"You can't say that. I'm Iranian."
  March 2, 2026 “You can’t say that. I’m Iranian.”An Iranian-American woman on survivor’s guilt and griefBY ROYA SHARIAT  THE AUTHOR AND HER MOTHER AT AN IRANIAN FESTIVAL IN 1999 (COURTESY OF ROYA SHARIAT) This weekend, I watched the U.S. move from threats to strikes against my homeland, Iran. And I was haunted by an old memory that now feels like a warning. In 2017, I ended up at a New Year’s party full of American diplomats in Argentina, invited by a friend of the host who warned me that I might meet some strange characters. As midnight approached, the host raised a toast and asked everyone to share their resolutions for the year ahead. The answers were predictable—more travel, good health, new adventures—until one guest wearing a bloodthirsty grin exclaimed: “Regime change in Iran!” For a moment, I dissociated. Then I did what years of existing as an Iranian in America have trained me to do: I clapped back. “You can’t say that. I’m Iranian.” The room fell silent. Heat rushed to my face, but the only way out was through. With a shaky voice, I told him that American intervention in Iran has never led to anything good, that people’s lives aren’t pawns for someone else’s resolutions. I spent the rest of the night crying while a friend tried to console me, until I learned that the man I’d yelled at was one of America’s highest‑ranking military generals. This was just one of many uncomfortable moments I’ve encountered as an Iranian-American, an identity that raises eyebrows and prompts questions I’m often unqualified to answer. For the past two months, I’ve witnessed the latest regime-led violence unfold from the comfort and safety of my London home, while faced with an entirely new set of questions: What’s the best way to show up for a community you can’t be physically present in? How do you process survivor’s guilt and grief simultaneously? How do you reconcile so many disparate viewpoints, both within Iran and abroad? “Regime change” has re-entered the bloodstream of political discourse, moving from abstraction to reality in a matter of months, and especially this weekend in the wake of the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s draconian supreme leader. The phrase itself is staggering: How can toppling a foreign government be made to sound as quick and seamless as changing an outfit? In two words, the nuances of diplomacy, the violence of war, and the brutal mechanics of how regimes actually fall are erased. The phrase becomes so abstracted from its meaning that it’s palatable enough to pass as a New Year’s resolution. Forget a revenge body; how about regime change?  THE AUTHOR AND HER MOTHER, 2023 (COURTESY OF ROYA SHARIAT) But “regime change” doesn’t capture what’s actually needed in Iran. Removing a leader is not the same as dismantling a system, or building what comes next. Destruction is not a shortcut to freedom, and freedom doesn’t get to be declared by people insulated from the consequences. Iranians deserve self‑governance. They deserve a free Iran, liberated from repression and fear, from a government that’s repeatedly used lethal force against its own citizens. Iranians inside the country have risked their lives to say as much: through the historic, women-led “Women, Life, Freedom” movement sparked by Mahsa Jina Amini’s 2023 death, through recent anti-government protests wherein women were front and center, through the simple act of refusing to be silent. But liberation can’t come from bombs, or from the sudden collapse of power without a path forward. Power vacuums are not freedom. They create the same kind of conditions that brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power after the 1979 revolution. This moment requires holding multiple realities at once: relief in the wake of Khamenei’s death, grief for civilians killed in the crossfire—including schoolchildren—and fear and skepticism about what comes next. The governments invoking Iran’s freedom, like the U.S. and the U.K., have not historically delivered it in the region, or in Iran itself. The U.S. backed an undemocratic coup in Iran in the 1950s. That history makes one thing clear: Change imposed from the outside is never neutral. What happens next will not be determined by a single death, but by who holds power, and how. Every New Year, someone raises a glass and makes a resolution about other people’s lives. What people in Iran are demanding is dignity and agency: the right to shape their own futures on their own terms, with solidarity—not agendas imposed from the outside. For Americans watching, the responsibility is not to decide Iran’s future, but to listen to those already risking everything to shape it themselves—people who are asking, simply, for life over destruction. If you want to listen to Iranian voices, start with Nilo Tabrizy, Yara Elmjouie, Sahar Delijani, Gissou Nia, and Vali Nasr.  Roya Shariat is a London-based writer and author of award-winning cookbook Maman and Me: Recipes from Our Iranian American Family. When she's not hunched over her laptop or in the kitchen, Roya writes a newsletter on culture and joy called Consumed.  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
Meet "the mother of Black feminism"
  February 27, 2026 The Unsung Mother of Black FeminismOn the last day of Black History Month, meet history-making Anna Julia CooperBY REBECCA CARROLL  ANNA JULIA COOPER CIRCA 1902 (VIA GETTY IMAGES) If you really want to “listen to Black women,” start with Anna Julia Cooper. Widely considered the mother of Black feminism, she was among the most important Black women educators, essayists, and activists of the 19th century. She defended her dissertation at 66—in French—at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1925, almost certainly making her the first woman born into slavery to earn a PhD. (Meanwhile, that year, back in her adopted hometown of Washington, D.C., 30,000 members of the KKK were marching in a public demonstration of white supremacy.) And Cooper is the only Black woman quoted on the U.S. passport: “The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class—it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.” She lived to 105, yet few people today know her by name, even if they know many of her words. For instance, the phrase “when and where I enter” is often attributed to the abolitionist Martin Delany, the first Black field officer in the United States Army during the Civil War, who said in full, “When and where I enter, my people enter with me.” But it was Cooper who turned the phrase into what would go on to become a foundational fighting text for Black women in America. “Only the black woman can say when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood...then and there the whole Negro race enters with me,” Cooper wrote in her seminal 1892 collection of speeches and essays, A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South. In fact, in the 1890s, more than a decade before W.E.B. Du Bois coined the phrase “double-consciousness” to describe the dual sense of self experienced by Black Americans, Cooper was speaking and writing about the dual marginalization of race and gender that Black women face. And while a lot of 19th century Black public intellectuals (like Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, and Cooper’s Oberlin classmate Mary Church Terrell) were formulating theories about racism and sexism at that time, Cooper was among the first to connect these oppressions—essentially an intersectional feminist almost a century before the term was coined. Du Bois’s theory was that to be Black in America meant seeing oneself through two specific lenses: the oppressive white gaze, and the identity of a liberated Black self. But Cooper took a more inclusive and nuanced stance at a time when being a woman was too often considered something else entirely—even by Du Bois himself. It’s well-documented that Cooper struggled to get her work published in The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, where Du Bois served as editor from its founding in 1910 until his resignation in 1934. In a series of 33 letters the two exchanged between 1923 and 1932—thirty years after her essay collection was published—Cooper appealed to Du Bois to publish her newer works. The tenor of their correspondence is cordial, but it’s clear that Du Bois, who nominally expressed support for Cooper’s writing, was more comfortable talking the “profeminist politics” talk than actually walking the walk: He never published her. He was not the only man to fail to show Cooper the respect she deserved.  A PORTRAIT OF COOPER CIRCA 1892, SCANNED FROM HER BOOK (FAIR USE) Born into slavery in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1858, Cooper was the daughter of an enslaved Black woman, Hannah Stanley Haywood, and, it is widely believed, her white enslaver, Fabius J. Haywood. She turned six the year of Emancipation and, like many newly freed Black kids in Raleigh, enrolled in Saint Augustine Normal and Collegiate Institute at the age of nine. She excelled, and her young activism included protesting the boys-only admission to Greek and Latin courses. “A boy…had only to declare a floating intention to study theology and he could get all the support, encouragement and stimulus he needed,” she wrote in A Voice from the South. “While a self-supporting girl had to struggle on by teaching in the summer and working after school hours to keep up with her board bills, and actually to fight her way against positive discouragement to the higher education.” By the age of 11, though, she was made a scholarship-teacher (for $100 a year) to tutor other students. And she did eventually get the chance to study Greek with the boys. She married her husband, George A.C. Cooper—a minister and Greek teacher at Saint Augustine—in 1877 at the age of 19, and remained at the school as a matron. But George died from an unknown illness two years later, and Cooper enrolled at Ohio’s Oberlin College in 1881, eventually earning two degrees. Higher education for all Black people, but especially Black women, became Cooper’s main fight while there, and remained so throughout her life. After leaving Oberlin with her master's, she became an accomplished academic and speaker. In many of those speeches, and in her essays, Cooper—whose vision for feminism included all women—was openly critical of white women suffragists for blatantly sidelining not just Black women, but all non-white women, in their fight to secure women’s right to vote. In fact, she considered it a betrayal. From her essay “Women Versus the Indian”: “Is not woman’s cause broader, and deeper, and grander, than a blue stocking debate or an aristocratic pink tea? Why should woman become plaintiff in a suit versus the Indian, or the Negro or any other race or class who have been crushed under the iron heel of Anglo-Saxon power and selfishness?”  WHILE MANY MAY HAVE FORGOTTEN THE STORY OF ANNA JULIA COOPER, PASSPORT HOLDERS CARRY HER WORDS WITH THEM. As an educator, she fought on behalf of her students, which earned her enemies. She angered the board of the school at which she became principal when she successfully advocated for many of her Black students to pursue collegiate studies rather than be pushed into vocational training. And then, at the same school, the long-widowed Cooper found herself at the center of a smear campaign when she refused to stop helping students gain admittance to and attend college. Members of the board accused her of having an affair with a young man in her professional circle, and brought the fabricated scandal to the local press. Ultimately, despite public support on her side, she was forced out of the school in 1906. Despite other stops and starts—including a period when she adopted her five nieces and nephews—she was determined to earn her PhD, which she finally completed in her sixties after transferring to the Sorbonne. And throughout her career, she managed to nurture close ties with her loved ones. “Her family called her Sis Annie, her closest friends, Cookie,” remembers Shirley Moody-Turner, associate professor of English and African American Studies at Penn State University, and editor of The Portable Anna Julia Cooper. “Her students presented her with flowers, and cards, and gifts, and candy.” In the later part of her life, Moody-Turner says, “her closest friend and fellow educator, Lula Love [Lawson], sent Cooper dresses, slippers, foot powder, and insoles to make sure that Cooper was comfortable, fashionable, and cared for.” In making sure Cooper is honored for her extraordinary contributions to the canon of Black feminism, it can be hard not to flatten her into a symbol. But let’s also remember that our heroine was just as much Sis Annie as Anna Julia Cooper, who loved flowers and candy, who stopped her world to care for her family, and stayed looking fly.
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The Great Outdoor Whitewashing
  February 26, 2026 Howdy, Meteor readers, Tonight, in the words of Cardi B: We’re going outside. Plus, Rebecca Carroll talks to Reshona Landfair about reclaiming her life after years of abuse at the hands of R. Kelly. Lots to read, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONHistory lives in the land: “We ended DEI in America,” Donald Trump bragged Tuesday night at the State of the Union, pouring salt into the wound of what has already been a particularly trying Black History Month. (And we were off to such a good start…) Since March 2025, Trump has been on a crusade to literally rewrite history. His administration has forced the removal of African American studies at universities, charged the Smithsonian with focusing too much on “how bad slavery was,” and—perhaps most offensively—stripped content that “disparages Americans past or living” from historical sites. The nonprofit Democracy Forward has confirmed that at least 27 sites across the country were asked to remove or alter signage and exhibits mentioning things like enslavement, climate change, the mistreatment of Native peoples, eugenics, and the role of women in outdoor conservation. Some of the most egregious changes have been the removal of historical works like “The Scourged Back” in Georgia’s Fort Pulaski National Park, panels depicting enslavement during the nation’s founding in Pennsylvania’s Independence National Park, and signs detailing the work of abolitionist John Brown in West Virginia’s Harpers Ferry National Park. It’s not accidental that so many of these attacks on history have focused on public outdoor spaces. They’re heavily visited: In 2024 alone, there were 331 million visits to parks, recreation areas, memorials and other lands managed by the National Park Service. To remove informational panels from sites where historical events actually took place is a particularly blatant denial of history. It’s also an insult to our intelligence to deliver such an omission when we’re standing on the blood-soaked soil where it all happened.  THE MUCH DISCUSSED PANELS AT INDEPENDENCE NATIONAL PARK, WHICH WERE REMOVED AND EVENTUALLY RESTORED BY FEDERAL COURT ORDER. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Unfortunately, we have been here before, as history professor and author of Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights Keisha N. Blain knows all too well. “Trump joins the long list of American presidents to employ these tactics,” she says. The attempts of erasure we’re now seeing are part of a “long project to return the United States to a pre-Civil Rights Movement era.” President Woodrow Wilson didn’t stop at whitewashing history; his administration also tried to prevent Black students from receiving formal education, recommending instead that they be sent to vocational training schools. This strategy was self-perpetuating, Blain says: If people were not learning about Black history, then they were not learning about resistance tactics they could apply to the present. Blain finds that the Trump administration is similarly working to “promote a single vision of the American past that elevates white identity…and suppresses critical questions as well as dissent.” Intentionally altering public lands to erase marginalized groups has been happening since the establishment of the U.S. government and was heavily normalized during Jim Crow and the dawn of the “nature gap”—a term that refers to the racial disparities in access to nature or green spaces. Communities of color represent 74 percent of nature-deprived communities, with Black communities making up more than half of that figure. This gap goes far beyond whether or not someone enjoys camping—it can dictate communities’ longterm health outcomes. Still, “for as long as white politicians have employed these kinds of tactics, Black people in the United States have vigorously resisted,” Blain says. “They recognized the challenges before them and they devised strategies—working in tandem with like-minded individuals.” The same is happening right now in the outdoor community. Black and brown creators are working to create more access and safety for those who are tired of hearing that hiking, camping, or simply existing outside belongs solely to white people. History is in the land and in community—which you can find by going outside with groups like blk.people.outside, the hood hikers, outlandish, Negus in Nature, and brownpeoplecamping. AND:
 Three Questions About...Reclaiming Your LifeReshona Landfair, who survived abuse by R. Kelly, knows it’s a long road RESHONA LANDFAIR, AUTHOR OF THE NEW MEMOIR WHO'S WATCHING SHORTY? RECLAIMING MYSELF FROM THE SHAME OF R. KELLY'S ABUSE. (COURTESY OF RESHONA LANDFAIR) Reshona Landfair was a preteen when she, like nearly every other Black girl in mid-’90s America, became enamored with the R&B mega-star R. Kelly. Landfair was growing up in Chicago, where Kelly was a hometown hero, and where her own family had strong musical ties: Her father was a studio musician, and her aunt, Sparkle, was a singer on Kelly’s label. Landfair herself was in a semi-successful rap group with her young cousins called 4 the Cause, which toured abroad regularly, and had great aspirations. In 1996, Sparkle introduced Landfair to Kelly in order to, she says, help her niece’s dreams come true. Kelly, 29 at the time, already had a then-quiet reputation for preying on girls, and began grooming and sexually abusing Landfair—at the time still a middle-schooler—a year after they met. The violence worsened, and continued for decades. Landfair was a prisoner, first emotionally trapped by Kelly’s predatory behavior and the manipulative relationship with her family that he had weaponized, and later literally held captive in guarded rooms of Kelly’s studio, or other locations of his choosing. And then came the video. When Kelly was charged with child pornography and exploitation in 2002, an explicit “sex tape” featuring a 14-year-old Landfair was shown as evidence in two of his trials. After an acquittal in 2008, he was finally convicted in 2022, due in large part to the tape and Landfair’s testimony. Now, Landfair has written a memoir of recovery. In Who’s Watching Shorty? Reclaiming Myself from the Shame of R. Kelly’s Abuse, which features a foreword by activist and former A&R executive Drew Dixon, Landfair reflects on her trauma, her voice, and forgiveness. Do you have a particular memory of when it first felt like self-reclamation and liberation were possible? The first moment that comes to mind is having to face Robert in the courtroom [in 2022]. That was the first time I was able to think freely, think for myself, and really stand up for what I personally believed in, versus what I was taught…[Then] when I turned 30 years old, I took a trip to Jamaica. I had repaired my life mentally and physically and emotionally…[and] in that moment, I was able to be independent, do something nice for myself, take myself to a place with friends, and just communicate normally and be a normal human being. I can go out for a cocktail if I want, or stay out a little later, or engage in social conversations and not have to worry about what I'm saying or who I'm saying it to. Those are the most concrete moments that I have of really feeling like, “Wow, I can do this on my own. I can think for myself.” That's when I felt like I had my own leverage. There [have also been] moments when I compartmentalized, and tucked a lot of things away to try to forget that they happened. Having to dig those things out [while writing] and remember how I felt was hard, because it would take me back to a really, really dark place. You also write about forgiveness, of yourself and of your abuser. Can you say a little bit more about that? I struggle with that, and I think a lot of people do—because why forgive? Almost every abuser has had a terrible childhood [as R. Kelly did], but that shouldn’t be on us. I struggled with that for a really long time. I blamed myself for what happened. It took a really, really long time for me to see myself as a victim, because the way I was portrayed in the media was not necessarily as such. So you ask yourself, “What could I have done differently to avoid this happening to me?” Or “Why did he choose to do this to me, but he wouldn't have chosen to do it to this person or that person?” Until I realized, those were not my sexual desires. I learned intimacy through my abuser, and so, some things that didn’t feel right, I still went along with. But once I was able to think and be mature enough for myself and look into my heart and really get to know who I was, that's when I was able to release those things and let them go, because it was not something that I requested. I do forgive him. It feels difficult, but it is very genuine. Not all things about Robert were bad. That is not the way I met him. That is not the way I was introduced to him. I do understand that he went through certain things in his childhood and I feel like he had an enabling system around him that let him get away with so much that he didn't know when to stop. There's nothing left to revisit [in terms of my relationship with him]. It's more so just me really, fully healing. I can't do that holding a grudge, or still feeling anger. So a part of my healing process was to release all of that, and I'm blessed to be able to say, I at least forgive him. A lot of people have let you down in your life. When do you feel the most lifted up in your life today? I feel the most lifted when I'm with my son. He is five, and he is a bundle of joy. I know that he will understand this story one day. But he looks at me and he admires me in ways that are very necessary, very genuine, without knowing anything about this situation. So I just get the purest form from him. We’re looking at my rap videos [from when I was young], and he's learning so many new things about me that, again, I kind of just wiped out of my brain space. He’s learning a new version of me, and he seems to be inspired and really happy. I'm blessed to be his mother. This interview has been condensed and edited.  Rebecca Carroll is a writer, cultural critic, and podcast creator/host. Her writing has been published widely, and she is the author of several books, including the memoir Surviving the White Gaze. Rebecca is Editor at Large for The Meteor.  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
Smizing? In this economy??
  February 24, 2026 Greetings Meteor readers, So. How ‘bout that snowstorm, eh? Personally, I am on the side of one random New Yorker on TikTok who said she wants to see Punxsutawney Phil “seized and seasoned” by noon-thirty tomorrow. I’m on my way to Pennsylvania. In today’s newsletter, we enjoy some really funny jokes about hockey, and stand in admiration at the Epstein survivors attending the State of the Union tonight. Plus, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd weighs in on the America’s Next Top Model documentary we can’t stop talking about. I just wanna talk Phil 🔪, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONNo laughing matter: This weekend, both the men’s and women’s USA hockey teams took home gold medals after beating Canada in overtime. (There’s a Heated Rivalry joke running through my head, but I just can’t seem to articulate it.) We should all still be riding a collective high from that moment, but sadly, we do not live in the world of Rachel Reid. In this world, Donald Trump called the men’s team in the locker room after their win to congratulate them, also extending an invite to the State of the Union and to “do the White House the next day, just have some fun.” It should have been a standard moment. But he also took the opportunity to say that he would “have to bring” the women’s team, adding that he’d be impeached if he didn’t. The men in the room laughed as if it were a joke that another gold medal-winning team would be invited to the White House. You know what is funny, though? Women were not allowed to play ice hockey at the Olympics until 1998, almost thirty years after Title IX was signed into law. They won gold that year. The men, who have been playing Olympic hockey since 1920, didn’t medal at all in ‘98. You know what else is really funny? Until this weekend, men’s hockey hadn’t seen a gold medal since 1980.  YOU WOULD THINK A MAN OBSESSED WITH GOLD WOULD BE THRILLED TO BRING AS MANY MEDAL WINNERS AS POSSIBLE INTO HIS SPACE. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) And you know what’s absolutely freaking hilarious? A Republican president and his lackeys are celebrating women winning gold medals for the U.S. while simultaneously tripping over themselves to weaken Title IX, the very thing that made it possible for women to secure 67 percent of the gold medals won by Team USA this year. Surely, though, nothing is as funny as the fact that the women’s team was eventually also invited to attend the State of the Union, but declined, mainly for travel reasons. Because while the men’s team was flying by charter back to the states, the women’s team booked commercial flights back to Atlanta and weren’t aware they had been invited until late Sunday night. It’s almost as if proving dominance over and over and over again isn’t enough to be treated equally on a team whose entire motto is literally “One For All.” But I’m sure that’s not the case, because we’re all just kidding, right? P.S. Thrilled by the hockey events this weekend and still want to support women players? You’re in luck: The PWHL season resumes this Thursday (another reason the Team USA women had to rush home) when the New York Sirens take on the Montreal Victoire. Show up and show out. AND:
 America’s Next Top Model is a cautionary tale for this dark eraBY JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD  L-R: CYCLE 2 WINNER YOANNA HOUSE, TYRA BANKS, SHANDI SULLIVAN, AND MERCEDES SCELBA-SHORTE. MANY FANS STILL REMEMBER SHANDI FROM THE INFAMOUS "CHEATING" EPISODE THAT YEAR WHICH WAS REVISITED IN REALITY CHECK. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) America’s Next Top Model died first by sinking ratings, and then by TikTok. During pandemic lockdown, a new generation of viewers revisited the reality competition show, which ran from 2003 until its cancellation in 2018, and realized what they may have thought was a fun series about fashion shoots was, in fact, kind of messed up! This epiphany led to loads of social media posts by bored Zoomers lobbing critiques of the show and its supermodel host, Tyra Banks—and eventually culminated in Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, a Netflix documentary series probing ANTM’s effect on its contestants and the culture at large. Reality Check, which hit number one on Netflix, is the latest entry in the cottage industry of Y2K nostalgia, which reevaluates the mean-girl era through fresh eyes and contemporary values. Through interviews with former contestants and cast—including runway coach Miss J, creative director Jay Manuel, photographer Nigel Barker, and Tyra herself—the series examines how ANTM started as an aspirational project to upend the fashion industry’s constrictive white norms and ended as an outrageous circus that put white women in blackface and had models pose as crime-scene victims, among many other terrible, misanthropic ideas. It is clear from Tyra’s interviews that she has seen the TikToks and was media-trained and lawyered to near-oblivion before Reality Check, her responses containing a tablespoon of accountability and a heaping cup of denial about her own role in some of the most horrific things that happened on set. The most infuriating of these dodges is in response to Shandi Sullivan, the Cycle 2 model who was filmed “cheating” on her boyfriend but who, in retrospect, was unable to consent to sex with a virtual stranger after downing two bottles of wine (and, as Shandi confirms in the doc, blacking out). She charges that she was not cared for by production, their cameras rolling through it all. “It’s a little difficult for me to talk about production because that’s not my territory,” Banks says, before executive producer Ken Mok sidesteps an apology by saying the “girls” knew they were being filmed as if in a “documentary.” “Made for good TV,” present-day Shandi tells the camera, forlorn.  BANKS WITH ORIGINAL MEMBERS OF THE ANTM JUDGES' PANEL, NIGEL BARKER, RUNWAY DIVA COACH EXTRAORDINAIRE MISS J ALEXANDER, AND JAY MANUEL. (VIA NETFLIX) Tyra gets the brunt of Reality Check’s blame—the producers who declined to intervene with Shandi are nowhere to be found in this series—but as the writer Taryn Finley points out, ANTM was a microcosm of the racist, sexist, nihilistic culture of the years in which it aired. The 2000s were particularly exploitative, and it’s easy to write off that exploitation as a product of a long-ago, less-enlightened era. But Reality Check should be a warning for this era, too: The size diversity that Tyra says mattered so much to her is disappearing in a wash of semaglutides—and with it, acceptance of bodies that aren’t super-skinny. The racial and ethnic diversity Tyra says she hoped to champion has been banned (and even criminalized) at the federal and judicial levels. The tendency towards unexamined cruelty is apparent in U.S. culture every day, and its effect on women and girls won’t be calculable for years. And still, as a longtime America’s Next Top Model viewer, I can appreciate some of the small advancements it made. In a culture where a skinny, rich, white woman like Paris Hilton was viewed as the ideal, the fact that Black women and Latinas were shown as beautiful and worthy was important—even if some of those same women of color were often portrayed as angry, argumentative, or otherwise wild, especially early on. Later contestants like Isis King, Nyle DiMarco, and Winnie Harlow shared their lives with a massive audience which wouldn’t have otherwise seen a transgender model, a deaf model, or a model with vitiligo, respectively. In that sense, Tyra accomplished at least some of her stated goals, even if she had to bully a whole lot of other models to do it. (Justice for Danielle Evans, who should have been, and still could be, a supermodel.)  MODEL ISIS KING WAS ORIGINALLY BROUGHT TO ANTM AS A BACKGROUND MODEL DURING A CYCLE 10 PHOTOSHOOT WHERE THE CONTESTANTS WERE TOLD TO PRETEND TO BE UNHOUSED. AT THE TIME, KING HERSELF WAS AN UNHOUSED PERSON. SHE WAS INVITED BACK TO THE SHOW IN CYCLES 11 AND 17 TO COMPETE. SHE HAS SINCE BECOME AN ACTRESS AND STAUNCH LGBTQ+ RIGHTS ADVOCATE. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) While I would never argue that ANTM’s achievements outweighed its mistakes, it maintains a storied place in U.S. pop culture for a reason. (For one thing, it directly influenced RuPaul, who borrowed some of its rubrics for Drag Race.) And while Reality Check cocks an eyebrow toward the series’ increasingly outrageous storylines, through a lens of camp there’s a lot to love there—the rapper The Game visibly falling for OG e-girl Allison Harvard during the infamous “Pot Ledom” episode; the jokes about the lacefront beard; “Mama Hot.” Even the season hosted by musician Rita Ora—the more celebrity-zhuzhed Cycle 23, which aired in 2017 on VH1 after Tyra got the boot from her own show by the higher-ups—was packed with memeable, memorable moments. Even so, Reality Check forces the question: Was any of this worth all that? Lisa D’Amato, winner of Cycle 17: All-Stars and star of a forthcoming competing ANTM documentary on E!, suggests it wasn’t—and as a fan of the show, I tend to agree. “Watched the Netflix docu on antm and I still think it was sugar coated,” D’Amato wrote on Instagram. “It was wayyyyyyy worse for so many of us.”  Julianne Escobedo Shepherd is a Wyoming-born Xicana journalist, editor, and co-founder of Hearing Things, living in New York. She is currently at work on a book for Penguin about her upbringing and the mythology of the American West.  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
We're Bringing Shaming Back 🎵
  February 19, 2026 Salutations, Meteor readers, Yesterday, Cardi B teased a new haircare line, and while I enjoy a tease as much as the next gal, my daughter is scheduled for a wash day this weekend, so we can’t wait for April. Give us the goods, Cardi!  In today’s newsletter, we are visited by the ghosts of misogynists past. Plus, we kick off a new series, The One Who Got the Story, with a conversation with journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro. Adding to cart, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONFear and loathing: You may have heard that blatant misogyny is making a comeback. You may, in turn, have gotten used to people with an incredible level of power and influence saying wildly sexist things without consequence. Last week was no exception: White supremacist and far-right livestreamer Nick Fuentes, who has dined with Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago, went on a tirade about women that seemed extreme even for him, calling for “all women” to be “sent to the gulags” and dubbing women America’s “number one political enemy.” Since it’s my job to trawl for news about women, I clocked these shocking comments. But did mainstream outlets? Did you? The episode, and the general shrug with which they were met, clarified something for me: The way we react (or don’t react) to public declarations of misogyny has changed. Allow me to take you back to 2012, years before the student-led campus rape movement, Trump’s election, and the seismic shift ushered in by #MeToo. The “war on women” was on the rise, yes, but so was the “fourth wave” of feminism. The missteps of prominent men were meticulously covered by a thriving feminist media ecosystem. Jezebel’s page views regularly surpassed those of its parent blog Gawker. In February of that year, rightwing talk show host Rush Limbaugh went on a screed that, compared to Fuentes’s vitriol, seems downright restrained in retrospect: After Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke testified before Congress about the onerous costs of birth control at her university, Limbaugh devoted a sizeable chunk of his talk show to calling her a “slut” and a “prostitute” who “wants to be paid to have sex.” He then advised the women at Georgetown to put aspirin between their knees. With the help of Fluke’s sharp public response, the fallout was swift and bipartisan: Limbaugh’s comments were “misogynist” and “vitriolic,” said Georgetown’s president. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tx.) called them “over the top”; Sen John McCain (R-Ariz.) said they were “totally unacceptable.” President Obama placed a supportive call to Fluke. Limbaugh’s show lost 45 sponsors, even after he posted an apology (of sorts) on his website.  FLUKE DURING HER TESTIMONY. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Later that summer, another powerful white man said another awful thing. Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.), a vehemently anti-abortion politician who had just won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate, explained on a St. Louis TV station that rape from pregnancy is rare. “If it's a legitimate rape,” he said, “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Again, there was immediate backlash from all sides. Everyone from the Washington Post editorial board to leading health experts to then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney condemned Akin’s comments and clarified that “legitimate rape” is not a thing. Mainstream media covered every move of the controversy. Despite multiple apologies, Akin ended up losing his Senate race by 16 percentage points. Can you imagine any of this happening today? These two incidents were early examples of the willingness of women to call men out during the 2010s, a process that set the stage for #MeToo in 2017. One way to interpret our current moment of male supremacy is that it’s happening despite all that valiant earlier activism. But, looked at another way, it’s also happening because of the successes of this period. Men of all stripes—not just lunatics like Nick Fuentes but more genteel types like Ross “Are Women Ruining the Workplace?” Douthat—are pissed about exactly the kind of influence feminists started to have, and now they’re on their revenge tour. That tour isn’t powered by victory; it’s powered by fear. Feminist philosopher Kate Manne, who charges Douthat with “sanewashing” these men’s anger, describes Fuentes’ rhetoric as an “openly hysterical expression of patriarchal fear”—fear that women will speak up, get ahead, and take away men’s long-afforded privileges. They reflect a desire some men feel to remain shameless and unapologetic, a feat neither Akin nor Limbaugh achieved (although the latter continued his career and was eventually awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by guess who). It’s the same fear of being humiliated many women saw when they watched Renee Good’s murder at the hands of an ICE agent: the laughter of Good’s wife to his face, the three bullet wounds in Good’s body, the “fucking bitch” out of the agent’s mouth. Men’s fear can be deadly, but it also reveals the extent of women’s power. Demanding accountability worked in 2012. It worked in 2017. It can work again. —Nona Willis Aronowitz AND:
 THE ONE BEHIND THE STORY“I wanted to make sure she knew she had autonomy.”Lulu Garcia-Navarro on interviewing Gisèle PelicotBY NONA WILLIS-ARONOWITZ  GARCIA-NAVARRO AND PELICOT AT AN APARTMENT IN PARIS. (SCREENSHOT VIA THE NEW YORK TIMES) Lulu Garcia-Navarro, co-host of the New York Times podcast “The Interview,” has covered harrowing circumstances all over the world for the Times, NPR, and the Associated Press. She’s reported on everything from the war in Iraq to the Arab Spring uprisings to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But her recent interview with Gisèle Pelicot, she told me, was one of the hardest she’s ever done. In our new series, The One Who Got the Story—where we catch up with a woman or non-binary journalist who was behind a major story of the week—we ask Garcia-Navarro how she prepared to interview a woman who endured some of the most shocking sexual abuse one can imagine. Pelicot, whose husband secretly drugged her and invited dozens of men into their home to rape her, made the extraordinary decision during the trial to waive her right to anonymity and allow media in the courtroom. And yet, she’d never truly told her story—until now. On the occasion of her new book, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, Pelicot, 72, sat down with Garcia-Navarro for her first interview with an American outlet. It’s a sensitive yet unflinching conversation about pain and renewal. Here’s how Garcia-Navarro did it. I noticed in the beginning of the interview, you asked Gisèle how she’d like you to refer to her rapist (she answered, “Monsieur Pelicot”), and that struck me as a question specifically tailored to someone who’s gone through trauma. What kind of preparation did you do before talking to her? Because she had never spoken [to the media] outside of the confines of the trial, I didn't know what I was going to get. Some victims of trauma really have trouble articulating their interior life, how they might have felt about things, their recollections of things. So we just prepared by being extremely careful. We made sure that where the interview was going to take place was going to be a very intimate environment. [The crew rented an apartment in Paris for the interview.] The majority of the crew was female. And then I wanted to make sure she knew she had autonomy and she had her voice. [Asking her what she’d like to call her abuser] was a way for me to signal that this was something she had agency over. You were extremely careful, but you also didn’t shy away from the awful details. At one point you quoted a graphic passage of the book in which Gisèle notices that a crown in her mouth was loose, which she learned later was a result of, as she wrote, “the violence of penises being repeatedly forced into [her] mouth.” Can you explain more about the reasoning to include this? I know that there's great concern about retraumatizing people and I understand that. I also do feel that sometimes, in trying to protect the victim, we do a disservice to the audience in not really showing the full scope of the horror that somebody went through. I asked for her permission [beforehand]; I said I was going to quote directly from the book, and she said that that was fine. I tried to be as sparing as I could. I just used one line, but it was a line that really haunted me. It said so much about the dynamic between her and her ex-husband, how he gaslit her, how he manipulated her...I felt it was really important for people to know. You’ve reported amid conflict zones and revolutions, but how does this interview rank in terms of difficulty? I mean, 100 out of 10. It's one of the hardest interviews that I've done because I think it's just really hard to get right. And if I did, I'm grateful for it. A consistent theme is that people said that they went in bracing for the worst and thinking this was just going to be a tour of horror. What they found instead was her beautiful ability to explain her own experience. This interview has been condensed and edited.  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
The Sinister World of Looksmaxxing
  February 17, 2026 Happy Monduesday Meteor readers, Anyone else spend all of yesterday binge-watching and then emotionally recovering from the America’s Next Top Model docuseries? I saw all three episodes, but you know what I didn’t see? Anything resembling accountability from Tyra Banks. We were all rooting for you, ma’am. In today’s newsletter, we look at a troubling Senate race in Kentucky. Plus, we ask what everyone’s been asking the last few weeks: what the hell is looksmaxxing? Writemaxxing, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONSo it can get worse: As we all know and appreciate, Senator Mitch McConnell is not running for re-election this year. When he announced his retirement last year, it filled me with peace to know that his specter will no longer haunt the halls of government. But that peace is gone after watching a campaign commercial for Andy Barr, one of the three men in Kentucky vying to be the Republican candidate for McConnell’s seat. The ad is what the young people call ragebait—intentionally designed to make people angry with statements like, “DEI stands for dumb evil indoctrination.” And at the midpoint of Barr’s commercial, he says, “It’s not a sin to be white, it’s not against the law to be male, and it shouldn’t be disqualifying to be a Christian.” Those are words with a history, journalist Judd Legum points out. “The language used by Barr is a variation of the phrase 'It’s OK to be white,’” Legum writes. The phrase, abbreviated to IOTBW, dates back to 2017 when it spread on the "notoriously racist message board" 4chan. The term went on to be adopted by neo-Nazis and other white supremacist groups, who put up flyers with the term. One would like to imagine that proudly updating a neo-Nazi slogan for a political campaign would be disqualifying. (Although, to be fair, posing in front of a Confederate flag and weakening the Voting Rights Act didn’t end McConnell’s career.) It turns out Barr is just part of a trio of horrifying candidates in a campaign that has become “a racialized cage match revolving around convincing White people which candidate hates Black people the most,” according to professor Ricky L. Jones in the Courier Journal. “It’s a disgusting spectacle to behold.” The other two Republican candidates—former Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron and businessman Nate Morris—have both played up their anti-DEI bona fides and subtly vowed to protect white Kentuckians and stay loyal to Donald Trump. Cameron, who is Black, even went so far as to claim that systemic racism is a myth, and that he was proof. (Early polling from the New York Times shows that Cameron is ahead of his colleagues and will go up against either Charles Booker, a progressive who has lost two previous primaries, or the more moderate Pamela Stevenson, who was the first Black woman to lead a legislative caucus in the Kentucky General Assembly.) So what’s the moral here? It can, in fact, get worse than Mitch McConnell. Now’s a great time to check out who’s running against guys like these in your own state’s midterms and decide how the next few years of our collective lives are going to go. AND: 
