Judging girls: the last acceptable bias — In high school, I went through a phase of wearing miniskirts with high-heeled pumps. One particularly unfabulous outfit involved a bright yellow miniskirt with shock-red heels. My mother tried to keep me from leaving the house “looking like that” and failed. At 16, I was stubborn as a corpse. What's…

is this a new kind of privilege? — Last Sunday, I bought “Conversations with Friends” by Sally Rooney. In Kyiv, it’s rare to stumble on a book in English without Stephen King’s name on it, but I found it. It was jammed between Rooney’s larger novel “Beautiful World, Where Are You” and another book the name of which…

We love the Stranger Things resident metalhead, just not in real life — It wasn’t that it hurt getting shoved into lockers, but that it confirmed I was “the freak.” When checked into a metal grey locker while walking to class, some jock would sneer, “Watch where you’re going, freak!” Sometimes they’d call me “faggot” or “queer” depending on how malicious teens wanted…

On letting go and getting by — If you’re a parent who spends a lot of time online, it’s hard to escape the meme about making the most of the 18 summers you have with your children before they leave home. It crops up every year when the weather turns unbearably hot and school winds down. …

When surrender means you’ve won — It’s been two years since my last doctor’s appointment. At that visit our discussion was shrouded by social distancing and early motherhood. It was a time when I desperately begged for closeness and the world replied with a stern and final, “No.” My days were held together with a matching…

A tale of adoptee lore — There was a point in my life when I spent more time watching adoptee reunion footage than I care to admit. I mean, I was hooked. I was equally as fascinated by the adoptee’s response to seeing their biological family for the first time as I was by the biological…

My fate would be decided quickly — My wife and I recently visited a technical high school with our son, and in the Construction and Building Trades area, we ran into masculinity trouble. The moment we stepped into the vast and noisy workshop, we were met by the workshop’s ruler: a big man sporting a big plaid…