I’m Ariella, and for a long time, I have been undercover as a regular suburban mom, trying to guard the secret that I am bursting with ideas and observations about the world. Recently, a good friend pointed out that I haven’t been very successful at holding it all in, which is admittedly true. So rather than continuing to have things leak out in inconvenient places, I decided to park them all here.
Some of the things I like to write about are religion, parenting, marriage, and all forms of human connection. I’m especially interested in big collective stories that shape how we see the world, particularly because sometimes, it’s strangely easy to ignore them.
Do you suppose that it’ll ever make a comeback the way that 70’s bellbottoms did? Maybe I’m ahead of the curve. Or maybe behind. Or maybe I just think it’s just fun to romp around the world on intellectual adventures. Join me?
We can require all the ethics classes in the world, but as long as we continue to reward people who don’t heed those lessons, it’s probably not going to budge behavior all that much.
On the other side of self-reckoning, there is more distance from the day that we were our worst selves, and the genuine freedom to do better in the world.
This play makes the case for a life well lived; it is as rewarding now as it ever was, and ever will be.
Is there really a viable alternative to stories? Perhaps it’s really true that humans are innately primed to be persuaded, consoled, and inspired by a beginning, middle, and end.
If she thought she was teaching me about altitude and streams and trail markers, she was instead teaching me about the benefit of time and insight, as well as the gift you offer the world when you use words and sentences and grammar and craft to explain it all to the world.
It’s a weird, narrow way of talking about college admissions that we somehow think that we have identified a metric of success that is independent of a person’s racial identity.
