In the past couple weeks, I have found my mind circling back, again and again, to an article I read in this magazine, about a Japanese tidying guru named Marie Kondo. Her idea, in a nutshell, is this: People should share the spaces they inhabit exclusively with objects — furniture, books, clothing, cooking pans, potted […]

What is it about the word “mom”? It makes me want to choke. Not when I hear it in my own house, uttered by my own child, in reference to me. In that case I love it — heedlessly, actually, as if this universal and mundane moniker were a pet name bestowed upon me by […]

It’s been five years since Sarah Palin appropriated the feminist label, inserting her own brand of womanhood — the gun-toting, abortion-rights-defying, libertarian kind — into the larger women’s movement, infuriating its leaders on the left. And earlier this week, legions of conservative stay-at-home mothers, the same or similar to those who back then claimed Palin […]

Over at The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has written a rather unhinged meditation on the prospects for gun control — on the “moral work” of pushing new gun laws, and presumably the moral complacency of those who fail to see a way to make them happen. Gopnik’s essay is prompted by the suit a number of the Newtown families recently […]

Over at The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has written a rather unhinged meditation on the prospects for gun control — on the “moral work” of pushing new gun laws, and presumably the moral complacency of those who fail to see a way to make them happen. Gopnik’s essay is prompted by the suit a number […]

Sometimes I count the ways in which I am blessed, and one of them is that I get to wear jeans and a T-shirt to the office. I’m a writer, not a member of Congress, so the bar is low — anything better than fleece and I’m dressing for success. Still, I settled on my […]

One of the funniest items to wash up on the shores of my social-media beaches over the last week was the case of Bridget and her hostile Christmas cards. “Bridget,” one of four sisters, used to appear regularly on her parents’ traditional holiday card — well into adulthood. But then, according to the accounts I […]

“We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in.” So wrote Sheryl Sandberg in the book that has become an odd combination of girl-power mantra and explanation (even justification) for why there are still so few […]

  For a precious, fleeting period in my adulthood, I had a walk-in closet. This was during what I think of as my Mary Tyler Moore years, a decade in which I was single and had a good job, which afforded me a roomy rental apartment in a great neighborhood. This apartment had antique-pine floorboards […]

Like you, I suppose, I never gave My Little Pony very much thought, except to note it as a species of annoying plastic object that flows into our apartment with an invisible tide and then gets stuck there and never flows out. Assorted Little Ponies have found their way into the storage bins in our […]