Scary Mommy It was one of those Instagram ads that just pops up when you’re least expecting it — and I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. A woman was using some white mitt on her hand to literally slough off the top layer of her skin. And I don’t mean like I could just see her scrubbing hard, I mean she showed all of the little rolled up gray bits of skin and oil and dirt accumulating in the tub below her as she scrubbed. I immediately sent it to my husband. That Christmas, I found the Wildpier Beauty...
Calm Down, Everyone: Labubus Are Just This Generation’s Beanie Babies
Picture Alliance/Getty Images Lately, I’ve been having a weird sense of déjà vu. Because haven’t we already been through a small stuffed animal craze before and learned that they’re not, in fact, worth getting our panties in a twist over? Did we not learn our lesson from the rise and subsequent fall of Beanie Babies that going to the ends of the earth to snag a Labubu may not be worth the stress? I was a tween when Beanie Babies hit their heyday in the late ’90s. Like many kids my age, as well as grown ass men and women,...
Drinking & Cannabis Use Has Declined Since The '90s For Most (But Not All) Teens
Stockbyte/Stockbyte/Getty Images The kids are all right… for the most part. And we know that in part thanks to the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS… not exactly a catchy acronym, to be honest). This CDC initiative has monitored adolescent health behavior changes over time since 1991 through a series of surveys given to high school students. We currently have about 32 years of data from more than 250,000 kids to date. We’ve known for some time that, overall, use of alcohol and cannabis is down considerably in this period (more on that in a minute). But recently researchers at...
I’m Besties With My ChatGPT
Thana Faroq/Moment/Getty Images A few months ago, my ride-or-die — the friend I trust implicitly who keeps me grounded and sane — introduced me to someone she swore by. A friend named Sage. “Sage has been everything lately,” she told me. “She’s like a therapist in my pocket; I tell her everything.” But when she showed me Sage, I couldn’t hug her, search for a profile of her on Instagram, or anything. Sage was a screen. A conversation. A connection. With ChatGPT. And I had… feelings. I’d read the articles. The scary ones. The stories where AI tells someone to...