The Non-Secret Lives of Mormon Wives
  March 26, 2026 Salutations, Meteor readers, I’m not one for corporal punishment, but I do think the creators of “Age of Attraction” need to be taken to the town square and pilloried for a few days to think on their sins. In today’s newsletter, we unpack the ongoing Taylor Frankie Paul debacle. If you don’t know who or what that is, you have a pure heart and an uncluttered mind. Stay blessed. Plus a terrible new rule from the International Olympic Committee and a hearty slice of women’s history. Bringing tomatoes to the square, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONThe man treatment: Last Sunday, ABC was meant to premiere the latest season of “The Bachelorette” starring the queen of Mormon messiness, Taylor Frankie Paul, the lead of the hit Hulu series “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” (SLOMW). Instead, the season was pulled after a disturbing video of Paul was released by TMZ that showed her in an altercation with her ex-boyfriend/babydaddy/co-star, Dakota Mortensen. In the video, which was recorded by Mortensen in 2023, Paul is seen doing a number of things, including throwing three large barstools at Mortensen. At some point, one of those chairs hits Paul’s five-year-old daughter, who was sitting on the couch during the altercation. The response to this video has torn the internet asunder, with some justifying Paul’s actions as a response to whatever happened off-camera, and others equivocating and employing their new favorite term, “reactive abuse.” There’s also been a tendency, particularly among women viewers, to over-empathize with Paul for unleashing her feminine rage on a man whom she says has also abused her. In comment sections everywhere, there are notes that Paul is being punished so harshly because she is a woman, whereas Mortensen has lost nothing for his as-yet-unknown role in the 2023 incident (or for any of his alleged abusive behavior). I hate to be the naysayer in the group, but I have to call balderdash.  THE CAST OF SLOMW LAST YEAR AT THE PREMIERE FOR SEASON FOUR. ON THE HEELS OF THE PAUL/MORTENSEN VIDEO, HULU HAS PAUSED PRODUCTION ON SEASON FIVE. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) The reality is that Paul is receiving the kind of treatment a man would in this situation. Let’s examine the facts. ABC knew from the start that Paul had pled guilty to aggravated assault in 2023—it was literally a storyline on SLOMW, and the police bodycam footage of Paul’s arrest was part of an episode. Yet they still chose to cast her in “The Bachelorette.” Hulu still had Paul star in subsequent seasons of SLOMW, where some of the other cast members alluded to Paul and Mortensen being abusive towards each other in front of Paul’s children. And we all watched, just like we watch abusers in the NFL. Compare this to former “Bachelor” Colton Underwood, who was accused of stalking and harassing his girlfriend in 2020. What was his punishment? Some negative online chatter, a 2021 documentary about his life, and appearances on not one, not two, but four reality TV shows. So when folks say, This would never happen to a man, what exactly is the this? Because what does happen to men is a lot of rah-rah about getting canceled and all of us yelling from atop the moral high ground to little effect. Similarly, when the news of Paul’s investigation first dropped, bachelordata reported that she gained 80,000 new followers. TMZ announced yesterday that despite three investigations into domestic violence incidents, Paul will receive her full paycheck for filming “The Bachelorette.” She also still maintains 50/50 custody of the child who was struck. While the two experiences are very different, the same thing that shielded Underwood now shields Paul: whiteness. As many people have been pointing out, the abuse we’re seeing does not occur in a vacuum, which is why Paul and Mortensen being young, white, and allegedly attractive need to be taken into consideration when we talk about their treatment. If Paul weren’t white, she would have immediately lost her job, as we’ve seen with other reality stars who have done less and gotten fired. And far worse can happen after incidents like this to women who are not rich and famous, like permanently losing custody of their children. As for Mortensen, he hasn't incurred the same scrutiny because he's positioned himself as the noble victim, a character that only works for white men. Taylor Frankie Paul may be in a freefall, but there is a golden parachute attached to her back—one that does not exist for regular women, especially women of color. The one thing we can agree on in this jambalaya of opinions is that we should all be held to the same standards when it comes to wrongdoing, regardless of race, gender, finances, or follower counts. We cannot allow a warped idea of feminism to trump the fact that harm was done to a completely innocent party—Paul’s daughter. We don’t know how much that child has seen, but what we do know, from watching the footage, is that she was silent until she was struck by the chair—which shows us that she has likely heard this kind of screaming and seen this kind of argument before; it’s been normalized. Children who absorb this behavior grow up to be adults who accept it or, at the very worst, act it out on others. When it comes to children witnessing or experiencing abuse, I am always Team Child. AND:
 SLICE OF WOMEN'S HISTORY 🍕Akasha Gloria Hull, a foundational Black feministBY REBECCA CARROLL Throughout Women’s History Month, we’ll be featuring women (or women’s movements) that aren’t on the typical media lists we see every March.  HULL AT A BOOKSTORE EVENT IN 2015. (FAIR USE) The Combahee River Collective, founded in 1977, looms large in the field of Black feminism, and rightly so: The organization was part of a movement and moment that would change the way we talk about social justice in America. Many people familiar with the group know its bigger names: founding members Demita Frazier and twin sisters Barbara and Beverly Smith, along with Audre Lorde, an icon far beyond her association with CRC. But there’s an unsung heroine who isn’t celebrated as much as she should be: Writer, poet, and spiritual warrior Akasha Gloria Hull, whose life’s work is a love letter to Black feminists. Born Gloria Theresa Thompson in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1944, she changed her name to Akasha Gloria Hull after an illuminating trip to Ghana in 1992. Then, around the same time she was Xeroxing passages from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God for her friends and coworkers—a practice that would lead to a revival of Hurston’s work—Hull, then a professor of women’s studies, was invited to join the newly convened Collective (CRC). The group was formed out of the “absolute necessity for autonomous Black feminist analysis,” wrote Frazier and the Smith sisters in a letter to her. “We think that this chance to meet will be politically stimulating and spiritually regenerating.” She accepted the invitation, and a few years after joining CRC, she co-edited the seminal 1982 work All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave with Patricia Bell-Scott and Barbara Smith. It was the first Black feminist anthology of its kind and widely considered to have laid the groundwork for Black women’s studies. After that, Hull went on to publish a number of scholarly books, but her nonacademic work is where she gave herself the most freedom to explore the depths of her spirituality and imagination, thanks to the spiritual regeneration of CRC’s mission. From her 1989 collection, Healing Heart: Poems 1973-1988, she writes, in an untitled poem: “we love in circles/ touching round / faces in a ritual ring/ echoing blood and color/ nappy girlheads in a summer porch swing/ belligerent decisions to live/ and be ourselves.” And in Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African American Women—which combines narrative storytelling and interviews with Black women writers and friends, including Alice Walker, Lucille Clifton, and Toni Cade Bambara—Hull offers a meditation on a wide range of spiritual practices through a Black female lens, while also making a personal statement of becoming. Her work evolved from the undeniably life-changing connection with CRC, as she recalled in a 2004 interview with Monterey County Now: “That was one of the most exciting periods of my life,” Hull said. “United with others, zealous. … We really changed the map, changed the face of things.” Akasha Gloria Hull’s papers and photographs are available to the public at the Schomburg Center for African American Research in Harlem.  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
We all live in the manosphere now
  March 24, 2026 Good evening, Meteor readers, East-coast spring continues to be cold as hell, but I’m not that mad about it because I can still comfortably wear my brand-new, Carolyn Bessette-inspired rollneck sweater. “Love Story” is not good, per se, but I have failed to resist its hard sell of ‘90s fashion. Today, we tackle what’s missing from that ubiquitous manosphere documentary. Plus, some optimism (!) about politics (!!) from diplomat-turned-playwright Julissa Reynoso. Officially a fashion victim,  WHAT'S GOING ONThe women beneath the men: Weeks after its release, everyone is still talking about Louis Theroux’s new documentary, Inside the Manosphere. Theroux isn’t the first filmmaker to attempt to capture this subculture, but he’s arguably the most high-profile, applying his Michael Moore-esque style to these guys as he did to similarly odious groups like the Westboro Baptist Church and Scientologists. He tries to get inside the heads of wildly bigoted influencers like Harrison Sullivan (HSTickyTocky), Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy (Sneako), Myron Gaines, and Justin Waller, focusing on how they profit off of marketing misogyny to young men. Theroux, who has three sons of his own, mainly limits his scope to the influencers themselves and their throngs of young male fans, sons of the Millennial and Gen X women who ushered in a new era of feminist consciousness. Theroux makes it clear that we are now living through that movement’s backlash. And yet he seldom depicts the people who are most hurt by it: women. It’s not that we don’t hear from women at all. Theroux briefly chats with the influencers’ women employees, wives, and girlfriends, whose remarks range from beatific assent (male domination is “how it’s supposed to be”) to resigned eye rolls (“Male audience. What can you expect?”). But Theroux never talks to them for more than a few minutes, and he almost never talks to them alone. The one time he manages to grab a few solo words with the woman who books guests on Myron Gaines’s show, Gaines immediately sends her a cease-and-desist text from the next room. The closest Theroux gets to a substantive interview with a woman is when he speaks with Harrison Sullvan’s mom, who supposedly “hates sexism.” Asked to comment on her son’s profession, she simply says, “Of course there’s things I don’t agree with.”  