Quick, what’s in the Constitution?
  May 7, 2026 Hi, sweet Meteor readers, My daughter got a big-girl bed last night, and her unmitigated joy about unicorn sheets and celestial-themed pillows was frankly inspiring. “I have been yearning for this all of my life,” she told me. May we all cope with sudden change as well as she does. Today, we are moving past the devastation of the Voting Rights Act’s “demolition,” and towards what we can actually do about it. Plus, good news about S-E-X (for once) and three questions for journalist Tracy Clark-Flory about her amazing new memoir. Having mom feelings, Nona Willis Aronowitz  WHAT’S GOING ON“We are not without power”: We’ve spent the last week grappling with the Supreme Court’s gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This week—even as conservative states move quickly to gerrymander the hell out of their maps—it’s time to talk about what we can do about it. Melissa Murray, a NYU law professor and author of the new book The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader, was a guest this week on UNDISTRACTED with Brittany Packnett Cunningham, and she has some basic advice: Start with the actual Constitution. “Raise your hand, America, if you’ve actually read the Constitution,” Murray says. “Don’t play in my face.” The answer is likely to be “no.” Murray says many of her own law students haven’t read until she assigns it on the first day of class. The Constitution is still relevant, despite recent evidence to the contrary, because it gives us context both to how we got ourselves here, and how we dig ourselves out. Murray calls the Constitution “a trauma-informed document”—the trauma of the colonies having been oppressed by a global superpower. The whole purpose of the document, Murray says, was to limit the government’s power so it didn’t “run roughshod over the rights of ordinary people.” But of course, the original Constitution also contained some pretty horrific concessions to Southern states; the Constitution, Murray notes, “is literally rooted in a series of compromises about how to keep people enslaved, and we have to wrestle with that.”  On the other hand, the Constitution famously has amendments, and those amendments are a profound exercise in citizen power. In Murray’s book, she tells the story of the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th Amendments—all of which “were passed in this period at the turn of the century, where there was a huge populist movement.” These were drastic changes we can scarcely imagine now: The 19th amendment that enfranchised women, for instance, “basically doubled the size of the electorate in one fell swoop. Think of what we can do if we harness that kind of power.” Amendments are possible, she says: We could be thinking about statehood for Washington, D.C.— “Hello, it’s a Black city”—or we could pass an amendment to get rid of the electoral college, which Murray reminds us we once came very close to doing. (Did you know that? I did not.) Murray would love every college student in America to read her chapter about the 27th amendment, which regulates pay increases for Congress. It tells the story of a University of Texas-Austin student who helped get it passed in the nineties, more than 200 years after it was proposed. “That is a lesson for young people,” Murray says. “You can be constitutional change agents. We don’t have to take this.” AND:
  Three Questions (and a Compliment) About…Motherhood and SisterhoodTracy Clark-Flory’s new memoir grapples with her mother’s secret teen pregnancy, and a half-sister she never knew.Ever since she was a teenager, Tracy Clark-Flory was aware her half-sister existed. Her mom, Deb, had gotten pregnant as a teen in the 1960s, and been sent away to a home for unwed mothers. Deb placed the baby for adoption, but endured decades of grief, thinking about her lost baby every day even after she had Tracy years later. When Tracy was in her thirties—now married, a mom, and a writer—she took a DNA test and finally tracked down her sister, Kathy. I talked to Tracy about how this revelation led to her incredible memoir, My Mother’s Daughter: Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past, a personal and political journey that is almost psychedelic in its immersiveness. Mother’s Day is on Sunday, so let’s talk about Deb first: What do you see as your inheritance from your mom, especially when it comes to the issues you write a lot about, like sex and family? As a feminist journalist and memoirist, I have been in many ways writing against what happened to my mom back in the ’60s without realizing it. I saw the ironic juxtaposition that my mom was sent away in shame in the ’60s as a pregnant teenager and then I, so many decades later, devoted my life to writing about sex, publishing personal essays on the internet—in some cases, writing personal essays in defense of casual sex, which is to say premarital sex. But now I very much understand that sex was part of what devastated my mom and changed the trajectory of her life—and that I wanted to resist that. It’s why I’ve spent so much of my career writing about things like porn and sex workers’ rights; I have repeatedly confronted shame across my career. Without knowing it, I was trying to address some of the unfinished business from my mom’s life and her experience as a young woman in this world.  