Has your mom eaten today?
  April 28, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, There’s been another audio leak from the much-anticipated "Summer House" reunion, and at this point, Bravo just needs to stream all 12 hours of whatever they filmed, editing schmediting, we will watch it raw. In today’s newsletter, we look at what moms are giving up to feed their children. Plus, the enduring, questionable allure of Michael Jackson. Free the footage, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONCook a meal for Mother’s Day: A March survey of more than 1,000 mothers in the United States conducted by the group No Kid Hungry found that moms are struggling to feed their children. According to the findings, one in five moms has skipped a meal or eaten less so that their child could have something to eat. That includes a surprising 20% of middle-income moms, and even a handful of “higher-income” ones—but, as always, lower-income mothers are feeling the squeeze most. “That’s a pattern, and it has a name: maternal sacrifice as a survival strategy,” says Lillian Singh, senior VP of family economic mobility at Share Our Strength, the non-profit that started the No Kid Hungry campaign. The numbers quantify what many parents have already been feeling: It’s hard to be a parent these days—more than any other decade in recent memory, according to more than 60% of the moms surveyed. In fact, nearly a quarter of women surveyed admitted to taking on debt in order to afford food. Even psychologists concur that parenting has become more difficult over the last few years for many reasons, including cost-of-living rises and stagnation in pay. Singh also points to anti-parent policies as a factor: “Proposed SNAP cuts”—like the one happening right now under the Big Beautiful Bill budget—“don't just reduce a benefit,” she says. “They remove the floor that makes those small acts of sacrifice survivable…The moms in our network aren't asking for more. They're asking for less to be taken away.”  The man in the mirror: The biopic Michael, which follows Michael Jackson’s career, is doing record-breaking numbers at the box office despite the fact that its protagonist was the subject of years of molestation allegations (including some published just last week). It’s not because it’s critically acclaimed: The film has a 38% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but a 97% audience score. (Whereas with the 2019 documentary Finding Neverland, which profiled two of his accusers, those ratings are reversed.) Why the disparity? It’s complicated. Critics are struggling with the erasure of all of the complexities that made Michael, Michael—but that erasure seems to appeal to audiences. The film, produced by the Jackson estate and starring one of his nephews, Jaafar Jackson, glosses over nearly all of the difficulties Michael Jackson faced in his life and instead presents a pristine, idealistic version of the King of Pop. Put simply, the Jackson family is giving the people the version of Michael Jackson that fans loved most—the man on the stage—while completely ignoring the literal man in the mirror. Beyond preserving his legacy for profit, the Jackson estate has been working tirelessly for years on restoring the idea of Michael Jackson’s childlike purity, going so far as to have Leaving Neverland pulled from HBO and most streaming platforms four years ago. For the most part, this relentless rehabilitation has worked; given the wild success of the Broadway show MJ, the Cirque de Soleil show that sold millions of tickets, and a social media army ready to defend his legacy, Jackson appears too big to fail. Even the social stigma has faded: You’re more likely to see people happily bopping to “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” than to R. Kelly’s “Ignition (Remix)” —neither of which I will link to because I’m not tossing any extra streaming pennies to these men. And that’s really the question at the heart of the Michael divide. Can art ever truly be separated from the artist, and who exactly are we willing to do that kind of separation for? This film brings that quandary a step further by eliminating the person and focusing solely on the art. What viewers are left with, if Rotten Tomatoes scores are to be believed, is an enjoyable musical experience devoid of any analysis or acknowledgment of the costs of that art. But certainly, there are adult survivors of childhood abuse seeing all of this dialogue and wondering when art will be less important than their lived experiences. AND:
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The High Cost of Workplace Affairs
  April 23, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, Absolutely everyone is talking about Yesteryear, the new novel from Caro Claire Burke about a tradwife influencer sent back to the 1800s. My local library has a month-long waiting list for a copy, with 433 people currently in line. So we have decided we will not fall victim to FOMO! Over the next two weeks, the Meteor team will be reading Yesteryear and sharing our takes. Are you reading Yesteryear, too? Reply to this email if you want to be part of our roundtable.  In today’s newsletter, we dig into the alleged affair rocking the sports world and why some of us always face more punishment than others. Plus, a very special assignment for your weekend reading. Support your local libraries, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONNone’s fair in love and football: Yesterday, New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel announced that he would be missing part of this year’s draft to attend counseling. Why is a man advertising his plans to seek counseling? Step into my office. Earlier this month, Page Six published photos of Vrabel at a resort in Arizona with esteemed NFL journalist Dianna Russini. The photos were not particularly salacious—the two are seen eating, sitting separately in a pool, and exchanging an awkward hug—although a later one, of Vrabel and Russini sharing a kiss in 2020, hit the internet just today. Both parties have denied any wrongdoing, but it was clear as soon as the first photos went live who would be paying the price for an alleged consensual relationship between fully grown adults: Russini. The backlash has been swift and ugly. Russini resigned from her position at The Athletic, where she is currently under a conduct investigation. There have also been calls for the AP to investigate Russini’s NFL Awards voting history. Patriots fans on Reddit have even stooped so low as to start questioning the paternity of Russini's son, Michael, which was picked up by a sports outlet. Before we go any further, here’s my opinion on the journalistic ethics of it all: Russini, affair or not, is a rigorous and damn good journalist who has been doing the hard work of covering the NFL for years. Her work is not limited to Vrabel or the Patriots, and there’s been nothing to suggest that their alleged sexual relationship influenced her coverage. And even if you do agree that Russini made an ethical misstep, there’s no denying that she’s shouldering most of the fallout. As she was resigning, the NFL confirmed that it would not be reviewing whether or not Vrabel’s actions were a violation of conduct guidelines. There have been no calls for his