You know how if you have to be somewhere early in the morning and it’s super important then you can’t sleep the night before? That was me. I finally went to sleep at 3am and then I was an hour late for my 9am appointment. The courtroom was full and on one side were white people and one side were Black people, so I was like, okay, here’s where I belong. And then someone asked me if I was a lawyer, and I said no, and just as I was getting ready to go to the other side I heard someone calling my name.

The landlord’s lawyer said, “Are you Ms. Greenheart?”

I said yes and we went to a back room to talk.

This is how housing court works in Boston. The judges really really do not want to try cases because the outcomes are so bad for tenants. So they want everyone to do mediation.

This is my fourth month in a row of mediation. It’s always with different lawyers from the landlord’s law firm. They’re all really pretty – by far the best looking lawyers in all of housing court. It’s little touches like this that make me want to stay in my apartment.

In the room, I was surprised that I completely burst out crying. Like, panic-attack level crying. I tried to tell her what is going on — how I got five months behind and have not been able to catch up. After I wiped my hands on my pants, the lawyer asked me if I want a Kleenex. I said no, and she got me one anyway. I said to her between cries and heaves, “I’m a capable person. I just got behind. I know I can catch up.”

She said, “I know. We know who you are.”

This is an unnerving thing that happens in my life.

I pretend that I’m a normal person and that’s how I can function in the world. But then someone will let slip that they’ve read every post on my blog or looked at my Wikipedia page, and then I don’t know how to act. I don’t know if this means they like me or hate me.

So I freeze.

Then I think, well I have to assume she likes me and just go on.

She asked me about my situation and she was so nice I wanted to hug her. And then she left and then she came back and then I couldn’t even really understand what we were doing. She introduced me to two people who helped me fill out forms and she introduced me to the judge’s clerk who introduced me to more people and I was basically at the Golden Globes of housing court — going from one table to another talking with people who could get me on the right path.

Finally, when it was clear that I still had no idea what to do next, the lawyer told me I need to start paying rent on time. Because they want to know if don’t have to worry about catching up, will I be able to pay on time.

I was so stunned I couldn’t believe it.

You know what it reminded me of? After the World Trade Center fell on me, the therapist told me that my childhood was so traumatic that I should just focus on that, not 9/11. And I was like, oh, god. That’s really bad.

I felt like that in court. The landlord’s lawyer was so incredibly compassionate to me because she really heard what I’ve been dealing with. And then the judge sent her clerk to meet with me to figure out how to keep me from being evicted. Everyone was so incredibly nice.

When I got home, I slept for a full day. I have spent the last month thinking today was the day I’d be evicted. I had no idea what I was going to do.

I am really grateful to so many people for making this happen. I feel like I need to give an acceptance speech in order to make sure I get all the people I should thank. But suffice to say that the city of Boston, and my landlord, and the friends who listened to me be overwhelmed along the way — they all held my hand to help me land on my feet. And now I feel like I can just go back to being me.

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I thought the good friend test was who do I tell that I got a job at Harvard. But I ended up telling everyone. Then I thought maybe the good friend test was who can I reach out to when I’m having a total breakdown? But again, the answer is everyone, because no one solo person can actually deal with me calling them, repeatedly, so I have to just tell you all, here on my blog.

The research about friends talks about reciprocal friends. For example, does your best friend think you are their best friend? If the answer is no, then term for that person is not friend, it’s shitty friend. Because uneven friendships are alienating.

This explains so much of my life.

So I decided to do something about that. I wrote a note to my collaborator at Harvard and I told her she is so interesting to talk to and I love how intellectually challenging she is for me to keep up with and since friendship reciprocity comes up so much in articles we cite, I wonder, do we have a reciprocal friendship?

I took picture of the notecard and sent it to my academic brother because we agreed that I should send him any correspondence to Harvard people, before I send it, to be sure I’m not being weird.

He told me no. Do not send that to her.

So I crossed out her name and wrote his name, stuck a stamp on and sent it to him. I don’t know if I have a reciprocal friendship with my brother, but I do know that the biggest thing I can offer him in the realm of friendship is to not write about him. So I will have to write about engagement instead.

