Hola, Meteor readers,

I never truly mastered how to ride a bike. Attempts were made, but that whole idea of you never forget? You absolutely do. Normally, I don’t feel any kind of way about it, but after reading this piece in The Gist about the feminist roots of cycling and the Tour de France Femmes, I now have a strong feminine urge to hop on a bike.

THE ONLY KIND OF CYCLING I CAN MANAGE. 

In today’s newsletter, Rebecca Carroll joins us to talk about Sydney Sweeney and her jeans. Genes? Maybe both. Plus, a little happy dance to celebrate a Planned Parenthood legal victory.

Pedaling to nowhere,

Shannon Melero

WHAT'S GOING ON

These jeans suck: Last weekend, the American Eagle clothing brand unveiled its new campaign, featuring “Euphoria” and “White Lotus” star Sydney Sweeney, with the tagline: “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans.” The ads, which go predictably hard on the whole “sex sells” mantra of marketing, are every white guy’s wet dream. But it’s one specific video (which has since been removed) that was unmistakably provocative. And not in a good way.

In this particular ad, the blond-haired, blue-eyed Sweeney is lying on her back, her jeans unzipped, when she starts to speak in her signature voice of affected listlessness: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color,” she says, as she slowly zips up and fastens the top button at her bare waist. “My jeans are blue.” And then the voiceover (male, of course) drives it home: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

American Eagle has called the campaign “a return to essential denim dressing,” but critics have called it an idea that “shouldn’t have made it past the copywriter’s room” because of its clear nod to Trump’s view of “essentials,” and the white-supremacist pseudoscience of eugenics. And while “eugenics” may sound like an antiquated term, it’s very much still a part of our modern world. First developed in 1883 by British statistician and anthropologist Francis Galton, eugenics is the pseudoscience that argues selective reproduction between humans with “desirable traits” (read: white) can make for better and more desirable humans (also read: white) in society at large.

If this sounds familiar, it should: Ideas like these have been a recurring foghorn during Trump’s rise. At one New Hampshire rally in December 2023, Trump told his audience, “We’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” and warned that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” During his first presidential term in 2020, he spoke to a rapt crowd of white Minnesotans and said, “You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe?” More than 30 years prior, in a 1988 interview with Oprah Winfrey, when asked about his path to success, Trump answered: “You have to be born lucky in the sense that you have the right genes.” And he’s created a cult-like following of white men in his administration who espouse these same beliefs.

The “right genes” is the literal premise of the Sweeney campaign, and for American Eagle to push this kind of agenda, in this particular political moment—rife with tradwives, pronatalism, and exaggerated gender norms—feels like yet another corporate capitulation (hi, Paramount) to the dark, unapologetic depths of Trump’s hubristic agenda. (It speaks volumes about how compromised we’ve become that companies’ responses to Trump’s first term often went in the opposite direction.) Sure, we don’t necessarily look to ads for moral clarity, but they have always been a reflection of who we are as a culture–and what we’re willing to accept. But we shouldn’t accept this.

–Rebecca Carroll

AND: 

• Some good news! Medicaid patients and Planned Parenthood clinics everywhere won a key victory Monday, when a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration cannot deny eligible Medicaid reimbursements to Planned Parenthood clinics as outlined in the Big Beautiful Bill (for now–the administration plans to appeal the decision). The judge found that “patients are likely to suffer adverse health consequences where care is disrupted or unavailable.” This means that Medicaid recipients who rely on PP clinics for healthcare can still receive covered services. However, as the folks at Autonomy News pointed out, the intended damage of the right’s years-long “defund” mission has already been done: “By our count, at least 32 Planned Parenthood locations have said they’ll close in 2025,” and some of them have already closed. “Shuttering clinics is a way to ban abortion without explicitly banning it.”

• Last week, the rightfully criticized Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)—which has come under fire because of its lethal inefficacy—advertised a women-only aid distribution day in southern Rafah. According to witnesses who recounted their stories to the BBC, the day was chaotic and violent: “They started spraying the women with pepper spray, then they brought stun grenades and started throwing them on the women to force them backwards,” one woman, Khawla Sheikh al-Eid, told the outlet. She was at the site with her sister, she said, trying to get food for their children, but the two were separated in the madness, and eventually, Khawla’s sister, Mary, was shot in the neck and killed. The UN reported earlier this month that more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military while trying to get aid from GHF sites, which were established in May.

• Starting next summer, Minnesota’s new law around social media use will go into effect. It requires that social media apps and sites provide a pop-up when a Minnesotan logs on, asking them to “acknowledge that prolonged social media use can pose a hazard to their mental health,” NPR reports. Psychologists agree that warnings like this are necessary and effective, but nonetheless, tech companies are planning to push back on the law, arguing it may violate the First Amendment.

