Accidents at power plants are bad enough. But a leak from a bioreactor could be worse, since bacteria can learn new tricks when you're not looking.

Most professional women I know - myself included - long since gave up looking for a rulebook or a roadmap; we make it up as we go along. Every day presents a new choice, a new challenge, which makes long-term career planning seem like an especially abstract exercise.

There's a smartphone gait: the slow sidewalk weave that comes from being lost in conversation rather than looking where you're going.

Most of us were probably less than immaculately honest as teenagers; it's practically encoded into adolescence that you savor your secrets, dress in disguise, carve out some space for experiments and accidents and all the combustible lab work of becoming who you are.

If boomers were always looking to shock, millennials are eager to share.

Power is a tool, influence is a skill; one is a fist, the other a fingertip.