Oh you mean, the ancient civilization that has recognized third gender identities for hundreds of years thanks to cultural categories like hijras and kothis? Ok!
Not to get in the way of anyone’s schadenfreude but: Is anyone else super creeped out that there is night vision video of the audience of a random regional performance of a musical?
India had been losing its democracy slowly. Now its happening all at once. This is a classic move in the elected autocrat playbook: use a pliant justice system to make your most powerful opponents ineligible to run against you.
I'll never forget
@connie_walker
telling me how her in the late 1970s, her father, then a policeman, pulled over a man for driving erratically. It turns out he knew the man. He was a Catholic priest who had abused him at a residential school for indigenous children.
My wife
@candyfight
who literally spent years photographing transgender women in India just said "Wow are they also exporting ‘chai tea’ to india too?"
Republicans have lost the culture war by winning their most cherished goal. So now they are trying to whip up an anti-trans frenzy. It isn’t working. My latest column.
Happy Loving day from the child of an interracial marriage who is in a long and happy interracial same sex marriage! Lets keep all those unions protected!
Here’s the statement from New York City’s three library systems about Mayor Eric Adams’s proposed budget cuts: “We would need to suspend Saturday service at a number of locations… and completely eliminate Sunday service.”
A hill I will die on: Fauci telling people masks are not needed early in the pandemic despite evidence that they were caused incalculable damage to government credibility.
Wonderfully sophisticated analysis of this moment from
@michelleinbklyn
. A true old-school reported essay. I’ll be thinking about it all day, I’m sure.
I am not sure how you recover any kind of sense of safety in the world after a trauma like this. I grieve for this child and hope he can find some measure of peace and comfort.
Just devastasting. Ralph Yarl’s mother, Cleo Nagbe, says her son is “able to communicate mostly when he feels like it, but mostly he just sits there and stares, and the buckets of tears just rolls down his eyes.”
But the answers she found point to a civilizational crime. The genocide of a whole culture and way of life. Children ripped from their homes and forced to live in horrific conditions with priests and nuns who sexually and physically abused them.
One thing that this Supreme Court has made clear: *theoretical* harms to the holders of status quo power must be addressed with urgency. *Actual* harms to out groups must be ignored or or better still declared a figment of a long ago past.
He beat the man to a pulp and left him by the side of the road. She told me she wanted to find out who that priest was, and what he had done to her father. I wanted to know too. It was the beginning of an incredibly arduous reporting journey.
We need Vivek as our paramount leader because we need to build an America where everyone can become rich off a failed company whose investors lost all their money when the company cratered.
Turkish election is the biggest story in the world right now. If Erdogan goes it is a hopeful sign that elected autocrats can and do lose power, despite their seeming omnipotence.
The crimes against indigenous people, committed by settlers in countries across the globe, must be answered with justice. There are many kinds of justice, and
@connie_walker
's storytelling is a powerful step along the road to true accountability.
Connie is the most dogged and indefatigable reporter I have ever known. She will run down any document, find people long hidden, unearth buried secrets. The story she tells in Stolen is the story of her family, yes.
Connie approached the most intimate of stories - that of her own father and family - with the meticulous care of the first rate investigative reporter she is. They found and named abusers. They held institutions to account.
"An obvious lesson from the gargantuan success of both “Barbie” and the Eras Tour is that there is a huge, underserved market for entertainment that takes the feelings of girls and women seriously."
Even more importantly - they kept the stories and agency of victims at the heart of their work. At Connie's insistence, Episode 4 features the voices of survivors, in their own words, unmediated by narration. It is a devastating episode.
Support for same sex marriage in the US remains above 70%, per new Gallup poll. Republicans at 49 percent; weekly church goers at 41%. Interestingly, people who attend church nearly weekly/monthly support it at 67%.
I am so grateful that Connie chose to tell this story, and that she trusted me and the team at Gimlet to do help her do it justice. It is an incredible piece of work and I hope you will listen to it.
Why do we remember some things and forget others?
@maddow
's terrific new podcast about a forgotten anti-semitic sedition plot, abetted in part by sitting members of congress, got me thinking about whether and how we'll remember Jan. 6th.
The absolute disgust this judge has for queer people, coupled with his total contempt for the bedrock concepts of the American constitution, is breathtaking. Same judge as the abortion pill ruling. Just making things up, legislating from the bench based on his prejudiuces.
Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk refuses to grant relief to Texas college students who may be punished for hosting a drag show.
His condemns drag as “vulgar and lewd” “sexualized conduct” that harms children and is likely unprotected by the First Amendment.
I went to Alabama last month to try to understand the strange whiplash I've been feeling lately as a queer person. I met some extraordinary people. These are their stories, and mine.
Infuriating datapoint on why American medical care is so expensive: a single New Mexico oncology practice spends $350,000 a year fighting insurance company coverage denials.
Hamas was elected in 2006 and has never allowed another election since. They never won a majority of the votes, and most of the Gazan population today was too young to be eligible to vote in 2006.
One of my most prized honors: being named an honorary Sister of Perpetual Indulgence by the amazing queers I met in Birmingham, Alabama last year. These are incredible people helping alleviate suffering in their community. The Dodgers don’t deserve to be associated with them.