Engagement is how we relate to a friend. Here are reasons people think of someone as their friend:

Pride – this friend is someone who makes you feel important

Fun – this friend is someone to have a great time with

Pressure – this is a friend where there are consequences if you were not friends, like you’d feel guilt or they’d feel sad

Emotions – this friend is the person to share important events or feelings with

Special – this friend really wants me to be their close friend so there we are

Commitment – this friend feels good to be committed to

Take a pause here and think about where on this list your friends are in relation to you.

I’m waiting.

I don’t want you to be skimming this post and then forget to do the pause.

Did you do the pause?

I want friends who don’t skim, so don’t do that.

Okay. So it was sort of a trick question, except I got tricked too, and it doesn’t feel like a fun trick, it feels like a trick where I want to kill all the people who do research about friends.

Wait. Something else about friends: women only want to kill people who they are very close to, so this is how you know that I’m a very serious researcher now.

Back to that list. The trick about the list is that it’s not different types of friends. It’s different stages of friendship that we all go through as we mature.

In our 20s we collect lots of friends trying to figure out the trials and tribulations of adult life. In our 30s we cull our friends to just one or two and we add our own family. Because having a real friend is about reciprocal commitment (see that last type of friend on the list) so we can only really keep one or two. And then that’s it. We keep our friends and family for our whole life.

I use we very loosely here. As in not we. Because people who are committed to the same family and friends their whole life are people who value relationships over interestingness and do not read blogs. They probably don’t read very much at all, I mean, why would they? Collecting information to mull it over and then sharing ideas with other people is not the same as sharing commitment to a relationship with other people.

You knew autism was coming, right?

Autistic people make friends by sharing ideas. Neurotypical people make friends by sharing commitment to friendship. Neurotypical people do not see the dynamic exchange of ideas as a relevant part of friendship. Autistic people have a hard time understanding what to do with a friend if there is not an exchange of ideas.

I am not making this stuff up, okay? I’m actually shocked by it.

And there is the truth: the only people who I think are friends are people who share ideas with me. It’s why I always come back to you.

The post How scientists measure if you have good friends appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers.

I don’t make Nino pay child support and I pay him back for almost all the money he spends when he’s with the kids. He just sent me an accounting for all the times I haven’t paid him back in 15 years. I owe him $8540. I told him he has to wait because I’m currently being evicted from an apartment I love, and if I kill myself over being evicted and people see I just paid Nino they might think I killed myself because of him.

He laughed because he knows I know he wouldn’t care. Anyway, don’t worry about the eviction. I mean, worry a little, okay, because my rent is $5000/month. We can both worry a little together maybe, since obviously Nino is not worried, but I have things under control. It’s just a cashflow glitch — that might crush someone without my superhuman dissociation capabilities.

I go to CVS to cope. I buy Cookie Brownie Bar Mix because I am a mature adult now and I’m on Vyvanse and Topiramate, both approved by the FDA for bulimia, so I have things totally under control. I’m buying scientifically determined (by me) perfect food to avoid binging. The mix has two packets, one for the brownie and one for the chocolate chip cookies. So you can ration yourself.

Monday I got the letter from the landlord’s lawyer. It reminded of the kind of letter that Mr. Rogers used to open. They came to my door, knocked, and I said (to my dog), “Oh! Who’s at the door?” And then, there it was the little package of court documents that says: You’re fucked.

I wish I could make a trade with the law firm for SEO or something. I miss the go-go 2010s when BMO Harris Bank paid for a link on my blog without caring that I was social media non-grata because of a recent post. Anyway, not only does the law firm not care about backlinks, they also don’t care about phone calls. I know because they didn’t return mine. I mean, why would they? We will meet in court.

Did I ever tell you about the only time Nino took me to court? Nino had a huge stack of papers. I had nothing. The judge asked me why I didn’t bring anything. I said, “We don’t need to be here so I have nothing to say.” She asked Nino to explain why we were there. Then she yelled at him for a full five minutes for wasting her time. Maybe five hundred minutes. The amount of time doesn’t matter because this is not relevant except to explain the genesis of my courtroom hubris.