MYRON GAINES, IN ONE OF HIS MILDER MOMENTS. (CREDIT: YOUTUBE) Maybe individual interviews with these particular women were impossible, but I was dying to know: Where are Sneako’s exes? Who are Waller’s former women employees or employers? Could we have heard from a girl who went to high school with Sullivan, or a woman who worked alongside Gaines when he was, ahem, a DHS agent? If Theroux really wanted to uncover their humanity, as he claims, that could have been a way to go. The short interviews he does conduct with the wives and girlfriends often take on a distinctly paternalistic tone. Theroux harps on the one-sided monogamy many of these relationships have established; several of these men sleep with other women but expect their partners to remain “loyal.” It’s a valid data point about their chauvinism: As a practitioner of nonmonogamy myself, I can nevertheless concede that for more than a century, the jargon of “free love” has been twisted and manipulated by men to shame women into relationships they don’t want. But is polyamory the problem? Or just polyamory with misogynists? And how, I was left wondering, do the women in these influencers’ lives feel about the rest of it? Why didn’t Theroux ask Waller’s partner, Kristen, about what she’s going to teach their two daughters, whose diapers Waller claims to never have changed? How did Gaines’s girlfriend, Angie, feel about being ordered to clean up their shared apartment before Theroux sees it? (Thank gawdess she’s no longer with him.) Does Sullivan’s mum worry about her son’s future wife, or her future grandchildren? When Theroux filmed Sneako taking selfies with a preteen boy—who jovially chants “Fuck the women!” and “All gays should die!”—did he give a passing thought to the girls or gays that go to school with him? Theroux interviews random male fans on the street about why they look up to Waller; perhaps he could have pulled aside a few women observing their fandom.  NOTED HISTORIAN AND ARCHITECTURE EXPERT JUSTIN WALLER. (CREDIT: YOUTUBE) I found myself wanting to dispatch a girl gang to Theroux’s house, composed of regular women and girls who are exposed to this rhetoric on a daily basis. Like this 15-year-old girl who gave readers of The Guardian a glimpse into the “vile,” overtly misogynist content that social media feeds her, no matter how much she tries to steer the algorithm elsewhere. Or the girls in the classrooms of this educator, who reports that they’ve stopped raising their hands in class because “the social cost has become too high.” And this isn’t just about one film. As Feminist points out, these glaring omissions mirror broader discussions about the “boy crisis” and the “male loneliness epidemic”—which, by the way, is not exclusively male; a recent Pew survey reported just as many women feeling lonely as men. These debates zero in on boys as victims of a patriarchal society, and they certainly are, but they’re not the only victims. A subset of these trend pieces blame feminism, not our society’s bedrock misogyny, which these influencers cynically enforce for their own gain. It feels ridiculous to even clarify this, but manosphere influencers are not akin to girlbosses; as Amanda Montei puts it, those women “may have run on white capitalist forms of exploitation, but they did not actively teach other women and girls to abuse, control, and dehumanize men, nor were they advocating for the end of men’s civil rights.” The women affected by this misogyny remain faceless and nameless while journalists give openly misogynist, racist, anti-Semitic influencers the royal treatment. Not anymore. The Meteor will be rolling out a series on life and reality in this anti-feminist era, examining the backlash through the prism of women and girls who have to live through it. Stay tuned. AND:
 Three Questions About…Government that WorksBY SHANNON MELERO  JULISSA REYNOSO IN 2024. (CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES) “The best is yet to come…you’ll see.” These are the final words the audience hears in Public Charge, a political drama playing at The Public Theater in New York, which follows the true story of Julissa Reynoso, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and Ambassador to Uruguay in the Obama administration. At the show’s end, the actor playing Reynoso is referring to the future presidency of Hillary Clinton—a reality the audience knows is never realized. It is a bittersweet moment for both the character and the viewer; after years of work and small miracles, Reynoso’s character has realized her vision of easing relations with Cuba and freeing American political prisoner Alan Gross. In the final moments of the show, which ends in the winter of 2014, she is hopeful and full of belief in the power of good government. As