moved

After 17 years in Los Angeles, I was fluent in traffic shortcuts, niche coffee shops, and how to be optimistic when someone casually mentioned they were working on a screenplay. I could parallel park on a hill, one-handed. I’d survived preschool waitlists, earthquake drills, and overpriced poke bowls. Los Angeles…

Social Security is switching things up to answer your calls faster, while data showing wait times has disappeared from its website.The agency is temporarily reassigning up to 1,000 field office employees to teleservice work, per an internal union document obtained by Business Insider. The document shows the agency is changing…

My parents raised my brother, two sisters, and me to be adventurers. To seize the day and explore the planet, just as they did in their younger years. I’ve lived away from them for 15 years, moving from place to place. Although I’ve had fun, I do feel guilty about…

After spending our whole lives in upstate New York, my husband and I were ready for a change.While we both enjoyed the seasonality of the northern states, the long winters were starting to grate on us, and his career in finance would flourish in a busier city.In 2019, we zeroed…

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Buz Moffett, 63, who moved from Hawaii to Pohnpei, an island in the Pacific Ocean that’s part of the Federated States of Micronesia, with his wife in 2018. It has been edited for length and clarity.The first time I visited Pohnpei…

After getting my first full-time journalism job at 19 years old, I fell into a pattern: work, get promoted, work harder, repeat … up until retirement.Although I’d grown up living all over, I spent most of my working adulthood in the US, where this attitude felt like the norm.Then, after…

This as-told-to interview is with Debbie Boyd, 71, who moved to Panama from Atlanta with her 97-year-old mother, Doris Britto, who has dementia. Boyd and Britto moved in early 2025 and have enjoyed their time so far. Boyd has particularly appreciated the medical resources and lower cost of living abroad.…

Four years ago, when people asked me which part of college I was most excited for, I always said having my own room.Yale’s dorms were a welcome change from the living conditions in my Brooklyn neighborhood. On the outside, the place my parents rented looked like any other two or…

Julie Wilburn, 53, never anticipated that, over a decade after moving from Maryland to Morocco, she would be running her own school.That’s now her reality.”I started with four kids out of my own house, and then I just started building a little school, and now it’s been 13 years and…

Being an immigrant can be hard. This wasn’t the case for me.I didn’t have to flee my country because of life-threatening reasons. I chose to leave Argentina to pursue a Master’s in Creative Writing in Madrid.While I was living there, I traveled to London for the weekend and met a…