Dear Meteor readers,

“Our bodies are not designed to absorb and process this much violence, loss, and grief,” Min Jin Lee tweeted on Wednesday after this week’s massacre in Uvalde, Texas.

I have not been able to get these words out of my head as I’ve tried to move on this week—as I’m sure you have, too—heartbroken, haunted by the beautiful children’s faces, sitting with their parent’s grief, and unable to shake the horrid details that continue to emerge, and enraged that on the heels of the tragedy, the NRA went ahead with its convention (despite some Republicans and several country musicians pulling out).

The mourning, grief, and anger cycle is on repeat. If you missed it, do check out our list of ways to break the pattern of inaction.

Meanwhile, the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp defamation trial, which has been simmering in the background for the last two weeks, is entering its final days as the jury is now deliberating. Avoiding this event has been damn near impossible—prior to this week, the trial had been the most talked-about story this spring across social platforms: more than abortion, Ukraine, and even COVID.

While I’ve watched the bafflingly un-nuanced reaction unfold, there’s one person I’ve really been wanting to hear from—my friend Jaclyn Friedman. Jaclyn is a writer, activist, and sex educator who has been working on survivor justice for a long time. She is the co-editor of two important anthologies about rape culture, including Yes Means Yes: Visions of Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, and wrote two books on consent, power, and sex. TL;DR—she knows her shit!

Jaclyn says she knows exactly why we mistrust Amber Heard, and she’s written a searing essay about that and what it costs victims of intimate partner violence.

But first, the news.

Holding a fire extinguisher,

Samhita Mukhopadhyay

WHAT'S GOING ON

90 minutes: In many communities there is a saying: order a pizza and call the cops, see who comes first—the unspoken wisdom being that the police force in some neighborhoods (predominantly those of color) are in no rush to protect and serve. As more details about the police response to the Uvalde shooting emerge, it is shocking to learn the timeline laid out by Texas safety officials. What is most unsettling is that first responders didn't immediately breach the school,  after the shooter had gone inside. In fact, it would be another hour before a tactical team got close to the classroom where he had barricaded himself along with his victims. During that time—while parents were begging for help, for anyone, to save their children—officers “took cover” outside and waited for more backup so as not to risk being gunned down by a semi-automatic weapon. So answer me this: If even the “good guys with guns” are ineffective against an AR-15, how have we not banned the legal sale of that weapon? *Stares at every member of Congress*

The heat is on: Our leaders have been rightfully and urgently called to the mat for inaction on gun control. (Reportedly, a small group of Senators is trying to find common ground on gun legislation, including red-flag laws or expanding background checks) You know what’s making me skeptical? That Democratic leadership backed a pro-gun, anti-choice Democrat (Rep. Henry Cuellar) over a pro-choice young woman of color ready to back sensible gun legislation (Jessica Cisneros) in the District 28 race in Texas. The runoff was held the same day as the massacre in Uvalde, and as of Friday Cisneros was trailing by only 177 votes. As Rebecca Traister pointed out, this might be why we need new leadership.

Getting away with it: The FBI agents who fumbled the Larry Nassar investigations will not be facing criminal charges from the Department of Justice. Now mind you, in July of last year, the DOJ found “gross failures” on the part of the FBI agents who first received complaints from gymnasts in 2015. The two agents responsible for this absolute clown show, Michael Langeman and W. Jay Abbott, have been met with little more than a slap on the wrist: Langeman was fired from his position after the DOJ released its findings and Abbott retired. Must be real fuckin’ nice to retire in peace while more than 200 women deal with the trauma of being abused by Larry Nassar.

Come on Barbie, let’s go party: Serious Feminists™ have made much ado about Barbie dolls and their representation of regressive feminity. But for this brief moment in time, the doll is doing some good. On Friday, toy company Mattel released a new Collector’s Edition Barbie created in the likeness of Laverne Cox. While the doll is not an exact replica of the iconic Cox, this is the first ever Barbie modeled after a transgender person and its release is a big fabulous middle finger to the more than 200 anti-trans state bills filed this year. *Adds to cart*

AND:

• Actor Kevin Spacey has been charged with four counts of sexual assault in the U.K.

• The most accurate statement of the week is brought to you by writer Damon Young: “cowardice is the point of white supremacy, too.”

• There are no improvements in sight for the baby formula shortage. But you can still help by donating unused formula if you are lucky enough to have some.

INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE 

Why Everyone Online is Having Such a Ball Trashing Amber Heard

It's not a mystery—but it has real consequences, for survivors and all of us

BY JACLYN FRIEDMAN

AMBER HEARD LEAVING THE COURTHOUSE, WHERE HER TESTIMONY WOULD SOON BE DUETED BY A BUNCH OF TIKTOKERS. (PHOTO BY CLIFF OWEN VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

If you’ve been off-planet for the last month, lucky you! You may have missed the fact that Johnny Depp is currently suing his ex-wife, Amber Heard, for defamation, based on a 2018 op-ed she wrote in which she identified herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse,” but did not mention him by name. Heard is countersuing. The trial has made constant international headlines for the bizarre and shocking things that have been testified to under oath about both Depp and Heard. And it has unleashed a truly unprecedented torrent of pro-Depp shrieking in nearly every corner of Al Gore’s internet.

Some of it has not been exactly organic. Last Thursday, Vice broke the news that the Daily Wire (Ben Shapiro’s personal megaphone and the most likely publisher of whatever your racist aunt shared on Facebook today) has reportedly spent tens of thousands of dollars promoting biased and misleading pro-Johnny Depp content on social media. I wish I could say I was surprised, but honestly, the bear hug that “Hollywood elite” Johnny Depp is getting from “men’s rights activists” and white supremacists is the least shocking development since the hilarious failure of Truth Social.

Of course, they love him: he validates their entire worldview, which is that they are the real victims of feminism run amok and that saying otherwise is not just misguided but abusive. Of course, the right is invested in trivializing assault; there are enough 2022 GOP candidates facing allegations of sexual assault and/or domestic violence to warrant a New York Times trend piece. So of course conservatives are forking over loads of cash to flood the zone with pro-Depp propaganda.

But what feels genuinely shocking to me this time around is how many folks who should really know better are falling hard for it.

Yes, yes, Johnny Depp used to be dreamy. Trust me, I know. I was 15 when he broke through (my loins) as a face-meltingly hot damaged bad-boy cop on “21 Jump Street,” and 19 when “Edward Scissorhands” branded me with false (sexy) impressions about weirdo emo outsider men that I still haven’t been able to shake. Don’t bother me about Captain Jack Sparrow, that shit is like stevia compared to the pure cane sugar of early Johnny Depp hotness.

THERE'S NO WAY THIS BABY HAS SEEN A JOHNNY DEPP FILM AND CONSENTED TO JOIN HIS "TEAM." (PHOTO BY SARAH SILBIGER VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

But this jubilant defense of Depp goes beyond the derangement of parasocial adoration.  And while I’ve seen some thoughtful stories about Heard as an “imperfect victim,” I don’t think the reaction is just about the “complicated” details of the case, either. If the common wisdom—that Depp was a victim of Heard’s alleged abuses too—was sincere, the cultural conversation would be solemn. Instead, the reaction has been ecstatic and deranged—we are getting cat memes and Lance Bass on TikTok. Even Kate McKinnon gleefully treated the trial like a joke.

Now, remember: Amber Heard has testified that Johnny Depp hit her so hard that blood from her lip ended up on the wall, pulled her hair out of her scalp in chunks, and made her fear for her life on more than one occasion, among many other allegations found credible by a British judge in a separate case (where it is harder to prove such things than even in the U.S.). Depp testified that Heard struck him, threw things at him, and mocked him for objecting. So why is everyone having such a good time joking about domestic violence?

The reason is simple but awful: we, as a culture, hate believing women. I don’t just mean we find it hard to believe women. I mean we hate it. Studies have shown that we like women less when we actually have to listen to them. It is psychologically painful for most of us to believe women, even when we are women. So after years of at least sort of holding the line on #metoo, what a giddy relief so many seem to be feeling to not have to right now.

OKAY, BUT WHY? (PHOTO BY SARAH SILBIGER VIA GETTY IMAGES)

The facts of this case are just easy enough to manipulate to give anyone who wants it permission to stop doing the painful work of treating women as credible witnesses to their own abuse—work that anti-violence advocates have, in recent years, succeeded in convincing more people to undertake. Evidently, putting that burden down feels, to far too many of those people, like taking off an ill-fitting bra at the end of a long day.

Let me be clear: People of all genders can be abused, and people of all genders can be abusers. And most cases of intimate partner violence are hard to parse from the outside because it’s very common for victims to act in all kinds of ways that don’t seem like how we think victims “should” act. Abusers exploit this very fact in courts every single day. We just don’t usually get to watch it on live television. (If you’re having trouble sorting through what you’ve heard about this case, here are a few pieces I highly recommend.)

But whatever you personally believe, the way so many people have turned blaming Amber Heard into a bloodsport is already taking an awful toll on nearly every survivor I know—including myself. It’s hard to explain the hollow, falling feeling I get in the pit of my stomach each time I see someone I thought I could trust join in on the “fun,” somehow not considering (or caring?) that they might as well be laughing at one of the worst things anyone has ever done to me.

And the impacts on survivors only get worse from here. If Depp wins the suit against Heard for saying she was abused—again, without even naming him!—it is going to get a lot easier for abusers everywhere to use the courts to silence the exes they abused, too.  Whatever the jury decides, the euphorically vicious discourse has already sent a message to abuse survivors everywhere: if you dare speak up, you will be mocked and attacked from all sides. It’s no wonder that survivors are already considering backing away from their own cases, or that Depp fans are now turning on other survivors, as well as on Depp’s own daughter for not supporting him more publicly.

The impact of this misogynist Rumspringa will be felt by victims for a long time to come.

When I was in my 20s, my girlfriend Leslie had a therapist who explained the four steps of consciousness in the process of changing our behaviors and beliefs. You start out in unconscious incompetence, unaware of the things you’re doing or thinking that are harmful to you or others. Then, if you try, you move into conscious incompetence. This is the worst of all the phases: you’re aware of how you’re messing up, but you still somehow can’t stop doing it. If you keep at it from there, you can intermittently achieve conscious competence, where if you focus really hard, you can do something different and better. And if you keep at it long enough, you can sometimes get all the way to the ultimate goal: unconscious competence.