a viewer, you feel some of that too—until you exit the theater and your phone flashes the latest headlines. The experience is jarring. We spoke to the real Julissa Reynoso, who wrote Public Charge with playwright Michael J. Chapiga, about what it was like to strike such an optimistic note in such politically uncertain times. In the play, there are a lot of references to a memo you and Ricardo Zuniga wrote in 2009 about the importance of connecting at a person-to-person level with representatives of Cuba, despite decades of silence as policy. What is it like revisiting that idea as the U.S. is moving more towards isolationism? That’s just…diplomacy. We need to talk to all types of people, from people you like or don’t to people who don’t like you. It’s the only way you really can get anything resolved. That is the whole function of the State Department. [With this play] I wanted to help [people] understand what public servants do and the issues we face in trying to get things done. That was the main objective: explaining the life of a government official.  ZABRYNA GUEVARA AS JULISSA REYNOSO IN PUBLIC CHARGE. (COURTESY OF THE PUBLIC THEATER) A lot of the characters in the show are Latine, and as they’re trying to open the door to relations with Cuba, I noticed a theme of how we as Latine people struggle to work together intraculturally in the U.S. Was that intentional? No, it just happened to be that the people dealing with these hard things at the time were all people of color! That’s just who was there and that’s really a testament to [then-Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton, who put us there. But also, growing up I would see films about foreign policy or international relations and I did not see people like me in any of those scenarios. [In the administration], I had a bunch of people of color whirling around with me trying to solve issues and trying to make things better. And with the people who were around at this time—Cheryl Mills, [Uruguayan] President Mujica, some of the Cuban officials—I always thought, Man you can’t make this stuff up. It was all so out of the ordinary. [Now, with the current administration,] I think there's a lot that we've lost along the way. I do have faith that some of the people at these institutions can get it back in the right direction. This is not the first time our institutions have been under attack. But we can come back and be stronger—it’s just going to take a lot of work. And good people are going to have to join in at some point. It’s interesting you say that people have to join because there really is so much apathy right now. I don’t know that everyone still has the will to, you know, be the change they wish to see. People are gonna have to get over it. I always say, If it's not me or you, then who? We can’t just say Oh God, everything is so bad and then do nothing about it. That’s not how this works. You can’t just give up. I really want folks to understand that it is hard to make change but once you do it, it’s extraordinary. As a country we’re still able to do that, but it’s just hard. If it were easy, we would do it all the time. But change is a major investment and it takes a lot of failures along the way. We just have to keep at it.  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
"The system is not set up for men to live their truth."
Heated Rivalry showed us what could be—but for gay men at the top levels of pro sports, that’s still just romantasy
When Heated Rivalry star Connor Storrie performed a portion of his Saturday Night Live opening monologue flanked by players from the men’s and women’s U.S national hockey teams, they formed a perfect pop culture panoptic. All at once, we had queer joy, the resolution of national sports beef, comedy, political commentary, and just a dash of pettiness for seasoning. While the moment bore the weight of so many things, that weight was shouldered entirely by sport, and where we as fans stand in our relationship to it.
For all the good that sports has given us, historically, it’s also been used as a tool of exclusion, with women, LGBTQ+ people, and athletes of color having to fight to exist in the courts, fields, and pitches they now enjoy. While there has been progress, it’s been slow and uneven. Over the last five years, 27 states have passed laws banning trans students from sports, and last summer, World Athletics mandated sex testing for women’s sporting categories—all in the name of “protecting” athletes from an amorphous queer menace.
At the same time, women’s sports have never been bigger, and incredible trans athletes, lesbians, non-binary Olympians, and bisexual baddies are all over our television screens.
But what about queer men? As Uncloseted Media wrote last year, there are “zero” gay or bisexual men actively competing at the highest professional levels of U.S. baseball, basketball, football, and hockey. That stat remains unchanged, but the success of Heated Rivalry and the current generation of queer athletes has many revisiting the age-old question: Why aren’t men coming out while active? When will we see hot hockey players kiss each other IRL? (I must note here that there have only ever been two hot men in hockey, Henrik Lundqvist and Martin St. Louis. They are both retired and, sadly, straight.)
