Welcome to the Childcare Thunderdome
  June 2, 2026 Salutations, Meteor readers, Wishing everyone a joyful Pride, except for Sam Levinson. I hope that man gets a series of really bad paper cuts that never fully heal because his skin keeps coming into contact with painful and stinging irritants.  In today’s newsletter, Nona tries to understand why it is so incredibly difficult to navigate American childcare. Plus, Rebecca Carroll on which movie you absolutely need to see next. Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONDispatch from a childcare desert: I am a working mother of two, not at all a stranger to the red tape and wheel-squeaking required to secure affordable childcare. I learned the hard way that, at least in the small upstate New York city where I live, you often have to sign up your first-trimester fetus for daycare if you hope to have a spot by the time your baby is crawling. Yet I recently had a day that would make even the most psychotically organized parent’s blood pressure rise to unsustainable levels. Here’s what went down: I had long looked forward to the financial relief that would come when my four-year-old was eligible for my district’s Universal Pre-K program, which is free and has enough spots for every kid who wants one. But there’s an infuriating catch: The school only goes until 2 pm, so securing an aftercare spot (which does cost money, but less than the alternatives) is absolutely essential. I’d heard horror stories about how the aftercare’s capacity is woefully insufficient due to “staffing difficulties,” and gotten warnings that it’s first come, first served and your finger better be on the trigger come enrollment day. There are 40 aftercare spots available this fall for an estimated 120 children in UPK—an improvement, I was told, from last year. So I marked the date and time of signup on my calendar. And at the appointed hour, I hurried a venerated historian I happened to be interviewing off the phone so I could be available to hit that button. I made triply sure I had a pdf of my daughter’s vaccination form; the week before, I’d made a special in-person trip to my pediatrician’s office, heeding the warnings on the pre-registration materials that, without the correct form, my application would “BE CONSIDERED INCOMPLETE AND UNPROCESSED.” All-caps mine (technically; it felt like they were yelling).  A SNIPPET OF MONDAY'S GROUP CHAT And when the clock struck noon, my husband and I refreshed the registration portal until the link appeared, then filled out a seven-page form as quickly as humanly possible. Then came the texts from moms (and only moms) who were scrambling: “I didn’t even get the Brightwheel message” or “I don’t have that stupid fucking form they’re asking for” or “I have the right form, but it’s from 2024” or “Is it this form or the other one?” Some moms blamed themselves—“Eh, it’s my own lack of foresight!!”—but my boiled blood was directed at the system: Why was securing childcare during working hours harder than scoring Beyoncé tickets? Why did we need to all be Type-A Virgos for the privilege of PAID aftercare? What was enrollment like for people even busier than me, or parents who don’t work from home, or for the 12% of my city who are immigrants, who have to navigate this process in their second language? Should we move back to the city just because of the Mamdanicare?? (Haha, just kidding, I am not paying $4,500 a month for a two-bedroom apartment!) I tell this extremely detailed story not just to vent, but because it so painfully illustrates just how many ways our childcare system is broken. It is broken in the way that, even in a blue state that has made preschool a budgetary priority, the limited hours for UPK programs do not nearly reflect the obligations of working parents. It is broken in the way that the aftercare program, meant to fill this gap, is having trouble hiring staff because jobs at places like Target and Starbucks pay more than those offered by early childhood education. It is broken because, like nearly half of young children in the United States, my kids live in a childcare desert, where parents need to be ruthless ninjas in order to finagle care, or even find it. It is broken because, according to numerous studies, in the vast majority of cases it’s the mother who handles childcare logistics, taking time out of their workdays to put out fires such as these. It is broken because despite all these problems, and despite what they cost us, the question of how to fix childcare is still too rarely asked in political campaigns and debates. While I wait to find out whether my enrollment has been approved, I will say this again for the cheap seats in the back, and the moms in my group chats: It does not have to be this way, and we deserve far better than a series of small heart attacks on random workdays. —Nona Willis Aronowitz AND:
A Film Made Straight From the Gut of a Black Woman ArtistWhy you absolutely must go see “Is God Is”BY REBECCA CARROLL  DIRECTOR ALESHEA HARRIS WITH TWO OF THE FILM'S STARS, ERIKA ALEXANDER AND VIVICA A. FOX. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Aleshea Harris did not come to play. With her utterly dauntless directorial debut, “Is God Is,” she dares the film’s audience, along with all of Hollywood, to fuck around and find out what would happen if God really was a Black woman. The film, which Harris adapted from her own same-titled play after a successful off-Broadway run in 2017, follows twin sisters Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson) as they embark on a very Black Homeric journey through the American South. The mission is to carry out the dying wish of their estranged mother (Vivica A. Fox): “Make your daddy dead. Real dead.” The twins, now 21, grew up in the foster care system thinking their mother had died in a tub full of flames, where their father, called “Man” (a brilliantly against-type Sterling K. Brown), left her after he knocked her out, poured alcohol over her body, and then, with an eerie nonchalance that we see in sepia-toned flashbacks, lit a match and dropped it onto her body. But somehow she survived, if you can call the life she has since lived in a body maimed beyond recognition “survival.” Outside the small care center where the sisters have now been summoned, Racine, the take-no-prisoners twin, anoints their mother, whose real name is Ruby, as “God” because, “She made us, didn’t she?” We first meet Ruby laid up in bed, draped with a lime-green satin counterpane, as several young Black women stand on either side braiding her long micro braids. Through the holes of a compression mask worn to cover her burns, Ruby’s eyes conjure a deep and etheric beauty. Like, that might actually be God sitting up in that bed. Anaia, the we’re-not-killers twin, was also badly disfigured in the fire: Ruby tells her after they meet that it’s because Anaia had tried the hardest to save her. She has spent her whole life being called ugly, which Racine, her protector, has avenged on Anaia’s behalf without hesitation. The dynamic between Anaia and Racine, who often speak through telepathy conveyed with typed-out words on the screen, is in turns magnetic, tender, and unnerving. On its face, “Is God Is” is a revenge film, with clear nods to Southern Gothic and spaghetti western genres. There are also several moments that pay tribute to the canon of Black women filmmakers, like “Daughters of the Dust” by Julie Dash and “Eve’s Bayou” by Kasi Lemmons. It’s also extremely gruesome and violent at parts (although I would refrain from the Tarantino comparisons, because I think Harris has more vision). But at its core, this is a film that was made straight from the gut of a Black woman artist. Somewhere between a fever dreamscape, an ancestor’s love letter to Black girls everywhere, and a Salt-n-Pepa video from the ‘90s, “Is God Is” is a miraculously pure piece of art, and a welcome antidote in a moment when technology is bullying creatives, exploiting Black women and our likeness, and pushing an agenda of inevitability. AI, you could never.  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
Did Trump Ruin the Workplace?
