Alana Massey writes about culture, technology, identity, and relationships in both personal and reported work. Her stories have appeared on NPR, the Guardian, Matter, the New Republic, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and more. Her essay collection, All the Lives I Want, is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing.
Even a cursory look at the social, environmental, and economic impacts of working from home indicates that even more people could and should be.
This insistence that laboring people would be harmed by having the wages they demand is not just incorrect, it is paternalistic and condescending.
There's ample research on fear, but not much on why people enjoy inducing it. It could be power, group-bonding, or "everyday sadism."
High-achieving women are told to be proud of what they’ve accomplished. But professional triumphs don’t fill emotional holes.
We must consider the possibility that going to Mars is just as much an act of grief in denial as an act of triumph in achievement.
If Boomers shift from executive jobs to caregiving, will Millennials get their baby boom?
Economic forces, rather than technological ones, are changing the way young people pursue relationships.
Male friendships often center on groups and activities. But without strong one-on-one ties, men are more likely to feel isolated when romantic partnerships fail or don't happen at all.
Even men ostensibly committed to gender equality in the workplace often feel threatened by female bosses and act accordingly, according to the latest research.
The adults so fond of dismissing difficult teens might miss the irony that this is a distrusting and non-collaborative approach to their development.
Reporters should go easy on the sanctimony and fear mongering as they frame articles on pregnancy and childrearing.
Men constantly over-estimate their performance in the areas of household work and childcare (and just about everything else too) because society congratulates them for doing these things at all.
When we are suffering, sometimes the best friends and the most confessional discussions can be found online.
It is not the job of sex workers to do pro bono work un-paralyzing society’s hang-ups about sex, commerce, and the space where the two meet.
In a highly connected era where fans can easily and directly interact with famous people online, long-standing parasocial relationships have intensified and become increasingly complex to navigate.
It is time for universities to acknowledge their students of color as more than potential learning tools and diversity statistics for white students and brochures to brag about.
Recent research suggests that porn is hardly the life-ruining, woman-hating, healthy-sex-murdering specter we’ve been warned about for so long.
Alana Massey explores her own long-running relationship with the grotesque.
Over the last year, Alana Massey has applied to more than 700 jobs. She reports on all the free words she's created in the process.