“There’s so much performed masculinity that’s tied to men athletes,” explains Steve Granelli, Ph.D., a teaching professor of communications studies at Northeastern University. “It’s all rooted in this really toxic, very old understanding of gender roles.” That understanding is at the core of America’s Big Four—the MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL—which have long played a major role in shaping our collective idea of what it means to be a man.
In the 150-year history of American professional sports leagues, only two men have come out while still actively playing. The first was the NBA’s Jason Collins in 2013, who announced he was gay in an article for Sports Illustrated, while signed to the Washington Wizards, and was widely supported by the league and the fans. (The loudest voice of dissent came from sports broadcaster Chris Broussard, who called homosexuality a sin on air.) Eight years later, the NFL defensive end Carl Nassib shared that he was gay in a social media post. In an interview with Good Morning America, Nassib said he was met with “nothing but love and support” by his teammates and his organization. He continued in the NFL until 2023, retiring as a Tampa Bay Buccaneer.
Since Collins, gay and bi men have slowly begun to take up space, just not while playing in the Big Four. Athletes across different sports have come out in retirement or after career-ending injuries, and it’s slightly more common to see queer men in a solo sport like tennis. Luke Prokop, an active player in the development league, the AHL, came out last summer. Earlier this year, inspired by Heated Rivalry, hockey player Jesse Korteum announced that he was gay and walked away from the sport when he was 17 because he didn’t think he would be accepted. In Japan’s B.League last year, Joshua Scott, an American basketball player who was a darling of the NCAA during his time at the University of Colorado, Boulder, came out publicly as bisexual.
Scott tells me that although he would “hear some off-putting stuff about what it was to be LGBTQ” in “a lot of locker rooms,” he never felt biphobia directed at him back in Colorado. That wasn’t entirely the case when he transitioned to the pros in Japan. “There was a season where, because there were different rumors tied to my sexuality, I received zero offers to play for a team,” he says. Not yet out of the closet, Scott felt he couldn’t combat the rumors publicly without doing more damage to his career. “The system is just not set up to help men be able to live their truth, and that starts at the youth level.”
Still, “being out and playing has been one of the most rewarding experiences,” he says. Scott announced that he was bisexual on social media, intentionally choosing to skirt Japanese media, which leans conservative. Since then, “I’ve gotten to almost have it all in a way I didn’t even think was possible four or five years ago.” Part of “having it all” has been success on the court, with Scott being one of his league’s top five players in rebounds and averaging a 62.4% field goal percentage. He also learned he “wasn’t alone,” he says. “There are a lot of people within the industry that are searching for a way to have both their truth and to be able to just do their sport.”
So far, that search has not borne fruit within the Big Four, where even straight players feel a pressure to hew to traditional roles. Granelli, who specializes in the study of sports culture and fandom, cites NFL player Caleb Williams, who is straight, as an example of just how little room men are given to express themselves outside the “acceptable” constraints of masculinity. “Williams comes into the NFL, and there’s such a focus on him painting his nails,” Granelli says. Williams, who is now a quarterback for the Bears, received a lot of negative feedback and questions for his personal style, which included themed nail sets; rapper Lil Wayne commented, “We just lost a playoff game to a [expletive] w purple nails we fkn suck” after the Packers lost to the Bears in January. “When men challenge the expected presentation of an athlete in any way, there is immediate backlash,” Granelli says. Fans eventually came around to Williams and his nails, but only after he’d put on a winning display of masculinity on the field.
Conversely, women athletes have created an entirely different space. “There’s a strong understanding [in women’s sports] that there’s a huge spectrum in terms of player sexuality,” says professional soccer player Tierna Davidson. A center back for Gotham FC, Davidson has been an out lesbian for her entire career and married her former teammate Alison Jahansouz in 2024. She says that women’s soccer specifically “has fostered a safe and welcoming environment for queer people”; sexual orientation was “never something I was worried about.” Davidson also gives some of the credit for this openness to fans. “If you look at the birth and nurturing of women's soccer in the U.S., there were so many strong, queer characters in that story,” she says. Women’s soccer “attracts fans that feel seen and represented, and it helps make our environment more open and welcoming. We don’t always get it right, but fans definitely see it and want to be part of it.”