I open the chocolate chip cookie mix and eat the chips. Then I stand up and put the packets in the box and put the box in the cupboard like a high-functioning self-loving person. And then I make a list of the things I need to do to make sure I don’t get evicted.

I know you’re thinking it’s a little late for that. But the building manager has been so nice. And anyway, people have thought I’m past the point of no return so many times. And I’m not. Yet.

When we first looked at this apartment, on the 24th floor, I saw the windows could open. Like, for real open. My great grandparents bought a condo in John Hancock Center when it was built in 1969. There were huge window seats built around the whole edge of the interior to keep you from feeling like you’d walk to your death. You didn’t live so close to windows then. Now windows invite you to your death.

So I did a sanity check: Would I kill myself if I had an open invitation when I got out of bed every day? I thought: Nah. And then I thought: Look! I just made the assumption that I’d get out of bed every day! This apartment is great for me!

The post How to choose an apartment appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers.

When I announced I’m doing research about autism at Harvard, people said, Academia requires too much patience! You’ll lose your mind!

Undaunted I came up with a new paper every week for the first year. The papers were awful, but as a writer I didn’t mind writing to learn. So it turned out that my transition to academia was, indeed, an exercise in extreme patience: for my co-authors.

And maybe using past tense for that paragraph was too optimistic. But I’ve made progress. I downloaded five apps to figure out how to keep track of journal articles, and I spent the summer learning to use new software like Qualtrics — and even Excel felt like new software when I had to create a pivot table.

At some point I decided to stop learning new software and just focus on doing one thing really well. But then I decided I need to use Canva to make a presentation about what I’m learning in my research. I didn’t count Canva as new. I thought of it as gathering up all the things I’m doing into one tidy, project.

Of course the project got out of hand. I can’t just do something like make a presentation. I have to make 30.

Y said, “You’re literally making a YouTube channel on your laptop. This is not 1990. We have ways to share our videos now.” (This is what it’s like to have grown up kids: it’s like walking under the world’s largest microscope with a narrator following behind.)

I realized that I’m scared to show you the videos because I love them so much. I feel most comfortable making jokes about them, but the truth is I’ve worked really, really hard on them, and I want them to be fun and interesting and useful.  And I want you to love them. That’s hard to say.

I never did find an app to organize all the journal articles because I want them to feel like a story not a file cabinet. So these videos are my way of organizing everything I’m learning. And you know how academia is all about patience? These videos are my exploding exuberance.

Join my autism course You’ll get access to the collection of 30 videos I’ve created over the past year, and I’ll do a live presentation and discussion about key topics on Dec. 3, 4, 5, 6 at 8pm Eastern. 

The videos are not yet in the right order, but here’s a sneak-peek at the collection.

The post Unveiling my secret YouTube channel – and a course! appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers.

In the 70s my family’s knowledge of plastic exceeded our knowledge of gerbils, so we bought two girl gerbils  and a plastic Habitrail cage because it didn’t look like a cage at all. The two girls made babies, and started eating them. We thought that meant the cage was too small, so we bought more Habitrail stuff.

We had tunnels connecting more habitual not-cages, and then the not-girls had more babies and the babies that didn’t get eaten grew up and then everyone fought each other so we bought more plastic contraptions for everyone. We even made the gerbils run around my dollhouse which had been, until now, the most palatial of all things in my bedroom.

The cat was very interested. And by the time there were 20 gerbils, the cat had a pretty much full-time job searching for an opening in the Habitrail. To give you an idea of timespan here, gerbils go into heat every four days. So it was just long enough for my grandma to hear that the dollhouse was not getting enough attention and she sent over new  living room furniture from Bonwit Teller.

It was the 70s. So by the time the package arrived, the cat figured out how to open the top of the biggest section of the Habitrail. It was a far jump for the gerbils so when I came home from school and the top was dislodged, I knew it was only one missing. So I opened the front door of our house, and the cat would leave, gerbil in mouth.

We were almost in homeostasis: The cat got a gerbil a day. A gerbil got pregnant every four days. My parents bought new Habitrail pieces when the gerbils ate through the plastic, which was weekly. And my grandma sent me new furnishings for the dollhouse every time she went to Bonwit Teller which was also weekly.

