I write about books, education, politics, culture, and other topics in print and on the internet.

I review lots of books for the Boston Globe, most recently Day, Romantic Comedy, All of This: A Memoir of Death and Desire, and Very Cold People (you can find excerpts here and full texts behind a paywall here). Sometimes I write about other things too, like encountering myself in a Norwegian novel, abandoning writers, (not) making up snow days, and the reissue of the beloved All-of-a-Kind Family books.

I write for Cognoscenti, WBUR's website, about things like applying what we learned from the fight against Big Tobacco to gun control, Kellyanne Conway, the shootings in Orlando, and how to visit the dying.

I wrote about the amazing response when an arsonist burned down the Islamic Center in Victoria, Texas, the same weekend the president issued the first Muslim ban, for 500 Pens.

My open letter to the president, Sasha Obama, My Daughter, and the PARCC Test, went viral on the Huffington Post and the Washington Post's Answer Sheet education blog. Skip the comments. My follow-up, Something Is Rotten in the State of Massachusetts: An Open Letter to Governor Baker about Transparency, Accountability, and the PARCC Test, appeared on WBUR's Learning Lab and and the Answer Sheet.

Smells Like Words was my attempt to explain my anosmia (lack of a sense of smell). Readers called it "wonderful writing and description," "that unsettling beauty that can characterize an insight into the 'other side,'" and "absolutely spot-on."

I've been writing for a long time, so here is How Does Your Bookshelf Grow?, the column about books, reading, and family I used to write at Literary Mama, and some old pieces on working mothers, the 2004 election, Sarah Palin, my husband the chef, and leaving academia (that one raised quite a ruckus, generating more comments than just about anything Inside Higher Ed had ever published back then).

In my previous life as an English professor, I wrote Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).