Meet the community of survivors and activists behind South Korea’s first national war memorial for civilians.
I was summoned to Korea by an uncle who died 19 years before I was born. Through a series of chance encounters and unexpected opportunities, I was led by his ghost from my home in New York City to the central lowland city of Daejeon. From there, I traveled 20 minutes southeast to the remote valley where I am nearly certain he was killed, according to family members, news articles, and historical accounts.
Arriving on a bitterly cold winter day in 2024, I saw hundreds of white ribbons fluttering handwritten messages into the wind; they marked the barren clearing as a site of active mourning. A painting tied to the bare limb of a maple tree depicted a defiant young woman wearing a white minbok, standing beside a river of blood. Black letters tumbled down the right edge of the canvas: Who is it? In the heart of the nation, black-bullet gunners.
A tour bus to transport the grief keepers to the Golryeonggol massacre site.
Once called Golryeonjae for the dragon-shaped ridge along its northern edge, this valley held a hideous secret for decades. At the beginning of the Korean War, U.S.-backed South Korean troops and local police executed between 4,900 to 7,000 civilians here in a 10-day frenzy of anti-communist violence. The victims included thousands of political prisoners who’d been held at Daejeon Prison.
In recent years, the 1.5-kilometer stretch of pit graves has come to be known in Korea as “the longest grave in the world.” But family members of the victims and local organizers call it Golryeonggol (骨靈), the valley where the spirits of the bones dwell.
They would know. In 2020, they dug through the earth with their own hands to retrieve bones, teeth, shoes, buttons, and U.S.-made bullet casings. It was the third exhumation—and the first organized by civilians, who’d become frustrated by the slow progress of South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Exhumed remains at Sejong Memorial House.
Digging was their visceral initiation into the highest order of han (한): the embodied anguish and rage accumulated in the collective soul of my people, who have survived colonialism, a proxy war that killed an estimated 3.8 million Korean civilians in three years, and the cleaving of our homeland in rapid succession. It’s no wonder family members of the victims and local activists tend to this land as if it were a living being. They are its grief keepers.
Over the years, they’ve developed an elaborate communal practice of han puri—an externalized expression of han to release it from the body. By publicly healing a historical wound, they’ve also nurtured a fragile sense of possibility. After 26 years of organizing and six mass exhumations (the most recent in 2024), the Golryeonggol grief keepers are on the cusp of achieving their shared dream. In November, the South Korean government will prepare the mass grave site for the construction of Daejeon Peace Park, the country’s first and only national memorial to civilian victims of the war.
~
I made that first trip to Golryeonggol, accompanied by an interpreter and a friend, six months after my uncle first made himself known to me. I brought a suitcase full of fresh fruit, three gift boxes of dried persimmons, two bottles of makkgeolli, and a platter of fried fish. I’d come to perform a jesa, the ritual offering of food and drink Koreans do to care for the spirits of their ancestors.
Chun Mi Kyung (Chun Imo), President of the Daejeon Massacre Bereaved Families Association.
An offering of makkgeolli.
We were greeted outside a small building by an elegant matriarch named Chun Mi Kyung, whose father was killed in the massacre. Though her official title is President of the Daejeon Massacre Bereaved Families Association, I’ve come to think of her as the head grief keeper of Golryeonggol. Within minutes of our arrival, she and two other members of the association had washed the fruit, stacked the food on platters, and arranged carved wooden vessels on the floor.
When she noted the uncertainty in my face, Chun Imo (a respectful and affectionate word for maternal aunt, which she invited me to call her) gestured for me to kneel on the floor. She wrapped my hands around one of the vessels, filled it with makkgeolli, and moved my hands in three counterclockwise circles around the incense. Like an orchestra conductor, she guided me through two full prostrations before she, the other elders, and my companions paid their respects. After we concluded, the aunties cut up the fruit and passed the plates around as we shared our stories.
“Your uncle and all the people who were killed here, they are all my fathers,” Chun Imo said. “We take care of all of them just like we do our own dads.”
A jesa table at Sejong Memorial House, a forensic mortuary where the association performs regular ceremonies. The remains of 1,441 Golryeonggol victims are held here, as well as the remains of thousands of war crime victims from around the country.
During the 2020 civilian exhumation, Chun Imo and other members of the association discovered that many of the remains had been waterlogged and broken by construction.
“I slept alone in this house with the bones for days,” she said, sweeping her hands above the altar table to show where they had spread the fragments to dry. “But I was not afraid. At night I walk the grounds here with only the light from the moon. I take care of the spirits, and they watch over me.”
Prostrating before the spirits of the ancestors.
Later, as we said our goodbyes, Chun Imo grasped both my hands in hers and told me to come back for the community memorial ceremony, held annually at the end of June.
“I will see you here next year,” she said.
~
I traveled again to Daejeon this past June for the memorial, arriving at the clearing to find hundreds of people sitting under a massive white tent. Most were elders whose shrunken bodies told the story of wartime starvation. Paper lanterns dangling from surrounding trees cast a warm glow on faces ravaged by sun, time, and grief. Beneath the lanterns, a row of wooden easels held framed black-and-white portraits of the dead.
Son Bok Seong, whose husband's older brother was killed at Golryeonggol.
The opening ritual was a sangyeo procession, a Korean funeral bier. Four men carried a palanquin with a symbolic corpse of paper-cut chrysanthemums. A fifth man led them in a call-and-response song with a melancholy, strident melody. Late into the night, we sat with our restless ancestors through music, poetry, and shamanic rituals, plus a drum dance to accompany wandering spirits to the afterlife.
The next morning, we reconvened for Buddhist death rites, a Catholic sermon, and the formal jesa ceremony. I found my uncle in the center of the banner inscribed with the names of victims. Below it, a massive table sagged under dozens of platters piled high with traditional altar food.
A feast of plenty to remind the dead we know how they suffered.
~
It wasn’t safe to speak on the Daejeon Massacre publicly until the mid-2000s, let alone grieve its victims openly. In the absence of a formal peace agreement, the South Korean government waged an ideological war within its borders. It continues to this day under the banner of national security. Surveillance, disappearances, torture, and blacklists of anyone associated with leftists were once common enough that a generation of South Koreans blotted “red” relatives from their family histories.
A mourner covers his face.
The 1950 Daejeon Massacre was the largest in a vicious spree of civilian executions during that first summer of the war. It was carried out by President Syngman Rhee's military police, formally under U.S. wartime command beginning July 14. They targeted known leftists and people suspected of being sympathizers simply for being poor; the government had registered hundreds of thousands of them in a “political rehabilitation program” called the Bodo League in 1949. All told, the South Korean military police killed between 100,000 and 300,000 of its own civilians.
For decades, relatives of the victims, including my own, grieved in secrecy to avoid the scrutiny of successive right-wing dictatorships installed by the United States after the 1953 armistice. I understand why after meeting Chun Imo: Long after her father was executed, her eldest uncle was abducted by police and her brother poisoned by right-wing assailants. After years of being blacklisted, her youngest uncle died by suicide, her grandfather eventually lost his mind from repeated shocks, and Chun Imo herself moved to another town where no one knew her family.
Chun Mi Kyung (Chun Imo), President of the Daejeon Massacre Bereaved Families Association.
The long silence finally broke in 1992, when a left-leaning magazine called Mal (말, translated literally as Word) published the first exposé about the massacre. A novelist writing under the pseudonym Noh Gah-won interviewed a former police officer who had participated in the killing. He described how soldiers and policemen shot row after row of people until the valley was “a sea of blood.” Among the scenes he described, corroborated in subsequent years by eyewitness accounts, one detail roiled the magma of my han: U.S. soldiers had watched from the ridges surrounding the massacre site. One of them, Major Leonard J. Abbott, got close enough to take 18 grisly photos of the massacre in progress (declassified by the U.S. in 1999). They include a few shots of victims who look like teenagers, staring into the camera—immortalized on the threshold of death in the archive of a U.S. proxy conflict my high school teachers called “the Forgotten War.”
The Mal exposé might have also been forgotten if not for Sim Kyu Sang, an activist from the Daejeon region who was serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence at Andong Prison. Sim, who’d been incarcerated for participating in a building takeover during the 1990 Seoul student protests, grabbed the magazine from a pile of periodicals delivered to the prison when he saw the headline. Following his release a year later, he went to a senior center in the area and asked people who were old enough to remember. They refused to speak, other than to tell him they’d been warned by local police officers to report anyone who asked questions about the massacre.
Human rights activist Sim Kyu Sang, who now serves as the Daejeon bureau chief of Oh My News.
Sim Kyu Sang with Im Jae Geun, executive chair of the Daejeon Sannae Golryeonggol Countermeasure Committee and director of the Research Institute for Peace and Unification Education.
Sim wandered through the mountains for weeks until he identified the silhouetted mountain in one of the Mal magazine photographs. He walked into the valley and saw human bones and teeth scattered everywhere. The subsistence farmers who owned the land admitted they’d thrown out piles of human remains they’d found while plowing.
~
Hoping to halt the continued desecration of the victims, Sim attempted to publish a new story about the massacre for the next four years. No outlet would touch it until 2000, when both Mal and Oh My News published his citizen journalist report. Thereafter, he was inundated with phone calls from family members of the victims, who beseeched him to show them the site. In July 2000, he gathered the members of 16 families at Golryeonggol for the first time. They howled and wept for three hours.
In the years that followed, more people joined their kinship of grief, confronting together what no one person could bear to face alone. They became a living embodiment of jeong (정)—the Korean relational ethic of deep collective care, powerful enough to soothe our han. After incorporating as an NGO in 2007, the group evolved into a hub of local organizing for government accountability. Working in solidarity with similar associations across Korea, the Golryreonggol grief keepers have traveled to Seoul on numerous occasions to push forward the government’s tepid Truth and Reconciliation process. After a 2010 investigation, the commission concluded the state had acted illegally, holding itself and Syngman Rhee responsible for executing “incarcerated prisoners without due process solely on the grounds that they had a history of leftist activity or were suspected of sympathizing with the Korean People’s Army.”
Mourners gather to pay their respects at the Golryeonggol massacre site.
In 2016, South Korea’s government announced it would create a memorial peace park for civilian victims of the state from before, during, and after the war. It invited applications from local governments nationwide to host the project. Of the seven cities that submitted bids, Golryeonggol made a compelling case due to the scale of the massacre and the geographical range of the victims held at Daejeon Prison. Its team, led by Sim, was eventually selected by the national evaluation committee.
Like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission itself, progress on the memorial has depended on whether the national government leans right or left. In 2021, a large-scale excavation unearthed the remains of nearly 1,000 victims at Golryeonggol, lending new momentum to the project under the left-leaning administration of President Moon Jae-in. This came to a grinding halt under the far-right President Yoon Suk-yeol, who wanted to destroy the remains—a plan foiled by his impeachment.
Park Jun Su, whose father was executed at Golryeonggol.
Given their tumultuous journey, the grief keepers are understandably skeptical that they will live long enough to see the memorial. But Sim is confident construction will begin in December, now that the government has made a formal announcement and appropriated more than $48 million USD for it.
In the meantime, thousands of tormented spirits still need care. Knowing my uncle died violently and far from home, I feel deep gratitude for Chun Imo’s jeong with the souls of so many victims.
“Sometimes they cry out to me from hunger and sadness,” Chun Imo says.
When they do, she cooks an elaborate meal, sets the altar table with plates piled high, and invites the wandering spirits to eat.
A traditional ancestor table at Golryeonggol to mark Chuseok (Full Moon Harvest).
[post_title] => The Grief Keepers
[post_excerpt] => Meet the community of survivors and activists behind South Korea’s first national war memorial for civilians.
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My father left Somalia in 1982 to study engineering on a scholarship in Washington D.C. Then, a war began in his absence and changed the course of his life.
In the winter of 2021, forty years after his departure, I boarded a flight with him ready to see Mogadishu for the first time. My grandmother gone, my father wanted to track down his childhood home and divide the proceeds from its sale among his siblings.
The house was in poor condition, the concrete and stone badly damaged. My father was disoriented. He lamented that he did not recognize the neighborhood—the Hodan District—or the route we took there. So much had changed, been leveled or lost. What remained was in ruins.
~
I grew up in Portland, Oregon. I spent my days daydreaming in class and my evenings on the internet where I befriended other Somali girls from around the world. We were young and earnest and thought our angst made us exceptional. We were embarrassingly self-fetishizing. We didn’t want to be reduced to our identities, yet secretly feared they were the most interesting thing about us. We were raised on nostalgia, took it into our bodies like milk from our mothers.
We were born in the rupture of the archive, in its lapse.
Two weeks before our trip to Mogadishu, I stumbled down a staircase and hurt my ankle—a hairline fracture caused by repetitive strain, as opposed to a single discrete injury. The importance of strong ankles is basic physics: they dictate the force with which one can meet the world.
Traveling with my father, I walked with a limp; I could not bear my own weight. I took pictures of everything in an attempt to find my place in the rift between him and his fate, between his history and the history of his country.
To this day, my ankle buckles beneath me if I step the wrong way, instability no longer a condition but a fixture of my body.
~
Somalia’s borders were not drawn by clans, but through colonial contracts. Italy claimed the south, England the north, but in Djibouti, it is France’s legacy that lives on.
The proof of these colonial horrors can be found in the museums of Europe, alongside much of Africa’s plundered heritage. In 1923, Benito Mussolini inaugurated Rome's Colonial Museum in the Palazzo della Consulta which housed, at its height, over 12,000 artifacts stolen from its African colonies—Somalia, Libya, and Eritrea. In 1940, it was moved to a larger location and renamed the Museum of Italian Africa. With the outbreak of World War II, the museum fell into neglect. A damning relic of a defeated regime. Its archives were boxed away.
The history of the modern museum cannot be separated from the history of empire. Almost eight decades later, Italy’s colonial archives were transferred to the Museum of Civilizations in Rome which curated a project titled “The Museum of Opacities” in an attempt to critically examine Italy’s colonial past as it absorbed thousands of artifacts. The exhibit invoked French philosopher Édouard Glissant’s assertion that a people have a “right to opacity.” That is, something in each of us and our histories that cannot be translated, easily understood, catalogued, or contained.
