Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller.

My theory is this: Women falter when they're called on to be highly self-conscious about their talents. Not when they're called on to enact them.

There is no single way of grieving. But research suggests that there are some broad similarities among grievers.

Television has never known what to do with grief, which resists narrative: the dramas of grief are largely internal - for the bereaved, it is a chaotic, intense, episodic period, but the chaos is by and large subterranean, and easily appears static to the friendly onlooker who has absorbed the fact of loss and moved on.

There are many kinds of loss embedded in a loss - the loss of the person, and the loss of the self you got to be with that person. And the seeming loss of the past, which now feels forever out of reach.

After all dying is one of the most profound and difficult experiences we have.

What's endlessly complicated in thinking about women's gymnastics is the way that vulnerability and power are threaded through the sport.