The Non-Secret Lives of Mormon Wives
  March 26, 2026 Salutations, Meteor readers, I’m not one for corporal punishment, but I do think the creators of “Age of Attraction” need to be taken to the town square and pilloried for a few days to think on their sins. In today’s newsletter, we unpack the ongoing Taylor Frankie Paul debacle. If you don’t know who or what that is, you have a pure heart and an uncluttered mind. Stay blessed. Plus a terrible new rule from the International Olympic Committee and a hearty slice of women’s history. Bringing tomatoes to the square, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONThe man treatment: Last Sunday, ABC was meant to premiere the latest season of “The Bachelorette” starring the queen of Mormon messiness, Taylor Frankie Paul, the lead of the hit Hulu series “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” (SLOMW). Instead, the season was pulled after a disturbing video of Paul was released by TMZ that showed her in an altercation with her ex-boyfriend/babydaddy/co-star, Dakota Mortensen. In the video, which was recorded by Mortensen in 2023, Paul is seen doing a number of things, including throwing three large barstools at Mortensen. At some point, one of those chairs hits Paul’s five-year-old daughter, who was sitting on the couch during the altercation. The response to this video has torn the internet asunder, with some justifying Paul’s actions as a response to whatever happened off-camera, and others equivocating and employing their new favorite term, “reactive abuse.” There’s also been a tendency, particularly among women viewers, to over-empathize with Paul for unleashing her feminine rage on a man whom she says has also abused her. In comment sections everywhere, there are notes that Paul is being punished so harshly because she is a woman, whereas Mortensen has lost nothing for his as-yet-unknown role in the 2023 incident (or for any of his alleged abusive behavior). I hate to be the naysayer in the group, but I have to call balderdash.  THE CAST OF SLOMW LAST YEAR AT THE PREMIERE FOR SEASON FOUR. ON THE HEELS OF THE PAUL/MORTENSEN VIDEO, HULU HAS PAUSED PRODUCTION ON SEASON FIVE. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) The reality is that Paul is receiving the kind of treatment a man would in this situation. Let’s examine the facts. ABC knew from the start that Paul had pled guilty to aggravated assault in 2023—it was literally a storyline on SLOMW, and the police bodycam footage of Paul’s arrest was part of an episode. Yet they still chose to cast her in “The Bachelorette.” Hulu still had Paul star in subsequent seasons of SLOMW, where some of the other cast members alluded to Paul and Mortensen being abusive towards each other in front of Paul’s children. And we all watched, just like we watch abusers in the NFL. Compare this to former “Bachelor” Colton Underwood, who was accused of stalking and harassing his girlfriend in 2020. What was his punishment? Some negative online chatter, a 2021 documentary about his life, and appearances on not one, not two, but four reality TV shows. So when folks say, This would never happen to a man, what exactly is the this? Because what does happen to men is a lot of rah-rah about getting canceled and all of us yelling from atop the moral high ground to little effect. Similarly, when the news of Paul’s investigation first dropped, bachelordata reported that she gained 80,000 new followers. TMZ announced yesterday that despite three investigations into domestic violence incidents, Paul will receive her full paycheck for filming “The Bachelorette.” She also still maintains 50/50 custody of the child who was struck. While the two experiences are very different, the same thing that shielded Underwood now shields Paul: whiteness. As many people have been pointing out, the abuse we’re seeing does not occur in a vacuum, which is why Paul and Mortensen being young, white, and allegedly attractive need to be taken into consideration when we talk about their treatment. If Paul weren’t white, she would have immediately lost her job, as we’ve seen with other reality stars who have done less and gotten fired. And far worse can happen after incidents like this to women who are not rich and famous, like permanently losing custody of their children. As for Mortensen, he hasn't incurred the same scrutiny because he's positioned himself as the noble victim, a character that only works for white men. Taylor Frankie Paul may be in a freefall, but there is a golden parachute attached to her back—one that does not exist for regular women, especially women of color. The one thing we can agree on in this jambalaya of opinions is that we should all be held to the same standards when it comes to wrongdoing, regardless of race, gender, finances, or follower counts. We cannot allow a warped idea of feminism to trump the fact that harm was done to a completely innocent party—Paul’s daughter. We don’t know how much that child has seen, but what we do know, from watching the footage, is that she was silent until she was struck by the chair—which shows us that she has likely heard this kind of screaming and seen this kind of argument before; it’s been normalized. Children who absorb this behavior grow up to be adults who accept it or, at the very worst, act it out on others. When it comes to children witnessing or experiencing abuse, I am always Team Child. AND:
 SLICE OF WOMEN'S HISTORY 🍕Akasha Gloria Hull, a foundational Black feministBY REBECCA CARROLL Throughout Women’s History Month, we’ll be featuring women (or women’s movements) that aren’t on the typical media lists we see every March.  HULL AT A BOOKSTORE EVENT IN 2015. (FAIR USE) The Combahee River Collective, founded in 1977, looms large in the field of Black feminism, and rightly so: The organization was part of a movement and moment that would change the way we talk about social justice in America. Many people familiar with the group know its bigger names: founding members Demita Frazier and twin sisters Barbara and Beverly Smith, along with Audre Lorde, an icon far beyond her association with CRC. But there’s an unsung heroine who isn’t celebrated as much as she should be: Writer, poet, and spiritual warrior Akasha Gloria Hull, whose life’s work is a love letter to Black feminists. Born Gloria Theresa Thompson in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1944, she changed her name to Akasha Gloria Hull after an illuminating trip to Ghana in 1992. Then, around the same time she was Xeroxing passages from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God for her friends and coworkers—a practice that would lead to a revival of Hurston’s work—Hull, then a professor of women’s studies, was invited to join the newly convened Collective (CRC). The group was formed out of the “absolute necessity for autonomous Black feminist analysis,” wrote Frazier and the Smith sisters in a letter to her. “We think that this chance to meet will be politically stimulating and spiritually regenerating.” She accepted the invitation, and a few years after joining CRC, she co-edited the seminal 1982 work All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave with Patricia Bell-Scott and Barbara Smith. It was the first Black feminist anthology of its kind and widely considered to have laid the groundwork for Black women’s studies. After that, Hull went on to publish a number of scholarly books, but her nonacademic work is where she gave herself the most freedom to explore the depths of her spirituality and imagination, thanks to the spiritual regeneration of CRC’s mission. From her 1989 collection, Healing Heart: Poems 1973-1988, she writes, in an untitled poem: “we love in circles/ touching round / faces in a ritual ring/ echoing blood and color/ nappy girlheads in a summer porch swing/ belligerent decisions to live/ and be ourselves.” And in Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African American Women—which combines narrative storytelling and interviews with Black women writers and friends, including Alice Walker, Lucille Clifton, and Toni Cade Bambara—Hull offers a meditation on a wide range of spiritual practices through a Black female lens, while also making a personal statement of becoming. Her work evolved from the undeniably life-changing connection with CRC, as she recalled in a 2004 interview with Monterey County Now: “That was one of the most exciting periods of my life,” Hull said. “United with others, zealous. … We really changed the map, changed the face of things.” Akasha Gloria Hull’s papers and photographs are available to the public at the Schomburg Center for African American Research in Harlem.  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
"The system is not set up for men to live their truth."