Here’s the other thing about my family though.

My mom was a VP in the Fortune 500 and couldn’t hire a babysitter. My dad went to Harvard Law School. By day a high-powered Chicago trial attorney, by night, a gerbil warden.

Genius is an off-kilter brain and so is gerbils. My drive to understand autism is to make sense of how gerbils and genius exist in the same family. Learning about autism means learning to live with all parts of the brain even if it’s not what people are expecting. Autism is seeing how the genius and the crazy go hand in hand and can even thrive that way under the best conditions.

I’m starting another autism course Dec. 3. If you think you might be autistic, or you might have someone in your family who is autistic, or if you are just curious about why I won’t shut up about this topic, then you should sign up for the course.

We’ll meet online Dec 3, 4, 5, 6 at 8 pm. Eastern. There will be videos if you can’t make those times.

Sign up here!

You can find out more about the course here.

The post That Gen-X time latchkey kids were encouraged to collect rodents appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers.

After 20 years of blogging, learning to do academic research was a steep learning curve. People told me to ask for help from professors at Harvard because they’d feel obligated to help me because I’m at Harvard as well. In fact most did not even feel obligated to reply to my email. But Claudia replied.

She told me what I was asking for was best accomplished with an econometrics grad student and gave me some ideas. So basically I asked a professor who was six months away from winning the Nobel Prize in economics if she wanted to be my grad student.

But really, now we know how much Claudia Goldin helped people throughout her career.

Is there an equation for how many times I’ve cited Claudia Goldin’s research on my blog to determine how brilliant I am about women in the workforce? When I called Melissa to tell her Claudia won the Nobel Prize Melissa immediate recognized the name as the one she cuts when she edits because I drop Claudia into every post I write.

I think my blog is like a Claudia Goldin book club. Each week we read blog posts that are in some way about her research. Sometimes we talk about policy. Sometimes we make it all about us. Sometimes  we’d read a bit of her book, or read a nod to her research at Jezebel . But Claudia’s been with us the whole time

When I first started reading her, I wrote about The End of the Glass Ceiling. In 2005. People thought I was nuts, but I was hooked. I trusted Claudia’s research. The same year I cited her when I wrote you can’t get respect for work and for parenting, right after I had a baby. And it was Claudia’s research, in 2006, that made me realize most high-earning women quit after maternity leave and we should just own it.

Claudia would never tell people what to do. She’s not like that. But I am.

So I told you in 2013 don’t be the breadwinner. Because Claudia showed that if you have a stay-at-home husband you’re likely to get a divorce. In 2016 Claudia found that even paying professional women more than men could not get women to keep working after they had kids. So I ranted about don’t pay for an MBA or law school or medical school when you won’t even stay in the workforce long enough to pay back loans.

People always ask me, “How do you know that my job is stupid job if you don’t know what I do?”

And I say, “Because you told me that your husband works full time and makes a lot of money and you’re also the primary caretaker of the kids.”

That’s Claudia Goldin right there. She won a Nobel Prize for showing us that it’s impossible to have two parents doing “greedy jobs” — which is her term for jobs that are serious enough to earn the parent respect. Because if both people have greedy jobs then no one is parenting.

The other thing people say to me is, “I have a friend who has a great career and she’s a great parent.”

And I say, “No you don’t. She’s lying to you.”

I started calling out the liars. Claudia’s data gives me confidence to go one step further and say to women no, you are not an exception, stop posturing to other women. Stop pretending to be superhuman to make other women feel bad.

Let’s pause right there and let it sink in. Someone just won a Nobel Prize in economics for saying that you can either be a high performer in your career or a good parent but you can’t be both. This is revolutionary.  It’s important because we have known since the 1960s that parents who can manage on one income should have one parent stay home.

So why does the second parent work if we have fifty years of research saying the second parent shouldn’t work? Emily Oster, an economist who writes about parenting, cites this study in her first book, Crib Sheet. In the book she writes that she knows the research and she doesn’t care, because parenting is not as interesting to her as work.