500 MILES? HAVE YOU SEEN THE PRICE OF GAS? THIS IS FISCALLY IRRESPONSIBLE! (PHOTO BY RON SACHS VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

The reason it’s so hard for humans to change, even when we know we should, is because those two middle phases—conscious incompetence and conscious competence—take so bloody long, require so much work, and are painfully uncomfortable. Trying to change is the worst. That’s why we tend to hate women who force us to make the attempt.

I believe Amber Heard. I can’t make you believe her if you don’t. But for fuck’s sake, this case isn’t some metaphorical trip to Vegas where everything you do and say about this trial will stay there. It has already made the world a much scarier place for people who’ve been targeted by abusers, and a much friendlier place for abusive assholes who are right now selecting their next victims. Survivors don’t ever get a vacation from our trauma. So you don’t get a vacation from trying to teach yourself to care.

WE ASKED YOU ANSWERED 

Last Saturday, Megan Reynolds wrote about the importance of unplugging—and we asked how you get that impossible task done. Thanks to readers Elaine, Cynthia, Katherine, Lauren, and Ruben for sharing their thoughts, and a special shout-out to Anna C. (who’s been at a breaking point since 2020; same) for her unplugging tactic: “focus on what’s in my control.” I’m starting by focusing on how I can work to eliminate gun violence in my own state.

Thanks for the tips, y’all,

Shannon

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Dear Meteor readers,

On Tuesday morning, 19 elementary school students in Uvalde, Texas, got ready for school. They threw their homework into their backpacks, finished their breakfast, tied their shoes, and ran out the door. Those nineteen children with entire lives ahead of them—two days before the end of the school year and the joy of summer break—never returned home. They, along with two of their teachers, were gunned down by weapons so powerful that the bodies of the victims were unrecognizable. They were targeted, hunted, and brutally killed by an 18-year-old who had legally purchased two assault rifles on his birthday.

The tragedy is unspeakable—but it is no longer unimaginable. It is now a well-worn, inevitable cycle—a mass shooting, lives shattered, outcry, grief, and…no substantial change. The headlines end up on the lower half of the paper; the questions to politicians stop, and the trauma gets ingrained. As a father of a Parkland victim told Anderson Cooper on CNN Tuesday night, “it’s what I call a ‘new normal’.”

The idea of a father who has lost a child to gun violence having to acknowledge that this horror now seems “normal” made us sick to our stomachs. But he is, after all, right: This is not the first time we’ve been here, nor will it be the last. This is the third mass shooting in a week; there have been 212 in the United States alone this year and 27 of them have been in schools. Every shooting, we are told, is the “tipping point” that will change the will of politicians on guns. But Congress has yet to pass any meaningful gun control legislation for 28 years, since the assault-weapons ban of 1994. After Sandy Hook, another supposed tipping point, the Republican-controlled Senate thwarted every effort to pass a sensible gun law—including enhanced background checks, something 90% of Americans support. We’ve been worn down by years of inaction. It makes sense to feel hopeless.

MASS SHOOTINGS HAVE HAPPENED IN NEARLY EVERY STATE IN THE U.S. AND POLITICIANS ARE STILL DRAGGING THEIR FEET OVER REFORM. (IMAGE VIA EVERYTOWN FOR GUN SAFETY) 

But it’s also exactly what opponents of gun reform want us to feel. As Molly Jong-Fast put it on Twitter, we need to take bold action now; if we do not, the Republicans will do what they always do–“memory-hole” this tragedy and use talking points and legal grandstanding to erase the fact that what we’re talking about is the bloody massacre of innocent children.

But if you are looking for immediate and decisive action—you’d be hard-pressed to find it from Democrats right now, either. “When in God’s name will we stand up to the gun lobby?” Biden asked in his address to the nation. “What are we doing?” cried Senator Chris Murphy on the Senate floor (great speech...but who is we). “Americans can cast their vote in November,” Senator Chuck Schumer said when asked if Tuesday’s tragedy would precipitate an immediate gun bill that could save lives.

Should they not have the answers? Isn’t that the reason we all got out the vote in the last umpteen elections? Should they not have the plan? And why did Democratic party leadership endorse incumbent anti-abortion Rep. Henry Cuellar (who has an A rating from the NRA) over pro-gun control and pro-choice candidate Jessica Cisneros in none other than Texas? Make it make sense.

WE KNOW YOU'RE SICK OF HEARING IT BUT ELECTIONS ARE CRITICAL!! (IMAGE VIA VOTO LATINO)

The bottom line is this: We could dramatically reduce gun violence now, and not doing so is a deliberate choice. As Chris Hayes pointed out: Many of the issues that plague the United States are complicated—they are rooted in histories of oppression, of colonization. But not guns. Gun violence, at the rate that it occurs in the United States, is uniquely American and is directly connected to how many guns civilians can and already have access to. If you make guns less accessible, gun violence drops. No other country's leadership sits by idly while their children are slaughtered at school.

But we can do something—donate, call your legislator, share resources, march. We’ve put together a list below of actions you can take today.

It won’t bring those children back. Won’t help the parents who waited last night at the Uvalde civic center to confirm if their child was dead or alive.

But it’s our only option. As our colleague Brittany Packnett Cunningham says on today's UNDISTRACTED, “I  don't know what it's going to take. But I can't live like this. My son can't live like this. None of us should have to live like this.”

Y por nuestros gentes Latines, estamos unidos en nuestro dolor. No se importa si somos Mexicanos, Borinquen, Dominicanos, Sudamericanos—en este momento somos una sola comunidad fuertisomo. Sobreviviremos. Pa’lante. Siempre, pa’lante.

In love and solidarity,

Samhita and Shannon

WHAT YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW

If you’re someone who believes in thoughts, prayers, full moon rituals, or faith in a higher power, please do all of those things and call on all the gods and ancestors. But as many prophets have taught, faith without works is dead. Here are some small works that can make a difference:

TO HELP THE FAMILIES IN UVALDE

• Donate to the Texas Elementary School Shooting Relief Hub or to the League of United Latin American Citizens, a grassroots civil rights organization working to help victims on the ground.

• If you’re in the South Texas area, there are two blood drives underway at local hospitals where some children who remain in critical condition are being treated.

TO HELP KIDS ACROSS THE U.S. COPE WITH THIS AND FUTURE DISASTERS 

• Support March for Our Lives’ goal to fund more social workers and mental health specialists and less police presence in schools.

TO HELP END GUN VIOLENCE 

• Make a call to get the NRA convention, scheduled to begin Friday at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas, canceled. They don’t get to brainstorm lobbying tactics while the rest of the country mourns.

• Even if you can’t stand your elected representative, send a letter pleading with them to end the filibuster—a tool used time and time again to prevent the passage of common sense gun reform.

•  Once you’re tired of yelling at your local officials, give Senator Mitch McConnell a call. As Sherilynn Ifill reminds us, he vowed to block gun reform after Sandy Hook and hasn’t stopped.

• Join a local or national gun reform organization like CeaseFirePA, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, Newtown Action Alliance–or even start a group in your neighborhood.

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Dear Meteor readers,

I hope you are enjoying your weekend. I’m currently on my way to upstate New York: and my sunscreen is on but my phone is, shockingly, off. I like to unplug on the weekends—stay off social media, disable my alerts, and do something with my hands. (Have you even lived if you haven’t taken a Saturday afternoon nap atop unwanted tote bags you found while organizing a closet?)

Why am I sharing so much? Because news fatigue is real—and it took me years to figure that out. It’s been a tough week news-wise—we know that—and so for today writer Megan Reynolds gives us some reflections on what it looks like to disengage from the news cycle even when the world is on fire.

We’re curious to know how you unplug—and whether you do. So before you stash your phone, answer our reader survey on the subject.

But first, a little bit of news—to read at your convenience, and only when you’re ready.

From the woods,

Samhita Mukhopadhyay

WHAT'S GOING ON

It’s not okay in OK: Legislators in Oklahoma have passed *the* strictest anti-abortion bill in the country—banning abortion at “fertilization.” The bill also would allow citizens to sue abortion providers and anyone else they suspect has knowingly “aided or abetted” in abortion care. Gov. Kevin Stitt—who literally vowed to make Oklahoma the most anti-abortion state in the country—will likely sign this bill, meaning it will go into effect ASAP. Retire, bitch. The rest of us can donate to the Oklahoma Roe Fund here.

Feeding babies is apparently controversial: The House passed two bills earlier this week to help support families during the terrifying shortage of baby formula across the United States. One of the bills allows families to use money from a federal program to purchase formula. The other, apparently more controversial, bill would give 28 million dollars to the FDA to prevent this clusterfuck from happening again. Sounds great, right? Too bad 192 Republicans voted against it! I can’t think of a less controversial issue than babies need food and we should feed them, but ok. Here are some resources if you are trying to find formula or support a family that is.

AND:

• Jill Filipovic says we are on the precipice of an anti-feminist backlash. She's right and you should read this prescient piece. But is it a backlash or is it just misogynist business as usual? Discuss.

• Congratulations to Rihanna on the birth of her baby!! Fenty for infants when?

• Anna Delvey is starting a law firm. That’s not the punchline to a joke; that is an actual thing.

• Don’t miss this searing, personal essay from Irin Carmon over at New York Magazine about what happens to the body during pregnancy and childbirth, and why those realities are absent from public discourse on motherhood and choice.

• If you’ve been seeing a lot of strange videos in your FYP or explore page regarding Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, there’s a (very creepy) reason for that!

PERMISSION TO UNPLUG

There's a Better Way to Manage the Unrelenting News Cycle

Maybe you feel guilty tuning out, but a little breather could make all the difference. 

BY MEGAN REYNOLDS

ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATION BY UZO NGWU

Every morning for the past four and a half years, I would wake up, make coffee, and settle in for a day of imbibing the trials and tribulations of the world at large, via Twitter, an overflowing RSS reader, and the Slack channel of the feminist website where I worked. The purview of the website was large—covering everything from the Republican war on abortion to Bennifer 2.0—which meant that the possibilities for content were endless. I was dialed in and it was impossible to separate my leisure time from my work time. (RIP to the late-night Slack messages I sent to myself full of stray links, TikToks, tweets, and other digital ephemera, accompanied by hastily-written notes that, when viewed in the light of day, made little to no sense.)

