when I was a kid, a yelling day ...

I’ve been on Instagram posting my drawings and stories. But that lasted about a month before my kids asked me to remove posts they didn’t want their friends to see. Then they reconsidered: “You know ...

The worst criticism I’ve ever received from an editor is “it sounds like ChatGPT wrote this.” But as soon as Melissa told me that I thought: she’s right. Unfortunately, she said this about the post I ...

After 20 years of blogging, learning to do academic research was a steep learning curve. People told me to ask for help from professors at Harvard because they’d feel obligated to help me because I’m ...

There are some people I’ve been coaching since they were in high school. Usually their parents pay for the first few sessions and then I get overinvested in the kid. So I have to stop and ask myself: ...

John Gallagher wrote his dissertation about how people with a large following online relate to comments from their audience. Over many years he interviewed people who were top Redditors, top Amazon ...

I’m going to stop being so transactional. This means that I’m not going to be as pissy as usual when your comments don’t come as frequently as they used to. Well. Hold on. Right now I spend half my ...

No one has devised a perfect questionnaire for determining a narcissist, which is why the New York Times makes the argument for cutting narcissism from the DSM. We know what narcissism looks like: ...

US scientists are scared to talk about differences between male and female brains, probably because it will get them fired. The loudest voices say there cannot be male and female brains because there ...

Note from Penelope: This is a guest post of sorts. I asked Whitney to annotate one of my blog posts because I want to better understand the white privilege on my blog. I also thought this would be a ...