About KarenWorldUSA

I suppose I’ve always been a blogger.

Even before there was an Interweb, I was collecting and collating articles and information. I cut out and filed newspaper clips and, yes, obits, about people and ideas that interested me. I mostly kept these pages to myself and read through them whenever I needed ideas or intellectual sustenance or simply to be reminded of what I thought was interesting and important. (Much of this material was considered trivia by everyone else.)

When I started working in magazines and newspapers, I was delighted to find that I had an outlet for some of my useless information. In sharing this info, my strategy, if you could call it that, was to write the way I talked, which really came in handy when I became a columnist, where conversational copy is prized, rather than frowned upon. (In college, my Middle East politics TA threatened to fail me because my writing was “too Time and Newsweeky” and not “dry and academic” enough. That man is still (famously) trying to cast himself as a reasonable and correct voice above the Internet rabble.)

Back before Jeff Bezos made his famous pilgrimage to Seattle and when eBay was imaginary, I was already finding must-read links through that Yahoo! thing (who I’d work for a dozen years later) and emailing them to friends and family. (This was back when you emailed people who had email addresses.)

After years of finding and forwarding items of interest — but never really having a good answer to the question “Why don’t you have a blog?” — it finally dawned on me that all of these traits — a freakish love of facts and information, multiple obsessions, writing the way I talk and the (delusional?) belief that others may find what I have to say or share interesting — are what it takes to be a good blogger. So, in I go.

KarenWorldUSA is not a stunt blog. I’m not going to cook my way through anything or fake my way into anything. Nor is it a place where I talk about one thing and one thing only, because that’s just not how I operate. KarenWorldUSA is a place where I’ll offer my wry/skewed/heartfelt/sardonic take on the issues of the day and the topics that obsess me: Politics, pop culture, grammar, healthy living, lady stuff, music, art and, yes, death. (If you’re interested in more specific writing for and about ladies of a certain age, read my other blog.)

Welcome to my world. Thanks for being here.