I was living the dream, especially for a writer–I could cover whatever I wanted, as long as it was in the news and I had something to say about it. With each passing catastrophe, the pressure to say something of note about current events became too much.

Working in digital media straight through the pandemic planted the seeds for what I now understand to be burnout. As we all retreated to our homes, my coworkers and I were still tethered to work and each other through our shared Slack. There was a comfort in knowing that we were going through this together. Being plugged into the news cycle and producing work felt like the only way to manage the uncertainty of the world at large. And there was a certain pride attached to it—that even in the face of an unprecedented global health emergency and a massive shift in perspective, I was able to produce something that was informing people and possibly helping them in their time of need.

But I was exhausted, cranky, and clenched my jaw so much that sometimes, I bit down on a Popsicle so that I wouldn’t grind my teeth. Occasionally, I burst into tears over the smallest of slights.

When I left my job as a writer at the end of 2021, I immediately detached from the news cycle. In a way, I buried my head in the sand out of necessity, in part for my own survival. Suddenly, I was afforded the privilege of simply having an opinion and keeping it to myself. For a period of time, I stopped reading each individual morsel of news that crossed my path, be it in a text message or on Twitter or Facebook, and chose to use the internet for activities I’d previously abandoned, like online shopping and watching hours of beauty tutorials on YouTube.

Playing dumb in this way felt unusual at first. But I realized I had managed to fully disconnect when a friend texted me about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars (I’d stopped watching the telecast before it happened.) That this friend came to me with this news instead of the other way around meant that I’d almost gotten free. “I can’t believe I knew this before you,” my friend told me. Neither could I, but it felt great.

And it felt freeing. Watching television or reading a book, two activities that had become work, also, became leisure activities once more. But unplugging myself from that particular matrix was difficult, because a small part of me enjoyed the hustle and the bustle, as damaging as it was to my mental health. I was essentially trauma-bonded to the colleagues I’d worked with, and they were now my friends. For a few weeks after I left that job, my brain still churned with ideas and stray thoughts that could’ve been essays; instead of turning these into something bigger, I simply texted my friends, relishing in what I believe normal people call “conversation.”

I’m not saying that ignoring the atrocities that have become our new normal is a solution, in fact, it’s impossible to ignore these things because they take such a toll on our lives. But there is deep value in taking a moment between crises to breathe.  An act as small as condensing the constant barrage of notifications from various news sources into an easily-digestible summary that is now delivered to my phone once a day, drastically lowered my stress levels and still allowed me to be informed rather than overloaded with information.

I have learned that this is what a boundary feels like: the invisible line that exists between my feelings and something else, a line that exists to protect me from harm. Erecting that boundary has made it easier to engage with the news now, especially given the current moment. And while setting boundaries for what I consume sounds simplistic, it is an incredibly difficult thing to do in the midst of my reproductive rights and my very identity coming under constant fire. For some disengaging is merely a privilege, but for others, it can be the only way to get through a day. Or even save us from utterly losing hope.

Now that I no longer feel the need to respond publicly to everything that happens in the world, I can actually digest what is happening, and direct my energy toward the causes, issues, and concerns that matter. But it was only after I allowed myself to take that space that I felt I had the energy and the brainpower to really, deeply care again.

TELL US HOW YOU UNPLUG 

Disengaging from the news can be difficult. I, for one, have logged an embarrassing amount of hours on my phone this last week googling, “what is the difference between colonization and free association.” How do I disconnect? I rollerskate at a local park. It’s really hard to think about anything else when you’re rolling down a hill at 20 MPH.

We’d love to know how you find a slice of peace during These Times™. Click the button below to share your tips with us and we’ll feature some of your responses in our next newsletter!

xoxo,

Shannon Melero

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Dear Meteor readers,

How many times are we going to write to you with, “It’s been a tough week,” or “We’re totally out of words,” or “What else is there left to say?” But here we are, again. We’re in the unfortunate business of expressing ourselves with words, and yet we have run out of them.

When the news hit over the weekend that an armed gunman had walked into a grocery store in Buffalo, NY, and opened fire on the patrons, shooting 13 of them and killing 10, I’m sure, you, like us, were wordless too. What is there to say when you hear that Andre Mackniel was shot dead while picking up a birthday cake for his young son? Or that long-time community activist 72-year-old Katherine Massey—who had written an editorial just last year urging more federal firearms legislation—was among the victims?

And before we could even process it—there was another shooting. And then another. Since the start of this year, there have been 200 mass shootings.

Disgust. Anger. Despair. Fear. These were all the feelings—especially after it was reported that the Buffalo shooter had written a manifesto and had intentionally targeted Black people. White supremacy—not just hatred, but an organized strategy, rooted in the myth of the Great Replacement Theory—is revealed over and over again.

We are so far from a solution to gun violence and to a solution to white supremacy. But as Meteor founding member Treasure Brooks put it in her beautiful monologue, “it ain't going to go away unless we make it go away.”

Now back to that other ongoing disaster, in today’s newsletter, Sarah Leonard, writer and founder of Marxist feminist publication Lux, considers another possible strategy in the fight to defend our abortion rights.

But first, some news.

Trying to keep it together,

Samhita and Shannon

WHAT'S GOING ON

#WeAreBG: WNBA star Britney Griner has been wrongfully detained in Russia since February—for allegedly possessing hashish oil. The consensus among sportswriters and athletes has been to not make much noise about the arrest in the United States in the hopes that silence would somehow keep her safe. The choice to remain silent was also an economic one, many WNBA players travel overseas during their off-season to make additional money. Speaking out against BG’s detainment could put their second jobs on the line and even WNBA leadership encouraged discretion. But now it’s been months—and keeping quiet hasn’t done jack. On Tuesday, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver explained that his league is now working in concert with the WNBA to bring BG home. Silver told ESPN. “Our No. 1 priority is her health and safety and making sure that she gets out of Russia.” Say it louder.

USWNT: Hey! It’s something good! The U.S. Women’s National Team has achieved equal pay for the first time in its history. Earlier this year, players came to a settlement with their employers over a longstanding pay discrimination suit; that was a victory but didn’t quite make it to the back of the net if you will. The money promised to the players in the settlement earlier this spring was contingent on the ratification of a new collective bargaining agreement that would provide a structure for equal pay and equal treatment between the men’s and women’s teams. Well, now, that agreement has been reached, and to quote one of my favorite announcers we’ve got ourselves a GOOLLLAAZZOOOOOO! Going forward, the two teams will be receiving equal pay for games, equal accommodation, and the one thing everyone thought was impossible: equal World Cup Prize money. Which certainly the men’s team must be extra excited about considering they haven’t been serious contenders for the World Cup since *checks calendar* 2002. Now at least we can really mean it when we say, One nation, one team.

AND:

• An unprecedented investigative report was published this week, looking into the previously obscured deaths of Native children in boarding schools. The Federal Indian Boarding School Program took Native children from their homes, and in some cases caused their deaths—but the extent of the atrocities had not been documented to date.

• If you ever wondered how people fed babies before the invention of formula, a food historian has the answer.

• A town in France voted to allow women to wear burkini (a full coverage bathing suit)—but the French government is scheduling a new vote to shoot that decision down.

BLAST FROM THE PAST 

Could the ERA Get Us Out of the Abortion Rights Disaster?

It's complicated.

BY SARAH LEONARD

Y'ALL REALLY BEEN FIGHTING OVER THE ERA LONGER THAN SOME OF US HAVE BEEN ALIVE (PHOTO BY PATRICIA SULLIVAN VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

You know the deal—the looming overturn of Roe v. Wade means that trigger laws restricting abortion are likely to go into effect across the country, and a nation already suffering from a dearth of abortion clinics and radically unequal access—will become a much more dangerous place for anyone who can get pregnant.

The release of a draft SCOTUS opinion has sent us into a terrifying scramble for new tools to protect abortion rights. But some legal scholars argue that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)—the constitutional amendment guaranteeing sex equality—could be a powerful one.

I remember, shortly after the 2016 election, being approached by an ERA activist at an event and finding myself a bit baffled. What was the likelihood of Americans getting really jazzed around a long-ignored legal reform when women were taking to the streets, organizers were standing in front of deportation buses, and the newly named alt-right was holding rallies with openly carried firearms? And doesn’t the 14th amendment guarantee equal protection under the law anyway?

After the leaked opinion, I was moved to dig deeper when I heard that scholars were developing an argument to use the ERA to protect our rights. What if an old idea could offer the key to undoing new abortion restrictions?

First, some context. If you watched FX’s miniseries Mrs. America, you may have gotten a snapshot of how the ERA looked poised for an easy victory in the mid-1970s before careening off a cliff by the end of the decade. (If you haven’t, I highly recommend it as a tutorial–it shows the strategic fights within the women’s movement and the rise of Phyllis Schlafly–plus it’s got Cate Blanchett and a trippy hazy sequence at the 1977 National Women’s Conference!) The ERA had been first proposed in the 1920s, but gained momentum during the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s. It read, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

NATIONAL ERA MARCH, 1978. (PHOTO BY ANNE E. ZELLE VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

The amendment quickly became a bipartisan cause—with support that spanned the political spectrum from Gloria Steinem to Richard Nixon. By 1972, it had passed both houses of Congress. (Mrs. America features a charming scene in which supporters like Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm and feminist Betty Friedan lift champagne in paper cups to celebrate). It was then sent to the states for ratification; 35 out of the necessary 38 states passed it by 1977.

But the fight wasn’t over. Conservative cold warrior Phyllis Schlafly made her contribution to a rising right-wing movement by turning the ERA into a subject of high partisan drama, rallying overwhelmingly white housewives to denounce the amendment and defend the privileges it would supposedly strip from them, like exemption from the draft. States began rescinding their support and progress halted. The unbeatable amendment looked dead, and the champagne went flat. The ERA went from bipartisan to no-partisan, and its remains were swept into the dustbin of 1970s history by the Reagan revolution. A deadline, imposed by Congress and the president, for the amendment to be ratified came and went in 1982—although it was never clear if that time limit was legal to begin with.