resignation (at least not over this), and apart from his absence (beginning on day three of the draft), Vrabel is not expected to lose his job. This is, statistically, par for the course. Though Vrabel and Russini didn’t share a workplace, research shows that when women get involved with a coworker, they suffer more than men who do the same. “Women get half the [economic] gain of dating men with power, but pay double the costs when that relationship ends,” economist and associate professor of finance at the University of Southern California Emily Nix, who wrote a paper on the financial impacts of workplace relationships, tells The Meteor. (Think Kristin Cabot, aka the woman from the Coldplay kiss-cam.) Conversely, men see almost no change in their economic status after dating a superior or a subordinate—Cabot’s paramour Andy Byron resigned as CEO of the company and sold his house for $5 million, and is still a billionaire. Women also have a harder time bouncing back from these relationships, much like Cabot, who recently admitted that she is still looking for work. “One of the reasons women suffer such a big financial loss is because they’re the ones who end up leaving the workforce,” Nix explains. “A year after the event, they’re over 12 percentage points less likely to be employed…which persists for at least four years afterward.” That is what’s so vexing about this situation: seeing someone with the skill, expertise, and impeccable resume of Dianna Russini having her career stalled for a relationship with one out of the 384 coaching staffers in the NFL. Not to mention the blocks this could create for other women who are looking to grow in the industry. “I would not have advised her to resign,” Nix says. “I would have told her to fight tooth and nail because it’s very hard to regain your position. And we do find that women who leave one job have a harder time getting a better offer.” But hey, at least Mike is getting counseling. 🙄 AND:
 WEEKEND READING/LISTENING/WATCHING: “LEMONADE” EDITION 🍋🎶👯 EVERYONE WAS FINDING A FORMATION TO GET INTO. (SCREENSHOT VIA YOUTUBE) “Lemonade,” Beyonce’s sixth and arguably most iconic album, was surprise-released 10 years ago today. Even if you weren’t a card-carrying member of the Beyhive, it was impossible to ignore the ripple effects of this trailblazing “visual album,” whose lyrical, cinematic, and literary references to Black womanhood, history, and religion abounded. (And oh yeah, it’s a chronicle of Jaÿ-Z’s infidelity, mirroring the Kübler-Ross stages of grief.) The cameos were legion, ranging from Serena Williams to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown. Besides gifting us banger after banger, “Lemonade” spurred a kaleidoscope of thinkpieces, reading lists, roundtables, and entire syllabi that reflected on slavery, on Black feminist theory, on food, on witchcraft, on the supernatural, on Afrofuturism, on vulnerability, on capitalism, on marriage, on Black women’s place in rock ‘n roll, and so much more. The 1991 film Daughters of the Dust—directed by Julie Dash, the first Black woman to direct and produce a full-length, widely distributed feature film—was re-released as a result of the album’s nod to it. You could celebrate “Lemonade” this weekend by listening to it…or you could also read the myriad words of others dissecting it. Choose your own adventure!  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
It’s not just “violence.” It’s femicide.
  April 21, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, I am sending hearty applause to all of you finishers out there who hit the streets of Boston and Jersey City this past marathon weekend. I genuinely marvel at your abilities. In today’s newsletter, we try to wrap our minds around the uptick in femicides and the lack of response. Plus, a suspicious lawsuit out of California and a shred of good news for bodily autonomy. Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONCall it what it is: In 2023, historian and author Kimberly A. Hamlin wrote in the Washington Post that femicide—the killing of a woman because she is a woman—was on the rise, and that said rise is not surprising given our country’s deeply patriarchal and white-supremacist history. Her assessment rings particularly true this month, as the news of Dr. Cerina Fairfax, Celeste Rivas Hernandez, Lindha Zerpa Lara, Nancy Metayer Bowen, Ashlee Jenae, and Shaneiqua Pugh have flooded our screens. These women were murdered (aside from Pugh, who was critically injured), and men they were close or married to were named as perpetrators. Over the decade between 2014 and 2024, the number of women killed by intimate partners increased 22 percent. Men are suspects in more than 98 percent of those incidents. Yet “femicide” is not the term most commonly used to describe these kinds of killings; it appears nowhere on the CDC website. The public instead relies on terms like “intimate partner violence”: killed because of a relationship gone wrong. Or “domestic violence”: killed because of some mysterious, private matter inside the home. Neither of those phrases, though, makes clear who the target and perpetrator of that violence is. You can’t address a problem without first properly naming it. Femicide comes closer. The tradition of American femicide has its roots in our country’s history of patriarchy and violence. In her piece, Hamlin points to the exact legal mechanisms that have helped. The most enduring of these was “coverture,” the idea that women’s “legal identity was covered by that of her husband.” Under the laws of coverture, Hamlin writes, it was “basically inconceivable for a husband to be prosecuted for assaulting his wife or children,” because they were his property.  AN ANTI-VIOLENCE PROTEST IN ARGENTINA, 2019 (VIA GETTY IMAGES) More than a hundred years after coverture stopped being common practice, women are still being killed at an alarming and growing rate—and most often, according to data, by men they know. Some women are especially vulnerable: Researchers find that femicide occurs disproportionately among Indigenous, Latina, and Black women, the last of whom make up 14% of the population but, according to the CDC, a full 30 percent of intimate partner murder victims. Laws may change, but the long-term effects of men being told that all things and people are theirs to do with as they please, do not just go away. They adapt. But our response has not. The CDC lists intimate partner violence as a “significant public health issue.” So why is this administration, which purports to be protecting women from everything, stripping away resources meant to protect women from this very real threat? Why is the administration easing gun regulations when on average more than 70 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner every month? In other countries, women have taken to the streets to demand an end to these murders. We could do the same—or at the very least, begin asking candidates what they plan to do about a crisis impacting nearly half of all voters. Because this problem deserves to live not just in “intimate” and “domestic” corners, not just in lurid headlines or true-crime plotlines, but in the open air of the streets. AND:
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Is ICE a reproductive health hazard?