  May 29, 2026 Did Trump Ruin the Workplace?Three women reflect on the evolution of misogynyBY MARIN COGAN Earlier this year, 2016 nostalgia took over social media, with our friends posting wistfully about their more naive selves. The trend quickly ran its course, but that decade, from 2016 to 2026, has seen huge change—for politics, culture, the world. And it made us wonder: What’s different from then to now, particularly when it comes to women’s lives? What have we lost, and maybe gained? We'll be exploring this topic this summer, and we're starting here, with a deep dive on how work and the professional sphere have changed—or not—for women. A lot can happen in a decade. Around this time ten years ago, Americans were still debating whether to take the new Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, seriously. Global pandemics seemed like old-timey problems; artificial intelligence was still mostly in the realm of science fiction. The culture back then was different, too. In various industries, women were starting to speak out about workplace harassment and abuse. Others made noise about the chronic lack of representation of women and minorities. The discussions pressed both big companies and individual actors to acknowledge wrongdoing and work towards more just and equitable workplaces. And then came the backlash: the comebacks, the anti-woke movement, the defamation lawsuits, the assault accusations ignored, the startling rise of the manosphere. Ten years later, we are living in the aftershocks of that era, both the progress made and the retaliation it inspired. The Meteor spoke with three women–leaders in government, tech, and Hollywood–about what’s changed in their workplaces for women in the last decade, for better and for worse.  CLAIRE TRICKLER-MCNULTY IN 2022, WHEN SHE CAME TO GENEVA TO PRESENT AT THE COMMITTEE ON THE ELIMINATION OF RACIAL DISCRIMINATION. (COURTESY OF CLAIRE TRICKLER-MCNULTY) Used to ICE’s Old Boys’ Club, She Became the Target of a Sexist AttackClaire Trickler-McNulty, a lawyer, served as a Deputy Assistant Director at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Obama and during Trump’s first term, then as an Assistant Director there during the Biden administration. She witnessed dramatic swings in rhetoric and policy between administrations, and ultimately became the target of a deeply partisan investigation by House Republicans, who accused her of trying to push a “woke agenda” inside the agency—claims she says were baseless. Trickler-McNulty is now a policy fellow at Hyphen and co-hosts a podcast called The Melting Pod about immigration. There were some efforts under Obama, and then under Biden, to encourage the hiring of more female officers. But the whole time I was there, law enforcement was still predominantly male. If I hadn’t been a lawyer, I would never have been in those rooms. There were definitely parts of ICE that felt like old boys’ clubs—cliques of men where you had no hope of getting into their inner circle of leadership. When I took maternity leave the second time in 2015, my boss told me…that the real burden of maternity leave is on men, because they have to pick up for women who are taking leave. Which is not what you want to hear from your boss as you're taking maternity leave. I befriended a lot of female law enforcement officers during my time there. I wanted to support women moving into leadership positions because I knew it was a gendered environment. I saw a number of women–really good, dedicated law enforcement officers–repeatedly passed over for promotions in favor of men. The women would tell me, “The guys who get promoted are the ones who go drinking with the boys, who go to strip clubs together.” I absolutely saw women get passed over while less qualified men moved up through these networks. That was happening during the Biden administration. It’s recent history. [But] under the first Trump administration, things changed significantly…It definitely felt like more men were being elevated into leadership positions. A certain clique became more ascendant. That said, the [changes of the] first Trump administration felt slower to me. It was more like watching sandcastles slowly get washed away. That’s part of why I wanted to go back into government later. There was still so much detention reform work to do, like trying to implement the Prison Rape Elimination Act. I felt like so much of what we had tried to fix had been washed away, and I still had this fire in me to try to fix some of it. And then, in 2023, I got heavily attacked by the far right. Part of it absolutely felt gendered. I think I was an easier target because I was a woman on the West Coast with a hyphenated last name. When I look at younger women coming up now, I do see progress in how they interact with men and set boundaries. That makes me happy. But then I look at what’s happening at the senior levels, and it doesn’t feel like there’s been nearly as much progress there. I still think about the moments where…women reported harassment and leadership just shrugged. Those are the things I feel guilty about, especially because I was a supervisor. Looking back, I wish I had been less afraid. Less worried about making men angry. Less worried about what they thought about me. More secure in myself and in what I was doing.  TRACY CHOU AT WORK. (COURTESY OF TRACY CHOU) She’s a Tech Worker Who Started at Google—and Became an Anti-Harassment AdvocateTracy Chou started her tech career with internships at Google and Facebook before becoming a software engineer at Quora and Pinterest. In 2013, Chou posted a viral Medium post about the lack of publicly available data about women in engineering roles at tech companies. Chou earned media recognition and awards–but also backlash from male colleagues and internet trolls. Later, she founded Block Party, a digital anti-harassment tool. Quora was this new question-and-answer platform when I was there in 2010-2011, and we needed content for the site. So all of us who worked there were trying to generate content. I found my little niche answering questions about being a woman in engineering. I had colleagues who really didn't like it and would act out. Sometimes they would try to undermine me, or complain about me [advocating for representation of women.] I had one Asian engineer say to me, “Engineering is the one thing that Asian guys have. Why can't you just let us have it?” And other people who complained to me about how we already lowered the bar so much for women and minorities, do we have to lower it even more? I felt like I had to overperform as an engineer. I remember getting in super early to the office, working really late, and trying to create that extra space for diversity work on the weekends, so that it wouldn't feel like it was taking away from my main job. Probably around 2018, my platform had gotten a bit bigger. I started experiencing more pile-ons, but there was still also targeted harassment from individual people who would go pretty deep–I had instances with thousands of trolls on Reddit, and then some of that spilled over onto 4chan, and those people started coming after me too. Then I also had to deal with people who became obsessed with me. There was one guy who was stalking me. He lived internationally but showed up in San Francisco multiple times. Block Party came directly from the experience of dealing with harassment myself and from having seen it on platforms I had previously helped build. I was frustrated by companies saying, “Abuse and harassment are really hard problems to solve.” I thought: It’s not that hard. I’m sure you can do better than what you’re doing now. I had literally worked on some of these platforms [so I knew it was possible]. And I had also been the target of abuse and harassment myself. The silver lining is that I was able to take that firsthand experience and turn it into better solutions—not just for myself, but hopefully for other people too. All the diversity efforts and the MeToo movement impacted the tech industry in similar ways. If you look at computer science enrollment numbers, many more girls are enrolling and graduating with computer science degrees. There are also many more female founders now. The whole ecosystem seems to have improved, and there are many more efforts supporting women in tech, women in VC, women in engineering, and underrepresented minorities more broadly. I also think the general cultural awareness around these issues has increased dramatically. Ten or 15 years ago, most people didn’t know what intersectionality meant. Now, many people are at least familiar with the concept. That’s all positive. What’s worse is the recent backlash and demonization of DEI—the fact that people feel so emboldened to be loudly and proudly anti-DEI. I expected progress to be slow. I didn’t expect this level of aggressive backlash. Still, the work will continue in some way. So overall, I’m still mildly optimistic. But I also feel tired of fighting.  