I know not everyone feels they are better off since the storm, but I do. Now I can barely recall the restless and unfulfilled person I used to be. Five years ago I spent my time obsessing about my career and ambitions, now I spend it enjoying my family and friends via backyard BBQs, music [...] [Posted: 28 Aug 2010]
It turns out that many of the most common stereotypes about aging are dead wrong. Take the cliché of the youthful entrepreneur. As it happens, the average founder of a high-tech startup isn’t a whiz-kid graduate, but a mature 40-year-old engineer or business type with a spouse and children who simply got tired of working [...] [Posted: 27 Aug 2010]
In most situations where I am with other people of color, white people will try to communicate with me first. I am more likely to appear in the media, especially if my skin affords me the designation “omniracial.” (Hello, Beyonce.) People will think I am pretty. full stop. I am more likely to get a [...] [Posted: 27 Aug 2010]
“If you need a job and you need to improve your life chances, you know, why not? I mean, it’s not that it’s free and it’s not that it doesn’t cost you, but it may be worth paying that price.” That’s Joe Gyourko, a real estate professor at the Wharton School at the University of [...] [Posted: 26 Aug 2010]
Friendship is uniquely suited to fill this void because, unlike matrimony or parenthood, it’s available to everyone, offering concord and even intimacy without aspiring to be all-consuming. Friends do things for us that hardly anybody else can, yet ask nothing more than friendship in return (though this can be a steep price if we take [...] [Posted: 26 Aug 2010]
Last week, a Twitter friend asked about learning programming and where to start. I suggested ActionScript 3.0, but 140 characters isn’t enough to explain why. That’s what blog posts are for. ActionScript sounds like a weird choice, right? It’s client-side, not server-side. You can’t connect to a database or create files on the fly without [...] [Posted: 23 Aug 2010]
Sometimes I love attention from men. But when it’s respectful and when I clearly indicate that I want it. Guys, here is how you tell if a girl is interested: if she makes direct eye contact with you, smiles, and asks you questions, then she probably wouldn’t mind getting to know you. (If you’re British [...] [Posted: 21 Aug 2010]
Now, I’m privileged enough to have a lot of access, but just a few years ago, I certainly didn’t have a social network that connected to Silicon Valley venture capitalists, despite having a relatively large network. And I still don’t know the first thing about sports, so a sports analogy only emphasizes that I’m not [...] [Posted: 17 Aug 2010]
While reading And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails, I came across something known as a shrub — a brew of vinegar, sugar, and berries or ginger used to flavor soda water, or during colonial times, rum and gin. Though the book described how shrub was made, it [...] [Posted: 11 Aug 2010]
A law against spousal rape. A law against spousal murder. A paycheck of her own. And egalitarian marriage. Once women got political power, they insisted on being protected by the ordinary privileges of citizens of a modern democratic society rather than a husband fenced in by the medieval kind of marriage to which Douthat and [...] [Posted: 10 Aug 2010]