  April 17, 2026 The “Toxic Legacy” of Operation Metro SurgeThis winter, in Minnesota and elsewhere around the country, ICE used tear gas on citizens. Now public health experts worry that these chemical weapons may be linked to reproductive problems. Yessenia Funes reports.BY YESSENIA FUNES TEAR GAS ON A STREET IN MINNEAPOLIS THIS WINTER. EVEN THOSE NOT PROTESTING WERE AFFECTED, RESIDENTS SAY. (PHOTO BY SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES.) Asha kept a bag ready throughout most of January and February. Inside, she packed bandages, gauze, water, saline, tourniquets, and general first aid. The 30-year-old works as a healthcare professional in Minneapolis, and when she’s off the clock, she responds to community emergencies as a street medic, mostly treating her neighbors who have been exposed to chemical weapons. On the day in January when federal officers shot and killed 31-year-old nurse Alex Pretti, she says, “I watched a lot of elderly people get tear-gassed.” And that wasn’t the first or the last time Asha, who is sharing only her first name to protect her identity, saw law enforcement attack her neighbors. Since the Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge, which deployed 3,000 federal immigration agents to the Twin Cities, the emergencies have felt nonstop to Asha. The administration concluded its Minnesota incursion on Feb. 12, firing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem weeks later, partly for her failure to manage the fallout in the state. Minneapolis is seeing fewer agents than in prior months, but people are still scared. And the whole city still feels the surge’s effects in their bodies—perhaps literally. Public health experts fear that ICE’s actions will leave a toxic legacy for communities across the country. In cities like Los Angeles, Portland, and Washington, D.C., independent analysts have raised concerns over federal officers’ indiscriminate deployment of chemical agents like tear gas or pepper spray—and not just on protesters. People are being exposed while stepping out for work or errands, or even sometimes at home. Researchers can’t easily study the long-term impacts of these weapons—there’s no ethical way to expose people to these chemicals in a controlled experiment—but what they do know paints an alarming portrait for public health, especially in women, people with uteruses, and children. Asha Hassan, an assistant professor of women’s health at the University of Minnesota Medical School (not to be confused with the street medic), began collecting data on reproductive health impacts in 2020 when the Black Lives Matter uprisings sprang up across the country and, with them, a police response that often involved tear gas. She had heard whispers of menstrual irregularities and miscarriages, but after looking at the available literature, she realized scientists had ignored some key population groups. “A lot of the research that we do have on tear gas is from the ’50s and ’60s,” Hassan explains. “It’s on mostly healthy men who are in a military setting. It really hasn’t been tested on women, children, people with chronic conditions, people with any sort of disability.” Studies have focused on “this particular type of body: a cis, straight man who is serving in the military and has the ability to be healthy.”  A PROTESTER IN LOS ANGELES FLUSHES A FELLOW DEMONSTRATOR’S EYES OUT AFTER EXPOSURE TO TEAR GAS. (PHOTO BY JON PUTMAN/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES After putting out a social media call to hear from those who had been exposed to chemical weapons like tear gas, she received more than 600 emails from all over the world in just a few weeks. In 2023, she published a paper that included more than 1,200 responses from people exposed in the U.S. between 2020 and 2021. The findings confirmed Hassan’s fears: Tear gas exposure was linked to negative reproductive health impacts for anyone of reproductive age. “Even after one exposure, we started to see some impact,” she says.
The more a person had been exposed, the more likely they were to face a number of issues: breast tenderness, spontaneous bleeding, and cramping. The study also found an above-average rate of miscarriages, but the sample size didn’t include enough pregnant participants to make a strong conclusion about tear gas’s effect. AN “OBJECTIVELY CHILLING” USE OF TEAR GASIn the decades after World War II, the majority of world leaders agreed to ban riot control agents during war as part of the Chemical Weapons Convention. (The U.S. government shares limited information on the chemicals that make up these weapons, but they can include chlorobenzylidene malononitrile and dibenzoxazepine, which can harm the respiratory system.) However, U.S. police are still allowed to use these weapons to protect public safety, explains Rohini Haar, a public health professor at U.C. Berkeley and medical adviser at Physicians for Human Rights. But that’s not what’s happening in the U.S. under Trump, Dr. Haar believes. “You’re not seeing that these weapons are used to quell any sort of riot or protect public safety,” Dr. Haar says, emphasizing that ICE agents have fired tear gas as protesters were walking away, not to disperse a crowd. “They’re actually harming public safety.” Dr. Haar has treated tear gas patients across the globe, including at the Aida Refugee Camp in the West Bank. There, Palestinian families have been exposed to periods of near-daily tear-gas use by Israeli soldiers. No one is safe—not people cooking dinner at home or children walking to school. “That’s happening now in the U.S., too,” Dr. Haar says. “The experience in Aida is kind of a warning.” Indeed, a federal judge ordered ICE to stop its use of tear gas in Oregon last month after the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on behalf of protesters. In his filing, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Simon wrote, “Defendants’ conduct – physically harming protesters and journalists without prior dispersal warnings – is objectively chilling.” At least one additional case also focuses on the federal government’s recent use of chemical weapons in Portland. The Meteor reached out to Customs and Border Protection to understand its reasoning behind officers’ liberal use of tear gas. The agency did not comment, but Gregory Bovino, the ICE official who led the Minnesota operation and lost his job in January, has defended the use of chemical weapons as a favorable alternative to “lethal devices.” In Minneapolis, ICE agents have also deployed tear gas outside people’s apartments and buildings, where the chemicals can and do seep indoors. The weapons are most toxic in enclosed spaces. The day officers killed Pretti, Asha, the street medic, fled into an apartment building to catch a break. “The air inside was almost as bad as the air outside,” she recalls. “You were standing inside and coughing,” Asha says. Tear gas “was seeping into every apartment in that hallway.”  