~
When my father took me to see Somalia's national monuments, my uncle and cousin joined us. We started at the Somali Youth League memorial, a plaza dedicated to the young activists who played a key part in the movement for independence. Next was Daljirka Dahsoon, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and Hawo Tako, a woman who watched over the city with a torch in her hand and an arrow through her heart. Then we saw the Seyed, father of the Dervish Movement, disparagingly called the Mad Mullah by the British, seated atop his famed steed in Mogadishu’s city center. A short distance away was Taalada Dhagaxtuur, the statue of an anonymous stone-thrower, symbolizing the brave men who fought the British with nothing but stones and the steel in their spines.
None of these statues are the originals, all of which were destroyed at the start of the Somali Civil War, their bronze and stone limbs reduced to scrap and sold to neighboring countries. We took pictures in front of their doppelgangers.
We wandered the streets of Mogadishu and the streets of memory. Our last stop of the day was the Somali National Museum, but it was closed to the public. Built by the Sultan of Zanzibar, the building dates back to 1872 before it was converted into Somalia’s first public museum, the Museo della Garesa, by the Italian colonial administration in 1933. Its collection included roughly 3,000 items, serving as an archive of Italian military history. For the colonial administration, it also served as proof that the Italians had created order out of chaos, and preserved what would have otherwise been lost.
It would not be the building’s last transformation.
In 1960, seventeen African countries, including Somalia, gained independence from colonial rule. Less than a decade later, General Siad Barre seized power in a military coup and the Supreme Revolutionary Council adopted Scientific Socialism as Somalia's state doctrine.
As political, economic, and cultural ties between Somalia and the USSR deepened, a team of Soviet scholars arrived in Mogadishu in 1971 for an archaeological expedition aimed at decolonizing Somali history. The scholars sought to forge a continuous chain of rebellion by linking the Dervish Movement in the late 19th century to Siad Barre's 1969 coup, casting Somalis as both victors of an unbroken struggle and heirs to its liberation.
The construction of a new national museum and the preservation of the country’s cultural heritage became top priorities for the new government, and the 1987 completion of the Somali National Museum was hailed as a great achievement by UNESCO.
But the promise of the young republic was usurped by a ruinous civil war. The museum was looted, its collection stolen and sold, then scattered as far and wide as Somalia's people.
~
In the fall of 2024, my friends Aziz Farah and Ibrahim Hirsi, cultural workers with no formal training in art history or curation, joined forces with Asha Noor, a higher education professional, and Idel Rasheed, a researcher and curator, to launch Koor Archives, a traveling exhibition dedicated to preserving Somali heritage. Though they live in four different countries— Canada, the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom—they are bound by their shared commitment to the tangible and intangible elements of Somali culture.
Aziz and Ibrahim met earlier that year at Piasa, a French auction house that was selling the lifetime collection of Pierre Loos, a Belgian “tribal art dealer.” They successfully bid on 45 Somali headrests. The next day, they spent hours wandering through a Parisian flea market and stumbled upon a Brazilian dealer of East African art. After some haggling, they acquired a cache of books and a traditional Somali amber necklace. Their collection has since grown substantially, culled from galleries, private collections, estate sales, online auctions, street vendors in Somalia’s back alleys, and donations from families and friends.
Their search has exposed them to the political economy of antiquities, an underworld built on expropriation and dispossession. They spend time on Facebook forums where people clash over what constitutes art, where African artifacts are described as primitive, even as they exchange hands for thousands of dollars, buying Somali artifacts from non-Somalis, often at exorbitant prices, and haggling with strangers over the right to their own heritage.
In Somalia, the buying and selling of antiquities is unregulated. There is a network of impoverished residents who steal items from graves and sell them to local dealers. And while most of Africa’s cultural heritage remains in Europe due to centuries of colonialism, Turkey and the UAE’s increased influence in the region has resulted in what Aziz calls a “second plunder.” One antique seller in Mogadishu tells Ibrahim that Arabs and Turks are now his most frequent customers.
Some of the items in the Koor Archives’ collection make Aziz and Ibrahim uncomfortable, like the taxidermy mounts of gazelle and antelope heads, their faces frozen since they were hunted in 1910. “Europeans loved their trophies,” Aziz says. The duo dream of returning them to Somalia where they can be properly laid to rest.
In many ways, Koor is what Françoise Vergès, the French postcolonial scholar and curator, calls the anti-museum: a space that uplifts a poetics of ordinary life and invests in communal stewardship, both the tangible and intangible elements of Somali culture, including oral traditions, poetry, music and song, and collective memory. In Frantz Fanon’s theory of decolonization this kind of rupture is “a program of complete disorder.” The anti-museum, then, might be understood as an attempt to reconstitute what Fanon describes as a world “cut in two”: a world of buyers and sellers, objects and owners. A program that dares to emancipate both the imagination and archive.
Koor is a project of love and disorder, the only forces strong enough to upend “a world of statues" and bring into being a world with no masters and no marble gods.
In their first public exhibit in Toronto of over 100 rare Somali artifacts back in the summer of 2024, three generations of a single family—a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter—stood around a loox, a wooden tablet used to read and write the Quran. Elders shared memories of learning the holy book this way. Someone recalled the process of making ink. Another spoke of trees sprouting from the dirt where the ink of sacred verses had been rinsed. The verses they first read on the loox were inscribed not only on wood, but on their hearts.
~
Long before I met Aziz and Ibrahim, I took my grandmother to the only Somali Museum in North America, in Minneapolis. I expected her to share my excitement, but she was dismissive. “We have these things at home,” she said.
It was true: In our garage in Portland were several xeedho, woven containers central to her tribe’s wedding customs, which she’d lovingly protected from dust in hopes of saving them for my own wedding.
She looked at the wooden fandhaals on display and said: “This is a spoon. Why is a spoon in a museum?”
I did not yet know to question the museum’s logic, its bureaucratic and lifeless classification of the world. My grandmother was impervious to this conditioning. To her, these items were ordinary, pedestrian staples of everyday life.
Years later, wandering the Africa collection at the British Museum, I marveled at the Somali artifacts sealed behind display cases. I knew there were even more hidden within the museum’s bowels. I pressed my hand to the glass that separated me from them and them from the world—a checkpoint I could not cross. Each artifact bore a date of acquisition wed to the name of the donor, the seller, the excavator, the field collector.
I thought of the feet that once wore the leather sandals on display, imagined the roads they tread. The woman who held her long hair over the smoke of a glazed incense burner. The fingers of the blacksmith wrapped around his iron hammer. The shield of hide and wood and the human heart it once protected from harm.
I look at the pictures from my 2021 trip to Mogadishu, I see our smiling faces, our skin glistening with sun and sweat. My uncle has since died, but he is immortalized in these photographs. In my favorite picture, we are posing in front of the Somali flag and underneath a banner that says, “Soomaliya Soomali baah leh.”
Somalia belongs to Somalis.
I lay claim to all that lays claim to me. My living and my dead and the dirt from their graves. My father’s childhood home. His schoolbooks and the sins of his youth. The grief that beats inside him like a second heart. I inherit the echo and the trace and the blue that binds us—the flag, the sky, the sea.
[post_title] => A Somali Archive of Our Own
[post_excerpt] => When memory in the aftermath of war meets nostalgia for a place and time that no longer exist.
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Why I think looksmaxxers have more in common with trans people than they'd like to admit.