Heated Rivalry showed us what could be—but for gay men at the top levels of pro sports, that’s still just romantasy
When Heated Rivalry star Connor Storrie performed a portion of his Saturday Night Live opening monologue flanked by players from the men’s and women’s U.S national hockey teams, they formed a perfect pop culture panoptic. All at once, we had queer joy, the resolution of national sports beef, comedy, political commentary, and just a dash of pettiness for seasoning. While the moment bore the weight of so many things, that weight was shouldered entirely by sport, and where we as fans stand in our relationship to it.
For all the good that sports has given us, historically, it’s also been used as a tool of exclusion, with women, LGBTQ+ people, and athletes of color having to fight to exist in the courts, fields, and pitches they now enjoy. While there has been progress, it’s been slow and uneven. Over the last five years, 27 states have passed laws banning trans students from sports, and last summer, World Athletics mandated sex testing for women’s sporting categories—all in the name of “protecting” athletes from an amorphous queer menace.
At the same time, women’s sports have never been bigger, and incredible trans athletes, lesbians, non-binary Olympians, and bisexual baddies are all over our television screens.
But what about queer men? As Uncloseted Media wrote last year, there are “zero” gay or bisexual men actively competing at the highest professional levels of U.S. baseball, basketball, football, and hockey. That stat remains unchanged, but the success of Heated Rivalry and the current generation of queer athletes has many revisiting the age-old question: Why aren’t men coming out while active? When will we see hot hockey players kiss each other IRL? (I must note here that there have only ever been two hot men in hockey, Henrik Lundqvist and Martin St. Louis. They are both retired and, sadly, straight.)
“There’s so much performed masculinity that’s tied to men athletes,” explains Steve Granelli, Ph.D., a teaching professor of communications studies at Northeastern University. “It’s all rooted in this really toxic, very old understanding of gender roles.” That understanding is at the core of America’s Big Four—the MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL—which have long played a major role in shaping our collective idea of what it means to be a man.
In the 150-year history of American professional sports leagues, only two men have come out while still actively playing. The first was the NBA’s Jason Collins in 2013, who announced he was gay in an article for Sports Illustrated, while signed to the Washington Wizards, and was widely supported by the league and the fans. (The loudest voice of dissent came from sports broadcaster Chris Broussard, who called homosexuality a sin on air.) Eight years later, the NFL defensive end Carl Nassib shared that he was gay in a social media post. In an interview with Good Morning America, Nassib said he was met with “nothing but love and support” by his teammates and his organization. He continued in the NFL until 2023, retiring as a Tampa Bay Buccaneer.
Since Collins, gay and bi men have slowly begun to take up space, just not while playing in the Big Four. Athletes across different sports have come out in retirement or after career-ending injuries, and it’s slightly more common to see queer men in a solo sport like tennis. Luke Prokop, an active player in the development league, the AHL, came out last summer. Earlier this year, inspired by Heated Rivalry, hockey player Jesse Korteum announced that he was gay and walked away from the sport when he was 17 because he didn’t think he would be accepted. In Japan’s B.League last year, Joshua Scott, an American basketball player who was a darling of the NCAA during his time at the University of Colorado, Boulder, came out publicly as bisexual.
Scott tells me that although he would “hear some off-putting stuff about what it was to be LGBTQ” in “a lot of locker rooms,” he never felt biphobia directed at him back in Colorado. That wasn’t entirely the case when he transitioned to the pros in Japan. “There was a season where, because there were different rumors tied to my sexuality, I received zero offers to play for a team,” he says. Not yet out of the closet, Scott felt he couldn’t combat the rumors publicly without doing more damage to his career. “The system is just not set up to help men be able to live their truth, and that starts at the youth level.”
Still, “being out and playing has been one of the most rewarding experiences,” he says. Scott announced that he was bisexual on social media, intentionally choosing to skirt Japanese media, which leans conservative. Since then, “I’ve gotten to almost have it all in a way I didn’t even think was possible four or five years ago.” Part of “having it all” has been success on the court, with Scott being one of his league’s top five players in rebounds and averaging a 62.4% field goal percentage. He also learned he “wasn’t alone,” he says. “There are a lot of people within the industry that are searching for a way to have both their truth and to be able to just do their sport.”
So far, that search has not borne fruit within the Big Four, where even straight players feel a pressure to hew to traditional roles. Granelli, who specializes in the study of sports culture and fandom, cites NFL player Caleb Williams, who is straight, as an example of just how little room men are given to express themselves outside the “acceptable” constraints of masculinity. “Williams comes into the NFL, and there’s such a focus on him painting his nails,” Granelli says. Williams, who is now a quarterback for the Bears, received a lot of negative feedback and questions for his personal style, which included themed nail sets; rapper Lil Wayne commented, “We just lost a playoff game to a [expletive] w purple nails we fkn suck” after the Packers lost to the Bears in January. “When men challenge the expected presentation of an athlete in any way, there is immediate backlash,” Granelli says. Fans eventually came around to Williams and his nails, but only after he’d put on a winning display of masculinity on the field.
Conversely, women athletes have created an entirely different space. “There’s a strong understanding [in women’s sports] that there’s a huge spectrum in terms of player sexuality,” says professional soccer player Tierna Davidson. A center back for Gotham FC, Davidson has been an out lesbian for her entire career and married her former teammate Alison Jahansouz in 2024. She says that women’s soccer specifically “has fostered a safe and welcoming environment for queer people”; sexual orientation was “never something I was worried about.” Davidson also gives some of the credit for this openness to fans. “If you look at the birth and nurturing of women's soccer in the U.S., there were so many strong, queer characters in that story,” she says. Women’s soccer “attracts fans that feel seen and represented, and it helps make our environment more open and welcoming. We don’t always get it right, but fans definitely see it and want to be part of it.”
On the men’s sports side, that fan-player relationship is just as key in determining how an athlete is received. “It only takes one moment, one small thing, for fans to feel a certain disconnect with a player and turn against him,” Granelli explains. “I mean, look at Josh Allen.” Allen, the beloved (straight) quarterback of the Buffalo Bills, had long been considered by fans as “one of us,” but upon his marriage to actress Hailee Steinfeld, a small subset of the Bills Mafia started calling him a sellout. “Dating someone from Hollywood is what makes him not like us?” Granelli, a lifelong Bills fan, groans. “He’s never been one of us! He’s 6’5” and has more talent than we’ll ever understand. But that’s all it takes for some people: One moment of not being able to identify with a player.”