TRACY CLARK-FLORY AND HER MOM, DEB (COURTESY OF TRACY CLARK-FLORY) Also…the impacts of adoption are generational. There are all these ways in which Kathy’s absence and my mom’s longing for her was very present across my childhood, even before I knew of my sister’s existence. I detected my mom’s longing and didn’t have an explanation for it. I didn’t understand how my mom could sometimes be so close to me, but also absent from me and at arm’s length. Now I see that as being part of the legacy of the adoption, of the fact that she lost her first child. Your sister is half-Black; her biological father is a man from Nigeria whom your mother met at college. And a big part of this book is about race and the lopsided sexual expectations that Black and white women have to reckon with. Can you explain more about how this dynamic works? These homes for unwed mothers would not have existed without racist ideas that place white women on a pedestal—and of course, once you’re on the pedestal, you can fall from it. Black women, on the other hand, were cast as bad girls from the start; there was no distance to fall. [Black feminist writer] bell hooks writes about this shift in the 19th century where…white women were cast as pure and innocent, whereas Black women were portrayed as hypersexualized jezebels. [Black feminist scholar] Patricia Hill Collins has argued that the jezebel stereotype made the idea of pure white womanhood possible. Through these homes, white unmarried mothers were rerouted towards marriage and the nuclear family. Black unwed mothers, on the other hand, were expected to raise their own children. And then, as a result, they faced all sorts of costs, from lost education to poverty. They were also targeted with harassment from welfare officials and sterilization. This racially divided approach to unwed motherhood worked against shared rebellion, and Black and white women’s fates were determined along these very separate paths, which also served to hide their shared interest in reproductive justice.  TRACY CLARK-FLORY AND HER SISTER, KATHY, DURING THEIR FIRST MEETING. (COURTESY OF TRACY CLARK-FLORY) You discuss these traditional institutions and expectations that harmed your mother, and at the same time you are very aware of the fact that you ended up in a heteronormative, monogamous, nuclear family. How do you think your family configuration fits in with this fascination you’ve always had with shame and sexual rebellion? It’s been very odd to be researching the ways in which marriage, as an institution, have been historically used to control women’s sexuality, and then look at my own life and see I have found myself within this institution. I’ve found some of my greatest happiness, my greatest sense of comfort within marriage, and yet Christopher and I will sometimes look at each other and be like, “Why did we get married?” And it’s not because we’re questioning our connection or commitment to one another, but we’re questioning how it is that we ended up within an institution that in so many ways we do not philosophically or politically agree with. And of course, I know the answer. There’s so much that points us in this direction and rewards us for taking this sort of path. But I wish we lived in a world where there were more options readily available. I’m very interested in imagining alternate ways of structuring our lives. Speaking of, I love the descriptions of the unwed mothers living together and even writing a newsletter together. It’s so cool and ironic that while these unwed mothers were sent away to be “redeemed” so that they could be in a nuclear family, they were actually living communally in a temporary sisterhood. They should’ve started a mommune! I love these women and their gallows humor. [In their newsletter] they’re joking about the unwed mother-mice that go skittering across the floor in their rooms. You know, the vibes were pretty good! They were in these really miserable and traumatizing circumstances, but the fact that they were still able to develop that kind of sisterhood really speaks to the power of the connection.  ONE MORE THING A new exhibit from The Institute for Primary Facts drives home the enormity of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged crimes. It transforms the Epstein files into an imposing physical entity, with 3,437 books, more than 3.5 million pages, and 17,000 pounds spanning the width of several walls. But why print, catalog, and display an archive that’s already available on the internet? David Garrett, a lead organizer of the exhibit, tells Meteor contributor Ann Vettikkal that it will force people to take the files seriously by removing them from the context of “doomscrolling.” The volumes, he says, also serve as a monument to the “sheer scale of evidence” of Epstein’s alleged crimes and connections to powerful figures like Trump. The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room will be open to the public in New York City starting tomorrow through May 21.
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