“Hi, nice to meet you, I’m Allison.” This is a sentence I have fought to say, yet despite my warm intentions, occasionally, what the other person hears is an out of tune piano. Their confusion doesn’t typically last for more than a breath, but to me, that brief pause can feel like an eternity.
I don’t believe this apprehension is always derived from hate; as humans, we constantly look for boxes to put people in, to help us understand one another. Maybe that momentary hold is from the contrast between my feminine name and my “masculine” voice. Maybe it’s simply my own internal struggles. But on days where I am not busy questioning if my rights have been taken away yet, I have a peculiar thought: Are trans people the only ones who experience this introduction anxiety, or do cis people feel it, too?
In previous decades, there were aesthetic archetypes—such as the tomboy, the metrosexual, or even the neon-racoon-striped-hair scene kids—that bent the gender binary, allowing room for desperately needed gradients of self-expression. Each of these have lost their cultural tether over time. Twenty years ago, what made a man and what made a woman appeared to be looser. Today, the culturally dominant aesthetics are the “clean girl,” the “gym bro,” and “stealth wealth.” The diversity of self-expression has been snuffed out.
This cultural shift has taken place alongside American politics using trans existence as an attention-diverting scapegoat. The societal pressures and heightened scrutiny placed on trans bodies has had some unforeseen consequences: Cisgender people are now suffering from more rigid standards of gender, too. Women athletes are being subjected to invasive sex testing for not fitting what society deems “woman enough.” The WNBA is being targeted as a political hotbed of discourse centered around the league not having a clear enough definition of what a woman is, resulting in routine harassment both on the court and off of it. Heterosexual dating has increasingly been framed by influencers and “experts” alike as something transactional, asking how the man can provide and what the woman can offer in return.
Over the past several years, there has also been a rise in lifestyle content targeted towards men centered around hustle culture, exuberant wealth, and extreme fitness—broadly referred to as the “manosphere.”
Within this sphere of influence is the “looksmaxxing” community, a collective of individuals who have game-ified their appearance and, nonconsensually, the appearances of everyone else. Originally a cross-section of manosphere and incel (involuntary celibate) content, this collective of mostly men is fixated on making themselves as attractive as possible, as determined by what looksmaxxers deem to be a “mathematical” formula. Their scale ranges from zero to eight (“chud” to “chad”), but the online forums are very quick to tell you that an eight is almost impossible to achieve—only one in twelve billion will ever reach that score. Do these men fear being a 4.5, I wonder? When they say “nice to meet you,” do they worry that someone might notice their canthal tilt is slightly out of the ideal five-to-seven degree range?
I find a strange amount of empathy for these fears: I am always working towards having people perceive me how I see myself internally. The journey of self-actualization is not an easy one, but whether looksmaxxers want to admit it or not, it's also one that we share. Looksmaxxers message each other on forums asking where to get a reliable peptides dealer, or what methods they can use to ascend the scale. Trans women flock to forums to do much of the same, seeking advice on how to do their makeup, or tips for passing. Passing and ascending might as well be synonyms. To “pass” is the coveted goal for many of being perceived as a cisgender woman, to “ascend” is to get one step closer to becoming the ideal man. There is more in common between us than even I’d like to admit. (Maybe if they weren’t so hateful, we could even form a union one day.)
I struggle to share this empathy willingly, as the poster boy for this culture is a 20-year-old influencer named Braden Peters, who goes by the name “Clavicular.” Peters currently has over one million followers on TikTok, and was even profiled by TheNew York Times earlier this year, where he was referred to as a “social media sensation” and “a beacon for a group of narcissistic, status-obsessed young men.”
This profile feels especially frustrating, in part for the legitimacy it has afforded both Peters and the looksmaxxing movement. In it, he does not shy away from expressing his belief that he is above the law. (A belief underlined by an image he posted to Twitter/X stating “men’s facial features may sway criminal sentencing.”) There is even a subsection titled “No More Politics" where the reporter dives into Peters’ use of racial slurs, as well as all the time he has spent with self-proclaimed white supremacists and influencers charged with rape and human trafficking, including brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate, arrested in Miami last July.
The looksmaxxing movement sits comfortably nestled under the manosphere umbrella alongside other hateful movements, such as blackpill and incel cultures. (In fact, many looksmaxxers often post using the same hashtags.) Like its sister movements, there is also a consistent pattern of violent escalation and dehumanization of anyone who doesn't fit within the system that looksmaxxers follow, ranging from cyberbullying to explicit forms of interpersonal physical violence.
This is, perhaps, the most crucial difference between transgender people and looksmaxxers. While arguably victims of the same cultural pressures, looksmaxxers are able—and choose—to identify with the aggressor. The most horrifying part to me in all of this is that Peters’ act of violence might not be a disqualifier for adoration, or continued participation in the most problematic aspects of the looksmaxxing movement. As looksmaxxing has unfortunately made its way into the cultural zeitgeist, I personally refuse to allow it to separate from its hateful, racist, misogynistic origins. But to create fundamental change, all of us must do the same: Peters’ case must be a wake up call to not de-sensitize ourselves to this movement, including the inevitable harm it has already caused, and the harm it will likely continue to cause if left unchecked.
Looksmaxxers’ relationship to gender expression and identity hasn’t ultimately protected them from judgement (and depending on how Clavicular’s case plays out, perhaps neither from consequence): The brutal scrutiny they’ve placed onto others has ended up reflected back toward themselves. Although most looksmaxxers are born male, society's expectations of men have gotten more extreme. Within manosphere culture, you must be fit, tall, and disciplined. So if you’re a short man who experiences joy, you might feel incongruent with your gender. Like many trans people, they, too, are experiencing a form of gender dysphoria, a psychiatric diagnosis that refers to the psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s perceived gender identity. Rather than an internalized journey, however, looksmaxxers continuously take in these negative external pressures and fire them back at each other—along with everyone else. Peters himself has stated that “men aren’t supposed to be happy.” The difference is that looksmaxxers believe others should suffer alongside them, and that often, they should ultimately suffer worse.
It's important to acknowledge that trans women are not immune to toxicity. There are niche corners of the culture centered around categorizing each other as “doll” or “brick,” which to some, simply translates as passing or not passing. Thankfully, this is not the dominating narrative for the trans community—it's actually the opposite: No matter where someone is on their self-actualization journey, whether day negative ten or day one hundred, our appearance doesn’t change that we are women. Anyone who says otherwise is rightfully shamed, quite the opposite approach to the one that looksmaxxers take, where it doesn’t matter how far on your looksmaxxing journey you are, god help you if you are 4.5 on their scale—or worse, a woman.
Still, the perpetual burden of incongruence isn’t something I’d wish on my worst enemy. We are all dolls, and deserve the grace of autonomy and self-expression. I hope looksmaxxers can also feel that warmth—from each other and themselves—soon. But to get there, they must first reckon with the collective trait at the root of their ugliness: hate. Because no matter how effective their peptides or hard the hammer hits their jawline, the only true path to their ascension to chad-hood might just depend on their finally embracing the opposite.
[post_title] => A Letter to the Chads from a Doll
[post_excerpt] => Why I think looksmaxxers have more in common with trans people than they'd like to admit.
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A day in the life of Misk and her Hello Kitty backpack at one of Gaza's makeshift schools.