Reimagining men’s sports to be more inclusive then becomes a chicken-and-egg quandary. Whose openness—an athlete’s, a fandom’s, or an organization’s—must come first to secure the openness of the other in a system that is built to be symbiotic? We are meant to see our most aspirational selves in athletes, and they, in turn, are made to feel secure and valued by our love. But too often the love of a fan does not extend to the fullness of an athlete’s persona, and if an athlete knows he cannot be fully himself and still receive that love, then why should he risk it? Women and trans athletes have more room to negotiate that risk because it is ever-present—they open their eyes in the morning, and that risk looms over them. But for men, who are shielded from bias by their athleticism and an assumed idea of masculinity, coming out means asking them to give up the one shred of safety they may feel they have.
Scott is hopeful that, eventually, that will all change. “There’s that adage that real men don’t cry,” he says. “But the beautiful part about sports is the passion, the anger, the disappointment, the tears and, yes, sometimes crying…[when I was closeted] I didn’t want to be exposed or have others think I was weak. But since coming out, I find myself stronger for walking in my truth.”
"I Was Floored..."
  March 17, 2026 Howdy Meteor readers, Happy Women’s March Madness season to all who celebrate!  In today’s newsletter, Ann Vettikkal speaks to three New York moms about what it would mean for them to access free childcare through Mayor Mamdani’s proposed universal 2-K program. Plus, an AI battle looms upstate and a double slice of women’s history. Rooting for South Carolina again, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONAffordability in real time: The victory speech Zohran Mamdani gave the night he was elected mayor of New York City ended with a familiar call-and-response. “Together, New York, we’re going to deliver universal…” Mamdani began. “Childcare!” the crowd shouted back. And earlier this month, just a few weeks into his tenure as mayor, Mamdani announced that 2,000 daycare spots for two-year-olds in primarily low-income parts of New York would be available in the fall, with plans to expand “2-K” universally in the next four years. The Meteor spoke to working parents raising young children in New York City to understand the financial, physical, and emotional costs of parenthood in an expensive city—and what Mamdani’s plan for universal childcare could mean for them.  EVERYONE'S FAVORITE MAYOR DURING THE CHILDCARE PROGRAM ANNOUNCEMENT WITH NEW YORK GOVERNOR KATHY HOCHUL. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) “I just felt such an incredible sense of relief.”—Roona Ray, a part-time healthcare worker whose wife works in costume design. They live in Jackson Heights, Queens; have a 5 year-old, 3 year-old, and 2 year-old; and currently pay $1,400 a month for childcare. “I actually started as a single mom by choice. And then I met my partner, and we decided to get married. My mother-in-law really helped a lot in the first few years. But then I got fired from my job when I was nine months pregnant with my third child, and that really set us in a tailspin. And I broke my foot and… I didn't work for a long time. It was very hard to take the time to look for work, because I was just too knee-deep in parenting. It was a very stressful time. We applied for childcare vouchers and got them, so we did have some help from the state, but it took a number of trials to apply. The paperwork is very confusing. I went back to work a couple of months ago, and it's been a big adjustment. I think a lot of people are just running on empty all the time and that's a very bad feeling. Luckily, I was able to find a job where I work four days a week. Our older two kids are in public 3-K and kindergarten. The youngest one is in a home daycare. So we've been paying for her [with] cash. We have seven more months of paying for child care…[before] we get to 3-K. [Accessing 2-K childcare] would be really great for us, just to save us a few months paying for child care. I think it could be really wonderful for so many parents, and just give so much relief.” AND:
 DOUBLE SLICE OF WOMEN'S HISTORY 🍕🍕Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, feminists of faithBY SHANNON MELERO Throughout Women’s History Month, we’ll be featuring women (or women’s movements) that aren’t on the typical media lists we see every March.  A PORTRAIT OF SOR JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ PAINTED BY MIGUEL CABRERA, 1750. (NATIONAL HISTORY MUSEUM, MEXICO CITY, MEXICO) In the beginning was the Word, and that word was decidedly not “feminism.” But the work of liberation has long been in motion even before we had a word to package it together. In the late 1600s, Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez, a Mexican woman born under Spanish colonial rule, became one of the early champions of feminism by doing something most modern women would shudder to consider: She joined a convent. De Asbaje y Ramírez would take on the name Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, becoming a poet and fierce advocate for women’s right to education. She understood that “her desire to learn was an impulse given to her by God,” explains Latina feminist theologian Theresa A. Yugar. Sor Juana also believed that having opinions was central to understanding God. “She said it was better for women to be educated by women, because being educated by men could cause innumerable harm and women could be violated,” says Yugar. While serving the Church, Sor Juana published stage plays, mathematical treatises, social manifestos, and criticisms of homilies. For this, she was silenced, her works suppressed until the 20th century, when she was recognized as the first published feminist of New Spain. While Sor Juana was the first, she certainly was not the last. Three hundred years after her death, another prominent theologian helped develop a new understanding of the unique relationship between Latinas, God, and the struggle for liberation. Her name was Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, the mother of mujerista theology. Isasi-Diaz, a Cuban immigrant, joined the Ursuline order as a novice in her twenties, but eventually left the order to pursue a doctoral degree at a seminary school. She believed that women should be ordained within the Catholic Church (a debate that continues to this day) and wanted to become a priest. But within the Church that was a non-starter, so Isasi-Diaz became the next best thing: a professor shaping the lives of Latine PhD students at Drew University. Her work helped make feminist thought and practice accessible to Latines of faith who were often left out of mainstream American feminist movements, even though they were quite literally in the room. (Xicanisma also took on this work of centering Latine people, but with less of a focus on faith.) Her work echoed that of Audre Lorde, who “taught us early on that unless we created new methods for doing theology we would not effectively dismantle the…[traditions] that have excluded women…for ages,” Isasi-Diaz wrote in “Lo Cotidiano: A Key Element of Mujerista Theology.” She goes on to explain that mujeristism prioritizes the liberation of Latine women and calls for centering their “cotidiano”—the realities of their everyday lives—and “not an abstract faith but the faith that sustains grassroots people in their daily living.” The relationship between faith and modern-day feminism is still fraught, particularly when it comes to the Catholic Church. But these women exemplify that there is a place where the two things can meet and, God willing, get us closer to the fully realized dream of collective liberation.  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
What Free Daycare Would Mean to New York City's Parents
Three women on the insanity of childcare costs, and how Mayor Mamdani's plan would change that
By Ann Vettikkal
The victory speech Zohran Mamdani gave the night he was elected mayor of New York City ended with a familiar call-and-response. “Together, New York, we’re going to deliver universal…,” Mamdani began. “Childcare!” the crowd shouted back. And earlier this month, just a few weeks into his tenure as mayor, Mamdani announced that 2,000 daycare spots for two-year-olds in primarily low-income parts of New York would be available in the fall, with plans to expand “2-K” universally in the next four years.