On the men’s sports side, that fan-player relationship is just as key in determining how an athlete is received. “It only takes one moment, one small thing, for fans to feel a certain disconnect with a player and turn against him,” Granelli explains. “I mean, look at Josh Allen.” Allen, the beloved (straight) quarterback of the Buffalo Bills, had long been considered by fans as “one of us,” but upon his marriage to actress Hailee Steinfeld, a small subset of the Bills Mafia started calling him a sellout. “Dating someone from Hollywood is what makes him not like us?” Granelli, a lifelong Bills fan, groans. “He’s never been one of us! He’s 6’5” and has more talent than we’ll ever understand. But that’s all it takes for some people: One moment of not being able to identify with a player.”
Reimagining men’s sports to be more inclusive then becomes a chicken-and-egg quandary. Whose openness—an athlete’s, a fandom’s, or an organization’s—must come first to secure the openness of the other in a system that is built to be symbiotic? We are meant to see our most aspirational selves in athletes, and they, in turn, are made to feel secure and valued by our love. But too often the love of a fan does not extend to the fullness of an athlete’s persona, and if an athlete knows he cannot be fully himself and still receive that love, then why should he risk it? Women and trans athletes have more room to negotiate that risk because it is ever-present—they open their eyes in the morning, and that risk looms over them. But for men, who are shielded from bias by their athleticism and an assumed idea of masculinity, coming out means asking them to give up the one shred of safety they may feel they have.
Scott is hopeful that, eventually, that will all change. “There’s that adage that real men don’t cry,” he says. “But the beautiful part about sports is the passion, the anger, the disappointment, the tears and, yes, sometimes crying…[when I was closeted] I didn’t want to be exposed or have others think I was weak. But since coming out, I find myself stronger for walking in my truth.”
Dolores Huerta. Ana Murguia. Debra Rojas.
  March 19, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, Today I offered to salt and eat Nona’s arm in exchange for not having to read about any more awful things in the world. We’re having dinner later this week. In today’s newsletter, a New York Times investigation shows us just how much the women of United Farm Workers sacrificed to keep the movement alive. Plus, the U.S. tries to play bully on the world stage and loses. Gathering the seasonings, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONSigue luchando: Yesterday, The New York Times released a sweeping, years-long investigation into labor rights activist Cesar Chavez, revealing that Chavez had groomed and sexually abused women and girls who were part of the farm workers’ movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Three women are named in the article: Ana Murguia, who was 13 the first time Chavez “summoned” her to his office and molested her. Debra Rojas, who was 12 years old the first time Chavez groped her. And Dolores Huerta—labor rights icon, feminist, and the co-founder of United Farm Workers—whom Chavez pressured into sex in 1960, then raped in a grape field in 1966. Murguia told the Times that Chavez had known her since she was eight years old and by the time she was 15, following two years of repeated molestation by Chavez, she “wanted to die.” Huerta, who turns 96 next month, released a statement yesterday confirming what was in the Times, writing, “I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work…I wasn’t going to let Cesar or anyone else get in the way.” She also shared that both encounters with Chavez resulted in pregnancies; in each case, she hid her condition with baggy clothes and arranged for the babies to be taken by other families. Those children eventually met their mother and their siblings, she writes, but “no one knew the full truth about how they were conceived until just a few weeks ago.”  The news that this revered man, an icon of Latine civil rights, could betray his own people, could so deeply harm the young women and girls who trusted him, is shocking and painful (and yet another reminder that a man’s progressive politics have very little to do with how he treats women). The fact that Chavez’s legacy was so fiercely protected despite years of whispers of what he’d done, however, is par for the course. The Times notes Huerta’s silence around her experience was what she viewed as a “strategic necessity.” Women in movements have always needed to remain silent about their suffering, lest the man at the center of it all fall off his pedestal. Women of color, particularly, have long been expected to stay loyal for “the cause,” which most often means shielding abusive men who have centered themselves in community work. In her classic 1979 book Black Macho and the Superwoman, Michele Wallace criticized the way the typical Black male civil rights activist relied on a Black woman’s silence: She “had to understand that manhood was essential to revolution—unquestioned, unchallenged, unfettered manhood,” Wallace wrote. “She was just going to have to get out of the way.” Black women, from Anita Hill to Russell Simmons accuser Drew Dixon, have been labeled traitors for calling out men of their own race. This is also the case in Latine communities and some families, where silence is practically a virtue and machismo is the rule of law—men protect us, so we must protect them. But time and again men, even and especially those with larger-than-life status, have failed to fulfill their end of that bargain. It’s hard to overstate what Chavez means to Latine communities, especially in California and Arizona, which are dotted with statues of him and streets bearing his name. He was a father figure to many, and the reaction of his own son, Paul Chavez, to the allegations may lend us insight into what many might be feeling: “It was unimaginable to me, just hard to process,” he told New York Times reporters. “You’re talking about my dad.” The revelations have left officials struggling with how to disavow Chavez, and devotees wondering how to fill the void at a time when his legacy served as a balm on the terrifying assault on civil rights, labor, and Latines. “Now, Latinos and others who admired Chavez have to grapple with his moral failings of the worst possible magnitude at the worst possible time,” writes journalist Gustavo Arellano in the Los Angeles Times. “When there’s an administration doing everything possible to crush Latinos and we’re looking for people to look up to like never before.” We still have those people to look up to. Ana Murguia. Debra Rojas. Dolores Huerta. These are the women whose names should replace those street signs, those statues. These women—and the ones whose names we don’t yet know—sacrificed pieces of themselves for the greater good; Huerta gave up her own flesh and blood to become a leader, overshadowed for years by her own rapist. They held an entire movement together in spite of everything that movement took from them. Each of us owes them a debt, which we start repaying today. We must protect each other, believe each other, and above all else, sigue luchando. AND:
 TFW THAT NEW CBA CHECK HITS. OUR PRESIDENT, NNEKA OGWUMIKE. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 SLICE OF WOMEN'S HISTORY 🍕Shere Hite, sexual revolutionaryBY SCARLETT HARRIS Throughout Women’s History Month, we’ll be featuring women (or women’s movements) that aren’t on the typical media lists we see every March.  HITE AT HOME, 1976. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Shere Hite has made your sex better, even if you don’t know her name. The feminist sociologist’s most well-known work, a groundbreaking 1976 study known as The Hite Report on Female Sexuality, is one of the bestselling books of all time and forever changed the conversation about women’s pleasure. It explored sex through the prism of how women felt about their bodies and their intimate relationships, rather than through the paternalistic lens of male psychologists. And the changes brought about by the women’s movement were featured prominently in the study’s results. “We owe her a lot,” says Rosa Campbell, author of the forthcoming The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and then Disappeared: Shere Hite and the Hite Report. “Today we know that politics enters the bedroom” and “that sex—how we do it, how we want to do it, what we like and what we don't like, our desires and proclivities—is not just a matter of personal choice, but of politics too.” The Hite Report collated the answers of around 3,000 women who responded to the 58-question survey she distributed to more than 100,000 prospective participants. “She found widespread sexual dissatisfaction among American women,” says Campbell. “Seventy percent could not orgasm from penis-in-vagina sex… and required clitoral stimulation to orgasm.” She found that many women knew that, but were too ashamed or embarrassed to ask for it. “For sex to improve, women needed more than knowledge—they needed power.” Hite’s strict yet chaotic upbringing, failure to be taken seriously in the boys club that was Columbia University’s doctoral history department in the 1960s, and background in modeling and porn all inspired her work—and her high-femme fashions and past in sex work landed her a spot on The Phil Donahue Show. Millions of suburban housewives suddenly knew about this book, and helped it fly off the shelves. She later became a victim of the backlash to feminism in the 1980s. Eventually, she retreated to Europe, where she lived until her death in 2020. Ultimately, Campbell says, “her work was really brought into disrepute because it was relentlessly feminist.”  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
"I Was Floored..."
