I graduated high school in 1998, either (depending on which arbitrary marker you choose) the last of Gen-Xers or the first of the Millennials. Like so many of us who came of age in the 90s, Friends was a delightful, aspirational glimpse of the future. (I had no perspective to realize that my friends of…
The letter arrived at my house at the end of October in a plain white envelope with no return address. My name – or some approximation of it (“Depruiter” it reads, because, in the words of my beloved, “The person who addressed it is an idiot”) has been printed out on a label and affixed…
(Above: my student ID in 1999. Let’s just keep our comments to ourselves.) There’s this pattern I keep seeing. It goes like this: Woman accuses man of sexual assault. Man denies accusations. Man’s PR team then releases numerous letters from women saying that he’s not a sexual harasser because, you know, he didn’t harass…
Trigger warning: please note that this is a blog post about online abuse, and includes screen caps of tweets sent to me. Graphic threats and abusive, hateful language toward women appear therein. A few weeks ago, I gave a keynote talk at World Domination Summit in Portland. The thesis: while we regard online misogyny and abuse…
When I got home, I cried. Finally. Rand hugged me, wore that same worried look he gets on his face when something goes wrong and he’s not there for it. For a long time I wondered what it was about me that meant the second I went on a trip on my own, things started…
When I was 23, a few weeks after Kill Bill premiered, I dressed up as Uma Thurman’s character from the film for Halloween. In it, she wears a yellow jumpsuit that is itself an homage to Bruce Lee’s outfit in Game of Death. I searched for weeks for something similar, and finally found a pair of…
I haven’t written about babe.net’s story of a young woman’s evening with Aziz Ansari because I wasn’t sure what to say about it. I figured if I waited long enough, the issue would pass, and we could move on to other situations that are easier to assess. But the article has lingered in my mind,…
Last night, I made cinnamon rolls. I’m not a huge fan of cinnamon rolls, per se, but this recipe was included in Mario Batali’s sexual misconduct apology letter, and so I feel compelled to make them. Batali is not the first powerful man to request forgiveness for “inappropriate actions” towards his coworkers and employees. He is…
Image credit. I am at my book reading in Portland. Though the room is small, it is packed. The audience is mostly friends, though there is a large cluster of people I have never met before. It is, without hyperbole, one of the highlights of my career, the sort of thing I dreamed about when I…