The Meteor spoke to working parents raising young children in New York City to understand the financial, physical, and emotional costs of parenthood in an expensive city—and what Mamdani’s plan for universal childcare could mean for them.
“I just felt such an incredible sense of relief.”
—Roona Ray, a part-time healthcare worker whose wife works in costume design. They live in Jackson Heights, Queens; have a 5 year-old, 3 year-old, and 2 year-old; and currently pay $1,400 a month for childcare.
“I actually started as a single mom by choice. And then I met my partner, and we decided to get married. My mother-in-law really helped a lot in the first few years. But then I got fired from my job when I was nine months pregnant with my third child, and that really set us in a tailspin. And I broke my foot and… I didn't work for a long time. It was very hard to take the time to look for work, because I was just too knee-deep in parenting. It was a very stressful time. We applied for childcare vouchers and got them, so we did have some help from the state, but it took a number of trials to apply. The paperwork is very confusing.
I went back to work a couple of months ago, and it's been a big adjustment. I think a lot of people are just running on empty all the time and that's a very bad feeling. Luckily, I was able to find a job where I work four days a week. Our older two kids are in public 3-K and kindergarten. The youngest one is in a home daycare. So we've been paying for her [with] cash. We have seven more months of paying for child care…[before] we get to 3-K.
[Accessing 2-K childcare] would be really great for us, just to save us a few months paying for child care. I think it could be really wonderful for so many parents, and just give so much relief.”
“It actually made me feel a little bit better about having another child.”
—Nancy Keith, a scientist whose husband works in the restaurant industry. They live in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with a one-year-old, and pay $26,000 a year for childcare.
“Luckily for me, I had pretty good maternity leave benefits, so I was able to stay with my baby for about six months. My husband took some time off of work beyond the New York parental leave. We were really trying hard to bridge the gap ourselves so that we wouldn't have to pay for child care on a daily basis.
I was floored when I learned how expensive child care can be annually. Even the non-fancy [daycares] are quoting so much. What we pay is on the lower end compared to other people. I feel lucky in that sense. But between rent and childcare, that's where a lot of our money goes.
I was very excited to hear [about universal childcare], and it actually made me feel a little bit better about having another child. My husband and I are in our late 30s, and we waited a bit before we felt like we could financially be ready for a child. Even now, it's still tough with daycare costs, and we're both working full time. Having something like universal childcare in place would really motivate more people to not be too afraid to have kids. Knowing how much everything costs in New York, adding in a child can really impact your decisions. Knowing that there are these initiatives makes me want to stay in New York.”
“I need a full time job so I can pay for childcare so I can find a full time job.”
—Ankita Chachra, a freelancer with a background in urban design, lives in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, with her husband, her three-year-old, and her nine-month-old. They pay approximately $60,000 a year for childcare.
“I moved to New York City in 2012. But between 2020 and 2023, we were in the Netherlands, and my son, my three-year-old, was born in the Netherlands. So I had maternity benefits and paid care leave. But we decided to move back to Brooklyn for a few reasons. One, we had a house here. Second, we just love the city. And third, we would be closer to at least my husband's family, who's in Chicago; my family's in India. Sometimes the answer [to childcare gaps] is actually family and friends who are available.
We would look at our mortgage amount and then the daycare costs. And oftentimes, the daycare costs were higher than the mortgage. It was like almost having a second mortgage. We were actually really concerned when we found out that we were going to have a second child, because my husband had been on a loan forgiveness program [which was] about to expire, and those costs were going to come back up. And I was moving into freelancing; I didn't have a paid family leave plan.
I need a full-time job so I can pay for childcare so I can find a full time job. It's not just about having [universal] childcare. I think it's recognizing that we need quality childcare, but we also need options, like being able to pay family and friends for the time that they're spending. I'm excited that this is happening and that it's being talked about. And I also like the fact that childcare finally is being [treated]—at least in some situations—as a public good.”
Ann Vettikkal is a recent graduate of Columbia University, where she reported on labor issues and the 2024 campus protests; edited the long-form, narrative magazine The Eye; and hosted a weekly show for the student-run radio station WKCR.
Lipstick, Selfies, and Prosthetic Legs
Gaza is home to the world’s largest group of child amputees. A photographer documents the lives of two of those children, who are still healing and waiting.
By Eman Mohammed
Layan’s first request after her surgeries was simple: She wanted to wear dresses again.
Before the bombing, she loved how fabric moved when she spun, how a skirt could flare and turn an ordinary hallway into a stage. After she lost both of her legs in an Israeli airstrike on her home in Gaza, dresses became a negotiation with balance, stitches, and pain. Learning to walk again meant relearning her body, figuring out how to trust it enough to stand inside the clothes she missed.
Layan is not the only child from Gaza learning to adapt to life-altering injuries. The United Nations has reported that Gaza is now home to the world's largest cohort of pediatric amputees per capita, with more than 4,000 children losing limbs since October 2023.
Most of those children remain in Gaza, with little hope of being evacuated to receive rehabilitation in a safe environment. Since October 2023, organizations like HEAL Palestine have facilitated secure passage for 62 children to the United States through medical visas, but in August 2025, those visas were suspended for Palestinian passport holders. Extensions quietly disappeared. When treatment ended, the Trump administration required their return. HEAL Palestine pledged not to send any Palestinian child back into an active genocide, and since then, those who could not remain in the U.S. have been placed in temporary housing in Cairo, waiting for borders to open, for stability to return, and for a future that does not yet exist.
Layan, 14, was one of the children who were granted medical evacuation to the United States through Heal Palestine. She arrived in Chicago in March 2024, and her host family has navigated lawyers, deadlines, and a system built to send her back before she was ready, fighting to keep her in the country while she relearns how to walk on both prosthetic legs. For now, her healing continues there, and she’s back in school. She still wants to go back to Gaza, not out of nostalgia, but because it is the only place that feels complete. Return remains blocked under Israeli restrictions.
Rozan, 13, understands interruption in a different way. After her evacuation for treatment, she was sent back to Egypt to wait for the borders to open. She lives with another family sponsored by HEAL Palestine, a mom and a three-year-old from Gaza. Her time in Cairo stretched from temporary to indefinite. Rozan lost her leg and seventeen members of her family in a single Israeli airstrike. The number sits in the room even when no one says it, but she doesn’t perform grief. She draws, studies, argues about outfits before school, and laughs when clay collapses in her hands on a pottery wheel, then tries again.
Neither girl fits the story people want from them. They are not symbols of unmitigated triumph. Their days revolve around prosthetic fittings, therapy schedules, visa deadlines, and the long logistics of survival. Healing is technical work. It takes money, translators, housing, doctors, tutors, and adults willing to build a net strong enough to hold children who have already fallen too far. That net exists because a community refused to let them disappear.
