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? |
Meet "the mother of Black feminism"
  February 27, 2026 The Unsung Mother of Black FeminismOn the last day of Black History Month, meet history-making Anna Julia CooperBY REBECCA CARROLL  ANNA JULIA COOPER CIRCA 1902 (VIA GETTY IMAGES) If you really want to “listen to Black women,” start with Anna Julia Cooper. Widely considered the mother of Black feminism, she was among the most important Black women educators, essayists, and activists of the 19th century. She defended her dissertation at 66—in French—at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1925, almost certainly making her the first woman born into slavery to earn a PhD. (Meanwhile, that year, back in her adopted hometown of Washington, D.C., 30,000 members of the KKK were marching in a public demonstration of white supremacy.) And Cooper is the only Black woman quoted on the U.S. passport: “The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class—it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.” She lived to 105, yet few people today know her by name, even if they know many of her words. For instance, the phrase “when and where I enter” is often attributed to the abolitionist Martin Delany, the first Black field officer in the United States Army during the Civil War, who said in full, “When and where I enter, my people enter with me.” But it was Cooper who turned the phrase into what would go on to become a foundational fighting text for Black women in America. “Only the black woman can say when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood...then and there the whole Negro race enters with me,” Cooper wrote in her seminal 1892 collection of speeches and essays, A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South. In fact, in the 1890s, more than a decade before W.E.B. Du Bois coined the phrase “double-consciousness” to describe the dual sense of self experienced by Black Americans, Cooper was speaking and writing about the dual marginalization of race and gender that Black women face. And while a lot of 19th century Black public intellectuals (like Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, and Cooper’s Oberlin classmate Mary Church Terrell) were formulating theories about racism and sexism at that time, Cooper was among the first to connect these oppressions—essentially an intersectional feminist almost a century before the term was coined. Du Bois’s theory was that to be Black in America meant seeing oneself through two specific lenses: the oppressive white gaze, and the identity of a liberated Black self. But Cooper took a more inclusive and nuanced stance at a time when being a woman was too often considered something else entirely—even by Du Bois himself. It’s well-documented that Cooper struggled to get her work published in The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, where Du Bois served as editor from its founding in 1910 until his resignation in 1934. In a series of 33 letters the two exchanged between 1923 and 1932—thirty years after her essay collection was published—Cooper appealed to Du Bois to publish her newer works. The tenor of their correspondence is cordial, but it’s clear that Du Bois, who nominally expressed support for Cooper’s writing, was more comfortable talking the “profeminist politics” talk than actually walking the walk: He never published her. He was not the only man to fail to show Cooper the respect she deserved.  A PORTRAIT OF COOPER CIRCA 1892, SCANNED FROM HER BOOK (FAIR USE) Born into slavery in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1858, Cooper was the daughter of an enslaved Black woman, Hannah Stanley Haywood, and, it is widely believed, her white enslaver, Fabius J. Haywood. She turned six the year of Emancipation and, like many newly freed Black kids in Raleigh, enrolled in Saint Augustine Normal and Collegiate Institute at the age of nine. She excelled, and her young activism included protesting the boys-only admission to Greek and Latin courses. “A boy…had only to declare a floating intention to study theology and he could get all the support, encouragement and stimulus he needed,” she wrote in A Voice from the South. “While a self-supporting girl had to struggle on by teaching in the summer and working after school hours to keep up with her board bills, and actually to fight her way against positive discouragement to the higher education.” By the age of 11, though, she was made a scholarship-teacher (for $100 a year) to tutor other students. And she did eventually get the chance to study Greek with the boys. She married her husband, George A.C. Cooper—a minister and Greek teacher at Saint Augustine—in 1877 at the age of 19, and remained at the school as a matron. But George died from an unknown illness two years later, and Cooper enrolled at Ohio’s Oberlin College in 1881, eventually earning two degrees. Higher education for all Black people, but especially Black women, became Cooper’s main fight while there, and remained so throughout her life. After leaving Oberlin with her master's, she became an accomplished academic and speaker. In many of those speeches, and in her essays, Cooper—whose vision for feminism included all women—was openly critical of white women suffragists for blatantly sidelining not just Black women, but all non-white women, in their fight to secure women’s right to vote. In fact, she considered it a betrayal. From her essay “Women Versus the Indian”: “Is not woman’s cause broader, and deeper, and grander, than a blue stocking debate or an aristocratic pink tea? Why should woman become plaintiff in a suit versus the Indian, or the Negro or any other race or class who have been crushed under the iron heel of Anglo-Saxon power and selfishness?”  