Photo by LeoThere are rare bird sightings.Then there are rare teenager sightings.Summer has become a complicated choreography of music theater, birthday parties, sleepovers, concerts, camps, and friends. Leo’s calendar has somehow become fuller than mine, and Kelly and I have

I’ve been thinking about power this week.Not the kind that comes with titles or degrees or corner offices. Not the kind that lets you decide budgets or policies or who gets promoted. A quieter kind of power. The kind almost

Today was the first day of Young Writers Camp. Nearly eighty kids showed up on a rainy Pittsburgh morning carrying backpacks, water bottles, and nervous energy. Some found each other immediately. A conversation about K-Pop somehow turned into a conversation

Cedar Point, OhioThe music felt loud.Not louder. Just loud. I was driving our RV from Sandusky, Ohio to South Haven, Michigan when I noticed it. Two hours earlier, the exact same playlist had sounded fine. Now every song felt one

On Monday morning, my body hurt.Not in a concerning way. More in the way your body hurts after you’ve spent an entire weekend convinced you’re twenty-five and capable of moving mountains.I stood in the kitchen holding my coffee and looking

Can you find the missing headphones in this picture? Hint: Yellow AirPod case.I didn’t say no much as a kid.Honestly, most of us weren’t really encouraged to.Back then the gold standard for children — especially girls — was agreeable. Helpful.

Molly Booker May 2026Last night at PPG Paints Arena, I wasn’t sure if I belonged there.Bruce Springsteen is a privileged white man. This is his crowd, right?Lots of older white guys in denim. Beer. Arena rock mythology. America.As a queer

Meet Shelly.We picked her up on Friday—a 2025 Coachmen Leprechaun, twenty-eight feet of “are we really doing this?” energy—and within an hour, I was driving her solo down winding Pennsylvania roads like a woman who absolutely has her life together.

What Does Success Even Mean?Robert Holden once asked me a question that stopped me cold:How do you define success?Molly and Kelly in Costa RicaI was completely caught off guard.Had I ever actually slowed down long enough to answer that for

Birding taught me something this week: you don’t rush. You move from perch to perch. You stop. You wait. You notice. This essay does the same.Perch: PaperThis week, for Environmental Imagination, we read The Conference of the Birds. This is

Prized Archie Comic Book CollectionThis week for Environmental Imagination we have the theme of Flora, Fungi, and Fauna: Encountering a “Cabinet of Curiosities.” In Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald introduces the idea of the Wunderkammer—a cabinet of curiosities, or more directly

(I wonder what Otis is dreaming about….turn sound on for the full wonderment!)I just started Vesper Flights for my Environmental Imagination course, and honestly — don’t you already love that title?Environmental. Imagination.As if the world is inviting us back into

For a long time, I thought home was a place you could point to on a map.Colorado felt like home.Then Nashville did.Now Pittsburgh does too.But somewhere along the way, I realized that none of those places ever fully answered the

Intentions. Prepare a story about the best-laid plans. As I sit at my desk, laptop open, blank screen, my coffee nearly finished, I’m faced with it. Writing. Funny, not funny. I started an MFA in creative writing program at Chatham

I got some hard feedback recently—from more than one person.Apparently… I’m not a great communicator.Oof.Right to the throat.If you know me, you know this is the hill I would’ve sworn I could die on: going there, getting real, saying the

We’re counting down to the second Wicked movie coming out, and the other night I said to Kelly, very earnestly:“Wait—there are two Wicked movies??”She blinked.“Yes,” she said. “There was a first one. We saw it together.”And I swear to you: