ByElizabeth Hours Updated
Comments 378 Comments

Frugal Friday’s Workwear Report: Flutter-Sleeve Top

Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking.

The thermometer got up above 50 degrees in my neck of the woods this week, so I’m ready for all things spring. This cute flutter-sleeve top comes in nine (!) different prints, all of which will add a little springtime joy to your outfit.

I like the slightly longer length for wearing with skinny jeans or leggings, but it will also tuck nicely into a pencil skirt or a pair of trousers.

The top is $39.95 at Lane Bryant and comes in sizes 12–40. If you buy one, you can get a second for 70% off today.

Two options in straight sizes are this Loft top ($19.88; final sale) and this Ann Taylor top (regular & petite; 30% off of $59.50).

Sales of note for 12.5

Sales of note for 12.5

And some of our latest threadjacks here at Corporette (reader questions and commentary) — see more here!

Some of our latest threadjacks include:

378 Comments

  1. Last night I was able to get an expiring Covid vaccine dose despite not qualifying in my state yet. I called about 20 nearby Walgreens pharmacies around 6-7pm to ask if they had any leftover doses from the day. Different stores had varying policies (and patience vs annoyance at my question)…2 of the 20 offered to put me on a waitlist and one of the 20 had a dose from a missed appointment that would have been thrown away if I hadn’t called. I don’t know how common this is, but given that I was successful in one day and prevented a vaccine dose from being totally wasted, I would urge you to try if you have patience and can travel to pharmacies in less populated areas. I had about 20 minutes notice to get there from the time she confirmed the extra dose to the time the pharmacy would have closed…so you have to be ready.

    I’m so grateful for my good luck and would love to pay it forward. Am planning to write a thank you note to the store about the pharmacist who totally went out of her way for me, and make a generous donation to some cause (food bank maybe) but interested in other creative ideas too.

    1. T r o l l i n g about this the first time wasn’t enough? The pharmacy would’ve called and found someone actually eligible for that dose (plenty of eligible people are on lists and live close to the pharmacy). You did it, it’s done, but make no mistake, it wasn’t ethical, and you don’t need to brag about it here.

      1. Not OP but this is completely ethical. Doses ARE going to waste in some places, and they’re regularly given to non-eligible people to avoid waste. I got a leftover dose at Walmart and was told by the pharmacist that if they have no one on the waiting list answers their phone, they walk around the store offering them to people – all the older people in my state who want the vaccine have made appointments, so the people who get offered it in store are younger, mostly college students since I live in a college town. Sorry you’re sad you haven’t gotten it yet but don’t hate on others for getting lucky.

        1. But OP took it from someone who didn’t get a call. They didn’t get the chance. I understand you disagree and that’s fine but I don’t believe it’s ethical.

          1. If people aren’t on the list, then how would the pharmacy know to call them? You’re assuming that pharmacies know phone numbers of eligible people who live nearby. That would be nice but that’s not reality.

          2. Bummer for those people (if they exist), but I still don’t understand why it’s unethical. There’s no evidence people on a waiting list were more deserving of the vaccine than OP. And I suspect if they had a formal waiting list they wouldn’t have offered her the dose when she called. You’d be surprised how many pharmacies don’t maintain a waiting list and either discard leftover doses, give them to people shopping in the store or give them to acquaintances of the pharmacy staff. Why is OP less entitled to the dose than those people?

      2. You’re wrongly assuming that all places have wait lists and that eligible people are on the lists. Pharmacies don’t have databases and automatically call nearby eligible people.

        1. Here, the waitlists are for people who are not eligible yet mostly. Eligible people are having no issues getting a spot (I am in the south… and there are lots of vaccine-rejectors though).

          1. Same in my Midwest state. No one eligible is on a waiting list. They can just make an appt for today because there are plenty of appointments.

      3. Uggh, I’m not trolling nor did I post about this before, and this pharmacy didn’t have a waitlist nor would they have called anyone–it closed as I was getting there and again they would have thrown it away.

      4. The rural county next to mine has more doses available to give than they do willing recipients. They can’t find enough arms to put them in, and they already burned through their entire wait list. Now they are begging people to convince their friends to accept the shot and help spread through word-of-mouth that they have appointments for anyone who is able to get to the site regardless of their geography or current state phase eligibility.

        1. Can you share what state? If it’s within driving distance of me and accepting out of state residents, I’d go!

          1. I’m in Michigan and know the situation is similar to the one described above for our more rural counties. Not sure how they handle out of state people, but maybe call around and explain your situation, see if you can get in?

          2. I think this is the situation in rural counties in most red and purple states so I agree the best bet is looking at the rural counties in your own state. I’m in Indiana and we have a similar situation. We’re not vaccinating out of state residents, but people in the cities are driving to rural counties to get vaccines.

      5. Is this actually true across the entire country? It seems feasible to me that many places will lack the resources, time, and manpower to maintain perfect schedules and backup lists.it also seems feasible that the vaccine is not distributed perfectly according to population density and some places may have more supply than resources to manage. In a perfect world I agree it should be managed better on the administrative side and every distributor maintain a deep waitlist of eligible people. Your comment just sounds very confidently unkind (which is fine, but I’m curious if you know something I don’t).

        By all accounts we’ll have more vaccines than we know what do with in the next couple months so hopefully this is a short-lived debate.

      6. Reading comprehension fail perhaps? She called 20 places. It appears that 17 were not helpful, 2 offered to put her on a wait list, and 1 said we have a dose that is about to go to waste. It’s not like she cut line at a location with a wait list – it was quite literally about to go waste. It appears that you are very triggered by vaccine discussions to the point that you are misinterpreting them. You might be happier if you would just scroll on by.

        1. Nesting fail. Meant for the person who thinks OP stole a vaccine from a worthy recipient.

    2. Honestly, I’d not document anything that wasn’t strictly by the book. You could cost someone her license or her job. Just pay it forward to a food bank and patronize the store.

    3. This is happening in GA since it’s hard to get a vaccine here. I had good luck getting on wait lists at Walmarts, so-so luck at Walgreens, and no luck at Publix. But I haven’t gotten a call all week, so it’s a crapshoot.

      1. Oh are Walmarts in Georgia taking anyone for the waitlist now? I called last week (Atlanta area) and was told you had to be eligible to join the waitlist but if they’ve changed I’ll call back (trying to get my SIL a vaccine).

        2. The new eligibility grouping for March 15 is pretty extensive. I think a lot of people will qualify based on the health conditions on that list.
          Super jazzed both my parents will from both age and health conditions finally!

          1. Yeah I think my SIL actually qualifies in the March 15 cohort but I can’t really say to her “guess what, you’re overweight so you can get a shot now!”

      2. My ILs are >80 or are otherwise eligible and are waiting for either a phone call (!!!) inviting them to come in for a shot or one to magically appear via the Shot Fairy. A different relative who seems in no way eligible just got one, probably because she has prior experience trying to get high-demand concert tickets (remember that???) and is used to keeping a million windows up and constantly hitting refresh at her WFH tied-to-a-computer job.

        I wish all older people had a Young Person who’d have done that for them, but it seems that that would have been what it took. My state held off on letting anyone else into the queue because the initial eligible people (other than hospital-based workers) weren’t in fact getting shots. I think the backlog is bad and now they are having to send actual Shot Fairies out to people’s houses to get them vaccinated. But if others are willing to get unused shots, eventually the queue will shorten enough for it to be easy to make an appointment for a shot (BUT people will still have to take the initiative to do that).

        1. I think a lot of people have this attitude! We offered to vaccine concierge my in-laws, but they were like “nah, our doctor will give us a call when there’s a vaccine waiting for us.” They ended up getting offered doses while shopping at Walgreens a few weeks ago, but still radio silence from their doctor even though they’re ~75 with serious health conditions.

          1. That is insanity. Their doctor’s office probably doesn’t have the vaccine yet, and who’s to say the office will go through its records and call patients if and when it does get doses?

          2. Where we are, hospital-affiliated doctors are able to get it but independent doctos aren’t (like not even for themselves and their staff). A dentist (often independent small businesses unaffiliated with large groups) had a hard time getting it for himself and his staff even though they are by unmasked people all day long (OTOH, that they haven’t gotten sick all this time to me means that they are asking the appropriate screening questions, using PPE appropriately, and cleaning sufficiently — I get that I am lucky, but they are inside with unmasked breathers all day long, day in and day out).

          3. I’m sure you know this, but it’s bananas to think your doctor will call you for this

          5. This doesn’t make sense. Independent doctors have no way of knowing when they will receive the vaccine, nor do they necessarily have an easy way to sort their patients by appropriate health conditions / co-morbidities. Those of you in other sectors seem to think that independent doctors have whiz-bang databases where they can magically select all diabetics, all people with high blood pressure, etc. and … do something with them.

          6. To be fair, their doctor did say he would call them once he gets doses for them. I agree it’s bananas to wait though. My husband was really frustrated with them.

        2. Why hasn’t your spouse at least registered their parents with the proper public health authority so they will get that phone call from the shot fairy?

          1. They prefer the Shot Fairy. They are really passive people and this is where it really does not pay off.

            Also, I think that months ago the line was short and an 85YO would be at the front of it. Now, you don’t get bumped to the front of the queue just because you’re the most likely to die. You wait behind the 20 teacher’s aide and 30 year old smoker and others who got in line once they were eligible and didn’t just sit by.

          2. No, an 85-year-old still gets bumped to the front of the line. Maybe behind actual teachers, but definitely in front of the 30-year-old smoker.

          3. That’s right Anonymous at 10:00 a.m. In a completely decentralized system run differently by different states, counties, corporations, health systems, and providers, everything works exactly the same everywhere.

          4. Anon, that makes no sense. Even if old people don’t automatically get bumped to the front of the line, they have to get in line if they ever want to get called.

        3. Umm… everyone I know with parents that age booked the shots for their parents. No one was expecting their elderly parents to handle the online registration process themselves.

          There are a couple groups/organizations that are helping people find shots. Just have them use one of those groups.

          1. My 78 yo parents booked the shots for themselves, online. Just because they are that age doesn’t mean they aren’t fully able to use iPhones / iPads / laptops.

          2. Umm okay, my parents are that age, completely computer literate and handle their own lives. I think we do need to not think of people in their 70s and 80s as helpless.

          3. My nearly 90 year old parent handled it himself with no problem. It’s kind of ageist to assume that every elderly person is not competent to handle internet things.

        4. I really want to volunteer to help older and/or not tech saavy people get appointments (if you know what you’re doing, it’s honestly not that hard here), but I have no idea how to go about doing that. All the older people in my life have gotten their’s and I have no idea how I would go about locating random strangers to help since by definition those who need the help aren’t likely to be asking for help on NextDoor or Facebook or whatever.

          1. Try contacting your town/city’s Council on Aging, if you haven’t gone that route yet!

          2. One facebook, search to (your state) Vaccine Hunters and join the group. Different versions of the these groups have different rules and procedures, so read a bunch of posts and it will become clearer what your state is like and how the group acts to get the appointments. My niece in NY also just posted on her FB page and asked people to spread the word that she was willing to help after she ran out of neighbors and friends of friends that needed help getting vaccines.

          3. Another poster recommended joining Facebook vaccine hunters for your state. The appropriate state groups were very helpful in getting appointments for several elderly relatives with limited computer skills (and in two cases, severely impaired vision). All had appointments scheduled in less than 24 hours, and they are in states where booking is a nightmare. These groups are essential for many.

            My state also has an Facebook equity vaccine group, with a special mission to help minority groups disproportionately impacted by the virus and who are receiving vaccines at much lower rates.

        5. In Washington State, it’s hard to find a vaccine (though that may be changing). We have a very active large FaceBook group dedicated to getting non-tech-savvy elders, minorities and underserved people shots. Literally thousands of people help people unrelated to them every day get the Covid vaccines. Some of these are registered volunteers, others just find openings on the internet and post about it with an #open hastag.

          There are FaceBook groups for other states, if people want to volunteer to help. Or you could set up one in your state, have the local papers/TV stations publicize it and help people that way. I’ve helped a ton of people this way.

          I think in parts of Washington State, pharmacies and shot centers need to keep list of “eligible” people only to get excess shots at the end of the day. I think that that is good, as long as doses aren’t wasted. I’ve read that in NY and other places, doctors can lose their licenses and people can be fined for giving the shots to ineligible people, and shots are being wasted. I’m wholly on the side of “shots in arms, no waste” so I think that waste is crazy.

    4. How long did it take to call 20 stores, wait in the hold queue, and get hold of a pharmacy worker? I live in a densely populated area and yet I don’t think there are 20 walgreens stores all within 20 minutes drive.

      1. Only 2-3 minutes per call (including automated line to get through to pharmacy), usually no wait time to have a pharmacy worker pick up, which I was surprised about. If there was a wait time I hung up because I assumed they were busy and didn’t want to annoy them. The largest amount of time was compiling the list of pharmacies that were nearby.

    5. You might ask the pharmacist whether a thank you note mentioning your vaccination would be helpful to her. I read an article about a doctor who, having a vial of doses about to expire, administered them to people in his personal network. He was disciplined and excoriated on social media. What you see as doing the right thing may be looked upon differently by the store execs.
      If you do want to write a note, maybe keep it something you can say you observed without disclosing the circumstances: “She was warm and gracious even under trying circumstances. She put her patients at ease.” Etc.

