Groupon's model: Getting the group discount rate first, finding the group second. The daily deal goes out and, if a minimum number of people sign up, they can all share in the group rate. Vendor gets customers, customers get a discount, Groupon gets a cut.

Rachel Sklar

Us Up UN

Groupon is a great concept packaged in a superb name, but the concept of group discounts is not new.

Great Age Up

If you don't know Tom Lehrer, you should - in addition to being a classical pianist, mathematician, songwriter, satirist, researcher at Los Alamos and, he claims, inventor of the Jell-O shot, he is just delightfully funny and graceful.

Rachel Sklar

Funny You Writer

I don't feel like I have to apologize for being a technophile, ever. Technology is awesome and lets me do so much. Nor do I feel like I have to apologize for loving my work.

Rachel Sklar

Work Technology Techno

Is there anything about the JonBenet Ramsey case that isn't weird and disturbing?

Rachel Sklar

Weird Thing Thin

Groupon, as you probably are by now aware, is exactly what it sounds like: a daily-deal site offering group discounts. Maybe you've seen that done before, but certainly not like Groupon, which has executed with an energetic sales force and engaging copywriters, many culled from the Chicago comedy scene.

Rachel Sklar

War You Writers

What I do want is to be transparent about where I am and how I got here. I don't like the cone of silence - it didn't do me any favors in my 20s or 30s, and I don't see it doing much for other women, either.

Rachel Sklar

Women Men Where

I started as kind of an outsider - freelancer working from home, building contacts from the ground up etc. - so I didn't have too many relationships holding me back.

Rachel Sklar

Work Relationship Home

I downloaded a Ricky Gervais podcast once at the persistent urging of a friend and found it funny but distracting - if I'm online, I'm surfing, which means I'm distracted from the podcast. So it's a form that doesn't really work for me.

Rachel Sklar

Work Funny Which

If there's one thing that 2009 showed us, it's that everything is happening everywhere, across multiple platforms, each one making waves that end up crashing against each other and commingling into one giant media sea.

Rachel Sklar

Where Wed Waves

What does 'work' mean in this 21st, ultra-wired century, with its exploding new industries, low barriers to entry and endless possibilities? Is technology making our lives more flexible - or our days more endless?

Rachel Sklar

Work Technology Wit

I not only work online through my various projects, but I am an avid user of online technologies to connect and engage with friends as well.

Rachel Sklar

Work Age Wit

I am a pop culture person. And car people have clearly contributed to pop culture, which is how I knew about purple French tail lights and 30-inch fins without exactly knowing what they were.

Rachel Sklar

Car Without Wit

I don't mind other guys seeing movies I want to see and then writing about them. That's fine, especially when it's the New Yorker's Anthony Lane, because he knows this stuff pretty well.

Rachel Sklar

Movies Yorker York

Twitter is an astounding platform for information, but it's a total blank slate - which means it's an astounding platform for disinformation, too.

Rachel Sklar

Wit Which UN

Flying over New Orleans on our approach, I got it. There was no view of land without water - water in the great looming form of Lake Pontchartrain, water cutting through in tributaries, water flowing beside a long stretch of highway, water just - everywhere.

Rachel Sklar

Great Art Yin

Jessica Jackley has a gift for making people want to fork over their cash. To total strangers. Far, far away.

Rachel Sklar

Anger Way Want

Emily Gannett is tireless. I know this because I have traded emails with her at 2 A.M. only to later wake blearily to a chipper morning missive sent south of 6 A.M. before her morning run.

Rachel Sklar

Morning Wit Wake

If anyone was going to write the definitive account of what the 2008 election meant for women, it would be Rebecca Traister.

Rachel Sklar

Women Men Write

In September 2005, I was three things: the media blogger for 'FishbowlNY,' a maniacal Daily Show fan, and the only person to smuggle a tape recorder and camera into a big Magazine Publishers of America event featuring Jon Stewart interviewing five hotshot magazine editors in an unbelievable bloodbath.

Rachel Sklar

War Art Wing

There's a tendency, when the offspring of a famous person does something notable, to define them by their more-famous parent.

Rachel Sklar

Famous Us Thing

Oddly, a search for 'jeggings' in my email inbox shows that my first exposure to the phenomenon came from - wait for it - Mike Allen of 'Politico,' who helpfully explained the concept on December 20, 2009.

Rachel Sklar

My weekends are oases of time and space, where I am able to draw a breath and dive into the stuff I couldn't get to that week - the great article I bookmarked, the friend whose emails I kept dropping, the blog post I'd meant to write on a subject that wasn't timely but was still important.