• Pivoting from the phone screen to the TV screen: As a first-time parent, there are a number of things I’ve been made to feel bad about, chief among them letting my child watch television before the age of three. (If loving Ms. Rachel is wrong, I don’t want to be right.) But a recent analysis from the American Psychological Association finds that screentime is not a be-all, end-all determinant of how your child will turn out. “This comprehensive study highlights the need for a nuanced approach to managing children’s screen time,” one of the study’s authors explains. Instead of focusing purely on eliminating screens whenever possible, parents should instead focus on the 5Cs: child, content, calm, crowding out, and communication. Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk spells it all out and takes up for all of us TV-loving moms out there.

THE GOAT TV MOM. FIGHT ME. (VIA YOUTUBE)

• Yesterday, Michael Lewis, a 55-year-old man, pleaded guilty to stalking and harassing WNBA star Caitlin Clark. Much has been said about Clark—she has been both a hero and a villain in her very short WNBA career—but what we often forget is that she is a 23-year-old woman thrust into the kind of blinding spotlight that has destroyed a number of young women before her. And if we don’t want to be watching a heartbreaking documentary 15 years from now about the downfall of the Caitlins and the Angel Reeses and the Cameron Brinks of today, then our parasocial relationship with celebrities needs to end.

• This week is the Senior League Baseball World Series in South Carolina—an event for Little League teams comprised of 13-to-16-year-olds from around the world. But this year, a team from Venezuela was denied visas to enter the United States. “They told us that Venezuela is on a list because Trump says Venezuelans are a threat to the security of his country,” the Venezuelan league president told the AP. “What do we do with so much injustice, what do we do with the pain that was caused to our children?” This is reportedly the second time this month a Latin American sports team was barred from entering the U.S.

• To everyone’s but somehow also no one’s surprise, JaNa and Kenny have broken up. Cue the Scottish narrator.

WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE FIJI. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

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Greetings, Meteor readers,

Tomorrow is Juneteenth, so our offices (and maybe yours) are closed. But we couldn’t shut down our laptops without leaving you with a little bit of relevant reading and listening. Today Rebecca Carroll walks us through a year that, in spite of it all, has been culturally Black as fuck.

Afterward, if you feel like luxuriating a little longer, read six incredible women on what they believe is the true meaning of Juneteenth. And of course, it wouldn’t be a celebration without hearing from Opal Lee, the “grandmother of Juneteenth,” who spoke with Brittany Packnett Cunningham a few years back about her relentless work to make this holiday a reality. Our thoughts are with Ms. Opal this week as news recently broke that she will not be leading the annual Walk for Freedom in Fort Worth, Texas, due to health complications.

Remembering it’s a we thing,

Shannon Melero

The Black Cultural Abundance of Juneteenth

This year, for me, Juneteenth started on February 9.

BY REBECCA CARROLL 

STILL THINKING ABOUT HIM (VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

I’ve watched it four times. Every time it’s given me something different. But what it has given me overall—in its multi-layered, legacy-laden, undeniably art-centric symbolism—is the assurance that one thing Black folks are always gonna do is find our freedom reflected in each other. I’m talking about Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show at Super Bowl LIX. It became the most-watched halftime show in history, drawing in more than 133 million viewers, and it felt not only like a call to action—because “sometimes you gotta pop out and show”—but also the very best of what Juneteenth invokes for me.

Black folks’ relationship with America is obviously fraught. The country was built on our backs. Slavery is as foundationally American as the Super Bowl. And Juneteenth is, ostensibly, about American freedom. But even after the Emancipation Proclamation, Black Americans were still widely not considered to be free civilians, and that is why we continue to seek that freedom out in and for each other. After tennis star Coco Gauff won the 2025 French Open earlier this month, she said, “Some people might feel some type of way about being patriotic, but I’m definitely patriotic and proud to be American. I’m proud to represent the Americans that look like me.”

And that was also the beauty of Lamar’s show—he could have easily declined to perform at such a mainstream Americana spectacle. Instead, he used it as an opportunity to reconfigure the American flag through the formation of his all-Black backup dancers, who wore red, white, and blue. Recently, when a young Black woman asked me how I write for my specific audience of readers, I said, “The same way Kendrick Lamar just performed the Blackest-blackety-black halftime show performance at the Super Bowl, for his specific audience of viewers, Black folks.” Because we know how to find each other, and speak to the insides of one another. It’s in the tradition of call-and-response, of ancestral homage, dignity, and legacy. It’s in our DNA. And it is an aegis of Black cultural jubilation in a year of targeted demoralization—when Black historic landmarks, Black museums, Black books and course curricula, and DEI initiatives are being defunded, denigrated, and dismantled.

