Work & Business

  1. The first thing I learned when I started writing about lingerie full time was that I was never going to be able to have a normal social life again. Telling people you’re a freelance writer is one thing, but telling people you write about lingerie all the time makes them look at you like you’re some kind of alien freak.

    151 comments
  2. Making polvoron was as much a part of my childhood as Mama’s absence was. It was a tradition, then a rite of passage made more poignant by my mother’s brief visits home. With each return came the knowledge of a new step in the polvoron process, and with each new step came the promise of my mother’s permanent return – her homecoming.

    10 comments
  3. Erica Westly tells the story of the National Soccer Alliance, the first professional women's soccer league, and the decades of unequal treatment leading up to the current pay dispute between members of the USWNT and the US Soccer Federation.

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  4. 9:17 am: Sleep with a source.

    10:00 am: Sleep with my boss.

    10:58 am: Find a powder-blue Oxford shirt that doesn't quite button up over my breasts. Buy eight.

    72 comments
  5. I started working as a writer for reality TV the same week I graduated from my MFA program. For eight hours a day, I sorted through footage of uniformed men and wrote deep-bellied voiceovers full of puns that would make your dad cringe for a show that I will refer to as "Rural Cops."

    14 comments
  6. "She was great. Wasn't she great?"

    "She was really great. And Tim loved her, which is key for a position like this."

    "Do you want to light the match this time, or should I?"

    "Oh, I'd love to."

    they burn every trace of her application and existence, dancing naked among the flames

    155 comments
  7. When we were sailing I felt borne up by wings capable of taking me much farther than I’d ever thought possible, to places where I could watch the storm petrels glide before the rising and falling walls of waves. Where a calm night’s watch was spent watching the swirling bioluminescence in our wake while trying to think of the ways and whys I could and should steer my professional life away from the noise and…

    5 comments
  8. Even if you’re not afflicted with Must Always Make Everyone Like Me Syndrome (which I definitely suffer from), anyone trying to move forward in their career is going to feel a certain pressure to agreeably take on as much work as they’re capable of doing. The line between “happy to help out” and “being a doormat” is often both fine and blurry.

    39 comments
  9. You might call it a story of blurred lines, perhaps, but the lines weren’t blurry to me. I was terrified that I would be kicked out of my graduate program because a professor wanted a sexual relationship with me and I turned him down.

    133 comments
  10. The job where instead of firing employees she didn’t like, my manager would move their cubicle every three months until they quit.

    The job where I knew it was time to go when she moved my cubicle to a spot directly under the air conditioning vent.

    The job where my director would look at my lunch and say, “Wow, are you going to eat all of that?”

    498 comments
  11. I trust book buyers to read beyond their immediate experience, beyond their census box. This is what readers have done since literacy became commonplace, so I don’t know why that’s a great leap for our industry today. But I still hear it all the time: “Does this group buy books?” “Is this group enough of an audience?” I hear real fear in that question.

    57 comments
  12. You know how "the customer is always right"? That phrase takes on a whole new meaning when you get inappropriate questions about your racial and ethnic background in your place of employment.

    46 comments
  13. You don’t have to stick it out indefinitely in an environment where explosive rage is the norm. While you’re there you might as well treat it like bootcamp, where you can learn to inoculate yourself against taking things too personally, but you might also consider following in your former coworkers’ footsteps and developing an exit strategy of your own.

    38 comments
  14. I understand how you might think I'd be Frau Blucher in this situation, but I'm not. I'm her Marty Feldman.

    25 comments