Catherine Baab-Muguira

Four different East Coast cities claim Poe, but he belongs to Richmond. Here's why.

Here's my love letter to RIC.

My older sister leans over, touches my knee with her own and asks, “Why’d you shoot so low?”

A couple offered to buy our house and it made me cry.

Poe is remembered as the inventor of the horror genre, thanks to Halloween-friendly poems and stories like “The Raven” and “The Tell-tale Heart.” But his creative work can be seen as another kind of business enterprise, charting his valiant but often futile attempts to “coin one’s brain into silver.” This makes him an instructive example today, when new technologies mean that creators face some of the very same problems that they did in the 19th century, including an oversupplied market and the proliferation of free content.

Doubling down on your ambitions is the best way to get revenge, and no one ever knew this better than Poe.

“My mom had five kids by the time she was my age. My dad was starting his second career. And I’m still punching in my parents’ landline at CVS to get the discount.”

Pam Beesly broke my heart. It wasn’t so much that she married someone else—namely Dunder Mifflin paper salesman Jim Halpert. It was that she first dropped out of art school in New York, schlepped back home to Scranton, and then got married.

Gaby Dunn can't listen to her own podcast — at least not the early episodes. "I'm really embarrassed about things that I said," she admits, particularly the details she revealed about her bank balance and conversations she'd had with her student-loan servicer. But that's exactly what makes "Bad With Money With Gaby Dunn" so fresh.

When I realized my hair was turning orange under the white dye goo, I finally hit send on the text I was hoping to avoid: “EMERGENCY. I’m getting something really stupid done to my hair.”

What happens when a generation raised with a “you can be whatever you want to be” ethos meets the worst job market in years?

A couple nights ago, I stumbled across a cache of rejection letters – possibly one of the largest deposits of rejection letters recorded in human history. They were all addressed to me.

A few weeks ago, I was visiting New York City, standing in the top floor of The Whitney, staring at the museum’s giant burning candle of Julian Schnabel, when God spoke to me.

Some people can do self-improvement without self-loathing or recrimination, without descending into the kind of zealous frenzy that prompts strangers to ask, “Is there someone I can call?” I am not one of them.

I wrote this article in Focus mode, like everything else I write.