And we’ll be taking it slowly Hello, friends! Remember when I said I’d be going on maternity leave and pausing the magazine for a few months because I was having a baby? Show of hands: how many of you with kids laughed your asses off at that “few months” bit? …

On the things we can’t control, and the ways they force us to let go — This month — the whole of 2022, really — has been a rollercoaster on a personal level. I’ve been pregnant with my first child, which, as a naive and ambitious person, I thought wouldn’t affect my work or my writing or this magazine — spoiler alert: I was wrong. Keeping…

On spring and second chances — It’s officially spring, and things are coming back to life in the northern hemisphere. Snow is melting, grass is growing (way too fast for some of us to keep up with mowing it), and previously brittle, brown branches are breaking out in blossoms. I never get tired of watching the…

February is a tricky month: grey, dark, short — and then there’s Valentine’s Day. — It took me a while to get on board with Valentine’s Day. I mean, look, we all know it’s a made-up holiday whose sole intent is to sell shit, right? But it persists, and once I learned to adjust my perspective I got kinda into it. As a teen, I…

The myth(?) of the summer slowdown and an announcement — Well, that happened. This is entirely my (Anne’s) fault — life got hectic on various fronts, and we didn’t solicit enough submissions, and I forgot to put writing this newsletter on my TeuxDeux app (and if it’s not on the TeuxDeux, it’s not getting duxn) and before we realized what…

Working to better understand my patchwork heart — When my ex-fiancé learned I was writing a memoir about our breakup, he added a paragraph to his next woeful email. It began “I worry that your new book in the works will portray me as an awful monster.” He went on to simultaneously own his “deeply hurtful behavior…towards the…

Hyper-Detailed Sonogram Technology Can Detect Details of Fetus’s Body and Soul — Baltimore, MD — May 15, 2021 GE is proud to announce our newest ultrasound product, forthcoming in summer 2022: the Mantis™, affectionately known at GE headquarters as ‘Shrimpy.’ Like its ocean-going namesake, the Mantis™ ultrasound machine looks just a little bit evil and can detect a wide range of complex…

What defines a mother? Does she need to be blood related to a child, or just consider that child to be family? Does her child need to grow up, does she need to raise her from infancy to adulthood? These are the questions our May pieces wrestled with. On Mother’s…

Note: this piece originally appeared on nicoledieker.com on May 12,2021 I began this year with a resolution to prioritize my writing, despite having a plate so overloaded it was bending at the edges. …