Next week, Americans all over the country will be celebrating Thanksgiving — that time of the year we can all put our differences aside, appreciate all the many things we’ve been blessed with, and eat all sorts of incredible coma-inducing food.   This week, though, we here at LBW recommend throwing a Friendsgiving party first . If…

By and large, magazines are still sold by their front pages. The face that graces the cover can make or break sales, which is why most of the time, every glossy you see will feature a celebrity striking a power pose. This month, Relevant took a very different — and refreshing — approach. The cover features…

At the beginning of the year, when I launched this blog, I set some wildly ambitious (and, okay, maybe unrealistic) goals for myself, and I encouraged anyone who’s reading to do the same. Yup, I get all rah-rah, “let’s do this!” about benchmarking my future and planning things out. Maybe it has to do with…

As a writer, I’ve always believed that words are powerful, but I’ve never taken them too seriously. In college, I was the one not-so-subtly rolling my eyes when people complained that first-year students should be called “freshpeople*,” not “freshmen.” There is a point where we become too PC, and we’re so careful about phrasing every…

The entire time I read The Grapes of Wrath, it felt more like I was slogging through it. I re-read certain passages over and over, because my eyes glazed over the text and I realized I’d skimmed an entire page without comprehending a word. The book’s structure — Describe the landscape in one chapter, move…

Sometimes we all fall short of the mark. We shoot for a huge, life-altering goal, we map out every detail, we jot down benchmarks to get us there…and we come nowhere close to it. We want to disappear, to push it out of our heads and forget we ever even tried, to magically prevent people…

A week ago, I picked up a copy of Brene Brown’s Rising Strong, and just about every chapter has a “Daaaang, Brene” moment. As in, “Daaaang, Brene, that insight cut me to my core,” or “Daaang, Brene, I’ve never looked at it that way.” I’m not one to dog-ear or underline parts of books (I’m all…

Years after its release, people are still quoting Mean Girls, and not just because the one-liners are off-the-charts amazing (though, let’s be honest, they are). Recently, I was told that the most powerful comedy is the kind that’s used to skewer underlying truths in our everyday lies and point out the absurdities within them. That’s…

I’ve got a confession for you.  Sometimes, when I am spending time with my wife or hanging out with friends, something happens to me.  It’s subtle at first, like a quiet whisper, and I’ll try to ignore it.  Then, like a symphony that crescendos to a fortissimo, it captures my attention firmly in its grasp.  A…

As a new school year kicks into gear and the lazy days of summer start to slip away, it’s easy to go from feeling refreshed and ready to take on new projects to obsessively worrying (read: panicking) about doing it all. That’s always been me, and it was especially true during my junior and senior…