Good morning, friends!
My twin boys turned 1 year old on Friday. I normally don’t share anything ultra-personal in this newsletter, but I felt compelled to write about this wild experience. Here goes:
The Best and Worst Day of My Life
It has taken me a year to write about the best and worst day of my life. I’ve tried several times before, but I would get a few paragraphs in, feel my heart start racing, and shut my laptop.
Let’s try this again.
When I got a positive pregnancy test last February, my husband and I were ecstatic. We were about to have a third child. A few days later, we went to the doctor expecting the routine excitement of hearing a heartbeat for the first time. Instead, we discovered I was pregnant with identical twins.
Shock. Disbelief. Excitement.
The celebration lasted less than a minute.
As the doctor congratulated us, she kept moving the ultrasound probe back and forth across the screen. At first I thought she was simply being thorough, but after a while it became obvious she was looking for something she couldn’t find.
She explained that she couldn’t see a membrane separating the babies. If that was true, the twins were sharing a single amniotic sac, making the pregnancy extraordinarily high risk. (She later told us that the only thing riskier would have been conjoined twins.)
After what felt an excruciatingly long time, she turned on the bright overhead lights, looked directly at us, and said, “Let’s talk.”
I immediately started shaking because the energy in the room had changed so dramatically. She explained that without a membrane, the babies would likely be born extremely prematurely and could face severe neurological complications. Then she said the sentence I still have nightmares about: “This is the time when most people choose to terminate the pregnancy.”
Shock. Disbelief. Terror.
As someone who writes for a living, I rarely struggle to describe a feeling. This is one that’s simply impossible to explain.
Even now, as I write these words, my body reacts exactly as it did that morning. The best way I can describe it is a strange cocktail of dread, grief, anger, disbelief, and a physical nausea that made me feel like I might collapse. The only thing I remember managing to say was, “Are you sure? Maybe it’s just too early to see it?” She told me she had looked carefully and was pretty sure there wasn’t a membrane.
She handed me the ultrasound images. My hands were shaking as I took them, and we walked out of the office. I think it was a sunny New York morning, but I honestly couldn’t tell you. All I saw was gray. I don’t remember what I was thinking on the walk home. I only remember feeling like I was about to throw up.
When we got home, I put the ultrasound photos into a kitchen drawer and sat on the couch staring at nothing. After a few minutes, I felt an overwhelming urge to look at them again. I still can’t explain where that impulse came from. All I can say is that I believe in God, and I believe something beyond me got me off that couch.
I pulled the images back out and started studying them one by one. On the first image, I thought I saw a faint curved line. Then I saw it again on the second. And the third. And then I started Googling images of ultrasounds. I saw that ultrasounds of twins sharing one amniotic sac didn’t look like mine. Ultrasounds of twins with separate sacs did. They all had the same faint line I thought I was seeing.
This all happened during the first week of March 2025. I knew what ChatGPT was, but I hadn’t really used it in any meaningful way. So I took a picture of the ultrasound, drew an arrow toward the faint line, uploaded it, and asked the simplest question I could think of: “Hi! What is that line the arrow is pointing to?”
ChatGPT identified what appeared to be a membrane.
My immediate reaction was that it had to be wrong. There was simply no way a machine had spotted something that an experienced physician had spent ten minutes looking for. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I barely slept that night. The next morning, I uploaded the ultrasound to the patient portal and asked the doctor what the line represented.
There was no response.
I left the apartment exhausted and so very numb. I was waiting to cross the street when I caught my reflection in the glass of an office building. I looked awful. Then, almost as if the words weren’t mine, I heard this sentence in my brain: “In this moment, everything is okay.”
Read the rest of the article here:
The Best and Worst Day of My Life
It has taken me a year to write about the best and worst day of my life. I’ve tried several times before, but I would get a few paragraphs in, feel my heart start racing, and shut my laptop.
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THE PROFILES.
— The superagent who told Taylor Swift ‘no’ [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— Uber’s founder staging a comeback
— The CEO who tried to copyright a guitar shape
— The WNBA rising star asking lots questions
— The actress who wants a real life
THE PEOPLE.
The superagent who told Taylor Swift ‘no:’ Ari Emanuel is 65, still an agent for Scorsese, Wahlberg, and Dwayne Johnson, and also runs the company that owns UFC and WWE. His new memoir Roll the Calls (with J. R. Moehringer) opens on the word “rage.” A dyslexic kid from Chicago who almost didn’t finish high school, he treats grudges as fuel and daily phone calls as a closing strategy — Oprah, Larry David, his own wives. He lost Taylor Swift rather than let her buy WME à la carte. He keeps a mental list of people who are dead to him. And he is only now, for the first time, watching Entourage. He’s on season two. (New York Magazine)
Uber’s founder staging a comeback: Travis Kalanick is back. Nearly a decade after being ousted from Uber and cast as the poster child for Silicon Valley’s toxic “bro culture,” Kalanick has reemerged as a cult hero to a new generation of founders. He’s making a comeback armed with a $1.7 billion robotics venture called Atoms. (FORTUNE; reply to this email if you can’t access the article)
The CEO who tried to copyright a guitar shape (gift link): Bud Cole runs Fender, and this spring the company sent cease-and-desist letters to about 60 guitar makers over the Stratocaster body. Players revolted & boutique shops freaked out. In his first interview since the campaign, Cole says the lawyers got ahead of the conversation — then says 18 firms have already signed redesign deals, and the fight is now aimed at the big manufacturers. The Strat has been copied for decades, and Fender wants that to stop. Defining what a Strat even is turns out to be the hard part. (Bloomberg Businessweek)
The WNBA rising star asking lots questions: Olivia Miles is a 23-year-old Lynx rookie averaging 19.8 points and six assists, flirting with 50-40-90, and she just broke Caitlin Clark’s rookie scoring record. That is not the interesting part. The daughter of two engineers runs on one rule — “in my brain…it has to make sense.” She interrogated Cheryl Reeve for 90 minutes on a pre-draft call that was supposed to be a formality. She asked about ghost screens, bus outfits, and whether veterans would be salty when she got the keys. (The Athletic)
The actress who wants a real life: Dakota Johnson is 36, living alone with a rescue hound named Tokyo, and opening the thriller Verity opposite Anne Hathaway this month. Anne Hathaway calls her “the panther next door.” The interesting part is what she’s building offscreen. Through her production company TeaTime, she tries to make sets “womb-like,” a protective maternal space after years of watching people get forgotten or twisted by bad oversight. She messes with the press on purpose (“because the other side is fucking with me”). (Vogue)
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