1. Read articles on how to parent your children during a pandemic and get super frustrated at anyone who claims to be an expert on an experience that no one on earth has ever experienced. (Teenagers did not exist during the 1918 Flu Pandemic and neither did TikTok, I don’t think.)
2. Remind yourself every day that your teenagers are not your friends. They would rather be with people their own age. They would prefer to be with their friends, but hanging out with their enemies would also be better than hanging out with you.
3. Puzzles > Board Games
4. Check-in on your…

This Is Us

For parents of school-age kids, May is filled with end-of-year concerts held in auditoriums with the acoustics of a school cafeteria, because it is the school cafeteria. These events are lovely and life-affirming, but they often start at nine in the morning or three in the afternoon or, occasionally, at the almost working-parent-friendly hour of six at night, which can still be impossible for anyone commuting during rush hour. …

Last month, Disney finally announced that it would re-theme Splash Mountain at Disneyland and Disney World. The ride, based on the racist 1946 movie Song of the South, will now be rebuilt to feature Tiana, the first Black Disney princess and the star of the 2009 film The Princess and the Frog.

Though the problematic nature of Song of the South had been flagged for decades, it was, as many news outlets argued, a Change.org petition with more than 20,000 signatures that finally pushed Disney to make the decision. The articles implied that the petition represented a popular uprising and…

In my former life as a tech podcaster, I used to switch phones, smartwatches, and tablets with my co-host for the entire month of January. He was an Android guy and I was all Apple all the time. This was always an entertaining experiment (to us anyway) and made for many good discussions that you can still watch on YouTube if you‘ve got some extra time on your hands.

For the most part, I loved my time with Android. I liked customizing my home screen (although Apple lets you do that now), sending Star Wars holograms with the first Pixel…

“When is the last time you actually thought about PDFs?” asks Rob Walker in his excellent look into the 30-year-old tool we often take for granted. “The PDF is a…

In mid-February of 2020, I took a trip alone to the desert. It was the first and only vacation I’d taken by myself in my entire 47 years on this planet. I am the mother of three teenagers and an elderly dog. I’m also married to a man who loves solitude, and he thought that I would love it too, so he encouraged me to go away for a week. I don’t do well by myself, and I’m terrible at relaxing, but I managed. I took the week off work and social media and taught myself how to be alone…

Internet Happy Places

At the end of a year in which we could not explore much IRL, team OneZero is sharing our favorite places we found online.

It is generally frowned upon for a wife and a mother of three human children to say that, most days, her favorite thing in the world is her dog. And yet, my dog is pretty amazing. But I also love other people’s dogs, and this year I really didn’t get to pet enough of them. Naturally, my favorite place on the internet was anywhere where the dogs are.

In 2019, only one person on my team…

Story Spotlight

When I moved to Petaluma, California (former egg capital of the world), I thought I would get chickens. Instead, I got three children. And then I got a dog. Our neighbor had chickens. But they didn’t have a chicken coop or a fence. And one morning as my family was sitting down to breakfast we saw our dog, Gilbert, run past the glass doors, a cloud of white feathers in his wake. Our neighbor had one less chicken.

People are weird when they hear that our dog killed the neighbor’s chicken. But they shouldn’t be. “They are predators, after all,”…