Greetings, Meteor readers,

We’ve got a lot to get through today, but first, please indulge me for a moment. (Or just skip down to What’s Going On, I won’t take it personally.) Today is Samhita Mukhopdhyay’s last day as editorial director here. She’ll still be Meteor-adjacent, but I told her I couldn’t let her go without emailing her (and by extension, you) my farewell speech:

Samhita, my Taurus twin, my fellow DDC member, you have been an incredible leader, a mentor, an unwilling recipient of my voice notes, a source of strength, and above all else, a friend. This departure feels like a death. But, if there’s one thing I believe in more than you and everything you are, it’s that not even death is permanent. So, no goodbyes. I’ll see you on the other side. ♥️

Speaking of grief, we chat with Sarah Jaffe about her new book on how mourning affects politics. Plus, the exciting conclusion of Fat Bear Week and some weekend reads.

The last SM standing,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

• A new report from UNICEF has found that more than 370 million girls and women worldwide have experienced some form of sexual assault before age 18. That translates into one in every eight girls suffering from sexual violence. And the risk doubles in what UNICEF calls “fragile settings,” beset by war or disaster: “We are witnessing horrific sexual violence in conflict zones,” UNICEF’s executive director Catherine Russell said, “where rape and gender-based violence are often used as weapons of war.”

• New evidence has confirmed that Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna died last month while in captivity in Russia. Roshchyna disappeared in August 2023 while traveling to cover the war in an area that had been occupied by Russian forces. According to Reporters Without Borders, she is the thirteenth journalist to die in the line of duty since the war began in 2022. “Her life was taken because she dared tell the truth,” said the International Women’s Media Foundation. “The international community must pressure Russia to cease targeting journalists and silencing press freedom.”

• Are you trying to make sense of what’s happening in the WNBA, which has seen a sharp increase in racist and sexist abuse against players? So are we. It’s a good thing Brittany Packnett Cunningham spoke to Cari Champion on this week’s episode of UNDISTRACTED about the making (and gross mismanagement) of this season’s most lucrative rivalry.

• Thrilling animal news: Yesterday was the conclusion of Fat Bear Week, and it was a big year for the moms! Not only did voluptuous mama bear Grazer take home the win for the second year in a row, but, in an act of fat, furry revenge, she actually prevailed over Chunk, a male bear who had killed one of Grazer’s cubs earlier this year.

FAT BEAR QUEEN, GRAZER. (VIA NATIONAL PARK SERVICE)

Three Questions About…Grief

It’s a tool of revolution, author Sarah Jaffe explains. 

As the anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel approached, I prepared myself for anger and blame on social media. What I noticed instead was the palpable sense of grief that coursed through people—grief for what we’ve seen, what has happened since, and what we’ve lost.

That’s actually not unusual: Collective grief plays a profound role in our politics; it can unite us and inspire change. But we don’t often give grief the space to truly transform us into better political citizens.

I talked to the author and labor journalist Sarah Jaffe about how we might do that—a subject she takes up in her new book From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay: Why did you decide to write about grief?

Sarah Jaffe: The thing that got me started thinking about grief was the death of my father. [This book] takes our emotional lives seriously and argues two somewhat contradictory things: that grief is an integral part of being a full and complete human and also that the world creates so much unnecessary grief and pain and that we could, in fact, stop some of that. And then a third thing, which is that we ought to talk about it.

When my father was ill, I had some idea that I could be good at grief, that I could work hard at it the way I had at everything else in my life. I was so wrong about so many things, but particularly the [fact that grief] will come when it comes and fade when it fades, and there is nothing you can do but ride the waves of it. This, of course, is a very difficult thing to accept in a world that runs on the time clock and the biweekly paycheck and in a country that doesn’t even give us health insurance, let alone expansive paid time off.

Grief is mostly considered private, something you have to manage on your own. Can you talk about the importance of moving grief from the personal to the public?

Nearly all cultures have grief rituals in which the community comes together to mourn. In the capitalist West, those rituals have been shortened and forestalled, if not ended altogether. Yet there have been moments in the last few years where the world seemed to erupt in collective grief. The George Floyd uprising [was] probably the largest of those, when despite lockdown orders people spilled into the streets and mourned and demanded change.

Last week, I was in Minneapolis for a book talk, and I went down to George Floyd Square, where the names of people killed by police are still painted in the street and fresh flowers are still laid where George Floyd was killed and massive sculptural fists stand in the streets. The call “Black Lives Matter,” the demand to “say her name,” are calls for us to grieve. The demand “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living”—taken from labor agitator Mother Jones—has been embraced by Jewish groups calling for a ceasefire in Gaza (and now in Lebanon and beyond). Such public mourning does more than bring us together—it calls on us to think about the world we live in, and the harm that it does every day, and how we might imagine it differently.

When my father died, I remember you reached out with a beautiful letter of advice on how to navigate what was to come. I loved seeing in the book that someone else had done that for you. Why do you think this act of reaching out with wisdom in moments of grief is so important?

Grief is universal, and yet it can feel so profoundly isolating when it happens to us. No one, it seems, understands. Except then the people who do understand start to find you, and they share little or big bits of wisdom, and they hold you when you need holding, and they tell you their stories.

This book is a way of paying forward the care I got from people when I didn’t remember my own name and couldn’t remember to eat. [It’s a way to show] that maybe the world is built [not] on transactional, one-to-one reciprocation, [but rather] on what philosopher Eva Kittay calls nested caring obligations. I live in New Orleans, and like a lot of people this past week, I have been haunted by the destruction done by Hurricane Helene in places that are nowhere near the coast and are hundreds or thousands of feet above sea level. So many people here have been reaching out with money and time and donations and fundraisers for people we’ve never met in another part of the country, because we know what it’s like to face climate disaster. We build solidarity with those acts of care, without asking for them to be directly repaid.

WEEKEND READING 📚

On the great outdoors: Meet Rhiane Fatinikun, the founder of Black Girls Hike. (The New York Times)

On the stuff of parents’ nightmares: After her children’s nursery temporarily lost their license, journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian set up a makeshift daycare in her living room—and nearly lost her sanity. (The Cut)

On the gender cleanliness gap: Anne Helen Petersen explains why women—even child-free ones—are trained to “serve our spaces.” (Culture Study)

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