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October 30 - October 31, 2024
As Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I live with it every day. And every day I make an effort to turn my eyes to the future instead.
Schadenfreude is one of those long German words with a very specific meaning: “Finding joy in the troubles of others.” Not particularly admirable, but quite human. Scholars like Tiffany Watt Smith have traced similar concepts across cultures and languages. The French call it joie maligne. In Japan they say, “The misfortunes of others taste like honey.”
I miss a time when truth mattered. I miss fact-based debates about policies to solve problems and improve lives. I miss the clear separation of church and state, once sacrosanct, now breached by culture warriors and Christian nationalists. I miss elections where everyone respects the will of the people, without constant attacks by sore losers and wannabe dictators.
Now, Jane says, we should see aging as a staircase: “You gain well-being, spirit, soul, wisdom, the ability to be truly intimate, and a life with intention.”
Every day matters more if there are fewer of them ahead. What are we going to do with the time we have left? How can we make, in the words of Mary Oliver, our “one wild and precious life” count?
“progress is possible, not guaranteed.” We have to work for it. Fight for it. Earn it. And right now, so much of what we’ve gained is in danger of being lost.
It’s not a coincidence that ten of the past eleven recessions have hit during Republican administrations.
if you want to keep going, you have to keep learning.
“Hopeless people,” she told me, are “easily controlled and manipulated. But hopeful people can move mountains.”
“Fascism,” as Yale history professor Timothy Snyder put it, “is might over right, conspiracy over reality, fiction over fact, pain over law, blood over love, doom over hope.”
Globally, women and girls represent 80 percent of climate refugees—and that number is sure to grow in the years ahead.
About 40 percent of people on Earth live within sixty miles of a coast. Extreme weather, rising seas, and soaring temperatures know no borders.
In the United States, less than 2 percent of all philanthropic giving is to organizations that serve women and girls.
The United States is the only developed nation in the world that doesn’t require paid leave for new mothers.
Businesses lose an estimated $12.7 billion annually because of their employees’ childcare challenges.
Rights are important, but they are nothing without the power to claim them.
As my friend Madeleine Albright said, there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.
One in three women of reproductive age in the United States now lives under an abortion ban.
Abortion bans are a denial of women’s citizenship and humanity. There is no freedom without bodily autonomy—and no autonomy without full reproductive health care.
Around the world, women’s rights are often among the first things authoritarians target, usually cloaked in the mantle of traditional family values and religious piety.
Is it any surprise that states with the most restrictive abortions laws also have the least women in statewide and legislative office?
Reproductive freedom has never been about reproduction alone. It’s about power. Power over women’s bodies, yes, but also over our dreams, careers, and how expansive and fulfilling our lives are.
Even back then, I understood that protesting is only effective if it’s part of a broader strategy to drive real change.
People who use social media for more than three hours a day are twice as likely to experience loneliness and feelings of social isolation compared with those who use social media for less than thirty minutes a day.
When people are disconnected from friends, family, and communities, their lifetime risk of heart disease, dementia, depression, and stroke skyrockets. It’s also a gateway to substance abuse.
Studies show that delaying unlimited internet access until after puberty (the years when social media use is most likely to be correlated with poor mental health) can protect kids from the worst impacts.
Under McConnell’s leadership, every single Republican in the Senate—every one—has consistently blocked legislation to restore the Voting Rights Act, while Republican-led states pass ever more draconian restrictions on voting that disproportionately affect people of color, young voters, and poor people.
But a study from the organization Informing Democracy identified hundreds of local officials across six battleground states who have taken anti-democratic actions, such as refusing to certify vote totals, and many of them are set to administer or influence the 2024 elections.
Exhausting us is part of the authoritarian playbook. They unleash a torrent of lies not because they think we’ll believe all of them, but because they hope we’ll eventually be so overwhelmed that we’ll give up on the idea of truth and justice completely.
There’s no retirement from doing good, no statute of limitations on our call to service.
What the suffragists’ example shows us (and what the “suffs” sing in the rousing finale) is that “progress is possible, not guaranteed.” Change doesn’t happen on its own. Equality will not be given to us. Throughout American history—from our founding to the Civil War and Reconstruction to the movements for women’s rights, civil rights, and LGBTQ+ rights—change happened because people devoted their lives to it.
