It was a Sunday afternoon, February 26, 2012 and a 17-year-old African-American high school student went out for a walk in his gated community. He was wearing a hoodie and he had a package of skittles in his pocket. He never came home.

A while back while she was in the midst of her yoga certification, my young cousin reached out to ask me a question and about her grandfather and her grandmother, who by that time had divorced. Without much thought, I answered her according to the truth as I knew it—

It never fails to amaze me that a mother is always able to lift the weight of her baby, no matter how heavy.

That’s something my mentor’s 90-year-old sister said to me when I met them for a visit a few months back. She had watched me gingerly lift my baby in his car seat onto the table after she struggled to lift his load from the chair. I hadn’t thought of it like that before, but the truth of this necessary, if unconscious, lesson struck me.

I don’t know why I’m asking this because it’s really none of my business but is that KC person, a relative of yours?

This was a private message I sent to a FB acquaintance on Friday night when the riots over the death of George Floyd were beginning to escalate.

Friday, my acquaintance posted the Jimmy Kimmel commentary on the story and KC went off on a rant about how racism was an excuse, reverse racism and something else I don’t remember, because I snapped.

I was flying back from Arizona and #ICONICwithAliBrown when I noticed. Among the people sitting in the nine, first-class seats, I was the only woman.

It’s not the first time I’ve noticed the disparity between men and women in the front half of the plane but today it was particularly meaningful. I had just seen Cindy Eckert speak about founding a pharmaceutical company, selling that company for one billion dollars and then suing the buyer to get it back when they failed to bring the product she fought so hard to create to market, Addyi.

It’s an interesting thing, the heart.

It remembers.

Transplant patients, given new life after surgery, often report having acquired some of the preferences of the donor, especially when it comes to favorite foods.
Strange but true.

Yesterday I was on a panel—via zoom—at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto. If you’ve never been to the city, it’s located on the water’s edge and is a popular location for festivals, art, concerts and performance.

The topic was “Raising our Sons: White + Black Mothers Speak”. I don’t have a whole lot of experience being a mom yet but it’s something that I’m quickly forming opinions about. I had already held a similar support and thought session like this for clients shortly after the riots began. But yesterday was different because the audience was strangers and it was extra important for me to speak clearly from the truth of my experience.

If you’ve been on Facebook the last couple of days you’ve probably seen the post gone viral about yanny and laurel. I’m not going to go into the logistics of how all of this went viral, you can read that story here. However, what you need to know for the purposes of branding your interior design firm, is that scientists have an explanation for why each of us hears something different. The audio clip is known as an “ambiguous figure”. Like Rubin’s Vase, it’s an optical illusion.

I booked a reservation at the Mezzanine, inside the new Los Angeles outpost of the popular, New York, hotel The Nomad, and was greeted by a recorded message in a British accent. Apparently a 2015 poll of 11,000 people in 24 cities around the world, showed that a British accent is the most attractive in the world. Sociolinguists say that our perception of accents has to do more with social and cultural associations than it does with the actual sound.

They’re not new, these conversations we’ve been having about Houzz and online design services and fees. Nor is it new that some trade vendors, on the defensive, have undercut designer pricing because they can’t figure out their place in the market and because they’re afraid. Everyone deserves to earn a living. But there is definitely a new kind of undercurrent in the ether. Can you feel it? A tipping point that has a lot of designers saying, enough.