WHILE MANY MAY HAVE FORGOTTEN THE STORY OF ANNA JULIA COOPER, PASSPORT HOLDERS CARRY HER WORDS WITH THEM. As an educator, she fought on behalf of her students, which earned her enemies. She angered the board of the school at which she became principal when she successfully advocated for many of her Black students to pursue collegiate studies rather than be pushed into vocational training. And then, at the same school, the long-widowed Cooper found herself at the center of a smear campaign when she refused to stop helping students gain admittance to and attend college. Members of the board accused her of having an affair with a young man in her professional circle, and brought the fabricated scandal to the local press. Ultimately, despite public support on her side, she was forced out of the school in 1906. Despite other stops and starts—including a period when she adopted her five nieces and nephews—she was determined to earn her PhD, which she finally completed in her sixties after transferring to the Sorbonne. And throughout her career, she managed to nurture close ties with her loved ones. “Her family called her Sis Annie, her closest friends, Cookie,” remembers Shirley Moody-Turner, associate professor of English and African American Studies at Penn State University, and editor of The Portable Anna Julia Cooper. “Her students presented her with flowers, and cards, and gifts, and candy.” In the later part of her life, Moody-Turner says, “her closest friend and fellow educator, Lula Love [Lawson], sent Cooper dresses, slippers, foot powder, and insoles to make sure that Cooper was comfortable, fashionable, and cared for.” In making sure Cooper is honored for her extraordinary contributions to the canon of Black feminism, it can be hard not to flatten her into a symbol. But let’s also remember that our heroine was just as much Sis Annie as Anna Julia Cooper, who loved flowers and candy, who stopped her world to care for her family, and stayed looking fly.
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The Great Outdoor Whitewashing
  February 26, 2026 Howdy, Meteor readers, Tonight, in the words of Cardi B: We’re going outside. Plus, Rebecca Carroll talks to Reshona Landfair about reclaiming her life after years of abuse at the hands of R. Kelly. Lots to read, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONHistory lives in the land: “We ended DEI in America,” Donald Trump bragged Tuesday night at the State of the Union, pouring salt into the wound of what has already been a particularly trying Black History Month. (And we were off to such a good start…) Since March 2025, Trump has been on a crusade to literally rewrite history. His administration has forced the removal of African American studies at universities, charged the Smithsonian with focusing too much on “how bad slavery was,” and—perhaps most offensively—stripped content that “disparages Americans past or living” from historical sites. The nonprofit Democracy Forward has confirmed that at least 27 sites across the country were asked to remove or alter signage and exhibits mentioning things like enslavement, climate change, the mistreatment of Native peoples, eugenics, and the role of women in outdoor conservation. Some of the most egregious changes have been the removal of historical works like “The Scourged Back” in Georgia’s Fort Pulaski National Park, panels depicting enslavement during the nation’s founding in Pennsylvania’s Independence National Park, and signs detailing the work of abolitionist John Brown in West Virginia’s Harpers Ferry National Park. It’s not accidental that so many of these attacks on history have focused on public outdoor spaces. They’re heavily visited: In 2024 alone, there were 331 million visits to parks, recreation areas, memorials and other lands managed by the National Park Service. To remove informational panels from sites where historical events actually took place is a particularly blatant denial of history. It’s also an insult to our intelligence to deliver such an omission when we’re standing on the blood-soaked soil where it all happened.  THE MUCH DISCUSSED PANELS AT INDEPENDENCE NATIONAL PARK, WHICH WERE REMOVED AND EVENTUALLY RESTORED BY FEDERAL COURT ORDER. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Unfortunately, we have been here before, as history professor and author of Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights Keisha N. Blain knows all too well. “Trump joins the long list of American presidents to employ these tactics,” she says. The attempts of erasure we’re now seeing are part of a “long project to return the United States to a pre-Civil Rights Movement era.” President Woodrow Wilson didn’t stop at whitewashing history; his administration also tried to prevent Black students from receiving formal education, recommending instead that they be sent to vocational training schools. This strategy was self-perpetuating, Blain says: If people were not learning about Black history, then they were not learning about resistance tactics they could apply to the present. Blain finds that the Trump administration is similarly working to “promote a single vision of the American past that elevates white identity…and suppresses critical questions as well as dissent.” Intentionally altering public lands to erase marginalized groups has been happening since the establishment of the U.S. government and was heavily normalized during Jim Crow and the dawn of the “nature gap”—a term that refers to the racial disparities in access to nature or green spaces. Communities of color represent 74 percent of nature-deprived communities, with Black communities making up more than half of that figure. This gap goes far beyond whether or not someone enjoys camping—it can dictate communities’ longterm health outcomes. Still, “for as long as white politicians have employed these kinds of tactics, Black people in the United States have vigorously resisted,” Blain says. “They recognized the challenges before them and they devised strategies—working in tandem with like-minded individuals.” The same is happening right now in the outdoor community. Black and brown creators are working to create more access and safety for those who are tired of hearing that hiking, camping, or simply existing outside belongs solely to white people. History is in the land and in community—which you can find by going outside with groups like blk.people.outside, the hood hikers, outlandish, Negus in Nature, and brownpeoplecamping. AND:
 Three Questions About...Reclaiming Your LifeReshona Landfair, who survived abuse by R. Kelly, knows it’s a long road RESHONA LANDFAIR, AUTHOR OF THE NEW MEMOIR WHO'S WATCHING SHORTY? RECLAIMING MYSELF FROM THE SHAME OF R. KELLY'S ABUSE. (COURTESY OF RESHONA LANDFAIR) Reshona Landfair was a preteen when she, like nearly every other Black girl in mid-’90s America, became enamored with the R&B mega-star R. Kelly. Landfair was growing up in Chicago, where Kelly was a hometown hero, and where her own family had strong musical ties: Her father was a studio musician, and her aunt, Sparkle, was a singer on Kelly’s label. Landfair herself was in a semi-successful rap group with her young cousins called 4 the Cause, which toured abroad regularly, and had great aspirations. In 1996, Sparkle introduced Landfair to Kelly in order to, she says, help her niece’s dreams come true. Kelly, 29 at the time, already had a then-quiet reputation for preying on girls, and began grooming and sexually abusing Landfair—at the time still a middle-schooler—a year after they met. The violence worsened, and continued for decades. Landfair was a prisoner, first emotionally trapped by Kelly’s predatory behavior and the manipulative relationship with her family that he had weaponized, and later literally held captive in guarded rooms of Kelly’s studio, or other locations of his choosing. And then came the video. When Kelly was charged with child pornography and exploitation in 2002, an explicit “sex tape” featuring a 14-year-old Landfair was shown as evidence in two of his trials. After an acquittal in 2008, he was finally convicted in 2022, due in large part to the tape and Landfair’s testimony. Now, Landfair has written a memoir of recovery. In Who’s Watching Shorty? Reclaiming Myself from the Shame of R. Kelly’s Abuse, which features a foreword by activist and former A&R executive Drew Dixon, Landfair reflects on her trauma, her voice, and forgiveness. Do you have a particular memory of when it first felt like self-reclamation and liberation were possible? The first moment that comes to mind is having to face Robert in the courtroom [in 2022]. That was the first time I was able to think freely, think for myself, and really stand up for what I personally believed in, versus what I was taught…[Then] when I turned 30 years old, I took a trip to Jamaica. I had repaired my life mentally and physically and emotionally…[and] in that moment, I was able to be independent, do something nice for myself, take myself to a place with friends, and just communicate normally and be a normal human being. I can go out for a cocktail if I want, or stay out a little later, or engage in social conversations and not have to worry about what I'm saying or who I'm saying it to. Those are the most concrete moments that I have of really feeling like, “Wow, I can do this on my own. I can think for myself.” That's when I felt like I had my own leverage. There [have also been] moments when I compartmentalized, and tucked a lot of things away to try to forget that they happened. Having to dig those things out [while writing] and remember how I felt was hard, because it would take me back to a really, really dark place. You also write about forgiveness, of yourself and of your abuser. Can you say a little bit more about that? I struggle with that, and I think a lot of people do—because why forgive? Almost every abuser has had a terrible childhood [as R. Kelly did], but that shouldn’t be on us. I struggled with that for a really long time. I blamed myself for what happened. It took a really, really long time for me to see myself as a