      1. Thanks, that crossed my mind too so I was planning to do similarly to what you say, saying she was really helpful and professional in a busy stressful time, not mentioning specifics. I think/hope that can only be good or neutral for her.

        1. Ah, now that I started typing this, you probably didn’t get a receipt… but anyways, those surveys at the bottom of your receipt are a GREAT way to share feedback to the store. The results are shared with the store manager, district manager, and higher-ups so a compliment goes a long way and helps the whole store in the long run. It’s actually better than sending a card, which is only shared with the immediate store. It means a lot to store associates when you take the time to fill out a survey about a good experience.

      2. That’s the kind of feedback I give on surveys after contact with call centres etc. Full score, and “Kind and efficient service in difficult circumstances, thank you!” or similar. Non-specific, but with something about good personal service and their having done job very speedily and efficiently. If it’s a sale, I try to mention that they stood out and helped me get just what I needed/wanted.

      3. I read that same article. I would just confine my “thanks” to being pleasant and grateful in the moment, and move on.

    6. I got a waste dose from a Walmart. They were incredibly professional, I had to be there in 15 minutes. They called to schedule my second dose already.

      1. I got my dose yesterday at a Wal-Mart (I qualify based on health conditions, sadly – I would rather not have cancer and be waiting, TBH), but there is a line on the qualification form for “prevention of waste”, meaning you don’t otherwise qualify but you’re taking the shot to prevent it being thrown away. Seems legit to me. Not sure why everyone is losing their minds about this.

    7. Don’t take the bait, people. This is a distillation of every post about vaccination, down to the “write a thank-you note” advice from yesterday.

      1. Wow I really thought I was doing something helpful by spreading the news but Kat feel free to delete my post if this was so awful. Again, the vaccine literally would have gone in the trash as the pharmacy was closing for the evening.

        1. I work at a vaccination clinic and we love the thank you notes we get! I work 15 hour days, 6 days a week and it can be hard to remember the humanity attached to what we’re doing, hearing the real stories from the people on the other side really help

          1. Isn’t it enough that people are pleasant and say thank you in the moment? Honestly it would never occur to me to write a thank-you for a vaccine, any more than I would write a thank-you note for having a nurse take my blood pressure.

          2. In my state, a lot of the people working at the clinics (including people giving the shots) are volunteers. These are people who have sacrificed the most in this pandemic by having to work very long hours in horrific conditions and are now volunteering their time to get it over faster. I live in a very red state, and apparently they’re subject to a not-insignificant amount of verbal abuse by people who are driving their family members to vaccine appointments, while begging their family members not to get the vaccine, etc. In general I try to write positive reviews or send nice emails when I get really good service somewhere because I think it’s a nice thing to do. In this case, it seems like a small gesture that could lift someone’s spirits when that person has really given up a lot to keep us safe. It’s ok if you don’t want to, but it’s not a dumb thing to do in general.

          3. I have been volunteering as much as my real job allows administering vaccines at my city’s mega-site (blue city in a red state). Honestly, it’s enough that people are getting their vaccines. A thank you and politeness is an added bonus. Our processes are so messed up that a thank you note would never get to anyone actually involved in the process.

          4. A lot of people work at the site but aren’t patient facing (like me!), and as stated above there’s a lot of volunteers too. There’s so much that goes into running a site. One of the managers at the site is actively collecting feel good stories to share with everyone working.

            I’ve seen a grizzled former Marine brought to tears from a thank you note we got.

            After working over 90 hours a week for the last few weeks, I’m exhausted and I get cranky and hearing the patients experiences humanizes what I’m doing and I get a little nicer.

          5. I’ve heard that a good way to get the shot is to volunteer for a non-medical slot at a vaccine clinic (such as monitoring the waiting room and directing people where to go). I have no problem with that, but it’s not necessarily altruistic.

          6. Yes, my county health department vaxs all their volunteers and you don’t need medical qualifications to volunteer. You do your first volunteer shift the day you get your first shot of vaccine though, so there is some exposure risk. I wouldn’t recommend it to an older or immunocompromised person but if you’re young and healthy it’s a good way to get a dose early.

          7. It’s really weird to take an anti-thank you note stand haha. Thank you notes are kind but not required. It’s lovely that a portion of the population does it.

      1. Okay I am going to close and not refresh this page again after this comment as I don’t appreciate being called a t r*ll and this is the third time already, but I have literally no idea why that would be accused when I am saying that at least at some places at some times, there are vaccine doses that will literally be thrown away if someone doesn’t proactively call and ask for them. No one else more deserving will get these expiring doses by you not asking for them…unless the more deserving person calls too. The only cost is a couple hours of your stress and time and the risk of annoying a pharmacy worker by calling them at a busy time.

        Anyone else can feel free to write about how evil I am (I won’t see it) but I am hoping at least one person here will be inspired to do what I did and save a dose from the trash for themselves or a loved one.

    9. I see absolutely nothing wrong with what this poster did. Better it go in her arm than go to waste.

        1. People are jealous that they haven’t been vaccinated yet and are taking it out on people who were lucky enough to get a leftover dose.

          1. I have also heard that some sites are use it or lose it – if they can’t show that they are using up all their doses, they might be at risk of getting fewer doses in the next allocation.

    10. At the risk of receiving hate/disparagement, I wanted to pass on that there’s a site that will match you with a clinic that has an extra dose about to expire – https://hidrb.com/

      1. I don’t understand the hate and disparagement on this. Maybe it’s wrong to take an extra dose in some places, where there’s a very organized system that’s working to get all/most doses to people who are higher on the CDC’s priority list. But, that is NOT the case in a lot of places. My state has tons of appointments available for everyone who is in eligible categories right now (you can get a same day appointment!), and the categories are quite vague and expansive. Rural areas have a big surplus and will give to anyone who comes in. I live in the biggest city in the state and most places are not doing wait lists over the phone or online because it’s a lot of work for them and they are already quite overburdened, but they will give you an extra shot if you hang around the pharmacy at the end of the day. I don’t see anything wrong with taking one of these extra shots that would go to waste otherwise, especially when there’s no mechanism really set up where I am to get the extra doses to people in the eligible categories.

      2. I signed up a few weeks ago (and also my early 60s parents) and we haven’t heard anything back, at least in our neck of the woods.

      3. I don’t see why that would draw disparagement. It’s designed to manage waiting lists in an efficient and equitable manner, exactly the opposite of the Hunger Games approach.

    11. The Walgreens near me most definitely had a wait list. You joined it from the website. And it put you on a waitlist for your surrounding areas. (When appointments became available they opened at several stores nearby all at once.) I grabbed one of the scheduled times near me and then received a call the day of asking if I could come in earlier. If every Walgreens gets inundated with a bunch of calls like this from folks who aren’t eligible it only stands to reason that it creates additional chaos around an already chaotic process. I highly doubt that dose would have been thrown away–that just doesn’t make sense at a time right now when demand is so high regardless of your geographic area. What makes more sense is that you saved someone the time of having to call someone from the list the way they did with me.

      1. Demand is actually not that high in every geographic area. My state has opened it up to everyone 50+ and if you qualify you can get an appointment for today or tomorrow, maybe you’d have to wait a week if you want your preferred vaccine manufacturer and geographic location. I don’t think doses are going to waste here, but lots of doses are going to non-eligible people (including me) off waitlists because there is rapidly waning interest among eligible people. In the long run, it’s good to be in a pro-vax state, but in the short term there is a LOT of availability in many states where there are a lot of anti-vaxxers.

      2. The wait list you’re talking about is different from the “waste list” mentioned above. People who aren’t eligible can’t make appointments (at least not without lying about eligibility) so sometimes they get on wait lists for vaccines that would otherwise go to waste.
        I agree it’s chaotic. The whole thing is chaotic.

    12. Man, this group really has to have something they can be morally superior about at all times. Something will always come fill the vacuum if a topic becomes irrelevant. High achieving chicks, except when it comes to self-esteem, I guess.

  2. I read a good article in Areo Magazine about censorship and the Dr. Seuss situation and thought I’d pass it along. I’m inclined to agree that the estate should have relinquished the copyright if it wished to distance itself from the books. I’m not sure if I agree that replacing images in books would be a good thing – maybe in a new edition with a clear forward section explaining the change, but not in the Stalinist way where the old images are disappeared. Would be curious to hear what you all think.

    Also, this is the first article that I have read from this magazine and I’m kind of impressed. Maybe this will be a good resource for those of us who have been posting looking for better sources of news and discussion.

    https://areomagazine.com/2021/03/11/de-jure-and-de-facto-censorship-why-we-need-to-be-concerned-about-both/

    1. Do you believe in private property or not? They own it, they can do what they want with it.

      2. The article is literally about why and how to think about the ramifications of actions by private companies to censor content, so I’m guessing you didn’t read it.

        What a company legally can do and what a company should do are not always the same thing, and there is a valid and important conversation to be had about this issue, which goes beyond “do you believe in private property?” And I’m a libertarian, so yes, I believe in private property rights and am more than happy to defend them.

    2. Obviously they can do what they want, but I think that they should have changed the problematic text/images or just deleted those pages and kept publishing the books. I read elsewhere that when Dr. Suess was alive, he had changed “China man” to “Chinese man” in Mulberry Street and my mom told me that she looked at the old copy we had where the man was yellow skinned, and that had apparently been changed in more recent editions as well. Given that precedent, it seems like Dr. Suess was perfectly happy to make changes with changing times and would likely have been fine with additional changes. I’m not super worked up about this either way, since there are tons of other wonderful children’s books, but I don’t see why editing is a problem.

      1. Right? He himself recognized that the images were problematic and tried to do better. People out here all angry about people trying to learn and grow and wanting them to give up copyright so they can make sure racist books continue to be published.

        I’m loving all the nutso right wingers buying up all the Seuss books and making a mint for the company that made the decision not to publish. Seuss books belong to the Seuss company – they can publish or not publish if they want – that’s the core of private property. Forcing people to publish something is as bad or worse than censorship.

        1. No one is advocating to force them to keep publishing. The argument is to release the books into the private domain ahead of schedule.

          1. If you own a work but no longer want it published, you should pass it to the public domain early so that many other people can publish it? That doesn’t make sense to me at all.

          3. The issue is forcing private property to be in the public domain when the property owner does not want it to be. Whether it is required to be out there by the owner or the owner is required to let someone else put it there is just semantics.

    3. Someone posted here a few days ago that they suspected the whole thing was a stunt to sell of remaining copies of books that the estate wanted to stop publishing because they weren’t selling well.

      2. Yep, everyone and every action is motivated by money and everything is secretly a conspiracy to sell stuff. Sure.

    4. I’m not impressed with this article.

      I think it’s a bad faith argument that somehow the owner of a copyright should be forced to publish a book they find morally problematic and unflattering to the legacy its famous dead creator or reliquish it to the public domain. You can wish they would have replaced the parts they found problematic, but you can’t force them to or reliquish their rights.

      I also think it’s really problematic to act as if people in publishing have some great moral obligation to the public to put out content they find reprehensible, particularly when we live in the digital age and they are not the primary gatekeepers of information. You can publish your racist garbage on your racist blog all day long. No need for a publisher to back you up. You just can’t publish racist garbage owned by someone else.

      Also, I’ve yet to hear anything but a “slippery slope” argument in favor of the insistence that children look at problematic racist charicatures in picture books. This isn’t satire being confused for racism. This isn’t a novel that displays outdated but historically accurate racial norms. I cannot understand how children not seeing unkind racial streotypes in picture books is a loss to society or to the public discourse.

      1. It’s not just for children, though. There are plenty of college students who would benefit from being able to discuss how racial stereotypes have been portrayed in children’s literature in the 20th century, to give just one example, and losing access to the books loses an educational opportunity. I imagine that you will still be able to look at specific images online but it’s not exactly the same as being able to review an author’s work in its full context with a critical eye. I think this is especially important for images that are not very black-and-white. There is a conversation to be had about whether portraying a Chinese man holding chopsticks is actually offensive. Are we saying that any cultural depictions of other races by white people is unacceptable to the point that the material should become unavailable? These are difficult conversations that we need a lot of tools to answer.

          1. Yeah, I’m really wondering if this person knows anything about “academic libraries,” “archives,” or “the used book market.”

          2. Right. I can recall studying plenty of books and texts that were no longer in print as an American Studies major for exactly these purposes.

          3. That’s the problem though. These actions have a ripple effect, like eBay stopping the sale of used copies and libraries stopping keeping them in stock. We should have conversations about that.

          4. Anon, please consider why you are defending racist works so strongly today. What’s your problem??

          5. Oh please, there are tons of Anonymous posters on this thread and I don’t see a single one arguing that racism is good.

        3. Won’t the copyright protection run out eventually, and the books cross into the public domain? Until then, I am pretty confident that scholars can obtain one of the millions of copies that are floating around. It’s not like the books will be cleansed from library shelves or declared illegal possessions.