The nearly-passed amendment moldered in limbo for nearly forty years. It took another conservative revolution to revive interest in it: Donald Trump’s presidency.

This time, it had legs, and between 2017 and 2020, the remaining three states ratified the ERA, meaning that, if one viewed the deadline as illegitimate, the amendment should now be the law of the land and be certified by the Archivist of the United States. But the Department of Justice under Trump advised the archivist to reject the amendment in deference to the deadline and the result has been another extended limbo.

As two legal scholars explained in detail in the Washington Post, the passage of constitutional amendments has always been messy, and today, experts disagree on whether the ERA is already part of the Constitution (and if not, what to do about it). You can be mad at the Trump DOJ, at the archivist, or at the ghost of Schlafly—any of whom bear some responsibility for our current position. But the murky legality of the ERA makes it especially hard to know how to fight for it.

MRS. PHYLLIS STOP THE ERA SCHLAFLY (PHOTO BY BETTMANN ARCHIVE VIA GETTY IMAGES)

To figure this mess out, I called Katherine Franke, a Professor of Law at Columbia University, and Director of the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law, where she launched the ERA Project to study and develop policy in relation to the amendment. You must be busy, I told her. “We’re all busy!” she responded. I got down to business.

In short, Franke believes that the ERA has the potential to protect abortion on grounds of sex equality, instead of on privacy grounds, as put forward in Roe v. Wade. SCOTUS’s draft opinion rejects the notion that any existing Constitutional provision protects abortion, including the 14th amendment from which the notion of a right to privacy emerges. (It should be noted that the grounds on which Roe was decided have long been controversial even among liberals; Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg believed that privacy was a weak basis for protecting abortion.)

The ERA Project has laid out a number of arguments about how the ERA’s more explicit language about sex equality could render abortion restrictions unconstitutional, including that such restrictions “single out abortions for more onerous treatment than other medical procedures that carry similar or greater risks.” At the moment, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania is hearing a case about whether the state’s ban on Medicaid funding for abortion violates the state’s ERA (they instituted their own in 1971). The ERA Project has submitted an amicus brief arguing that it does; the outcome has the potential to demonstrate that an equal rights amendment would render abortion restrictions unconstitutional.

Franke notes that with SCOTUS now including several justices who emphasize adherence to the literal text of the Constitution, having an explicit requirement for sex equality could prove decisive. So while the ERA wouldn’t literally insert the word “abortion” into the nation’s governing document, one could argue it does the next best thing.

Some have cautioned that the ERA runs the risk of being interpreted by SCOTUS as a requirement for “sex-blindness,” thereby blocking measures that single out women–even to help them. Franke argues the opposite, saying that adding sex explicitly to the Constitution would make quite clear the type of discrimination that needs to be eliminated.

She also points out that the amendment wouldn’t just affect abortion. The ERA, Franke says, would require that “federal, state, and local government take measures to eradicate structural sex discrimination from their policies and laws.” The Center is developing a slate of policy options for local and state officials touching on everything from pregnancy provisions to employment law. The amendment could also have important anti-discrimination benefits for queer and trans people.

So: how do we get an ERA victory?

Franke says there are a couple of paths. A case is currently working its way through the DC Circuit Court challenging the archivist’s decision. At the same time, the Senate is about to vote on lifting the time limit (the House has already voted to do so). Should that measure win bipartisan support, even if it fails to pass due to a filibuster, Franke argues that this offers sensible grounds for Biden to declare the ERA valid.

There’s no one simple trick to undoing abortion restrictions, and fighting back will require a mass movement of folks who protect clinics, help pregnant people get the health care they need (legally or not), and fight for measures like court reform and an end to the filibuster. But one thing is clear—the work that second-wave feminists did to get the ERA passed hasn’t been in vain. Building a movement around a constitutional amendment privy to judicial interpretation may not feel exciting—but I’m starting to think it should.

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Dear Meteor readers,

This week one of the world’s most respected Palestinian American journalists, Shireen Abu Akleh, was killed while reporting on an Israeli military raid in the Palestinian city of Jenin. Shireen was wearing a  bulletproof vest clearly marked “PRESS” and helmet when she was struck precisely in the head by an Israeli sniper.

Over the last three days, millions of Palestinians—myself included—have been holding vigils, organizing protests, and sharing our love and our demands for justice for Shireen. As we mourn the collective loss of someone who was a “big sister” to all of us, I was taken back to the first time I remember seeing Shireen on TV.

In 2000, my brothers and I were sitting on the floor of my grandparents’ living room in New Jersey playing dominos and eating freshly cut apples. My Sidi (Arabic for grandfather) was sitting in his chair in the back right corner of the room glued to the TV, as usual. At the time, I truly believed Al Jazeera was the only channel my grandparents had in their home because it was the only thing ever on their TV. I hated it, mainly because I couldn’t understand a word being spoken.

But on this particular day, I vividly remember my Sidi watching the television and crying. I glanced at the screen and saw the horrific live news coverage of what I’d later learn was the Second Intifada, being narrated by a beautifully brave woman with the most eloquent Arabic accent I had ever heard.

Shireen was a calming voice of reason in the face of endless traumas: settler-colonialism, illegal military occupation, generational displacement, and the apathy of the global community. She took an inconvenient and dangerous truth—one that has been suppressed and distorted for the last seven decades—and reported it as clearly and as honestly as any journalist could ever hope to, even in the face of unyielding violence. She did it for nearly 25 years. And she did it for us. The calculated executions she once covered with unwavering conviction became the very story that claimed her life.

It is a painful coincidence that the week we lost a powerful voice for Palestine is the same week we commemorate the 74th anniversary of Al-Nakba, on May 15th. In today’s newsletter, psychologist Dr. Shirin Zarqa-Lederman writes about the “catastrophe” that altered the course of world history and changed her own family’s life forever.

But first, a little bit of news.

In Shireen’s honor,

Jenan A. Matari

WHAT'S GOING ON

Lady Liberty gets it right: On Thursday, an anonymous group dropped a 30-foot green banner at the Statue of Liberty with the words “ABORTION = LIBERTY” emblazoned on it. This is, of course, in response to the leaked SCOTUS opinion warning that the justices intend to overturn Roe.  The organizers told the Meteor they, “refuse to stand idly by as one of our most fundamental rights is stripped away from us.” The green is a reference to the fight for reproductive rights in Latin America, dubbed the Green Wave—now coming to the United States. Join the movement: abortion rights protests are planned across the country today. If you want to find one near you, check here. #AbortionEqualsLiberty.

About those trigger laws…: As of now, pregnant people in Louisiana will not be charged with murder for having abortions. The state house has thankfully rejected a particularly terrifying anti-abortion bill—HB 813—that would have categorized life as beginning at conception and could have opened up the possibility of criminal prosecution for women who choose abortion. For now, the bill is dead, but there are 13 states that have already passed trigger laws. Here is a list of things you can do to protect abortion rights in these states and beyond.

AND: 

• Is Musk going to buy Twitter or what? This plot needs to die.

• Britney Griner will be detained in Russia for another month. It’s already been 86 days. Bring BG home.

• The defamation trial between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard carries on, and throughout it,  Heard has been memed, mocked, and called a fraud. So as The Cut asks, what happened to 'Believe women'?

PALESTINIAN HISTORY

The Lasting Trauma of Al-Nakba 

Seventy-four years after the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland, we're still here. 

BY DR. SHIRIN ZARQA-LEDERMAN

A DEMONSTRATION COMMEMORATING AL-NAKBA IN GERMANY, 2021 (PHOTO BY CARSTEN COALL VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

“At some point in every Palestinian’s life, we realize that Al-Nakba is far from over.”—Mohammad Al-Kurd, Palestinian poet and activist

In 1948, when my father was just shy of 13 years old, he and his family were forcibly exiled from their village of Ein Karem in Jerusalem, Palestine, along with 750,000 other Indigenous Palestinians. Every year on May 15th, we commemorate this violent displacement known as Al-Nakba, which translates to “the catastrophe.” Al-Nakba was the colonial campaign that forcibly removed Palestinians from their homes beginning in 1947 in order to create the state of Israel—a displacement that continues to this day.

Now 86, my father often regaled us with stories of a pre-Nakba Palestine. He would talk about the kazoz (Arabic for soda) factory that my grandfather would take him to after a day at their olive orchard in Jabil Al Rawas. He would tell us about sitting Sukkot with his Jewish friends until the rain drenched the earth. During Easter, he dyed eggs using onion peels and red currants with his Christian neighbors.  And during Ramadan, his Jewish and Christian friends would fast right alongside him. While pre-Nakba Palestine, of course, had its fair share of societal issues, many Palestinians who were there recall a land that was a religious haven for the three Abrahamic faiths (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism). My dad lights up when he tells those stories—but you can see the light dimming as his mind ultimately always leads his thoughts back to Al-Nakba and to the trauma he and our family endured.

The fate of Palestine had actually been decided long before my father’s time. In 1897, at the first World Zionist Congress, Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl declared that Palestine would be the Jewish homeland, and the theft of Palestine was later negotiated by Herzl and Lord Balfour of England in an agreement known as the Balfour Declaration—which stated that Palestine would be the “national home for the Jewish people.” This declaration did not officially establish the state of Israel, but was further supported by the British Mandate over Palestine, issued by the newly formed League of Nations in 1923, which “gave Britain the responsibility for creating a Jewish national homeland in the region.”

Zionists began encouraging more members of the Jewish faith from Eastern Europe to migrate to Palestine, falsely describing the territory as “a land without a people, for a people without a land.” Antisemitism in Europe had long existed and the Jewish communities of Europe were already seeking refuge in Palestine. Palestinians welcomed them, even hosting Jewish refugees in their homes.

Imagine two white men—and the international community—deciding to train armed guards to remove you from your home with the support of multiple governments. That's what happened to my dad.

Recently, I asked my father how much he remembers of the massacre of Deir Yassin in April of 1948, a village only three miles from his home. The survivors of the Deir Yassin massacre fled to my father’s village for protection from Zionist paramilitary groups. After a long pause, he said, “I remember most, [that] women and children were running towards us crying, so many of them were bloody,” and then he quickly reverted back to the political failures of the era.

