Persona Non Grata: My Experience with Adam Foss

November 18, 2020.Reading time 15 minutes.

No one ever talks about how sexual harassment disrupts your ability to just do your damn job.

STIs aren’t a consequence. They’re inevitable. [Ella Dawson’s TEDx Talk With Transcript]

May 11, 2016.Reading time 26 minutes.

I don’t care how you got herpes. An STI is not a reflection of your character or a consequence of a bad decision.

All of My Coworkers Know I Have Herpes. It’s Great.

December 16, 2015.Reading time 7 minutes.

Tomorrow I’m giving a short talk about the work I’ve done this year to combat herpes stigma. Here’s the catch: I’m doing it at my office. For my entire company. Including everyone who works remotely on an internal live-stream. That’s somewhere between 150 and 200 of my coworkers, give or take a bunch of interns. […]

The badass women of TED: or, my second herpes outbreak

April 1, 2015.Reading time 18 minutes.

I have never wanted to be flawless. It took a long time to understand that about myself. I don’t mean flawless in the “***flawless” Beyoncé sense; I mean perfect, undamaged, smooth—what young women are supposed to strive to be. My edges have always been jagged, and I’m a provocative person despite how much I loathe […]

Journal entry: morning commute

October 13, 2014.Reading time 3 minutes.

So here is your daily life at the beginning of October. You get up at 7:25am and put on your nice jeggings from Uniqlo, the soft, tight-enough ones in dark business colors that you wear with a thick brown belt and knee-high boots. You drag one of your two leather jackets across your shoulders, the pink […]

Stop asking me for TED Talk recommendations

October 5, 2014.Reading time 7 minutes.

I’ve been working for TED for about six weeks now, and one of the first questions people ask me is, What’s your favorite TED talk? And then after that, What talk should I watch? These are both hard questions to answer. TED’s collection is massive and incredible; I often fall into spirals where one video leads to another […]

I talked to The Gradmit about my post-grad feelings

October 4, 2014.Reading time 1 minute.

Where do I see myself in five years? In a perfect world I’d be writing freelance about sexuality, feminism, and pop culture while working on my best-selling series of feminist erotic novels. More realistically, I can see myself with a career in social media management and writing fiction off the clock. The Internet has opened up […]

Bye Bye Berkeley: Sexual harassment, self-esteem, and social media

August 10, 2014.Reading time 12 minutes.

I move home next week. After two and a half months in the Bay Area I’ll board a plane at SFO direct to JFK and start the next, next chapter of my life. I wanted to write a blog post to acknowledge this, to talk about how important and intense this summer has been, but […]