Cara Lepidus earned her J.D. from Boston College before becoming a Big Law junior associate working 80 hours a week. After her first child was born, her firm’s generous “Work/Life Balance” policy allowed her to work 70 hours a week — while only cutting her salary in half. Forty pounds heavier, and unable keep both her bosses and her baby from near constant screaming, she turned to freelance writing, where she can’t hear screaming but does receive the occasional death threat via online comment section when internet strangers think Blanche, and not as she has claimed Sophia, is the best Golden Girl.
Derek Parker has eaten nothing but Cup-O-Noodle for forty-two days and counting. He begs you to click on this article. He won’t get the 50 bucks he needs for his kid’s doctor’s co-pay unless 1,000 of you share this piece.
Becky Stevenson, has a Ph.D in astrophysics from Cal State. By day, she is a Astronomy Educator at her local science museum teaching school-children that the universe is filled with billions of stars similar to the sun; that there is a high probability that some of those star are orbited by earth-like planets likely to develop intelligent life; and that many of these planets are much older than the earth. She is up every night from 3 AM to 6 AM nursing panic attacks while contemplating, “If there is intelligent life, then where the fuck are they?” Her writing is influenced by her desire to connect with intelligent life, or at least to relieve herself of the feeling that she is the only one that cares.
Justin Smith hates wearing pants.
Bob McIntyre received a 1600 on his SATs. Apparently the SAT is no longer graded out of 1600 points and thus his habit of using the score as shorthand for his intelligence has been endangered. His millennial boss asked him what he did for self-care and he thought she was using a euphemism for masturbation. No longer sure of his place in corporate America, he now writes about bitcoin and robots.
Laura Steinberg graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University, a fact her children are wholly unaware of, not because she hasn’t told them, but because they fail to see her as a human person. Laura just completed seven loads of laundry, has had an infant latched to her breast for the past 45 minutes, and is 30 minutes late for her son’s lacrosse game. The women in her neighborhood drink wine at 3pm and occasionally ask her if she is “still doing that blogging or whatever.” She has been published in the New York Times, The Paris Review, and Forbes. She speaks Mandarin with her Chinese food deliveryman, who is the only adult she has seen today.
Robert Darling has a trust fund. Like a really big one. And his father didn’t stay mostly faithful to his mother in order to keep up appearances so that he could slave away at his great grandfather’s venture capital firm. Robert is a citizen of the world.
Samantha Dern does not have a perfect life, but every time she says the sentence, “I’m a writer” she smiles. The smile lasts until her hunger sends her to riffle through the cupboard she shares with her four roommates for some Cup-O-Noodles.