Personal Essay

I'd rather handwrite every document I submit.

"I've repeatedly been mistaken for my date's child and regularly asked if I'm old enough to sit in an airplane's exit row."

I was struggling with quarantine — until I found the polar explorers.

When we broke up, I thought it would be his rock bottom. I was wrong.

My worst days at Amazon have been when I was loaned out; in fact, the worst days of my life were when I was loaned out.

In this, the age of the global pantry, ingredients like turmeric, tahini, and gochujang have finally shaken off their hitherto "exotic" status. But it's white cooking personalities like Alison Roman and many of the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen stars who have had viral success using them.

There's no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. That doesn't mean your social friends aren't losing it.

I can't help but see shoppers in terms of risk — especially when they deliberately break the rules

You'd think after doing something a couple thousand times the bosses would have the process down.

Like almost every woman of my generation, I was raised on a diet. After decades of obsessing over my weight, quarantine is finally giving me permission to stop caring.

Stephanie asked her husband for a divorce two weeks before the state of emergency was declared. Now she's sleeping on the sofa, but they're also cooking, playing video games, online dating and apartment hunting together.

I know why people turn to conspiracy theories in uncertain times. I did the same when my husband had a brain tumor.

Young, healthy people like me are getting very, very sick from the disease caused by the coronavirus.

I have come to the conclusion that, in fact, Friday is the worst day of the week. Worse than Tuesdays, definitely worse than Mondays. Hear me out.

New York felt like the center of the publishing world; it took a long time to learn a writer can flourish outside its gates.

Ahmaud Arbery would've been 26 today, and I've been thinking about how sometimes the traits we admire most in our kids are the same traits used to mark them for death.

Small primary care practices are turning to crowdfunding to survive. If they don't make it, it's a loss for all of us.

How meal delivery became surreal.

It was easy to get one. It was difficult to take any meaning from it.

Turntable.fm predicted the future of the internet, but didn't survive to see it. The nostalgia for it hints at what could be a new normal — or just a passing fad.

Nearly five years since its series finale, the prestige TV drama has seen an uptick in viewers—old and new—since quarantine began in March. It might sound weird, but there are several reasons.

I learned the quiet heartbreak of losing someone who truly understood what it meant to live in a body like mine.

It's possible to show leadership or grit or enthusiasm in one area, and then fail to show it in other activities.

The class offered three things I'd been desperately missing: drawing, being connected to other human beings and thinking about the body as something to embrace and take joy from.

I silently observed the members of a wedding-shaming Facebook group leave mean, judgmental comments on a photo of my dress.

My mantra used to be, "Stage IV cancer! Could it get any worse?" Then it got worse.

It seems like everyone in the world loves "Fetch the Bolt Cutters." So why don't I? On the isolation of disconnection.

I eat pancakes for breakfast every morning now. This is not because of quarantine. I started doing it well before the pandemic hit.

I was biking home when you barreled into me with your car and left me to die.

Perhaps one way to define cis and trans masculinity against each other is to say that, in both cases, "the collapse is the point" — it just plays out in different ways.

Nothing worked to ease the pain of chronic illness — until I discovered bee venom therapy. Now I've stung myself thousands of times, and found a community of people who became my closest friends.

Tracking your daily symptoms can help you and your doctors make better decisions about whether a hospital visit is needed.

Older Americans are about to learn how hard it is to stay afloat. I clung to the middle class as I aged. The pandemic pulled me under.

For the first time, it seems, the entire world knows what it's like to live inside my head.

A boxer reveals the body issues and internalized misogyny that kept her in the ring.

Sure he had a yacht, but he also wrote "I love you" in blood the first night we met.

Cayce French, who is serving life in prison at the Oregon State Correctional Institution, describes how getting clean and participating in rehabilitation programs has transformed his identity.

It both thrills me to watch myself as others might watch me in the world, and instills in me a deep loneliness — a grief that reminds me I am so helplessly stuck inside of myself.

I vowed to spend the coronavirus quarantine focused on looking inward and improving myself. Then I went on one virtual date and everything changed.

Struggling with the world's, and his own, homophobia, one queer young man searches for intimacy in the world of internet porn.

In the throes of a midlife crisis, journalist Angus MacKinnon bought a hotel on a Scottish island. Customer complaints, mounting chores and missing cash soon convinced him he was disastrously unsuited to his new career.

Maintaining distance is almost impossible in our plant. We work shoulder-to-shoulder for hours and only get two 15-minute breaks a day and a half-hour for lunch. We don't have time to wash our hands regularly.

Forced to shutter Prune, I've been revisiting my original dreams for it — and wondering if there will still be a place for it in the New York of the future.

The irony isn't lost on me. Here I am, a Brooklyn physician in a time of pestilence, spending my few free hours playing a game set in a fictional America torn apart by plague.

Forced to shutter Prune, I've been revisiting my original dreams for it — and wondering if there will still be a place for it in the New York of the future.

"It's not the end of the world, but you can see it from here."

What I learned then might help you now.

Feeling guilty about fleeing the city for greener pastures is not a sufficient reason to write a personal essay.

"Today we feel like one big army devoted to one fight. Today it feels like maybe, just maybe, we can keep up."

Vanessa Santiago departed as the virus began to spread through the prison. The outside world had changed in ways she was unprepared for.

Unable to make her weekly appointment because of social distancing, Carlene takes her hair into her own hands.

For the single among us, the advent of coronavirus was like a game of musical chairs: in an instant, the people we were casually dating were the people we were stuck with — whether we liked them or not.

What Lies Ahead for the Marshall Islands?

This is life in the time of coronavirus, where a 46-year-old woman from Indiana is stuck self-quarantining with her husband, one month after he asked for a divorce.

Americans feel pressured to work under the best of times. What happens during a pandemic?

All the good habits and self-optimization in the world don't give you real control over your body. Back away from the bread starter.

A hopeless teenage crush, an older actress and one extremely uninformed college decision.

Adam Kuhlmann was outmatched at the 1993 Little League World Series. His 11-year-old nephew helps him to learn from his errors.

Because we know so little — and have so little faith in our leaders — we are scrambling for some sense of order. That often means leveling judgment on others.

There's a technique — even a flair — to freezing food successfully