How We Became the 99%

September 17, 2026

Occupy Wall Street, 15 years later ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

September 17, 2026

Salutations, Meteor readers,

Yesterday, I wore a hoodie all day, and it was glorious. Today I stepped outside and it’s like I was entering a sauna. Can we not have multiple seasons in a single week, please?

In today’s newsletter, we grapple with the lessons of Occupy Wall Street, 15 years after the first protesters arrived at Zuccotti Park. Plus, new reports on sleep, birth control, and girls in sports. And, of course, a little mood booster to send you into the weekend.

Removing the sweater,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

We are (still) the 99 percent: Fifteen years ago today, the first Occupy Wall Street protesters set up camp in New York City’s Zuccotti Park. The aesthetic among the occupiers, who had created a microcosm of a leaderless society, was gutter punk-meets-Vietnam War-era demonstrator, complete with drum circles and tie-dye. The demands of this around-the-clock grassroots movement were diffuse: Abolish corporate greed, and capital punishment, and police violence, and war, and corporate censorship.

It was an unlikely start for what would eventually be a massive global movement. Many saw OWS as white-man coded and felt alienated from it, even though plenty of women, especially women of color like Nelini Stamp and Shaista Husain, helped found and develop the movement. I was initially skeptical, too, despite agreeing with the demands. To me, OWS’s message was too muddled, the 24/7 commitment too prohibitive. The movement “needs a public image that’s provocative but broadly appealing,” I wrote at the time. “And it needs to fit our lives.” I was more attracted to the clearer, narrower message of the Slutwalk protests.

TWO WEEKS IN, OCCUPY WALL STREET WAS GIVING ANARCHIST COLLECTIVE. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)

But then, very quickly, things shifted. Occupy crystallized its message with “We Are the 99 Percent,” a brilliant populist slogan (and Tumblr) that changed everything for me. Big labor unions like SEIU jumped on the bandwagon. Lots of feminists embraced the cause and created their own offshoots. Leftist titans like Judith Butler, Cornel West, and Naomi Klein made appearances at the encampment, followed by celebrities like Michael Moore and Talib Kweli. In less than a month, the movement had spread like wildfire to 951 cities across 82 countries.

Even President Obama eventually supported the movement, remarking that it reflected “broad-based frustration.” Meanwhile, Bain Capital cofounder and presidential candidate Mitt Romney would become a perfect foil for the OWS era, especially when a waiter later secretly recorded him at a donor event as he denigrated the 47% of Americans who don’t pay income taxes.

BY OCTOBER, OWS HAD TURNED INTO A MASS MOVEMENT. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Eventually, the cold weather came, and the revolution would not be winterized. Though Americans’ class awareness had grown, true concrete wins had thus far eluded the movement. When the last Occupy tents came down, many progressives (including me) felt deflated and depressed. But then, at a panel in 2013, organizer and scholar Dorian Warren said something I’ve since cited a million times: If this class-conscious era is a new civil rights movement, he explained, we’re only at the Montgomery bus boycott—almost ten years before President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from the aftermath of Occupy Wall Street, it’s that movements take time. They go through periods of backlash and retreat. Hard-won victories can show up years after watershed moments. The energy of OWS flowed into the Fight for $15 in 2012, which buoyed the surprise rise of Bernie Sanders in 2015, which led to the ascension of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “the squad” in 2018. Then came the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 (which had unmistakable class consciousness), Amazon workers unionizing in 2022, the election of Zohran Mamdani in 2025, and the Hot Socialist Summer of 2026.

All those movements and moments have Occupy Wall Street in their DNA, and they have it to thank for getting mainstream America to wrap its head around the wealth gap, which continues to grow. Today, it’s worth remembering OWS’s humble origins. What utopian fringe idea today will seem righteous and obvious in 2041?

—Nona Willis Aronowitz

AND:

A new map generated by Power to Decide and the Guttmacher Institute has found that 21 million American women in need of low or no cost reproductive care are living in birth control deserts. While that number is stunning, it may already be worse, since the data from these maps are from 2020 to 2023. “Many of these clinics have closed,” Megan Kavanaugh, a researcher who helped create the map, told NPR. “We know Planned Parenthoods have closed in the past year due to what happened with the defunding with Medicaid.”

Earlier this month the CDC released a study showing that American adults are friggin’ exhausted—especially women. According to the findings, 20 percent of women surveyed experienced frequent fatigue while only 13 percent of men experienced the same. One cardiologist told NBC News: “Just living in this country, we all, at some point, feel fatigue.” Hard agree. But, for women, the problems of fatigue and sleep loss run much deeper; professor Roxanne Prichard wrote in 2025 that “women’s weariness” has long been “pathologized and medicated.” Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton and Sara Teasdale “didn’t survive menopause,” she wrote. “All expressed desperate sleep needs but received inadequate care. All three died by suicide.”
Speaking of menopause, it turns out it’s the key to bipartisanship. This week, Sen. Kristen Gillibrand, a Democrat, and Sen. Rick Scott, a (pretty terrible) Republican, requested a Government Accountability Office report detailing how the federal government is advancing research and treatment of menopause. The request letter was co-signed by three other women Democrats. Hopefully this moment of political unity isn’t just a (hot) flash in the pan. 🥁
A report from Girl Scouts of the USA finds that 83 percent of girls in sports believe that having fun is more important than winning. Parents involved in the study had a much different outlook, but perhaps they have not heard about the recent goings-on at Hyrox. It’s really time to rethink the whole “winning is everything” ethos. (Except for my three-year-old, don’t rethink anything, sweetie; you’re going to the NWSL someday.)
One more thing for the parents: From now on, no one needs to know how many times your child made you listen to the Muffin Man song.
Literary icon Annie Dillard, whose explorations of nature disrupted the male-dominated genre of wilderness writing, died on Tuesday at her home at the age of 81. “She had a spectacular clarity on how to use words for more than writing,” The Meteor’s Rebecca Carroll tells us. “She used them both to live and to examine life.”
Japan is now home to more than 100,000 centenarians, and about 94,000 of them are women. This really brings a whole new meaning to “never say die.”
Congratulations to new moms Lady Gaga and Lena Dunham. May your burp cloths always be close at hand.
Don’t mess with outdoorsy people.

MOOD BOOSTER

Every Thursday, one of our editors shares a small thing that’s getting them through. If you’ve got something brightening your week, we want to know—reply to this email and share!

MY ELDEST SON AT DR. DAVIES’ APPLE ORCHARD SPORTING A MOMMY-MADE SWEATER.

This week, during my usual late-night doomscroll, I saw a woman post that the season we are in is apple fall, not pumpkin fall. As someone who has a hard time releasing summer, this brought me great comfort. Apple fall doesn’t just have superior weather; it also has a superior flavor profile. Apple cider, hot apple cider cocktails, apple cider doughnuts (which I make from scratch, thank you), canned hard apple cider. Who even needs pumpkin spice? No one.

—Shannon