HEAL Palestine and the families around it function less like charity and more like extended kin. Apartments become shared recovery spaces. Older children teach new arrivals how to balance on unfamiliar legs. Caregivers trade information about clinics, schools, immigration rules. The girls grow inside that ecosystem of attention. Their resilience is not solitary, it is built collectively, reinforced by people who keep showing up.
In the afternoons, Rozan’s apartment fills with ordinary noise. A ball skids across the tile. Someone shouts. Someone laughs. Inside that chaos is the thing policy could not erase: children insisting on motion, and a community answering by making sure they never have to move alone.
Click on the images below to view the photo gallery.
Eman Mohammed is an award-winning Palestinian photojournalist from Gaza and Senior TED fellow. Her work has been featured in Le Monde, VICE, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and more.
Four Oscars for Glen Coco
  March 12, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, I take back all the bad things I’ve said in the past about men’s baseball. As a matter of fact, does anyone know how I can get this job with the MLB? In today’s newsletter, Rebecca Carroll shares her Oscars predictions and hopes. Plus, some bloodthirsty chatbots to avoid. Take me out to the ball game, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONIt’s that time of year again: Let’s give out some shiny statuettes to movie stars! The 98th Academy Awards is this Sunday, so here are some of my (Rebecca’s) selective predictions and/or hopes for the winners. Jessie Buckley should and will win Best ActressIn Hamnet, Irish actress Jessie Buckley gives a career-defining performance as Agnes, the fiercely independent wife of a young William Shakespeare. The film is a powerfully intimate adaptation of the 2020 novel of the same title by Maggie O’Farrell, who co-wrote the screenplay with director Chloé Zhao. It imagines the raucous courtship between Agnes and William, their subsequent marriage, the family they create together, and the devastating loss of their 11-year-old son Hamnet to plague. Opposite Paul Mescal, who is quietly extraordinary as William, Buckley depicts the messy, raw anguish of a mother who has lost her child with everything she has. It is as much a physical performance as it is an emotional one, and it is absolutely one for the books. Michael B. Jordan deserves Best Actor DONNA JORDAN, THE WOMAN WHO GAVE US THE GIFT OF MICHAEL B. JORDAN. WE OWE YOU SO MUCH, MS. DONNA. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) After the drama of the last few weeks, it almost certainly won’t be Timothée Chalamet, despite an egregiously self-serving and overindulgent press campaign for Marty Supreme. (Shouldna been talking shit about the opera and ballet, Timmy.) He also doesn’t deserve it. The award for Best Actor should go to Michael B. Jordan, who plays twins and (spoiler) a twin-turned-vampire, so he actually gives three transformative performances in one brilliant movie. In case you’ve been without wi-fi for the past year, Sinners is the story of twin bootlegging brothers who return to the Jim Crow South from Chicago. They put up a juke joint, and the rest is history. Benicio del Toro and Teyana Taylor NEED to get Best Supporting Actor/ActressBenicio del Toro’s performance in One Battle After Another is maybe the only reason to see this film—it’s that good. Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s political drama-cum-action thriller is meant to be about former white guy revolutionary Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), who got soft, smokes weed all day, and has a Black and biracial daughter. But as soon as the film introduces del Toro as karate sensei Sergio St. Carlos, he becomes the understated star. There’s something del Toro does as an actor in a supporting role (see: The Usual Suspects) that transcends the time his character is afforded, and he does it with a glorious, breathtaking ease. My guess is that Sean Penn (who also stars in One Battle After Another) will win, because his portrayal of Colonel Lockjaw is a classic Oscar performance—broken, stilted, deranged. And Hollywood loves a straight white man playing a damaged, disabled, or otherwise impaired person. Teyana Taylor plays Black revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills in the same film. It’s a problematic role that has stirred a lot of discourse. It screams Black woman tropes to some, real-talk empowerment to others. But trope or not, Taylor nails it. She is that bitch, and I admire her commitment. She deserves to win, but she is also favored to win, since she won both the Golden Globe and BAFTA for supporting actress. Sinners should win everything elseIts collaborative ingenuity, elegance, and masterful storytelling are simply undeniable. Ryan Coogler gathered a team of actors, filmmakers, musicians, and dreamers, and created a miracle. Honorable Mention: Bugonia THE BRILLIANT MINDS BEHIND BUGONIA (VIA GETTY IMAGES) I’ve seen Bugonia three times. It’s a haunting, subdued prophecy about human nature that feels acutely on point. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and starring his longtime collaborator Emma Stone, Bugonia is a remake of the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan. In it, Stone plays Michelle, a high-profile CEO of a major pharmaceutical company, who is kidnapped by part-time beekeeper and full-time conspiracy theorist Teddy (a pitch-perfect performance by Jesse Plemons) and his neurodivergent cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis). It’s hard to describe the plot further without including spoilers, and also without making it sound wacky or predictable. Trust me: It is neither. Somehow, the arc of this film manages to be melancholy, torturous, and eerily beautiful all at once. —Rebecca Carroll AND:
 HEIGL'S RESPONSE TO CRITICISM WAS, "ANIMALS DON'T VOTE." GIRL? GIRL. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
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The Iran War Will Touch Everything
  March 10, 2026 Greetings Meteor readers, International Women’s Day was on Sunday, and I had the great pleasure of celebrating it with my daughter at a New York Sirens game where she got to watch her first hockey fight. Nothing says “girl power” like the feminine urge to strangle your rival. In today’s newsletter, we focus on the war in Iran and its effect on every part of our lives. Plus, bad news for Wyoming and a piping fresh slice of women’s history from Nona Willis Aronowitz. Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONIt touches everything: The United States is 11 days into the war with Iran and, unlike previous wars, the administration has not quite yet figured out how to brand and promote this invasion of a sovereign nation to the masses. That isn’t for lack of trying—Trump and his ilk are selling this war to the troops as “part of God’s divine plan,” blessed by Jesus to bring about Armageddon. (Tell me you didn’t finish reading the Bible without telling me…) Americans, for their part, have done their best to roll with the punches, joking about the start of WWIII (again) and facing down potential nuclear winter with as much humor as can be managed. This dissociation is somewhat understandable. The moment in front of us is almost too grave to comprehend. We wonder what this war will cost us and worry that, for civilians, it may cost everything. It certainly already has for Iranian women and children. The fact of the matter is, this war will touch every aspect of our world. In this moment, we look to fellow journalists who have begun to unpack the ways how. Women’s rights: “In every war, women and girls are among the first whose security becomes fragile,” one Iranian photographer tells Outlook India. “When a girls’ school is bombed, it is not only a building that is destroyed, it sends a message that the future of girls is once again under threat.” Power vacuums, like the one created by the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are detrimental to women’s movements—fighting for your rights inevitably takes a backseat to fleeing for your very life from airstrikes and gunfire. The looming influence of AI: Carole Cadwalladr writes about what she calls the “broligarchy’s first war” and how the influence of billionaire tech bros is reshaping warfare. “Was it AI that selected the Iranian school where at least 168 people were killed, mostly children?” she writes. “This is a crucial question. Were those children the collateral damage of an AI hallucination? We can’t let this moment pass. Minab, like Aberfan, is a place that should be burned onto our brains.”  