It takes a special person to go to work when everyone knows the family does not need the extra income. Goldin shows that the majority of women, even the very educated of those women, choose to drop out of the workforce because they know they can’t be a good mother and also be good at their job. Whatever good might mean to them, they know they can’t be good at both.

I say this as a parent who did everything wrong. I wanted to have a really interesting career and I wanted to be very involved with the kids. And there was no room for my marriage. I wanted to get everything. Be everything. And be respected for everything. And that’s probably why I’ve been entranced by Claudia Goldin for 20 years.

I see Claudia’s research as a celebration of humanity. She traces women’s rights from the 60s and 70s where almost 50% equity was achieved, through the 80s where women fought for a lot more. So by the time Generation X (my generation) got to the workforce we felt mostly equal.

Her research resonates with us because my generation didn’t want to fight. We wanted to raise our kids. All her data now validates us, because we lived counter to what the baby boomers were doing yet had no voice of our own. She discovered that the more power women have the less women want to work.

Claudia Goldin is so ahead of her time. She is so post-feminist. And her Nobel Prize is a celebration of what can happen when we are committed to elevating each other. And trusting the data.

The post Claudia Goldin won the Nobel Prize for the truth about women and work. appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers.

Golden Ladders by Yoko Ono

I’m scared to talk about my job at Harvard because of imposter syndrome. But I know from experience that writing here and talking about myself incessantly is the way to beat it.

If I post about things that make me nervous, then the people who are going to call me out will do it right in the comments sections. You know that adage keep your enemies close to you? It’s sort of like that.

It’s also like when I got a job writing a weekly finance column — my brothers told me I shouldn’t even take the job, because people will find out that I cashed out my 401(k) to pay for childcare, and I’ll get fired so fast it wouldn’t even be worth the trouble to start. I took the job and wrote my first column about that. And I never worried again that people would think I’m financially incompetent.

Just kidding. I know I’m financially incompetent. And I worry all the time that I look reckless trying something totally new when I am too old to be messing with income. Because I am reckless.

What no one tells you about Harvard

I’m in a lab run by a professor who is the best manager I’ve ever worked under. I want to put her name here, but shockingly, not everyone thinks it’s an honor have their name on my blog. She is amazing at motivating and inspiring people to do the work she wants to do. And she’s organized. She published an incredible number of papers while she had kids and I’m always asking questions that are too personal to figure out how she manages her life. I wonder if anyone has written their dissertation on their advisor’s life skills?

Perks of being on the bottom rung

Being an expert in your field makes it really difficult to ask hard questions that generate new insights. In a new career everything is a surprise.

For example, in a conversation about whose name is going on a paper, I asked, “How are you deciding which order?” The answer was that one person is outside the country and can’t be paid, so his name will go first and the person getting paid will go second, and the person who is most important goes last.

I’m not even sure if that’s right. It’s like trying to speak another language you don’t really speak, where you nod continuously and wish for understanding.

Blogs are still the best resource to learn a new industry

Even though very few people still keep a blog, the ones still left standing really really know their topic. PhD Comics is a primer on academic claustrophobia. Tyler Cowen’s blog is a masterclass on disrupting academia. My blog is a cautionary tale about the insane hubris it takes to switch to academia after basically building a career on berating people about being in academia.

ChatGPT is an important tool for entry level work

At the bottom of the ladder you know nothing, so in many cases, ChatGPT can do your job better than you can. This is not cheating, this is a service to the people above you so they don’t have to slog through your reams of entry-level crap.

Six months ago there was no grant proposal that ChatGPT couldn’t write. But as I got smarter at knowing how to add nuance, ChatGPT got dumber about where to find information. Or maybe ChatGPT has imposter syndrome too, but is less willing to tell you when it doesn’t know something?

On the other hand ChatGPT is happy to tell you when it doesn’t want to tell you things. Ask for information about women in the workplace. ChatGPT pleads ignorance — somehow women working has been relegated to the same off-limits category as building bombs.

I told my mom I used ChatGPT to write a conference proposal. She’d already honed in on all the downsides of my draft, so I know I was egging her on. But I thought it would be a challenge to her to have negativity in an area where she knows nothing.

