ArcaMax

As a single mom, I've spent Christmas alone while my daughter visited with her father's family for the holiday. I've also celebrated Christmas morning as a blended family with my daughter, new husband and stepdaughter. Holidays can be challenging with so many moving parts and so many players who have emotional stakes in the day. I'm here to tell...Read more

In the past month I've written about hospice care for the homeless, read a novel centered around a nursing home during COVID lockdown and read a memoir written by a neurosurgeon as he was dying from cancer.

What did all three of these have in common? Death, yes. But there was something more. They each shined a light on the importance of knowing...Read more

How many of you are gearing up to tolerate the Thanksgiving relative you don't like? You know, the one relative that after a glass of wine will be ready to argue about the war in Gaza, banned books or women's rights? Or maybe it's LGBTQ rights and marijuana that will get the family fight started. There's no shortage of controversy around us and ...Read more

I shared a work achievement with my husband recently and he responded, "You've always been a diamond in the rough." He knows that I am not the product of any sort of traditional trajectory. Instead, I'm the product of informal apprenticeships thanks to people who saw something in me and gave me a chance. My dad would tell you that I always had ...Read more

Since Matthew Perry died last week, I've seen countless clips in my social media feed of his work as Chandler Bing on "Friends." But snippets of a recent interview have also been circulating. In November 2022, Perry was a guest on "Q with Tom Power." He was promoting his memoir, "Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing." Perry told the show ...Read more

Jim Crow laws are often thought of (especially by white people) as a thing of the past. Something that the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s worked to undo. We think of lunch counter sit-ins, Martin Luther King Jr. and the March on Washington.

We do not look in the faces of the people of our community who endured the fight in their daily lives...Read more

My son asked me on our way to school which emotions were the bad ones. I told him that emotions aren't good or bad, they're just information that helps us figure stuff out. It's our job as parents to help kids decipher how they are feeling and what their emotions are trying to tell us. Too many times we try to comfort children through things ...Read more

If we don't understand our purpose -- why we do the things we do -- we allow ourselves to get unnecessarily distracted.

Work has been more stressful than usual lately. Things are shifting and changing at stations much higher than my paygrade, with influences trickling down to my daily work. This is life as an employee in corporate America. Some...Read more

Oct. 1-7 is banned books week. If you look at the most challenged books of 2022 and why they were challenged, it is abundantly clear that parents are terrified of sex -- especially gay sex. Parents want to keep all of that information and the nuance that surrounds it tucked away from children. At the same time conservative lawmakers are ...Read more

Starting Oct. 2, Kellogg Company announced it will be dividing into two independently traded companies. Kellanova will handle all the snacks and WK Kellogg Co. will handle cereal brands. When people think of Kellogg's, they tend to think Corn Flakes, Pop Tarts and Raisin Bran. But I think of the Canada goose.

Some call them Canadian geese, but ...Read more

I've seen Duran Duran in concert once before, in August of 1993. I was 18 years old and bought myself a front-row center ticket for their show at Riverbend Music Center in Cincinnati. It was a birthday present to myself, and I went alone.

Everyone has a band that feels more like the soundtrack to their formative years. Duran Duran was that ...Read more

When I was a kid, video games had two options: play with a friend on a console or try to beat the computer. The rise of the internet and smartphones has added a third option: play online with friends and strangers. It's great that gaming has become super accessible. Games are on our phones and on our computers as well as our TV consoles.

My 7-...Read more