A MASS FUNERAL HELD IN IRAN FOR THE STUDENTS AND FACULTY KILLED BY AN AIRSTRIKE LAST MONTH. (PHOTO BY HANDOUT VIA GETTY IMAGES) Climate disasters: Acid rain fell over Tehran this weekend after the U.S. bombed an oil site in the region. Iranians, who are already enduring a historic drought, must now contend with their water supplies being polluted for years. Journalists Mark Herstgaard and Giles Trendle explain how that impact will not be limited to the Middle East, because “modern warfare is inextricably linked with climate change.” As a number of studies have already shown, it’s women who bear the brunt of a worsening climate. The global economy: We’ve already seen it at the gas pump and in the stock market: This war is hammering the economy. And it’s not just in the United States. Trump promised in a horrendous and lie-riddled speech yesterday that he would initiate attacks from which Iran would “never recover.” Were that to happen, entire nations would be brought to unimaginable levels of economic distress. AND:
 NO TOXIC FANS IN THE COTTAGE!!!! (VIA GETTY IMAGES)  SLICE OF WOMEN’S HISTORY 🍕Johnnie Tillmon, radical welfare rights activistThroughout Women’s History Month, we’ll be featuring women (or women’s movements) that aren’t on the typical media lists we see every March.  TILLMON PHOTOGRAPHED BY BRIAN LANKER, 1988. (VIA NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION. COPYRIGHT BRIAN LANKER ARCHIVE) “I’m a woman. I’m a Black woman. I’m a poor woman. I’m a fat woman. I’m a middle-aged woman. And I’m on welfare.” Welfare rights activist Johnnie Tillmon proudly wrote those words in 1972 in Ms. magazine. Born in 1926 in Arkansas as a sharecropper’s daughter, she worked in the cotton fields at age seven and later in laundromats while she struggled as a single mother of six children. But in 1963, after a tonsillectomy landed her in the hospital, she reluctantly applied for welfare so she could better handle the demands of motherhood. She was taken aback by how caseworkers denigrated her and policed her personal life. Welfare officials questioned her purchases, inventoried her fridge, and barred her from, as she put it, “male company.” Tillmon’s experience wasn’t unique: Welfare recipients—especially Black women, who were largely barred from collecting welfare until the 1960s—were routinely persecuted, their homes searched and their sexual histories interrogated. Some were even sterilized as a condition to claim benefits.  MEMBERS OF THE NATIONAL WELFARE RIGHTS ORGANIZATION AT A MARCH IN BOSTON IN 1969. (THE BOSTON GLOBE VIA GETTY IMAGES) Tillmon’s own experience formed the backbone of her life’s work. She started organizing her fellow welfare recipients and formed Aid to Needy Children Mothers Anonymous, a group that assisted people who’d been kicked off welfare. That group later became part of the National Welfare Rights Organization, which grew to 30,000 members by 1968. She argued for a guaranteed minimum income decades before UBI became a standard leftist rallying cry. And while some women were arguing for liberation from domesticity, Tillmon was arguing for liberation from government oversight. In the same 1972 essay, she called welfare “the most prejudiced institution in this country” and “like a super-sexist marriage.” She drew a parallel between men and the Black Power-inflected concept of “The Man”—oppressive, white, patriarchal institutions like the police, the prisons, and bureaucracies like the welfare system. “For Tillmon, economic independence—which meant being untethered from exploitative employers and from the constraints of the market—also ensured freedom,” Premilla Nadasen, a professor of history at Barnard College who has written extensively about Tillmon, told The Meteor. That included freedom for women to raise and choose the size of their families; “nobody realizes more than poor women that all women should have the right to control their own reproduction,” Tillmon wrote. Now, in an age when government assistance has been eviscerated and motherhood has been idealized as a white Christian pursuit, Nadasen says, “it's really powerful to reimagine the world through Johnnie Tillmon's radical vision.” Her work was not only about “the right to a living wage for women’s work,” Tillmon wrote. It was about “the right to life itself.” —Nona Willis Aronowitz  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
Ball Really is Life
  March 5, 2026 Salutations, Meteor readers, Does anyone have the phone number for the Hague? I’d like to report Alex from Love is Blind and his dirty-ass beard for crimes against humanity. In today’s newsletter, we’re digging into the importance of the WNBA’s contract battle. Plus, a title change for Kristi Noem and a concerning update on the progress of women and girls worldwide. Wash your face, kids, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONBall is money: We find ourselves in a unique moment in the celestial Ball Is Life calendar. Unrivaled has just crowned the Mist as this year’s champions, March Madness is ramping up, and the WNBA just released revenue-sharing payments for the 2025 season. All should be right with the world of women’s basketball. But there’s been a very large hitch in our collective giddyup: contract negotiations between the W and the players’ association. It isn’t just fans and players who have to worry about whether or not the regular season will start on time in May. In a normal year, part of the excitement of March Madness is getting to witness the national debut of future WNBA stars. It was this very tournament that brought all of us the light of the world that is DiJonai Carrington and beloved big woman Kamilla Cardoso, among many others. But with a strike looming because of ongoing negotiations, we’re all nervously staring down the clock. Scheduling concerns and rookie contracts aside, there’s also a larger discussion about pay equity playing out right in front of us, and much of it echoes the fight for fair compensation outside of sports. “Women athletes are such an open display of the issues that a lot of women face in society,” sports business journalist Aryanna Prasad tells The Meteor. “When it comes to pay equity, they're very vocal, and they have huge platforms, and I think that's what's really powerful.” Women politicians are talking about these intersectional issues, she says, “but maybe not everyone is tuning in to C-SPAN. But athletes are centered in pop culture. Everyone has eyes on someone like Caitlin Clark.”  THE MIST CELEBRATING THEIR WIN AND THE KNOWLEDGE THAT THEY BROKE AN ATTENDANCE RECORD THIS YEAR. (VIA GETTY AIMGES) And players in the W have always shown a level of fearlessness when it comes to social justice. At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, WNBA players were full-throatedly talking about racism on and off the court—fines be damned. “Women athletes are not afraid to be activists,” Prasad says, and the women of the W have taken that same approach to financial issues. Their willingness to be open about pay disparities, revenue sharing, and the behind-the-scenes work of getting a strong CBA provides a tangible blueprint for the grit, time, strategy, and solidarity required to achieve those goals. In the case of the WNBA, the main sticking point of these negotiations has been a fairer revenue-sharing split, similar to the kind of revenue-sharing seen in the NBA. Prasad notes that in terms of league lifespan, the WNBA is still in its infancy at the age of 30 (I, too, am just a baby then, yes?), and the boom we’ve seen in the last three years has changed player expectations. “The league is becoming profitable, and it’s such an attractive investment; everyone is all in,” Prasad says. “The players see that…and understandably, they want their fair portion.” AND:
 THE OVERNIGHT DEMOCRAT SENSATION (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 SLICE OF WOMEN’S HISTORY 🍕Jo Ann Bland, child activist who marched in SelmaThroughout Women’s History Month, we’ll be featuring women (or women’s movements) that aren’t on the typical media lists we see every March.  BLAND IN 2015, WALKING OVER THE EDMUND PETTUS BRIDGE IN SELMA, ALABAMA. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Most narratives about the marches for voting rights in Selma, Alabama focus on men like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee cofounder Rep. John Lewis. But activist Jo Ann Bland (sometimes spelled Joanne Bland), who played a key role in the movement and passed away last month at the age of 72, actually grew up in the city and started fighting for civil rights as a young girl. One day, her grandmother told her she couldn’t sit at the counter at Carter’s Drugstore because she was Black. Gazing at the white kids licking ice cream cones, she recalled in an interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2024, “I became a freedom fighter that day.” She joined SNCC shortly afterwards, at just eight years old, and by the time she was 11, she once wrote, she had been arrested at least 13 times. That same year, she was one of the protesters who tried to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge on March 7, 1965, which would eventually be known as Bloody Sunday. The Voting Rights Act passed that August. That bridge is “sort of like Mecca,” Bland told NPR in 2022. “I had so many people tell me they didn't realize the bridge was that small. That's because the history is so huge, so huge.” She remained committed to preserving that history until the end of her life, giving tours of Selma that she called “Journeys For the Soul” and, in 2021, establishing the city’s Foot Soldiers Park at the location where protesters gathered before their marches. “This is urgent, that we start to capture our own histories,” she said in the same NPR interview. “When we leave, those stories are gone. Who will tell the story?” Judging by the outpouring of remembrances since her death, we’d say a lot of people. —Nona Willis Aronowitz  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
SCOTUS Deals in the Dark, Again
  March 3, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, I don’t know about the rest of y'all, but I’m a stress baker and given how bad things are, my oven has been working overtime. On Saturday, I made a burnt basque cheesecake that my taste testers said was perfection.  In today’s newsletter, we take a look at the Supreme Court’s latest use of its emergency docket. Plus, three questions with author Savala Nolan about her new book, Good Woman: A Reckoning. Pain au chocolat next, Shannon Melero Crocker  WHAT'S GOING ONNo argument: Yesterday, in an emergency docket decision, the Supreme Court chose to “pause” a California policy that prevented teachers from informing parents about a student’s gender expression. For the safety of queer students, California’s board of education had directed teachers to not discuss changes in gender expression or any kind of social transitioning with parents, out of concern that some students might face abuse at home. In response, a group of parents and teachers filed an emergency appeal claiming that the policy violated their religious rights. The Supreme Court sided with those parents and teachers. “The State argues that its policies advance a compelling interest in student safety and privacy,” the decision reads. “But those policies cut out the primary protectors of children’s best interests: their parents.” (Nevermind that the parents are arguing not for the sake of their children, but for the right to exercise their own personal religious beliefs over their children’s lives.) The decision essentially means that students do not have an expectation of privacy if they choose to confide in a teacher or start to explore their gender identity (if they, for example, ask to be called by a different name) at school. The pause on California’s policy doesn’t mean teachers are now compelled to out students; rather they will be expected to answer questions from parents who are trying to find out if their child is socially transitioning. If they don’t, they run the risk of being punished for violating parents’ rights to exercise their religious beliefs.  A DRAG MARCH FOR TRANS RIGHTS IN SAN DIEGO (VIA GETTY AIMGES) There are several alarming issues competing in this case, but perhaps none more alarming than the one brought up by Justice Elena Kagan in a dissent joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Speaking of the haste with which the conservative judges came to a decision in the case, Kagan wrote, “The court is impatient: It already knows what it thinks, and insists on getting everything over quickly. A mere decade ago, this court would never have granted relief [without a] full briefing, oral argument, conference, and opinion writing, along with the time they take.” Kagan also noted that the Court had received a “scant and inadequate briefing” about the merits of the case and called the majority’s decision “tonally dismissive.” That is the dark magic of the court’s emergency docket: the ability to decide quickly and with minimal explanation which rights supersede others. Kagan herself admits that the parents’ group had certain rights, but so did the California Department of Education, which had created the policy for the protection of students. We are seeing, in real time, an erosion of due process at the highest court in the land, and it isn’t the judges who are paying the price. This time, it’s students, who are daily running out of safe places to express themselves, and who will suffer at the hands of six conservatives and the stroke of a pen. AND:
 Three Questions About…God the MotherIn Savala Nolan’s new book, Good Woman, clarity is the goal.BY SHANNON MELERO  AUTHOR AND ESSAYIST SAVALA NOLAN (COURTESY OF SAVALA NOLAN) There are certain things you read as a writer that make you think, I should stop trying because nothing I do will ever be this good. Most recently, I felt this way after finishing essayist Savala Nolan’s latest book, Good Woman: A Reckoning, which Ms. Magazine has named one of the most anticipated feminist books of this year. Good Woman is a collection of poignant, brutally honest essays exploring the various cages women put themselves into so that they might be considered “good”—good mothers, good wives, good daughters—and the ways in which those cages can be small deaths. The book opens with a gut-punching essay titled “Mothers Superior,” which weaves Nolan’s experiences as a mother and how that changed her understanding of God. In a line that gave me chills, Nolan writes, “Calling God a father seems like wishful thinking, delusion, or outright deception.” I asked Nolan about the godlike work of mothering and how that extends into different facets of life. There’s a lot of friction between mainstream feminism and religious belief, almost to the point where in some feminist spaces you’re really looked down on for believing in God. But you don’t shy away from using that as a point of entry for a bigger conversation about feminist concepts. What was the thinking behind bringing folks into the fold that way? I can relate to the idea that you can't be a deep feminist and also believe in God, although I would add the wrinkle that, at least in American culture, there are certainly Black feminists who have a relationship with God that is interesting and central and different than what you would consider the mainstream white feminist approach. But for me personally, I am a feminist and I'm also a womanist in the Alice Walker sense, [which is] a little bit more earthy and loving than feminism. I also have had a lifelong interest in God and those two things have always been at odds, although I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. What I came to realize after having a child and experiencing motherhood for myself was that the problem was not so much whether or not God exists, but how God was spoken about in American, Judeo-Christian culture. God was always presented to me as a father and that description defied all of my experience because it was mothering that was so much more like what God was supposed to be. This idea that I was supposed to be able to rely on God and trust God and feel God's care 24 hours a day, no matter what… that did not feel like something that I associate with fathers. Because fathers don't really do that. That's a motherly quality. That round-the-clock, tireless