Life, from start to finish, is a collaborative endeavor. At the university in Boston where I teach, we’ve entered the period of the academic year that I call The Panic. As April dovetails into May, nary an hour passes without an email from a student in need. They need extensions. They need extra credit. They […]
Having a spouse or a child is not the thing that makes a person a grown-up; putting other people’s needs ahead of your own is. After I asked readers to describe their feelings about the holidays, many expressed frustration. They wrote of nosey relatives who grilled them about their romantic lives, of being relegated to […]
Adulthood, as it’s taught to us, is a construct, and we can tear it down and reconstruct it ourselves, to make not one other version, but one million others. Earlier today, I was doing some aggressive scheming about how to get to see Taylor Swift in concert. It went something like, “I can’t do that. […]