PEOPLE IN MINNEAPOLIS RUN FROM TEAR GAS—WHICH FEDERAL AGENTS USED WIDELY THE DAY THEY KILLED NURSE ALEX PRETTI. (PHOTO BY STEPHEN MATUREN/GETTY IMAGES) For those who aren’t familiar with the chemicals, stepping outside of one’s home can feel completely normal—until the stinging, dry stench hits, explains Minneapolis resident Slime Seamstress, a 31-year-old trans seamstress using their soon-to-be legal name. They were exposed to tear gas twice in January. They never attended a protest; exposure occurred instead during routine walks to pick up groceries or meet a friend. About a week later, they menstruated for more than 30 days straight. After three weeks of bleeding, they went to see their doctor, who suggested that the tear gas had caused the disruption. “That’s what scared me,” Seamstress says. “They said that it seemed serious.” Seamstress didn’t have the means to purchase more menstrual products after their supply ran out, so they sewed their own reusable pads with the fabrics they had at home. They can’t afford a gas mask, a $40-230+ product which has become essential for many Minnesotans, either. At the height of protests, Seamstress avoided leaving the house. “A HIGHLY TENSE SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL SITUATION”Staying home isn’t an option for everyone. Timothy Monko, a former post-doctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota, has investigated these chemicals, contributing to a 2021 paper scrutinizing the safety of tear gas. The research’s takeaway was clear: “We should not be using it without actually understanding its effects,” Monko says. Those findings were enough to scare him and his wife: They may want more children in the future, so his wife carried her gas mask everywhere when ICE officers were regularly facing off against local community responders this winter. Monko isn’t the only researcher to make similar conclusions. Public health expert Patricia Huerta has heard accounts of irregular menstrual cycles and miscarriages following tear gas exposure in Chile. The associate professor of public health and medicine at Chile’s University of Concepción published a 2023 paper focused on the 2019 social uprisings there, where police used crowd control agents during protests. She’s unsure whether chemical exposure alone is to blame for people’s symptoms—or whether it acts in combination with the trauma people experience during these law enforcement confrontations. “It’s a highly tense social and psychological situation,” Huerta says. “It’s quite stressful. It’s the smoke. It’s the smell. It’s a policeman pointing at you with a shotgun that you don’t know will shoot a tear gas canister or a rubber bullet.” Every researcher interviewed for this story agrees that there is a lot regulators still don’t understand about the long-term impacts of exposure to various types of chemical agents, but that they know enough to say with confidence that ICE’s recent use of tear gas and pepper spray isn’t safe. In the meantime, Seamstress is anxious over their next menstrual cycle. Asha, the street medic, remains available should her neighbors need her again. She’ll respond to emergencies however she can as long as her community is under attack. “Through all this, we’re just trying to meet the needs of our community,” she says. “We’re just looking after our neighbors….If it’s dropping off groceries or helping people pay rent, then it’s that. If it’s helping people who have been tear-gassed or pepper-sprayed, then we do that. We’re just helping in whatever way we can.”  ABOUT YESSENIA FUNESYessenia Funes is an environmental journalist focused on uplifting the voices of society's most oppressed. She publishes a climate-justice newsletter called Possibilities, and has been published in The Guardian, The Verge, Yale Climate Connections, National Geographic, New York Magazine, and more.  ENJOY MORE OF THE METEOR Thanks for reading the Saturday Send. Got this from a friend? Don’t forget to sign up for The Meteor’s flagship newsletter, sent on Tuesdays and Thursdays. |
An influencer vs. “sex-pest” culture
  April 16, 2026 Hey Meteor friends, Cindi here—coming to you with a short-n-sweet send, kind of a palate cleanser to wash away whatever foul taste is in your mouth after a week that brought us the Alpine divorce, unholy White House delusions, and the unmitigated horror that is the Rape Academy (a story broken by CNN last month but only seeping into our consciousness now). It has not been a week to renew one’s faith in mankind. However! Humankind continues to be awesome, in the face of all this awfulness. When I asked Meteor colleagues what was inspiring them, I heard about astronaut Victor Glover greeting his neighbors, the cast of Born to Bowl, and one truth-telling American in a robe. And here’s one more item to add to that lineup: the fact that the overdue reckoning that came for the creeps of Capitol Hill this week was engineered, in part, by Instagram influencers who heard loud whispers of sexual misconduct against Rep. Eric Swalwell and weren’t willing to just let it go. DC power brokers accused them of being backed by MAGA, or by billionaires, “but it was just us in our group chat!” one of them, Arielle Fodor (aka Mrs. Frazzled), told Brittany Packnett Cunningham on UNDISTRACTED this week.  I won’t spoil your listen—it’s a good one—but Arielle shares how she and her collaborators collected information, took measures to protect the women sharing their stories (including finding them legal support, and even new job offers), and ultimately helped lay the groundwork for robust reporting by the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN, and, quite quickly, Swalwell’s resignation from the California governor’s race and from Congress. The bottom line? As Brittany says, “it's high time that we understand that whether we like the person or not, Democrat or Republican, doesn't dictate how accountable they should be. There's no possible way for a culture of exploitation and extraction to end if we only hold the people accountable that we don't agree with, whose music we don't really care for, who we didn't vote for. It's on us to hold the bar for every single person.” Enjoy the episode. Enjoy your evening. Enjoy whatever your bright spots are. The Meteor  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend?  |
When The Guy is Accused of Sex Abuse
