Salutations, Meteor readers,

Before we get into it today, exciting news: We’re going to the Tribeca Film Festival! This summer, you can catch the world premiere of Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print; our very own Cindi Leive served as an executive producer. The film—from McGee Media in partnership with HBO—looks back on Ms. magazine’s 50+-year history to tell the story of how it defied the odds and brought feminism to the masses. Plan to be in New York in June? Grab a ticket!

In today’s newsletter, we provide perhaps the only positive take you’ll read about the past 100 days. Plus, Rebecca Carroll talks to Dr. Connie Wun about the 50th anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam.

Counting the days,

Shannon Melero

WHAT'S GOING ON

The worst of times: A mere 100 days ago, Donald Trump took office, and it has been a vengeful, embarrassing, and violent presidency thus far. It has also been a test for the American people—so today, we’re heralding the ways women have spent this time fighting back against an overgrown playground bully. Hats off to…

• Skye Perryman: Serving as CEO and president of Democracy Forward, which has filed over 600 legal actions dating all the way back to Trump’s first term, Perryman and her team have stood up for libraries, federal employees, and immigrants. Just last week, they blocked the administration from carrying out its threat to prosecute or cut funding to schools teaching history classes that referenced race or racism. And yes, the administration likes to ignore court orders—but Perryman and her peers are taking the extra steps to ensure court oversight.

• Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX): The rising sophomore has taken on the task of saying what a lot of us are thinking. When discussing the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man mistakenly deported on suspicion of being a gang member, Crockett noted that Garcia was “a lot less criminal than the person that’s sitting in the White House.”

• Sarah Inama: A sixth-grade history teacher in Idaho, Inama had decorated her classroom with a sign that read “Everyone is welcome here”; it featured drawings of raised hands, all in different skin colors. Her school district sent her a letter to remove the sign because it deemed it “controversial,” according to the Trump administration’s executive order on DEI. Initially, Inama felt pressured and removed the sign. But then, she told Today, the directive “sounded like racism,” and she decided to put it back up. Controversy ensued—but ultimately the sign stayed, and so did Inama.

• Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA): She recently launched the Resistance Lab, a series of online gatherings to teach people “the best tools and tactics and frameworks to fight back” against attacks on democracy. The first one drew about 1,500 participants. She’s hoping to do another lab with a focus on “nonviolent training” for peaceful protests. “Think Selma church basements and the kind of training that they did to prepare people…Because that moment is coming,” she told The Nation. Here’s how to be alerted to the next Resistance Lab and other actions happening in your state.

• Erin Reed: The administration has mounted an astonishing war on the press—using its power to file lawsuits against media companies and shutting down US-funded news outlets around the world. Which makes the fearless journalism that reporters keep producing all the more impressive. To name just one impressive outlet: Erin Reed in the Morning tracks news and legislation targeting the LGBTQ+ community. Team Trump has been working since day one to erase trans people from existence, and at every turn, every action, the Erin Reed team has been there to act as a speed bump and keep its 120,000 readers informed.

These leaders—and thousands more—are doing the work that needs doing, at one of the hardest times to do it. More of this over the next 1360 days!

AND:

• A Wall Street Journal investigation found that AI “digital companions” created by Meta are engaging in sexually explicit conversations with minors. The bots, some of which use celebrities’ voices to speak to a user (you can’t see John Cena but you can hear him), were reportedly rushed through production by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who encouraged developers to “loosen the guardrails around the bots to make them as engaging as possible,” sources told WSJ, “including by providing an exemption to [Meta’s] ban on ‘explicit’ content as long as it was in the context of romantic role-playing.” Fortunately, since the investigation broke late last week, Instagram has blocked minors from accessing the bots.

• Conservatives don’t want poor students to go to college—or at least they don’t want them to be able to pay for it. Yesterday, the GOP-led Committee on Education and Workforce introduced a new budget proposal that restructures the financial aid system and changes eligibility requirements for Pell Grants. The suggested changes for Pell would require students to take on more credits per semester to maintain the grant, unfairly targeting low-income students who already divide their time between school, work, and family responsibilities.

• On Sunday, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced its 2025 inductees. This year’s honorees include LGBTQ+ advocate Cyndi Lauper and the OG sex-positive trio Salt-N-Pepa—a nice reminder that not everyone is afraid of celebrating icons of cultural progress.