THE AUTHOR'S FATHER (CENTER) WITH HIS SIBLINGS IN PALESTINE IN THE 1940s. (PHOTO COURTESY OF SHIRIN ZARQA-LEDERMAN) 

By the time Al-Nakba formally ended in 1949, 13,000 Palestinians had been killed, some 530 villages had been decimated, and Israel had occupied 78% of historic Palestine. My father, his parents, and his siblings fled to Jordan, where a refugee camp had been established; my grandfather farmed in the Jordan Valley until he could afford to buy a piece of property and eventually built a home for his family.

In December of 1949, the United Nations passed Resolution 194, which declared that the 750,000 Palestinians who were expelled during Al-Nakba had a right to return to their property or be compensated for their losses. (Palestinians who remained in occupied territory were given residency as “Arab-Israelis.”) In 1952, Israel did allow members of the Jewish communities of Palestine to return to their lands where they were welcomed as Israelis. However, many Christian and Muslim Palestinians were not allowed to return to their homes and were never given any compensation.

As a Palestinian in the United States being denied the right to return to my ancestral homeland is just one dimension of the generational trauma my family and I experience. A key thing I’ve learned about trauma is that a person cannot begin to heal from it until the traumatic experience ends. But nearly every day, even in 2022, there is footage of some violent act being inflicted on the people of Palestine. Children are shot and arrested, held without charge on the same streets where my father once roamed freely as a child. Thousands of homes are demolished, creating more Palestinian refugees and ensuring that healing can never truly begin. Yet in spite of it all, we remain. In our homeland and across the diaspora we fight, and rally, and shout, and above all we remember. We remember and we hold the pain of our elders so that the Indigenous people of Palestine—no matter their religion—are not forgotten.

That is the burden, the trauma, that follows countless generations who may never experience the peace my father once did, walking to a soda factory from an olive orchard. It is the legacy of Al-Nakba. But so is our steadfastness.

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Dear Meteor readers,

If you’re feeling like I’m feeling, then you are probably worried, confused, exhausted, and maybe a little hopeful. Why hopeful? Because people are righteously pissed off about the possibility of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and that anger gives me hope.

It’s currently Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month and I’ve been reflecting a lot about what it means to be an Asian American feminist—about how I can’t separate being a woman from being a person of color. And about how having access to reproductive health care has allowed me to live a full and self-determined life—despite the many obstacles my family had to overcome to survive in this country.

One month is never enough time but for AAPIHM, I take the opportunity to reflect on the incredible leaders, thinkers, and members of our community who push us to figure out how to be a collective despite our complicated and diverging lives.

I think of the inimitable Grace Lee Boggs, who taught us about intersectional organizing through her commitment to the American civil rights movement. I think about the great Yuri Kochiyama, who was radicalized after her father was detained at a Japanese internment camp and dedicated her life to social justice. I think about the legends we live amongst today, leaders of my generation like Ai-jen Poo and Vanita Gupta.

I also think about the many, many workers, shopkeepers, taxi drivers, nail technicians, housekeepers, caretakers, doctors, engineers, lawyers, and accountants—the people who keep our country moving and our lives running.

And, most personally, I think about the people who taught me that my voice matters—our culture-makers and creators—Padma Lakshmi, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amy Tan, Alexander Chee, Celeste Ng, Ocean Vuong and so many more. They’ve expanded public consciousness about the multifaceted experiences and identities of Asian people, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders.

In today’s newsletter, in honor of AAPIHM, we are excited to share with you a conversation with the award-winning author of Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, Min Jin Lee. In light of high rates of AAPI violence, she talks to Emmy and Golden Globe-nominated actor, author, and director Amber Tamblyn.

Their conversation made me think of a quote from Grace Lee Boggs that I often come back to: “Love isn't about what we did yesterday; it's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after.”

But before we get to the goods, first—the news.

In love and solidarity,

Samhita Mukhopadhyay

WHAT'S GOING ON

Schumer is right??? I rarely type these words, but Senator Chuck Schumer is giving me hope. Today the U.S. Senate is scheduled to vote on a bill that would codify the right to abortion, a move that could render the upcoming SCOTUS decision on Dobbs v Mississippi Women’s Health Center toothless. In discussing the bill Schumer stated the obvious, for those who haven’t gotten the memo, “It's a woman's right. Plain and simple.” Yas, Chuck! The prediction is that the vote is doomed, so why the big push now? With the mid-terms around the corner—seems like a *great* time for voters to see exactly who is and isn't willing to stand up for abortion rights. So if you don’t like what’s happening in your state, here’s a handy calendar of all the upcoming primaries.

Sweet Home Alabama (but only if you’re cis and straight): As of May 8th, providing gender-affirming care to trans youth is a felony in Alabama. The newly created Alabama Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act prevents doctors from prescribing hormones and puberty blockers to patients under 19. Doctors found violating the law could face up to 10 years in prison. So let’s all just stop dancing around this issue and call it by its name: this is a war on trans youth—the Alabama state legislature would rather deny them their right to exist than allow trans youth to make decisions about their own bodies.

The ladies doth protest too much: In the days since The Leak, protestors have gathered outside the homes of Justices Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Alito to alert these clueless men about what’s at stake if they move forward with overturning Roe. Kavanaugh and Roberts complained that their private spaces had been violated, and in response, the Senate approved extra security for the Justices. You know what else is a private space? My uterus. Would be a shame if a bunch of people in robes who never met me just showed up out of nowhere and told me I couldn't decide how things go in my private space. Oh, wait…

A PEACEFUL VISIT TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF AN APPOINTED GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL (PHOTO BY KEVIN DIETSCH VIA GETTY IMAGES)

AND:

• If you haven’t heard already, there is a BABY FORMULA SHORTAGE IN THE UNITED STATES! I feel like we need to be panicking more about this.

• BLM leader Patrisse Cullors has some regrets about how the organization was run, but still claims that there was no mishandling of donations by leadership.

• “Bitch wasn’t just a publication—it was an identity marker.”

• Naomi Osaka is starting her own sports agency!!

LOVE AND WAR 

Min Jin Lee on Justice for Asian Americans

The author talks to Amber Tamblyn about survival, joy, and the old stereotypes that still linger. 

MIN JIN LEE AT THE JUSTICE FOR ASIAN WOMEN RALLY IN NEW YORK (PHOTO BY TAYFUN COSKUN VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

Min Jin Lee has been sounding the alarm on the startling rise of anti-Asian violence for the last few years. And the award-winning author has been unapologetically “extra Asian” lately. In March of this year, on the one-year anniversary of the tragic shooting at a spa in Atlanta where eight people (six of them Asian women) were killed, Lee helped organize a nationwide #BreaktheSilence action demanding justice for Asian women. Through tears, she addressed the rally in Times Square: ”We have read the data, but I want to know how you are doing in light of such dismal and terrifying hate?”

The data paints a grim picture: the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism found that anti-Asian hate crimes were up 339% in 2021. In light of these startling statistics, actor, writer, activist, and Meteor founding member Amber Tamblyn wanted to hear from Lee—and understand how non-Asians can be allies. They sat down to talk about anti-Asian violence, movement-building, and what it means to create a culture of “grace.”

Amber: I've seen [the work] you’re doing to expose racism and violence—which is permeating both our culture and literally our streets, against Asian American elders. And I wonder if you would just talk a little bit about that and your experience fighting to bring more awareness to the violence that is happening in your community right now?

Min Jin: I think that is one of the reasons why I am speaking so consistently about the insult and the assault and the murders of Asians and Asian Americans in this country right now. There's been an upsurge of such violence in the past several years, especially in light of the Trump administration. However, this kind of discrimination and exclusion has been happening, even by the state, ever since Asians and Asian Americans have been in this country.

Amber: I’ve read that the Asian American community in the US is one of the least likely communities to report violence and to report these assaults. And I was shocked by that statistic, but I [realize] it's not so simple, [because] of the complicated relationship our country has with its police force.

Min Jin: There are so many, many poor immigrants in this country who are terrified of speaking up for fear of affecting their immigration status, for fear of affecting their jobs. And [many] even think that they don't have the right to complain. They come from countries in which political persecution is so commonplace. [So] very often the victims won't come forward for fear of persecution—and the persecution may not exist, but in their minds, it's quite present.

One of the things I'm trying to do is to bring greater awareness [and] talk about it when I can. I'm asking the media to please pay attention to this situation. Part of it is representation, and part of it is telling the truth about how the economic disparity in our community is so, so wide. We have the poorest people in America, and we have some of the wealthiest people in America. So the idea [that] all Asian Americans are wealthy and educated is so completely, statistically, factually untrue. And if I could bring that to bear, then maybe I've done a little bit of truth-telling.

PROTESTORS IN GEORGIA SHORTLY AFTER EIGHT PEOPLE WERE KILLED IN ATTACKS ON SPAS IN ATLANTA. (PHOTO BY MEGAN VARNER VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

Amber: Watching the work that you have created in the last couple of years—both as a writer and a researcher, at the nexus of thrilling storytelling and unearthing these really hard truths—has been pretty profound. This is where, in my mind, for women, it’s not really a luxury to write about these things: This is not a hobby; this is an act of survival. How do you feel about that statement?

Min Jin: I think the word “survival” is so important because right now we are seeing girls and women under threat—especially poor girls and poor women, and that cuts across race, and it cuts across boundaries, and regions. We're seeing political actors trying so hard to destroy the lives of girls and women. And I guess that's the reason why I feel rather impassioned to make sure that our alliances get stronger, not [made] weaker by minor differences that we can definitely talk out.

Amber: I love that so much. And I needed to hear that because it has been a hard couple of years, as it has been for everybody. Obviously, I've dealt with my own feelings about the movement-building process and activist spaces that feel like we're just ripping each other apart without the context of nuance and how difficult this work is. There is a world out there that just wants us not to exist and not to thrive. And also on a deeper, sadder level, not to love each other.

What you just said reminded me of this episode [of the On Being podcast] I just listened to [featuring] my friends Tarana Burke and Ai-jen Poo. And there's a thing that Tarana said: “I don't think we can have movements that have liberation politics that don't have a politic of grace.”

