We’re raising adolescents in an often brutal, wildly unfair world. This is what I told mine at the start of the pandemic. — You know what? Your parents’ generation is woefully unprepared to help you through this. It sucks, it’s unfair, and it shouldn’t have happened like this. It is not fair that I have to ask you to grow up along side me right now. …

Not many people can identify the exact moment they became a cook, but I can. Many people can identify cookbooks that inspired them, that changed them, that showed them new ways to think about the world, and I can, too. (There’s a meme going around right now where people are sharing cookbooks that are important to them.) There are a small handful of cookbooks that…

What mental illness looks like. — The last six months have been a reckoning. Reckoning: the settling of an account. Reckoning: retribution for one’s actions. Reckoning: the art of estimation. I have been pondering an essay about burnout for awhile now. It’s still a little out of reach, the words and ideas still mostly hazy. But…

How Columbine changed the way we think about victims. — I didn’t grow up in gun culture. I didn’t live in a place where kids played sanctioned hooky on the first day of hunting season. No one I knew had a gun safe in their house, a rack on their car. Yet, we were all obsessed with guns, for a…

When chicken gets to be a celebration. — Normally in the winter, the good farmers who give us our monthly meat allotment (we don’t get to choose what’s in it) give us hearty, stewy things. Things with bones and skin and the promise of ballast. …

I promised myself I wouldn’t write this article until I’d earned it. After placing in three Challenges, winning one, a Vocal Spotlight, and with half a dozen Top Stories under my belt, I think it’s fair to say I’ve figured out a thing or two about how to catch Vocal’s attention. I joined Vocal last summer, when I saw an ad for…

What your teenager needs to hear — I found her where she said she’d be. I didn’t say a word as she got in the car. We put the windows down, and I played Irish fiddle music, loudly. She didn’t complain. We were on the highway, 15 minutes into the drive before I spoke. …

Sometimes, soup gets witchy. It can be a little like potion-making when the world’s on fire. …

A series of unleashed rants about images that came up on Unsplash when I searched “salad.” Right off the bat: who the hell leaves tomato stems IN your salad? What is the point of whole lettuce leaves? Literally no one wants a piece of watermelon radish that big. The dressing is spattered like, uh, someone did something really dirty to this salad right before serving. Rude.