        4. So the books aren’t banned by anyone, they’re just not going to keep publishing them. I don’t understand how that would prevent anyone from discussing them.

        5. I have not seen enough discussion about whether what they are choosing to not publish (which is within their right) is actually racist. I think it’s important for kids to learn how people live in different countries and knowing that in some Asian countries people eat their food with chopsticks is just a fact.

          1. I think you’re being purposefully obtuse. The controversy isn’t over the line about how people in China use chopsticks as utensils.

          2. What. Yes it is very racist to depict someone from China with bright yellow skin, are you kidding me right now? And it’s racist to say they “wear their eyes aslant” as it’s written in “If I Ran the Zoo.” And it’s racist to depict people from Africa in grass skirts with exaggerated lips and nose rings. JFC.

          4. pugsnbourbon, I liked this article from the magazine The Week that addresses the specific images with more nuance than I’ve seen most places: https://theweek.com/articles/969971/why-dr-seuss-cancellation-chilling

            “The answer isn’t that anything goes; it’s that we can use common sense to distinguish between old texts or images that degrade or dehumanize members of a group and ones that reflect dated but non-malignant stereotyping. Among the canceled Dr. Seuss books, for instance, If I Ran the Zoo really does contain some shockingly racist iconography of Africans as thick-lipped, potbellied, half-naked savages in grass skirts. On the other hand, the supposedly racist depiction of a Chinese man in To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street involves an actual costume worn in parts of China at the time the book was published (1937), a bowl of rice, and chopsticks. (The original edition also gave the man bright yellow skin and a pigtail and referred to him as a “Chinaman,” but Dr. Seuss himself later made changes.) Mildly stereotypical? Sure, but much the same way as, say, the depiction of a Jewish man wearing a yarmulke and eating a bagel or a Scotsman playing bagpipes in a kilt. Many Asian-Americans have said they don’t find the picture offensive, and effectively purging the book from the Dr. Seuss canon because of it seems excessive.”

          5. Yes – if these racist images are not published how will we ever known what 1 billion plus people eat.

            New books are never being written, clearly these are the only source of info on Asian foods.

          6. This is not effectively purging. What an exxaggeration. Reminds me of the headline ‘Piers Morgan breaks his silence’, published a mere 24 hours after he stormed off live tv.

        6. Yikes, this is such a reach. You think these books will cease to exist all of a sudden? What a terribly bad faith argument.

    5. Honestly I think this article is bad and it’s clearly selling something to a subset of people with a particular axe to grind. If someone doesn’t want to sell something they have every right not to and by no means are they be obligated to give up a copyright because people are offended by what they decide or decide not to sell. The author reminds me of my cousin who thinks he’s super smart arguing on facebook except he’s really not.

      2. And did you all look at the rest of the articles? This publication is just some Bari Weiss type shit. Pass

        1. Bari Weiss is a great original thinker. I wish the NYT had kept her on instead of Ross Douthat.

    6. I don’t know the timelines for public domain in the US, but I assume that at some point in the future any work will be in the public domain, and can be reprinted in the same way other older literature can be made available. I assume there’s no way the Library of Congress will “unpublish” any books like these, and IMO they shouldn’t be.

      It seems common sense to me that current rights-holders can choose not to reprint as long as the works have not fallen into public domain, but I can’t see how book sellers or rights-holders of already printed books can – or should – stop selling the already printed books. The kind of censure where a store banns sales of printed books, even controversial ones, is not something I am comfortable with. I would rather have outdated (and racist, sexist, anti-whatever) views available for sale and in libraries, than loose the opportunity to buy other controversial works (like S. Rushdie, where a publisher even was shot for printing) that are a necessary part of freedom of speech. I think we loose something more valuable than what we gain, if the solution is presented as “to unpublish”.

      1. Do you have any concept of how stores work? Stores, including bookstores, make decisions about what to sell all the time, based on what they want to sell and what they think customers will buy. If a book store is not interested in selling a dated racist children’s book, they don’t have to.

        1. I think you think you’re coming off really smart and superior, but you just seem like a jerk. Making “duh” points as if this is an easy issue doesn’t advance the discussion.

      2. I agree with this. I’m not comfortable with private enterprise telling me what I should read and how I should interpret it. I’m confident in my own ability to be able to digest offensive, racist, or sexist images, learn something from them about history or art or politics or whatever the subject is, and not become racist myself. Once art has been created and released to the public, I believe that all actors (private, public, and otherwise) have a role to play in not stopping access to it.

        1. But you are comfortable with the government forcing the rights holders to keep the books in print or alternatively enter them into the public domain?

          Much better and more important books go out of print all the time. They can be relatively hard to track down, but specialized libraries exist for this reason.

          1. So everyone who disagrees with you on the subject of de facto censorship is just a right-wing reactionary who supports storming the Capitol? I get that it’s easier to just fire off a tweet-style post than actually consider the context or the nuance of a conversation, but c’mon. You’d be better off just collapsing the thread if it’s so beneath you to contribute.

          2. Sorry anonymous, but I agree with her. That website is atrocious and the de facto censorship argument is weird and not convincing me. Your rights are not being trampled upon.

    7. I don’t think they should have relinquished the copy right at all. It’s being used as a wedge issue and all that would have happened is some right wing publisher would have published it and Fox News watchers would buy up all the copies to “own the libs” and it would all briefly be number 1 on the bestseller list before the world moved on and forgot.

      I don’t actually have a problem with the images being changed in future publications so long as it is done thoughtfully and with a note. I do see why it’s particularly hard with Dr Seuss books as his images are done by him and very much part of the books.

    8. I’m shocked and literally feeling scared and harmed by the fascism on display in this thread. If you don’t approve of the censoring of Dr. Seuss’s racist imagery, you’re no better than the capitol rioters and should be in jail with them!

      4. HAHAHAHAHAHA

        So you’re saying if I wrote a book and decide I don’t want to keep publishing it, the government should force me to keep doing so?

        And you’re calling us fascists?

      5. You don’t appear to know what the words censoring and fascism mean.

        You don’t need Dr Seuss, you need a dictionary.

      6. I don’t approve of the woke police sticking their nose into everything and trying to force everyone to think exactly like they do. I’m tired of the woke people and their name calling if anyone dares to question anything that they’ve already decided is the one and only forever and ever right way.

    9. Did anyone even care about these minor works until the estate decided to stop publishing them? I seriously doubt that anyone worried about censorship actually owned copies of the books prior to this kerfuffle.

    10. Lots of people in this thread happy to argue for the rights of private companies and private citizens so long as those rights are being used in the service of their preferred ideology…how many of you defended the rights of Catholic hospitals not to offer birth control services? How many of you would support a conservative religious organization that terminated the employment of an employee because he fathered a child out of wedlock?

      Or do you only care about the rights of private companies so long as those companies agree with you?

      1. Your head is so far up your own a55 I can’t even. This is nothing like denying birth control to other people. No one has an innate right to read someone else’s work that the writer doesn’t want to share. Come on!

        1. Nobody has an innate right to receive every medical service that they want from every single provider either. Get your condoms from Planned Parenthood; don’t force nuns to give them to you. Buy that crazy anti-abortion lady’s books from some other website; don’t force Amazon to sell them. I believe in the free market – I think most of you actually don’t.

        1. You mean like how you agreed with this comment without stopping to consider whether it was analogous?

      4. yeah, denying healthcare or discriminating against specific people is the same as a company saying they will discontinue a certain product while there are hundreds of alternative products available and easily obtainable. Also, the bar to writing and publishing your own racist children’s book is very low. If it’s so important to you, just go ahead and solve the problem.

      5. Both of those scenarios are examples of a private institution discriminating against someone. You’re not being discriminated against because they’re no longer printing new copies of If I Ran the Zoo.

      6. I’ll put it differently: I think the “do you believe in private property?” comment was in bad faith. I don’t think most commenters here care about private property rights or about rights of free association unless those rights are being used to ends that they agree with. The argument that a Catholic hospital not wanting to provide birth control services is discrimination is ridiculous: discrimination against whom? Not women – not all women take birth control, believe in birth control, or want birth control, and not all people who use birth control are women. A private organization doesn’t want to publish (and by publishing, appear to sanction) books that are racist. A private organization doesn’t want to offer (and by offering, appear to sanction) services it believes are immoral.

        I believe pretty strongly in the rights of private citizens and organizations to do what they want with themselves, even when I disagree with the decision. The Seuss Estate is fully within its rights legally (and personally, I think it was the right decision btw). But given the general logical inconsistency of commenters here when it comes to this issue, excuse me if I don’t believe that you guy have actually suddenly seen the light on the critical role that private property rights play in protecting individual freedom and liberty of conscience.

        1. I don’t think this is about ‘suddenly seeing the light’. This is about conservative judges saying corporations are people and if you don’t want to sell someone a wedding cake then nobody can force you. While turning back rules like this might be a left wing utopia, others are just finding a way to persist within the given set of rules. I don’t see the slippery slope about individual freedom here, unless of course you mean the slippery slope of future generations not getting the chance of developing a myopic view of non-white people and maybe treating them as individuals.

    11. You know Fox News et al are pushing this Dr Seuss story because they don’t want to cover the COVID relief bill, which is enormously popular with the American people but every republican voted against it? They don’t know how to cover that story, so they cover Dr. Seuss.

      Someone declining to continue publishing their own writings is not news, and it is certainly not a weeks-long news story.

      1. Another reason Fox News is going all in is probably because Dr. Seuss resonates with their 3rd-grade reading level audience.

        1. Honestly most of the knee-jerk responses here are 3rd-grade level. “YoU jUsT lOvE rACiSM!!!!1”

      2. They are desperate to keep the indignation train running amongst their viewers. They are not even a news channel anymore. They spent more time covering the Harry interview than they did showing the impeachment trial. Faux outrage is the only currency they have.

  3. I posted on Wednesday about some long-simmering gender discrimination issues in my workplace coming to a boil and asking for some help moving forward with a lawyer. Thank you to everyone who answered and expressed solidarity. 

    Yesterday my (male) boss called and we had a long talk. He reminded me of some things that I had been forgetting, helped me see a little more clearly what he was thinking, acknowledged that he needed to look a little harder to see what I view as patterns of discrimination. We agreed on a path forward for me and my work, which actually makes his job a whole lot harder, and he pledged to try to get me the support and promotion of my work that I have been missing. He is not always the greatest communicator, but he was really trying yesterday. What he said made me understand a little more what he meant about not letting things bother me – I had felt that was incredibly dismissive of a systemic program – but the way he meant it was a little different. A particularly interesting thing was that he really encouraged me to stop thinking about things as I had been and think about them in a different way, which a female colleague and I define as more “the way a guy would.” And it really made sense.

    Yes, I know that this probably sounds a little surprising, or a little hostage-videoy (“he helped me understand…”). I’m being intentionally vague not even to shield my identity or avoid slandering my employer but mostly because I think trying to describe all the weeds in an internet forum often winds up being self-defeating. I’d just ask you all to trust my instinct on this (and my willingness to trust him and the new opportunities in front of me) as much as you trusted what I said on Wednesday.

    With all that said, throughout the day yesterday I took two calls from female coworkers who were reaching out to express very similar frustrations (not as ready to boil as mine, perhaps, but the same impulse) about patterns of sexism that they experience. By the afternoon when I was talking to the second one, I was starting to think about whether we women needed to talk together and move forward in some collective way. I’m not convinced that’s the right path yet, and it would obviously depend on what other people think, but it could potentially be productive. 

    Thank you all again for the good thoughts and for listening and if this is at all helpful to anyone else, so much the better.

    1. In the horror movie Get Out, the main character can sense that something is wrong almost immediately, but repeatedly ignores his own instincts. When he finally accepts what he knew all along – that he is in danger – it is too late. Listen to your instincts. You know something is wrong.

      I wish you the best of luck, but I have seen this story far too many times. I know how it ends. Or hey, maybe you will learn how to think “the way a guy would” and the men will all change how they think, feel, and act in response.

      1. I agree the OP should seriously consider getting out of the situation. The fact that she might not have an actionable gender discrimination case doesn’t mean the discrimination isn’t happening.

    2. Girl, you sound like you’re in a hostage situation. YOU ARE A QUEEN and deserve so much better than this. I know there are Reasons that things aren’t black and white, but still…to an outsider this sounds bad. My biggest piece of career advice is that you can’t talk your way into a good company culture. If things aren’t right, there is no amount of advocacy that can change it. Just leave for greener pastures and be thankful for the experience.

    3. I do think we should trust the poster’s judgment and also encourage her to continue to network with her female colleagues so that they can collectively look for ways to nudge the needle. No workplace is magically free of the legacy of centuries of discrimination, and the advice to just quit every time this happens just isn’t realistic. I would take good notes on what the boss promised, and pull them out and look at them again next year and see where you are.

      1. There are workplaces filled with good but imperfect people who honestly want to improve. Stay at those places and be a part of that change! If OP felt there was widespread discrimination, considered seeing an employment lawyer, and her boss told her that she basically needs to start thinking like a guy, then OP is probably not at one of those places.

      2. Nah, I’m never going to ignore red flags. Let’s just call things out as they appear.

    4. Just remember, you are the one who thought something was wrong enough to post about it here. You are right that you are under no obligation to give us details, but you brought it up. If you trust yourself, then there’s something there that’s not right.

