Wild Problems

Dear Mary: Help! I keep finding hairs in my mother-in-law’s cooking

Q. My boyfriend and I have moved in with his parents for six weeks for various reasons. His mother is quite dominant in the kitchen, which is fine because I work full-time from home and she does all the meals, except I keep finding hairs in her cooking. It’s such an unpleasant feeling knowing there’s a hair in your mouth, but when I picked one out the other night I glimpsed her rolling her eyes at her husband. She has two dogs and I’m unsure if they’re dog or human hairs. I’ve calculated I will be sitting down for approximately 70 more meals with them. Can you help? – Name and address withheld A. No woman should even hint at any problems in her mother-in-law’s cooking. It will backfire big-time. Pretend not to notice any further hairs.

Living one’s best life

From our US edition

In our era of Twitter hot takes and Medium listicles promising to make you millions, I have a soft spot for life-wisdom books, meditations of the old school that you can spend quality time with even when the ideas presented in them are timeless. I’ve read with pleasure the popular life guidance books of the past decades, from The Happiness Hypothesis or Letters to a Young Contrarian to Zena Hitz’s quietly transformative Lost in Thought, and I felt a renewed connection with the ancient questions of existence in a modern retelling. It should be the habit of all widely read thinkers, whether coming from STEM, the humanities or the social sciences, to sit down and write an accessible recap for all of us of what they have found out.

wild problems