  April 14, 2026 Hey there, Meteor readers, It’s taken longer than expected, but I have finally listened to all of ARIRANG in one sitting, and phew 😮💨 if it weren’t for my spinal problems and unreliable knees, I’d be at a rave somewhere right now messing up the choreo to Hooligan.  In today’s newsletter, we’re talking about now-former-Congressman Eric Swalwell and the weight of women’s whispers. Plus, an overwhelming but positive week for the people of Hungary. Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONThe loudest whispers: Just days after accusations of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and sex with interns went public through a combination of traditional reporting and dedicated influencers, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) has ended his campaign for governor and resigned from Congress. (He maintains that the allegations against him are false and only that he’s “made mistakes in judgement.”) The news of Swalwell’s resignation was quickly followed by that of Rep.Tony Gonzales (R-Tx.) who also stepped down in light of an investigation into his relationship with a former aide. If one didn’t know any better, this would be a moment to celebrate the seemingly swift downfall of men who were the masters of their own destruction. But instead we’re left to assess a larger problem, particularly within the Democratic Party. Over the last few years, Swalwell, who entered Congress at 32 and is now 45, has been positioned by the Democratic Party and the media as a bridge between young voters and an aging party in need of resuscitation. In 2016, as the Dems were feathering their nests for what we all believed would be another four years of their party running the show, Swalwell was crowned the “Snapchat king of Congress” by none other than the internet queen herself, Taylor Lorenz. (Ironically, it would be that same platform he would later use to allegedly send unsolicited dick videos to women.) Swalwell was expertly using the platform to bring in new voters and show the ins and outs of Congress, becoming what Politico called a “something for everyone” kind of candidate. Up until this week, Swalwell had a strong chance of succeeding Gavin Newsom with a healthy bloc of Democratic endorsements, and the backing of at least one billionaire donor. He was, at least in California, The Guy. And yet, he was The Guy despite a years-old whisper network about his alleged behavior, which included sexting his subordinates and at least three allegations of rape. After the allegations were published last week, much of the response from political insiders on both sides was that “everyone” already knew. The same way so many people knew about Harvey Weinstein. And R. Kelly. And Jeffrey Epstein. And Donald Trump. So why didn’t this reckoning happen years ago? Well, according to a Sacramento lobbyist who spoke to Politico, part of the reason is that those in the know were “willing to delude ourselves or not ask the questions that should have been asked.”  SUPPORTERS DURING SWALWELL'S SHORT-LIVED PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN IN 2019. INTERESTING THAT HIS TAG LINE INVOLVED THE PHRASE "DO GOOD." (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Some folks, however, did ask the question. Political consultant Mike Trujillo, who had been collecting stories from women about Swalwell since 2017, told Politico this week that when he tried pitching what he knew to reporters, Swalwell’s camp discredited him. Eventually, Trujillo found that after Swalwell dropped out of the 2019 presidential primary, women had “lost interest” in sharing their experiences. The rumors persisted, but the story went nowhere. That’s partly because, as a society, we’re trained not to immediately believe women. But in this particular situation, there’s another factor: the unspoken quest for the great white hope. Since the racist backlash against the Obama administration became clear, Democrats have been on the hunt for the next person who could be a one-size-fits-all savior with a magical ability to unite people of all walks. It couldn’t be Joe Biden (too old), Bernie Sanders (too left), or Hillary Clinton (too woman-y). So the party has increasingly turned its attentions to younger, maler candidates with the same popcorn quality as Swalwell: white and easily made palatable to as many voters as possible, regardless of their actual politics—as evidenced by the fawning, thirsty, sometimes horny coverage similar candidates get. These men aren’t just politicians who drew national attention by accident; they’re the well-tended, well-protected seeds of the party. Women in politics who speak up about sexual harassment and assault have long been treated like a “political inconvenience,” as journalist Grecia Figueroa writes, rather than victims of a system that protects abusers regardless of party lines. The insiders who already knew about Swalwell’s track record with women could have easily slowed down his rise or stopped it altogether. After all, this secret was so well-known that a sitting member of Congress reportedly admitted to Arielle Fodor (aka Mrs. Frazzled), one of the women who exposed Swalwell, that the rumors about him were true. But instead, legislators waited until the rumors made it onto CNN to withdraw support and virtue-signal that they really do believe women. Just not the first time. AND:Shortly after the 2024 election, writer Megan Carpentier sought advice about how to fight authoritarianism from activists who’d done it around the world. One of those activists, professor and former member of Hungary’s National Assembly Gábor Scheiring, gave his thoughts on Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s “electoral autocracy”; at the time, Scheiring said that we can’t protect democracy by “just talking about how important it is to have a constitutional court…The overwhelming majority of people don’t really think in these terms. They are concerned about inflation and real wages and unemployment and inequality.” On Sunday, that autocracy came to an end with the landslide election of the center-right Tisza Party’s Péter Magyar and, after 16 years, Orbán’s ouster. Hungarians celebrated in the street, Americans felt a bit envious, and Carpentier emailed Scheiring to get his thoughts. He attributed Orbán’s defeat primarily to those same economic factors he listed in 2024—a relevant data point for those of us raging against Trump. “Orbán tried to reframe the election around geopolitics, parading his friendships with Trump and Putin,” Scheiring said. “But you cannot eat a foreign policy alignment, and Hungarians decided they had had enough.” While the magnitude of change under Magyar is “an open question,” Scheiring said, “at the very least, a door has been opened that many Hungarians had stopped believing would ever open.” May it open wide around the globe.  WOW IMAGINE HAVING A PARTY IN THE STREETS AFTER SUCCESSFULLY VOTING OUT AN AUTHORITARIAN...ONE DAY! (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
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Where Abby Wambach Finds Hope
