You know it’s a slow news day when a newspaper decides to run a generational warfare op-ed. When I find one circulating online, I find it almost soothing, because it means that there are no new major horrors to deal with today — no enormous massacres, no massive uncontrollable fires…

Women are just supposed to just jerk off to our own smug sense of satisfaction, day in and day out, until we’re just piles of Boniva dust. When I turned 28, everyone started asking me when I was going to have a baby. No…

Everyone wants a prestige haunting; no one wants their house haunted by the toilet repair man. To get this out in the open: I, much like Rob Lowe, believe in ghosts. In my New England hometown, this was probably the one thing about me that didn’t make me an oddity…

My mother seemed to think you could catch being upper class, like it was a cold — When I was 12, my mother and I were in this ongoing argument. She wanted me to grow up to become a trophy wife; I wanted to grow up to write one really cool novel and then die while I was still hot. I mean, she wasn’t that explicit about…

Or, why I grew up thinking all adults are miserable — I never met any happy adults when I was a kid. My parents were miserable, my parents’ friends were miserable, my friends’ parents were miserable, and that was pretty much all the adults I knew. …

How to celebrate your impending irrelevance — If you are anything like me — a 38-year-old who owns multiple DVD copies of Heathers so I can still watch it when the grid goes down and the world becomes The Road, even if one of the cannibals on The Road steals my other copy — you woke up…

If you’ve spent any amount of time studying biology — by which I mean, if you’ve spent any amount of time getting stoned and watching Blue Planet — you know that nature is all about interdependencies. …

I felt nothing. So I headed to my desk for another busy day of browsing online sales and waiting to die. — I was running two hours late to work on the day I figured out I was really, truly, finally about to get fired. The whole “two hours late” thing wasn’t, like, an eerie portent of doom or anything. I had been pushing my start time back later and later for…