day-in-day out kind of caretaking is motherly. Once I was able to really experience that myself, I was able to see that motherhood is actually the right metaphor for any god that's worth believing in. That idea has some kind of spiritual woo-woo juiciness to it, but it has political, real-life juiciness to it as well. [We need to] have policy goals around treating motherhood like something that deserves to be compensated or seen or understood as foundational to the economy. If one way of [highlighting that work] is saying, Hey, what mothers are doing is on the level of God, then that can translate into political arguments. You’re very intentional about describing motherhood as a verb that transcends gender and is not solely rooted in the act of giving birth, but in godlike levels of attentiveness and care. Fatherhood, historically, is not that, but you write that fatherhood could, at some point, become more like mothering. What would that look like? Because when I read it, I felt like you were asking me to imagine a color that’s never been seen. Motherhood is accessible to anyone. There’s not only one way to mother. If we pull the lens back, even just a millimeter, you start to see there are people who perform mothering in a friend group or for their office, their colleagues, or there are people who mother their aging parents. We're talking about a level of attunement, a sense of responsibility, and an emotional openness. Anyone could mother, including a dad. Which is not to say fatherhood isn’t its own special thing. [But in order for dads to mother] I think men would have to be socialized a little differently, and we'd have to understand motherhood in a cultural sense as a godlike function that is worthy of anyone aspiring to do it, because it is the most essential and profound way any of us can connect with the bigger mystery of the universe. Toni Cade Bambara says the goal of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible. I want to make the idea of mothering irresistible. Even to men. What are you hoping people take away from this book as a whole? [When] I hit midlife, I had my career going, my marriage, had a baby—you know, all the stuff. I realized that being the way I was told to be by my culture—agreeable, helpful, obedient, quiet, in control of my body—were making me sick. What you’re told as a girl is that if you’re all of these things, you’ll find happiness. But like many women…I realized that’s a bill of goods. It’s snake oil. I did all that shit and it didn't work. So I just started to question, with searing intensity, how I'd been socialized in every area of my life, and I started to shed it. At that time, I was finding that [my daughter] had so much joy and freeness. And I just thought, This precious little child is also going to be 40-something one day and following the same trajectory. That put some fear in me. So I wrote this book in the hopes that it helps people hit that epiphany sooner than midlife. It isn’t fair that we have to wait to pass 40 to start clearing all of this mess. My dream is that more women can find this clarity way sooner than I did.  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
"You can't say that. I'm Iranian."
  March 2, 2026 “You can’t say that. I’m Iranian.”An Iranian-American woman on survivor’s guilt and griefBY ROYA SHARIAT  THE AUTHOR AND HER MOTHER AT AN IRANIAN FESTIVAL IN 1999 (COURTESY OF ROYA SHARIAT) This weekend, I watched the U.S. move from threats to strikes against my homeland, Iran. And I was haunted by an old memory that now feels like a warning. In 2017, I ended up at a New Year’s party full of American diplomats in Argentina, invited by a friend of the host who warned me that I might meet some strange characters. As midnight approached, the host raised a toast and asked everyone to share their resolutions for the year ahead. The answers were predictable—more travel, good health, new adventures—until one guest wearing a bloodthirsty grin exclaimed: “Regime change in Iran!” For a moment, I dissociated. Then I did what years of existing as an Iranian in America have trained me to do: I clapped back. “You can’t say that. I’m Iranian.” The room fell silent. Heat rushed to my face, but the only way out was through. With a shaky voice, I told him that American intervention in Iran has never led to anything good, that people’s lives aren’t pawns for someone else’s resolutions. I spent the rest of the night crying while a friend tried to console me, until I learned that the man I’d yelled at was one of America’s highest‑ranking military generals. This was just one of many uncomfortable moments I’ve encountered as an Iranian-American, an identity that raises eyebrows and prompts questions I’m often unqualified to answer. For the past two months, I’ve witnessed the latest regime-led violence unfold from the comfort and safety of my London home, while faced with an entirely new set of questions: What’s the best way to show up for a community you can’t be physically present in? How do you process survivor’s guilt and grief simultaneously? How do you reconcile so many disparate viewpoints, both within Iran and abroad? “Regime change” has re-entered the bloodstream of political discourse, moving from abstraction to reality in a matter of months, and especially this weekend in the wake of the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s draconian supreme leader. The phrase itself is staggering: How can toppling a foreign government be made to sound as quick and seamless as changing an outfit? In two words, the nuances of diplomacy, the violence of war, and the brutal mechanics of how regimes actually fall are erased. The phrase becomes so abstracted from its meaning that it’s palatable enough to pass as a New Year’s resolution. Forget a revenge body; how about regime change?  THE AUTHOR AND HER MOTHER, 2023 (COURTESY OF ROYA SHARIAT) But “regime change” doesn’t capture what’s actually needed in Iran. Removing a leader is not the same as dismantling a system, or building what comes next. Destruction is not a shortcut to freedom, and freedom doesn’t get to be declared by people insulated from the consequences. Iranians deserve self‑governance. They deserve a free Iran, liberated from repression and fear, from a government that’s repeatedly used lethal force against its own citizens. Iranians inside the country have risked their lives to say as much: through the historic, women-led “Women, Life, Freedom” movement sparked by Mahsa Jina Amini’s 2023 death, through recent anti-government protests wherein women were front and center, through the simple act of refusing to be silent. But liberation can’t come from bombs, or from the sudden collapse of power without a path forward. Power vacuums are not freedom. They create the same kind of conditions that brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power after the 1979 revolution. This moment requires holding multiple realities at once: relief in the wake of Khamenei’s death, grief for civilians killed in the crossfire—including schoolchildren—and fear and skepticism about what comes next. The governments invoking Iran’s freedom, like the U.S. and the U.K., have not historically delivered it in the region, or in Iran itself. The U.S. backed an undemocratic coup in Iran in the 1950s. That history makes one thing clear: Change imposed from the outside is never neutral. What happens next will not be determined by a single death, but by who holds power, and how. Every New Year, someone raises a glass and makes a resolution about other people’s lives. What people in Iran are demanding is dignity and agency: the right to shape their own futures on their own terms, with solidarity—not agendas imposed from the outside. For Americans watching, the responsibility is not to decide Iran’s future, but to listen to those already risking everything to shape it themselves—people who are asking, simply, for life over destruction. If you want to listen to Iranian voices, start with Nilo Tabrizy, Yara Elmjouie, Sahar Delijani, Gissou Nia, and Vali Nasr.  Roya Shariat is a London-based writer and author of award-winning cookbook Maman and Me: Recipes from Our Iranian American Family. When she's not hunched over her laptop or in the kitchen, Roya writes a newsletter on culture and joy called Consumed.  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