victim, because the way I was portrayed in the media was not necessarily as such. So you ask yourself, “What could I have done differently to avoid this happening to me?” Or “Why did he choose to do this to me, but he wouldn't have chosen to do it to this person or that person?” Until I realized, those were not my sexual desires. I learned intimacy through my abuser, and so, some things that didn’t feel right, I still went along with. But once I was able to think and be mature enough for myself and look into my heart and really get to know who I was, that's when I was able to release those things and let them go, because it was not something that I requested. I do forgive him. It feels difficult, but it is very genuine. Not all things about Robert were bad. That is not the way I met him. That is not the way I was introduced to him. I do understand that he went through certain things in his childhood and I feel like he had an enabling system around him that let him get away with so much that he didn't know when to stop. There's nothing left to revisit [in terms of my relationship with him]. It's more so just me really, fully healing. I can't do that holding a grudge, or still feeling anger. So a part of my healing process was to release all of that, and I'm blessed to be able to say, I at least forgive him. A lot of people have let you down in your life. When do you feel the most lifted up in your life today? I feel the most lifted when I'm with my son. He is five, and he is a bundle of joy. I know that he will understand this story one day. But he looks at me and he admires me in ways that are very necessary, very genuine, without knowing anything about this situation. So I just get the purest form from him. We’re looking at my rap videos [from when I was young], and he's learning so many new things about me that, again, I kind of just wiped out of my brain space. He’s learning a new version of me, and he seems to be inspired and really happy. I'm blessed to be his mother. This interview has been condensed and edited.  Rebecca Carroll is a writer, cultural critic, and podcast creator/host. Her writing has been published widely, and she is the author of several books, including the memoir Surviving the White Gaze. Rebecca is Editor at Large for The Meteor.  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
Smizing? In this economy??
  February 24, 2026 Greetings Meteor readers, So. How ‘bout that snowstorm, eh? Personally, I am on the side of one random New Yorker on TikTok who said she wants to see Punxsutawney Phil “seized and seasoned” by noon-thirty tomorrow. I’m on my way to Pennsylvania. In today’s newsletter, we enjoy some really funny jokes about hockey, and stand in admiration at the Epstein survivors attending the State of the Union tonight. Plus, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd weighs in on the America’s Next Top Model documentary we can’t stop talking about. I just wanna talk Phil 🔪, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONNo laughing matter: This weekend, both the men’s and women’s USA hockey teams took home gold medals after beating Canada in overtime. (There’s a Heated Rivalry joke running through my head, but I just can’t seem to articulate it.) We should all still be riding a collective high from that moment, but sadly, we do not live in the world of Rachel Reid. In this world, Donald Trump called the men’s team in the locker room after their win to congratulate them, also extending an invite to the State of the Union and to “do the White House the next day, just have some fun.” It should have been a standard moment. But he also took the opportunity to say that he would “have to bring” the women’s team, adding that he’d be impeached if he didn’t. The men in the room laughed as if it were a joke that another gold medal-winning team would be invited to the White House. You know what is funny, though? Women were not allowed to play ice hockey at the Olympics until 1998, almost thirty years after Title IX was signed into law. They won gold that year. The men, who have been playing Olympic hockey since 1920, didn’t medal at all in ‘98. You know what else is really funny? Until this weekend, men’s hockey hadn’t seen a gold medal since 1980.  YOU WOULD THINK A MAN OBSESSED WITH GOLD WOULD BE THRILLED TO BRING AS MANY MEDAL WINNERS AS POSSIBLE INTO HIS SPACE. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) And you know what’s absolutely freaking hilarious? A Republican president and his lackeys are celebrating women winning gold medals for the U.S. while simultaneously tripping over themselves to weaken Title IX, the very thing that made it possible for women to secure 67 percent of the gold medals won by Team USA this year. Surely, though, nothing is as funny as the fact that the women’s team was eventually also invited to attend the State of the Union, but declined, mainly for travel reasons. Because while the men’s team was flying by charter back to the states, the women’s team booked commercial flights back to Atlanta and weren’t aware they had been invited until late Sunday night. It’s almost as if proving dominance over and over and over again isn’t enough to be treated equally on a team whose entire motto is literally “One For All.” But I’m sure that’s not the case, because we’re all just kidding, right? P.S. Thrilled by the hockey events this weekend and still want to support women players? You’re in luck: The PWHL season resumes this Thursday (another reason the Team USA women had to rush home) when the New York Sirens take on the Montreal Victoire. Show up and show out. AND:
 America’s Next Top Model is a cautionary tale for this dark eraBY JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD  L-R: CYCLE 2 WINNER YOANNA HOUSE, TYRA BANKS, SHANDI SULLIVAN, AND MERCEDES SCELBA-SHORTE. MANY FANS STILL REMEMBER SHANDI FROM THE INFAMOUS "CHEATING" EPISODE THAT YEAR WHICH WAS REVISITED IN REALITY CHECK. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) America’s Next Top Model died first by sinking ratings, and then by TikTok. During pandemic lockdown, a new generation of viewers revisited the reality competition show, which ran from 2003 until its cancellation in 2018, and realized what they may have thought was a fun series about fashion shoots was, in fact, kind of messed up! This epiphany led to loads of social media posts by bored Zoomers lobbing critiques of the show and its supermodel host, Tyra Banks—and eventually culminated in Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, a Netflix documentary series probing ANTM’s effect on its contestants and the culture at large. Reality Check, which hit number one on Netflix, is the latest entry in the cottage industry of Y2K nostalgia, which reevaluates the mean-girl era through fresh eyes and contemporary values. Through interviews with former contestants and cast—including runway coach Miss J, creative director Jay Manuel, photographer Nigel Barker, and Tyra herself—the series examines how ANTM started as an aspirational project to upend the fashion industry’s constrictive white norms and ended as an outrageous circus that put white women in blackface and had models pose as crime-scene victims, among many other terrible, misanthropic ideas. It is clear from Tyra’s interviews that she has seen the TikToks and was media-trained and lawyered to near-oblivion before Reality Check, her responses containing a tablespoon of accountability and a heaping cup of denial about her own role in some of the most horrific things that happened on set. The most infuriating of these dodges is in response to Shandi Sullivan, the Cycle 2 model who was filmed “cheating” on her boyfriend but who, in retrospect, was unable to consent to sex with a virtual stranger after downing two bottles of wine (and, as Shandi confirms in the doc, blacking out). She charges that she was not cared for by production, their cameras rolling through it all. “It’s a little difficult for me to talk about production because that’s not my territory,” Banks says, before executive producer Ken Mok sidesteps an apology by saying the “girls” knew they were being filmed as if in a “documentary.” “Made for good TV,” present-day Shandi tells the camera, forlorn.  BANKS WITH ORIGINAL MEMBERS OF THE ANTM JUDGES' PANEL, NIGEL BARKER, RUNWAY DIVA COACH EXTRAORDINAIRE MISS J ALEXANDER, AND JAY MANUEL. (VIA NETFLIX) Tyra gets the brunt of Reality Check’s blame—the producers who declined to intervene with Shandi are nowhere to be found in this series—but as the writer Taryn Finley points out, ANTM was a microcosm of the racist, sexist, nihilistic culture of the years in which it aired. The 2000s were particularly exploitative, and it’s easy to write off that exploitation as a product of a long-ago, less-enlightened era. But Reality Check should be a warning for this era, too: The size diversity that Tyra says mattered so much to her is disappearing in a wash of semaglutides—and with it, acceptance of bodies that aren’t super-skinny. The racial and ethnic diversity Tyra says she hoped to champion has been banned (and even criminalized) at the federal and judicial levels. The tendency towards unexamined cruelty is apparent in U.S. culture every day, and its effect on women and girls won’t be calculable for years. And still, as a longtime America’s Next Top Model viewer, I can appreciate some of the small advancements it made. In a culture where a skinny, rich, white woman like Paris Hilton was viewed as the ideal, the fact that Black women and Latinas were shown as beautiful and worthy was important—even if some of those same women of color were often portrayed as angry, argumentative, or otherwise wild, especially early on. Later contestants like Isis King, Nyle DiMarco, and Winnie Harlow shared their lives with a massive audience which wouldn’t have otherwise seen a transgender model, a deaf model, or a model with vitiligo, respectively. In that sense, Tyra accomplished at least some of her stated goals, even if she had to bully a whole lot of other models to do it. (Justice for Danielle Evans, who should have been, and still could be, a supermodel.)  MODEL ISIS KING WAS ORIGINALLY BROUGHT TO ANTM AS A BACKGROUND MODEL DURING A CYCLE 10 PHOTOSHOOT WHERE THE CONTESTANTS WERE TOLD TO PRETEND TO BE UNHOUSED. AT THE TIME, KING HERSELF WAS AN UNHOUSED PERSON. SHE WAS INVITED BACK TO THE SHOW IN CYCLES 11 AND 17 TO COMPETE. SHE HAS SINCE BECOME AN ACTRESS AND STAUNCH LGBTQ+ RIGHTS ADVOCATE. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) While I would never argue that ANTM’s achievements outweighed its mistakes, it maintains a storied place in U.S. pop culture for a reason. (For one thing, it directly influenced RuPaul, who borrowed some of its rubrics for Drag Race.) And while Reality Check cocks an eyebrow toward the series’ increasingly outrageous storylines, through a lens of camp there’s a lot to love there—the rapper The Game visibly falling for OG e-girl Allison Harvard during the infamous “Pot Ledom” episode; the jokes about the lacefront beard; “Mama Hot.” Even the season hosted by musician Rita Ora—the more celebrity-zhuzhed Cycle 23, which aired in 2017 on VH1 after Tyra got the boot from her own show by the higher-ups—was packed with memeable, memorable moments. Even so, Reality Check forces the question: Was any of this worth all that? Lisa D’Amato, winner of Cycle 17: All-Stars and star of a forthcoming competing ANTM documentary on E!, suggests it wasn’t—and as a fan of the show, I tend to agree. “Watched the Netflix docu on antm and I still think it was sugar coated,” D’Amato wrote on Instagram. “It was wayyyyyyy worse for so many of us.”  Julianne Escobedo Shepherd is a Wyoming-born Xicana journalist, editor, and co-founder of Hearing Things, living in New York. She is currently at work on a book for Penguin about her upbringing and the mythology of the American West.  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
“I wanted to make sure she knew she had autonomy.”
Lulu Garcia-Navarro on interviewing Gisèle Pelicot
by Nona Willis Aronowitz
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, co-host of the New York Times podcast “The Interview,” has covered harrowing circumstances all over the world for the Times, NPR, and the Associated Press. She’s reported on everything from the war in Iraq to the Arab Spring uprisings to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But her recent interview with Gisèle Pelicot, she told me, was one of the hardest she’s ever done.
In our new series, The One Who Got the Story—where we catch up with a woman or non-binary journalist who was behind a major story of the week—we ask Garcia-Navarro how she prepared to interview a woman who endured some of the most shocking sexual abuse one can imagine. Pelicot, whose husband secretly drugged her and invited dozens of men into their home to rape her, made the extraordinary decision during the trial to waive her right to anonymity and allow media in the courtroom. And yet, she’d never truly told her story—until now. On the occasion of her new book, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, Pelicot, 72, sat down with Garcia-Navarro for her first interview with an American outlet. It’s a sensitive yet unflinching conversation about pain and renewal. Here’s how Garcia-Navarro did it.
I noticed in the beginning of the interview, you asked Gisèle how she’d like you to refer to her rapist (she answered, “Monsieur Pelicot”), and that struck me as a question specifically tailored to someone who’s gone through trauma. What kind of preparation did you do before talking to her?
Because she had never spoken [to the media] outside of the confines of the trial, I didn't know what I was going to get. Some victims of trauma really have trouble articulating their interior life, how they might have felt about things, their recollections of things. So we just prepared by being extremely careful. We made sure that where the interview was going to take place was going to be a very intimate environment. [The crew rented an apartment in Paris for the interview.] The majority of the crew was female. And then I wanted to make sure she knew she had autonomy and she had her voice. [Asking her what she’d like to call her abuser] was a way for me to signal that this was something she had agency over.
You were extremely careful, but you also didn’t shy away from the awful details. At one point you quoted a graphic passage of the book in which Gisèle notices that a crown in her mouth was loose, which she learned later was a result of, as she wrote, “the violence of penises being repeatedly forced into [her] mouth.” Can you explain more about the reasoning to include this?
I know that there's great concern about retraumatizing people and I understand that. I also do feel that sometimes, in trying to protect the victim, we do a disservice to the audience in not really showing the full scope of the horror that somebody went through. I asked for her permission [beforehand]; I said I was going to quote directly from the book, and she said that that was fine. I tried to be as sparing as I could. I just used one line, but it was a line that really haunted me. It said so much about the dynamic between her and her ex-husband, how he gaslit her, how he manipulated her...I felt it was really important for people to know.
You’ve reported amid conflict zones and revolutions, but how does this interview rank in terms of difficulty?
I mean, 100 out of 10. It's one of the hardest interviews that I've done because I think it's just really hard to get right. And if I did, I'm grateful for it. A consistent theme is that people said that they went in bracing for the worst and thinking this was just going to be a tour of horror. What they found instead was her beautiful ability to explain her own experience.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