Min Jin: Amen. It should be exactly as Tarana Burke said, a “liberation ethic,” because it's not just me getting whatever men get. It's actually for all of us to be free to be who we're supposed to be. And that's a very revolutionary point of view.

PROTEST IN NEW YORK CITY AFTER THE MURDER OF CHRISTINA YUNA LEE. (PHOTO BY MICHAEL M. SANTIAGO VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

Amber Tamblyn: What I've learned is, in any [movement] work, there's a very delicate balance between honoring the wisdom and experience of your elders, and also breaking free of that to find what is important and needed in the current culture and climate.

Min Jin: Well, it's funny, I'm 53 years old. I'm the middle girl of three girls in my family. My mother always worked and she earned money for our family, which was important. But then also I felt that our father really supported our full capacity as young women. So very often people talk about the patriarchy of East Asian Confucian cultures, and obviously, true. But my father— because he has three girls—I think he ended up feeling like, yes, I want you to be able to cook well. Which is obviously sexist. And yet, he also felt like you should be able to do whatever you want to do because my girls are the best.

He used to say, “Oh, if a boy doesn't want to marry you or date you because you're smart and you're educated, know this: He will have dumb children.”

Amber: Oh shit. That's amazing.

Min Jin: Right? But my dad said that! I grew up in a very feminist household. So I'm always surprised when people say things about Asians and Asian Americans being sexist, because I'm like, “Well, that wasn't my experience.”

Amber: That brings me to my [last] question that I wanted to ask you personally, but also for anyone reading this interview who's also upset and outraged by [the rise of anti-Asian violence]. What is a very simple way to be more involved, to be more engaged?

Min Jin: The Alliance is an organization that supports victims [of anti-Asian violence] who wish to come forward. If they don't have money for a lawyer, they have all these pro bono lawyers who are willing to do it. But very often the victims will not come forward. I think that you understand this very well as somebody who cares about the Me Too movement, [but] very often Asians and Asian-Americans are not believed. So, first of all, can you believe it when someone tells you, I'm afraid to take the subway, I'm afraid to walk down the street because somebody might attack me in a poor neighborhood? Secondly, find the [political] candidates who care about the core of your community.

The third thing is really simple: Sometimes, if you feel like it, you could offer to walk your friend somewhere. Sometimes it is a matter of reaching out, talking to the person who feels deeply ignored, [and] making him, or her, or them visible in your life. There are moments in recognition that we can give to each other, which can build a world and counteract all that cruelty.

Amber: I love that. What gives you hope about the future?

Min Jin: Well, I'm a mother and I'm a professor of young people, so the next generation obviously gives me hope. And what also gives me hope is that I come from a long history of women who are fighting for good things. And it's so important to understand that we're not alone in this. For me, I keep thinking about how many beautiful friendships I have found in the movement, [and] how many people I really adore, whose laughter I speak to when I'm having a hard time. Having a shared, common purpose is a wonderful way to build friendships. So that gives me a lot of hope.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

THERE'S STILL TIME! 

Did you miss the live stream of 22 for '22: Visions For a Feminist Future? We've got you covered! The full show is still available to watch whenever you need an energetic boost of hope or if you just want to bask in the glory that was Chris Smalls' stunning pink outfit. You can watch the whole show here!

Queridx Meteor reader,

We want to wish a Happy Early Mother’s Day to all the moms, mamis, muthas, mxms, fur-moms, step-moms, and angel-moms out there today. Whether you’re getting a dozen roses or a macaroni necklace, or the very cool gift that I got my mom (which is still a surprise because I love psychological warfare, and she does read this newsletter), we hope you feel loved and appreciated every day. And if today isn’t a day you care to acknowledge for whatever reason, then may it be a day you direct all that love and appreciation to yourself cause everyone can use a little extra boost. 

In today’s newsletter, author and mother Angela Garbes talks about parenting through a pandemic and how the entire U.S. economy hinges on the unpaid work of care. It’s a moving and sobering reminder that parents of all kinds are absolute heroes.

Speaking of heroes, I saw Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness this week, and I won’t spoil it, but it is literally a fantasy film about parenting, and Elizabeth Olsen’s performance was surprisingly moving in a way that had nothing to do with superpowers and stuff blowing up.

But before I lose you to multiversal travel, let’s take a quick news cruise.

Love,

Shannon Melero

ESSENTIAL READING FOR THE ROE-POCALYPSE

It’s been a ridiculously difficult week. Between protests, clearing out your bank account to donate to abortion funds, and figuring out who to blame—there’s a lot to keep on top of. So here are a few pieces from the week that are keeping us informed and infuriated.

• Jill Filipovic has three steps on how we all need to fight for abortion rights: get to work, get informed, get brave.

• Some Republicans are drafting legislation to stop people in their states from leaving to acquire legal, safe, out-of-state abortions.

• Abortion in the U.S. is a tale as old as time; Peggy Cooper Davis explains how enslaved women terminated their pregnancies, how the cruelty of the past shaped the constitution and how present cruelty can help us change it again.

• “An Abortion Provider Confronts the End of Roe”

• No time for a long read? Here’s a great podcast on how Ireland repealed a constitutional abortion ban and what that might mean for the U.S.

AND:

• Later this month, Karine Jean-Pierre will become the first Black (and first openly gay) White House press secretary ever.

• As if Summer 2022 wasn’t already shaping up to be crappy, bread is going to be super expensive.

• Louisiana is looking to criminalize IUDs. What episode of Black Mirror are we living in right now?

TOUGHEST JOB EVER

The Essential Work of Mothering

Angela Garbes on the unpaid domestic labor that keeps the world turning 

BY SHANNON MELERO

THE DELIGHTFUL ANGELA GARBES (PHOTO BY ELIZABETH RUDGE) 

Every Mother’s Day, I find myself asking the same question many children of single mothers do: How did my mom do it all on her own? It’s a silly question to still be pondering at my age. (The answer is so obviously witchcraft; I mean how else?) But, as I’ve come to understand more about parenting, the question has evolved: How does anyone do it? 

Even in two-parent households, the work of parenting and caregiving is accomplished without much structural support. Parental leave is a luxury, childcare costs about as much as a year of college, and despite the fact that caring for someone is a 24/7 endeavor, none of it is considered “real” work. You’re just expected to do it and do it well, and the stakes are even higher than in your actual job: Should you fail there are entire institutions built to judge you rather than one overzealous regional manager.

Author and mother Angela Garbes wrestles with these questions and more in her new book Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change. If her words don’t change how you see the caregivers in your own life, then I can’t imagine what else will.

Shannon Melero: You mention in your book that you went through a lot of emotional changes when the pandemic started, which impacted how you were doing your work as a writer and as a mother. Now that we’re two years plus into it, what changes have you seen in how you think about care? 

Angela Garbes: I think that becoming a mother radicalized me in a way. You know, once I had a child, I was like, Why don't we have leave again? Why is my health care, which I believe is a human right, tied to paid work outside of the home? 

And in 2020 when everything shut down, I had two children at the time that were five and under, and I could do nothing but take care of them. That was the only job I could perform. I didn’t have time or space to write. I felt like my ability to do any kind of professional work was slipping away. But at the same time, it was so clear that the only important work in front of me was making sure that my family, my children, and my community were safe and healthy. And so I was kind of wrestling with those two things for a long time.

Essentially, I’ve come around to thinking that the only work, the only real work human beings have, is to survive and that that’s done through care work—through care of the body. That’s what we need to be prioritizing. It's great that people have professional interests. And you can enjoy doing it. But work in the United States is coercive. When your health care and your basic needs are on the line—and not having a job takes away all of those things—[then] work becomes a condition of survival. That’s not how it should be.  

You also mention how care is perceived very uniquely in America in comparison to other parts of the world—can you break that down for me a little bit? 

In American capitalism, we ignore domestic labor. We really just fail to acknowledge that American capitalism needs free labor in the home in order to function.

If you look at other countries like the Netherlands, they have capitalism as well. But they have things such as paid family leave, [and] subsidized or universal health care. They have education that is affordable, and accessible child care and pre-K, and this is the number one difference I see.

The book is also very much rooted in my experience being Filipino American. And, you know, I see [how domestic labor looks] in the Philippines, which is obviously the legacy of American colonialism. But I’ve always been struck by how domestic labor in the Philippines, even though it’s problematic…there’s something very honest about it.

Everybody has nannies, everybody has maids, everybody has cooks and they are part of the home. You see them. They’re not invisible. And while it’s complicated, it’s a huge part of the workforce. And so you see the care work. It’s impossible to ignore it because it’s happening right in front of you and it involves people outside of the nuclear family.

Do you think that that’s something that could ever translate in the U.S.? Care work being visible instead of something we try to hide? Because I know you mentioned in the book that, going back decades, women of color are responsible for raising all of these white children, but they’re never in the family photos because they’re “holding the camera,” as it were.  

I have to believe we can get there. But I just think that people in a lot of ways haven't seriously considered domestic labor. I think about the representations of motherhood and mothering—you know there are these influencers and for them part of the work of mothering is to create an Instagram or a TikTok with cleaning videos and things like that. And I’m not trying to diminish that at all because again, mothering is unpaid labor and you need money to survive.

But at the same time, there’s not a lot of prominent influencers who are featuring their nanny or their cleaning lady. No one’s saying, Here’s who is helping me. We’re still trapped in this deeply conditioned state of hiding that stuff away and thinking that the labor happening in the home is private. That it’s outside the sphere of capitalism or outside of the “real” world. Obviously, that idea is starting to shift but the way I see it, the domestic space is now a place where content is created and consumed but we’re still not really talking about it as work.

Is there anything that’s come out of the pandemic and the public’s understanding of caring and motherhood that makes you feel hopeful? 

I wrote this book from a deeply hopeful place, which is that things can be different.

A lot of Americans support paid family leave, even though our government is failing to deliver that. But there’s cultural momentum right now which [I believe] is a result of so many people being in dire financial straits.

I always hear stories about women raising the issue of paid leave in their workplace and it’s other women who are like, Well, not having it worked for us! That’s capitalist patriarchy, and it really breaks my heart. Because it was hard for you then it has to be hard for somebody else? The way I see it, I don’t want what was hard for me to be hard for anyone else.

