The Mama Bear by Chairman Mom

Newsletter editor Lily here.

It’s official: My little brother is a college student. It’s a day that we (but especially my mom) thought would never come, and now he’s living in a dorm room with a roommate who plays too many video games, signing up for the anime club, and probably pulling a few late nights to finish assignments he procrastinated. Ah, college kid life.

I’ve spoken in a few newsletters about my brother facing some social and communication processing challenges in the past, so I think we were all a little nervous about and intrigued by how he’d handle college life. Luckily, though, it seems to be going great. Read more...

We are in the final, insane, chaotic throes of planning the Chairman Mom Flee. Hopefully we will do a good enough job that you won’t see any of that chaos when you arrive and will simply be able to relax and restore and connect.

In talking to a lot of the folks coming and following some of the threads around the Flee, it seems a lot of us have had the sh*t kicked out of us in one way or another over the last 12 months. So based on your feedback, I decided to really up the self-care aspect of the retreat this year. (With our amazing speakers and the powerhouse women attending, the career-care part is well taken care of!) Read more...

Given my recent admission at how badly I’m failing at back-to-school motherhood, I felt like I needed to share a dramatic evolution: Some three weeks into the school year, I’ve finally got my sh*t together. 

This didn’t seem like the week it was going to happen. Monday, we flew back from Europe and I had a big hole of momming and work and everything else to climb out of. I woke up at 2am Tuesday morning (thanks jet lag) and started my work day. I basically worked 15 hours straight before I ran out to grab groceries (Oh yeah! Kids need to eat!) and then ran to grab a neglected kid birthday gift and then ran to get my kids.  Read more...

I own four copies of The Testaments. I pre-ordered the hardcover from Amazon the moment I could. I got the ebook, because I was out of the country when it came out. But because I hate reading on a phone, I also bought another hardcover copy at a train station in London—the first one I saw in the wild. “Better get two,” Paul said. 

I devoured it in a few days. And it only took that long because I forced myself to pace it a little bit. In fact, when I posted on Instagram that I felt hesitant to start, Catherine finished my thoughts: “I’ve been holding onto my copy since it dropped, hesitant to start it because once I start it I will gobble it up and it will be done, I’ll have read it for the first time and I’ll never have that experience again.” Read more...

I can’t tell you how happy I am that my day job is no longer being a journalist. For the first time in decades I don’t have to care about the ins and outs of the latest high-profile tech IPO. 

And yet, I had a thought reading about the latest reports that WeWork may—again—have to slash its IPO valuation, down to perhaps the $10-20 billion range, more than half the value of its most recent private company round. This coupled with things looking ever worse Uber: It’s expensive re-branding efforts haven’t paid off, and its stock is hitting an all time low of more than 30% under its already-disappointing IPO price. Read more...

This recent thread on empty nesting has me thinking about something I think about a lot when I’m in the middle of something super stressful, uncertain, or seemingly unsustainable. I force myself to pull back and remind myself that this is the fun part. 

Credit a 20-year career as a journalist. But universally the times that everyone successful looks back on and wishes they could return to are those hellish, chaotic, uncertain moments. 

We all know a lot of this is revisionist history. The mind plays tricks on you, making you remember a hellish family vacation as the glory days, and the same with building a startup. I vividly remember a point I hit with my second book when I called Paul and screamed at him to never let me write another book because I forgot how awful that point was.  Read more...

I’ve had a crazy few days. A challenging few days of tears. A few days that have also brought me a lot of happiness. And a few days that redefined some things in my life in pretty meaningful ways. 

It’s also a few days that unexpectedly brought me to Rome—and to Italy—for the first time. I’ll get into all of that another time, perhaps.

I have spent a lot of this week walking around absorbing this phenomenal place and stunned that I’ve never come to Italy before. I don’t know what I was expecting but it wasn’t this. I would have come sooner if I knew. But on the other hand, I’m glad I never came sooner. I think this was the moment in my life that I was ready for Rome.  Read more...

I am about 80% vegetarian right now, which shocks no one more than it shocks me. So I really resonated with something Shannon Downey posted recently on Instagram about the downside of the rise of Impossible burgers. 

It’s certainly laudable that things that look and feel and taste like meat are getting more folks onto an eco-conscious plant-based diet. The problem is when these options take over the only “vegetarian” option on restaurant menus. 

Yes, there are tons of folks who aren’t vegetarian because the love the taste of meat. But there are a ton of people—like Shannon—who are vegetarian in part because the feeling of eating animal flesh makes them queasy. And no matter what, if you are vegetarian long enough, you start to fall into this camp.  Read more...

I don’t know how one person can have the courage of the woman we used to know during the Brock Turner case as Emily Doe, who has outed herself via a new memoir as Chanel Miller. And I say this as someone who once got kidnapped pregnant in Nigeria. I say this as someone who so aggressively stood up to a massive company that it resulted in threats and armed guards. 

But the strength and courage and bravery of Miller is something altogether otherworldly. 

Recently, Paul tweeted that people should forgo the dudes getting paid to write belatedly about the bad actions of companies like Uber, and instead give their book money to people like Susan Fowler who took on these companies when it was actually a courageous thing to do.  Read more...

Run don’t walk to read this profile of Renee Zellweger. In an age where no one seems to still be playing the celebrity profile game, this is a masterpiece. 

Renee Zellweger didn’t get the most sh*t in Hollywood, but she definitely had enough fame fast enough that her sense of privacy and boundaries was completely eroded. She dated questionable and varied men, had dramatic swings in weight, appeared to have dramatic plastic surgery, and all of this became common property for the world to dissect and opine on.  Read more...