After three years of lockdowns, a year of war and revolution that is inching ever closer, of insurrections and unrest, of watching governments from Iran to the United States enact tighter and tighter controls over women’s lives, racism and right wing fascism on the rise, it feels like we’re…

And it’s crazy that anyone thinks it did. — A friend celebrated US WNBA player Britney Griner’s return home from Russia this past week with a short but sweet post on Facebook. My friend was simply congratulating Griner and her family for finally being reunited after an international prisoner exchange, where Griner was traded for Viktor Bout, aka The…

Trigger warning: this article discusses rape — On 16 September 2022, Jina (Mahsa) Amini, died after being severely beaten by the Iranian government’s “Morality Police” for not wearing her hijab correctly. CCTV footage of Amini stumbling from her wounds and collapsing leaked, and two female reporters wrote about the case. The government claimed she had a heart…

A subtle but powerful way to create positive change — Someone I am close to posted this video on Facebook, with the comment that this is the language you need to learn in order to speak to his hip teenage daughters. He was being a dad, and was bordering on making a dad joke. Except the video wasn’t funny. The…

As a little girl in the 1970s, Queen Elizabeth II was a very different female role model to the women I saw on TV — When I was a little girl, I once asked my mother: who would you rather meet? The President of the United States, or the Queen of England? “The President of the United States of course,” my mother replied. A first-generation American, my mother was a proud US citizen who was…

I’ve been sick all summer with Covid, and here’s what working through it and recovery looks like — Hi there! You haven’t seen me in a while because, over the summer, I got sick with Covid… but I still had to work (at home and isolated). My work capacity was really reduced, of course, but I had to keep going because I’m running a company. I think that…

What my mother taught me that the Supreme Court never will — When I was about eight years old, my mother tucked me into bed one night and told me this story: When she was about my age (at the time of the story), a man in her small Wisconsin town — a friend of her father’s — took her into the…

This is a story about how one man’s vision has changed the way the world perceives safety, the dangers of gender-biased data, and the surprising history of car alarms. In the early 1970s, American architect and city planner Oscar Newman published his book, Design Guidelines for Creating Defensible Space. A…

Did you know that icky feeling you get is actually a self defense tool? — The last article I published on Medium was a bit unhinged. I was ashamed of it, so I deleted it. Shame is a funny thing: we classify it as an emotion, and it feels so heavy, so toxic, so burning, so awful that we would do anything to avoid feeling…