    5. Boss: Just because only men are given promotion opportunities around here doesn’t mean that we’re sexist. You’re just looking at it the wrong way.

      1. This. It’s so easy, when you’re younger or not yet cynical, to believe that an earnest person is being honest. Beware of this. It is indeed possible boss never saw these problems. It’s also possible that boss did see the problems, doesn’t want to lose a good worker (you), but has no intention of changing, championing you or actually speaking up in other parts of the organization to effectuate change. How do you think it makes him look to be accused of sexist behavior? Not great. He has no incentive to broadcast this to others to help them fix it…

        Also, I want to believe that workplaces are woke and that when he says, “Thank you for bringing this to my attention, he means it.” But cynical me does not think this way. Cynical me thinks–this person has now been branded a troublemaker, possibly has put her job in jeopardy by speaking up, and management will not find a (non-protected) way to tell her that she’s “not a good cultural fit” (because you don’t condone sexism!!!) and will work to counsel you out. And if you rope other women into this, you’re not just a troublemaker, you’re some sort of firebrand activist.

        I want to believe he was being honest. But I’ve seen the “troublemaker” scenario play out far more often. It’s wrong. It’s so frustrating. It’s hard. And I am not worried for you, OP. I really would polish your resume and be looking for another job, just in case.

  4. Has anyone had IPL or similar treatment for broken blood vessels? How effective was it?

    I’m so embarrassed of my “whiskey nose” but I’m not seeing any good local reviews. Wondering if it’s something I’d need to drive to a bigger city to do.

    1. I had BBL for mild rosacea, mainly on my cheeks. It really toned down the redness and cleared up the broken capillaries. It’s been probably 18 months to 2 years since I had it done and the results have lasted and I’m very pleased. I had it done at a medspa because I really trust the person who does the procedures and she has a medical degree and background.

    2. I had mine done at a facial plastic surgeons office. I would not risk doing it at a medspa unless I was super confident in the person’s abilities. Definitely would not do it at a place with bad reviews.

      It is worth the drive. I went to a larger city for mine for 3 sessions.

    3. I had real laser, not IPL. I’ve had several treatments over several years. It works but they come back. I also had bruising that meant some down time/heavy coverup makeup. But it was totally worth it. I went to a medical laser facility run by an RN who has an MD on call in the same office complex. Their bread and butter is laser hair removal and tattoo removal (because there’s the most demand for it) but they really enjoy working on skin challenges and have a sub specialty in rosacea treatment. I can’t wait to go again when I am vaccinated!

  5. Does anyone here have any recommendations for favorite This American Life episodes? I loved Aldi’s Golden Ticket and other episodes that are more dramatic than humorous (eg, the squirrel cop one). Would love to hear more great episodes!

    1. 20 Acts in 60 Minutes and 129 Cars are episodes I listen to over and over again. Petty Tyrant is not one I listen to repeatedly but it’s so good.

    2. I loved Seven Things You’re Not Supposed to Talk About. One of the producer’s moms has these strict rules about good topics of conversation (the forbidden topics are supposedly boring), so they make a story about 6 of the 7 things she says you’re never supposed to talk about and then ask the mom what she thought about the stories.

      Another great one is Act V.

      One of my favorite segments of all time was on Ep. 241: 20 acts in 60 Minutes. It’s Act 20, called “The Greatest Moment I Ever Saw on a Stage.” I’m tearing up just typing it right now. It’s stuck with me for YEARS after I cried in the parking garage pulling up to work.

    4. Pretty recent but I really enjoyed Boulder v. Hill, episode 727. My Friday afternoon routine lately has been to listen to TAL live on my local NPR channel while cleaning my apartment. It’s the best part of my week, weirdly.

    5. The Problem We All Live With – Part 1 & Part 2
      Switched At Birth
      Anatomy of Doubt
      If You Don’t Have Anything Nice To Say, Say It In All Caps
      Right to Remain Silent

    6. Ahh…. great question.

      I really love the early episodes, when Ira Glass was doing more of the interviewing and story telling from his own life sometimes. He is less involved now, and I miss him.

      I would go to their website and look at their classic episodes/producer recommended episodes. Just go through all of them. Classic episodes like the Cruelty of Children are such a great example of the show, and even better, include a story from David Sedaris. Break Up is lovely. And I am still deeply touched every time I listen to Shoulda Been Dead.

      And that cop telling the story about the squirrel is legendary and has also been on the radio show The Moth. If you haven’t been listening to the Moth, you should check it out. All story telling.

  6. We talked about saving $ on groceries a while back I think and Aldi / Lidl didn’t come up. My city has both now but they are both a 30+ minute car ride, so further than a Walmart that has a large food section (it seems to have mostly Very Large Quantities of normal groceries, like if you need a package of 50 granola bars, so maybe good for day cares and sports teams, as well as smaller typical packages of the same items). Are Aldi / Lidl more like a Trader Joe’s with really awesome special items? Or just a low-frills place where you BYO bags? Our Costo seems to fill the cheaper/large quantities/specialty items buckets, but in these times, I don’t really need large quantities or specialty items (no entertaining, no need for a dozen limes, no need for sheet cakes). I’m all about saving a $, but maybe I just need a quarterly trip to Wal*mart or Costo to sock up on staples and do my weekly shopping closer to home.

    [I never go to Trader Joe’s now — there is always a line to get in regardless of time of day and I’m convinced it’s because everyone WFH that there is no post-lunch lull when you can just zip in.]

    1. Just chiming in to say that it took me months to brave the Trader Joe’s line. And when I did? It’s great! There’s no longer a line to check out and I’m out of there faster overall. Ymmv of course, but just my experience.

    2. In the UK, they are no frills, but significantly cheaper. I do about 40% of our shopping at Aldi, get bulk stuff from a fair trade place online, and the rest at our local farm shops. I’m an optimizer and the limited choice is helpful since there are only 2-3 choices of things. I prefer Lidl to Aldi, but not sure if it’s the same in the US.
      Not sure if this is a California thing, but Grocery Outlet has had a makeover since I was a kid. Went with my mom last time we were visiting and it was great. It might be location dependent, this was chi chi Walnut Creek.

      1. Just FYI, the Grocery Outlet in my town has been getting lots of hate on Nextdoor for not taking precautions other stores are taking and are mandated here for things like requiring masks, ensuring distancing, etc. It might be worth checking out local reports before going.

    3. My SILs swear by Aldi, and when he shopped with them during a visit my husband was shocked at how much food they got for the money. I tried it and didn’t end up buying anything because they didn’t have most of what was on my list. It seemed like a place for supplemental shopping of whatever random stuff they happened to have in stock at the moment, rather than a primary source for basic staples and fresh groceries.

      Now that curbside pickup is available at several local stores, apparently without a price markup, I compare prices on line and order from Kroger and Walmart depending on who has what I want cheaper. Once my vaccine kicks in I’ll go back to biweekly TJ’s shops and go in to Publix for fresh produce because curbside pickup seems to be a dumping ground for rotten produce. Not messing with Aldi or Lidl.

    4. Try Walmart Neighborhood Market. It is basically a real grocery store with a smaller produce section.

    6. I LOVE Aldi. It’s the closest grocery store to my house (walking distance, in NOVA – the closest Lidl is farther so I haven’t been). I love it for many reasons, but one that is not often mentioned here is that it’s FAST. Most have like 6 aisles. There’s only so much time you can spend in it (good for COVID, good for being busy in regular times).

      It is small like a Trader Joes, and has probably 98% house brands. It’s super cheap, and there’s not a lot of decision-making you need to do (there’s one brown mustard, no deciding between sizes and brands or waiting for a sale. While it can have some large packages, it’s not a bulk store like Costco.

      The most fun part is the ‘aisle of shame,’ which is fun random stuff that changes every week. (It has food, house stuff, pet stuff, whatever stuff). The rotating aisle of shame keeps it fun, and prevents the limited selection from feeling soviet-limited and more just capsule-wardrobe roations. The special items can be awesome (German week! Great greeting cards for $1) or lame (I don’t care for their kitchen/house stuff).

      That said, their produce selection isn’t super broad, and I like to supplement with Hungry Harvest to keep up variety. I have also not been to a TJs in over a year, and do costco quarerly-ish.

      1. It is shockingly fast! I make my quick loop for produce/eggs/organic milk, and then do a quick spin through their seasonal and frozen sections. I am almost always out in under 10 minutes — the cashiers are lightning-quick and because you bag your own groceries, there’s no extra delay. I have lost my tolerance for slow cashiers at other stores thanks to Aldi.

    7. I find at my local Aldi, I can never 100% rely on them having something I need that would be default elsewhere, such as plain canned black beans or tomato sauce. They have a small stock. So it is not where I do my main weekly shop. But I do love stopping in to grab some stuff I forgot.
      They do have some fun random items, but they seem to be one off luck of the draw things. Last week I bought some frozen marinated swordfish fillets that were delicious. Never seen them before.
      I also like getting my chocolate there. They stock a couple of European brands for a good price.

    8. Aldi is no frills, at least for the couple I’ve been to. No awesome special items like TJ’s although I did like Aldi’s pain au chocolat for cheap prices. I don’t have an Aldi near me so I’m sticking with TJ and Costco until farmers markets start back up soon.

    9. Aldi and Trader Joe’s aren’t under the same parent company (common misconception) and I don’t think they’re that similar. Aldi is a discount store has limited variety in things and doesn’t replace the grocery store for me, but it does satisfy all the basics. I kind of like browsing the aisle of random household crap that Aldi has in the middle .

      I honestly really like the Trader Joe’s line. It’s annoying having to wait but you’re no longer crammed inside with a million people running into you blocking all the aisles. It’s worth the wait.

      1. This is a Covid thing that will go away. I am going to miss one way aisles, it’s made shopping so much faster!

    10. I buy as much as I can at Trader Joe’s to keep our spend down. I think Aldi has lower quality food than Trader Joe’s, and what they had was so random I could not get most of our staples.

    11. We don’t find Aldi to be that useful. As others have mentioned, the stock is hit or miss so you can’t rely on it for staples. The produce is typically not great (bagged salad that already looks limp and brown at our local store).

      We mostly shop at TJ and supplement with meat and more produce from the local market and pantry staples from a typical grocery store.

    12. I shop at an ethnic supermarket where you can hear about 10 different languages spoken while you shop. They stock seven or eight kinds of pepper, a dozen kinds of feta (I counted once), more unusual meats, lots of variety in general in the canned goods section as well as the fresh produce. Same brand names, waaaay cheaper than other stores.

  7. I’ve seen articles and comments here saying that eating indoors at a restaurant is very risky. Does anyone know if the studies differentiate between people who eat indoors with only their own households vs mixed households? I’m wondering if the people who get Covid in restaurants are getting it from people at their own table or the air in general.

    1. No they don’t because the answer is simple and doesn’t merit wasting time on. Eating indoors is a fantastic way to get Covid and choosing to do it unvaccinated is stupid.

      1. +1. That’s how I see it too. This is an area where we can preserve our valuable, limited mental energy. I don’t debate every day whether I should skip the seatbelt – I just wear it, no question. I don’t weigh the pros and cons of mountain biking at high speeds without my helmet – I don’t do it. Not eating indoors right now should be the easiest decision you make all pandemic. Why give yourself unnecessary decision fatigue where safer, easier, and pleasant alternatives exist? I don’t get it at all.

    2. I don’t have a link because I read it a months ago, but there was a contact tracing study showing transmission between people at different tables. The transmission was because patrons were “downwind” from an infected person in the air’s path to the HVAC system, if that makes any sense.

      1. Erin Bromage wrote about it in May.

        We aren’t dining indoors until we are vaccinated.

        1. I’m vaccinated and not eating indoors until every adult has a shot or herd immunity or cases are at rock bottom level. But I’m immune compromised so more at risk.

          1. Same and I’m not immune compromised. I just see it as very high risk and very low reward. There are lots of things I’m desperate to do after a year of isolation but eating indoors is not one of them, especially considering it’s almost patio season.

          2. I’ve also just been eating really, really well while stuck at home with nothing else whatsoever to do!

    3. It’s less risky because you are with your own household but it is still risky. You are unmasked in an enclosed space with non-household people. The variants in particular are much more transmissible. Our public health recently recommended that teachers wear face shields in addition to face masks because of the highly transmissible variants.

    4. Anecdata here. DH and I have been “dining in’ since our state (VA) allowed it last June. Once per week, and we mask/distance as required. Put our masks back on when the waiter approaches. We had no issues until recently, as cases have been declining. We ate out with one friend, at a restaurant that had a lower ceiling than others we generally go to. We got Covid, and so did our friend. All got sick on the same timeline, so I don’t think we got it from the friend. I think the ventilation in the restaurant wasn’t great, and another table probably passed it on, even though they were distanced from us. So IMHO it’s less risky if you’re only with your household, in a high-ceiling, well ventilated space, and more risky gathering with friends or going somewhere less well ventilated. FWIW DH and I are/were comfortable with the risks involved, and were not doing anything not allowed in our state. For us getting sick wasn’t great fun, but we are fine now. YMMV.