The other thing that makes me hopeful was that during the early days of the pandemic we really saw that caring was this deeply human urge. It’s human nature to care for other people and I think we all really saw that our institutions are not set up to care for us, but we did it for each other.

No matter who you are, everyone is familiar with care on some level. You’ve been cared for at some point in your life and maybe now you care for someone, whether as a mother, auntie, nanny, mentor, etc. So I think about all of us getting back in touch with that urge to care and I feel really hopeful when I see evidence of that every day.

WILL WE SEE YOU MONDAY NIGHT? 

Darling Meteor readers,

Recently I saw someone post, it’s getting really exhausting living through a historic event every six minutes. Never has that been more relatable than this week when an anonymous hero leaked a draft of the Supreme Court’s opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—the case that could overturn Roe v. Wade.

I want to say that this has thrown us into a state of crisis but that would imply that we’ve not been enduring crises for the last few years. So I’ll call it what it is: another problem that no one wanted.

I’m angry. You’re angry. Entire pockets of the country are angry. And outside of donating to abortion funds and primal screaming in the streets (yes to both), it feels like there is nothing we can do to stop SCOTUS from rolling us toward a dangerous and uncertain future for people who want to have control over their own bodies.

So it was only suitable that for this newsletter, author and Meteor editor-at-large Rebecca Carroll asked journalist Rebecca Traister the question on everyone’s mind. Where do we go from here?

We go forward.

In quiet rage,

Shannon Melero

(P.S. We know what day it is. May the fourth be with you all. We’re gonna need it!)

WTF

DR. AYANA ELIZABETH JOHNSON IN NEW YORK CITY (PHOTO BY GINNY SUSS)

• There’s a leak in this boat: Here’s the quick and dirty on the week’s big story: SCOTUS has confirmed that there will be an investigation into who leaked the draft opinion, a breach which Chief Justice John Roberts called a “betrayal.” Sir, Theresa Giudice spreading rumors about her friends’ marriages is a betrayal. Someone warning the country that we’re about to lose our reproductive rights? That’s God’s work. Give the leaker a medal.

• Rights Watch: If you’re not freaking out about this leak because you don’t have feelings about abortion (first of all, how?) then here’s something else to freak out about: birth control and same-sex marriages aren’t safe either. In one of the week’s best roundups, VICE interviewed several legal experts on what the imminent Roe rollback could mean for other basic rights, and the responses are bleak. One professor told the outlet, “If your rights have not been understood as automatic for the last 200 years, or if your rights are not explicitly stated in the Constitution, this court is basically saying you do not have those rights.”

AND OTHER THINGS GOING ON: 

• I didn’t really get the Met Gala theme this year but it’s nice to take a mental break and just look at some nice gowns. Blake Lively understood the assignment.

• An Apple store in Maryland is trying to unionize. Hell yeah!

• The U.S. has finally acknowledged that Brittney Griner is being wrongfully detained in Russia.

• It’s time for Joe Biden to decide once and for all if he’s the president of just the Catholics or if he’s the president of the entire United States. (More on that from Rebecca Traister below.)

• “Meet the Reddit ‘Aunties’ covertly helping people get abortions”

• California is looking to add abortion protection to its state constitution.

ABORTION AT RISK

“We Are Living In Minority Rule” 

Rebecca Traister on the future of abortion rights and what Democrats need to do now.

BY REBECCA CARROLL

THANK GOD FOR ABORTION! (PHOTO BY GINNY SUSS) 

You mad? I am. So when Politico published the leaked draft opinion on Monday, indicating that the Supreme Court was primed to overturn Roe V. Wade, rather than beat my head against the wall, I reached out to political writer and author Rebecca Traister, whose concise and provocative columns have covered this terrain and predicted this outcome for decades. Her 2019 bestselling book Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, documents the historical arc of women’s rage and since there’s never been a better time for that—we zoomed about it.

Rebecca Carroll: When the news broke last night about the SCOTUS leak, you tweeted: “Intellectually I am unsurprised, mentally knew this was coming, have been writing about it for years, understand Roe has been insufficient for millions, etc etc. And yet: my teeth have been chattering uncontrollably for an hour. Bodies/minds are so weird.”

I felt that too—can you say more?

Rebecca Traister: I certainly understood that night that this was coming. But there have been all these distinct moments that I remember knocking the breath out of me, each and every one of them, but in which it was abundantly clear that this was what was going to happen. Like when I read the headline that Anthony Kennedy was retiring, the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, the night that Justice Ginsburg died, the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett.

I was ready for the breath to be knocked out of me at the end of June [when the SCOTUS opinion is expected to be officially delivered]. I certainly was not ready for the text message I got Monday night at 8:40. My eldest daughter was like, "Mom, are you okay?" She tried to put a blanket over me. And it was a visceral, physiological reaction. I guess it was like a shock, a physical shock reaction.

Part of the shock is that this is happening now. We won the 2020 election largely because of the women's vote and, specifically, women of color. And yet even with Democrats in power because of us, here we are. How do we reconcile that? Or do we reconcile that?

Well, I don't think there's a neat reconciliation that's possible. I think we have to hold multiple things in our heads at one time. One is elections do matter, actually. And the other is that Democrats have to be better and fight far more forcefully. And this is a critique that I've had for a long time. I hear a lot of resistance to that: Like, this is not the Democrats’ fault, this is right-wing. And, absolutely, this is decades' worth of right-wing strategizing to exacerbate gendered, racial, and class inequalities.

But this has been the right-wing for 40 years. And it's also about Democrats who have not effectively fought that party. Roe is about to be overturned. Voting rights were gutted in 2013. Labor protections have been gutted and environmental protections have been gutted and there's a lot more that's on the table coming up.

So lots of these things can exist at the same time. It is absolutely crucial that we elect Democrats. Sure. Yes. It is also crucial that Democrats themselves get better at waging this battle.

IT'S NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS (PHOTO BY GINNY SUSS)

I want to understand better for myself, for the folks around me, for all of us: What is a right? What is a human right if it can be so freely stripped?

We are talking about everything [fought for] by early abolitionists and suffrage movements through emancipation, through labor movements often spearheaded by immigrants—to the 19th amendment, through the Voting Rights Act, through the Civil Rights Act, through Griswold and Loving. These rights have been pulled from the guts and marrow of this system that was designed to impede them. And here is where I see a failure over the past generation or two: to understand that once those rights were extracted, that didn't mean we just got to relax our grip on them.

Politically, in terms of our leadership, there have always been people on the ground, at the grassroots who have been talking about how easily these things could be stripped from us, and those people have been called hysterics. That's something [U.S. Sen.] Ben Sasse said specifically about abortion during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. He said, I've seen these hearings and people are always yelling hysterically about how abortion's going to be overturned and it's never happened. It's all [accusations of] hysteria, but it's also the tacit message coming from Democrats who over my lifetime have fought for a big tent and said, We shouldn't have litmus tests on things like abortion and have repeatedly called those who talked about abortion as single-issue voters who were impeding a broader progressive project.

The people who understood the intensity that this battle required even after having won were written off as radical, infantile, or overdramatic. Reproductive justice advocates have been pointing out over decades that [using] the language of “choice” never worked as morally compelling. It's the “choose your choice” feminism where any choice that a woman makes then becomes feminist, which is not the case.

What reproductive justice advocates were correctly pointing out always is that the right to abortion goes hand in hand with the right to competent, accessible, affordable, and high-quality healthcare for all people— [and] as we know, Black maternal mortality rates are through the roof in this country and healthcare more broadly is unavailable. It goes hand in hand with affordable housing, quality education, safer gun laws, and things that better enable people, not just to be able to choose to end pregnancies but also to have children and to be able to raise them safely and with some economic stability.

But I would also say that 70% of Americans don't think abortion should be illegal. The reason the right did its genius moves of taking over the judiciary is because they cannot win on this issue legislatively. The Electoral College overriding the will of the majority of voters has produced the majority of Supreme Court justices right now who are deciding against a majority of Americans.  What we're living in right now is minority rule.

CROWDS IN NEW YORK SHOUTING THEIR SUPPORT OF ABORTION IN THE STREET (PHOTO BY GINNY SUSS)

When we first got on the phone, you were listening to the clip of Elizabeth Warren fuming. Why is that video so important? Because there are a lot of ways that can also be dismissed.

Sure. There are a million ways it can be dismissed. Fuck those ways. That clip shows blood, it shows feeling, and it shows urgency. I feel like the president and the leaders of this party need to get out of bed the night that it happens and tell people who need care that they can go get their appointments tomorrow. To explain it, to treat it with a big siren emoji, to get on TV, to get on the internet—do what you have to do, speak to the people you claim you want to lead into battle.

At the end of the statement he released [Tuesday] morning was the idea that everybody can vote for us in November. Okay. Tell me why Joe? Tell me why. Because until that statement, he hadn't said the word abortion. He did include the word abortion in his statement this morning. Congratulations. It was like four paragraphs down. I'm glad.

What I keep trying to wrap my head around is it's so clear to me why abortion matters—but how do we keep a new generation caring?

What we have not done is successfully transmitted the stories of not just what life was like pre-Roe, but about the degree and difficulty of these fights. We tell very neat stories about how everything from the civil rights movement to the gay rights movement to the women's movement landed us with these sort of cheerful endpoints. And we don't linger on how long it took and we don't linger on how hard it was and we don't linger on how many people suffered and died during the course of these fights. And we do that because it's human to want to put that stuff behind us and to say, Look, we're moving forward.

People might not feel hopeful right now. Why should they? 

It's hard to feel hopeful. I can't point to something that's being like, well, the great thing is X. Nope. No great things. Okay? None. Zero great things. However, I have to say that as tempting as it is to give into despair or hopelessness, it is crucial to remember, again, that this is why it's important that we learn more and better about the generations that came before us. Let me tell you, generations of people with far fewer resources and living in spaces of far greater systemic violence and injustice, found a way to fight for a better world. And if we can't because we're bummed out, which we are, then we have a major problem. So it's not a question of, is there a reason to feel hope? Damn fucking straight there is because if we don't, we stop moving. And if we stop moving, then we permit the harm, and that's not possible.

