How to do everything, by the Highlight

Erin Walsh and Andrew Croan didn’t plan to have a baby.

In 2015, Walsh, now 32, was working her dream job doing maintenance on a boat. She loved the flexibility — she and Croan, 33, who works in the cannabis industry, would travel west from Portsmouth, Rhode Island, each winter, living off the income they’d earned in the preceding months. They went out to eat. She drove a pickup truck with no back seat.

Yellowed leaves. Drooping leaves. Dried leaves. It’s pretty easy (and heartbreaking) to spot a sick houseplant. Who among us has brought home a healthy plant, perhaps a tropical split-leaf monstera or a fuzzy, opalescent succulent, only to soon stand guilty of planticide? (Sheepishly raises hand.) Who has kept a dearly departed air plant on a windowsill months after its expiration as a painful reminder of the crime? (Maybe just me.) What’s less straightforward, and what can be downright daunting, is how to prevent a houseplant’s seemingly preordained demise before it’s too late.

We’re in the midst of a vibrant houseplantaissance. Millennials dig them, particularly apartment dwellers in big cities looking to infuse their corners of cramped real estate with breaths of fresh air from the great, green outdoors. And it’s no wonder why: Healthy houseplants mean healthy humans. Studies have shown that indoor plants boost productivity, purify the air, and bust stress.

Cold winter months are unavoidable for many of us. In these literal and metaphorical dark times, you may find that what you choose to eat can have a profound effect on your outlook.

Before you eat, it helps to set the scene. And who better to advise on embracing winter’s charms than our northern neighbors? Germans have Gemütlichkeit, Swedes have mys, and Danes have hygge; though there are subtleties to each, they are all about creating cozy and warm feelings, especially in the winter. “Hygge is about an atmosphere and an experience, rather than about things,” writes Meik Wiking in his 2017 book, The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living. Light a few candles, put on some music, cuddle up under a heavy blanket, and you’ll be feeling snug and comfortable in no time.

It’s Monday, you’ve just gotten home from work, and you’re blessedly free from social obligations for the night. You heat up some takeout, plop down on the couch clutching your phone … and start to scroll through Instagram. Then you switch over to Facebook. Then you power up your laptop and look for something good to watch on Hulu.

All of a sudden, you’ve been on the couch for three hours. Your shoulders are stiff and your vision is a little blurry. You feel oddly stressed out, having essentially done nothing since you got home.

Part of The Happiness Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

It was early February in Los Angeles, and Andra Izgarian, 29, had reached a career high point: As the director of media operations at Condé Nast, she had scored an invitation to the 2019 Grammys.

A few years ago, an essay titled “Why I Wear The Exact Same Thing to Work Every Day” went viral. Written by an art director named Matilda Kahl, it detailed how Kahl had spent three years wearing a weekday uniform of black trousers and white silk blouses with a neat black leather bow tied around her neck.

The story was picked up everywhere: Kahl later told Business Insider that, in the days after it was published, she was doing two TV segments, four radio interviews, and responding to dozens of newspaper inquiries a day. I was working as a fashion editor at a digital publication at the time, and I understood immediately why the idea struck a chord: Getting dressed for work is a nearly universal challenge, made doubly difficult if you’re a woman. Still, to me, the approach seemed a little extreme.

Part of Issue #7 of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

Molly Elwood, a copywriter in Portland, Oregon, started using a screen-time monitoring app earlier this year and was unnerved when she discovered she was on her phone 11 hours in one day. Once, she couldn’t get off the Instagram/Facebook/Twitter/e-mail merry-go-round while riding in the passenger seat during a road trip and ended up carsick.

It’s a weekday morning, in the dimly lit hour when you meander into your kitchen, blink blearily into the light of the refrigerator, and try to decide what to pack for lunch. You could take leftovers or pile together odds and ends between two slices of bread and call it a sandwich, or, now that you think of it, you have been wanting to try that hummus place around the corner from your office, and — oh, would you look at the time? Your five minutes are up.

If you were in Norway, this would probably never happen: You’d have matpakke. Meaning “packed lunch” in Norwegian, the word refers to a specific, minimalist style of open-faced sandwich that’s easily assembled and eaten every single day by much of the country’s inhabitants.

As a former wedding writer, I spent many Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons — nearly 100 of them — watching couples make their way down so many aisles, and gaze at each other across altars or under chuppahs, and exchange vows in typical and truly odd locations, including a cemetery. (Yes, I’m dead serious.)

Regardless of age, gender, or the quality of booze at their open bar, they all had something in common: They wanted their weddings to be fun, meaningful, and drama-free. And that meant navigating some difficult scenarios on the road to their big day.

The internet knows my age and home address. It knows how much I make and what I do for work. It knows when I last voted (2018!) and who I voted for (RIP). Recently, I got married in a supposedly secret ceremony at city hall. The internet found out before my mother.

I didn’t willingly share this information, but I’m not at all surprised that it’s online. Personal data — the searches, photos, purchases, locations, and Facebook messages that populate digital identities and fuel the attention economy — is the internet’s favorite currency. It’s also becoming impossible to control.

If you’re reading this, you probably already know that you need to adopt better work-life boundaries.

Perhaps you feel like your brain is constantly on fire with thoughts about work and you’re beginning to suspect there’s a better way to live. Maybe you — and I’m spitballing here — just received yet another Sunday morning “Hey, just sent you an email” text from a coworker about a deeply not urgent email and you’d love to figure out how to tell them, “Hey, cut that shit out,” in a professional way. Perhaps you — again, spitballing — worked 60 hours a week for the past year and still aren’t getting a raise, or you recently watched the Layoff Angel of Death sweep through your company and realized that being available at all hours of the day didn’t save anyone’s job.

Part of Issue #5 of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

If you’re not a frequent cook, browsing through recipes can be an anxiety-riddled affair.

Rep. Cheri Bustos, the Illinois lawmaker who is charged with ensuring House Democrats hold on to their majority, had some brutally honest words for a 20-something woman asking when Congress might see gender parity.

“Probably in your lifetime, not mine,” Bustos, a 57-year-old Congress member in her fourth term, said during a March event. At the gathering, hosted by the Wing in Washington, DC, Bustos spoke at length about the need to recruit more women to the Democratic Party (she’d like to set a new record in the House, building on the 89 who are currently serving) while recognizing just how many challenges remain.

I’ll be the first to admit that I live frugally. I like vacations and fashion, and one day plan to own a home, but I’m a millennial living in an expensive city, so most days, these goals feel like distant mirages in the desert. So to help afford these luxuries, I’ve become a home barista, comparison shopper, and bargain hunter.