Love, Ice Cream, & My Final Conversation with My Mom

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Love, Ice Cream, & My Final Conversation with My Mom

Ten days before she died, we shared one last long conversation filled with laughter, tears, tenderness, and the words that mattered most.

Today, my mom would have turned 82. But she passed away earlier this year, on February 8. On Thursday, January 29, I stayed up late typing up a conversation I’d had with her that night because it felt so meaningful and important.

She’d been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in mid-November and was receiving hospice care at home. Brain swelling and seizures had affected her ability to move and communicate. I didn’t know that night would be our last extended conversation—the last time she would be able to speak in full sentences, albeit short and slow ones.

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Public Talk on Outsourcing Intimacy: The Cost of Connection without Courage

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Public Talk on Outsourcing Intimacy: The Cost of Connection without Courage

For over 30 years, I’ve been studying the shifting ways we meaningfully connect with others, or try to, through the internet and technology. And on Thursday, May 14, in San Diego, I’ll be giving a public talk about how intimacy, and our ability to cultivate emotional and physical closeness with others, is being increasingly impacted by technology. Especially with the rise of human-like AI interactions.

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When Consent Isn’t Enough: From my mother’s bedside to Epstein’s world, what consent misses about power

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When Consent Isn’t Enough: From my mother’s bedside to Epstein’s world, what consent misses about power

I’ve been thinking about consent a lot this year, but in some new ways. In my work, I’ve long pushed back on simplified ideas like “No means no” and “Yes means yes” and tried to bring in the complexity of real human interaction. But what I didn’t expect was that caring for my dying mother would clarify what felt so wrong about Jeffrey Epstein’s world. Consent is not just about permission, but about how power is used when someone is vulnerable.

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Gen Z's TikTok Take on Lavender Marriages

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Gen Z's TikTok Take on Lavender Marriages

Historically, a lavender marriage referred to a union between a man and a woman in which one or both partners were secretly LGBTQ+, arranged to conceal their orientation and preserve social, economic, or career standing….Today, the term has resurfaced on TikTok and in Gen Z conversations with a completely different meaning. In a Cosmopolitan article on this trend, I shared…

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What Beach Volleyball Teaches Me about Love

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What Beach Volleyball Teaches Me about Love

The sand was just warming under my feet last Saturday morning, the ocean breeze cutting across the beach as I walked toward my usual court. I’ve played beach volleyball with the same group (mostly men, a few women) for more than fifteen years. We only play two-on-two (no fours or sixes), and it’s one of my favorite parts of the week. Frustratingly, my skill level changes from week to week, and it took me years to realize that when I focus on just two things—especially when a serve is coming in—everything flows better. Those two things are…

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I was too embarrassed to walk into the store

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I was too embarrassed to walk into the store

Even as a health educator, buying my first toy felt impossible. At age 20, I became a sexual health peer educator at Lehigh University, about 80 minutes from where I grew up in Pennsylvania. The program was run through the health and counseling center, and we were trained to go into dorms and classes to teach and facilitate conversations about safer sex. I started in the fall of 1993, when the focus was on something called Outercourse…

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