Here's the telephone number:

1-800-799-SAFE.

Grab a pencil, write it on a post-it note, put it in plain view, memorize it. It's the National Domestic Violence Hotline, and if you're being abused, they can help you. They'll pick you up, they'll take you -- and your children, if you...

For the past 48 hours, every time I've gone to that sad place about the unexpected -- unfathomable -- passing of my friend, Joan Rivers, I've found myself, just a few moments later, beginning to laugh.

I keep hearing the classically Joan lines she might have said, had she...

My good friend, and colleague, stand-up comedian Vicky Kuperman, has been sending me emails throughout the summer, updating me on the progress of her "bucket list," to which she'd turned her complete attention back in May.

According to Vicky's regular dispatches, she's been bucketing like crazy this...

If comic brilliance could be converted to nuclear energy, Robin Williams would have qualified as a one-man power plant. Lightning-quick, wildly unpredictable, and possessed by an endless cast of characters and voices -- on stage and off -- Robin...

Talk about heaven on earth.

I'm writing this from the desk in my little room in a lovely and charming inn in East Hampton, New York. I arrived here last month to begin work on a new play at the Guild Hall theatre -- "Clever Little Lies," a funny...

Run a Google search for great quotes about the summer season -- which officially begins tomorrow -- and you'll see exactly how differently (and personally) it affects all of us.

"Summer afternoon -- summer afternoon," wrote Henry James. "To me those have always been the two most beautiful words in...

Memo to gods of doom everywhere: You don't scare me today, even though it's Friday the 13th.

I can't say for sure why I've never been a 13th-o-phobe. Maybe it's because I grew up Catholic and celebrated "Good" Fridays every year -- even when they fell on the 13th....

"There are two kinds of people in the world: those who stop at a traffic accident to see if they can help, and those who just drive by."

I was just a little girl when my dad first told me that -- and I remember actually watching him do...

A few days ago I was walking near my apartment when a swarm of young men and women whooshed by me. They were all wearing long robes and holding their mortarboard hats fast to their heads, as they rushed in the direction of our neighborhood school.

"Hurry!" I heard...

June 8th is one of my favorite days of the year. When else can you leave a trail of candy wrappers (or lottery tickets, or trashy novels) in your wake, and feel good about it?

On this day, you can -- because it's National Name Your Poison Day, and across...

Who was it who once said, "Youth is full of pleasure, age is full of care?" Ah, yes, that would be William Shakespeare (who, incidentally, died just three days short of his 52nd birthday -- which was considered quite old at the time).

Well, I hate to disagree with the...

I was always terrified of marriage. It seemed to me like a place where women lost sight of themselves. And I was quoted saying things like "Marriage is like living with a jailer you have to please." Or, as Gloria Steinem once said, "I can't mate in captivity."

You get...

Over the years, I've celebrated Mother's Day on this page by telling you all about my mom -- Rose Marie Cassaniti Thomas. I've talked about how she was a force a nature, a whirlwind of energy who could...

Today is International No Diet Day. In other words, food lovers, it's a day to fall off your "don't even think about it" dietary regimen, and dig in to you heart's content.

It's "an annual celebration of body acceptance, including fat acceptance and body shape diversity. This day is also...

In honor of Huffington Post's 9th birthday, we're celebrating by sharing 9 ways to reinvent yourself. That's because Arianna herself has been a shining example of reinvention for her entire career.

"You have to do what you dream of doing," Arianna once said, "even while you're afraid."

I've always...

The room erupted in applause. And the funny thing was, the person who earned the ovation wasn't even there. She was probably on call.

I was in a Barnes & Noble in New York City this...

Storytelling is one of our oldest art forms, and oldest urges, dating back to the Stone Age, when the ancients told their stories by carving them on the walls of their dwellings. Millions of years later, native Indians would carry on the tradition, gathering in a circle around a fire,...

The research was, to say the least, disturbing.

The year was 1993, and according to a Harvard study by Dr. Carol Gilligan -- as well as research conducted at the University of Minnesota -- as girls approached adolescence, they stopped raising their hands in class; their self-esteem began to wither;...

Earlier this month, I was invited to sit in at a front page meeting at The New York Times, where editors from the various departments pitch their stories to the Executive Editor, who ultimately decides what will make it to page one.

That Executive Editor, Jill Abramson, is a front...

Like most people who do a lot of their work at home, I frequently live amid chaos -- phones ringing, emails binging and someone always popping up at my study door, telling me so-and-so is calling just as someone has arrived for a meeting! It can often be overwhelming.

But...