  March 17, 2026 Howdy Meteor readers, Happy Women’s March Madness season to all who celebrate!  In today’s newsletter, Ann Vettikkal speaks to three New York moms about what it would mean for them to access free childcare through Mayor Mamdani’s proposed universal 2-K program. Plus, an AI battle looms upstate and a double slice of women’s history. Rooting for South Carolina again, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONAffordability in real time: The victory speech Zohran Mamdani gave the night he was elected mayor of New York City ended with a familiar call-and-response. “Together, New York, we’re going to deliver universal…” Mamdani began. “Childcare!” the crowd shouted back. And earlier this month, just a few weeks into his tenure as mayor, Mamdani announced that 2,000 daycare spots for two-year-olds in primarily low-income parts of New York would be available in the fall, with plans to expand “2-K” universally in the next four years. The Meteor spoke to working parents raising young children in New York City to understand the financial, physical, and emotional costs of parenthood in an expensive city—and what Mamdani’s plan for universal childcare could mean for them.  EVERYONE'S FAVORITE MAYOR DURING THE CHILDCARE PROGRAM ANNOUNCEMENT WITH NEW YORK GOVERNOR KATHY HOCHUL. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) “I just felt such an incredible sense of relief.”—Roona Ray, a part-time healthcare worker whose wife works in costume design. They live in Jackson Heights, Queens; have a 5 year-old, 3 year-old, and 2 year-old; and currently pay $1,400 a month for childcare. “I actually started as a single mom by choice. And then I met my partner, and we decided to get married. My mother-in-law really helped a lot in the first few years. But then I got fired from my job when I was nine months pregnant with my third child, and that really set us in a tailspin. And I broke my foot and… I didn't work for a long time. It was very hard to take the time to look for work, because I was just too knee-deep in parenting. It was a very stressful time. We applied for childcare vouchers and got them, so we did have some help from the state, but it took a number of trials to apply. The paperwork is very confusing. I went back to work a couple of months ago, and it's been a big adjustment. I think a lot of people are just running on empty all the time and that's a very bad feeling. Luckily, I was able to find a job where I work four days a week. Our older two kids are in public 3-K and kindergarten. The youngest one is in a home daycare. So we've been paying for her [with] cash. We have seven more months of paying for child care…[before] we get to 3-K. [Accessing 2-K childcare] would be really great for us, just to save us a few months paying for child care. I think it could be really wonderful for so many parents, and just give so much relief.” AND:
 DOUBLE SLICE OF WOMEN'S HISTORY 🍕🍕Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, feminists of faithBY SHANNON MELERO Throughout Women’s History Month, we’ll be featuring women (or women’s movements) that aren’t on the typical media lists we see every March.  A PORTRAIT OF SOR JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ PAINTED BY MIGUEL CABRERA, 1750. (NATIONAL HISTORY MUSEUM, MEXICO CITY, MEXICO) In the beginning was the Word, and that word was decidedly not “feminism.” But the work of liberation has long been in motion even before we had a word to package it together. In the late 1600s, Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez, a Mexican woman born under Spanish colonial rule, became one of the early champions of feminism by doing something most modern women would shudder to consider: She joined a convent. De Asbaje y Ramírez would take on the name Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, becoming a poet and fierce advocate for women’s right to education. She understood that “her desire to learn was an impulse given to her by God,” explains Latina feminist theologian Theresa A. Yugar. Sor Juana also believed that having opinions was central to understanding God. “She said it was better for women to be educated by women, because being educated by men could cause innumerable harm and women could be violated,” says Yugar. While serving the Church, Sor Juana published stage plays, mathematical treatises, social manifestos, and criticisms of homilies. For this, she was silenced, her works suppressed until the 20th century, when she was recognized as the first published feminist of New Spain. While Sor Juana was the first, she certainly was not the last. Three hundred years after her death, another prominent theologian helped develop a new understanding of the unique relationship between Latinas, God, and the struggle for liberation. Her name was Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, the mother of mujerista theology. Isasi-Diaz, a Cuban immigrant, joined the Ursuline order as a novice in her twenties, but eventually left the order to pursue a doctoral degree at a seminary school. She believed that women should be ordained within the Catholic Church (a debate that continues to this day) and wanted to become a priest. But within the Church that was a non-starter, so Isasi-Diaz became the next best thing: a professor shaping the lives of Latine PhD students at Drew University. Her work helped make feminist thought and practice accessible to Latines of faith who were often left out of mainstream American feminist movements, even though they were quite literally in the room. (Xicanisma also took on this work of centering Latine people, but with less of a focus on faith.) Her work echoed that of Audre Lorde, who “taught us early on that unless we created new methods for doing theology we would not effectively dismantle the…[traditions] that have excluded women…for ages,” Isasi-Diaz wrote in “Lo Cotidiano: A Key Element of Mujerista Theology.” She goes on to explain that mujeristism prioritizes the liberation of Latine women and calls for centering their “cotidiano”—the realities of their everyday lives—and “not an abstract faith but the faith that sustains grassroots people in their daily living.” The relationship between faith and modern-day feminism is still fraught, particularly when it comes to the Catholic Church. But these women exemplify that there is a place where the two things can meet and, God willing, get us closer to the fully realized dream of collective liberation.  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
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? |
