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

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,

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

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

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

  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