“Why is this so hard!?” Jen thought aloud to what she thought was only her laptop.

“Why is what so hard” Leigh responded

Jen whipped her head up from her laptop, eyes wide “I didn’t even hear you come in.”

“That makes sense why you probably didn’t hear the Chinese delivery guy knocking on the door either. I pulled up a second later and just took care of it.”

Confused, Jen responded, “Wait, did you pay again.”

“Yeah it’s no big deal.”

“I know it’s not a big deal, but you always get it. I have nothing to offer you…

“It was a dark and stormy night,” Leigh started in her worst Dracula impression.

“Oh don’t scare him!” Jen interrupted sweeping into the kitchen. Under her breath, she muttered, “I hate spooky season.”
“He doesn’t understand anything I’m saying.” Pointing to the almost 3-year-old, Leigh scoops the boy up into her arms.

“He understands more than you think. Don’t underestimate kids — right Henry?”

As much as Jen loved her wife, she couldn’t get behind Leigh’s love of Halloween. This was probably because she had to read and research real-life bad guys, as a journalist covering the crime beat in…

As a treat on weekends when I’d accompany my mother running errands we would go to a hole-in-the-wall American-Italian restaurant in town called Franconi’s. There’s not much special about this place. From the drab color palette on the interior to the generic ‘Italian’ paintings that hung minimally on the wall, or even the gumball and toy machines near the counter that never seemed to need to be refilled, it was textbook average.

It’s these habitual places that become special over time. On these outings we would grab lunch together, nearly always ordering the same thing. As a kid, I wasn’t…

I open a new tab and type in the first two letters, the auto-fill completing the rest because in a spare moment of each day I pull up a job board, hoping for new listings. All my recent search history to the left shows off “safe” options, options that I’m overqualified for, or don’t require much rearranging of my life.

Every so often though after going through the usual list I take a chance, and look up specific museums that are categorically ‘dream institutions’ to work at. …

I’ve got an unpopular opinion — museums and non-profits need to stop buying into the idea of third-party facilitated team-building. Hear me out.

A Cure For All That Ails You

This straight-up corporate snake oil is selling a band-aid solution to a systematic problem in the museum-world.

While there is often a huge rift between on-the-floor employees and leadership, spending a few hours pulling metaphors from guacamole-making competitions isn’t going to make the long-lasting change you’re looking for.

From outrageous competitions to the tried and true trust-falls, third-party companies that create a stressful environment to build bonds between co-workers end…

“What would you say if you could speak directly to your target audience for thirty minutes without any interruption?”

It’s one of the first questions posed in Hannah Hethmon’s ‘Your Museum Needs A Podcast: A Step-By-Step Guide to Podcasting on a Budget for Museums, History Organizations, and Cultural Nonprofits.’ It’s something museums should consider carefully at their very core, but particularly with programming. For a lot of content, our audience is opting in, and will only stay is what you’re saying is compelling enough.

Which is exactly why taking a crack at trying to make a podcast might just be…

“Woah.”

I sat at the tiny two-person table in early June in a friend’s nearly-windowless Brooklyn apartment, sulking after being let go from my job. In a semi-panic stricken decision, I immediately booked a train to the city to say goodbye to my co-workers on my own terms, and start soul searching for the next career adventure. What I didn’t know is that my soul searching was going to go so much deeper than simply shooting for my next dream job.

In front of me was a book all about Enneagrams―radically simplified, it’s an in-depth dissection of personality types, but…