      1. Yes we did all tell you indoor dining was stupid and a good way to get covid and we were right.

      2. Thank you for illustrating why dining indoors during a pandemic is a risky activity.

      3. You have no idea how many other people might have been infected in those nice airy restaurants. Allowed in the state =/ good practice.

      4. This may be obvious, but I feel compelled to point our that your ‘We had no issues until recently’-anecdata does not reflect the lowness of the risk. It means that you got lucky a bunch of times in a row. It’s like experts telling you, there is a one-in six chance to roll a six on a dice roll, but you roll 10 times and never get the six, so you feel it’s much less likely to happen than it is.

        1. Yes, this. I know someone who has been partying, traveling, in bars, seeing friends the entire pandemic and then got Covid at a haircut. It doesn’t mean haircuts are riskier than all the other stuff. It just means they got horribly unlucky with the haircut and incredibly lucky with all the other stuff.

      5. I’m sorry to laugh at you being sick, but honestly, coming on here to tell everyone that restaurant dining is safe and then admitting you got COVID from a restaurant is comedy gold.

    5. It’s very risky. There were lots of early studies about transmission between different tables via HVAC and that was before the more transmissible variants. The combo of 1) indoors, 2) no masks and 3) close proximity to the same people for up to an hour, is a dangerous combination. For reference, I’m vaccinated and planning flying, hotel stays, outdoor dining and theater (if it’s open) this summer but I have zero plans to do indoor dining and am not sure when I will.

    6. On a similar note, I’ve been wondering about stats on restaurant workers, particularly servers. They are around unmasked patrons all day. Are they getting sick at an extraordinary rate? I’m sure someone will respond to insist that they are certain that they are and I’m a fool for asking, but I’d like to see some actual data, not just what “seems” to be true.

      1. rest assured, if there was data that servers were dying at a high rate, we would see it. we have not seen it, because it does not exist.

        this is an invitation for someone to prove me wrong with legit data. drop a link.

      2. I’m curious about data on this too but I would point out a couple things -1) they are masked and often in face shields and gloves as well, which provides some protection to them – not perfect but certainly not zero – and 2) they are moving around a lot, going between outside and inside and not sitting next to an infected person for an hour straight. People really underestimate how much the duration of contact matters for transmission.

      3. In my immediate acquaintance, servers have fared badly (despite their own masks). I haven’t seen stats.

      5. Servers are also probably staying masked, unlike diners, so it seems like they have a slight advantage within the dining room. But I have seen that restaurant employees are getting hit hard.

          3. They don’t protect the wearer as much as they protect others near the wearer, but they offer some protection to the wearer, particularly if the contact with the infected person is quick.

      6. My brother is a bartender in a restaurant, and he knows a number of coworkers who have gotten sick (or thought they did, but didn’t test) but didn’t disclose it because they don’t get any sort of sick leave and they get a ton of pressure from management not to call out and they also don’t have insurance. If they did disclose it, the restaurant expected them to be back on the job in a week (!) or be fired. I called the health department anonymously and all they did was call and ask the owners if they were following guidance with zero follow up. This is in a blue area of a blue state.

      7. My pool is small, but of the 5 people I know who work in person at grocery stores or restaurants, all have had COVID. They were not doing other things, so99% sure they got it from work. They say most of their coworkers have had it too.

    7. It’s from the air in general. COVID-19 is airborne, as we’ve known for months, and most places do not have adequate ventilation. I’m looking forward to doing a few more things once I’m vaccinated, but indoor dining isn’t going to be one of them – it’s just too risky according to all the evidence we have available and there are plenty of safer alternatives, like takeout or outdoor dining with good spacing. Why is it worth it just to be inside? I get why people want to eat restaurant food, but why do you want to be inside?

    8. It seems Iike you would just need one super contagious person there to potentially infect everyone. We do have antidotes about that. The majority of places will be warm enough for outdoor dining soon anyway, right? I don’t really care about indoor dining so it doesn’t seem worth the risk to me (if you’re still highly susceptible to COVID, ie never had it or the vaccine), but YRMV.

    9. There isn’t good large scale population data on this because the contact tracing data, particularly in this country (US) has been garbage throughout. But there have been case studies documenting particular restaurant outbreaks (there was one in March or April 2020 from a restaurant in China) showing how air flow/ventilation systems can move the virus from table to table.
      As with all things, there’s no absolute risk, just a spectrum. I’d put the spectrum at:
      Lowest: Dining at your own house with your household
      Low: Dining outdoors at your own house with your own friends/family (assuming everyone actually does not go inside! and if they do, masks up)
      Also Low: Dining outdoors at a restaurant with just your household at the table
      Middle: Dining outdoors at a restaurant with people from another household at your same table
      Much Higher: Dining indoors at a restaurant with only your household at the table
      High: Dining indoors at a restaurant with one other household at the table
      Highest: Dining indoors at a restaurant with multiple households at the table.

      Of course, there’s a ton of other variables. How exposed are the other households you are dining with? What is the case load in your area? At the end of the day, you can do everything “wrong” and it can be fine…i.e. if you go to a 100% full restaurant and dine indoors with some friends at your table on a day when no one else dining there has COVID, you won’t get it.

      But I’d come down on the side of Kitten- it’s finally getting warm enough to do some pleasant outdoor dining in most of the country, and we probably can all get our first dose of the vaccine within the next 3-4 months…I’d stay out of indoor dining until then, especially with the new unknowns of the variants.

      1. This is really well written, thanks. I had to explain to friends recently why I didn’t want to have dinner with them in an igloo (so functionally inside).

        1. Are you just looking for support for doing whatever you’re going to do anyway?

          500,000+ people are dead. They’re not coming back. They’re dead. That’s an enormous, extraordinary change in mortality in our country and there’s no denying that.

        3. I don’t know why you don’t trust the data from China – to the extent the govt was lying, it was in the opposite direction (suppressing info about Covid risk) and it was the government/state media downplaying the virus, not scientists publishing in peer-reviewed journals. But here’s a very similar study from South Korea: https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2020/12/15/this-is-how-quickly-covid-19-can-spread-in-a-restaurant-per-new-study

          The CDC has also said in the US adults who have dined in a restaurant are twice as likely to test positive for Covid as adults who don’t. But it could be correlation more than causation (i.e., adults who are fine with indoor dining also do other risky stuff). My county health department does pretty decent contact tracing and has said that the #1 identified source of Covid transmission was gatherings with family and friends and #2 was bars and restaurants, so there’s that.

  8. I’ve had a situation at work where someone not doing her job has prevented me from doing mine. Let’s say she puts handles on teapots and I paint the teapots. The handles need to be on the teapot first. (For those that don’t read Ask A Manager, Teapot maker is a default analogy there.) So, I’ve tried to address the problem six ways to Sunday one on one, with supervisors and in meetings and nothing was being done about it.

    Finally, I sent an email to my boss and office manager basically saying I’m beyond frustrated but I can’t do ABC until other person does XYZ and I’m out of ideas on how to get it done. (I don’t have the authority to discipline her.)

    So, this prompted a Zoom in which my boss scolds me and says I should have requested a phone call rather than putting things in an email because it looks like I’m trying to make a record documenting the situation. Uhhh — so what if I was? I should have every right to make documentation about a situation that is causing me to not be able to do my job. I mean, really dude? That’s your takeaway from this whole thing?

    It’s actually comical. “Stop documenting things that make me look bad.”

    1. OMG my boss does this to me too. She puts everything in an e-mail, but gets mad if I do.

    2. Well, that is valuable feedback, it sounds like your approach isn’t effective at your organization. Maybe that’s part of the problem you’re having with teapot handle maker, too. A lot of being effective isn’t that you’re a good teapot painter, but how you get along and work with others. You demonstrated an instinct for a “documentation” email (can be seen as petty, especially when it’s not your job to document a colleague) instead of collaborative and willing to talk to work things out.

      1. OP says that she has raised the issues with supervisors and in meetings before documenting the problem. This sounds less like an organizational culture issue, and more like an ineffective manager who doesn’t want a paper trail about the ineffectiveness.

      2. But sometimes (a lot of times) managers don’t manage. Rather than dealing with an issue, they are babies about it and just want other employees to bear the fall out.

    3. Do they care if your job gets done late? I mean at certain levels you do what you can do and if it doesn’t get done because of a dependency that’s not met then that’s your manager’s problem.

    4. That’s infuriating, but frankly, I would take it as a sign that you did something right. I once had to send an email like that because my then-company tried to institute a new break policy (without checking with me first) that violated applicable wage and hour laws, and I’m the labor and employment attorney. If you send me something like that in writing, I’m going to have to respond in writing. Like it’s literally my job. Be glad I didn’t reply all because I would have if I were higher up the food chain.

  9. What makes an area feel “unsafe” for you?
    There have been a few threads on the topic of traveling alone and the idea of a “safe” area seems to differ quite a bit. The threads got me thinking back on when female coworkers/acquaintances would mention that the area near our office wasn’t safe. Our office was in the financial district of a large city. The area was well lit had security officers everywhere, and was filled with bustling businesses. I never felt unsafe for one moment (even around the occasional homeless person) and always noticed the difference in our levels of unease. I assumed that they just didn’t feel comfortable outside of their exurb communities. How about you all? Does an area “feel” unsafe when the buildings are shabby? When there are groups of males loitering? When there are homeless people? Can an area feel unsafe to you when none of these things are present? Do you feel unsafe in all city centers? How much of feeling safe is tied to structural upkeep, landscaping, or demographics?

    1. My grocery store has a guy on a bike who silently comes up to you, gets very close, and demands money. He has threatened my husband. When I go to the store, I scan the parking lot for me and the last time I was at the store, he was parked outside the entrance. I am about to quit this store as I feel like he at some point will take what he isn’t given (I don’t even carry cash now that most businesses won’t accept it), which is either my phone (has card wallet) or my keys. He crosses a lot of lines for me, safety-wise.

      I have a sibling in Memphis: daytime security guards in grocery store parking lots. It just says to me “unsafe at any time of day,” which is sad.

    2. Why are the men (why do people say “males”?) loitering? Are they hoping to get picked up for day labor? Or hanging out where they are otherwise tending to be with friends? Or something else?

      When I lived in dense housing, I would hang out on my front steps, as did many others (often men in groups, sometimes with a beer or a cigarette). That was our social space, not an episode of The Wire.

      1. Not that poster, but homeless people are not a monolith. There are some in my city who target people walking alone, particularly women, and are aggressive and threatening. Definitely in the evening, but I was on a side street with few storefronts at lunch and got so aggressively pursued that I ran until I got to a CVS.

      3. I really don’t but I can see how the wording of my comment kinda implies that I do. I’ve met many people who are AFRAID of being anywhere near visibly homeless. I’m not.

        1. Denizens of People’s Park in Berkeley (a large, long-standing homeless population) stabbed two people over the weekend who just happened to be walking in the area. I think some reasonable fear is necessary and safe. A lot of these people are dealing with a combination of drug snd mental health issues.

          1. Police were called to People’s Park over 1,500 times in 2018. That’s JUST for stuff that rose to the level of needing police attention and that’s just one year. I 100% support the university building dorms there instead – it’s too far gone.

      4. I live in the Bay Area where there is a massive homeless population.

        Indeed, there are plenty of homeless people that do not warrant being afraid of in any way.

        However, there are many that have severe mental problems, are on heavy drugs, are very scary, and do not live in the reality that you and I live in. There have been numerous assaults and attacks on completely innocent bystanders here, I could cite some but don’t have the energy or time to sit and find all the links. I’m sure a Google search would be sufficient. Sometimes it’s easy to spot who these are, and sometimes it’s not obvious until you are within a foot of them. In these instances, I’m sorry but you are a fool if you put yourself in danger’s way by not being extra alert and giving plenty of space to just prove a point to yourself that you aren’t afraid of homeless person generally.

        To be clear, my heart breaks for all of them whether it is a mentally healthy person down on their luck, or a not mentally well person that clearly is not getting or sticking to the help that they clearly need. But that doesn’t mean you are a bad person when your guard is WAY up during certain encounters. It should be.

        1. I was going to say basically exactly this (and you said it better). My office is located in an area with a large population of chronic homeless. The reason many of them are homeless is that they are mentally ill and/or hard core drug addicts. I feel badly for them but that does not mean I do not get someone from security to walk me to my car when I leave after 6 pm

    4. I feel really safe in my current neighborhood because my neighbors are CLOSE. And it’s a front porch, not a backyard, kind of neighborhood.

      One night a man camped out on our porch leaving behind half a deli sandwich, a box cutter, and some empty bottles of booze. My neighbors apparently called the cops, but we slept through the whole thing.

      My parents love the idea of having no neighbors around but it freakes me out. Years and years ago an entire family was tortured and murdered in the two acre zoned fancy area of our town. No one heard a sound. It’s just emotional because both areas are statistically very safe, but I never want to live without neighbors.

      1. That’s unsettling, isn’t it? I’ve found evidence of people spending time in my car, on my front porch, and in my backyard.

      2. Years ago my friend’s neighbor whose wall adjoined hers (one apartment faced south and the other north) was murdered inside the apartment and my friend didn’t hear a peep. Having close neighbors doesn’t necessary protect you.

