This morning, I opened my daughter’s closet and pulled out this daisy handbag, this one that I had bought her for her birthday from the Kate Spade store some years ago. I haven’t ventured into The Teenager’s closet for poaching in a long while. Partly because we are in different fashion phases of our lives, partly because this is her closet, partly because while this is her closet, I designed it to suit specific needs and so I know what every piece in it actually is—where her prom dress rests, where her sneakers hang, where her skirts and her dresses await her, where the saved-toys from her childhood are stored. I am missing her, so there is that, that pull that is physical, to have that connection, other than the myriad texts that volley between us all day. So, I have my bag, or rather The Teenager’s bag, and I am on the subway, the L train, my least favorite line, it’s always filled with backpacks that bash into me, the odor of bad weed and days-old boozing, a vaper’s ski lift, and I’m reading Augusten Burroughs’ Toil & Trouble and the woman beside me taps me and pulls out her daisy Kate Spade make up bag and she tells me her story: her name is Daisy and her ex-boyfriends Mom gave it to her for HER birthday. For two stops, we filled in all the gaps in our storylines and, really, I was so happy she tapped me, that she shared her story with me. It made for a lovely start to my Monday yes, a wonderful and necessary lilt for my general mood, coupled with me being deep in this vortex of witchy wonder. It is the smallest of gestures that give me a hope, a lifeline, and this morning’s tap did just that.

RIP Diahann Carroll.

Susan Rice: “My parents taught me to be “twice as good” as my white peers in order to be considered almost equal, making sure that I understood that, as an African American woman, I could not expect the world always to be fair but neither could I let prejudice or self-doubt hold me back.”

Sophia Chang: “I’m a 54-year-old Asian woman. I’m a single mother of two young adults who is out here raising hell, who is out here fighting for myself and for others, who is out here fucking with abandon. That’s fucking radical in my eyes.”

Katie Couric: “I don’t want to use the ‘relevant’ word, but it’s just wanting to continue to have a voice, and I think that’s what everybody really wants.”

Rachel Maddow: “I decided that I wouldn’t put anybody on TV who I didn’t feel like I could honestly and wholeheartedly recommend to my audience that they were worth watching.”

Rihanna is coming out with a book, yay.

Become an influencer!

What do women spend their money on?

Mindful laundry-doing.

And now have a laugh with Erin Jackson.