Good evening, Meteor readers,

Do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior, Arlette Amuli? No, but seriously. I know a lot of you are fans of dating shows, and Amuli is the creator and host of the most riveting dating show I have seen since Blind Date (the original, not the reboot). It’s called Pop the Balloon or Find Love. You can catch it on YouTube and thank me later, especially after you’ve gone through the emotional roller coaster that is “Doctor Elom.” IYKYK.

In today’s newsletter, we wade gently into the murky waters of President Biden’s campaign. While some Democrats are standing firmly with him, others are looking over his shoulder to see who might be next (we do have a vice president, right?). Plus, Scarlett Harris talks to writer Emma Specter about her new memoir More, Please, and your weekend reading list.

🧷🎈♥️,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

Dance of Democrats: The will-he-or-won’t-he saga of President Biden’s 2024 run might feel like a breezy House of the Dragon subplot if only the entire concept of representative democracy in the U.S. weren’t at stake. This week, calls for Biden to step aside for a more viable and virile candidate increased, with multiple Democratic congresspeople weighing in. Even George Clooney, of married-to-Amal fame, wrote an op-ed about how Biden should make way for a new nominee, which is notable since Clooney raised $28 million for Biden just three weeks ago. “We can put our heads in the sand and pray for a miracle in November,” he wrote, “or we can speak the truth.”

So far, Biden has doubled down in response to the growing fears over his ability to beat Trump and the Project 2025 army, but there are signs of tiny cracks in his resilience: the New York Times reported today that the campaign is conducting a survey about whether voters might prefer Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket in a match-up against Trump. And as the Times notes, a lot rests on the (unscripted) news conference Biden is delivering tonight in the wake of the NATO summit: If it goes the way of the debate, party leaders might defect from Biden. (Harris, or Gretchen Whitmer, or Gavin Newsome, or JB Pritzker have all been floated at various times as Biden replacements.) There’s also the question of whether the Democratic Party would have already asked Biden to step aside if VP Harris were white and a man—even though a recent poll showed her chances of beating Trump are better than Biden’s. (Some progressives have even been rallying around the “KHive” on social media, which has been flooded with enthusiastic jokes about loving context and coconut trees.) Either way, the Democratic Party needs to straighten out its shit quick—there are only about 16 weeks until the election, and beating an autocratic rapist felon should simply not be this fraught. Democracy, as the DCCC texts keep reminding me, hangs in the balance.

—Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

AND:

• Researchers have found that women in the workplace experience more burnout than their male counterparts, mostly due to the expectations placed on women to succeed at work while taking on the bulk of household responsibilities. So, has anyone shown this research to the members of Congress who voted against a national paid family leave policy? Asking for a (tired) friend.

• Shelley Duvall, The Shining scream queen and Popeye’s perfect Olive Oyl (among many other roles) has died of diabetes complications. Playing “He Needs Me” in her memory.

SHELLEY DUVALL (VIA GETTY IMAGES)

• Doctors and weapons experts are finding “many of the deaths, amputations and life-changing wounds” afflicted on children in Gaza are due to “fragmentation” weapons fired by the Israeli military in crowded civilian areas. These kinds of weapons are designed to “maximize casualties” by sending shrapnel flying; more than a thousand children in Gaza are now amputees, and an estimated 7000 or more have been killed.

• The Environmental Protection Agency has ordered Marathon Oil to pay $241.5 million, the largest-ever civil penalty for violating the Clean Air Act, for polluting air in the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation with its oil and gas plants there. Marathon is also expected to severely reduce its carbon emissions as part of the judgment. Meanwhile, the people who actually live at Fort Berthold—the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation—are reclaiming their history as farmers by building a huge greenhouse to remedy its isolation from fresh produce, an effort to create food sovereignty and feed people on their and other reservations—and they’re using the natural gas emissions of their exploited land to heat said greenhouse.

• Katy Perry’s new single and video for “Woman’s World” drops tonight, and she’s already gotten a legitimate bit of flak for collaborating on a woman’s empowerment anthem with Dr. Luke, the longtime producer who Kesha accused of drugging and raping her (and then refusing for years to let her out of their recording deal). One person who should not be getting flak, though, is actor and advocate Abigail Breslin, who called out the song and, more generally, working with abusers—and now says she is getting death threats for it. To quote Kesha… this party sucks.

• Scientists are inching ever closer to reviving the extinct wooly mammoth. It would be great if scientists took this level of fascination and funding and applied it to something less Jurrassic Parky, like, oh, I don’t know, understanding menopause.

BOOK TALK

Giving Oneself Permission to Want More

Writer Emma Specter on her new memoir about binge-eating, coming out, and fat acceptance.