ONE MORE THING

If this week's SCOTUS draft left you wondering, what now, then make sure to register for The Meteor's virtual event on May 9th, 22 for '22: Visions For a Feminist Future, presented in partnership with Gucci's CHIME FOR CHANGE.

You'll hear from Colombian human rights lawyer Paula Avilla-Guillen on the state of reproductive freedom and what comes next. You won't want to miss it! Click here and make sure to reserve the best seat on your couch for an emotional and inspiring evening.

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Hey Meteor friends,

Do you know what I love, specifically, about the last day of April? That I can finally post a million “It’s gonna be May” memes. This is one of my top 10 favorite parts of being online, hands down, and I have not a shred of shame for loving it.

You know what isn’t making it into my Top 10? Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter a.k.a The Bad Place. While I’m personally not an avid Twitter gal, the news that Musk was spending the GDP of a small country to buy everyone’s bad takes incensed my timeline—and writer Shamira Ibrahim helps me understand why. She's blessed today’s newsletter with the ultimate explainer of the potential risks, not just for Twitter pros, but for everyone.

Also, Tuesday is Eid al-Fitr—the post-Ramadan holiday and start of a new month on the Islamic calendar. The Meteor’s Ayesha Johnson and her sister are bidding farewell to Ramadan in this issue too.

But before that, let’s check the news.

In love and memes,

Shannon (It’s Gonna be Me)lero

WHAT'S GOING ON

Shots for tots: On Thursday, Moderna put in a request to the FDA to approve a low-dose Covid vaccine for children under five years old; it’s the first of the Big Three U.S. vaccine providers (Moderna, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson) to do so. A study involving more than 6,000 children from six months to six years old found, “levels of antibodies equivalent to what has protected older children and adults,” NPR reports. Moderna’s chief medical officer told NPR, “You're going to reduce your chances of getting disease by about a half.” It’s time! 

NOklahoma: This week the governor of Oklahoma signed a bill banning non-binary gender markers on birth certificates. And last month, Lambda Legal filed a lawsuit over an executive order from the governor prohibiting transgender Oklahomans from correcting the gender on their birth certificates. SOMEHOW IT MANAGES TO GET WORSE, THOUGH! On Friday, the legislature passed a 6-week abortion ban. Usually, I have something pithy to add but the disdain for bodily autonomy in that state warrants no pith. Why are you like this, Oklahoma?

What in the men's rights: Johnny Depp has taken ex-wife Amber Heard to court for a 2018 Washington Post op-ed she wrote referencing her history of domestic violence. In an effort to restore his reputation, he is suing her for $50 million—alleging her account of abuse is “demonstrably false.” The proceedings have been gut-wrenching to watch, with prosecutors pouring over every nasty detail and expert testimony of Heard’s mental health. The details of this case paint a very complex picture of an abusive relationship—but the extent to which defending Depp has become a clarion call for men’s rights activists is also concerning. (“He could have killed you, he had every right,” said one TikTok reported by Vice.) Look, the guy sent texts saying he wished his wife's corpse was decomposing in a trunk. You're really going to stan Captain Jack Sparrow after that?

  AND:

• “What young Starbucks union organizers want you to know.”

• Rats continue to flee sinking ship but will they just scurry back when it's convenient?

• This should win an award for wild headline of the week: “Record Levels of Meth Have Been Found in New Zealand’s Wastewater.”

• Imagine getting served custody papers at work. It can apparently happen to anyone.

RATIOED

Even If You Don't Want It To, the Sale of Twitter Means Something

Elon Musk paid $45 billion for your bad tweets, but what’s he going to do with them?

BY SHAMIRA IBRAHIM

TO TWEET OR NOT TO TWEET, THAT IS THE QUESTION (PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY RAFAEL HENRIQUE VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

Unless you were on one of Jeff Bezos’ field trips to the outer rim of space this week, by now you have likely heard of hair transplant enthusiast Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.  Depending on your level of activity within the bird app, it might be hard to understand why it really matters that Twitter will soon be under the stewardship of a South African Bond villain who seems to be creating an apartheid state of his own within at least one of his existing companies.

Perhaps you are more of an Instagram or TikTok person or were driven off by Donald Trump’s reign as the trending topic of the day for 5 years. Maybe you found yourself in the crosshairs of stan Twitter one day, as I once did, pleading my case amongst the BTS Army, and lost interest after that. Or maybe you logged in, saw #couchguy trending, and realized you were entirely too old for frenetically-paced social media conversation.

It is a conversation that is more critical than ever

But whoever you are, and however little you care, ownership of Twitter may have a direct impact on your life. First, due to years of inattention and unregulated deference to Silicon Valley, companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google have a disproportionate amount of influence and control over media, information, and data—both our consumption of it and our personal details.

Second, despite Twitter being an important tool for raising awareness, there is tremendous potential for harm on the platform. Consider #endfathersday—a fake campaign created by Twitter trolls impersonating Black feminists, with the goal of making Black women the target of harassment. Black feminists responded with the hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing, but the damage was done. Or the misogynist hate campaign, #GamerGate, in 2014-2015 which used creative freedom as an excuse to viciously target women on multiple social media platforms, and which helped feed the rise of the online right.

Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist” who defines free speech with elementary maxims like “someone you don’t like [is] allowed to say something you don’t like,” is probably not inclined to reconcile with any nuance how “free speech” could also lead to targeted harm of marginalized communities and genders.

THIS MAN IS REALLY IN CHARGE OF THINGS (SCREENSHOT VIA TWITTER)

And the legal impetus isn’t there to hold these companies accountable, either. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have testified before Congress on the future of existing laws such as Section 230, which protects free speech and online platforms from the liability of user content. It’s a complicated relationship–the same “free speech” protections that ostensibly allowed dialogue on the internet to flourish are now allowing these platforms to function as proxy news providers but without the editorial standards. Ultimately, Section 230 shields large platforms from taking accountability for the harm caused by misinformation and abusive campaigns.

It is a conversation that is more critical than ever, while the platform leaves many people open to harm, Twitter also empowers marginalized groups. In recent history alone, tweets in real-time prevented the plight of African immigrants in Ukraine from being pushed into obscurity in the nascent days of the ongoing conflict with Russia; mobilized national solidarity for ongoing unionization efforts for essential workers during the pandemic; and made visible the Black women working to eradicate the existing biases found in algorithms that make many social media platforms inherently anti-Black.

Reverting Twitter back to a privately owned company leaves many uneasy about their sense of safety and community on the platform. Will “Black Twitter” be given the same free rein to mobilize, entertain, mourn, and advocate as in years prior? Will conversations there be weaponized against demographics seeking safety and camaraderie—bucketing the entire usage history of everyone who has used a particular hashtag into a data extraction point, free to be solicited by a nefarious third party?

The legal impetus isn’t there to hold these companies accountable...

There’s also the question of what lengths Musk will go to earn back his investment. The easiest way for Musk to shore up revenue will be by revving up advertising or increasingly licensing data out to brokers. Given that Musk himself has used his cult of personality to influence cryptocurrency markets via social media with Dogecoin, selling demographic information–even if short-sighted–may hold high appeal. With even less regulatory oversight and monitoring from shareholders, there’s never been so much incentive to engage in surveillance capitalism.

This is the world we are facing: where billionaires can choose to control the flow of information by doubling down on a fabulist rendering of free speech.

But on today’s internet—free speech always comes with a price.

AN EARLY EID MUBARAK!

A Farewell to the Month of Ramadan

BY AYESHA JOHNSON

(FROM LEFT TO RIGHT) ANEESA AND AYESHA JOHNSON AT SHEIKH ZAYED GRAND MOSQUE, ABU DHABI (PHOTO COURTESY OF AYESHA JOHNSON)

In just a few days, Ramadan will come to a close and nearly two billion Muslims worldwide will first chug several gallons of water, and then celebrate the holiday of Eid al-Fitr. At the start of this month, The Meteor’s Shannon Melero asked why this widely celebrated holiday is still so misunderstood—or even forgotten. And now, for the end of Ramadan, The Meteor’s Ayesha Johnson speaks with her sister Aneesa about community, work stress and the spiritual significance of the last 30 days.

Ayesha: Hey Neesee, how are you feeling? How’s the month been for you?

Aneesa: Even better than I expected. Ramadan is kind of bittersweet when it ends. The solidarity of all of us doing the same thing, together, for a shared purpose, it's very unique.

Ayesha: It’s very powerful. We're all feeling these hunger pains, we're all tired. A part of Ramadan that we’ve never really chatted about is how much it’s about community. Iftar [the sunset meal to break fast] is meant to be not just with your family, but also your community. This Ramadan, I’ve been mostly breaking my fast alone. But it’s such a different experience when you’re with other people. I’m curious, how has your understanding of Ramadan changed over the years?

Aneesa:  When you're a child, you're doing it mostly because everyone around you is, and it feels like the adult thing to do. I think probably at some point in high school, I started to look into things. That was the first Ramadan that I started going to Taraweeh prayer [voluntary supplemental night prayers], and that's when my perception started to change. Yeah, I'm not eating all day, but what’s the other aspect of it? I am also paying attention to how I speak to people, my patience, my anger, and what I'm absorbing. This Ramadan, I’m asking myself what habits do I want to build, to carry me through the next one? [Ramadan] always reminds me of how much I actually have—to pause on wanting more if for only a month.

Ayesha:  I remember fasting at work for the first time—I was so scared that I was going to mess up my paralegal job or do something wrong because of fasting. I was terrified that I’d be a little loopy. Now, I’m more confident in my skills and I think I’m also just more comfortable with myself—if I do mess up and it’s because I’m fasting, it’s not the end of the world.

Aneesa: The hunger is intense but there's also the humility. Yes, we're depriving ourselves of something, but for a lot of us, we know we have food in the fridge that we can use to break our fast at the end of the day. And there are so many people on this planet that don't have that…They don't have that security.

Ayesha: That's a part that I've also always appreciated as well—an appreciation of [the fact that there’s] a whole lot to be grateful for in life.

This was fun...I'll talk to you soon.

While you're sharing that it's gonna be May with your friends, remember to also share this newsletter! 

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