Amid the ruins of destroyed buildings and the weathered tents that have become home for more than one million displaced people in Deir al-Balah’s camps, 11-year-old Misk walks alongside her classmates, carrying her Hello Kitty school bag. Along the way, she encounters just a few of the human realities of displacement: families searching for water and food; children carrying yellow plastic jerrycans as they take on daily responsibilities far beyond what they should or can.
But for Misk, this path represents the road to being a student again. She is feeling eager and excited. In her backpack, she carries a couple of things she had been without for some time: a notebook and a pen.
Since 2023, hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza have lost access to formal education amid the ongoing genocide and displacement of Palestinians. Israeli military operations have destroyed and continue to destroy many school buildings, while others have been converted into shelters for displaced families. Temporary learning spaces began popping up in early 2025 as teachers and volunteers transformed displacement tents into classrooms, adding desks, chairs, and blackboards so children could return to learning despite the ongoing violence. These spaces have offered more than a place to study: They have given children a chance to regain a part of their daily routines, a community of peers, and something resembling the normal life they'd lost.
Misk was in the third grade in May 2024 when Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued evacuation orders—paper slips that were airdropped over entire neighborhoods ordering people to vacate their homes and leave town. In southern Gaza, her city of Rafah welcomed over a million displaced residents overnight, while Misk and her family ended up in the center of the Gaza Strip at Deir al-Balah, where they still share a single small room in her relative's house—a room where they all sleep, eat, study, and work, in circumstances that have changed nearly every part of their daily lives. Amidst all this, Misk’s new school at the Deir al-Balah displacement camp, while temporary, has become a refuge.
On a recent September day, Misk sits with eight other children inside a small room. There is no school gate, no morning assembly, and no bell marking the beginning or end of their lesson. Yet children still arrive at 9 a.m., with whatever basic supplies they can find. Some carry old notebooks or loose papers, and the few pens they have. They sit at simple wooden desks facing the board, enthusiastically raising their hands as their teachers—sisters Jumanah, 24, and Shahd Al-Naouq, 22—guide them through lessons in Arabic, English, and mathematics. The scene resembles an ordinary classroom, where children listen, answer questions, and learn together. But instead of concrete walls and a permanent building, their class takes place in a single tent inside a displacement camp.
This one-room school did not start from big plans or with help from a fully-funded institution. It started with a question. Last year, Jumanah was an ambitious university graduate with an accounting degree preparing to begin her career. But the war had changed that path. Job opportunities were scarce and starting a career in accounting seemed increasingly out of reach as she was forced to navigate the daily challenges of an uncertain future.
Then, earlier this year, Jumanah visited a friend whose relatives were hosting a displaced family. There, she noticed a young girl drawing. She could not stay focused for long. Every so often, the girl’s mother would ask her to help wash clothes by hand or with other chores, and she would get up. After finishing, she would return to her pen and paper and continue drawing.
“When I saw Misk trying to draw despite everything happening around her, I thought we needed to do something,” Jumanah tells me. “I felt that children had not only lost their schools; they had lost a part of their daily lives.”
She thought about the children living in the area and in the nearby displacement camps, probably tens of thousands of them, who were growing up without education or a place to return to after losing their homes. Then came her question: If children could no longer safely reach their school due to displacement, long distances, and Israeli bombardments, what if their school came to them?
Her sister, Shahd, agreed to be a part of it.
“We did not have a school or big resources, but we had children who wanted to learn. I said, ‘Let’s start with what we have.’ Even if the place is simple, the important thing is that they have a place to come back to,” Shahd says.
When they first opened the school, Jumanah welcomed their students inside their Deir al-Balah home, a small structure made of corrugated metal. She put a single table in a room and bought a small chalk and marker board. Shahd, an English literature student at the Islamic University of Gaza, joined her, and together the sisters spoke to their neighbors and asked for small donations to help pay for the necessary supplies. Before long, children from the neighborhood and the nearby camps came. Misk was among the first to join.
At that point, there were no more than ten students from six to 12 years old. Jumanah took on most of the responsibility for organizing the space and putting together lessons on basic Arabic, math, and other topics. Shahd, meanwhile, taught the children letters and numbers in English.
At first, their goal was not to complete a full school year or make up for everything the children had lost during the past three years of war. “The most important thing for us was to make children connected to learning and make them feel that there was still a place waiting for them every day,” Jumanah says.
As more families learned about the school, more children began attending. Within four months, Jumanah and Shahd were able to move to a newly designated area in their neighborhood, where not one but three rows of tents were set up as classrooms, allowing them to welcome even more children. They have since been joined by additional teachers, who also volunteer their time to teach the students.
A few simple wooden desks and learning materials were added, including notebooks, textbooks, pens, and another blackboard. Children sat in rows next to one another, with the chalkboard at one end, like a traditional classroom. It became known as the Al-Itqan (Excellence) School.
Al-Itqan has provided a refuge for children, but it is not separate from the reality of the camp—it is at its heart. Daily life continues outside its main entrance, as people push water carts between the tents, walking back and forth as they try to secure their basic needs. The children, too, also carry different stories with them—stories of the years they've lived without access to education.
For Misk, returning to the classroom has meant more than just the opportunity to sit in front of a book or complete an exercise. It has also been a chance to be with other children who have lived through the same experience. It has meant she can finally build new friendships; that once again, she can belong.
“I was happy,” Misk says about the chance to return to school again. “I felt like I was living the way I used to. I had a place to go, meet other children, and learn again.”
The school has offered something similar to other children, too, while still presenting challenges shaped by the realities of life in the camp. There is a twelve-year-old, Farah Al-Harazin, who always sits in the front, not because she chooses to, but because she needs to be close enough to see what’s written on the board. Due to limited access to medical care, she hasn't yet been able to get treatment for her weak eyesight. Still, Farah is now in a space that understands her needs and has allowed her to participate with the other children.
“I asked Aseel, ‘Where is Yousef? Why hasn’t he come for a few days?’" Shahd says. That's when Shahd learned that every morning he had to fetch water for his family living in the camp.
There is also Issa, who always comes to the classroom with an empty pot inside his backpack. The pot is his way of providing food for his family: Classes begin at 9 a.m., but every day, Issa leaves to the community kitchen (takiya) to fill the pot with whatever food is available at 10 a.m. He then brings the pot home before returning to class.
Among the children is also Ahmad Nasrallah, who lives with a kidney condition, making everyday life especially difficult. The stifling heat, poor ventilation, and lack of electricity in the classroom made the space feel exhausting and suffocating for him. During lessons, Ahmad often struggles to breathe and finds it difficult to concentrate.
Earlier this year, Jumanah tried to move him to a better spot, where some air could reach him without him having to walk out of the classroom. “Sometimes I felt that I was not only their teacher," Jumanah tells me. "I felt like I was a mother to them. Every child has their own circumstances.”
What the sisters-turned-teachers have witnessed in their students are not isolated cases, happening only in Al-Itqan. According to the United Nations and education organizations like Save the Children, there are around 700,000 children aged four to 17 who have missed nearly three academic years of in-person learning, while around 93% of schools in Gaza require major repairs or reconstruction.
But these numbers do not show the small ways that conflict and dispossession continue to shape the lives of children.