BY SCARLETT HARRIS

EMMA SPECTER ENJOYING DESSERT WITH A SIDE OF HER NEW BOOK (SCREENSHOT VIA INSTAGRAM)

Landing a culture-writer position at Vogue five years ago was a dream job for Emma Specter. But on their first day, they had to call out sick after a particularly brutal binge-eating session, a disorder they’ve struggled with since childhood. “My eating disorder was so out of control that I’d managed to let it rob me of my first day at Vogue,” Specter writes in her thoughtful, unflinching new memoir, More, Please: On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing, and the Lust for “Enough.”

Since then, Specter has carved out a niche at Vogue which she calls “the body beat,” helping to bring body–positive content to a publication that has historically been anything but. “I’m glad to say that offering something different has been really rewarding,” Specter tells The Meteor. “I think there is a hunger within women’s media for stories that… speak to a larger range of experiences.”

In More, Please, Specter explores how they began “coming around to the idea that more can be good. While Specter is delighted by the early praise for More, Please, she “hope[s] that we get to a point where this book is no longer relevant because it’s not newsworthy that a fat person is vaguely at peace with themselves.”

Scarlett Harris: This book is not only the journey of your binge-eating disorder and fat acceptance, but of coming to terms with your queerness. Did you always know you wanted those ideas to be intertwined in the narrative of this book?

Emma Specter: Before I started writing, I hadn’t really thought of queerness and disordered eating as being as linked as they were. But it was impossible to move into a phase of my life in which I was dating the people I wanted to date, being aware of my sexual and gender identity…and not also want to investigate why I’m consistently making choices with food that feel bad and hard for me. The [binge eating] behaviors weren’t necessarily new or specific to when I came out, but the desire to understand them more and have them become less frequent definitely felt linked.

You write about all the ways you tried to whittle yourself down to a certain mold women are taught we should fit, especially when you were dating cishet men. You’ve since found happiness and acceptance in your body and the queer community, but did you have a similar feeling when you were first dating women? 

I thought I would be, but when I actually started dating and having romantic and sexual experiences with people whose bodies looked similar to mine or were sorted on the same gender scale as mine, it really was the last thing on my mind. There was plenty of anxiety around coming out for me, but as an out and fat person now, I do feel a sense of relief that I don’t have to sort my life around trying to appeal to men anymore. No queer relationship freed me from that forever—it’s still something I have to negotiate—but it’s an incredible freedom to acknowledge that I was living my life chasing the approval of men and be able to release that.

You quote in the book a 2022 study by the Trevor Project that found that members of the LGBTQIA+ community are more likely to experience eating disorders. Did learning about that change how you [thought about] your own eating disorder?

I had this wrong idea when I settled into queer identity…that since I was out now, everything else in my life must fall into place, because that was the answer I was searching for my whole life of why I didn’t feel like I fit in in certain places, or why I didn’t feel comfortable in my own body, or why I didn’t have a good relationship to sex. But coming out was just the beginning.

I wish it weren’t the case that it’s such a common thing among queer, trans and gender-nonconforming people to feel bad inside your body. Food or exercise or messing with how your body looks and feels is always accessible, and is there for you when it feels like nothing else is. It’s such a common response to a systemic problem.

So often when we think of those who suffer from eating disorders, the image we have in our minds is of an underweight person. How important was it for you to highlight that eating disorders come in all forms and particularly how they affect fat people?

So important. It’s really hard to see yourself making your way to a place of recovery when you feel like you’re not represented in recovery narratives. There is an erasure of dignity [in] society’s incredulosity that a fat person struggles with an eating disorder. I feel that everyone struggling with disordered eating should be afforded a level of respect for the process of healing that, unfortunately, most of us don’t get.

The title, More, Please, and part of the subtitle, “The Lust for Enough,” have multiple meanings. Can you talk a little about that?

My editor Rachel Kambury pointed out the many meanings that More, Please could have—not just [about wanting more food] but also wanting more from my personal life, wanting more from my professional life, and giving myself permission to want more. I’m coming around to the idea that more can be good. It’s a celebration of saying: What if I was open about my desires?

WEEKEND READING 📚

On broken promises: Ahead of the Olympics, Paris has been much praised for its strides to clean up the city and lessen the carbon emissions from the games. But part of that plan has included busing unhoused people out of Paris, luring them with the promise of housing elsewhere. An investigation found something much different. (The New York Times)

On the meaning of words: Why are we still using the word “porn” to describe sexually explicit non-consensual images? (The 19th)

On bad influences: The extremist anti-abortion activist whose draconian, self-published book is shifting Republican politics. (ProPublica)

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