ALL THREE MEMBERS OF SALT-N-PEPA (SANDRA "SALT" DENTON, DJ SPINDERELLA, AND CHERYL "PEPA" JAMES) AT THE 2018 ESSENCE FESTIVAL. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)  

• Vatican watchers are preparing for the big day next Wednesday, when Conclave, the process to choose a new pope, begins. Seven cardinals are considered front-runners, including Filipino cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, who has been called the “Asian Francis.” If elected, Tagle would be the first pope from Southeast Asia. But one expert suggests there’s a candidate we’ve all been overlooking.

Three Question About...The End of the “U.S. War in Vietnam”

Five decades after the conflict’s end, Dr. Connie Wun reflects on generational trauma and the battles we’re still fighting.

BY REBECCA CARROLL 

THE VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL IN WASHINGTON, D.C. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

Tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War—a conflict that remains both controversial and divisive. Here in the U.S., the first televised war brought pushback against the draft, and a feeling that America shouldn’t be intervening in a conflict between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. By the time Soviet-backed North Vietnam invaded Saigon and declared victory in 1975, the protracted war had claimed the lives of as many as 3 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, as well as 58,000 American soldiers.

Dr. Connie Wun, the executive director of AAPI Women Lead, was raised in Oakland by Vietnamese refugees. We sat down on the 50th anniversary of the exact day that her grandmother and mother were forced to leave Vietnam, to talk about her personal connection to the war, why remembering it matters, and the fight against war on every battleground.

In some ways, it feels counterintuitive to commemorate war, but why do you think it’s important to commemorate the Vietnam War in particular?

Here [in America] we call it the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, they call it Reunification Day [marking the liberation of southern Vietnam and its reunification with the North after “the U.S. war in Vietnam.”]. And across the globe, it’s called the Fall of Saigon. So, depending upon who you ask, there are various interpretations of what April 30th, 1975, means. Some people are commemorating and honoring the three million-plus people who were killed, and the slow, ensuing deaths that followed. Trauma from the war was among the main causes of my grandmother’s cardiovascular diseases.

And that’s the case for many Vietnamese people today. We have high rates of chronic health illnesses, diabetes, and depression, and these are all underreported. My grandmother passed away after having triple bypass surgery. Many of us are permanently displaced and are commemorating the loss of our homeland. I have family members who fought with the Viet Cong, and then people who fought with the South. We are commemorating loss, we are commemorating tragedy.

When my grandmother was forced to leave, she left with my grandfather, my mom, aunt, and uncle; my grandmother’s cousins as well as their nieces and nephews. More than 20 people left with them on the flight to the refugee camps in Guam, and then the Philippines. According to our family stories, our family was a part of Operation New Life [a military-led humanitarian effort for refugees who evacuated Vietnam before the end of the war]. Over the past few years, I’ve been collecting our family's stories—I have inherited centuries of warfare.

How do you find a definition of solidarity for yourself and the work that you do?

The premise of solidarity for me is about surviving, resisting, and ending global and domestic wars. So that’s global and domestic wars against Black peoples, global and domestic wars against Indigenous peoples, global imperialist wars, and colonial wars. Modern civilization is premised upon global and domestic warfare. What I don’t know is if we’ve learned as a whole, and I don't know if we’ve agreed to care about, is that war and its implications are forever.  

How do we see through to a time when we don’t have wars?

We have to undo modern civilization. That’s the task at hand. The way through is to submit to the fact that we’re under warfare. Which is why my grandmother passed away some 20 years after leaving Vietnam. My job, having inherited her legacy, is to keep fighting and to demand that I get to stay alive. I will be one of the people who is going to overthrow what’s taken so many people’s lives. That has to be our commitment to each other—undoing, overthrowing, and building something else.

FOLLOW THE METEOR

Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend?
Sign up for your own copy, sent Tuesdays and Thursdays.

[email protected]

Greetings, Meteor readers,

It’s Earth Day! And also, it’s Taurus season! May we all feel some stabilizing, comforting energy over the next few weeks because boy, do we need it.