AMY ADRION, RIGHT, ON SET DURING HALF THE PICTURE. (PHOTO BY ASHLY COVINGTON) She’s a Director For Whom “MeToo Absolutely Mattered”Amy Adrion is an Emmy-nominated writer and director. Her 2018 film, “Half the Picture,” examined the experiences with systemic discrimination faced by women directors in Hollywood. She has also directed episodes of Storyline Online, and teaches filmmaking at Rochester Institute of Technology. I never had any particular instance of sexual harassment or overt discrimination. I worked as a production assistant, as an assistant director, and as a low-level crew member on tons of independent films. I worked for a distribution company in New York at the time when [Harvey Weinstein’s] Miramax was the big player in town. I went to Sundance and all the film festivals. I never personally had a negative experience in my early career in film. But I do think the issue was less about individual moments of discrimination and more about the fact that the people in power tended to be white men from a certain cohort, and they responded to the stories that connected with them. And so you would have these breakout films by women directors at festivals [and then] you would see them kind of drop out of the cultural conversation after 10 years. I think that is discrimination in a broader sense. The stories that make women, nonbinary, or gender-expansive people feel better about being themselves just haven’t had as many people in positions of power supporting them. As frustrated as I am by the current state of things, it would be totally disingenuous to say nothing has changed. A lot has changed. You look at the stories that are being made now, and they’re very different from what was in theaters or on television 20 years ago. There is more diversity of voices and stories being told. Is it enough? No. And it’s frustrating because there was this energy around diversity and hiring different voices–especially around 2020–and it definitely feels like there’s been a backslide. A lot of women directors I know who finally got their first TV episode, or maybe their second, aren’t really getting hired anymore because the business is contracting. MeToo absolutely mattered. It was an important movement that had a real impact. Harvey Weinstein is in jail. You can’t say it came and went without consequences. It was necessary and important, and it’s had lasting repercussions. That said, I think MeToo also created a lot of discomfort among people in power, and that discomfort led to backlash. When I started making “Half the Picture,” I interviewed some women who had been part of a group inside the Directors Guild back in the early ’80s who were looking at the numbers of women working as directors and agitating for change. They were probably in their sixties when I interviewed them, and while they were grateful there was renewed attention on discrimination against women directors, they also had this very world-weary attitude of, “Oh, this again.” At the time, I was very much like, “No, this is different. Things are changing. The ACLU is investigating. Women are speaking out. We’re finally making progress.” And now, 10 years later, I find myself with a much more cautious optimism. I think human beings naturally assume things just evolve and get better over time—that progress is inevitable. But it’s not. If the last 10 years have taught us anything…it’s that you have to keep fighting for these rights constantly, or they will be threatened or taken away. That was a hard lesson for me to learn in my forties. The interviews have been edited for clarity and length.  ABOUT MARIN COGANMarin Cogan is an independent journalist. She was most recently a senior correspondent at Vox and has worked as a writer for New York magazine, GQ, ESPN the Magazine, and other publications.  ENJOY MORE OF THE METEOR Thanks for reading the Saturday Send. Got this from a friend? Don’t forget to sign up for The Meteor’s flagship newsletter, sent on Tuesdays and Thursdays. |
Next they came for the IUD users
  May 28, 2026 Hello, Meteor readers, Y’all. I caught up on part one of the “Summer House” reunion last night, and I just…🚬😮💨. Obviously, I was too emotionally exhausted to put together a coherent newsletter, so I put the bat signal up, and Nona is here to come to all of our rescues.  In today’s newsletter, North Carolina’s absolutely bonkers abortion bill marks a new era for anti-choice rhetoric. Plus, what the DOJ’s campaign of retribution against E. Jean Carroll means for her. Reunions should be fun, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ON
Abortion opponents go for blood: You may have gotten wind of a proposed law out of North Carolina, the gruesome language of which belongs in a dystopian novel. HB1232 would grant a fertilized egg full personhood and not only permit the death penalty for women who get abortions but also legalize vigilante violence against anyone seeking to destroy a fertilized egg (a category which could include abortion providers, yes, but also anyone who uses an IUD, does IVF, or even drives a patient to an abortion clinic). This bill has an almost zero chance of passing, especially after a social media outcry that caused one of the bill’s co-sponsors to remove his name (but we saw you there, Rep. Ben Moss of Richmond). Still, the proposed law is worth pausing on, because it reveals a lot about the anti-abortion movement’s true intentions—and just how much its polite mask has fallen away in recent years. Even just a decade ago, anti-abortion activists were united in their attempt to make their extremist goals sound less so. This often manifested as a form of double-speak that classified abortions as murder, yet did not explicitly seek to punish the people who got them as murderers. If anyone revealed themselves to be ignorant of this logic—like when then-candidate Donald Trump told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews in 2016 that there should be “some form of punishment” for women who’ve had abortions—the right wing would jump in to make clear that they viewed these women not as criminals, but victims who deserve sympathy. (Even Trump, notoriously averse to apologies, was forced to walk back his abortion comments.) Feminist journalists like Jessica Valenti and Irin Carmon have been drawing attention to the punitive nature of the anti-abortion movement for years, and conservatives had been criminalizing pregnancy for individuals way before Dobbs. But until recently, the official line of GOP politicians was that women were not the targets of anti-choice legislation. How times have changed. Just in the last couple of years, a growing number of bills have popped up that would criminalize a person having an abortion. Proposed legislation in Montana threatened women who travel out-of-state for abortion care with up to five years in prison. Red states continue to regularly introduce bills classifying abortion as homicide—a crime, of course, that generally carries stiff penalties. A bill out of South Carolina, which passed committee in April and is awaiting a vote in the state Senate, would explicitly sentence women who’ve had abortions to prison time. Again, none of them have passed yet. But just a few years ago, virtually no politician on the right would even state these goals out loud, let alone draft legislation incorporating them. And this is how extreme abortion rhetoric—much like online misogyny and “household voting”—slowly gets normalized. Years ago, fetal personhood proponents seemed like fringe wackos; now their language is embedded in state laws across the country. Most actual people, to be clear, still oppose punishing abortion patients, but they’re increasingly witnessing respectable-looking lawmakers in suits and ties, or pundits behind podiums, talking about it. I’ve always been of the opinion that when you really decode most conservative talking points, however rote they sound, the results are pretty damn violent. Now there’s no decoding needed. Abortion is no exception. If powerful zealots devoid of empathy really believe abortion is murder, and that the life of a fertilized egg trumps that of the woman carrying it, it’s only a matter of time before they follow that position to its logical conclusion. Our job is to take them at their word, and keep being appropriately shocked by their bloodthirsty language. —Nona Willis Aronowitz AND:
 WHY DON'T I EVER LOOK THIS GOOD WHEN I HIKE? (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 WEEKEND READING 📚On changing tides: In? Matriarchy. On its way out, albeit slowly? Patriarchy. (The Persistent) On screen: Why the rom-com “One Night Only” should give all of us some pause. (The KHole) On that book: The novel Yesteryear hits different for Latine readers. (Subestack) And speaking of that book! Thanks to all of you who joined us last week for the first but don’t-worry-not-last Meteor book club. We loved meeting you, hearing your thoughts about Natalie and Caleb, and generally chewing the feminist fat together. If you missed it and want to join future gatherings, send us an email.  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
You may now disenfranchise the bride
  May 26, 2026 Happy Monduesday, Meteor readers, Siri, play Ja Rule’s “New York”:  THIS IS THE FIRST TIME WE'VE SEEN THIS HAPPEN IN 27 YEARS, THE CITY IS HEALING ITSELF. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) In today’s newsletter, we try to understand how a decision to change your name after getting married could impact your vote. Plus, Pope Leo XIV makes a big statement. Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONMrs. Voter: Despite its unpopularity in the Senate and with voters, Donald Trump is still working on making the SAVE Act happen with an obsessive laser focus that would put Gretchen Wieners to shame. In case you’ve forgotten, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act is a bill that has passed the House twice, only to be defeated in the Senate. Its supposed goal is to prevent non-citizens from voting, a problem that, once again, does not exist in the way that Republicans want their base to believe. But if passed, the bill would mainly affect American citizens. The bill would change voter registration and ID requirements—and establish a rule that the name on one’s current ID has to match one’s birth certificate. These requirements have many feminists concerned over the disenfranchisement of married women voters. First of all: How many people would this affect? Quite a few: According to a 2023 report from the Pew Research Center, roughly 80 percent of women married to men take their spouses' last name after marriage, while five percent hyphenate their name. Ironically, of women who did change their name, white, Republican-leaning women were more likely to make the change compared to Democrats, moderates, and women of color. Meanwhile, Black and Hispanic women are more likely to take on a hyphenated name. It would appear the GOP is trying to shoot itself in the foot by making things harder for its base. These numbers also raise a related question: Why do the vast majority of all women continue to change their names despite there being no tangible benefit to doing so, and a mountain of paperwork to make it happen? “It doesn’t necessarily mean a conscious acceptance or endorsement of patriarchy,” author and marriage historian Stephanie Coontz tells The Meteor. Sometimes it’s a preference for a different name, a dislike for your own name, or a desire for the whole family to unite under one name, like an ancient Scottish clan. “For a lot of people, [it’s] just a convenient way to deal with the fact that they're going to have kids and the kids [can’t] keep indefinitely combining their names,” says Coontz. In my own case, my full last name is Melero-Ureña, the surnames handed down by my father and my husband, respectively. My decision to hyphenate was driven largely by my culture, which traditionally applies a maternal and paternal surname to a child to preserve both lines of the family tree. But perhaps, in a strange way, surname changes are an acknowledgment of patriarchy’s erosion. A paper published last year in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility identifies a fascinating dynamic that the average married person may not have considered: “compensatory gender display.” Observing data from the state of New Jersey over a period of 21 years, researchers found consistent evidence that women who have lower financial or education status than their husbands tend to take his name, reflecting what they call a “marital exchange/bargaining approach.” This correlates with the Pew survey, which found that, overall, the more highly educated a woman is, the less likely she will take her husband’s name. But this study also found that women whose status exceeds their husbands’ are also more likely to take their husbands’ names than if their status were the same. They do so, the researchers argue, “to compensate for their deviation from traditional gender roles”—in other words, as a sort of apology to the world for their success. These cases “highlight the enduring power of gendered expectations…despite women’s rising status.” Whether we’re aware of it or not, there’s a bit of patriarchal residue over a lot of our decisions, and this one, about taking our spouse’s name, will likely be around for a while. But will hundreds of years of naming tradition and underlying patriarchy be the thing that kills our votes should the SAVE Act pass? Not if we keep pushing back. AND:
 HANG THIS IN THE LOUVRE...BUT DON'T LET IT GET STOLEN. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
The Dangers Rise for Clinic Staffers
  May 21, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, I’ve been informed by my husband that everyone loves Landry Shamet right now (Knicks player, don’t worry if you’ve never heard of him). And I would just like to say that I was loving on Shamet in December!! I’m finally a trendsetter. Anyway, congratulations to the entire city of New York for how well we’re all doing in the playoffs. In today’s newsletter, violence against abortion providers is on a steady rise. Plus, farewell to Stephen Colbert and hello to E. Jean Carroll. Shamtastic, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONAn emboldened wave of zealots: Imagine checking in several patients for their appointments at your job at an abortion clinic, only to have them begin throwing unknown liquids and powders throughout your facility—at which point you realize they are not patients at all, but undercover extremists. That’s what went down in July 2025 at the Women’s Center of Delaware County, Pennsylvania. Given that the incident “happened in the space [where staffers] spend countless hours providing compassionate care,” says Amanda Kifferly, Vice President for Abortion Access, “clinic staff felt uneasy and violated.” Kifferly’s recounting of this story, along with so many others, was gathered in a new report from the National Abortion Federation (NAF), which found that since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, violence against abortion providers and disruptions at clinics have increased across the country; instances of death threats, clinic theft, and stalking doubled over just the first year of Trump’s second term. And anti-abortionists aren’t satisfied with targeting providers; they’re also going after patients more often. Incidents of obstruction—anti-abortionists physically blocking a patient’s entrance to a clinic—have quadrupled. Tracii Wesley, the head of security at Feminist Center for Reproductive Liberation in Atlanta (and the star of the Oscar-nominated short “The Devil Is Busy”) told NAF that she sees protesters block patients’ path multiple times a week, sometimes shouting “explicitly racist” rhetoric to the clinic’s mostly Black and brown patients. (The white patients, she said, receive a less hostile “We’ll pray for you.”)  A YOUNG WOMAN, WHO TRIED TO POSE AS A CLINIC ESCORT, REMAINS STATIONED OUTSIDE OF A CLINIC READING THE BIBLE ALOUD FOR THOSE TRYING TO ENTER. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Violence against providers is certainly not new, but it’s thriving under an administration that has stopped enforcing the 1994 Freedom to Access Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a law meant to criminalize obstruction, property damage, or threats of harm to employees of clinics and religious establishments. Rather than maintain the law, Trump claimed that the Biden administration had been overzealous in prosecuting anti-abortionists. Shortly after taking office, he pardoned known perpetrators, among them Lauren Handy (the infamous activist who stole aborted fetuses) and those same extremists who would go on to invade and vandalize the Women’s Center in Pennsylvania. NAF also notes that the newly aggressive administration brought with it “the fear of ICE raids and violence against immigrant communities, alongside a surge in hate speech and racist rhetoric”—all of which may deter patients from seeking reproductive healthcare, the report states. NAF’s numbers only cover reported instances, which means there are likely untold numbers of stories out there. As Abortion, Every Day writer Jessica Valenti points out, “We know why anti-abortion extremists are feeling so fearless.” They’ve got the president and the entire right-wing machine on their side. But providers and patients have us on their side. The Women’s Center, which has multiple locations, has a reproductive freedom ambassador program that allows volunteers to get active in supporting patients and centers. Planned Parenthood offers a patient escort program. And if neither of those are your jam, the Center for Reproductive Rights has a plethora of options on how to get involved at all levels. Anti-abortionists are working together to fulfill their mission; it’s on those of us who care to match that energy. AND:
 FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
When your parents get detained by DHS
 May 19, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, You know how you think in your mind something is a great idea, and then the longer you ponder, the less great it sounds? Anyways, I signed up for a 36-mile group hike. It’s giving mid-life crisis, but at least I get to see some trees.  In today’s newsletter, we look at the staggering number of children who have been abandoned after their parents were detained by ICE. Plus, the woman who was forced to give birth in a New York courthouse. Training mode, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONThe forgotten children: In February, ProPublica spoke to a group of children who had been detained in Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas. Those children, some as young as two years old, were detained with their parents. Many of them pleaded to be rescued. The response was sizable: Protests were held outside of Dilley with demands from locals, mom groups, and even Ms. Rachel to release the children from detention. Some have been released while others face an uphill legal battle. Because of the publicity surrounding Dilley, we know some of these children’s names. They are real to the public; their faces give the average person something to fight for. But what about the children we don’t see? The ones who are left at home, but without their caregivers? “We know surprisingly little about what happens to children of detainees,” a new report from the Brookings Institute states. Relying on “demographic characteristics of detainees matched with likely unauthorized immigrants in the American Community Survey,” the organization estimates that since the beginning of the second Trump administration, 205,000 children have been impacted by parental detention, meaning one or both parents living in the household with them have been detained. Roughly 145,000 of those children are U.S. citizens, and nearly a third are under the age of six. In the most extreme cases, 22,000 children who are citizens of this country have been left with no parents because both parents have been detained. (Brookings notes that these numbers are not exact due to limits on available data from the Department of Homeland Security, but says they are a very close estimate.)  PROTESTORS ON THEIR WAY TO THE SOUTH TEXAS FAMILY RESIDENTIAL CENTER IN JANUARY AFTER THE ATTEMPTED DEPORTATION OF LIAM CONEJO RAMOS AND HIS FAMILY. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) What’s more, little is being done—at least by the federal government—to help. “No government entity is responsible for [the children’s] well-being,” Brookings states. And there is “no systematic approach to protecting the children of those detained by ICE.” All in all, we’re talking about more than 200,000 children left without one or both of their parents. That’s equivalent to the entire population of cities like Little Rock, Arkansas or Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s more than 60 times the population of the entire city of Dilley, Texas. Imagine an entire city, traumatized. That is how many kids we’re talking about. And the government, it seems, wants more. Brookings estimates that if the administration continues moving towards its goal of removing every unauthorized immigrant from the U.S., 2.5 million children will be affected. The report calls for, at the bare minimum, DHS to collect and report accurate data on these children. But what is needed more than that is an end to the unjust immigration policies that leave them parentless to begin with. The midterms are 24 weeks away. The people we vote in will control how much funding DHS gets. Every candidate should be asked about what they are doing about the tens of thousands of kids whom our government has abandoned, and about the 2.5 million more who are at risk. AND:
 AN ICONIC STOLE FOR AN ICONIC GRADUATE. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
A world where only husbands vote
  May 14, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, We are excited to officially invite you all to a virtual book club discussion of Yesteryear, the book we quite literally cannot stop talking about. Your favorite newsletter pals will be in attendance, and we’d love it if you could join. Just hit the button below to sign up for our inaugural meeting. You’ll receive a link to join and a few discussion questions to noodle on ahead of our chat. It will be a lunch-and-laugh, so feel free to come with a snack or your favorite emotional support beverage (mine is a twice-reheated cup of coffee that I forgot I reheated). In today’s newsletter, we are exploring the wonderful world of submission. No, not that world, the other one. Plus, Erin Brockovich has a new mission, and your weekend reading list. See you at book club, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONCreeping conservatism: An outlandish suggestion has been cropping up on the right-wing internet. One so silly, so out of pocket that you would think it hardly merits discussion…and yet! Apparently, there are women out there who believe, quite firmly, that women should not have the right to vote as individuals—a position euphemistically known as “household voting.” Far be it from me to yuck anyone’s yum, but when your yum is coming for my rights, I will yuck if you buck. This thought isn’t new amongst conservatives, but it is gaining enough ground that at next month’s Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit, one of the invited speakers is an influencer named Savanna Faith Stone who doesn’t believe women should vote. As far as we know, the 19th Amendment is not in immediate danger (even if our own Secretary of Defense’s pastor is a fan of it and the SAVE Act is setting the stage). But we bring it up today because, in the age of algorithms rewarding extreme rhetoric, fringe ideas are increasingly becoming mainstream. Look at the president. Remember when that was just a national joke?  SAVANNA FAITH STONE (SCREENSHOT VIA TURNING POINT USA) Stone, like many of her ilk, believes “husband and wife are one flesh and therefore should make that political decision together.” One family, one vote…it’s an idea that was first proposed in the ‘80s, inspired by pronatalist movements in Europe. Now it’s getting an alluring rebrand courtesy of beautiful 20-year-old influencers yearning to give up their vote in exchange for a man who will make all the decisions, and the money. This current iteration of household voting relies on strict interpretations of Biblical passages establishing the man as the head of the household and the woman as a “helpmate.” Ephesians 5:22, for instance, reads, “Wives submit yourselves to your husbands as you do to the Lord.” This idea of complete submission lies at the heart of the “no votes for women” issue, and that idea isn’t as fringe as we might like it to be. In fact, people who say they prioritize submission in their relationships are everywhere, and they’re talking about their desire for submission loudly and proudly. If you’ve seen the most recent season of Love is Blind, then you’ve heard about submission from Christine and Vic. If you’ve watched more than two minutes of Pop the Balloon or Find Love on YouTube— a speed-dating show with more than 100 episodes and more than a million views per video—you’ve heard it from literally hundreds of contestants on that show, regardless of gender. The rise of Mormon influencers who are talking about their mixed feelings on submission while still submitting? We see so many of them because they’re literally paid by the church to sell a vision of the nuclear Christian family. Submission is in the air—not in the Fifty Shades of Grey way, more the “you and your votes are mine” way—and it’s being renormalized at an alarming rate.  Of course, the promotion of Christian submission gets less strict when applied to men. Conservatives who take Ephesians literally conveniently forget the line that comes right before the submission of women: “Submit to one another for the sake of Christ.” Details, details. At any rate: The worry shouldn’t just be that someone like Savanna Stone is going to Turning Point to talk about this. We should worry more about how easily the same idea has been sliding into television and social media as an aspirational way of living. Women and young girls consume more media than men. Our eyes need to be fully open to what we’re waving off as too small to succeed. You know what they say about mustard seeds. AND:
 SIRI, PLAY IT'S RAINING MEN. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO LEAVE THESE DELIGHTFUL CHILD FANS? (VIA GETTY IMAGES)  WEEKEND READING 📚On the facts in front of us: Tracie Morrissey painstakingly lists the many details about the young boys that were part of Michael Jackson’s orbit. Seeing it all together is stomach-churning. (Flagged & Reported) On the “ambition penalty”: Apparently, nothing has changed since 1999: Single women are being shunned by potential dates for owning property. (The Guardian) On sisterly love: Lindsey Adler goes long on Amy Wallace, who fiercely protects her brother David Foster Wallace’s legacy and humanity. (The Small Bow)  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
The devil wears a prairie dress
 May 12, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, The WNBA’s 30th season tipped off this weekend with gigantic rings and an iconic performance from the one, the only, the incomparable Ellie the Elephant. You literally love to see it.  ELLIIIEEEEEE (VIA GETTY IMAGES) In today’s newsletter, we’re putting on our cutest boots to dig into the intersections of “The Devil Wears Prada 2” and book-of-the-moment Yesteryear. They’ve got more in common than you think! But first, the news. xoxo, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ON
 The Devil Wears a Prairie DressYesteryear and “The Devil Wears Prada 2” have the same moral: Let women’s ambition run wild.BY NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ  ANNE HATHAWAY'S ANDY SACHS IN "THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2" AND MODERN DAY TRADWIFE HANNAH NEELEMAN, AKA BALLERINA FARM. (SCREENSHOTS VIA YOUTUBE AND INSTAGRAM)
Everyone is talking about Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke’s bestselling novel about a deeply venal tradwife influencer who suddenly wakes up in the year 1855. The book (which will soon be a movie) hits many, many notes: Its time-travel element reminds us how little the 19th century deserves rose-colored glasses, but Yesteryear also seeks to expose modern ills like the empty grift of tradwife cosplay, the rise of the manosphere, and social-media brainrot. Maybe it’s because I immediately followed this book with a viewing of "The Devil Wears Prada 2," but to me, Yesteryear is above all a warning about what happens when women are not allowed to be openly ambitious. A little-discussed detail about the main character, Natalie, is that she breaks with her small-town Christian upbringing to attend Harvard on a free ride. She doesn’t mention specific intellectual ambitions, but we know Natalie is gifted and sharp from a young age. She was “practically running” her Sunday school class by the time she was 12. Never one to socialize, she was excited to go to a college “where intellect would matter much more than being likable.” Pretty soon, though, Natalie’s long braid and air of superiority render her an outcast, and we are treated to a succession of fish-out-of-water scenes that reminded me of Tom Wolfe’s anti-hookup-culture novel I Am Charlotte Simmons. Homesick and lonely, Natalie takes refuge in a church group whose members are comfortingly familiar, even if they’re “dumb as rocks.” It’s there where she meets her future husband, Caleb, a wealthy senator’s failson. She never gets her degree. Within a few short years, she’s a wife, mother, and owner of a vast Idaho farm that becomes the stage for her illusory world—and her family’s principal source of income. Without giving away too much, I’ll say that throughout Yesteryear, Natalie is not well. She is selling a life premised on domestic bliss, but she experiences very little genuine happiness throughout the book. She tamps down her anger by pretending she is being watched at all times. She smiles maniacally no matter what. She appears to suffer from severe postpartum depression and psychosis. She has zero respect for her increasingly red-pilled husband, whom she realizes is “an actual, honest-to-God idiot.” (“Please give my husband a spine,” she prays to the Lord at one point. “I’m tired of him needing to borrow mine.”)  (VIA PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE) One of the only flashes of pleasure we see Natalie have is her rush of ecstasy when two nannies show up to almost fully take over her five children’s care. Eventually, she becomes physically unable to repress her innermost negative thoughts and instincts (which leads to an incident that jeopardizes her influencer career). Other than a desire for control and outward perfection, we don’t know what truly makes her tick—because she doesn’t know. In her 1983 book Right Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin describes how a woman’s intelligence, if left to wither, disfigures her. “Imprisoned, intelligence turns into self-haunting and dread,” she writes. Confining a smart woman into a domestic space for which she is ill-suited will only lead to misery, because intellect by its very nature cannot be perfect and pre-packaged. “Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world” because “intelligence is also ambitious: it always wants…more of a bigger world.” And yet, Dworkin notes, within the traps of a patriarchal society, a woman “cannot be ambitious in her own right without also being damned.” Natalie’s distress and eventual downfall in Yesteryear is a cautionary tale of what happens when a woman’s intellect is imprisoned, or in this case, channeled into the pursuit of creating an avatar of the ideal white Christian American family. Natalie becomes an influencer almost by accident, but her ruthless negotiations with Caleb’s father reveal her skill for playing hardball, her fearlessness in the face of power—leading us to wonder what would have happened if that unflinching quality had been applied elsewhere. Contrast this bleak portrait of an unfulfilled woman with the fizzy romp that is "The Devil Wears Prada 2," the number one movie in America right now. Watching “DWP2” on the heels of reading Yesteryear, it struck me how happy the lead women seem to be when they’re working hard, especially in comparison to the first movie. The first act treads familiar territory—Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestley is cruel and vindictive as Runway’s editor-in-chief; Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs is put upon as her newly minted features editor. But the rest of the movie has a dynamic duo caper feel, allowing the two women’s wild ambition to thrive in a bigger world. Andy’s successes are unvarnished feel-good moments, and we spend absolutely no time mourning the hypothetical family she never built. Instead, we hate the brotastic heir, and later the callous billionaire tech mogul, who pose an existential threat to Runway and the media industry writ large. At one point, Miranda does acknowledge the domestic sacrifices she’s made, the many lost moments with her daughters, but leaves us with an affirmation: “Boy, I love working. I really do. Don’t you?” These lines are delivered with an authentic smile that makes a mockery of Natalie’s Instagram-ready grin in Yesteryear, a smile so relentless that, at one point, it remains frozen upon her face even when tears run down her cheeks. The moral of both stories seems to be: Let women’s ambition run free—free from the manosphere, free from insipid rich dudes, free from stifling expectations. The villains of "The Devil Wears Prada 2" are not powerful women, but unambitious men messing with the careers that powerful women painstakingly built. In the funhouse-mirror world of Yesteryear, the antagonists are men, yes, but also women enforcing the rules. Perhaps the runaway success of both projects shows us that work can make us happy—as long as we’re the ones making the rules. P.S. Our Yesteryear book club is meeting next week, and we’d love to have you! Reply to this email if you want in.  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
The Toni Morrison approach to mothering
Black women deserve to claim and relish the depths of freedom motherhood can bring.
