Greetings, Meteor readers,

A lot happened today. Let’s talk about it!

Fleeing,

Shannon Melero

WHAT'S GOING ON

You don’t get to choose: During our morning meeting, while I regaled my colleagues with Sabrina Carpenter theories, a news alert popped up. I swear a group of women hasn’t gone that quiet that fast since Huda’s last crash-out. The alert was that the Supreme Court had published its decision in Medina v. Planned Parenthood. The court ruled 6-3, along ideological lines, that South Carolina’s governor, Henry McMaster, was on sound legal footing when he removed Planned Parenthood South Atlantic from the state’s Medicaid program in 2018.

To be clear, South Carolina already outlaws abortions after six weeks, and the Hyde Amendment has long ensured that federal funds cannot be used to reimburse abortion costs anyway. (State funds are a different story.) This case is about punishing Planned Parenthood for its association with abortions, even though its clinics also provide STI screenings, contraception, mammograms, and a number of other vital health services. A 2021 study found that of the millions of women Medicaid recipients who had gone to Planned Parenthood for care that year, 85 percent of them received contraceptive services.

That means that when McMaster removed PPSA from the Medicaid program, any Medicaid patient going to one of its clinics lost their healthcare provider, which is why PPSA and one of its patients sued McMaster for violating the “free choice of provider” clause in the Medicaid Act. The lower courts sided with the plaintiffs repeatedly. But the state’s director for the Department of Health and Human Services picked up the fight, and SCOTUS decided that losing access to your health provider is not a violation of your rights.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who wrote the dissenting opinion, characterized this decision as “stymying one of the country’s great civil rights laws” and Slate points out, associated the majority with white supremacists who once sought to undermine Reconstruction. She deftly laid out what this decision will really do: “It will strip countless other Medicaid recipients around the country of a deeply personal freedom: the ‘ability to decide who treats us at our most vulnerable.’ ”

THE FACE OF A WOMAN WHO IS TIRED OF THE TOMFOOLERY IN THE COURT. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)

For patients outside South Carolina, this decision could have a ripple effect. Governors nationwide now have the runway they need to essentially defund Planned Parenthood in their states by blocking the organization’s access to Medicaid funds, which account for one-third of Planned Parenthood’s revenue. At the same time, Republicans are trying to eradicate the organization via the Big Beautiful Bill, which seeks to end Medicaid reimbursements to Planned Parenthood nationally. If passed, the bill “could lead nearly 200 clinics to shutter—90% of them in states where abortion is legal,” independent journalist and Autonomy News cofounder Susan Rinkunas told The Meteor. “If the Trump administration is able to nationalize this Supreme Court decision, people even in protective states would have less access to reproductive healthcare, including abortion.”

Bottom line: This decision goes beyond attacking bodily autonomy. Today, the court reaffirmed that being poor, or a woman, or Latine, or Black—the groups that make up the majority of Medicaid users—means that the freedoms and choices enjoyed by everyone else don’t apply to you. If you don’t have the money or the whiteness or the penis to pay for the doctor you want, you’re out of luck.

AND: 

• Congratulations are in order for Zohran Mamdani, who beat out his fellow Democrats and that one sex pest to become the Democratic mayoral nominee. While many New Yorkers (and New York expats) rejoiced in the win, there were some who were not thrilled about potentially having a Democratic Socialist and Muslim for mayor. Including one woman whose kids I used to teach, who told her social media followers to “expect a mini-Biden who favors Muslims to run NYC.” Baby girl, we already run NYC, mashallah. 😘

• Speaking of Tuesday: Anthony Weiner, the former New York congressman who was attempting his third political comeback by running in the Democratic primary for one of Manhattan’s city council seats, appears to be in a distant fourth place according to initial returns. As you may remember, Weiner has been ensnared in multiple sex scandals, including serving 15 months in federal prison in 2017 after sexting a 15-year-old girl. This loss, paired with that of mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo, sends a message: Voters understand that sexual misconduct isn’t a side issue to brush away at the ballot box. It matters, and it’s often part and parcel of being a power-hungry bully.

• After nearly four decades, Anna Wintour will be stepping down as editor-in-chief of Vogue, although she will stay on with the magazine’s parent company, Conde Nast, as global editorial director. But if she’s looking for my career advice, now is a great time to retire and cash in that 401-K—it must be a 401-KLMNOP at this point.

• Tomorrow, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez are getting married in Venice, Italy—and the protestors are out in force. Earlier this week, they unveiled a 65-foot banner with Bezos’ face on it that read: "If you can rent Venice for your wedding, you can pay more tax." And this morning, a new group mobilized in Piazza San Marco Square—where Meteor collective member Amber Tamblyn, who happened to be in Venice (not for the wedding!), watched as “protestors were dragged and carried away by police, except for one lone protestor who scaled a high flagpole,” she wrote from the scene. “It was a powerful display of resistance, bringing attention to the climate crisis—the couple’s infamous $500 million yacht, Koru, creates an estimated 70,000 tons of emissions a year—and to the Italian government’s terrible decision to allow the Bezos wedding to take place in this fragile city.” But protests against income inequality are spreading globally, and they strike her as acts of “love and bravery,” she writes. “At one point, the lone protester…made a heart with his two hands. I smiled up at him and made the gesture right back.”

