The first time I heard about vaginal rejuvenation surgery was at a brunch when I was in my late 30s. I love brunch because it feels Jewish. After I typed this I googled it to make sure I wasn’t crazy. And it turns out that while there is no causation, there is correlation: the more Jews there are in location in the US, the more brunches there are. Maybe Jews do brunch on Sunday like we do Chinese food on Christmas: we need to entertain ourselves while the Christians are in church.  Maybe we like brunch because so many Jewish foods are breakfast foods, so there’s no point in straying too ..read more

My Autism Workshop start this Wednesday. You should join. People say to me, “Why does it matter if I have autism or not?” The answer is you can transform your life by using what we know about autism to your benefit. Experience the intellectual jolt of an autistic group. We have a love/hate relationship with groups; We hate forced participation but we love watching and listening. When we learn about autism on our own, by reading, we engage in selective learning and we miss a lot. However in a group, we are great at seeing what other people need to learn, so we see better for ourselves as ..read more

 I kept this picture to remind myself that when I don’t want to get out of bed and I do anyway, I’m glad I did. The picture doesn’t inspire me, so I’m putting it here to remind us all that tricks for self-discipline that work for most people do not work for people with autism. Luckily there are lots of ways we can make our lives easier, we just need to use different methods. Therefore: my 7-week workshop about autism! Each week, I’ll summarize research on the topic then we’ll discuss how to apply it in our own lives. In between meetings we’ll continue those discussions on a private forum, wh ..read more

I was walking my dog in the Boston Common today, near the Embrace. A controversial sculpture is a great place to train an Australian Shepherd because people approach from all angles in the park with intention. Then people slow down and meander, directionless, trying to understand which way to look at the sculpture. Herding dogs do not respect this behavior. So I work on teaching her to leave people alone when they are not behaving like a proper herd of cattle. I am a sloppy, inattentive dog trainer, so it’s good for me to train in an area where the stakes high if I don’t pay attention. I ..read more

I’m in New Orleans on the floor of my hotel room while Z sleeps. He sleeps in the middle of the day so we can go out at night. The first night we saw jazz bands at 2am. Accidentally. They were so loud underneath our window that we went outside to find a band on every corner playing for tips. The second day we moved hotels. I told myself it was an architectural decision. This new hotel is a refurbished church rectory. But we probably moved because falling asleep to neighborhood jazz makes for nightmares now that Z is going deaf from his car accident. Now we’re staying next door to a vaulted Vi ..read more

I’ve stopped saying yes to interviews because I piss people off. Or I scare them. I’m not sure I can tell the difference. If someone hangs up in the middle I know they hate me, but if someone doesn’t hang up in the middle but also doesn’t use the interview, I think, maybe they liked talking with me but they’re saving the interview for a really special time. In ten years. I broke my vow of silence to be a guest on a podcast with Meghan and Sarah. They have a cool-girl vibe that victimized me the first 50 years of my life. But I think my time has come. Also, I read that women are supposed ..read more

Why is no one wondering why Netflix paid so much money? I’m surprised. It seems so obvious to me, so I haven’t said anything, but it’s one day before the show starts and I have to say it now so everyone knows I was right. Before I tell you what’s in the Netflix movie, I want to acknowledge that I have a history of being incompetent at breaking news. For example, Alexis Ohanian accidentally told me that he sold Reddit before he told anyone else. I didn’t realize how big it was and I broke the news, buried in paragraph five of an umpteenth blog post about how to manage your career. Then I had no ..read more

 Aspen Art Museum  My earliest memory is when I learned to read. I was three. I sat in a tiny rocking chair in my grandma’s house with Dick and Jane. And it just clicked. I didn’t know how I read the words, but I did. In kindergarten a teacher asked, “Who knows what elamenopee means?” I could already read long books but I didn’t know what I was singing with L-M-N-O-P. In first grade, I told the teacher I can already read. She gave me the dictionary and told me to read it. I read it. She asked me what it meant. I said I didn’t know. To me it was not obvious that reading and understandi ..read more

Designed by Lisa Be for Project Vortex As you may know, I’m doing research at a lab at Harvard where I focus on autistic women. One thing I’ve learned is there are lots of easy, objective tests we can give ourselves to determine if we have biological markers for autism. I’m excited to share those with you so we don’t have to have any more discussions about everyone asking themselves do I have or don’t I? I also notice the news that will help women the most is very slow to get to the public. So I’m offering a workshop to give autistic women groundbreaking research into their lives right now ..read more

During Hurricane Ian millions of gallons of pig feces whooshed across North Carolina. Pig poop gets my attention. I raised my kids on a hog farm and the water was too conatminated to drink due to decades of farming with gestation crates: a birthing invention of factory farms that is a stacked storage system to get the most pigs per acre. In past years Hurricane Florence and Hurricane Matthew sent feces flying so we know which problems ensue: human sickness, contaminated drinking water, rivers, plants and fish. There’s a race issue as well. The farm owners are white and their pig shit lan ..read more