 Three Questions About...LooksmaxxingMegan Reynolds explains what the menfolk are up to now. A MAN! (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Bubbling up recently from the putrid waters of the manosphere is a thing called “looksmaxxing.” On the surface, looksmaxxing is a language dodge by men who want to achieve a perfect aesthetic without having to use feminine terms like “plastic surgery” or “nose job.” Harmless, right? Probably not if legacy media is devoting so much ink to introducing us to someone named Clavicular—a man I’d happily go my whole life knowing nothing about. To understand the latest trend clogging our FYPs, I turned to author and chronically online elder millennial Megan Reynolds, who has a talent for demystifying internet rabbit holes. What exactly is "looksmaxxing" and how did this particular corner of the internet claw its way into the light? Looksmaxxing is the act of “optimizing” your appearance towards the traditional aesthetics of masculinity, via a wide range of methods, from working out and eating well to various surgeries, steroids, hair transplants, and the like. For the men who participate in this subculture, the focus is generally on the skin, muscles, and, for some reason, the jawline. (Think Gaston from Beauty and the Beast or the phrase “a jaw that could cut glass.”) A looksmaxxer's final form is a Chad—an archetypal "hot" man, the strapping and handsome stereotype of masculinity, idolized by incels. Chads get Stacys, which, as you may have surmised, are essentially their female counterparts—attractive, sexually available blondes. Looksmaxxing has been around since the 2010s, in the more red-pill, incel-adjacent corners of the internet, where distorted and dangerous thinking flourishes. We can thank TikTok and social media in general for the fact that we’re even discussing what this is today. If we want to look for a deeper answer [of why it has become more mainstream], I think looksmaxxing is also about a sense of control, especially in a world where young men feel like they’re in a state of crisis that is seemingly unsolvable, born out of the ballyhoo around the loneliness epidemic. [Also] I would say that Scott Galloway, the NYU professor/pundit/podcast host, who recently published the book “Notes on Being a Man,” is stoking the fires here just a touch, too. In an appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s podcast in December 2025, Galloway suggests that when looking for someone to have sex with, women are looking for men who can “signal resources” (i.e. make money), and while he is careful to not say outright that women want a man who is physically attractive, that is certainly implied. “I worry we are literally evolving a new breed of asexual, asocial male,” he said in an interview with The Guardian in 2025. Galloway’s entire thing is that men are here to “protect, provide, and procreate.” To my mind, presenting this rhetoric to a group of people who are feeling a bit left out in the first place is pouring gasoline on the fire.  A MAN WHO SPENT A MONTH TRYING TO BE MORE MAN, FOLLOWING THE GUIDELINES OF LOOKSMAXXING. TO BE CLEAR, THIS PERSON IS NOT CLAVICULAR, WHO WE ARE DECLINING TO SHOW BECAUSE HE DOES NOT DESERVE THIS MUCH ATTENTION FROM WOMEN. When we think about the manosphere, we think about guys out in the wild, chopping wood, trying to assert dominance over all things through strength. But "looksmaxxing" sounds like the antithesis of that. Are the bros embracing a wider scope of masculinity, or is it really all a net negative? It’d be nice if this was a gesture towards enlightenment, but what lies at the heart of looksmaxxing is desire—specifically, the men who are trying to mold themselves into the aesthetically ideal men are doing so in order to attract women. The manosphere is powered by the fumes of men who, like many, many people on earth, have faced rejection, either romantically, professionally or otherwise. What’s sinister about this is not rejection, as that is a simple fact of life, but the entitlement that men feel when faced with rejection. And it’s what people do with that entitlement that makes this entire situation alarming, to say the least. The TikToker who is sort of resurrecting looksmaxxing is a 20-year-old named Clavicular who associates with the likes of Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate. What's the connection between a sharp jawline and the right? Ugly guys can be fascists too, no? If we must trace the connection between the far-right and a jaw that could cut glass, we have to go back to the Nazis and their demented and incorrect views on beauty and the aesthetic ideal. The ideal Aryan man is blonde, blue-eyed, and muscular, the perfect specimen of physical fitness, absent any trace of racial ambiguity. Fascism, too, is about control—and if looksmaxxing is a means of seizing control over the one thing a young man actually can control, then it makes sense that these movements are inherently connected. It’s important to note, too, that Clavicular is doing what he does for the clicks—attention, in this economy, can lead to fame, financial gain. He and his compatriots are just a flash in the pan, but the real issue here is the thinking behind it.  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
My Personal Black History
Four Black women on the moments that made them
By Rebecca Carroll
When you think about Black history, you may think of stories and lore from the long ago and far away past. But the small details of our personal experiences as Black people in America in the recent now comprise the same nuanced Black history made by our ancestors. So we asked a few Black women in The Meteor collective to share memories themselves. Black history in the making.
“In that sacred space, Black history was not abstract”
A year before my mother, Dr. Willa Alfreda Campbell Wilson, passed away, we traveled to Orangeburg, South Carolina, the town where I was born and where my parents devoted years as professors at South Carolina State University. We were there for a dear friend’s wedding, joyfully reconnecting with our community, but it was essential to my mother that we visit the memorial honoring those killed by state violence during the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre. Standing there with my father and my husband, Mom paid tribute to friends she had lost and shared what she had endured and survived during the massacre and in those years: being beaten, jailed more than a dozen times, chased by police dogs, and hosed down for demanding basic human rights. She spoke about how Black women’s bodies were deliberately targeted, how she was kicked repeatedly for sitting at a lunch counter, and how violence was used to threaten dignity and suppress the movement.
In that sacred space, Black history was not abstract. It was personal, embodied, and still reverberating through our family. That moment affirmed why I do the work I do. As a storyteller and amplifier of cyclebreakers and truthtellers' stories, I understand that documenting our narratives is an act of love, resistance and preservation. My mother taught me that silence enables erasure, and that bearing witness is both a responsibility and a form of protection for future generations. Honoring our ancestors means telling the truth about what they endured and ensuring their sacrifices are neither minimized nor forgotten.
—Jamia Wilson, Random House executive editor and author of Young, Gifted and Black and Make Good Trouble
“She was showing me that we could make our own platforms”
My mother was an artist, a teacher, and an entrepreneur. When I was a child, I used to go with her to sell t-shirts and other apparel she made through her silk-screen printing business. She’d make drawings and create designs particular to Blackness, and print them herself. [Her life] was her—a single, independent woman—her daughter, and her work. At the time, it felt ordinary, but now I see it as Black history happening in real time.
Sitting beside her at those events, watching her build something from her own creativity, taught me what Black entrepreneurship, Black womanhood, and Black artistry could look like. She was showing me that we could make our own platforms, our own economies, our own images. I ain’t really realize it until recently, but I carry that with me in my own practice now. My work feels like a continuation of that history she started.
—Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, artist and cultural worker
“I wish I’d known then what I was looking at”
My father, Rev. Ronald B. Packnett, pastored a historic Black church in my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. Among the responsibilities of the pastor’s daughter was to accompany him on his visits to those on our church’s “Sick & Shut-in” list every week, after school and during the summer break. And at 6 or 7, it wasn’t always the most welcome experience.
One day we stopped by a nondescript house on St. Louis’ North side—the forgotten side of the city—where storied brick houses that have been in Black families for generations stand buttressed against the white flight, urban blight, and systemic neglect of a city determine to choke off the very people who made it great. An old man opened the door of the house; he wore a white t-shirt and suspenders, slippers and a slight smile on his face. He was glad to see us darken his door, and was kind to me. I was polite, because I had home training, but I knew what was coming: boredom.
Sure enough, I sat. I waited. I waited more. I wandered. While my father and the old man in the white t-shirt talked, I happened upon some photographs. I wish I’d known then what I was looking at, and would have then known what to ask the man who owned them. I would have asked how it felt to watch the great Jackie Robinson break the color line. I’d ask him if it was true that Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson were even better than Jackie, and if the Negro Leagues would have beat up on the MLB as badly as we all think they would have. I would have asked him what he thought of Ozzie Smith, our backflipping hometown hero, who was as successful as he was popular with the Black folk and white folk in our still segregated city. I would have asked him if, given the chance he should have gotten, he thinks he would have beaten the greats, been a Hall of Famer, and retired wealthy in Ladue, instead of his well-kempt home full of love and care on the forgotten side of St. Louis.
That day, I was in the home of the legendary James ‘Cool Papa’ Bell, who played for some of the greatest baseball teams in Negro League history. And before I left, he gave me some caramel candy and a kiss. Because that’s how we do. Our heroes strive because they love us. And we owe them our love in return. May the makers of Black history be elders who live bountiful lives of dignity. And like Cool Papa and my daddy, they become our ancestors to remind us to be free.
—Brittany Packnett Cunningham, podcast host and interdisciplinary strategist
“An emotional blueprint”
As a Black woman who grew up without Black family, it has been imperative for me to create my own Black history, every day throughout my life. And as a mother, that has meant hanging Black art on the walls of our home, stacking our shelves with an abundance of Black books, listening to Black music on our Bose speakers, and cultivating community and traditions with our chosen Black family. Perhaps as meaningful, if not more so, it has meant pouring my love of Black culture, and my dedication to honoring its representation and impact, into my son, openly and often, providing him with an emotional blueprint that will help to shape the future of his own Black history.
—Rebecca Carroll, writer and cultural critic, editor-at-large for The Meteor
Worker’s Rights, But Make it Fashion
  February 12, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, Love is Blind is back, and frankly, I could stay in the pods forever with this batch of weirdos. But duty calls! In today’s newsletter, we tell you what’s extra-special about this year’s New York Fashion Week with a little help from former model and activist Sara Ziff. Plus, a quick check-in on the Olympics. Chilling in Ohio, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONWalk the walk: There’s something different about the fall/winter New York Fashion Week this year, which officially kicked off yesterday in Tribeca. Its models will be protected by a new labor law called the Fashion Workers Act. The law guarantees protections so basic that they wouldn’t be notable in many other industries: access to their own contracts and agreements, overtime pay, meal breaks, limits on fees and expenses charged by their agencies, and recourse around late payments, harassment, and retaliation. These bedrock rights have been denied to models (who are often minors) for decades. The law is the result of years of tireless work from advocates, including Sara Ziff, the founder and executive director of the workers’ rights nonprofit Model Alliance. Ziff started modeling her freshman year of high school, landing jobs in places like Seventeen magazine and the Delia’s catalogue, both basically bibles for girls (okay, me) in the late nineties and early aughts. As her career and education progressed in tandem, she became aware not only of the well-publicized problems with the industry—like its obsession with extreme youth, thinness, and whiteness—but the conditions that scandals like the Epstein files have made clear: It’s also a hotbed for widespread financial and sexual exploitation.  SARA ZIFF AT WORK IN 2005 (VIA GETTY IMAGES) “People often see models as being privileged and don't picture bad working conditions,” Ziff tells The Meteor. Most people don’t know, for example, that it’s commonplace for modeling agencies to hold power of attorney over their talent (even those over 18), which keeps models in the dark about their pay and scope of work. Models often end up in debt to their agencies; Ziff recalled to The New York Times how agencies would front wages that were late, then charge her 5 percent interest for the delay. And until the passage of the FWA, models had few legal avenues to fight back. Not that models haven’t tried. For decades, the fashion industry has fiercely pushed back on calls to improve labor conditions. Attempts to unionize have fizzled, a Diane Sawyer exposé failed to inspire concrete changes, and Ziff herself has been fighting for these protections since she founded Model Alliance in 2012. She chalks the resistance up to sexism, and an undervaluing of women’s work. “If you had middle-aged white men complaining about not being paid their earnings or being sent to castings and told to take off all their clothes,” Ziff says, “I don't think anyone would stand for that.” So can we feel better watching NYFW’s runway shows knowing the models are protected? Well, it depends on how much they know. Ziff says the success of this law depends on spreading the word. “There are multiple layers of enforcement built into this law,” she says, like the ability for models to sue their agencies, a safe way to file complaints with the labor commissioner, and penalties for violations. But that enforcement “requires the models themselves to understand their rights and take action if they feel their rights have been violated.” Those rights go beyond compensation. Ziff has long understood that being young and financially vulnerable leaves women and girls in the fashion industry exposed to sexual abuse, too. “In light of the MeToo movement and ongoing news about Epstein,” she says, “people are starting to connect the dots that this almost entirely unregulated industry has been a breeding ground for abuse.”  That abuse has propelled Ziff’s advocacy years before the Fashion Workers Act became law. The Model Alliance was also instrumental in passing 2022’s Adult Survivors Act, which gave sexual assault survivors a one-year window to sue their assailants regardless of preexisting statutes of limitations. The law is responsible for high-profile cases like E. Jean Carroll’s claim against Donald Trump and Cassie’s lawsuit against Diddy, and has helped kickstart a MeToo 2.0 of sorts. Ziff filed her own claim in 2023, accusing Fabrizio Lombardo, a former Miramax executive and a close associate of Harvey Weinstein, of rape. (The case has since been resolved.) Ziff sees the Fashion Workers Act and the Adult Survivor’s Act as important first steps, but she’s not declaring victory anytime soon. “Patriarchy is alive and well,” she says. “We're finally developing the language and the consciousness to try to dismantle it. But sadly, this is a life's work and it's probably going to take many lifetimes before we level the playing field.” —Nona Willis Aronowitz AND:
 PROTESTORS OUTSIDE OF STONEWALL IN MANHATTAN SHORTLY AFTER THE ANNOUNCEMENT THAT THE FLAG WOULD BE REMOVED. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 WEEKEND READING 📚On the grass people: Meet the woman behind this year’s Super Bowl halftime show. (Paper) On mother knows best: New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani wouldn’t be anywhere without the brilliant Mira Nair. (Vulture) On frenemies: Women on the right have a new name for women on the left that they hate: AWFULs (affluent white female urban liberal). Talk about white-on-white crime, damn. (Vox)  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
The Scary Bill That Will Not Die