Three years ago, before the war, Misk’s Hello Kitty backpack was simply part of her daily journey to school. After losing her family home, she used it to carry the few clothes and personal belongings she could take with her. Today, she walks between the tents with the same backpack, carrying a notebook, a pen, and a bottle of water. The makeshift school that started with eight children has grown, too, and now welcomes nearly 100 students across its three tent classrooms.
After more than two years away from her old school, Misk now attends classes every day, with friends her own age.
Amidst so much, it's like she is living part of her childhood again.
[post_title] => The Things Children Carry
[post_excerpt] => A day in the life of Misk and her Hello Kitty backpack at one of Gaza's makeshift schools.
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Why you should pay attention to Indiana's Public Question 1 this election.
For 175 years, bail has been a constitutional right for everyone in Indiana awaiting trial, with the exception of anyone charged with murder or treason. The same system is used in most of the country, allowing defendants to live outside of jail while awaiting trial for a crime. It’s imperfect and favors the wealthy, but at its best, bail is meant to balance a person’s liberty—until and unless proven guilty—with the safety of the broader community.
On the Indiana ballot this November, Public Question 1 asks Hoosiers to amend the state’s constitution to narrow that right. If the amendment passes, anyone charged with any crime in the state could be denied bail if “the proof is evident or the presumption strong and the state proves by clear and convincing evidence that no release conditions will reasonably protect the safety of any other person or the community.”
Proponents of the measure, which first had to pass the state legislature, cite public safety concerns. They claim that people who are released from jail on bail too often go on to commit dangerous crimes.
On the other hand, opponents are concerned about preemptively taking away defendants’ liberty, the vague and broad language of the amendment, and the potential for biases in and out of the courtroom.
A High-Risk Proposal for Rare Offenses
Under the current bail system, even if someone is ultimately released on bail, it can take many days for them to be able to walk out. The new amendment would make it easier to hold people in jail while they wait for hearings and other procedures.
“It is a significant disruption on the life of that person if they're being held in custody,” says Ray Casanova, the chief public defender for Marion County, where Indianapolis is located. “I do think [the measure] is going to have a disproportionate impact on low-income folks.”
People held in jail can lose their jobs, potentially resulting in other losses, including housing and custody rights to their children. In jail, they may also not have access to essential medications. All before they have been found guilty of a crime.
Vicki Becker, a prosecutor in northern Indiana’s Elkhart County, told Indiana Capital Chronicle that the amendment was introduced because “so many individuals…were back out in the community without any accountability whatsoever and continuing to commit offenses against other people,” adding that, “it just did not sit well with prosecutors who are much more focused on protecting public safety.”
Others question whether the amendment is really needed to protect communities, including State Senator Rodney Pol, a Democrat from the northwestern corner of the state. “If you can demonstrate that [the accused] are unsafe, there are already avenues” to mitigate that risk, he says.
For example, in many counties, judges have the latitude to set bail high enough so that a defendant will not be able to pay it. Casanova also points to measures such as GPS monitoring, no-contact orders, and situations when bail can be revoked. “Is this provision really providing additional safety or is it just essentially removing a constitutional right?” asks Casanova.
Data shows it’s rare for people released on bail to commit violent crimes while awaiting trial—1.4% of high risk people released before their trial have done so, according to ACLU analysis of data from the Indiana Office of Court Service. Rates of new crimes were even smaller for those deemed moderate and low risk.
When those violent crimes do happen, “it’s a tragedy,” says Zach Stock, who works for the Indiana Public Defender’s Council as a legislative counsel. “It's just natural human nature to say, ‘Gosh, we had that guy confined. And had he remained confined, that wouldn't have happened.’”
“But that’s assuming that we have more power than we do. It's really hard to predict the future,” Stock says, which is what prosecutors are ultimately attempting to do when they try to prove to a judge that a person poses a risk of harm.
Unless you detain everyone, some people who are released ahead of their trial are going to commit a crime. Making those numbers as small as possible “does come down to improving our ability to predict the future,” says Stock.
A Precursor to Losing More Rights
For State Senator Pol, the amendment lays the ground for the abuse of other rights, like the right to protest or to unionize. Someone could be accused of being a violent protester, for example, and be held without bail, only to end up with a lesser charge of disorderly conduct. “Now I lost a year of my life for disorderly conduct, you know, because I was out at a protest,” Pol says.
Levi Gonzalez, a policy associate at The Bail Project, an advocacy and bail assistance nonprofit, echoed those concerns. He says such proposals are also not just limited to Indiana. In other states across the country, more laws are “looking to ultimately deprive people of their liberty at a moment where there's also a lot of political tension and upheaval,” he says. Given what he refers to as a “creeping authoritarianism” in the country, there could be political pressure “to make an example out of people“ arrested at a protest or demonstration.
The broad nature of Indiana’s ballot measure makes those concerns possible. It's different from the “tough on crime” eras in the 1980s and 1990s when change in the criminal justice system was incremental. “Now it's like, let's just go for everything,” says Gonzalez. This worries him.
Other states, like Tennessee and Alabama, are also broadening the scope of crimes for which people can be held without bail. But other states usually list specific new offenses that will be ineligible for bail. They don’t usually make it as broad as Indiana has, where, “any person who gets arrested for any offense now could potentially be at risk of being detained” without bail, says Gonzalez.
The wide scope of Indiana’s amendment means it doesn't necessarily only affect marginalized communities like the state’s Black and Latino residents, who make up around 18% of the state’s total population, says Gonzalez. “But of course, they're always going to be the ones that are going to face the brunt of this because those communities are ultimately going to be the ones that are going to come in contact with law enforcement more often.“
Protections Vulnerable Under Companion Bill
Should the amendment be approved by voters this November, another related bill passed by the state legislature earlier this year would also take effect.
The companion bill, as it’s called, would provide some protections to people facing charges and pretrial detention. It is “kind of a bright spot in what looks like an otherwise hopelessly contentious political landscape,” says Stock of the collaboration among his agency, prosecutors, judges, and legislators to create the bill.
The bill specifies a 48-hour time limit before a detention hearing and a person’s right to appeal a decision. It asks the state to meet a higher burden of proof, “because we are talking about taking away liberty before proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” says Stock. Judges will also have to document why they're making their decisions.
But because these protections aren’t in the amendment itself, they could easily be overturned by another legislative bill. Changes to the amendment, on the other hand, would require it to pass the legislature in two different sessions and then receive another ballot vote approval. “It's good to ultimately have that companion bill to provide that due process, but it's a lot better when it's enshrined in the actual constitutional language,” says Gonzalez.
Senator Pol is one of the legislators who worked on the companion bill and says it makes the amendment a little bit more palatable with the safeguards for the accused that it puts in place. “But I still don't think it goes far enough, and I still think that it is a dangerous precedent that's being set.”
While Senator Pol did vote to pass the amendment on the Senate floor, he says, “I’m still not a fan of it, and I'm still not going to vote for it on the ballot.”
[post_title] => Bail On the Ballot
[post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to Indiana's Public Question 1 this election.
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Why you should pay attention to Alabama's Statewide Amendment 3 this election.
On the ballot in Alabama this November is a proposed constitutional amendment to policies on prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance in public K–12 schools.
