Sarah Todd

One day several years ago, my friend Ehren got to talking with some buddies about which Hogwarts house they would be in. These conversations always involve an element of suspense. Perhaps you will find out that your friends think of you as a smart Ravenclaw because they appreciate your quick-witted commentary at Bachelor viewing parties. Perhaps your PowerPoint presentations have earned you a reputation as a brave Gryffindor among your coworkers, fighting for all that is good and right.

What’s the right way to respond if your boss makes an inappropriate—or even unethical—request? Former FBI director James Comey says he found himself facing just such a dilemma in February, when US president Donald Trump reportedly asked him to drop a federal investigation into the recently-fired national security adviser Michael Flynn.

When I graduated from college in 2005, I was disappointed to discover that the Venn diagram between Stuff I Liked to Do and Stuff People Would Pay Me to Do contained very little overlap. Today, I understand that this is a totally normal predicament—especially when you’re in the beginning stages of your career. The important thing is to find ways to do the stuff you like regardless.

There’s a line in a poem by Czeslaw Milosz that’s always stuck with me: “Love means to learn to look at yourself/ The way one looks at distant things/ For you are only one thing among many.” The key to happiness, the poem suggests, is to understand that you’re not that special—so that you can better relate to the world around you.

I have 2,937 unread emails in my personal inbox. Some of those emails are newsletters and Lyft ride receipts and discount offers from the Gap. But some of them—an amount I do not want to ponder—are real emails meant for me specifically. There are notes from friends and long-lost classmates; young people starting out in journalism attempting to arrange coffee and chat. I have read these emails and marked them as unread, fully intending to get back to them later. And then I have not written back, because I am terrible.

This week, the internet had a hearty laugh after intrepid Bloomberg reporters discovered that the chopped fruit-and-vegetable packets sold by startup Juicero, intended for use with the company’s $400 wi-fi-equipped cold-press juicer, could just as easily be squeezed by hand. A Silicon Valley darling, Juicero had received $120 million in venture-capital funding, plus breathless press coverage (it recruited ”12 PhDs, 50 engineers, and seven food scientists“), for essentially designing a Capri Sun.

Most mornings, while I drink my coffee, I jot down a to-do list. “Call bank,” I write. “Respond to one zillion emails. Clean kitchen. Prepare for meeting. Write article. Read friend’s cover letter. Go for jog.” This is not a list of things that I will actually do. It’s more a list of things to remember to feel guilty about not doing later, when it is nighttime and I am back home, in bed, staring up into the darkness.

Antarctica is about to lose a lot of ice. Scientists report that Larsen C—an ice shelf the size of Delaware—is close to splitting off from the rest of Antarctica, with its rift having grown by 20 km (12.5 miles) in December alone. Here’s an elegy to an ice shelf that held strong for more than 10,000 years—and a call to action for the rest of us.

When you are an adult, it is hard to make new friends. I myself used to be real weird about it. At a party, for example, a potential friend might ask about my favorite sandwich. This is it! I would think. My big shot! What’s a cool kind of sandwich to like? But in my eagerness to impress, my mind would go blank and I’d blurt out “applesauce,” which is a fruit mixture and not a kind of sandwich at all. So my new potential friend would give me a puzzled look, and I’d assume they now hated me forever. During this period of my life, I spent a lot of time fake-texting fake friends by the window.

As Donald Trump’s inauguration approaches in the US, many Americans who oppose the president-elect are vacillating between despair and anger. Some feel sorrow as Republicans prepare to defund Planned Parenthood and repeal the Affordable Care Act; others, like MSNBC television host Rachel Maddow, are left sputtering in furious disbelief at Trump’s ability to lie about issues of national importance.

Vowing to read more books is a perennially popular resolution—right up there with getting organized and exercising. But even if you consider yourself a bibliophile, it can be hard to get through books when you’ve fallen out of practice. Here are a few tricks that can help you read more—and become more relaxed, empathetic and mentally fit to boot.

When I was a child, I was not very good at hitting balls with sticks or kicking them with my feet. I didn’t think this was a huge tragedy. But my classmates—suburban mini-jocks with blond hair and weirdly precocious opinions about designer labels—certainly seemed to hold it against me. I got used to being picked last in gym class, tried to lay low in the outfield, and accepted that PE class was basically a state-sanctioned form of emotional torture.

I was standing in the shower recently when I realized that baked oatmeal has changed my life. Historically, my weekday morning breakfast routine has vacillated between eating and spending too much ($5 egg-and-cheese bagels) and eating too little (leftover bits of cornflake dust). Then, this year, I started making a big pan of oatmeal every Sunday.

Each fall, I volunteer at a writing workshop for teenagers in Brooklyn. Some of the students are the children of immigrants; some are people of color. Some identify as gay or bisexual. Being New Yorkers, they’re uniformly smarter and funnier and more independent than I was at their age—but they’re still just kids. And now they will come of age under a president whose bigoted campaign rhetoric, choice of running mate, and recent administrative appointments have given them every reason to feel unsafe.

After last night’s presidential election, many Americans woke up this morning feeling lost and betrayed. Some are talking about moving to Canada. Others are wondering if things would be better in Europe, or Australia. Believe me, I get it.

Election Day is finally here—and as America waits to find out whether we’ll elect our first female president or a man who can’t even be trusted to run his own Twitter account, a lot of us could use some distraction. Whether you’re waiting in line at the polls or trying to unclench your jaw at the office, here are some engrossing reads sure to transport you to a world far, far away.

My high school poetry teacher couldn’t get enough of Bob Dylan. He had us pour over the lyrics to “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” in class, and brought in photocopies of the songwriter’s deliciously unreliable magazine interviews. Once, he even showed us a novelty dollar bill he’d acquired, with Bob Dylan’s face on it. When he needed to be alone and think, he said, he’d drive around in his pickup listening to a favorite mix tape—two full sides of “Tangled Up in Blue”—on endless repeat.

I always thought feminism and gender would be central issues during the first election to feature a woman with a 50-50 shot at the US presidency. But before the 2016 presidential race, I imagined the impetus for those conversations would be the woman candidate, her policies, and the possibilities her candidacy represented—not an opponent who boasts about sexually assaulting women on video.

GOP politicians are scrambling to condemn Trump after the release of footage in which he brags about his attempts to force himself on women. While the disavowal is welcome, there’s an unfortunate thread linking many of the public statements from male leaders. Many have suggested that they find Trump’s behavior indefensible because of their own status as husbands and fathers. Such language implies that women are worthy of respect primarily because they are members of men’s families—not because they are human beings who deserve to move through the world safely.

Practice is for wusses.

A properly timed shoulder-shimmy can speak a thousand words.

Meetings! There are so many in this world, and far too few people who bring fancy doughnuts to them. But in the absence of a tasty snack, writer and comedian Sarah Cooper may be able to help you survive your next confusing PowerPoint presentation.

It’s no secret that US presidential candidate Donald Trump engages in misogyny and racism on the regular. But during the presidential debate on Sept. 26, he revealed that his behavior could be even worse. There are times in his life when he could have said or done something horrible and then he didn’t. And for that, he would like our deepest congratulations.

A gunman shot and killed two police officers and a sheriff’s deputy near the police department’s headquarters in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on July 17. Law enforcement officials believe that the only shooter is dead, according to a press conference with Louisiana State Police superintendent Mike Edmonson.