By Rebecca Carroll
When I was nursing my son as a baby, he started doing this thing where he would latch the little fingers of his free hand around my bottom lip, and then proceed to slowly knead at it in a small but persistent effort to pry open my mouth. It almost felt like he was trying to find some sort of entryway back into my body. Once, when he was about two, I softly placed my hand over his as he tugged at my lip, and asked in a whisper, “Does this feel like love to you?” He stared back at me with his beautiful, bright eyes, and nodded “yes.” It felt like love to me, too.
I am reminded of this hushed exchange of heartwork between us whenever I see one of these pieces about “styles of parenting” that crop up online every now and again, introducing or reintroducing terms like “attachment parenting,” “helicopter parenting,” “gentle parenting,” and “intensive parenting.” The methods they describe might sound fresh, but they’re often adjacent to the four Mayo Clinic-approved styles of parenting, which have been around since the 1960s—authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and uninvolved. And they almost always feel white-coded, not just because labeling (or, let’s be honest, marketing) how parents interact with their children is about having the time and the income to ponder how you might like to categorize your “style” of parenting. These terms also dissociate and intellectualize what is, to me, and to many Black mothers I know, an emotionally freeing, visceral experience.
It is striking to me how little the experience of Black mothers factors into the standard offerings on how to parent today. Instead, we get media portrayals of Black mothers as struggling single moms and “modern-day mammies,” or neck-rolling, meme-friendly, “You got McDonald’s money?” kinds of stereotypes. But Black mothers are, and Black mothering is, so much more than that. And we deserve to claim and relish the depths of freedom mothering can bring——especially given the inherent, deeply harrowing history of when and if we were even able to keep our children.
Morrison offers this piece of advice: “When they walk in the room, my face says I’m glad to see them.”
No one knew that better than the late novelist Toni Morrison, who was herself a single mother of two boys. Becoming a mother, Morrison said in a 1989 conversation with Bill Moyers, “ was the most liberating thing that ever happened to me.” The demands of her children, she went on to explain, were not like those of her colleagues, friends, or lovers. “Somehow all of the baggage that I had accumulated as a person about what was valuable just fell away. I could not only be me—whatever that was—but somebody actually needed me to be that.” That’s exactly how I felt when I was nursing my son, when he needed me to be that person who would feel like love.
Later, years after I stopped nursing, I snuggled him often and regularly, let him sleep in the bed with us at night, and made myself available to him in ways that felt centered and honest. I seldom missed a call. I always allowed myself to be vulnerable even, and especially, when I didn’t have an answer to solve a problem—while also trying like hell to solve the problem. “If you listen to [your children],” said Morrison, in that same conversation with Moyers, “somehow you are able to free yourself from baggage and vanity… and deliver a better self, one that you like. The person that was in me that I liked best was the one my children seemed to want.” Obviously, we have to make choices, set boundaries, and act as moral compasses for our children, but isn’t that part of delivering the version of ourselves that we like best?
REBECCA AND HER SON, KOFI (COURTESY OF REBECCA CARROLL)
My friend Caryn and I raised our sons, who are just eight months apart, as cousin-brothers, and have frequently mused over the past 21 years about the ways in which parenting Black children is not just about “the talk” for our sons, or warnings about the oversexualization of Black girls for our friends with daughters. It’s about mitigating the harshness of their inevitable reality growing up in America, with the softness of our generational instincts.
Morrison’s approach to parenting squarely challenges the meme and media stereotypes (not that she would have paid them much mind), and blatantly disregards white mainstream guides. Black mothering doesn’t need a name or a category; it deserves a kind of reverence. In simpler terms, Morrison offers this one piece of salient advice: “Let your face speak what’s in your heart. When they walk in the room, my face says I’m glad to see them. It’s just as small as that, you see?”
The summer after my son went to college, I was really struggling with him being away. Like, actually grieving. We sat down one evening to talk about it. I told him how hard it was for me to be physically separated from him, almost as if a part of my body was missing. And he said, “Mom, I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. And that’s a testament to you and your mothering.” I’d like to think that is in no small part because my face has always said I’m glad to see him when he walks into a room.
More Mother’s Day reading and watching from The Meteor:
A Feminist Love Letter to Baby Formula
It’s Time to Rethink the Empty Nest
My Abortion Story Is Not What You Think
Three Questions For Tracy Clark-Flory About Motherhood and Sisterhood
Syria's Mothers Are Fighting to Rebuild Their Homes
Quick, what's in the Constitution?