Statewide Amendment 3 would compel local school boards to adopt rules requiring the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of each school day and allow student-initiated and student-led prayer. However, the amendment would not require students to participate in either the Pledge or prayer. If passed, students would have the right to opt out based on their beliefs and would be allowed to leave the classroom during either.
On February 5, 2026, the U.S. Department of Education issued updated Guidance on Constitutionally Protected Prayer and Religious Expression in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools, replacing previous guidelines from 2023. The update states that students, teachers, and school employees retain their constitutional rights to freedom of speech and expression, which includes engaging in personal, visible prayer. Although the United States Supreme Court previously determined that public schools and their employees (including teachers, coaches, and principals) cannot lead, organize, prescribe, or endorse prayer or religious exercises during school activities, Alabama has leaned into the Department of Education’s newest recommendations, which have created a voluntary religious expression loophole.
Back in May, the Alabama legislature approved the proposed amendment by attempting to explicitly enshrine student-led prayer into their state constitution to shield it from future legal challenges. Since April, Alabama law has required public K-12 schools to conduct the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of each school day. Additionally, students are permitted to “pray or engage in religious activities or religious expression before, during, and after the school day.”
The bill was introduced by Republican State Representative Reed Ingram, who says the United States was founded on Christian principles. He also says that today, there are families who don’t have time to implement faith-based activities, like prayer at home, because they are too busy working. (Though he notes he doesn’t personally know a family struggling with this.)
Both Republicans and Democrats in the Alabama House of Representatives and Senate have expressed support for the proposal.
“This is an opportunity, not mandatory; it's a voluntary basis, student-led only,” Ingram explains. “Nothing is going over the PA, and it’s nothing that’s going to be led by a teacher or principal. The student only prays if they stand up and tell the teacher they want to pray this morning, and the class will have that option.”
Ingham adds that student-led prayer can be led by students of all religions and faiths, not limited to just Christianity, but that’s not clearly written into the bill.
Following the 2024 presidential election, Baptist News Global reported that the conservative thinktank, the Heritage Foundation, does not propose a mandatory federal school prayer program. However, its conservative framework aligns with efforts like this one to expand and protect individual religious expression in public schools. (The Heritage Foundation wrote the infamous Project 2025, a conservative blueprint to transform the federal government and social structures of the country at large.)
Other people of fath, including Christians, are against implementing this type of bill into state law, like Rev. Julie Conrady, Minister at Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham and Tuscaloosa. She says that this kind of amendment imposes or forces a religion onto individuals who may not believe in the faith being practiced during student-led prayer.
“Alabama has plenty of churches. If folks are not getting what they need on Sunday morning, Wednesday night, and all the other opportunities they have for religious freedom and expression during the week, then they need to choose a different school for their children,” Conrady says. “Because Alabama public schools should remain available for every student to be themselves, without being coerced to subjective practices, including this bill.”
About 25% of Alabamians do not identify with Christianity, according to a Pew Research report from 2025. Conrady says this amendment dismisses that figure.
“The Universalist Church is included in the fourth of [Alabamians of other faiths], which also includes Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, nones, and the atheist, and the humanist,” she says.
The minister adds she’s been talking with other religious leaders who oppose this type of bill in other red states, and they are planning to take action up to the Supreme Court if the bill passes in November.
“There will never be a separation between church and state,” says Zareen Dodwad-Khan, 46, who lives in Leeds, Alabama. Khan is Muslim and has three kids in public schools. “If the majority of people want prayer in school, I’m not gonna fight it and say I'm totally against it, because I’m a minority. And I teach my kids about their religion and identity at home.”
However, Khan also says she will likely vote “no” for the amendment in November.
“I’m a Christian, who believes in Jesus Christ. We pray every night before dinner. It’s like church, politics, and school have all been mashed together and rolled into one. Instead of the way it was intended to be, which is all separate things and separate parts of our lives, they’re trying to make it all part of the same,” she says. “As a parent and a Chrisitian, I think that’s very concerning, and even for people who don’t believe the same way I do.”
Alabama voters will decide if they agree on November 3, 2026.
[post_title] => "There Will Never Be a Separation of Church and State"
[post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to Alabama's Statewide Amendment 3 this election.
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Why you should pay attention to Virginia's Question 1 this election.
This article is a part of Down-Ballot, a weeklong series highlighting state measures worth watching in the 2026 United States election.
Sara Sanatkar learned firsthand how important it is to have the freedom to make decisions over her own body when she faced an unexpected pregnancy at 19 years old.
This was in 2019. Sanatkar was in an unhealthy relationship, and knew she wasn’t ready to be a mother. But, unfamiliar with the laws regarding reproductive care in her home state of Virginia, Sanatkar wasn’t sure if she could have an abortion, so she Googled it and learned about Roe v. Wade. Back then, she felt immense relief. “I can have access to care. I can have access to legal care. I can have access to safe care,” she remembers her 19-year-old self saying.
Sanatkar says she was “geographically lucky” to have gotten pregnant in Virginia. Born and raised in Tehran, Iran, Sanatkar grew up in a country where, even though her family and the general population supported the right to abortion, the government did not. Leaving Tehran at age 15 wasn’t easy; despite some of the drawbacks women face, such as the threat of death penalty for illegal abortions, it was the only home she’d known. The year before she moved, she remembers sitting in the back of a taxi with her mother, whose words altered her perspective of home and family. While holding her hand, Sanatkar’s mother told her, “I'm so happy that you get to live in a country where you get to make decisions about your own body.”
In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade—the ruling that had provided Sanatkar relief just three years before—ending the federal constitutional right to abortion, once again leaving the authority with individual states. Since then, 20 states have either severely restricted abortions or established total bans, including West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
As the Field & Canvass Manager at REPRO Rising, a grassroots political organization working to guarantee comprehensive reproductive healthcare information and services to all Virginians, Sanatkar now works alongside the Virginians for Reproductive Freedom coalition, which includes ACLU of Virginia, Virginia League for Planned Parenthood, and the National Women's Political Caucus of Virginia, to protect the right to reproductive freedom within their state constitution. Since August 2024, REPRO Rising has been organizing awareness around Virginia Question 1—one of three proposed amendments to the state constitution on the ballot this November.
In her organizing work so far, she has seen an overwhelmingly positive attitude towards the amendment. According to Sanatkar, many people view it as “very reasonable,” which has resulted in “a sense of pride for me as a Virginia voter,” she says.
“Across Virginia, we’ve heard a consistent message from voters,” she adds. “Regardless of their personal beliefs or experiences with reproductive healthcare, Virginians believe these deeply personal decisions should remain between a patient, their family, and their doctor, not politicians.”
For Virginians, the outcome of Question 1 will determine whether the state establishes a fundamental right to reproductive freedom, following a complicated, multi-year process to add the amendment to the state constitution.
The constitutional amendment was first introduced in January 2023. The General Assembly subsequently passed the amendment in January 2025. The state process requires an intervening election, and a House of Delegates election was held in November 2025. Then, the General Assembly passed the amendment for the second time in January 2026.
Now it is up to voters to vote yes or no. A “yes” vote means Virginians will have a constitutional right to make their own decisions on reproductive care, including abortion. (However, not without some potential restrictions: The proposed amendment would still allow the Virginian government to pass laws regulating abortion care in the third trimester though with decreased barriers.) A “no” vote will mean the status quo is maintained, including the same restrictions to abortion care in the third semester that require approval from three physicians. What’s more, abortion rights in the future could eventually be restricted with a change in office.
