Second Day: Misadventures That End Happily Continuing from Day 1, today’s theme involves more luck than wit: People who by all odds are going to keep losing, but with a twist of fate find themselves better off than they were to begin with. Day 2, Tale 1: Martellino feigneth himself a cripple and maketh believe to…

Psst…they’re all streaming on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, or Disney+. Originally published a few years after the 1348 Black Plague epidemic, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron follows 10 young people who flee the horrors of Florence for an abandoned villa outside the city. Over the next couple of weeks’ quarantine, they pass…

if we meet again

Her wandering spirit made her difficult to know, but I’m still fascinated by her life — My mother was a stranger to me. For all her stories and souvenirs of a life spent wandering, Didi was a difficult person to get to know. Early on, I could tell she was different. …

If you want to leapfrog your career, skip the professional-development aisle and head straight to fiction. — I used to work with a guy who proudly asserted: “Reading fiction is a waste of time.” He did read books, but preferred the nonfiction kind, ideally sprung from the masterful dome of a billionaire investor. As a lifelong reader, I found his attitude to be dismissive on the one…

Don’t call it a moped. I could tell from the too-bright sound of my boyfriend’s voice over the phone that he thought I’d done something stupid. That something was renting a scooter from Revel, NYC’s latest form of transportation: on-demand electric scooters available in Brooklyn and Queens. My boyfriend and…

If I’ve learned anything since, it’s how to be kind to that girl we both used to know — First I sat down and wrote 15 pages about my supposed “first love,” the one borne out of an actual hurricane, then reread it a day later and realized what an asshole he was. This depressed me, but then I remembered you. That little zip, that look that passed between…

Dear Lyft Driver: Can you please not assume that just because I’m white and female that I’m going to quietly sit and agree with your racist bullshit? There’s been so much happening, and it all makes me want to crawl into a giant peach and float away across the ocean…

A TANKA Poem —