In today’s newsletter, Nona Willis Aronowitz explains what’s behind the administration’s “make more babies” plan. Plus, we bid farewell to the pope.

Bulls up,

Shannon Melero

WHAT'S GOING ON

Baby bust: Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the pro-natalist Trump administration, concerned about the U.S.’s falling birth rate, has been brainstorming ways to get American women to have more children. Some of their ideas include five-thousand-dollar baby bonuses, menstrual-cycle education, and a National Medal of Motherhood (a tactic you might recognize from the Nazis). Notably missing: plans to subsidize childcare, parental leave, or any other crucial improvements actual families have been requesting for generations. Lots of incredulous reactions across the internet made that exact point: “How can you expect us to have more babies without a strong social safety net?”

As someone who yearns for free daycare and paid maternity leave, I’m tempted to say the same. Yes, it’s darkly ironic that the Trump administration is calling for more babies even as it has made deep cuts to maternal and child health and opposed any repair of the U.S.’s woefully inadequate family policies. But the thing is, offering benefits to families doesn’t actually boost birth rates. In fact, many countries that provide robust support for parents, like Finland, Norway, and Germany, have birth rates below ours. There’s no evidence that Trump’s proposed policies would work, either. “Even the richest, savviest, most committed governments” are stumped, a history professor told Vox in 2023. “If such policies were discoverable, I think someone would have discovered them.”

So the question you’re probably wondering is: What’s so bad about the birth rate falling? Most countries in the world are now below the “replacement rate” of 2.1, and the trend is most pronounced in the richest nations; the United States is at about 1.6, a drop of more than 20 percent in the last decade. Seen one way, fewer babies is a success story of women truly having control over their own lives, and—thanks to contraception access, education, and career opportunities—being able to make choices that may or may not involve children. Maybe those decisions “shouldn’t scare us,” writes feminist writer Jill Filipovic, “but should inform us that when women have more options and opportunities, women’s desires become far more varied.”

Still, experts across the political spectrum agree that a shrinking population with more old people than young presents huge economic and humanitarian challenges. An aging society means fewer workers to keep society functioning—to grow our food, to build our houses, to care for the elderly. For many, the story of South Korea, which has the lowest birth rate in the world, provides a disconcerting glimpse of what happens when so few babies are born: 1 in 5 people in South Korea are over 65, and nearly 40 percent of those elders live in poverty.

But no matter how valid these concerns are, Trump’s “solutions” are both demeaning (ugh, that medal) and historically familiar: The one way governments have temporarily bumped up birth rates throughout history is by oppressing women. Think Nazi Germany and its Lebensborn program, which used women as incubators for 20,000 “Aryan” babies. Or Ceausescu's Romania, which severely restricted abortion and birth control access to devastating effect. Even our own “baby boom” in the repressive 1950s partially relied on pushing women into domesticity. This brand of pro-natalism—promoted by people like J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Elon Musk—often goes hand-in-hand with racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. While immigration is often touted as a short-term solution to the U.S.’s low birth rate, the Trump administration’s cocktail of natalism and xenophobia makes clear that they don’t want more babies of all kinds, just white, Christian babies in heterosexual nuclear families.

So, yes, I agree that we should seriously grapple with how to reshape society in the face of population decline. I just don’t trust this administration—with its blatant disregard for families and basic human decency—to do it.

—Nona Willis Aronowitz

AND:

• Following the death of Pope Francis on Monday, the news cycle was flooded with praise and in-depth examination of his polarizing legacy. Over his 12 years of service, Francis was a champion of immigrants and the poor, modeling his papacy after his namesake St. Francis of Assisi. In his final months, he also spoke out staunchly against the violence in Gaza, even using his final Easter sermon to call for peace. Still, as he himself pointed out multiple times, Pope Francis was the head of a corrupt church that even under his watch continued to abuse children, protect predators, and deny the sacrament of matrimony to same-sex couples. Did he bring the massive reform that many Catholics were calling for? No. But did he, as Phillip Picardi explained last year, create, for many faithful, “an opportunity for healing or reconciliation after a lifetime of religious-based trauma” through declarations and sermons? Yes. And that may be his true legacy.

