User Comments

samantharose June 25, 2023

Great article - it'd be nice to see a follow-up article about how much money the author spent on this trip and what that got her i.e. cities and countries seen, top experiences and sites etc. 

samantharose June 1, 2023

@passingthrough In my experience they do. I was an English-language assistant in France in their public school system. Over there the school day goes until 6pm and they also go to school every Saturday morning. Teaching that 5pm class I really believed it was too much - even the good kids are just too tired and I think it was overall detrimental to them rather than beneficial. 

samantharose February 23, 2023

@laura__palmer And what the transgender activists fail to acknowledge in this debate is that any cisgender predatory man can simply pretend he is a transgender woman to gain access to women's single-sex spaces to harm women. This is now happening all over the world. Due to gender identity not being able to be seen, there is no way to tell who is lying and who is telling the truth. 


J.K Rowling has never painted trans people as villains, who she is painting as villains is cisgender men who commit violence against women. She is acknowledging what predatory cisgender men will do to harm women, and they will definitely lie about their gender identity in order to gain access to single sex spaces. 

What trans people and their activists seem to want natural born women to do, is simply believe anyone who tells them they are a woman to be believed. The answer is no. 

samantharose February 13, 2023

You know what all those women also have in common? They all have BLONDE hair. Clearly, if you have blonde hair you cannot keep a relationship together XD 


The old adage of 'correlation is not causation' and cognitive bias could not have been more true with Annette's unintelligent column. There's a correlation between sales of ice cream and shark attacks, but does that mean that purchasing ice cream causes shark attacks? Two things happening at the same time never proves that one causes the other. 

samantharose December 5, 2022

I like to remind myself that often the hardest things I have ever done in my life are the things I'm most proud of. It was hard to get a Year 12 score in the 90s, to live in a foreign country and learn a language to proficiency, to scrimp and save to buy my first home or work my way to my dream job with many setbacks along the way. I imagine that parenthood will be the same - yes, there is a season of sacrifice and the fear is a healthy one and, in many ways justified. But I believe that for most people,  that period of sacrifice and difficulty is worth it. 

agree to disagree September 5, 2022

Can't say I agree with this opinion piece. This is the price you pay for selling your personal life for your career. She can argue she has to maintain an online persona for her career, but she never had to promote her relationship non-stop on her podcast, social media channels or in media interviews. She could have confirmed she was in a relationship and then not commented further. Complaining that the same audience who you wanted to know everything when all was rosy, now want to know why everything is bad is hypocritical. 


This also reminds of when she was upset that she 'couldn't go on a holiday' (to Italy) without generating a headline. She had posted a complaint that menus in Italy only had prices for men - instantly posted about it, which generated a lot of media coverage. When she comes back home, she's upset about generating media headlines without even trying. I can understand that but I couldn't help but think, 'hun.... has it ever occurred to you that you can go on a holiday WITHOUT posting about it to 40,000 people? How about only sending photos and updates to your actual friends? Or, even waiting until you're BACK from your holiday to post about it?' A lot of these celebrities only have themselves to blame. 

agree to disagree June 28, 2022

@KatP I don't understand this argument against abortion. Yes, minority women are more likely to have an abortion but they are choosing to have an abortion. Who is forcing these black women to have an abortion? Making abortion restricted or illegal doesn't change the fact these women want to abort their pregnancies. If anything, it would just increase the amount of illegal or unsafe abortion attempts among these populations. If minority women are more likely to have an abortion, it may be due to being more likely to be socially and economically disadvantage than non-minority women. Rather than anti-abortion advocates arguing for more restrictive abortions as a solution to that problem, wouldn't the more logical focus on improving the socio-economic status of these women? An increase in socio-economic status may then close that gap.