She was up for the challenge. My mom can finish the Sunday NYT crossword before she finishes her pint of ice cream. She saves the acrostic as a treat. She gave me the ChatGPT version of “you’re gonna get get fired.”

Learn which rules are sacred

To her point, I’ve been fired a lot. But typically I get fired for being a self-starter in things that shouldn’t start. Academics usually get fired for stealing or lying, which is not really my thing. Still, I read DataColada prophylactically. The blog’s tagline is thinking about evidence and vice versa, which I would totally want to plagiarize if plagiarism was my thing.

I found the blog because Francesca Gino, who I’ve quoted here, just got fired from Harvard’s Business School, and the guys at DataColada wrote a four-part series about how she lied about her results. You can read that starting here in DataFalsificada Part 1: Clusterfake. I wish I were having another child so I could have these people come up with a name.

At the beginning of your career a mentor matters the most

My mom does not joke about having kids because she got fired from a job she loved, so she got pregnant with me.

Then right away she got another job, and then she was upset that she was pregnant, and on top of that when they realized she was pregnant they fired her. She tells me it was okay the second time she got fired, because she got another job and her boss liked her so much that that they let her work from home. In 1966.

Me: “How did you work at home with a newborn?!”

Mom: “I wanted to have my own money. You know my family never had money. I didn’t want to live like that.”

I asked ChatGPT what Penelope Trunk should write about her mom. It spit back: Life is short, and time with our loved ones is precious.

See? I told you ChatGPT is getting dumb.

Changing careers is like relocating your home. The scenery is different but you’re still the same inside. I always want to know how women manage their careers and their kids. And I always ask questions that put me a little too close to trouble.

The post Lessons from the bottom rung of academia appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers.

I still have not seen a video of the towers falling. But I started reading commentary about it this past year.

I have never stopped thinking about the people jumping from the towers. Maybe because after the second plane hit, my brain couldn’t comprehend anything really, it was all abstract and unreal. But when my coworker told me “People are jumping from the building!” that’s when I understood it was real. And I followed her to go see.

In the recovery group we could tell where each person was that day by whether we said jumping or falling. I read in some comments section that the people who jumped were not choosing death, they were choosing life. Maybe this has been said a million times over the last two decades. But like I said, I am 20 years late to the commentary. The person said those people knew they were about to die by fire, so they chose to live a few more minutes being able to breathe, falling through the sky. Even holding hands.

Those images of people mid air look so different to me now. It resonates with me that the idea of choosing life looks a lot like taking a terrible path. We can only choose from what is available. And we have to be alive to make the best choice we can under any given circumstances.

When I crouched to hide myself from the downpour of debris, it was difficult to get myself to move. I felt frozen. And I realized suffocation was inevitable. But I didn’t want my death to be painful so I moved.

When I climbed out a broken window I didn’t know where I would go. It’s hard to say if I was looking for anything beyond a breath of air to breathe. Is climbing out the window to avoid suffocation the same as climbing out a window to get some air? I would have done anything to avoid suffocation. I’m so lucky I was on the ground.

This morning I took my son to the doctor in Medford, MA. Requests to schedule something so mundane on 9/11 still jar me, but I know people are moving on so I try to as well. I slept in my clothes so it would be easier to get out of the apartment on time without obsessing about the date.

I left my son in the waiting room and walked to to 7 Eleven to get coffee and I saw a line of five flashing firetrucks. Lots of people saw the trucks, but only I stopped. I asked people what’s happening and they all shrugged as they walked on by.

I walked closer, stepping in front of moving cars. Then I realized it was a moment of silence at 8:46 when the first plane hit. I stood too, til 9:03. Then I said to a fireman, “I was at the World Trade Center. This is a really nice gesture.”

He looked at me and said, “You were there?”

It occurs to me that the videos must be full of people looking Wall Street well dressed. Now I’m a lot older. There’s not much of a difference between clothes I sleep in and clothes I work in. But I’m still a person who wants to know what’s going on.

It’s comforting to know that after all these years, at least one thing about me has not changed.

The post 9/11: What’s still the same appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers.