The Mama Bear by Chairman Mom

In a year when there is so much we can’t do, I’ve started to reevaluate what I spend money on. I may never go back to spending as much on grooming, on travel, on eating out, and on working out. After not doing it for a year, it seems excessive and extreme and totally unsustainable. No wonder I’m always “broke”!

On the other hand, I’m examining things I’ve never allowed myself to spend money on. 

The juxtaposition of the two makes little sense. 

For instance, I have had absolutely threadbare running shoes for three years. I have had so many people tell me that I need new running shoes. Whether it’s my old OrangeTheory coaches or folks in the Chairman Mom thread where I talked about losing a toenail! Somehow spending $100 on shoes seemed like the equivalent of buying a Picasso.  Read more...

We never want you to feel judged here, but there are times it’s good to be uncomfortable. 

Last Thursday, when more than 100 of you RSVP’d for our antiracism event with Karen Fleshman, that was a good kind of uncomfortable. Karen held a space of love, of honesty, and of coming to terms with systems we’ve been complicit in. Her belief is that our generation can be the first one that truly develops interracial sisterhood. But white women are going to have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable for that to happen. And not just for one night.  Read more...

Our most read newsletter last week was about my desire to spend less money on things in 2021. And our most two clicked links all week? Heath Ceramics—a holiday splurge I made—and the Balmuda Toaster, a splurge I was resisting that I got obsessed with after reading about their IPO in the Financial Times.

The company’s founder spent more than a decade trying to perfect toast. He was allegedly once brought to tears by a loaf of bread. Fans obsess over the tiny little cup that you use to pour water into a slit at the top of the toaster. It steams the toast as it cooks, giving the exterior the crispness, while not overbaking it.  Read more...

I TOLD you we’d have some special guests as part of our New Media Masters course! 

Half of this course is about the basics of PR. The things you pay an agency tens of thousands of dollars to walk you through. That’s an amazing value. And even for companies that are post-launch, it’s an amazing reminder of what you need to revisit in terms of story, positioning and messaging. 

But the second half of this course—whoa, Nelly! 

We are getting into everything that makes media and storytelling and brand so hard right now. The way you used to launch anything—one-and-done profile on the Business section of the New York Times, New York media tour all respecting the same embargo, a feature on 60 Minutes—that’s all done for everyone except a small cadre of already-famous repeat founders. Media just doesn’t work that way anymore. Read more...

If there’s anything I learned from decades in journalism, it’s how easy it is to be cynical. 

I mean, in part, it’s the job. 

But my biggest breakthroughs as a journalist came not just from calling out horrible behavior unflinchingly, but believing in what could be huge when it wasn’t yet obvious. 

I took a ton of arrows and abuse for this. I was hilariously branded as an apologist for Silicon Valley for years because there were movements and companies that I believed could become huge multibillion dollar world-changing forces when it was easy to dismiss them as fads. Facebook was one. YouTube was another. Snap was another.  Read more...

There are plenty of 2020 cliches I avoided (baking bread) while many cliches I found were universal for a reason. One of the worst was tooth cracking. 

A few months into the pandemic, just after the murder of George Floyd and the teargassing of peaceful protesters, I was quarantined away from my kids at a friend’s house after a potential COVID exposure scare. (I have asthma, so I needed to be extra sequestered.) I was eating an almond and a tooth just crumbled. It was like something out of a bad dream. I was sort of stunned by it. I eat almonds a lot. How did that happen?  Read more...

Last year, Chairman Mom held nearly a dozen events about anti-racism, we paid consultants to make our team and community more anti-racist,and  we diversified the partners and contributors we work with. I became intentional about diversifying my personal friend circle and community circle around my family, I attended an anti-racist leadership course (taught by the amazing Breeze Harper), pushed my school community to take more action to become anti-racist, and read at least 20 books on the topic, including the “Me and White Supremacy” 28-day intense journaling challenge.  Read more...

Newsletter editor Lily here.

Earlier this week, Sarah posted a great question on Chairman Mom about Bridgerton. Given the show’s popularity (over 63 million households have tuned in, and it’s Netflix’s fifth most successful original series launch ever) and the fact that it’s an adaptation, people are also asking a lot of questions about romance novels and the romance genre at large.

Seeing as I’m a long-time romance reader, I write about romance for work, and I run a romance novel podcast, I’ve gotten asked a lot about questions in recent weeks from all sorts of people who are either complete newbies to the genre or who are giving it a renewed look. If I’m being completely honest, there’s been quite a bit of misogyny in these conversations, even with people whom you’d probably label as socially well-informed and aware in other aspects of life. There are a lot of comments about how cheesy the genre is, how sex scenes are gross, how romance novels are “basically porn,” how they’re shallow, the list goes on and on. Read more...

Today’s intro is from our contributor Amanda Munday, who’s the founder and CEO of The Workaround and author of Day Nine: A Postpartum Depression Memoir.

I moved into my apartment last week. I am now in the incredibly privileged—and frankly, absurd—position of having two homes alongside a struggling small business in a pandemic. This is not a vacation home, but rather a bachelorette apartment for me to go for my 50% time away from my children. It’s six minutes from my house. I may have referred to it as my p*ssy pad at least twice. Read more...

As many of you know, we’re investing pretty heavily in asynchronous online courses in 2021. I am so excited about this trend for so many reasons. 

The first is that women were set back generationally in the labor market last year. We need new ways of building careers, wealth, coalitions, and advancement, because what we’ve relied on up until now did not work. We need new ways of supporting one another, of networking, of building mini-teams around ourselves that position us to demystify the things that men share freely and to win.  Read more...