HOW'S THAT FOR A WARM VENETIAN WELCOME? (GETTY IMAGES) 

• So back to Sabrina Carpenter: After a maelstrom of feedback, she’s releasing an alternative cover for her next album, “Man’s Best Friend.” The new cover— “approved by God,” in her words—is less provocative than the first, prompting me to wonder why we are so obsessed with what white pop stars are doing with their bodies. Can a girl live? Sabrina is simply presenting herself as an adult woman who fucks, compared to say, Britney Spears, who was packaged by adults as a young girl in service of male sexual fantasies. But at the end of the day, I’m no better than every other person who spends their time opining over just how little sexuality blonde straight white women are allowed to express because it contradicts the idea of white purity. IDK, maybe we all just need to touch grass.

Three Questions About...Toni Morrison

She had a whole other job, and she was brilliant at it.

BY REBECCA CARROLL

COURTESY OF HARPER COLLINS 

Toni Morrison wrote some of the greatest literature of all time. It is less known, though, that she also edited some of the greatest literature, and that is what makes Dana A. Williams’s new book, Toni At Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship, such a gift. Williams, a professor of African American literature and the Dean of Graduate School at Howard University, conducted hundreds of interviews (including a handful with Morrison while she was still living) and unearthed letters and conversations between Morrison and the authors she published—among them Toni Cade Bambara, Lucille Clifton, Gayl Jones, and Angela Davis—during her nearly 20 years as an editor at Random House. The result is a thoughtfully reverent, always engrossing, and occasionally juicy narrative that confirms Morrison’s intricate genius, as well as her deep love of Black writers, Black books, and Black language.

Rebecca Carroll: What did you learn about Toni Morrison, the editor, that you did not know about Toni Morrison, the writer?

Dana A. Williams: I think they intersect, but Toni Morrison as editor was fully involved in the publishing community. I think of Toni Morrison-as-writer as someone writing in isolation—someone writing at their desk, really thinking about her story and her characters. Morrison as editor was everywhere. She was at every party. She was in the design team’s face, sometimes to their dismay. She was on the street trying to find writers, because she really did have to kind of beat the bushes in those early years to identify writers who had not been signed up by other houses. Angela Davis told me that her office was always bustling. There were people in and out all the time, which is part of the reason why, when she was working on a book of her own, she would not go in the office in the same way.

One of the beautiful things about this book has been rediscovering books I’ve loved forever, like Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love, now knowing that Morrison played such an integral role in shaping them. Were there books that you returned to in the same way during the process of writing this one? 

I absolutely went back and reread [Bambara’s] The Salt Eaters because I thought, Now I think I know what’s happening in this book. I love The Salt Eaters. I taught The Salt Eaters, but I never got all of it. The same thing was true of Leon Forrest, who I probably knew more about than any of the authors. All the fiction—the fiction [Morrison edited] was what I was so drawn to to begin with….But the more [Morrison and I] talked, the more she continued to ignore my questions about fiction. She was like the queen of indirection from the beginning to the end, because she never said, “This book really shouldn’t be about the fiction only.” She would drop hints like, “Have you seen Paula’s last book? Now that’s a book. If you’re going to write a book, that’s a book.” She was talking about A Sword Among Lions by Paula Giddings, which was interesting, because it is a biography of Ida B. Wells, and every time I would ask [Morrison] a question about herself, she would say, “I'm not interested in myself.”

After spending over a decade on this book, do you have a strong sense now of what Toni Morrison thought made good writing?

I kept asking her that question, and she said, “Well, obviously if it’s nonfiction, the argument has to be sound and it has to be compelling, and it has to make the case for the reader in a way that nobody else has made it before.” If she was editing on a topic that she didn’t know as much about, she was literally reading everything about the current conversation to make sure [the author was] moving this argument in a different direction. Editors don't have to do that.

For the fiction…I think she was more drawn to experimental writers than to straight beginning, middle, and end writers. She said, “With Gayl Jones, I had to ask questions about characters: What is motivating this character?” With Bambara, she said, “I just needed to make sure that she didn't leave the reader behind, because she’s moving so fast.” I kept thinking, There has to be this kind of crystallized way of saying [what good writing is]. But it was the interrogation. I think that was her distinguishing mark—to publish what stories she wanted to be told, and to let the writer be the writer.

WEEKEND READING 📚

On something different: Babe, wake up, a new kind of masculinity just dropped, and it involves Pedro Pascal. (TCF Emails)

On the worst trimester: Vox’s podcast, “Unexplainable,” tells the story of geneticist Marlena Fejzo, whose own torturous pregnancy led her to discover both a biological cause and potential cure for morning sickness. (Vox)

On evolving the stitch and bitch: Knitting clubs were once a place to complain about your kids and mother-in law (not me I would never), but young knitters are using their craft for a greater good. (Teen Vogue)

On what we eat: Food affects everything, but can it really do much about menopause, or are women being sold another fad diet? (Burnt Toast)

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