 April 10, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, Yesterday, a historic event took place in the heart of New York City—Nona and I met for the first time in person, even though we have worked together over several years, not just here at The Meteor, but at a previous job as well. The good news is there was no frame-mogging, as the kids say, but the awful news is that our combined beauty overheated the room we were in. We will be kept separated until winter. In today’s newsletter, we celebrate the return of UNDISTRACTED with guests Abby Wambach and Glennon Doyle. Plus, the worst-kept secret in America is revealed, and a new professional sports league crowns its champions. IRLmaxxing, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONEyes on the ball: Do you ever wonder why women’s sports feels like such a balm when everything else is…less balm-like? It isn’t just that visibility of women athletes themselves is on the rise. There’s something more to it, and soccer icon Abby Wambach—who, along with her wife, activist Glennon Doyle, was a guest this week on UNDISTRACTED with Brittany Packnett Cunningham—perfectly laid out what that something is. “It’s more than just watching women play,” she says. “It feels like something activism-adjacent.” Back in 2019, the USWNT began demanding pay equity, and Wambach was one of their most vocal advocates. Now, basketball players who were once using public restrooms to change before professional games have successfully negotiated a CBA that increased salary caps by 300 percent. And that didn’t just happen, Wambach points out—women worked together to do it, a strategy female athletes have had to employ for years. In the 1970s, “you’ve got Billie Jean King unifying a group of women to sign $1 contracts to create the Women's Tennis Association,” Wambach explains. Then “you have Title IX happening in the United States…and then you look forward, you see this boom of popularity. But what is never talked about and I think is so important is the reason why that happened was collective unity.” Wambach puts it this way: “It’s a very feminine idea that in order to have the most amount of people get the things they want out of their life, we have to figure out how to unify.” Oh, and you know what Wambach’s not feeling? The price gouging of the World Cup. “The sport competitor side [of me] is like, it's going to be such an exciting time,” she says. “But families…and fans can't go unless they pay like $10,000 for a ticket. It’s commodifying and corporatizing these things that have a beautiful essence. And I think that's why women's sports are having such a moment—because it's not totally commodified and taken over by the corporate landscape. Those people sitting in those seats…actually care.” To hear the full conversation (including Glennon on raising a boy in the manosphere) and get extremely hyped for what’s to come with women’s sports, check out the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts.  AND:
ONE MORE THING...New York friends/theater buffs/feminists lookin’ for weekend plans: These are your last few days to see “Antigone (This Play I Read in High School)” at the Public Theater. Our colleague Cindi Leive and podcast host Regina Mahone (of The A-Files) sat down with the cast and creators after a performance of the play, which reimagines Antigone as a fierce young woman who happens to be pregnant and is defying her uncle Creon’s Thebes-wide abortion ban to do what she wants. In one of the play’s best moments, Antigone (the riveting Susannah Perkins) says to her uncle, Creon (Tony Shalhoub): “These ears, these eyes, this hair, these knees, if there's anything we have in this world, that's it. Your own body is it. The conversation with yourself that never ends.” “For me, that speech really is the heart of the play,” playwright Anna Ziegler told us onstage. “It's the moment when Antigone is claiming the dignity that her body deserves.” She does, and it’s worth seeing.  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
Is your state pro-life or pro-death?
  April 7, 2026 Good evening, Meteor readers, The coverage of Artemis II’s voyage to the moon has been pretty heartwarming, no? It’s a rare moment of unity during a politically volatile time, probably similar to how Americans must have felt in 1969—except instead of witnessing “one giant leap for mankind,” we’re seeing Christina Koch become the first woman to fly around the moon on a mission that passes the Bechdel test. A marked improvement on an already nice thing! Speaking of unity, today we’re examining what red and blue states have in common in a post-Dobbs world. Plus, the ripple effects of the Iran war, and a highly suspect reading list. Artemis is a woman, Nona Willis Aronowitz   WHAT'S GOING ONDivided states of abortion: Yesterday, I saw two news items directly next to each other in my feed: One announced a new study published in JAMA finding that abortion pills are so safe that they likely meet the Food and Drug Administration criteria for over-the-counter sale. The other covered yet another arrest, this one in Texas, of a pregnant woman who had taken the exact same pills. In that moment, seeing these two stories in my field of vision, I experienced a kind of whiplash that has become familiar to me during the nearly four years since the Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion. On the one hand, we now know that abortion pills belong in the family planning aisle of drugstores, and liberal states believe in the medication’s safety so much that many have passed laws to protect doctors who prescribe them for out-of-state patients. On the other hand, in conservative states with abortion bans, abortion doctors and the pregnant people they treat are criminals. Depending on where you live, abortion is now either basic healthcare or grounds for murder charges and extradition. When it comes to abortion, are we now living in two Americas? On a fundamental level of human rights, Reproductive Freedom for All president Mini Timmaraju tells The Meteor, the answer is yes. Simply put, women in states with abortion bans are “second class citizens” living in a “segregated society,” she says. “We should call them ‘pro-women's death states’ and ‘pro-women's lives states.’ I mean, it's that extreme…Those red states are willing to basically torture women in pregnancy and create conditions where they are actively dying.”  WOULD HAVE LOVED TO BE A FLY ON THE WALL AT THIS CONFRONTATION. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) But, Timmaraju says, the reality is more nuanced. In a sense, red states and blue states are in the same situation: They’re responding to a state of emergency—and they can learn from each other’s reactions. Some blue states are enacting shield laws, passing constitutional amendments, and funneling millions of dollars into abortion services. Democratic governors like Illinois’ JB Pritzker, Maryland’s Wes Moore, and New Mexico’s Michelle Lujan Grisham “feel a heightened sense of responsibility to their neighboring states,” Timmaraju says, and “are going above and beyond to do everything they can to not just protect abortion care, but invest in access.” These states are modeling the kind of abortion-is-healthcare approach that all Americans are entitled to—which, as the midterms approach, is a good reminder that “you can change your elected officials.” But there’s a danger in thinking of abortion bans as a red-state problem, Timmaraju warns—in part because the goal of conservatives, who now control all three branches of government, is to make those laws, and those deaths, the norm for all of us. “I do think blue-state citizens are complacent because they don't understand the reach that [the Trump] administration has,” Timmaraju says. Dobbs was never going to be the last word on abortion; as we speak, the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services are trying to figure out how to restrict abortion pills nationwide. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency tasked its scientists with finding detection methods for trace amounts of mifepristone in wastewater—even though other scientists say there’s absolutely no evidence of this. (Suddenly Trump’s EPA cares about water contaminants?) Timmaraju says all the studies in the world affirming abortion pills’ safety will not stop these efforts. Republicans “already know they’re safe,” she says. “It's bullshit.”  MINI TIMMARAJU TO THE SUPREME COURT: THIS ISN’T OVER. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) And in the face of this kind of federal oppression, women in more liberal states should take a lesson from those already living under it. Blue states will have to take a cue from “the resilience and the courage” of community organizations, abortion funds, and individuals in abortion-ban states “finding any way to have abortions because it's life or death for them,” Timmaraju says. Like low-income women of color and immigrants, whose access to abortion has always been restricted even before Roe fell, they’ll have to “find ways to make it work.” Ultimately, Timmaraju notes, the real divide isn’t some states versus other states anyway; it’s “governments and policymakers versus the people.” The majority of Americans support abortion rights, and have done so for decades. Even a slim majority of Republican women would be in favor of a nationwide law guaranteeing abortion access. It’s why far-right abortion extremists keep losing when abortion is on the ballot, even in red states like Kentucky. In other words, it’s only our government that’s divided. We’ve been united about abortion for a long time. AND
 WHERE CAN I GET THESE MERMAID-IN-TRAINING COSTUMES FOR MY DAUGHTERS? (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
And one more thing: April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. If you’re a survivor or if you know someone who is (i.e., if you’re a human being), take the Survivor Justice Network national survey, to help close the data gap for survivors.  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
The "Birth" in Birthright
  April 2, 2026 Greetings Meteor readers, Big news! UNDISTRACTED with Brittany Packnett Cunningham has been nominated for two Webby awards! Voting is now open, and you can support us by clicking here and here, and firmly instructing your loved ones to do the same The polls are open until the 16th, so send this to your friends, your family, a neighbor, anyone with an email address. And if this celebration of UNDISTRACTED is making you miss the show, then you’re in luck: Season Four is on the way!  In today’s newsletter, we focus on the people who would be targeted the most if birthright citizenship evaporated: mothers and their babies. Plus, a quick trip to the moon. Vote for UNDISTRACTED, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONStateless: Yesterday, the Supreme Court—and for a brief moment, Donald Trump—heard oral arguments for Trump v. Barbara, the case to determine whether or not the president’s 2025 executive order ending birthright citizenship is constitutional or enforceable. As legal experts have pointed out, the government’s argument is entirely based on openly racist notions of who gets to be an American. What Wednesday’s arguments also made abundantly clear is that Trump’s administration has been so hyper-focused on removing immigrants via all available avenues it hasn’t stopped to consider the logistics of this order, especially when it comes to the “birth” part of birthright citizenship. “Are you suggesting that when a baby is born, people have to…present documents?” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked yesterday. “Is this happening in the delivery room?...Are we bringing in pregnant women for depositions?” Even most of the conservative justices seemed skeptical, including Amy Coney Barrett: “I can imagine it being messy on some applications…How would it work? How would you adjudicate these cases?” Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the man arguing on behalf of the administration, didn’t have clear answers. But he insisted that non-citizens who have children in the U.S. were “jumping[ing] in front of those who follow the rules,” as if having a child here would give those parents protection from deportation or detention. (It doesn’t.) The government may have shrugged at these questions, but we (and legal experts) are pretty sure of one thing: A ban on birthright citizenship would put enormous stress on the lives of expectant and new parents. In fact, this case only exists because of immigrant mothers who worried so much about the implications of the executive order that they sued the U.S. government. Over the last year, DHS has deported roughly 300 pregnant or postpartum women. Those who had U.S.-born children—like Heidy Sanchez, Cecil Elvir-Quinonez, and Nayra Guzman—were separated from those children by law enforcement. Under the 14th Amendment, these children are full citizens. But the government is proposing that instead of being granted citizenship, those children should provide evidence that at least one of their parents is a citizen in order to be considered for citizenship themselves. If they cannot do that, they will become, in legal terms, “stateless,” belonging to no nation and a citizen to nowhere. So where should those children go? Should we send them to jail? Or deport them? But to where, if they were born in the U.S? And how long would DHS wait after a woman gives birth to pursue a case against her—would agents show up in the recovery room at the hospital? At a woman’s six-week appointment after delivering? If a child is stateless and not subject to the “gift of American citizenship,” as Sauer put it, then are they also not protected by laws like this one, which confirms that abandoned children of unknown parentage are citizens? The end of birthright citizenship would, in the words of Samuel Breidbart and Maryjane Johnson of the Brennan Center for Justice, “create a new subclass of people lacking the full rights and protections long enjoyed by citizens.” Denied social security numbers, they would be without standard access to health care and education, and could “end up deported to foreign countries where they have never lived and where their welfare would be endangered.” All of this would create a culture of fear for everyone, immigrant or otherwise. “Under the new legal regime the order would create, everyone would be vulnerable to having their citizenship questioned,” notes Breidbart and Johnson. Even legal citizens would have to make sure they take their paperwork with them on the way to giving birth—or, frankly, to anywhere else. Think about that for a moment. If you were stopped right now on your way to the grocery store, how would you prove your citizenship? How would you prove your parents’ citizenship? Now imagine being asked those questions a woman in labor…or a five-year-old in the back of an ICE vehicle. AND:
 DON'T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU ON THE WAY OUT. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
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Soooo We Read Lindy West's Memoir
