A 43-year-old professional podcaster’s mother started, in retirement, a podcast called “Small Things I Have Thought About.” Two years later, the mother’s show has more listeners than the daughter’s professionally produced one. The daughter is proud. The daughter is furious. The mother does not check the numbers.
A bachelorette-party WhatsApp group was formed in 2019. The wedding was cancelled in 2020. Nobody left the group. Six years later, the twelve women in it message every day — about their jobs, their children, their divorces, their grief — but never, not once, about the wedding that was supposed to bring them together.
A preschooler in Denver has, over the past year, developed a system of quiet grudges against specific adults for specific perceived slights. She remembers everything. She has held one grudge against a barista for eleven months. Her parents have tried to understand what the adults did wrong. They have gotten nowhere.
A woman in Chicago mistakenly wandered into a running group meetup in 2023, thinking it was a book club. Nobody corrected her. She has now been in the group for two years, has run a marathon, and made her closest adult friendships. She has not, at any point, told them about the book club.
A woman in Chicago wrote an out-of-office email reply in a single afternoon in 2022. Three years later, it has been screenshotted, framed, quoted at conferences, and read aloud at a friend’s wedding. It is the best writing of her career. She wrote it in forty minutes. She has been trying to make peace with this.
A woman in Phoenix asked ChatGPT for advice about her marriage. The AI advised divorce. She filed two weeks later. Eighteen months on, in a happier place, she is uncertain how to feel about who, exactly, made the decision.
A 67-year-old man in suburban Minneapolis began, in the spring of 2025, dressing exactly as he had in 1987 — same haircut, same sweaters, same Polaroid camera. His daughter does not know if this is grief, art, or rebellion. He has gotten compliments at Target.
A 13-year-old in Portland has been running a private food blog for two years, reviewing every meal his mother makes. The blog has 47 readers — all his friends. The reviews are devastatingly accurate. He has agreed to let his mother read them only after he turns 18.