I would never tell anyone not to go to graduate school. It is a personal decision, and there are many reasons to go. But I would tell them not to go to graduate school believing that your performance in graduate school has anything to do with your ability to find a full-time academic job. Academia is closer to a Ponzi scheme than a meritocracy.

Let me be clear: there is nothing wrong with making your own food from scratch and designing your own clothes. But it’s an individual solution to a greater systemic problem, nothing more or less. When we opt-out of the greater society, whatever our reasons, we lose the power to challenge it effectively, which is something any splinter group from the Amish to the Shakers can testify to.

Besides the comments on proms and crushes and parents and school and #yolo, the most common theme on #followateen is people pointing out that #followateen is creepy. It’s a good point. Of course it’s creepy. It’s really creepy. If you haven’t yet noticed, Twitter is, itself, creepy. The language is creepy and the concept is creepy. The form is creepy and the content is creepy and the fact of all our relative habituation to it is very, very creepy.

The confusion of meanness with oppression is the root cause of why bigots feel that calling someone a “bigot” is as bad as calling someone a “tranny” or taking away their rights…Oppression is not about hurt feelings. It is about the rights and opportunities that are not afforded to you because you belong to a certain group of people. When you use a racist slur you imply that non-whiteness is a bad thing, and thus publicly reinforce a system that denies POC the rights and opportunities of white people.

A review of Lean In on the Vancouver Public Library website by someone who would like you selfish ladies to “give something back to men” already. Jeez!

Comments like Byers’ (“How did it become so difficult to call a woman good looking in public?”) belie a strange belief: that commenting on the appearance of a woman in public should be both easy and deserving of a positive response.

When I think about the “correspondence” I’ve generated over my life, I can sift it into a few embarrassing categories: adoring, inarticulate drivel to my boyfriend; unforgivably cruel jokes made in confidence to friends; whiney pleas unanswered by my parents; incensed threats to managing editors who owe me $300. Looking back, the number of non-humiliating e-mails I’ve sent over the course of my entire life could not exceed 30.

It makes no sense that you celebrate singledom after you’ve been coupled for years and are about to tie the knot. You should be having a last single hurrah right before you have the Talk with your partner about dating exclusively. Rituals would include the deletion of your OkCupid/Grindr profile and a slideshow of blurry cellphone photos of your wildest nights out. Friends could weepily bid farewell to the fun and relevant you, and prepare themselves for long brunches at which you drink too many mimosas and sigh and say, “I don’t know, like, I love him but we’re barely having sex anymore.

Wholesome weekend activities in the sunshine, in lieu of reading: cleaning and fixing my bike; riding my bike; gardening; making scones; drinking beer in the sunshine; buying flowers; eating pie.