Olivia Reese 
Monday has a reputation problem. It gets blamed for bad moods, slow coffee machines and every email that starts with "just circling back." But if you look around any office, classroom or kitchen at 8am on a Monday, you'll notice something. Not everyone is miserable. Some people are humming. Some are already halfway down their …
You can learn a lot about someone by watching them shop in December. One person walks into the mall with a printed list and a calculator app open. Another has had every gift wrapped since August and is mostly there for the free cookie samples. And somebody else is sprinting through the aisles on Christmas …
Every group chat runs on a cast of characters. There's the friend who sends a meme at 7am with no context. There's the one who tries to plan dinner and ends up negotiating dates like a peace treaty. There's the person whose voice notes are four minutes long and somehow worth every second. And there's …
Put six people in front of the same gingerbread kit and you'll get six completely different houses. One will look like it came from a bakery window. One will be buried under so much candy you can't see the walls. One will have collapsed by the 20-minute mark, and its builder will be eating the …
Think of the best compliment you've ever received. Not a generic "you look nice," but the one you still remember years later. Maybe a teacher told you that your essay made them see a book differently. Maybe a friend noticed you'd been working out for months before anyone else said a word. Maybe a stranger …
Picture a Sunday afternoon with absolutely nothing on the calendar. No errands, no plans, no one waiting on a reply. Within about twenty minutes, some people are knee deep in a brand new hobby. Some are horizontal on the sofa with a bag of pretzels. Some are scrubbing the oven, and some have somehow ended …
Some people can say "I'm sorry" in two seconds flat. Others would rather write a three page letter, bake a cake or go for a long walk before they even open their mouth. Everyone messes up sometimes, with friends, partners, coworkers and family, and the way we try to make things right tends to follow …
By the middle of January, a lot of people hit the same wall. The holidays are over, the days are short, it's dark when you leave work and the couch has started to feel less like a treat and more like a trap. That's usually when somebody in the group chat announces they've taken up …
Every January, stationery aisles fill up with people holding two nearly identical planners and agonizing over which one will finally change their life. Some of them will fill every page with color-coded notes until December. Others will write in theirs for eleven days and then use it as a coaster. Neither group is doing it …
You open the app to check one thing. Twenty minutes later you've watched a stranger renovate a bathroom, learned three facts about octopuses and somehow ended up on the profile of your cousin's ex's new partner. You close it feeling vaguely worse and a little confused about where the time went. If that sounds familiar, …