POPE FRANCIS DELIVERED HIS FINAL EASTER SERMON AT THE VATICAN THE DAY BEFORE HE DIED. VIA GETTY IMAGES

• In March, Ricardo Prada Vásquez called a friend from a Texas detention center to let him know he was being deported to El Salvador. But Vásquez never made it there, and his family, friends, and the U.S. government have no record of where he was deported to. An attorney with the National Immigrant Justice Center working to locate Vásquez told the New York Times that the story was “incredibly tragic—and we don’t know how many Ricardos there are.” (The story of Kilmar Abrego Garcia implies there may be many.)

• In related news, Dr. Noor Abdalla, who is married to detained Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, gave birth to the couple’s first child yesterday; her husband remains a political prisoner at a facility in Louisiana. In a statement, Abdalla wrote, “Despite our request for ICE to allow Mahmoud to attend the birth, they denied his temporary release to meet our son. This was a purposeful decision by ICE to make me, Mahmoud, and our son suffer.”

COLUMBIA STUDENTS AND ALUMNI CHAINED THEMSELVES TO THE UNIVERSITY'S MAIN GATE LAST WEEK TO PROTEST THE DETENTION OF STUDENTS. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

• Yesterday, Kenyan long-distance runner Sharon Lokedi won the women’s elite division of the Boston Marathon, completing it in two hours and 17 minutes, breaking the record previously held by Buzunesh Deba. We’ve come a long, glorious way from the first official run of Kathrine Switzer.

• The Mississippi Supreme Court has upheld a judge’s decision that trans people in the state may not legally change their names until they’re 21, even with parental consent. The ruling comes after a trans teenager and his parents filed for a name change in their county and were denied. But as writer S. Baum points out, girls in Mississippi can get married and change their last names to match their husbands…at age 15. Make it make sense.

• Still trying to figure out what the hubbub is about AI? Well, some scientists and researchers are currently using it to rescue all of us from a potential “sixth mass extinction.” Not as fun as turning yourself into a Studio Ghibli character, but who am I to yuck anybody’s AI yum?

• Let’s leave on a high note! Last year at our Free Future event, held in partnership with the Ford Foundation, former Hallandale, Florida, vice mayor Sabrina Javellana recounted her harrowing story of being targeted with deepfake porn images made and circulated without her consent. Local law enforcement told her the violation was “heinous,” but that there was nothing they could do. But Javellana persisted, and “turned my pain into advocacy,” getting a law passed to make creating any kind of nonconsensual deepfake a felony. Watch—and cheer for her—here.

FOLLOW THE METEOR

Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend?
Sign up for your own copy, sent Tuesdays and Thursdays.

[email protected]

Greetings, Meteor readers,

Congratulations to newly crowned NCAA champions the Florida Gators and UConn Huskies. But more importantly, congratulations to me for winning my first bracket pool ever! It only took three years 🥴.

In today’s newsletter, we look at the woman-specific impact of layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services. Plus, we’re all still thinking about The White Lotus.

Should I get a new dog,

Shannon Melero 🏆

WHAT'S GOING ON

Death by (ten) thousand layoffs: Last week the Trump administration decimated the Department of Health and Human Services; in the words of one former employee, “shitshow is an understatement.” As a result, the organizations housed under HHS—the Center for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid— lost 10,000 staff members, effectively shuttering a number of departments.

But not just any departments; the cuts will roll back decades of hard-won progress on women’s health research. Just take a look at what we’ve lost: Most of the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health was laid off, including the team responsible for updating contraception guidelines and groups researching IVF and fertility clinics’ success rates (despite Trump’s promises to make the procedure more accessible). Three of the four branches of the Division of Violence Prevention were also eliminated. The division, established three decades ago, was crucial to framing violence as a public health problem, and yet last week, on the first day of Sexual Assault Awareness Month, all of the staff working on intimate partner violence prevention and sexual assault prevention programs were dismissed. The administration also fired all of the CDC scientists researching drug-resistant STIs.

As is usually the case, these cuts will disproportionately impact Black, Latine, and lower-income women. The entire team working on the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a project started in 1987 to reduce infant morbidity and mortality by offering maternal health guidance through the entire birth process, was laid off last week. “Black women in America are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women,” one expert told Rolling Stone, and “we know this in large part because of the data collected and analyzed by the CDC.” And the timing of the system’s shutdown couldn’t be worse, a public health professor explained to Mother Jones: It “jeopardizes women and infants’ health at a time when maternal mortality rates in the US have been rising and access to maternity care is increasingly difficult.”

