The Mama Bear by Chairman Mom

This community has focused a lot on what it means to be a mom or decide not to become a mom. What it means to be ambitious and successful. What it means to reject gender binary restrictions. What it means to be a spouse or even a co-founder or a friend. 

But we haven’t examined the concept of “sisterhood” much. 

Adimika Arthur and I have been talking about sisterhood since July. What it means. The differences of sisterhood in the white community and in the Black community. Bonds with actual biological sisters and what makes someone a chosen sister.  Read more...

For a very, very long time, I lived in California but did not consider myself a “Californian.” I think when you come from a place like the South, there’s a lot of baggage in leaving and a lot of baggage in leaving to go somewhere like California. 

Many people I know lived here for more than 10 years before they considered it where they are “from.” It took me 20. 

I remember the very first time I went “home” (then, I still meant Memphis) for Christmas after moving here. I went to a bar, and they carded me. I showed them my California driver’s llicense, and the guy recoiled and said “OH CALI-FOR-NIA!” like my piece of ID was an assault. Like I’d smacked him in the face with it, not handed it over respectfully. Like I’d just said I was better than him. I got the stink eye the rest of the night. “I am from here!” I kept telling people.  Read more...

Newsletter editor Lily here.

By this time tomorrow, I’ll be on the open road with a few friends driving up to Vermont for that workcation week I mentioned a little while ago. Everybody’s tested negative for COVID in the past two days and has been quarantining for two weeks, and I also made everybody get flu shots.

To be completely honest, it’s that point in trip planning where everything is a little bit exhausting and people are asking questions they already know the answers to or can figure out themselves as grown adults. Couple that with the fact that nobody’s really had anything to look forward to for over seven months, and people are messaging at all hours of the day and night trying to create endless programming for us to do. (A Secret Satan exchange! An autumn photoshoot! A Halloween movie night!) I keep having to remind everybody that 1) all of us still have to work during the week (I’m covering the election for at least three different media outlets while I’m there), 2) it’s okay to treat the vacation part of the workcation like they would any other vacation, and 3) sometimes it’s okay to just blob. (I’ve written on multiple occasions of my love of blobbing.) Read more...

Deena Minwalla is Director of Product, Education at KQED. Prior to KQED, she was Co-Founder and CEO of HEARD, a school communication platform focused on increasing family engagement. She is mother to two daughters and lives in San Francisco.

When I turned 18, I couldn’t wait to vote. To me, it felt like a marker of adulthood. My voice would finally be heard. My voice mattered. It was an exciting time, 1992 to be exact, when Bill Clinton was running against George Bush. I remember attending a rally in Boston at Faneuil Hall, where Clinton spoke and the excitement in the air was electric. There was hope for change. It never occurred to me at the time that it was such a privilege to vote. I hadn’t really considered the fact that it took 244 years for women to receive the right to vote in this country. I took it for granted that it was my right to vote and that my vote mattered. Read more...

Long before Uber vowed to destroy not only my career but my family, and long before Pando, the investigative journalism startup I founded in 2011, was threatened with more than $400 million in baseless lawsuits, I was a journalist in the Valley just trying to do my job. 

On multiple occasions, major Silicon Valley VCs called my publishers and editors and leaned heavily on them to fire me. One of them was summoned to a billionaire’s mansion in the middle of the night because the request was so urgent. This particular boss of mine had never even met this billionaire before. I suspected and heard credible reports that this person also had me followed hoping to dig up dirt on me.  Read more...

My kids are going back to school today after more than six months GLUED to their parents’ sides. We do share custody, so both of us got breaks throughout that time. But we never had any extended family drop in, never did pods, never did camp. 

It’s uncanny to me to step back and think about every aspect of this. That for more than six months my children have had no meaningful contact with anyone other than their parents and their parents’ significant others. That I haven’t had any real space. That life as we had taken it for granted just stopped and became something that we would have considered unimaginable before March. And then became so routine, that the idea of them going to school for eight hours seems unimaginable.  Read more...

Uh….You don’t have to look far to see why the topic of building a radical, ethical startup might be one that resonates right now. Whether it’s Facebook’s complicity with a plot to kidnap a governor, or it’s 5% of Coinbase’s employees quitting in a pandemic after the company said causes like Black Lives Matter were mere distractions to its core mission and had no place at the office, Silicon Valley’s brand of “changing the world” isn’t a good look right now.

If you like the idea of building or working at a startup but don’t so much like the culture around it, join us for an amazing discussion about ethics and the startup world led by Jennifer Barcelos. Jennifer is the co-founder of the Namastream software platform, The Soulful MBA school and community, and the climate justice nonprofit Three Degrees Warmer. Prior to her foray into entrepreneurship, Jennifer served as a Gates Public Service Law Scholar and received a graduate degree in Environmental Science from Yale.  Read more...

Today’s contributor is Chairman Mom’s Virtual Events Manager Megan Harding, an events professional, editor, writer, and mom. Megan worked in events for Quartz and the High Line. She edits application materials for job seekers and college and graduate school applicants at MLH Writing, and she authored a story for the book Shout Your Abortion. Megan resides in New Jersey with her husband and five-month-old daughter.

I last ate a homemade edible in 2015. It was a makeshift s’more featuring visible weed granules, cooked up by a guy named Amir in his mom’s toaster oven. Amir and my boyfriend ate their s’mores and continued the night drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes. I, on the other hand, curled up into the fetal position and woke up the next day with a gnarly weed hangover.  Read more...

Newsletter editor Lily here.

Blaaaaah.

So here we are, just a few short weeks from the U.S. election, and between the pandemic and an election cycle that seems to have never ended for the past half-decade, everyone’s beyond exhausted. I’ve been covering politics pretty heavily for over four years now (since spring 2016), and my fatigue seems to go in waves.

I can tell this latest wave is really starting to hit based on the little things. After months of only ordering takeout maybe once per week tops, I’ve found my consumption steadily increasing (and my bank account decreasing) just so I have something to look forward to. (Yes, it’s emotional eating to the max!) My whole “getting my complete daily servings of vegetables” experiment has hit a snag. I’m not getting my full eight hours of sleep or even trying to go to bed early despite being 100% a morning person. The only books I seem emotionally able to handle right now are new adult college hockey romances. (And I don’t even watch hockey!) Read more...

“Ooooooh! Whatcha reading?” Evie said this weekend. She doesn’t normally take an interest in my super boring adult books. But this cover clearly intrigued her, even without an adorable animal. It was Majo Molfino’s Break the Good Girl Myth.

Those words “good girl” showing in a shattered font captivated my tiny seven-year-old feminist. We ended up having a long talk about the difference in being kind, working hard, listening to adults, and following the rules, which are great things, and the expectations of “good girlism.” I wasn’t sure she fully got the distinction, but later on when I asked her to do something she shot back, “Would you ask a boy to do that?”  Read more...