What seems innocuous to you can be anything but — Last Saturday I asked my best friend of over 30 years if he wanted to join me for dinner. We hadn’t seen each other for a few weeks so we were overdue for a chin wag. His response was brief: “I don’t feel social today.” Many people hearing something so…

How I learned to spot the red flags — the hard way — My career was just starting out during the tech boom of the early 2000s. As the new millennium began, I was managing databases in a dreary direct mail company. It was the last thing I wanted to be doing. A friend knew I wanted a change and sent me an…

Get prepared for some quality couch time — Netflix makes documentaries that are easily consumable. They’re like a cracker — satisfying in the chew but leaving no real impact on your hunger. Enter: The 2022 Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival. Last month was my first festival since 2019 and I forgot how engrossing real documentaries can be. …

I’d like to conversate about this impactful trend — I remember chatting with work friends in the late aughts about the exploding popularity of the word “impactful.” Suddenly, everyone in business and marketing was extolling the virtues of the impactful campaign for their impactful product. The consensus in my office was that “impactful” was overused, lacking specificity, just plain…

Is anyone else a post-pandemic scaredy-cat? — Saturday night was special. I was with three of my favorite people in a swank restaurant. We were celebrating my brother-in-law finally retiring. He’d intended to retire in Fall 2019 but then decided it was too early. …

An underperforming post suddenly takes off like a rocket — If you write on Medium, you know the algorithm is, to paraphrase Churchill, a mystery wrapped in an enigma. A strong story with a great headline and cover image will bomb while something you jotted off in half an hour will launch like a rocket. Why? Sadly, we’ll probably never…

Bioluminescent adventures in Mexico — After what felt like five years in the icy grip of winter, I needed to travel somewhere warm and sunny to thaw. It was my first trip since COVID, so it felt pretty monumental. Given that we’ve all spent the last few years at home, I wanted to ease my…

Diving in to test my score — I don’t think I’m a narcissist. But when I heard Dr. Drew Pinsky (known as Dr. Drew) developed an online test to determine your level of narcissism, I was intrigued. Before we go any further, let’s acknowledge that an online test can’t actually diagnose you as anything. This needs to…

Speaking for a group who rarely speaks for themselves — A recent article on this platform theorized empaths don’t exist. The reason? The writer found a list of traits that supposedly make someone an empath and doesn’t think they’re differentiated enough from the rest of humanity to make a unique category. I’ve heard this type of thing before, people saying…