    5. Maybe it’s because I’ve lived in NYC for the last 15+ years but I actually feel safer in most urban centers than I do in less populated areas. “Safe” to me means, significant amounts of foot traffic, occupied buildings, people = eyes to see things going wrong. “Unsafe” means someone unknown paying attention to me or engaging with me particularly. I’ll admit I tend to be uncomfortable when there are large groups of men. I got on a crowded subway car a few months ago and it was somehow all men (several dozen) and like one other woman. Put the hairs on the back of my neck straight up, even though no one said or did anything and in reality I was perfectly safe. I will say, I think NYC has (at least historically) a level of safety that has thrown my calibration off in other locations, so I may just be terrible at evaluating danger.

    6. Very few people around, quite simply. That’s why New York always feels safe. I am not saying it’s right, but you asked for “feel.”

      1. hello from nyc, it does not feel safe all the time anymore. i was walking by madison square park last night (gorgeous night) around 8:45pm. there were people out but not in a good way. i was freaked out and had to go home. bad vibes.

      2. Very much depends on the area. One of the scariest places in NYC is the financial district at night, because it is just EMPTY empty. You might not see one other person in five blocks.

    7. Homeless men on heroin. If you’ve ever walked through the San Francisco Civic Center BART station, you know what I’m talking about.

    8. Are men leering at me? Is there a low level of street light? Not a lot of people out? Are there random people loitering in dark corners, and when I pass by, do they stare? Do people follow me around? Do I have to look behind me when I reach my building before I open my the door to my building?
      Is there a noticeable shift in daytime vs nighttime vibe on the street?
      Basically, if something could happen to me and no one else would notice.

    9. I live in a walking/public transportation city (ie not someplace people are going door to door in a car) and feel safer in neighborhoods that have storefront businesses open until 9-10PM or later. Residential neighborhoods that are well lit and have either students out and about in the evening or families walking dogs early or late in the day also help too. When things look more rundown or are poorly lit I start feeling a little less comfortable. Much more so if there are needles on the ground, or dark alleys etc.

      In my city the financial district is incredibly safe from ~6 AM – 7 PM on weekdays but actively unsafe at other times of the day or week (most restaurants, stores, etc are closed, no residential real estate so no passerbys).

    10. Rooming houses make me feel incredibly unsafe. The vermin, the trash, the yelling, the drugs/needles, the property damage, the police presence, all of it is just so very unsettling as a small woman. I avoid them at all costs but unfortunately some are in central/desirable locations.

    11. It’s hard to say. Generally, as Jane Jacob pointed out, what makes pedestrians feel safe is a combo of the density of population constantly walking on the street at all times, as well as residents with street view who feel ownership over the sidewalks. If it’s NYC FiDi you’re thinking of, it’s actually not that safe under Jacobs’ standard, because there is very little traffic at night and on the weekends, and high rise buildings make it harder for residents to police sidewalks. That said, I’ve been on populated streets in Gramercy and GV in NYC, where mentally unstable homeless men kept following me and tried to hit me. Perhaps the fact that there were other people on the side wall helped prevent worse things from happening to me, but I can’t tell. I’ve also been at a perfectly safe suburban grocery store and felt a guy who kept following me everywhere and gave me the creeps. So a lot of times it comes down to a basic instinct as well, and ignoring that instinct is dangerous.

      1. +1, I live downtown and walking on a seemingly-empty street alone at night gives me the jitters even if it is a “nice” (well maintained, expensive real estate) area. An area that empties out at night isn’t fun to walk.

        1. Yes! I’m also in Philly and an area like Market St feels erie after dark, but 100% safe during the day.

          1. I generally feel safe in Philly but after one of my friends was almost beaten to death in a “nice” area I’ve had to acknowledge that anything can happen. I know it was a random act of violence but it really shook me up.

      2. This. I HATE working late in offices in financial districts that completely shut down at night. Even the 3-4 block walk back to my hotel puts me on edge because there is nobody. In the W in Chicago’s financial district the Starbucks we were closest to closed on the weekends, which was insane to me, but there really is no ‘residential’ traffic to speak of.

        1. I am also in Chicago. During the pandemic, I switched my schedule at work from 7-3 because I have to take the L and that lets me avoid rush hour. I am really enjoying not leaving work late in the evenings, because the evenings felt creepy and I was always on edge walking to the station. The latest I leave now is 4:30. I like it enough that I plan to keep the schedule from now on. Although it is dark in the mornings at 7 for part of the winter, downtown is already active and moving by then, so it doesn’t feel unsafe.

    12. Darkness, homeless people, lurking MEN (homeless or not), no other women around, secluded areas.

    13. Drug dealers do not make me feel unsafe. I’ve worked a few jobs in the community early in my career and they were actually a great source of information and protection. If I didn’t bother their livelihood, they wouldn’t bother mine.

      The post you are referring to from yesterday was regarding vacations. I had to do some deep soul searching but I realized some of the places I felt less safe vacationing were predominately black communities where I did not speak the language. I realize that is incredibly racist but it was a subconscious type of racism. Our media has always portrayed black males as threatening. That gets into our psyches even if it isn’t true. I think the poster who said she thought Bermuda was unsafe probably felt that way because it is a predominantly black country, even if she didn’t realize this was why.

      When I play out places I felt unsafe versus places that actually were unsafe, I think the only one that was actually unsafe was the part of Jamaica our cruise docked in where tons of people were trying to sell us drugs, not taking no as an answer, following us, grabbing our shoulders, etc.

      The other places, I was just around cultures I was not familiar with and that made me on edge even if for not justifiable reasons. Now that I’m aware of it, I’m working on it.

      1. I also have experience working with drug dealers. They tend to be exceptionally affable, tall men with good social skills, none of which is surprising. They tend not to be threatening physically, but they are predatory toward vulnerable people. So it’s similar to how I view cops as a white woman: I’ve never had a bad experience myself, but I recognize that they’re a problem for others.

        1. Oh absolutely! I meant I do not personally feel unsafe around them. I understand why others do.

    14. High crime rates, unregulated tent cities on streets and taking over all public spaces, rows of tents blocking the sidewalk and obstructing the view from the street, lots of men standing around all the time making creepy comments and watching me walk by, DA who is soft on crime, policy of releasing violent criminals from custody, drug dealers everywhere, and literal trash and human feces everywhere. The demographics don’t affect my feeling but I’m rarely harassed by women, Asians, or Latinos (despite the fact that they make up a majority of the population here). Oh wait that’s my city. I pretty much feel safer anywhere else I go, including “third world countries”. Yes I’m planning to leave.

      1. Hello, fellow SF resident! I’m leaving too. The city has allowed the “rights” of a small segment of the population to completely dominate the city to the detriment of everyone else, especially women, and I’m done with it.

          1. It’s too bad because it’s an amazing city in other ways, but the balance has shifted for me. I can’t get on board with city-wide policies that continue to spectacularly fail and that still receive nonstop support from the Democrats in power. I’m a Democrat, I believe in progressive principles, I vote Democrat, and even I am seeing how the failure of bipartisan solutions and ideas is destroying our streets. This has illustrated for me more than anything else that one party having a stranglehold on city and state politics does not produce good solutions. It’s not for lack of money, either – the city has a >$350M budget for homeless services (that’s direct funding only, not other funding like for street cleaning) and our streets still look like an actual garbage dump. Children living in cramped apartments in the Tenderloin couldn’t go outside safely during the pandemic because of the rampant open-air drug dealing dominating the streets.

          2. There are A LOT of people who choose living on the streets over transitioning into housing of any kind. I live in Berkeley and it’s an ongoing problem here, and Berkeleyans are the biggest bleeding heart voters ever and will always, always pass any ballot propositions asking for money for the homeless. But there are too many people not interested in being homed. That’s where their rights start to infringe on mine and I’m not cool with it.

        2. SF is awful. I moved a while ago but was back there for a business trip in 2018 and during the four block walk from my hotel to the meeting location, I saw people defecating on the street and shooting up what I assume is heroin, not to mention all the catcalling and street harassment. This was in the central business district (SoMA area), which happens to be adjacent to the worst neighborhood in the city. I think a major reason why SF is so unpleasant to visit is that there’s basically no separation between the bad areas and the areas where business people and tourists spend time. I spend a lot of time in both NYC and Chicago and they both seem to have much more separation between the business/tourist areas and the bad neighborhoods.

        1. Yea LA, although I have family (and work) in SF and it’s bad there too. This city is no longer suitable for low or middle class working families, in my opinion. Handicapped people who need to use the sidewalks (and can’t just jump on and off into the street like I do) and low income families who rely on parks as a space to bring their kids and have family gatherings are supposed to just go f&*$ themselves I guess. There are still some nice neighborhoods but the city is unable to do anything about homeless encampments so they pop up. It literally look like a zombie movie outside where I live. I was considering purchasing a condo in an affluent neighborhood a few years ago that now has a large tent city in it. A home is a huge investment for me on my own so it’s just too risky to buy here. Look at the “streetpeopleoflosangeles” insta if you want to see pics. It’s not an exaggeration or anomaly, I see stuff like that daily. Inland is better but if I’m going to be that far from the beach I’ll just move to a cheaper city. I’m not woke enough to live here.

      5. + 1. We were planning on retiring in SF because we love all of the activities the city has offered, but we have put that on hold until the voters in SF get their act together and get rid of the DA and other city officials who have actively abetted this situation. The homeless and drug crazed do not have the right to take over all of the public spaces. It’s particularly dangerous for any group of people seen as likely targets; the elderly, women, etc.

    15. I like to travel alone, and where I feel safe or unsafe depends a lot on the country. I do get harassed at home (Scandi) as well, but the kind of people who harass me are different in different countries. I generally feel safe at all times at home, but do avoid a few streets where I have regularly been harassed. But that’s a few streets in the whole of the country.

      I feel less safe overall in countries where macho cultures are a thing. I have been on the receiving end of a lot of hissing, spitting, shouting, touching, stalking and indecent exposure – in broad daylight – in normal tourist areas in various places in Southern Europe, for example. I have friends who are never harassed anywhere, and who are always shocked by my experiences. I do get approached a lot for more friendly reasons as well, old ladies, children and tourists seem to latch on easily.

      General places I feel less safe, are around areas like the big central railway or bus stations late at night, or areas where there are a lot of men (no point in pretending this isn’t about men) hanging around with no purpose. I mean people who are displaced or in a bad situation where the only thing can really do are hanging around, often very traumatized from terrible experiences as refugees from war zones etc. I support their need for help and welcome them, but yes, they can make me feel very unsafe in some city areas.

      I do consider things like street lights, flight routes, 24h shops, wider streets, traffic etc. when walking around at night, and have no problem changing routes or grabbing a taxi if I get a bad feeling. I never wear headphones, and walk with purpose. But I do walk around, and I do take public transport at night. I don’t feel safer if there are cctv or security officers, but regular people and normal activities is good, police are good (and unarmed where I live!). I don’t feel unsafe around addicts, but prefer not to pass known sales places at night. I prefer street walk ups to locked inner courtyards in city centres. I think the only time I’ve felt unsafe around homeless people anywhere was downtown in a major city in the US, where a group of homeless men in a campsite started shouting at me when I walked by (mid-day). In terms of landscaping, I think having sight-lines and alternate routes possible it the main boost in safety.

    16. Things that make me feel safer: lots of pedestrians, neighborhoods with close together houses and lights on or businesses open late (when walking/running after dark), being near other women, rainbow flags (I’m gay), police officers (which I realize reflects my privilege as a white woman). I also feel safer traveling alone in English speaking countries because I feel like I’m better able to navigate or ask for help.

      Things that make me feel unsafe: people arguing or fighting, neighborhoods without sidewalks (even if the houses are very expensive), groups of bored teenage boys, poor/no lighting, lots of boarded up windows (when I’m walking/running at night), streets with lots of fast-moving vehicle traffic, confederate flags or similar imagery, the presence of street sex workers (I’m not afraid of the workers themselves, but I am afraid of their prospective customers), and people acting erratically (darting out into traffic, taking their clothes off in public, muttering under their breath about how they want to kill my dog and wear his skin). Panhandlers make me feel unsafe once they start following me, yelling at me, or trying to touch me but I don’t feel like a neighborhood is unsafe just because someone asks me for money or is sleeping outside.

      Generally I feel much safer in urban areas than rural areas, but there are definitely certain areas of my city’s downtown that I avoid.

    17. I have never lived somewhere objectively unsafe or where I felt unsafe. But I’ve also had a ton of bad experiences in safe neighborhoods (mostly while commuting via public transit). I thought I loved public transit, but I haven’t missed the bad experiences and have noticed my stress levels falling since I haven’t needed to commute.

      1. During the day, I actually feel safer on public transit than I do in a cab or rideshare.

        1. I’m definitely counting some taxi and rideshare experiences. 98% of the time every thing is completely fine in my low crime university town. But I’ve also found it very hard (even just physically) to get away from someone (always a man) on a crowded bus. Even harder to get away from a driver, for sure.