GAUFF WITH THE ROLAND GARROS TROPHY WHICH SHE LATER AND HILARIOUSLY REVEALED IS NOT THE TROPHY CHAMPIONS GET TO TAKE HOME. (VIA GETTY) 

In the months after Lamar made the call, those responses have kept coming. Next came Ryan Coogler’s supernatural horror movie, “Sinners,” which both killed at the box office and earned glorious reviews. Like the Super Bowl show, “Sinners”—which follows twin bootlegging brothers who return to their Mississippi hometown to open a juke joint—is kaleidoscopic and heady, containing layers upon layers of historical references and truths. Amid recent indignities, Coogler managed to give us something rapturous, restorative, and unwavering in its tribute to Black freedom, Black love, and Black ingenuity.

And then came Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter and the Rodeo Chitlin’ Circuit Tour,” an all-stadium concert tour celebrating her Cowboy Carter album, which explores the Black roots of country music (another quintessentially American institution). Yes, Beyoncé is an extraordinarily talented and iconic artist. But what has stood out the most to me about the Cowboy Carter tour is not Beyoncé herself but the way her daughter Blue Ivy, with every bit of her badass, 13-year-old self, has showed out to perform with her mother onstage, giving a kind of “fuck-you”-fueled intensity well beyond her years. To me, Blue Ivy represents the collective power and tenacity of Blackness, and I imagine is exactly what the ancestors had in mind when they thought, We gonna call it Juneteenth, and then we gonna do whatever the hell we want to on this day forward from heretofore. 

CAN WE GET A YEE-HAW? (VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

And then there was The Met Gala. While I have real criticisms about the event as the standard of what constitutes haute fashion, and about its curated exclusivity (read: whiteness), I couldn’t help but feel like this year’s theme, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” was another response to Lamar’s call. Inspired in part by Black scholar Monica L. Miller’s book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Style of Black Diasporic Identity, all our fave fancy Black folks walked that blue carpet wearing the fiercest looks, channeling the very essence of Black elegance, just like the one that Black folks have historically created for Juneteenth celebrations.

SO...ABOUT THAT ALBUM? (VIA GETTY IMAGES)

After that, the ancestors came through…again: It was as if Annie, the Hoodoo healer from “Sinners,” gathered together a very particular recipe of roots and herbs to help conjure up some very large flames on a very specific plot of Southern land. It’s not nice to say, but when the largest surviving plantation mansion in the South burned to the ground on May 15, my first thought was, “Well, you shouldn’t have been enslaving people.” The demise of Nottoway Plantation in White Castle, Louisiana—which, like many plantations, had become a popular wedding venue—was reportedly caused by an electrical fire. Whatever the case, for it to happen during this run of Black cultural ascension seemed like poetic justice, and needless to say, the Black memes were delicious.

There are many more examples—Amy Sherald, Lorna Simpson, Rashid Johnson, and Jack Whitton all having solo art shows this year; Audra McDonald being a classy boss bitch, and giving an utterly singular “Gypsy” performance at the Tonys; Rihanna continuing to populate so glamorously—but given where we are in this moment, it feels right to end with Doechii’s speech at the BET Awards last week. Because ultimately, Black freedom has always meant getting other people free, too. Doechii, who won the award for Best Female Hip-Hop Artist, chose to use her platform during the live broadcast to speak out against the ICE immigration raids happening in Los Angeles. “These are ruthless attacks that are creating fear and chaos in our communities in the name of law and order,” she said. “I feel it’s my responsibility as an artist to use this moment to speak up for all oppressed people: for Black people, for Latino people, for trans people, for the people in Gaza.”

Juneteenth, which became a federal holiday in 2021, is about Black freedom. But it’s also about the function of freedom itself.

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Hey there, Meteor readers,

Hearty congratulations are in order for Meteor collective members Dawn Porter and Tanya Selvaratnam, both of whom are nominated for News and Documentary Emmys this year: Porter for The Sing Sing Chronicles and Documenting Police Use of Force; and Selvaratnam for Love to the Max. Watch if you haven’t!

In today’s newsletter, we’re strolling down the blue carpet of last night’s Met Gala with Julianne Escobedo Shepherd—and taking a moment to celebrate midwives.

Still thinking about this,

Shannon Melero

WHAT'S GOING ON

CARDI B AND HALLE BERRY. NO NOTES. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

Fashion’s dandiest night: Whatever your feelings about the Met Gala, this year’s theme, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, was an important one. It was selected by Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton last year after he read the 2009 book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, by Barnard professor Monica L. Miller, now chair of the college’s Africana Studies Department. Inspired by its deeply researched history of the way formerly enslaved Black people reclaimed the frippery they were forced to wear into their own distinct style, Bolton asked Miller to become the Costume Institute’s first guest curator in his ten-year tenure.

