The Library

Good morning, I attended a dinner last week. Not the kind with rosé and gossip. Twelve men at the table—finance, real estate, CEOs. The kind of men who sit on boards and fly private. Two women. I was one of them. At some point the conversation drifted, as it does, to a disgraced public figure. Someone wondered aloud how a man like that keeps his influence. I offered what felt obvious to me. Charisma. Perceived power. The ability to make people feel chosen. A string of pointed questions came...

Good morning, Valentine’s Day can be romantic. Complicated. Corny. Loaded. Sometimes all of the above. For me, it’s always had a softer meaning. My father was a commercial fisherman—strong hands, few words. But every Valentine’s Day, he bought my mother gladiolas. Never roses. He chose a thoughtful card, signed his name, and added tiny X’s—one for each year they’d been married. It was subtle. Tender. Which made it unforgettable. One of my father’s Valentine’s cards to my mother. 1966. When I...

Good morning, I've been competitive all my life. Self-inflicted mostly. Lately, I think about competition differently—the kind that comes with scoreboards and the kind that doesn't. This week we're serving up the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics, and why women are literally hiding in their cars from life—which honestly feels like its own endurance sport. Women over 50 are conditioned to compete on every front, except there are no awards. We're supposed to out-perform aging, out-hustle...

Good morning, Gazing out my window at 15 inches of glistening snow—with more on the way—I’m reminded that you can’t negotiate with weather. You can plan. You can prepare. You can be that person who keeps an extra charger in her purse and thinks this qualifies as “control.” But when the forecast decides to go feral, your schedule becomes a suggestion. Last week, my husband and I road-tripped from New York to D.C. for PROVOKED meetings, and I had to make a call: stay through the end of the trip...

Good morning, A few days ago, thanks to a recommendation from my editor Abby, I fell down a Reddit hole—the kind where you think you’re just scrolling for a minute. Two hours later my brain had seen things it didn’t know it needed to see. This one came from r/AskReddit. The question was so silly at first glance it made me laugh out loud: “Couples of Reddit, what’s the dumbest ‘house rule’ you and your partner made as a joke but are now low-key aggressively serious about enforcing?” The...

Good morning, This week, I want to talk about something I rarely discuss out loud: who we invite into this community. PROVOKED isn't a newsletter. It's a conversation. And conversations change depending on who shows up. I could grow this audience the easy way—by pouring more money into Meta ads and chasing numbers. We do use ads—some of you found us that way, and I'm glad you're here. But ads don't build community. People do. The women who make PROVOKED feel sharp, funny, raw, and thoughtful...