I had 50 painfully uncomfortable conversations with strangers to practice being assertive under pressure. Here’s what I learned. — I’m sitting alone in a coffee shop in Manhattan and I’m about to become the most disliked person in the room. First, I’m going to interrupt the man reading quietly near the window and ask for a sip of his latte. Next, I’m going to ask the line of people…

Forever living in the space between desire and futility — My crush is twenty-five years old. Not the man himself. He’s fifty-one, born in 1970 like me, and I’ve thought about him for at least a quarter of a century by now. We will never get together, but my desire never goes away. This might be the definition of Purgatory. …

The difficult final year of a much-loved and legendarily difficult woman — Introduction by Garance Franke-Ruta. Jump to the start of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s essay here. The late Elizabeth Wurtzel was best known for her memoirs and essays, especially Prozac Nation and Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, but after attending Yale Law School in her late 30s she also enjoyed having a…

Sometime late last year, I found some spare time in my work schedule. My daughter was slightly more than 2 years old, and I noticed her awareness of her world has gotten more astute. I always have this desire of imparting my experience and knowledge to her, and the best…

How the adoption industry fails women like me and you — I’ve never been a mother, but I had a baby once. I remember his insistent eyes, his gorgeous face, and the tenacious way he gummed my finger while I warmed a bottle of formula. Those joyfully exhausting then incalculably painful days came rushing back when I was reminded by a…

And why simple manners can transform your relationships — Most people don’t notice I’m polite, which is sort of the point. I don’t look polite. I am big and droopy and need a haircut. No soul would associate me with watercress sandwiches. Still, every year or so someone takes me aside and says, you actually are weirdly polite, aren’t…

But unseen barriers do — I’ve been a psychology professor since 2012. In the past six years, I’ve witnessed students of all ages procrastinate on papers, skip presentation days, miss assignments, and let due dates fly by. I’ve seen promising prospective grad students fail to get applications in on time; I’ve watched PhD candidates take…

My affair with the intellectual dark web — This is the story of the past three years of my life. It’s romance in a way, but it’s also a breakup story. It begins sometime in 2015, a year during which my life was coming apart in various ways. In addition to the unraveling of my marriage, I began…

Parents who don’t force musical instruments on their children deny them the profound pleasure of quitting — “We have a surprise for you,” Mom and Dad say. You’re eight years old, so you think it might be a new bike, or a tiger. You’re overjoyed. You can ride either one. You put out your hands and close your eyes. Then they place something in your hands, something…

‘Are the rich really different from the rest of us?’ I ask myself while wrestling with my billionaire younger brother at 3 a.m. — For most of the last decade, my brother Mark and his family lived in a house with a moat. The house — a four-bedroom French villa in Bel Air previously owned by Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony — is pretty impressive even without the moat, but that unnecessary protective trench…

I am 25 and it is 9:42 pm on a Tuesday. I am sitting in a Los Angeles subway station, which exists. I missed the train and the next is in 20 minutes, and I walk to a zig-zag shaped bench that was designed to be artistically interesting, but is…

Learning that self-discovery is a process, not a punishment — In February I was introduced to a man, a successful man by any standard, a man called Rupert (and naturally by “introduced,” I mean I heard him talk about himself on Radiolab for three minutes). Rupert is your average 71-year-old podcast guest, probably, except for one thing: He has gone…

Pertaining also to the several classes of elves; the production of herring oil; soccer and dentistry; and the lately outlawed uses of white magic. — 1. It was raining and there was fog when I drove up into the Westfjords, the gravel roads pocked and soggy, winding around the cliffs above the black volcanic sand. I squinted through the beaded windshield and slowed around the corners and wondered if I might die. Below, Siberian driftwood…

I learned the hard way: There are better morning routines than Googling people you envy and hating yourself as a result — I. On Jealousy “So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.” ―William Shakespeare, Hamlet “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt, This is My Story There’s a story I like to tell about the moment my life hit a major…

We will all face painful moments sitting next to dying people. What can we say? — At 3 p.m. on a Monday afternoon, death announced it was coming for him. He was only eight years old; his cancer cells were not responding to treatment anymore. His body’s leukemic blast cell counts were doubling daily. Bone marrow was no longer making red or white blood cells, not…

We left as Jewish refugees in 1994 and live in America. This is how it feels to watch from afar as your homeland is attacked. — I was born in Odessa, Ukraine. Last week, Odessa was invaded by Russian forces. As was the rest of Ukraine. By the time of my publishing this, hundreds of Ukrainians have died. If I was still in Ukraine, I could be dead. Far more likely though, I would be alive…