    18. This thread made me think about feeling safe or unsafe around homeless people. If folks are just hanging out minding their own business I don’t bat an eye. I see this every day at work (in before times) and I’ve never had a problem, it never even occurred to me to feel unsafe. When someone is lurking somewhere to try to corner me, even if I’m in my car, I feel less safe. I’ve had too many bad experiences with hyper aggressive panhandlers, I guess. And fwiw I doubt all panhandlers are homeless, there are plenty of urban legends about people with day jobs doing it just to make extra cash. But I wonder if that’s what people mean when they say they feel less safe around “homelessness” – the badgering panhandlers not the people minding their own business napping on a park bench or whatever.

      1. That’s a really good distinction. I feel the same way you do. I don’t feel unsafe because of panhandling or being near an area where homeless people congregate. I’d also see this on my daily commute. I did feel unsafe when signed out and followed by panhandlers; which has happened a few times.

        1. I feel safe 80% of time when I’m near work, which has a very high concentration of people experiencing homelessness. But the times I don’t feel safe is when it’s unpredictable- someone yelling and screaming and throwing indiscriminate punches at nothing. Fighting on the sidewalk in front of me. A large group of men who are clearly on something stronger than alcohol or weed. I also don’t feel safe when I feel like someone is watching me- one guy near my apartment definitely knows where I live (it was 100% unavoidable) and he stares at me really intently from dark corners, entrances, etc when I walk the dog, always wearing full black and drinking from a very large beer. He also just lurks around my building- he freaks out all the women in the area.

      2. We are around homeless people all the time and don’t know it–the woman checking you out at CVS might be living in a women’s shelter, your pizza delivery guy is crashing on a friend’s couch, etc. I’m happy to pay taxes to support transitional assistance to these people. The most visible are the unfortunately the mentally ill and drug addicted people roaming the streets. There’s been a guy making supernaturally loud gagging noises all night this week. His stamina could only be the result of meth. My building has repeatedly called the police because he is literally keeping people on the 9th floor awake all night, but this guy refuses services and the police can’t force him. He’ll probably eventually pass out or get hit by a car and end up in a hospital, then dumped off somewhere nearby. :(

      3. Yeah, that’s certainly what I mean. And I also think there is a stereotype that most of the homeless we encounter in the street are like Jewel, a nice white girl down on her luck. The functional homeless are largely in shelters or living in cars, or in relatively tidy tent camps. The street homeless are non-functional due to a toxic combination of drugs and untreated mental health problems and are more dangerous.

      4. +1. I live across the road from a homeless shelter. It’s not a big deal. Most of the folks there have jobs or are elderly/disabled. Others are in recovery or dealing with family stuff. Before the shelter moved in, the building was abandoned. It looks better now than it has in years.
        To hear some of the NIMBYS in my ‘hood, though, you’d think it was a scene from The Walking Dead. Honestly, I’m more leery of my housed neighbors, some of whom have made loud statements about “standing their ground” and “not backing down”. If I was out for a run and got hurt or encountered trouble, I wouldn’t feel safe knocking on a door in my neighborhood if it was someone I didn’t already know. I would be perfectly safe, though, going to the front desk to the shelter and asking for help.

    19. Homeless people do not make me feel unsafe. Drunk people generally do not make me feel unsafe. People clearly on other drugs do, and that’s because they’re more unpredictable. I’ve found that even walking by drunk people who might be arguing with each other, they will ignore me or even stop to move out of my way. I don’t trust that people on other drugs would do the same. Large groups of men also make me feel unsafe.

    20. I feel unsafe when there’s nobody else around. I live near New Orleans, and the Garden District is one of the places I feel the least safe at night. (And indeed, violent crime is an issue there.) All the rich people live behind high walls, so they can’t see anything happening on the street. And they tend to park behind private gates, not on the street, so well-lit sidewalks don’t seem to be a priority for the neighborhood.

      I feel safest in neighborhoods where neighbors hang out in front of their houses, people walk to bars and restaurants, etc. Bonus points if the neighbors smoke outside or really enjoy yard work.

      1. I used to live in a neighborhood which was mostly very orthodox Jewish people (as well as more secular Jewish folks). It felt incredibly safe because from Friday at lunchtime until late Saturday evening, dozens of people were out and about walking to services, hanging out in front of their house, visiting family, etc. Most of the larger institutions had security guards as well, so there were a lot of eyes on everything.

    21. I live in LA, though not in a part where I routinely have to walk by or through tent cities.* And I’ve lived here a long time – it was much more dangerous when I got here and to be frank, I took many more risks as a young law student living near downtown. I wouldn’t even let my bf walk me to my car late at night, and he lived in a loft in the Toy District!

      To me, I feel the most unsafe when I’m in a place at night with very few people, like a parking lot or a residential street without streetlights. But it doesn’t stop me from going places. I’m just not going to sit at home my whole life because of the tiny chance that Something Bad might happen. In 20+ years, someone broke into my car in a locked parking lot (which can happen anywhere) and I witnessed a crime in broad daylight (in a place I would never have considered unsafe for that time of day). Oh, and someone stole my bike wheels when I locked it improperly. That’s pretty safe!

      As for homeless people, I’ve gone to a church for 15+ years in a beach city that is referred to as “the home of the homeless.” Generally (and especially as I’ve gotten older), the homeless guys give me a pretty wide berth, especially if I have my husband or my kids with me. Homeless women are more inclined to approach me, but are also more inclined to be talking or yelling at someone that no one else can see. I do have Resting B* Face, so I suspect that tends to make people unlikely to approach me.

      *Almost every time I walk or drive past a tent city, it looks like someone is running a space heater or using a grill. So I’m worried more about a flash fire than the residents.

    22. For me, it is isolated areas. I work downtown in a medium size city with a lot of crime. (This city always tops the list of violent and property crime. FWIW, I don’t live here, I live in a much safer suburb.) in pre-COVID times, I always went jogging at lunch and felt perfectly safe. There are homeless people and drug addicts all over the streets, but they never bothered me. But the city was also always busy. There were office workers out for lunch, people walking around, the shops were full. I always got some street harassment, but ignored it. I am mostly working from home now, but do go into the office about once a week. I went for a walk the other day, and the streets, restaurants and shops are empty. There was no one out except homeless and addicts. (I do a lot of work with homeless and drug addicts, both as part of my lawyer job and as volunteer work in a different setting. I am not scared of them and see them as people just like me.) Anyway, as I was walking, two women stopped to tell me that a man had been following me for a while. I hadn’t noticed him. To make a long story short, he definitely was following me and it scared me. (I don’t believe he was homeless.) But as I was trying to get away from him, I noticed that there was no one else in the streets like there used to be. The schools don’t have kids out at recess, the buildings don’t have their usual security guards out front, everything is empty and that felt scary.

      I used to travel alone a lot and felt safe except when I once got lost walking around New Orleans at night and took a wrong turn down a dark, empty alley. Once I got back out on Canal Street I felt fine.

    23. In my rural area, there really aren’t many places I feel unsafe in. I won’t hike around my favorite parks at night, but that’s as much due to fear of wildlife as opposed to a random attack by someone. They aren’t lit at night, and far from town/roads. The only other place I’m not particularly comfortable is the east/west major highway in the area, because there have been several instances or women getting pulled over by what turn out to be fake police officers and assaulted. Rumor is it’s linked to human trafficking, who knows.

    24. This is such an interesting thread. I am probably naive idiot in some ways, but I almost never feel unsafe (and before anyone gets on my case, I’ve been raped twice both by acquaintances, not strangers). I have lived in urban and suburban areas, and spent time in very rural areas. I vacation predominantly alone, although I admit I am not the most well-traveled person in the world and tend to end up in the woods by myself most of the time (I do not feel unsafe there at all).

      When I lived in an urban area, there was at least one stabbing in the street outside my house, a running outstanding warrant individual who dropped his firearm on my friend’s gov’t car (that was fun), and a homicide around the corner (I saw the suspects and called 911 because I knew they were not from the area and they were acting extremely supicious – hiding behind a porch and continuosly looking around the corner and rapidly speaking to each other). Before the last wave of gentrification, we had a few prostitutes an our regular neighborhood drug dealer (easily recognizable with his Maserati). Hilariously, one of my neighbors and closest friends was the commissioner of state board of probation and parole. My neighborhood had a halfway house for people re-entering the commuity from incarceration (I volunteered there for several months), were adjacent to one or two homeless camps over time, and at one point I lived across the street from a bar which was a regular exchange point for drugs (one of our dealers had an extremely impressive all yellow suit plus hat and cane). All of that said, I never once felt unsafe and lived alone for 10 years there. I loved it. I had great neighbors (we all kept our eyes out), I didn’t walk around in the wee hours of the night, I didn’t go outside alone if I was drunk and my senses were dulled, I never walked around with headphones on, etc. I’ve also never felt unsafe while traveling alone, or in my current suburban (CRAZY SAFE) neighborhood.

      FWIW, I am a small white woman.

      Of course, I don’t live in SF or a place with the types of obvious and rampant concerns/issues experienced there.

      1. I like a good murder podcast as much as the next woman in my demographic, but I do think all of those old Dateline shows, the Law & Order franchise, Lifetime movies, etc. made women in my generation (and older) very very concerned about very very small risks. Sure, there are serial killers. But I’m way more likely to get killed in a car accident. The constant drumbeat of stories about missing kids and teens through the 80s and 90s made people paranoid, even though stranger abduction is very rare.

        1. I generally just want to avoid the kind of experiences I’ve had before. Stalking makes me the most nervous though. I had a guy on the bus sit down next to me, penning me in, and describe, accurately, my routine and my recent departures from it, as if he was making conversation (there were a dozen other red flags in how he was speaking and addressing me). I sure as heck changed my bus route and mixed it up for a few months after that.

          I really wish kidnapping and murder were rarer though. I think I thought it was too rare to ever happen to people I know. And one reason stranger abduction is rare is because the abductors insinuate themselves into their target’s lives ahead of time.

  10. On the theme of IWDay and sexism… does anyone have any resources about how sexist language in the workplace is part of the overall structural misogyny that leads up to huge numbers of fatalities from domestic violence and so on? I’m so so angry about everything this week and it feels like a productive way to channel that is to use the #choosetochallenge theme of this year’s IWD and challenge workplace language. As an example, new business pitches in my industry are still called beauty parades. In 2021.

    1. I’ve never heard “beauty parades.” “Beauty pageant,” yes. Better than cattle call? IDK. I don’t think any of this causes huge numbers of fatalities from domestic violence (like how many of these whitest of white collar workers are there in this world compared to all other workers?).

      2. It is a generational thing. I work with alot of older men like my Dad who are in their 70’s, and they think it natural to call women girls and they love Miss America contests and looking at pretty women on the street, etc, and mental acuity is not what they are interested in when they oooogle us. Nowadays, educated men know that they will not get us to be their girlfreinds if they are not sensitive to our needs, and we make that known to them on day 1. So the best way of dealing with this is to have a talk before you decide to have a relationship outlining what you want and what he wants, and if they are the same, fine, but if not, then it’s sayonara and no harsh feelings.

    2. I think there was a chapter on this in Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (UK-based book), but I have lost my copy so can’t double-check, sorry.

      1. Thanks – looking this up reminded me of Laura Bates’s new book The Men Who Hate Women so I have bought a copy of that!

    3. Men commit violence against women and kill them (“fatalities” don’t just happen). Your workplace’s language doesn’t contribute to that. We need to name the problem, which is male violence, and work from there.

      1. What I’m trying to find is any papers about how exclusionary and misogynistic language in the workplace contribute to the ongoing problem of male violence. They’re absolutely part of the same greater issue.

        1. No, they’re not the same issue (they’re both important, but they’re not the same). Most workplaces have at least some women in leadership roles who contribute to official branding, communications, etc. These women are not responsible for the actions of male murderers and rapists. Those men didn’t go to your company’s website for inspiration on what crimes to commit against women, just like men don’t read radical feminist works (which I’ve seen blamed for “contributing to violence) before they commit violence against women.

          I agree that we need to improve the quality of workplace discourse and counter institutional sexism. However, I don’t think that doing so will stop men from killing women, which I know is what you are concerned about after this horrifying murder.

          1. Maybe this is a language thing. They’re both issues in their own right, but they’re also both part of the greater problem of endemic misogyny and patriarchy.

      2. +1. Name the problem. Male violence is the problem. We never want to talk about it and we always want to find other causes but there’s a reason none of that has been working. It doesn’t get to the heart of the problem, which is that men harm women every day and in every country and for all of time.

        1. I took an anthropology class in college where we studied male apes/orangutans/bonobos consistently maiming their female peers. (I forget which study on what species.) The implications were obvious. The problem is unfathomably huge, longstanding, and never-ending.

    4. There’s a poster in all the elevators at my work with different safety tips – one box is “sexual assault prevention” and it’s all things like “walk in well lit areas” and “be alert at all times.” For months I’ve wanted to write “don’t sexually assault people” in sharpie across it but haven’t mustered the guts.

      1. I wouldn’t have the guts to do it on the poster itself, but maybe on a post it that I stick to the poster…

      2. Do it, why wouldn’t you? It’s not a flashing sign on your forehead (although tbh, I might not be far from that myself).