  March 31, 2026 Salutations, Meteor readers, I cannot remember the last time I felt so betrayed by two people I don’t actually know. Summer House’s West and Amanda have confirmed their “connection” in a joint Instagram statement, and I am physically ill.  In today’s newsletter, we’re digging into another bit of online drama that has dragged almost every feminist you know into the ring. That’s right, it’s the Lindy West discourse, and The Meteor’s Nona Willis Aronowitz and Rebecca Carroll think they understand why everyone cares about this so much. But before that, let’s take a look at the news. Unwell, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ON
 Yes, We Read the Damn BookWhy Lindy West’s memoir has hit such a nerve BY NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ & REBECCA CARROLL  LINDY AT THE PREMIERE OF HER 2019 SERIES, SHRILL. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) By now you’ve probably gotten wind of Lindy West’s new memoir, Adult Braces—which, among other things, details how millennial feminist writer West and her husband, Ahamefule Oluo, came to be in a throuple. After all, seemingly every single person on the internet has already given their two cents. So why, in our usually atomized pop culture world, is this story hitting a nerve? Is it because, amid misogyny’s comeback, we’ve become hyper-protective of our feminist heroes? Or because, as my colleague Rebecca Carroll points out below, it’s an “extraordinary confluence” of sex, gender, race, body image, and everything we’ve been debating for years? Or do we just all want to escape to a time when the latest viral Jezebel post was top-of-mind, versus, I dunno, war or the death of democracy? Eventually, Rebecca and I felt we had no choice: We had to read this book and talk about it. Nona: One thing that has irked me about this public conversation is that it’s clear much of the peanut gallery has not read the actual book. Now that we’ve both read it, what do you think? Rebecca: Two things can be true: The book can be good, well-written, and insightful, which I think it is. And the discourse around it can be messy. [One thing that the discussion about the book does get right] is that it sounds like Lindy is married to a narcissist. Early on she writes, “If there's one impressive/excruciating thing about Aham, it's that he doesn't do anything he doesn't want to do.” I mean.  WEST (RIGHT), WITH HER PARTNERS ROYA AMIRSOLEYMANI (L) AND AHAMEFULE OLUO DURING A 2022 INTERVIEW ABOUT POLYAMORY. (SCREENSHOT VIA YOUTUBE) Nona: Yeah, he doesn’t come off great. But I still believe she's telling the truth about her journey to break down her codependency and discover her sexuality, even if it’s messy. This is important with a feminist memoir, because my feminism is very much about revealing the complex truth of our lives and not squeezing them into a narrative, whether that's a conservative, socially acceptable narrative, or a narrative of what feminists think we should want. This dynamic is precisely the reason why Lindy was so afraid to be superhonest before, because her fans had her in a particular box, whether it was about body positivity or her perfect wedding. Rebecca: Yes, another thing that is very clear [from this controversy] is that if Lindy cannot choose what she wants to choose, that’s not feminism. It’s a foundational flaw of this historically exclusive movement: When people push back on its norms, there becomes a rift and a chasm. Which is why I'm very much like, “Burn it all down.” Nona: Besides the state of feminism, the polyamory element to this story has hit such a nerve. People are, for lack of a better term, so “triggered” by polyamory. They often don't accept it unless it’s a completely perfect relationship (which, of course, doesn’t exist). I am nonmonogamous and have read a ton about it, but even a casual reader can tell that Lindy’s initial desire for monogamy is extremely fear-based. She’s absorbed cultural messages of monogamy as a shorthand for being “chosen” and safe and honored. Rebecca: I don't agree. I don’t think it's fair to her instincts to say that her reasons for wanting monogamy are based solely on cultural messaging. Nona: But she herself questions why she’s terrified of nonmonogamy. She has a chapter called “Naked and Afraid”—which I have not seen cited once in the million articles I’ve read!—about her sexual repression, which she writes is “corrosive, stunting.” She’s always felt “shut like a vault,” in a “fat-girl apology cloak.” And she deeply wanted to break out of that! Polyamory, if it's done right, really respects the “unassailable separateness” of each partner, as the gawdess Esther Perel has put it. Lindy’s related conclusion—that polyamory can be an antidote to codependency—felt very earned, and very ignored in all the chatter about how this supposed feminist “let herself” be coerced into a throuple. Rebecca: And then there’s the race factor, which I think is really important. [Aham connects monogamy’s idea of ownership to slavery, which] completely preys on West’s white guilt and white saviorism that we as Black folks are always critical of. In the book, she talks about going to get this rental van, and there's this oversexualized Black woman emblazoned on the side of it. And she was like, "I can't possibly, as a white woman, drive this van into the deep South…unless the person who painted this image said, ‘Lindy, please drive my masterpiece far and wide for the culture.’" And I feel like that's essentially what Aham is saying to her: "Drive my masterpiece of polyamory far and wide,” as if he’s the one who invented the practice. Nona: Oof, yes. There are so many layers to this story! Rebecca: I think that’s why everyone is losing their minds over this book. It's an extraordinary confluence of everything that has been building in the zeitgeist over the past decade. It has gender norms and preferred pronouns and non-binary sexuality and performative millennial feminism and racial justice and body image politics. Among many other things, it’s making us look closer at the way a white millennial feminist married to a Black nonbinary male-presenting person [Aham uses him/they pronouns] continues to center herself. And the place that we’re working this out first is on the internet, on social media, where there’s this sort of default knee-jerk judgment and snark. But I feel heartened by the fact that all of these things have come together in this watershed moment. Nona: Really? To me this moment feels like backlash city; Helen Lewis gleefully pronounced millennial feminism dead in The Atlantic (and everyone from Roxane Gay to RBG caught strays). Why do you feel heartened? Rebecca: It’s an opportunity to look at human behavior while we’re still looking at, and caring about, human behavior. Apart from it playing out on the internet, it’s a wholly natural disaster involving real people with real lives, trying to figure out how to be with each other, in their bodies and emotions and identities. It’s so important to recognize that these things still matter.  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