Rachel Sklar

Reporters do decide what is news, but they don't invent it, even if they sometimes become part of the story by risking their lives in a danger zone, as in the case of ABC's Bob Woodruff and Doug Vogt.

Rachel Sklar

My first introduction to New Orleans was from the air, flying high over the city with a view of the land - and water - below.

Rachel Sklar

It is a pet peeve of mine when people throw around arguments citing 'Fair Use' and yet fail to actually explain what a fair use argument actually is.

Rachel Sklar

I have jeggings to wear and worlds to conquer.

Rachel Sklar

I didn't go to law school to become a lawyer, per se - let's just say I was leaning in to some strong suggestions from my parents - but my nebulous goals of someday becoming a writer were just that, nebulous.

Rachel Sklar

For single women, admitting that you want kids when you're still unattached can feel like exposing a vulnerability. It did to me.

Rachel Sklar

Of course the shrieking desire for the scoop can get really strong, but so is the desire to safeguard connections and keep everyone happy.

Rachel Sklar

I love technology, and man, is it helpful. But it also means you're always on. Always findable. Always available to 'just take five minutes' to answer an email, tweet a link for someone, check in quickly on FourSquare.

Rachel Sklar

What's more important to 'SNL': comedy or buzz? To the writers, players and guest hosts, it's probably the former; to Lorne Michaels and the suits at NBC, it's ultimately probably the latter.

Rachel Sklar

I read 'The Shining' before I ever saw the movie, when I was maybe 12.

Rachel Sklar

Craig Newmark looks like the kind of guy who would help you move your apartment, sell your furniture, get a job, or help you find that cute girl you saw on the subway.

Rachel Sklar

Stuart Blumberg is suddenly an authority on the modern - or, dare we say, post-modern - family, thanks to the critically-acclaimed debut of his new film, 'The Kids Are All Right.'

Rachel Sklar

For video clips, you can always assume that there is a creative component since you are literally dealing with production values.

Rachel Sklar

Good advice is just watch what you say on Facebook, on Twitter, on social networks because being sued is not fun. Filing a lawsuit is not fun. And being fired and having to do all of those things is not fun. So just avoid it.

Rachel Sklar

Twitter is all about user experience - the fact that it is so easy, so clean, so unencumbered has won it so many users and fans, for so many different reasons.

Rachel Sklar

I have to say, I worry about Twitter. Not that it will survive - they don't need my blessing for that - but that it will stay the kind of open, community-enhancing-and-enabling site that made it flourish at the outset.

Rachel Sklar

Put simply, the doctrine of 'Fair Use' applies to content republished from copyrightable material and how much of that content is, literally, fair to use.

Rachel Sklar

I wrote small stories here and there, then bigger ones. Some were even written for money. I signed up for a writing class and snuck my first assignment on a yellow legal pad in a partner's office while he read through my memo.

Rachel Sklar

I feel lucky every day. But I can also trace that luck back to decisions I have made. Frequently, those decisions have been to pay my own way to somewhere I want to be and something I want to do.

Rachel Sklar

New York apartments are notoriously small, and my cute little studio is no exception - space is at a premium, which is one of the reasons that I only have a mini-fridge. Great for leftovers, cheese, and chilling Diet Coke.

Rachel Sklar

You actually can be passionate about things like making rational decisions based on a thorough airing of the facts, a reasonable and informed debate, a respect for the Constitution that includes, um, knowing about it.

Rachel Sklar

Groupon's model: Getting the group discount rate first, finding the group second. The daily deal goes out and, if a minimum number of people sign up, they can all share in the group rate. Vendor gets customers, customers get a discount, Groupon gets a cut.

Rachel Sklar

What bothered me most about chick lit, frankly, was how the term was used to dismiss a huge chunk of the bookstore as silly, girlish prattle.

Rachel Sklar

On NBC, MSNBC and Hulu, you can size and cut clips to whatever length you want. Do online clips affect the TV market? I'm guessing not really.

Rachel Sklar

I don't fault my former law firm for running their business like a business or expecting their new hire to be worth the obscene rate she was billed out at, but fun it was not.

Rachel Sklar

As an expectant mom who is currently self-employed, I'm amazed at just how tied to the workplace maternity benefits are.

Rachel Sklar

I suspect I am like most people on the Internet in that I sign up for all sorts of sites and frequently use the same passwords.

Rachel Sklar

The road system that we've come to depend on, the road system that we built our wealth on and our power on, is falling apart.

Rachel Sklar