The exhibit itself lasts for nearly half a year, long after the last bit of carpet is rolled up. Superfine looks at the lineage of Black style in “the Atlantic diaspora,” and cites Zora Neale Hurston’s “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” an essay from 1934. “The will to adorn is the second most notable characteristic in Negro expression,” Hurston wrote. “Perhaps his idea of ornament does not attempt to meet conventional standards, but it satisfies the soul of its creator.” In other words: Black fashion evolved as a form of resistance against the way white culture expects Black people to be, but it doesn’t matter whether the clothes please anyone but the wearer.

Aesthetically speaking, this year contained the best fashion at the Gala in years, its “tailored for you” dress code encouraging attendees to show up and show out as themselves. Co-chair Teyana Taylor wore a long red cape embroidered with the words “Harlem Rose,” created by costume designer Ruth E. Carter, who in 2018 became the first Black woman to win an Oscar for Best Costume Design, for Black Panther. Rihanna donned a deconstructed suit—part jacket, part bustle, part waist-as-lapel—its regal pinstripes channeling the spirit of Ida B. Wells, assuredly strutting into her newspaper job at the New York Age in the 1890s.

DO WE THINK SHE'S HIDING R9 UNDER THAT HAT? (VIA GETTY IMAGES)

While the glitter of the Met Gala may seem out of touch in these violent times, it feels significant that Black creativity was celebrated at such a major institutional event, in a moment when institutions are being all but purged of Black people and other people of color. We’ve already seen how the Trump administration’s blatantly white supremacist agenda has affected the Kennedy Center, all cabinet-level departments, and state universities; he has promised to next come for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, PBS, and other government-funded institutions that bring alive the history of Black and brown people. Those institutions have only just begun to help this country grapple with its historical atrocities; now, thanks to the administration’s war on what it derisively refers to as “DEI,” the small progress that’s been made is being literally erased.

Don’t just talk about it, be about it, goes a common phrase in African American Vernacular English (AAVE). The long national project of what that means politically is being cut off at the knees, thanks to these attacks on Black history in classrooms, libraries, government websites, and museums. So it’s huge that “fashion’s biggest night” at the country’s most renowned art institution was about Black history and Black people reveling in Black fashion as resistance. It was emphasized across every major publication, every tabloid and blog, and all over every social feed—Black fashion history everywhere. As Professor Miller put it to Lala Anthony in an interview on the carpet last night: “I’ve never had such a big classroom.”

–Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

AND:

• Yesterday was International Day of the Midwife, and this year’s theme was “Midwives: Critical in Every Crisis.” According to the United Nations Population Fund, midwives are often the first and only responders providing care to pregnant women during conflicts or humanitarian disasters (care that’s threatened by the shuttering of USAID). And in the U.S., midwifery is essential in a climate where pregnancy is criminalized and maternal health outcomes are getting worse. In fact, research shows that midwife care improves birth outcomes and can help address health disparities. Shafia Monroe, a veteran midwife and activist in Portland, Ore., sees Black midwives as “the first line of defense” for protecting the health of Black mothers, who are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women. “The deaths of Black women are often due to not being listened to by doctors and hospitals,” Monroe says. “A Black midwife is going to listen to you.” (For more on why midwifery is so key to Black women’s reproductive justice, check out our video on the subject.) Monroe finds hope in the “slow but sure resurgence” of her profession: Even though our country’s medical system sought to marginalize midwives–and especially Black midwives–in the 20th century, midwives now attend 11% of births in the U.S., as opposed to only 1% in 1980.

• Immigration advocates are calling for renewed investigations into inhumane conditions at detention centers after three more immigrants died in April, bringing the total to seven deaths in ICE custody since the start of the second Trump administration. Detention centers are overrun as the administration denies bond to immigrants who are trying to appeal their deportations. ICE claims that it is providing appropriate medical attention to all those who need it, but Katie Blankenship of Sanctuary of the South tells Truthout, “They are putting lipstick on a pig to get the press off their back.”

• And another high five! Over the last few years, the outlet ProPublica has been doing the difficult and necessary work of exposing the extreme consequences of abortion bans. Yesterday, it received a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for public service for Kavitha Surana, Lizzie Presser, and Cassandra Jaramillo’s series “Life of the Mother,” which, among other things, examined two preventable deaths of pregnant women in Georgia and analyzed the impact of Texas’s abortion ban when the state neglected to. Reporting matters.

• When Maine governor Janet Mills refused to comply with Trump’s executive order banning transgender athletes from women’s sports, the administration fired back by freezing funding for nutrition programs, including free school lunches. Instead of acquiescing, Mills and the state’s AG took the administration court and won. You love to see it.

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