      6. OMG – people stop. The first “tip” for avoiding any kind of crime is do not commit the crime. Guess what? Rapists, murderers and thieves know that rape, murder, and theft are wrong (unless they are so mentally ill as to be disassociated from reality and those people do not know they did anything wrong so are really easy to catch.) Posters are not going to help with that.

        Some first year at my daughter’s college did this during the crime section of orientation and the person running it just said she doubted anything she could say would have stopped the guy with the knife who jumped a student a block off campus the year before. She made the point that when it comes to date rape and affirmative consent she had hopes of reaching everyone but when it came to avoiding assaults by strangers she could really only hope to stop it by working with potential victims.

        And honestly – posters like that are pretty frigging stupid and condescending. Is there an adult woman alive who does not already know that?

        1. I think your last paragraph is the motivation to deface the poster (at least, that’s how I feel about it–I’m not the OP.) Nobody thinks a potential assailant will see the graffiti and think oh, ok! The real message is “we already know all this sh*t, and it’s not our fault we keep being attacked.”

        2. Adult women know they’re stupid and condescending. But apparently a lot of adult men don’t. I feel like defacing the poster is a decent way to get the point across.

      7. This kind of thing makes me so mad. I remember being instructed to “use the buddy system” after a woman was assaulted in broad daylight on a major pedestrian street bordering my school.

    5. Kate Manne is a philosopher who’s written about misogyny, and I think her books are accessible to non-technical audiences and get at the dynamic you’re describing, Ribena. *Down Girl* and *Entitled* are both terrific. Also, I thought Chanel Miller’s memoir (*Know My Name*) reflected pretty effectively on the ways in which misogynistic language functions to legitimize or normalize violence against women.

      1. Fantastic, I will look those up, thank you. I think what I’m looking for is a way to ask (mostly) men to stop using patriarchal language in the office with some reasoning that’s bigger than “I’m sick of being made to feel ‘less than’.”

        1. I think No Visible Bruises, which focuses on the epidemic of domestic violence against women, would be an excellent pairing with Down Girl.

    6. I’d just start saying/writing ‘parade’ instead of beauty parade without making it a thing. See if you can get a couple colleagues in the industry on board through informal chats so it becomes more the norm.

    7. read the paperback “The Gift of Fear” this $15 book with an easy read chapter on domestic violence could save your life. you are welcome.

  11. Anyone every get totally blocked on a single task for work? I’ve had this ONE task that I’ve needed to do for weeks now and it weighs on me daily, but I just cant bring myself to do it. Every day I wake up and say “I NEED to do that today” and then I do everything but. I’ve tried setting a deadline for myself but it didn’t work because it was just me setting the deadline. There are people waiting for me to submit this, but no set deadline for anyone and they have been so patient with my “apologies for the delay” emails that even that doesn’t seem to force me into being able to do it. I feel horrible about myself and guilty and just can’t understand why this is happening (again). I will say that it involves working off of very messy handwritten notes and is not on a topic that I am interested in, so I’m sure those are factors that contribute but still. It’s so frustrating and I know I need to just do it for some reason…cant?

    1. See if “loss aversion” works here. If you don’t do it today, you have to give $100 to a political party you disagree with.

      1. I’m trying the opposite. I am working with my therapist on a reward system where I get points for habit streaks and for completely those assignments that have become weirdly blocked. (My therapist assigns the points and holds me accountable to make sure I can’t get greedy and assign points to every task). The when I have enough points, I “cash in” to buy myself rewards, specifically fountain pens, ink, and scarfs.

    2. I am experiencing the same issue. Please share what you learn, because I need to get past this block as well.

    3. Did I pass out and write this?
      I resort to self-shame. I think about how I’m letting down the people who need it and how they must be thinking so poorly of me. Is it healthy? Probably not but the work gets done.

    5. This is why I am a litigator – I need important external deadlines!

      Solve this problem by giving yourself an external deadline. Actively tell the people waiting for the submission when you are going to submit so that you have specific external deadline to meet. Then promise yourself a treat when you submit it.

      1. +1. I set a deadline with teammates or review meeting for tasks I’m really not looking forward to. It forces me to get it done.

    7. I really struggle with this too. And in the end when I finally do the thing, it’s really not that bad and I can’t figure out why I put it off that long!

    8. Some time ago somebody here said “doing the thing is much easier than worrying about not doing the thing.” And it is TRUE.

      So do the thing, Anon, and report back so we can have a You Did The Thing party for you!

      1. Came here to say that. Which reminds me, I really need to replace the water filter in my fridge….

      2. That was me! Part of a post about my “secrets of adulthood” (inspired by Gretchen Rubin’s books), which also includes “take the ibuprofen when you have a headache,” “track what I want to do more of,” and “Pet the dog.”

      3. I am very productive on Fridays because I don’t want to spend my whole weekend thinking about the things I haven’t done!

      4. I’m OP. Totally agree that the anxiety of having the Thing not done is way worse than actually doing the Thing. I’ve just finished a therapy session where I discussed this with my therapist and we uncovered the fact that the year anniversary of the pandemic is really affecting me in ways I’m not totally aware of this week, including my motivation and even ability to care about deadlines (whether set with myself or with others). I’m taking the afternoon off to allow myself time to process some pandemic trauma that I’ve been repressing, and hoping that the afternoon off and the weekend will be a much-needed break and I’ll approach the Thing “guns a-blazing” Monday morning to start off my week with a checkmark on my list. Thanks all for your suggestions and support!

    9. I am going to bungle this, but Senior Attorney says something like having the thing hanging over your head is actually more awful than just doing it.

  12. Help me justify buying a Kitchenaid mixer! I’ve held off on buying one for years under the justification that pretty much everything I want to make with it is unhealthy – cakes, pasta, cookies, sausages. So…are there healthy things I can make with it? Honestly, I might just cave and buy it anyway because there are so many cool cake recipes I want to try!

    1. I want one for homemade whole-wheat bread and pizza dough, but I don’t have the counter space.

    2. I mean have you not eaten cakes, pasta, cookies and sausages all this time? Or you just ate ones you didn’t make? Because homemade is always better and healthier!

    3. It will last forever. I don’t know that bread is any better than cookies and cakes etc, but it is excellent at kneading dough.

      1. And because of its durability, it also has much higher resale value than other kitchen appliances. Just to help you with that justification…

    4. started baking sourdough bread last year, and this was the justification I gave myself to get one. All that bread dough kneading is really much easier with it. Pizza dough as well, although not especially healthy.

    5. It is a valuable kitchen appliance with that you will have for many years and will find many ways to use it. Like a good food processor, the KitchenAid mixer is a good investment.

    6. My husband uses the juicer attachment to make fresh squeezed orange juice. I’ve heard using the paddle attachment is by far the easiest way to shred cooked chicken.

      I do use it mostly for cakes, cookies, pizza dough, and muffins. But homemade is healthier than store-bought, and taste so much better.

    7. OMG just buy it if you want to make those things. I promise you just because you have a new kitchen toy your diet is not going to become 100% cake.

    8. I think tou are right but AIMS is also right if those things are a part of your diet anyway. I guess the question is whether these items will likely become a bigger part of your diet if you have the mixer and whether it is important to you to avoid that.

    9. It’s a nice toy, not gonna lie. If space is tight, though, hold off, unless you make a ton of cakes.

    10. My husband bought one refurbished at Target online to save money. It has so far lasted about five years of baking a couple times a month, no complaints. Sorry I have no advice about healthy things to make with it!

    11. A kitchen aid was my first “big” purchase after law school and I’ve never regretted it. You can make all kinds of things with it, healthy or not. They last forever. There are lots of cool attachments. I wouldn’t hesitate unless I didn’t have the space (I don’t use mine as much as I did when sharing baked goods at work and dinner parties was part of my life, but I love that it’s there if I want to make something).

    12. I make bread weekly at least and 99% of the time I don’t use my kitchen aid for that, but I use it for lots of other stuff. I do make cookies and cakes in it pretty frequently, and my kids do too. I whip cream or egg whites in it and would hate to think of trying to do that by hand.

      I do have the counter space for it – I don’t have a big kitchen but I have a remodeled kitchen in an old house and fitting a modern range into a space between the range and a door (there are four doorways into my kitchen, it’s frustrating) meant we were left with a scrap of counter over a cabinet that is just over a foot wide. Not good for much other than a kitchen aid mixer, so it was meant to be.

      1. Just a PSA: I have a Williams Sonoma cream whipper, non electric, that operates by pumping the plunger (works like many chopper gizmos). I generally avoid single use gadgets, but received this as a gift. I take childlike pleasure in using this every single time (and it is a task that my kids will do cooperatively and independently).

    13. I bake (cup)cakes and cookies a lot and have never felt the need for a KitchenAid. It takes like 30 seconds to mix the dough by hand. Cake batter is especially easy to mix, cookie dough has a little more resistance but is still easy to do by hand. I think it’s more useful for bread/pizza dough that needs kneading. Just my perspective – I have no dietary concerns but it just doesn’t seem to be worth the cost and counterspace for me even as a very frequent baker.

    14. 1) It’s pretty and shiny on your countertop if you have the space and makes you “look like a cook” even in a clean kitchen
      2) the labor and time it saves during holidays and celebrations makes it worth it, even if you only use it 5 to 10 times a year
      3) good warranty and it lasts for a very long time.

    15. I didn’t think I would use it much but I bought a refurbished one on the Kitchenaid website and I love it. It makes making bread so much easier, saves my hands. I end up making bread much more often. The refurbished model arrived looking almost brand new.

    16. they last 40 yrs and with videos you can make minor adjustments if they get slightly out of whack after some years time. fantastic investment

  13. Reposting as posted too late last night: I have seen some commenters recommend Curology on here before. What are you using them for? Is it working? What tretinoin percentage did they prescribe? And also, can I pay from my FSA for it?

    I just started and the first formula made me itchy, the second broke me out. They don’t want to reformulate again and suggested using another product on top. Trying to assess if it’s worth continuing the conversation with them or just unsubscribe. I got 0.01% tretinoin.

    1. Isn’t itchiness just a side effect of tretinoin? I mix mine with regular lotion, otherwise it’s way too harsh for me.

    2. I don’t see why you wouldn’t just go with OTC differin? Or go do a telehealth visit with a derm and get a scrip there? If you hunt you can find adapalene online from pharmacies which seems to be better tolerated if tret makes you itchy/shed.

    3. I used it for about a year and then cancelled. I didn’t get those side effects, but it never made my acne go away, and I’d rather pay a bit more to get something from my in-person derm.

    4. I love my curology mix and could never stick with Tret from my derm the way I’ve stuck to curology.

      Mine is Tretinoin 0.05%, Azelaic Acid, and Niacinimide. I did react at first but did what they said – buffered with moisturizer until I built up a tolerance. I also started with something like 0.01% tret and worked my way up to where I am now.

      Benefits – my skin looks good. It helped a lot with some lingering acne but also really has been effective at anti aging. I don’t have a single brown or discoloration spot on my face. Cons – it does take a ramping up period, this is incredibly common, but it’s so worth it for me.

      If you’re not super into skincare, just spend the extra $10 and get the kit with their cleanser and moisturizer. I like the richer moisturizer option. The moisturizer in particular will help you acclimate to the tretinoin.

      If you’re into skincare and are already using other actives like acids or vitamin C, knock those off for a while and let the tret be your only active until you’re acclimated.

      Don’t use more than a single pump of the treatment. It doesn’t seem like much but it’s the right amount. Just dot that one pump all over your face (I do forehead, cheek, cheek, nose, chin) and then connect the dots.

    5. I’ve been using Curology for around four months now, mainly for persistent adult acne (though I think tretinoin and azelaic acid, both of which are in my Curology formula, both have some anti-aging properties as well), and I’ve had very good results on the acne front. My acne is doing much better on Curology (with 0.04% tretinoin, 7% azelaic acid, 1% clindamycin) than it was when I was most recently on 0.1% tretinoin microsphere and spironolactone pills. (I’d used the 0.1% Retin-A micro for years with on-and-off good results in combination with other prescriptions, but recently my skin got too sensitive for that tretinoin dose.)

      Some itchiness and dryness or peeling when starting tretinoin is very normal. When I first started the 0.1% Retin-A micro years ago, it took at least two or three months for my skin to adjust, and there was a lot of dryness and peeling. And even though my Curology tretinoin dose is much lower, it still took maybe two or three weeks to adjust to my Curology formula (though maybe the culprit was more the azelaic acid than the tretinoin).

    6. Tret has a known purge effect. It is going to break you out at first, possibly for several months until your skin layers cycle through. If you aren’t willing to wait it out, retinols and retinoids might not be the best choice for you.

    7. Waiting out doesn’t work for me with tretinoin. I switched to retinaldehyde. I keep waiting for Curology to offer it, since it would be nice to have it formulated with zinc and azelaic acid.

      1. Thanks all for your responses! To be clear, it wasn’t the tretinoin that made me itch. It’s my known reaction to clindamycin and the second formula without it doesn’t do that. Anon at 1:56, how did you ask your tretinoin to be increased? Don’t need this yet but will def need it at some point.

Comments are closed.