Maggie Blaha
I'm a content strategist, writer, and podcaster living in Brooklyn.
Projects:
- Thrift: What Your Garage Sale Says About You
- Modern Austen
- Quarantine: Voices in Social Isolation
- Coming soon: A podcast about cancel culture
Why the Food Acting on 'Gilmore Girls' Upsets Me
As I begin to write this essay, I'm watching Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel) take the tiniest bite of a hamburger I've ever seen a person take. Oddly, she's chewing like that bite contains more than a crumb of bun, and I feel myself cringing as I sit here trying to find the words to convey what about this makes me so angry.
Maggie BlahaPublished 3 months ago in Viva
The Meaning of "Being Alive"
I first heard the song "Being Alive"—from Stephen Sondheim's musical Company—when Adam Driver's character in Marriage Story, Charlie Barber, performs it at a piano bar. I didn't really connect with the song at the time, but the poignancy of this scene has stuck with me since I saw the film back in 2019.
Maggie BlahaPublished 4 months ago in Beat- Third Place in Gift Guide Challenge
The Myers-Briggs Personality Gift Guide
The thing about all the holiday gift guides you see this time of year is that they don’t tell you how to match their gift recommendations to the different types of people you have in your life.
Maggie BlahaPublished 4 months ago in Lifehack 
IRL
Inspired by John Green’s podcast ‘The Anthropocene Reviewed’ where he rates different aspects of our human-centered geological age on a 5-star scale, I decided to do the same for quarantine. You can read all my quarantine reviews and sign up to get them in your inbox here.
Maggie BlahaPublished 7 months ago in Geeks
My Ideal Dinner Party: A Novel
In the early days becoming a writer, to me, meant hosting or attending sophisticated dinner parties in a brownstone apartment with crown molding and paintings on the walls in some city like New York or Paris. This might explain why I’m a much better dinner party hostess than I am a writer. My capacity for rigid discipline only extends to planning dinner party menus and playing the woman of society.
Maggie BlahaPublished 8 months ago in Feast
Modern Austen's Guide to Throwing a Zoom Ball
In these days of social distancing and lockdown, people have been using Zoom to stay connected with friends and loved ones. From work meetings to game nights to birthday parties and weddings, Zoom has helped make life feel a little normal during this plague.
Maggie BlahaPublished 8 months ago in Lifehack
Is There a Connection Between Julia Child's Politics and Her Kitchen?
It was Nora Ephron’s film Julie & Julia (2009) that really introduced me to Julia Child and her tome of French cuisine Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Ephron depicts Child as a dominating but charming figure, who is firmly set in her opinions but also curious and open to learning new things. The reason she even attended Le Cordon Bleu while living in Paris with her husband Paul was so she could relish in her love of French food and teach Americans to do the same. And even though Simone Beck, one of the co-authors of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, points out in the film that a degree really isn’t required to teach cooking classes, Julia is adamant about doing things “properly.”
Maggie BlahaPublished 8 months ago in The Swamp- First Place in Tattoo Tale Challenge
No one mistakes my tattoo for a hat
If I could have gotten my tattoo when I was a kid, I wouldn't have needed to show the elephant within the stomach of a boa constrictor. That's not how the young artist in Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince originally intended to present his drawing.
Maggie BlahaPublished 8 months ago in Geeks