The Dodgers, caught off guard by the blowback to their decision to rescind a Pride Night invitation to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, are internally discussing potential compromise solutions, according to a team official. Via
@ScottMillerBbl
The MAGA base is a minority group in American politics whose needs we must all apparently bend over backwards to accommodate. This was the "lesson" many journalism leaders took from 2016 and are now fighting the same war. It is nuts.
there is something to write about how folks like licht insist on transmogrifying the trump base — a distinct minority of americans — into something like a majority
Republicans seem to think that transphobia is the perfect post-Roe wedge issue. But the abject cruelty of their post-Roe lawmaking blitz has only alienated the swing voters wedge issues are meant to peel off.
George Santos, who's currently demanding stricter work requirements for Medicaid beneficiaries, is accused of fraudulently collecting unemployment benefits while earning a $120,000 salary, a felony offense.
What's more - there is simply no demand for this "compromise." Efforts to make anti-trans policy a major issue in competitive elections have failed. It is madness to concede something that barely matters to anyone but the most rabid and unreachable of your opponents.
Whether this is a slight of hand or just poor reasoning, the problem is that this argument fails to distinguish between “compromises that ameliorate injustice” and “compromises that entrench injustice.”
🚨🚨
@ElonMusk
complied when India’s right-wing prime minister asked him to block a BBC documentary critical of him, and even deleted MP tweets by me &
@mazmhussain
I wrote about the excruciating cruelty of the rich world's treatment of refugees from the poor world, connecting the dots from a fire on the US-Mexico border to a biblical earthquake in Turkey and Syria.
I haven't gotten around to seeing Barbie yet (I know, I know) and need to see it somewhat urgently for work, but just discovered the 10:40 am showing at the Brooklyn theater near me is sold out. 10:40 am. On a TUESDAY. People love this movie!
"A top library staffer estimated that a team of 11 people spent 40 hours per week on her challenges last school year." Imagine feeling entitled to drain so much from our public resources.
The horrifying laws being passed to punish trans people in states the GOP controls are a harbinger of what’s to come and ordinary people, unsurprisingly, want no part of it.
“Most urban bike riders will tell you they'd rather ride on a quiet street with literally no markings at all than a very busy one with a painted lane and nothing else.”
This podcast series is a shameless rip-off of my
@TheAtlantic
story from last April. No credit is given and the creator did zero original reporting. He even mispronounces the main character's name through all 8 episodes. (It's "kuh-SEE," not "KEY-see.") 🧵
I’ve announced a $50K reward for info on the criminal who killed 5 illegal immigrants Friday. Also directed
#OperationLoneStar
to be on the lookout.
I continue working with state & local officials to ensure all available resources are deployed to respond.
"Beshear, a Democrat seeking a second term in a race that could test the political potency of Republican messaging on transgender issues, said in an interview that he has always opposed gender reassignment surgery for children."
Conspiracy Twitter is currently in meltdown after finding out Elon Musk's likely Twitter CEO appointee Linda Yaccarino is an executive chair of the World Economic Forum, an organisation they view as one of the roots of all evil in the world.
Centrists of a certain type seem to have become convinced that supporting trans rights is a liability for Democrats. They are working in a long tradition of sacrificing queer lives on the altar of so-called moderation. This is wrong and cruel.
What are we really doing when we police bathrooms? I wrote about bathroom bans, and how toilets have long been a site of humiliation and degradation along the lines of race, class and gender.
Long before he was famous for his Weinstein reporting,
@RonanFarrow
was famous (to me) for his thinking and writing about global diplomacy. This makes his investigative report about merchant statesman Musk the perfect marriage of journalist and subject.
We’ve had enough. We’ve joined over 100 organizations and leaders to demand that
@nytimes
stop printing inaccurate and harmful misinformation about transgender people and issues. Today we are outside of the Times building to send a clear message.
Absolutely incredible to watch the great
@connie_walker
accept a DuPont award for her phenomenal podcast, Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s. Brave and personal investigative reporting at its finest.
I keep seeing articles about a woman suing Disney after getting a “wedgie” on a water slide.
To be clear: the woman was injured so badly that her intestines protruded through her abdominal wall & blood gushed out of her.
Disney is trying to downplay her VERY SERIOUS injuries.
It is an outrage that in a city this rich, with this many problems, there aren’t more wealthy people willing to support local public service journalism. But it also demonstrates that billionaires will not save local journalism - we are going to have to find another way.
New: New York nonprofit newsroom The City has seen a major drop in support from donors, including the Ford Foundation and Craig Newmark. The organization and staff reached an agreement for employees to take a 20% work hour reduction.
Sabrina is an exemplary journalist who was doing her job, and doing it well, when she asked Modi about the treatment of minorities in India. The harassment she has faced is brutal and unacceptable.
Update: saw Barbie at a packed theater in Times Square this afternoon and loved it with all my heart. I laughed, I cried. 100 percent will watch it again. Perfect cinematic experience.
@AmericaFerrera
is exceptional and wow Ryan Gosling can commit. Oscars all around! Go Greta!
Abortion rights and trans rights are two sides of the same coin, and the anti-trans bills have demonstrated that clearly. Republicans want to police your body. Is it surprising that Americans are rejecting this? Of course not.