There’s a certain cliche of a person who subscribes to the New Yorker, but rarely reads the issues, and yet finds a way to quote the one article a month they actually do read in almost every conversation. That person is annoying. That person is me. A few years ago, pre-parenthood, when I was actually reading an article in said magazine, I tripped over a word I did not know: philistine. So I Googled it, and then experienced the humbling realization that as someone who has to l

I was temporarily debating whether I wanted to keep writing these. They take time (more than I’d like to admit, for a rather modest word count) and time feels increasingly compressed at this particularly stage in my life. But this whole experiment was intentionally low-stakes, with the primary goal of just writing something on a regular cadence. Like anything we get ourselves into, we can forget our initial intentions, and well-meaning, but unhelpful, layers get added to the

The bluebells dramatically arrive in our garden around March. It’s one of our favorite moments, plant-wise at least. Each year we know they’re coming, but it still feels like a wonderful little surprise when they bloom. Amidst some typical, mundane routine, I’ll look out the window and spot the first signs of them. And then what feels like only a few days later, our entire backyard has transformed into a landscape of sprinkled-blue — which emotionally speaking, feels akin to

There’s this collection of Dr. Seuss books Nina loves, to the point of memorization, called My Big Book of Beginner Books About Me . Each story covers a different body part, which we often point to while reading: feet, eyes, ears, nose…. And the other day, amidst the tooth chapter, I asked Nina: “hey, how many teeth do you have?” I then paused, quickly realizing that I don’t know how many teeth I have. Multiple decades of living with these things in my mouth, a round of bra

February is not the friendliest of months when it comes to time. With an arbitrary deadline to write something on a monthly basis, I was expecting a few more days to procrastinate. But now here I am on day 28, forced to put something out. So bear with me, lower the expectations: it’s a short one. The other day, walking by my bedroom mirror, I stopped for a few minutes too long to look at my face. While this mirror-gazing is normally just an embarrassing instinct of vanity, th

Happy new year? My French colleague, whose style, as you might imagine, is far more sophisticated than mine, told me that in France it’s acceptable to extend New Year’s greetings throughout the entirety of January. So if you, like me, feel like you’re barely getting acclimated to 2026, consider yourself in fashionable company. My writings over the last year have been less of a recounting of current events and more of a curation of ideas that I’ve found interesting for whateve

Coming off of holiday festivities, my brain, appropriately, is feeling rather sluggish. It’s fitting, I guess, for this liminal period of time between Christmas and New Years where somehow it’s more acceptable to find yourself still in sweats at 3pm. Much of society, necessarily, is humming along — especially for those we consider “essential” workers, whose pay I only wish matched their praise. But for the many of us in the unessential lot, we find ourselves nibbling a cooki