Style
How to tell if a coat is good quality before you buy it
Price is an unreliable guide. Ten minutes in the shop, spent in the right order, tells you far more.
The archive
Journal
109 pieces on clothes, rooms, books, food and the ordinary business of taking up space.
Books
Do audiobooks count as reading? What the research says
The argument is usually about credit. The evidence is about what happens in your head, and it is more interesting than either side allows.
Relationships
Making friends as an adult is mostly a matter of turning up again
The hard part is rarely meeting people. It is the second meeting, and the fifth, and the fifteenth.
Confidence
Your children will want photos of you, not the body you wish you had
Children forget most of their early years, so photographs become their memory. Why you belong in them, even if you would rather hold the…
Plus-Size Living
You cannot tell how healthy a woman is by looking at her
Size is visible. Blood pressure, blood sugar and fitness are not. What the evidence says about judging a woman’s health by how she looks.
Plus-Size Living
Why do people assume plus-size women don’t take care of themselves?
Larger women are routinely assumed to neglect themselves. Where that assumption comes from, what it costs, and why it gets care exactly backwards.
Relationships
What to say when someone comments on your daughter’s weight
A grandparent, a friend, a stranger in a shop. Calm replies for when someone comments on your daughter’s weight, and what to tell her…
Relationships
When your own family is the first place you learn to hate your body
For many of us, the first lessons in body shame came from home — a nickname, a comment at the table, a diet at…
Life
Why do we congratulate weight loss before we know why it happened?
“You’ve lost weight — you look amazing!” It is meant kindly. But weight loss has many causes, and some of them are the hardest…
Life
The mother who is never in the photos
In many families, the person taking the photographs is the one missing from them. On mothers, cameras and the quiet decision to stay out…
Plus-Size Living
When every doctor’s appointment becomes a conversation about your weight
When every symptom leads back to the scales, people stop going. What research shows about weight bias in medicine, and how to keep an…
Confidence
“If you cared about yourself, you’d lose weight.” Let’s talk about that.
It sounds like concern. Look closely and the sentence makes three claims — about care, weight and shame — and the evidence supports none…