So what happens next and how can you help? Lawyers contend that many of the layoffs are on “shaky legal ground”; some state attorneys general have sued to block them. If your state hasn’t joined the lawsuit, file a complaint with your AG’s office online and ask them to fight back against these layoffs. If there is a local domestic violence shelter or rape crisis center in your area, it’s a great time to call them and ask exactly what they need. The government may not care, but we still can.

AND: 

• The Supreme Court has ruled that the Trump administration can continue to deport Venezuelans en masse under the protection of the rarely used wartime law, the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, with only one caveat: the administration now has to give notice of deportation ahead of time. The ruling is only a half-win for the administration, though,  since the Court ruled that the ACLU and Democracy Forward could reintroduce their suits against the Act—just one at a time for each man detained, rather than in one large group. In a dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recalled the internment of the Japanese during World War II, writing, “We are just as wrong now as we have been in the past, with similarly devastating consequences. It just seems we are now less willing to face it.”

• Beloved YouTube star Ms. Rachel is once again under attack for her salacious political view that children should not be killed or starved to death. But I hope she cannot hear those people over the sounds of kisses she’s giving to her new baby girl, Susannah. Our biggest congratulations to the Griffin-Accurso family!

MY CHILD'S FAVORITE COUPLE, MS. RACHEL AND HER HUSBAND MR. ARON. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

• Back in February, a large image of Harriet Tubman, along with a quote from her, was removed from a National Park Service web page about the Underground Railroad. They were replaced with text that didn’t mention slavery until the third paragraph—and pictures of Postal Service stamps that touted “Black/White cooperation.” No one noticed these changes until The Washington Post reported on them earlier this week, but thanks to backlash from historians and social media users, the missing content has been restored. Yelling works.

• And here’s something you can yell about right now! The Trump administration is threatening to withhold funding from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum unless it promises it will “not recognize men as women in any respect.” In other words? Trans Americans (whether scientists, writers, activists or athletes) are not part of Trump’s version of American history. It doesn’t have to go down like that. Tell the Smithsonian what you think.

• If you need a little pick-me-up after all the news of the day, we invite you to spend some time in a happy place with Bad Bunny’s Tiny Desk concert.

• Still trying to unpack the season finale of The White Lotus? Us, too. I’m locked in an intense debate with my colleague Rebecca Carroll over Belinda’s fate. And if you’re wondering why Parker Posey’s character Victoria Ratliff is so beloved despite being generally annoying, writer Amy Odell has theories. Spoilers if you click!

FOLLOW THE METEOR

Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend?
Sign up for your own copy, sent Tuesdays and Thursdays.

[email protected]

Salutations, Meteor readers,

As we head into Super Bowl weekend, I want to lay out what would be the best, most chaotic but still entirely possible timeline of events. First, Kendrick Lamar does a duet with Taylor Swift during halftime. It would look like this. Then Travis Kelce scores the first touchdown of the second half, looks directly into the camera, and says, “Are you ready for it?” The Swifties go feral. The Eagles comeback in the final minutes to win it all. Jason Kelce rushes the field, rips off his shirt, and written across his stomach is the release date for Reputation (Taylor’s Version).

In today’s newsletter, we return to reality with federal censorship. Plus, your weekend reading list.

Ready for whatever,

Shannon Melero

WHAT'S GOING ON

Bad words: Trump’s war on DEI has taken an absurdist turn that’s ultimately quite serious. The National Science Foundation has been ordered to pull down or halt any research that contains certain forbidden words related to diversity and inclusion. According to reports, the list of banned words given to the NSF and other federal agencies casts an incredibly wide net and includes heinous phrases like “pregnant person,” “BIPOC”, “Black,” “Latinx,” “cultural differences,” “disability,” “diverse group,” “equality,” “gender,” “female,” “historically,” “inclusive,” “LGBT,” “racism,” “trauma,” and “women.” Just to name a few!

Notably missing from the list is “male,” “man,” or “white.”

