How Do You Season Your Pets?

Greetings, Meteor readers,

I hope you all had a fortuitous bingo night last night. Personally, I am writing a complaint to our bingo card maker for not having the foresight to include a box for “they’re eating cats and dogs in Ohio.” How did you miss such a predictable talking point, Bailey? Get it together.

In today’s newsletter, we’re reminiscing about last night, bidding farewell to an icon, and appreciating the childless cat ladies in our lives.

Grabbing the pepper grinder,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

Can we even call it a debate?: Back in my day, a debate was an intense, well-researched sparring of words between people who knew what they were talking about, at least most of the time. But that’s not what we watched last night.

Instead, the country had a front-row seat to the political equivalent of the final rap battle in 8 Mile. Vice President Harris was armed with razor-sharp attack lines like, “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people,” all of which were designed to get under Trump’s skin, and all of which worked. And in true Trump fashion, instead of having some sort (or any sort) of game plan, he decided to freestyle. But you’re not a rapper, Don.

The felon was flustered, reactionary, fumbling over his words. He wouldn’t look directly at “her” and “she” shut him down swiftly. (His use of the Vice President’s pronouns but never her name or her title felt like classic meant-to-belittle Trump.) Said Harris: “He’s trying to, again, divide and distract from the reality, which is: It is very well known that Donald Trump is weak and wrong on national security and foreign policy. It is well known that he admires dictators, wants to be a dictator on day one, according to himself.”

And he wasn’t just shut down by his opponent—for once, the moderators were ready with the fact check. When Trump lied and made the debunked argument that Democrats have made it legal to kill babies after birth, Linsey Davis clarified on live TV, “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.” When journalists have to explain that infanticide is illegal in America, we’ve really lost the plot. (But if you want to know more about the history of that nasty little myth, Jessica Valenti’s got that here.)

So, did we actually learn anything from this debate? The Trump we saw on TV was an angry, uninformed, and unqualified man trying to get a job he was already fired from. No revelations there.

The display of Kamala Harris’s adaptability, though, feels important and worth noting. The woman we saw last night was not the jovial “Momala” of memes and home cooking videos, but instead the Harris of Congressional hearings—skewering her opponents with sharpness and wit. She was a tactician, fully aware of her enemy and prepared to face him head-on, no matter how many times he tried to pretend she wasn’t in the room. It was satisfying to watch her unleash her master-class psychological jiu jitsu on one of the least likable men of all time. As Jessica Bennett wrote in The New York Times, “she laid bare the smallness of Trump’s manhood and asserted her own power.”

There were also the brief moments where we actually got to hear about Harris’s agenda, certainly more than the “concepts of a plan” Trump shared. She gave air time to her stances on increasing child tax credits, restoring abortion rights, and tightening gun laws. Some of her other talking points, however, like support for fracking, maintaining the status quo of foreign relations, and her aversion to an Israeli arms embargo may not have inspired those still undecided.

What is unquestionable about the debate, though, is that it was a battle. And as the great poet once said, “This guy don’t wanna battle, he’s shook.”

AND:

• There is nothing she does better than revenge.

MADONNA AND CHILD, 2024 (SCREENSHOT VIA INSTAGRAM)

• On Monday, the nominations for the Country Music Awards were announced, and noticeably missing from the list was the most anticipated country album of the year, if not the decade: Cowboy Carter.

• Abortion wins elections—and anti-abortionists know this. That’s probably why they’re doing everything in their power to keep abortion off the ballots and using misleading terms like “the will of the people,” which writer Jessica Valenti breaks down in this week’s episode of Anti-Abortion Glossary.

• After forty years with Univision, Jorge Ramos will be leaving the network and his longstanding post as anchor of the Spanish language news broadcast, Noticiero Univision. Ramos has had an incredible career primarily covering news out of Latin America, but he became a star to English speakers in 2015 when Donald Trump had him removed from a news conference for…asking questions. Abuelas everywhere are weeping over this loss, but Ramos plans to continue his work as a journalist.

• America’s Next Top Lesbian Chappell Roan graced the cover of Rolling Stone with her presence (and she looked divine, obviously). In her interview, she revealed that when she refused to perform at the White House (in protest of the government’s part in the attack on Gaza), she originally had something else in mind: She was going to say yes, show up, refuse to perform, and instead read “some poems from Palestinian women.”

• The king of voice work, James Earl Jones, died this week at the age of 93. Jones’ contributions to film, stage, and television are many, but for me, it was his work as Mufasa in The Lion King that resonated most. It may sound silly, but the sound of Jones’s voice in the scene where Mufasa speaks to his son from beyond the grave brought me, someone who had also suffered parental loss, immense comfort. Every time I heard him speak afterward, I would be reminded of that moment. May you be at peace, Mr. Jones, in your own great beyond.

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