  February 10, 2026 Salutations, Meteor readers, Good evening to this woman and this woman only. Everyone else, you’re just going to have to settle for an average evening. In today’s newsletter, we try to understand the GOP’s obsession with long-shot voter fraud legislation. Plus, a quick way to check if your state has a law that could criminalize your miscarriage. Bye Mia, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONBack from the dead: The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE) has been reintroduced for a third time, with the House scheduled to vote on it this week. If you’ve forgotten, the SAVE Act would require proof of U.S. citizenship to become a registered voter, including a birth certificate with a name that matches your photo ID. It would also require mail-in voters to prove their citizenship in person before casting a vote. It’s estimated that these requirements could disenfranchise as many as 21 million Americans—a Florida-sized chunk of voters!—including millions of married women who have taken their husbands’ names. It’s all in service of what Republicans claim is an effort to prevent voter fraud. “It’s a solution looking for a problem,” explains Julie Womack, the head of national programs for the political organizing group Red Wine and Blue. “We know that there is really no problem with voter fraud in this country.” (In an analysis of six swing states’ results in the 2020 election, for example, the Associated Press found just 475 potentially fraudulent ballots—less than .002% of the more than 25 million cast.) The GOP trying to solve a problem they invented out of thin air? Doesn’t sound like them. Democrats and voting rights groups have raised alarms over SAVE’s ID requirements, which would require people to provide birth certificates or naturalization papers and a form of government-issued photo ID to register to vote. Anyone who has ever been to a DMV knows that this is the start of a long day, particularly for married or transitioned people who have changed their names.  For all those reasons, the first two times SAVE was introduced in 2024 and 2025, it didn’t go further than the House. And there’s evidence that the onerous requirements would actually affect more Republican voters than Democrats. All of which begs the question: Why do Republicans continue to trot out this losing horse? Because the SAVE Act may very well hurt the GOP’s own voters, but there’s one guy it would impress: Donald Trump. His administration has endorsed the SAVE Act repeatedly; just last week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described it as “common-sense.” And the timing of this latest attempt does not surprise Womack. “There's so much going on in the news…it’s a time when a lot of people are distracted. I think [the GOP is] going to try more tactics like this, like doing it really quickly under the radar.” Womack says that the ultimate goal is to suppress votes in any way that works. “They can definitely do a watered-down version where it's just a voter ID law at the polls, or they could maybe put a restriction on voting hours or early voting or how many drop boxes,” she says. And part of the long game may be to inspire copycat laws: As with state-by-state abortion restrictions, “a lot of the states are taking these [causes] up now too. I live in Ohio. There's a [statewide] version of the SAVE Act in the Ohio legislature.” The best way to push back on all these measures, Womack says, is to call your representatives and get involved with voting rights organizations, like the Brennan Center for Justice or Fair Fight. In the meantime, let’s hope that the Republicans heading into the office to vote this bill forward can’t find their birth certificates that morning. AND: 
  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
"This Changes Everything"
  February 6, 2026 Happy Saturday, Meteor readers, We’re coming to you with a special treat from the archives today, in honor of the 100th celebration of Black History Month this February. Four years ago, our colleague Rebecca Carroll sat down with author and historian Imani Perry to discuss the surprising origins of Black History Month and its current role in the American story. When we first published this piece, we noted that legislators were trying to strip Black history lessons from school. Some of those efforts are now law, but advocates, educators, and avid readers remain undeterred. And I suppose that’s the history lesson in and of itself—the harder you try to erase it, the stronger it becomes. Love and power, Shannon Melero  “This Changes Everything”What Imani Perry taught me about Black History MonthBY REBECCA CARROLL  THE INCREDIBLE IMANI PERRY WAS HONORED AT THE 2025 WOMEN'S MEDIA CENTER FOR HER BODY OF WORK (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Years ago, when I was working at a mainstream media corporation, I was called into a marketing meeting for my ideas on how to best package Black History Month in ways that would boost ad sales and sponsorship on the site. I suggested, in all seriousness, because I genuinely believed what I was saying: "What if we didn’t package Black History Month at all? What if we took a break from selling this idea that Black History is something we should only think about for a month every February?" I was promptly dismissed from the meeting. The thing is, I was coming from a place of profound (and uneducated) cynicism, based on the belief that Black History Month was created by white folks. And I know I’m not alone in thinking this. Thank heavens for historian and author Imani Perry, whose book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, covers this terrain, and who went ahead and set the record straight for me—because honestly, I simply did not know. Rebecca Carroll: Given that I was adopted into a white family, raised in a white town, and then went on to spend the bulk of my career in white media spaces, Black History Month has always seemed exploitative and commercialized to me—but I was so curious to learn from you that Black History Month actually has its origins in Black culture. Can you explain? Imani Perry: Black History Month was an outgrowth of Negro History Week. In the early 20th century, Black history programs and curricula were organized in segregated Southern Schools. They happened in February because that was the month of Abraham Lincoln's birth and Frederick Douglass's chosen birthday (he didn’t know his exact birthdate, having been born in slavery). In 1926, historian and organizer Carter G. Woodson formalized these practices and established Negro History Week [in February].  A COLORIZED PORTRAIT OF CARTER G. WOODSON, THE FATHER OF BLACK HISTORY MONTH (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Negro History Week was an extension of a very deliberate effort that began immediately post-emancipation to document Black history…and resist the false claim that people of African descent had contributed nothing meaningful to human history or civilization. Negro History Week, which became Black History Month in the early 1970s, was focused on young people…and became a robust tradition. There were Negro History Week curricula—books on Black U.S., Caribbean, and African histories and historic figures; essays, documents, plays, pageants, and academic exercises along with the ritual singing of "Lift Every Voice and Sing." Often, these school-based programs invited the entire community to participate, and so these were collective celebrations, as well as opportunities for people to learn. It wasn’t really until the late 1970s that white Americans even began to have any significant awareness of Black History Month, and much of that came through consumer culture. So, [as with] Kwanzaa, a ritual that was developed primarily within Black communities made its way to the larger public through advertising strategies intended to compel Black buyers rather than [achieve] substantive political transformation. So we get fast food companies celebrating Black History Month in ways that mean close to nothing or, at times, are even offensive. But despite that, there continue to be institutions in which Black History Month is rooted in a tradition of Black people writing themselves into history in ways that reject the logic of white supremacy and give a more expansive reach to the story of Black life both in this country and globally. And so what does Black History Month mean to you, both personally and professionally? Personally, Black History Month is one of those traditions, like Emancipation Day or Juneteenth or Watch Night, that I cherish because it anchors me in tradition and ritual. Professionally…because I’m very invested in ensuring that my students know the history of Black institutional life, I teach the ritual as an outgrowth of one of the most important periods of intellectual development in African American history. Traditionally, historians describe the Jim Crow era as the "nadir" of American race relations, the phrase used by historian Rayford Logan. And by that, he meant the lowest point, that horrifying period when the promises of Reconstruction had been completely denied. What is remarkable about that time is that Black people got to work despite the devastation. There was exceptional growth in African American civic life in this period. People were building organizations and networks, writing books and developing social theory, building schools, and churches at every turn. And so, even when society shut the door to opportunity and treated Black people with horrible brutality, they kept dreaming, doing, and creating. For me, that is not just a key point for understanding African American history, but it is an incredible daily inspiration for my own work. Do you think it's ever more necessary in this current cultural climate to uphold BHM, and if so, to what end? I don’t think of Black History Month as more or less important based on the political moment. I guess I would say it will be important indefinitely because we live in a white supremacist country and world, and counter-narratives that value freedom and dignity and resilience will always be necessary as long as stratifying people on the basis of identity is the norm. Surely you’ve had experiences where (almost always white) people will say something that is just all kinds of wrong regarding BHM—I’m sorry to say I have had several—or there is this unspoken sense of "We’re giving you this whole month, can you just be grateful?" Can you recall such an experience, and how you responded/flipped the script for your own sense of sanity? Thank goodness I've never had a white person say to me that they’ve given Black people Black History Month. It would frankly be something that I'd laugh at for a long time. Nothing could be further from the truth. Black people created it for Black people, and particularly for Black young people, and have been gracious enough to invite others to participate. They should feel fortunate.  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. |
