When Clouds Get in Your Way — For months, my youngest stared at the map of Sesame Place on his ipad, manifesting a trip to this muppet mecca. The map was a complete and ready made vision board. Full vision, no notes. I couldn’t blame my son — the place looked bright, cheerful and inviting. Who wouldn’t…

An unlikely journey — A long time ago a famous American writer, whose name eventually got me in a sort of pickle, proclaimed that: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Indeed. Since the time I first discovered the quote, I came to appreciate it…

On curiosity, risk aversion, and nature vs. nurture, among other things — “I’m just curious,” I said on a Google Hangout a few weeks ago, “and I don’t know if that’s a good enough reason?” The calendar event read “we’re adopted lol.” I’d set it up after a mutual friend connected us (“You’re both adopted!”) so it was sort of like a…

ABSTRACT: To better constrain estimates of the prevalence of detransition and gender-affirming surgical regret, a wide range of studies (n=34+ original studies and 2 meta-analyses) were reviewed and sorted into high- and low-reliability subgroups. Studies whose methodology was broadly appropriate for determining detransition and regret rates (“high-reliability” studies) were separated…

Years of voice dictation trained me to think before I write — (That’s the first scanned page of this blog post! If you’d rather read the HTML text — with a picture of my Olivetti portable typewriter — skip to the bottom.)

Black cinema is an amorphous term that defies rigid classification. For the most part, scholars define movies made by black directors as black cinema, like Menace II Society (1993) and He Got Game (1998). Occasionally, though, a white director will tackle racial injustices, like David Midell, whose terrifying thriller The…

A horrific and allegedly peaceful death — April 2019 …Above all else, Linda loved her family, and her greatest joy in life was raising her three daughters. (Full disclosure: it’s us writing this.) She filled our lives with French braids, books, gingerbread men, handwritten notes, tea parties, and white turtlenecks. She gave us all the opportunities she…

Divorce saved my marriage. We’d had 27 years of mostly good times together and still thought very highly of each other. The divorce saved it from going horribly south. Saved it from bitterness. Saved us from words we couldn’t take back. Saved us from really fucking up our children. Saved…

In 2020, my goals were clear. They were also dead wrong. Here’s how I found my ambition again — and how you might reconnect with yours this year, too. — In January 2020, I started working on a new book. It felt urgent: Technically Wrong had been out for a couple years, and without a fresh title in the pipeline, I worried people might forget I existed. How would I sustain my self-employment if no one knew who I was…

From pitch to publication — Last month, I realized I was writing the very same email for the fourth time. It’s an email I’ve written what must be countless times before in answer to some variation on the question, “how do I publish a book?” I’m asked this question even more than “how do I…

A good writer friend calls me a “completionist” because I insist on finishing a piece of writing even when I know it isn’t any good, whereas she is able to abandon work as soon as she senses it stinks. She is right about me; I can’t bring myself to toss…

What the Arts and Crafts movement tells us about AI content and our unique humanity — AI tools have become incredibly powerful and increasingly good at mimicking human writing. GPT-3 and related tools like Jasper AI can compose articles, blog posts, and even entire books at scale. For the first time in history, it’s possible to create thousands of pages of text with almost no effort…

If you had asked 22-year-old me what my “career aspirations” were, I would have looked at you blankly and then casually changed the subject to what programs you’d recommend to model cute 3D bunnies for a video game, or whether the writers of Alias would be so devious as to…

So, you can’t draw and you’re not funny, but you want to draw comics. Well, great news: You don’t have to be able to draw, nor be particularly funny in order to draw comics. Here’s how: A Pen. First of all you’re going to need a pen. You know what? You don’t…

How be productive — for those days when you really don’t feel like writing — At any given moment, half of the ants in a colony are doing absolutely nothing. Until recently, scientists used to think ants worked in shifts. But according to an article published in Nature, “worker” ants can be separated into two groups — active and inactive. Active workers power nap throughout…

On the gritty glamour of ‘All The President’s Men’ — The political thriller All The President’s Men tells the true story of two Washington Post reporters who uncovered a scandal that brought down Richard Nixon, the 37th President of the United States. In the movie, these newspapermen did it by writing good old-fashioned pieces of honest American journalism. It didn’t…

Comics from my journal.

You probably do a lot of one-on-one meetings at work: with your manager, teammates, folks from other teams. Unfortunately, most people totally waste their 1:1 time. The problem: the 1:1s aren’t awkward enough. Here’s how to make them better. (This is part of a series. Check out Part 2 as…

An organized list of cognitive biases because thinking is hard. — 2022 update (1.7 million reads later 😱): The obsession that began with this post has turned into a book titled Why Are We Yelling? — The Art of Productive Disagreement, because it’s in disagreement and conflict that our biases tend to shine brightest. A follow-up post that explores what we…

The term “quiet quitting” has become a thing. It all started with a seventeen second TikTok video that went viral, in which the narrator says “it is not outright quitting your job but quitting the idea of going above and beyond at work.” Since then, quiet quitting has been covered…