  May 7, 2026 Hi, sweet Meteor readers, My daughter got a big-girl bed last night, and her unmitigated joy about unicorn sheets and celestial-themed pillows was frankly inspiring. “I have been yearning for this all of my life,” she told me. May we all cope with sudden change as well as she does. Today, we are moving past the devastation of the Voting Rights Act’s “demolition,” and towards what we can actually do about it. Plus, good news about S-E-X (for once) and three questions for journalist Tracy Clark-Flory about her amazing new memoir. Having mom feelings, Nona Willis Aronowitz  WHAT'S GOING ON“We are not without power”: We’ve spent the last week grappling with the Supreme Court’s gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This week—even as conservative states move quickly to gerrymander the hell out of their maps—it’s time to talk about what we can do about it. Melissa Murray, a NYU law professor and author of the new book The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader, was a guest this week on UNDISTRACTED with Brittany Packnett Cunningham, and she has some basic advice: Start with the actual Constitution. “Raise your hand, America, if you've actually read the Constitution,” Murray says. “Don't play in my face.” The answer is likely to be “no.” Murray says many of her own law students haven’t read until she assigns it on the first day of class. The Constitution is still relevant, despite recent evidence to the contrary, because it gives us context both to how we got ourselves here, and how we dig ourselves out. Murray calls the Constitution “a trauma-informed document”—the trauma of the colonies having been oppressed by a global superpower. The whole purpose of the document, Murray says, was to limit the government’s power so it didn’t “run roughshod over the rights of ordinary people.” But of course, the original Constitution also contained some pretty horrific concessions to Southern states; the Constitution, Murray notes, “is literally rooted in a series of compromises about how to keep people enslaved, and we have to wrestle with that.”  On the other hand, the Constitution famously has amendments, and those amendments are a profound exercise in citizen power. In Murray’s book, she tells the story of the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th Amendments—all of which “were passed in this period at the turn of the century, where there was a huge populist movement.” These were drastic changes we can scarcely imagine now: The 19th amendment that enfranchised women, for instance, “basically doubled the size of the electorate in one fell swoop. Think of what we can do if we harness that kind of power.” Amendments are possible, she says: We could be thinking about statehood for Washington, D.C.— “Hello, it’s a Black city”—or we could pass an amendment to get rid of the electoral college, which Murray reminds us we once came very close to doing. (Did you know that? I did not.) Murray would love every college student in America to read her chapter about the 27th amendment, which regulates pay increases for Congress. It tells the story of a University of Texas-Austin student who helped get it passed in the nineties, more than 200 years after it was proposed. “That is a lesson for young people,” Murray says. “You can be constitutional change agents. We don't have to take this.” AND:
  Three Questions (and a Compliment) About...Motherhood and SisterhoodTracy Clark-Flory’s new memoir grapples with her mother’s secret teen pregnancy, and a half-sister she never knew.Ever since she was a teenager, Tracy Clark-Flory was aware her half-sister existed. Her mom, Deb, had gotten pregnant as a teen in the 1960s, and been sent away to a home for unwed mothers. Deb placed the baby for adoption, but endured decades of grief, thinking about her lost baby every day even after she had Tracy years later. When Tracy was in her thirties—now married, a mom, and a writer—she took a DNA test and finally tracked down her sister, Kathy. I talked to Tracy about how this revelation led to her incredible memoir, My Mother’s Daughter: Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past, a personal and political journey that is almost psychedelic in its immersiveness. Mother’s Day is on Sunday, so let’s talk about Deb first: What do you see as your inheritance from your mom, especially when it comes to the issues you write a lot about, like sex and family? As a feminist journalist and memoirist, I have been in many ways writing against what happened to my mom back in the '60s without realizing it. I saw the ironic juxtaposition that my mom was sent away in shame in the '60s as a pregnant teenager and then I, so many decades later, devoted my life to writing about sex, publishing personal essays on the internet—in some cases, writing personal essays in defense of casual sex, which is to say premarital sex. But now I very much understand that sex was part of what devastated my mom and changed the trajectory of her life—and that I wanted to resist that. It’s why I’ve spent so much of my career writing about things like porn and sex workers’ rights; I have repeatedly confronted shame across my career. Without knowing it, I was trying to address some of the unfinished business from my mom's life and her experience as a young woman in this world.  TRACY CLARK-FLORY AND HER MOM, DEB (COURTESY OF TRACY CLARK-FLORY) Also…the impacts of adoption are generational. There are all these ways in which Kathy's absence and my mom's longing for her was very present across my childhood, even before I knew of my sister’s existence. I detected my mom’s longing and didn't have an explanation for it. I didn't understand how my mom could sometimes be so close to me, but also absent from me and at arm's length. Now I see that as being part of the legacy of the adoption, of the fact that she lost her first child. Your sister is half-Black; her biological father is a man from Nigeria whom your mother met at college. And a big part of this book is about race and the lopsided sexual expectations that Black and white women have to reckon with. Can you explain more about how this dynamic works? These homes for unwed mothers would not have existed without racist ideas that place white women on a pedestal—and of course, once you're on the pedestal, you can fall from it. Black women, on the other hand, were cast as bad girls from the start; there was no distance to fall. [Black feminist writer] bell hooks writes about this shift in the 19th century where…white women were cast as pure and innocent, whereas Black women were portrayed as hypersexualized jezebels. [Black feminist scholar] Patricia Hill Collins has argued that the jezebel stereotype made the idea of pure white womanhood possible. Through these homes, white unmarried mothers were rerouted towards marriage and the nuclear family. Black unwed mothers, on the other hand, were expected to raise their own children. And then, as a result, they faced all sorts of costs, from lost education to poverty. They were also targeted with harassment from welfare officials and sterilization. This racially divided approach to unwed motherhood worked against shared rebellion, and Black and white women's fates were determined along these very separate paths, which also served to hide their shared interest in reproductive justice.  TRACY CLARK-FLORY AND HER SISTER, KATHY, DURING THEIR FIRST MEETING. (COURTESY OF TRACY CLARK-FLORY) You discuss these traditional institutions and expectations that harmed your mother, and at the same time you are very aware of the fact that you ended up in a heteronormative, monogamous, nuclear family. How do you think your family configuration fits in with this fascination you've always had with shame and sexual rebellion? It's been very odd to be researching the ways in which marriage, as an institution, have been historically used to control women's sexuality, and then look at my own life and see I have found myself within this institution. I’ve found some of my greatest happiness, my greatest sense of comfort within marriage, and yet Christopher and I will sometimes look at each other and be like, "Why did we get married?" And it's not because we're questioning our connection or commitment to one another, but we're questioning how it is that we ended up within an institution that in so many ways we do not philosophically or politically agree with. And of course, I know the answer. There's so much that points us in this direction and rewards us for taking this sort of path. But I wish we lived in a world where there were more options readily available. I'm very interested in imagining alternate ways of structuring our lives. Speaking of, I love the descriptions of the unwed mothers living together and even writing a newsletter together. It's so cool and ironic that while these unwed mothers were sent away to be “redeemed” so that they could be in a nuclear family, they were actually living communally in a temporary sisterhood. They should’ve started a mommune! I love these women and their gallows humor. [In their newsletter] they're joking about the unwed mother-mice that go skittering across the floor in their rooms. You know, the vibes were pretty good! They were in these really miserable and traumatizing circumstances, but the fact that they were still able to develop that kind of sisterhood really speaks to the power of the connection.  ONE MORE THING A new exhibit from The Institute for Primary Facts drives home the enormity of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged crimes. It transforms the Epstein files into an imposing physical entity, with 3,437 books, more than 3.5 million pages, and 17,000 pounds spanning the width of several walls. But why print, catalog, and display an archive that’s already available on the internet? David Garrett, a lead organizer of the exhibit, tells Meteor contributor Ann Vettikkal that it will force people to take the files seriously by removing them from the context of “doomscrolling.” The volumes, he says, also serve as a monument to the “sheer scale of evidence” of Epstein’s alleged crimes and connections to powerful figures like Trump. The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room will be open to the public in New York City starting tomorrow through May 21.
 FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