SOME MORE BAD, AWFUL, TERRIBLE WORDS (VIA INSTAGRAM)

Now, if the word does appear in a research paper, the corresponding project will not be immediately thrown out the window. Instead, it will have to be manually reviewed to determine whether or not it violates the executive orders on DEI. Nonetheless, let’s be extremely clear: This is censorship throughout multiple federal agencies, and a blatant attack on scientific progress. Darby Saxbe, a professor at USC, also shared a “decision tree” that was included in an email to NSF staffers, laying out how to flag research for further review. “You can't design a study of humans without using at least one of these terms,” she noted, “which means that biomedical, brain, social science research is now on ice in the USA.”

Let’s pause for a moment here. Sometimes it’s easy to imagine that fascism or authoritarianism is just the Big Actions, like putting people in prison without due process (already happened) or suppressing the media (in the process of happening). So censorship of this kind may be concerning but still fall short of setting off the big F alarm bell. But please know that I am standing in front of you, clanging a cowbell with all my might because censorship is a cornerstone of fascist government. It is the base Lego piece that holds everything else together and historians argue that we’re watching it happen right now.

To demonstrate just how absurd a word ban like this is, the rest of this newsletter will censor all words on the list and mentions of any women in leadership positions.

AND:

• A judge has moved the deadline for federal employees to decide whether to resign from their posts and accept a vague and possibly illegal buyout from the administration. The “Fork in the Road” plan was introduced to employees two weeks ago and was followed by a series of emails (and tweets) that were thinly veiled threats from Elon Musk, encouraging as many workers as possible to resign. The labor unions filed a request for a temporary restraining order claiming, among other things, that Fork was a “pretext for removing and replacing government workers on an ideological basis.” A hearing has been scheduled for Monday to hear arguments on whether the plan can go forward. Sheria Smith, union president at the Transport Workers Union, Local 252, said of the buyout offer, “It was really, really insulting, frankly. It insulted our work ethic and insulted our commitment to our jobs.”

• On Tuesday, Donald Trump went on an apparently unscripted ramble about “owning” the Gaza Strip, leveling it, and turning it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” This is, on every level, pure nonsense because the United States can’t just walk into an occupied land and say “we own this.” (Except for that one time. And that other time. And the other other time.) A plan like that, of course, has historically been considered ethnic cleansing and a violation of international law. Trump also teased that in four weeks he would have an announcement regarding the West Bank, which is currently being bombarded with raids by the Israeli military.  So: When Trump said “we” will own Gaza, was he really just referring to him and his friend Benjamin Netanyahu? We’ll find out.

• Yesterday, the National Women’s Soccer League reached a settlement with players to the tune of $5 million. Three years ago the league came to a screeching halt when allegations of widespread misconduct including abuse, racism, and sexual coercion went public ahead of the now-infamous Yates Report, named for former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates who led the investigation. The settlement money will be placed into a victims’ fund for current and former players.

SINEAD FARRELLY, ONE OF THE WOMEN NAMED IN THE YATES REPORT WHO CAME FORWARD TO EXPOSE THE DEPTH OF ABUSE IN THE LEAGUE. FARRELLY RETIRED FROM PROFESSIONAL SOCCER LAST SUMMER. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

• Feminists in Kenya composed a letter to feminists of the world who are in the fight against fascism (that’s you, sis), urging them to “not become passive to oppression.” You can read the full letter here, but if you need a boost to get through the evening, here is my favorite bit: “The current state of the world is not new…This is the world we have lived in. But as we have learned from our ancestors and the feminists that have come before us: we do not bow. We do not shrink. We do not retreat.”

WEEKEND READING 📚

On those old tweets: Some people aren’t exactly surprised by Karla Sofia Gascón’s history of racism and Islamophobia. (Remezcla)

On fire: An incarcerated firefighter in California shares what it’s like to do an impossible job. (Teen Vogue)

On law and order: Is anything Elon Musk doing legal? A law professor breaks it down. (Vox)

On making a comeback: So-called “natural” birth control isn’t new. But femtech apps are pushing a hard rebrand that has drawn in thousands of more women to a “new” way of family planning. (Mother Jones)

FOLLOW THE METEOR

Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend?
Sign up for your own copy, sent Tuesdays and Thursdays.

[email protected]