The issue has been a key part of Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger’s platform since her electoral victory over Glenn Youngkin last November. In June, half a year after taking office, Gov. Spanberger joined the Reproductive Freedom Alliance (RFA), a nonpartisan coalition of governors dedicated to protecting reproductive freedom across the nation.
“Virginia is the only state in the South where a woman has the same freedom to make her own healthcare decisions as she did before the fall of Roe v. Wade. Today, we are taking a step to reaffirm those freedoms,” Gov. Spanberger said in an RFA press release last June.
In effect, a “yes” vote means Virginia law won’t change, says Executive Director of Virginia ACLU Mary Bauer. “Our goal is not to change Virginia law. Our goal is to enshrine reproductive freedom into our constitution because we know that these rights can be taken away with a flick of a politician’s pen,” she says. “We want to make sure that our rights don’t depend on who happens to be in office at any given moment.”
Prior to the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which eliminated the federal constitutional right to abortion, roughly 3% of patients accessing abortion care in Virginia came from out of state. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and more Southern states limited access to abortions, the percentage of out-of-state patients jumped to 30%, according to the Virginia Independent. This means the results of Amendment 1 will affect more than just Virginians. Arguably, the state is the last stronghold for abortion care in the South.
“To see Virginia as a leader in this space is really a beautiful thing,” Bauer says.
If the amendment fails to pass, there is a risk that Virginia will transform into a state banning abortion, says Dr. Kimberly Chernoby, a physician and reproductive rights lawyer. “Virginia is a state that is not very clearly Democratic or Republican,” she says. “Our legislature has gone both ways, and so there is a real risk that in the future, and it could be near future, that we could lose access to reproductive healthcare.”
Amendment 1 also holds implications for practicing physicians. “It means that when my patient is miscarrying and I have to offer them an abortion to treat their miscarriage, that I'm not worried. ‘Am I going to go to jail? Am I going to lose my medical license? Am I going to be fined $10,000?’ The idea that any physician is asked to weigh those things at the bedside is really incredible,” Dr. Chernoby says. “Abortion is routine healthcare, and you cannot affect all other aspects of reproductive healthcare. When you limit abortion care, you are by definition going to limit all other aspects of reproductive healthcare, and you can't have one without the other.”
It’s exactly this full span of reproductive healthcare that Sanatkar is advocating for, and that she’s encountered broad support for through her organizing. “It's a very simple question: Do you want to have access to bodily autonomy, and do you want to be able to make decisions independently with your doctor without being scared that the state is going to punish you or your provider? And I think [the] majority of Virginians are going to say ‘yes’ to that,” she says.
[post_title] => When the Future of Bodily Autonomy Is in Question
[post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to Virginia's Question 1 this election.
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Why you should pay attention to Colorado's Proposition 134 this election.
This article is a part of Down-Ballot, a weeklong series highlighting state measures worth watching in the 2026 United States election.
In February 2025, just 16 days after President Trump took office for the second time, he signed an executive order banning trans girls and women from competing in girls’ and women’s sports in schools receiving federal funding. That directive, part of the administration’s broader assault on trans rights, goes against multiple studies showing that transgender students benefit from participating in athletics, including earning higher grades and a reduction in self-harm.
This November, Colorado voters will decide where they stand on this issue by voting on Proposition 134, a ballot initiative regarding the right of trans students to play on K-12 and college sports teams that align with their gender identity.
“We talk about the importance of sports being this place for community, particularly for youth, but this is a few people assuming for the rest of people what their values are around sports and inclusion,” says Ash Neufeldt of Rocky Mountain Equality about the measure. Rocky Mountain Equality is a Colorado-based LGBTQ+ non-profit organization that advocates for, educates, and supports LGBTQ+ individuals and families.
While supporters of the proposition describe it as an effort to protect girls' sports, opponents like Neufeldt are concerned about its ambiguity and the process for determining which students would face restrictions. “When it comes to things like this for people who are trying to keep particular gender roles, a lot of times, it's related to genitalia,” Neufeldt says. “It could have the most invasive implications for kindergarteners all the way through college athletes.”
Hannah*, a parent of a trans youth who requested anonymity due to safety concerns, agrees. “I think the thing is really poorly written and very vague. Anybody could be accused, and then what happens? The coach has to verify. How does that happen?” Hannah questions in what other setting would another parent be okay with a school meeting that is essentially about their child’s genitalia. “But somehow with our girls, it’s on the table because they're trans?” she asks.
While similar laws have been enacted in other states, including Idaho and Mississippi in 2020 and 2021, respectively, 2026 will be the first time U.S. voters decide on the issue at the ballot box. (Three other states—Washington, Arizona, and Nebraska—have similar ballot measures this November.) If passed, the initiative would require school- and association-sponsored athletic teams to be classified into one of three categories: males, females, or mixed. Teams designated for males would remain open to females, so long as no corresponding female team exists. The reverse, however, would not apply, meaning if no male team exists, anyone who is not a cisgender woman or girl would be barred from joining female teams. Neufeldt says this asymmetry points to a fixation and disdain for trans women and trans girls in particular. From her viewpoint, proponents of the measure are suggesting that a six-year-old transgender girl is somehow dangerous to cisgender girls of the same age.
The organization leading the campaign in support of the initiative, Protect Kids Colorado, says on its website, "Bigger, stronger biological males are invading girls' sports in Colorado, taking away our girls' dignity, safety, and opportunity.” Parents like Hannah push back against such arguments. “What do we need protection from? Show us one time when this has really, truly been a problem,” she says, referring to transgender athletes participating in K-12 sports. Beyond this, the "bigger, stronger" argument hinges on testosterone-driven puberty, a stage many trans kids never experience. While not every trans child uses puberty blockers, those who do must monitor hormone levels with regular blood checks. Hannah says these checks have shown her that her daughter’s testosterone levels are two-thirds lower than the average cisgender girl.
Another parent of a trans child who also asked for anonymity says they “are manufacturing an outrage that just doesn’t exist,” noting that Colorado already has guidelines from the Colorado High School Activities Association (CHSAA). Under CHSAA's existing policy, a transgender student's home school conducts a confidential evaluation to determine eligibility—meaning coaches, athletic directors, and principals already have a formal process for making the call on what team(s) a student is allowed to play on, with CHSAA reviewing decisions on appeal rather than deciding unilaterally.
"The reality is Proposition 134 is so unclear. There's no accountability, there's no enforcement structure," says Nadine Bridges, Executive Director of One Colorado, an advocacy organization dedicated to advancing equality, freedom, and opportunity for LGBTQIA+ Coloradans and their families. "We have 179 school districts in the state of Colorado, and each one can interpret it any way they want. I don't believe they're setting up a structure to protect girls. I think they're setting up a situation that makes it even more gray. This is allowing government to get involved in decisions that families, experts, coaches, and schools should be allowed to make."
If the ballot measure passes in November, Neufeldt says sports will no longer be a place of fun, friendly competition and community building. It will become a place of interrogations. And that loss would fall on kids who are already struggling. Nearly 60 percent of transgender and nonbinary youth experience depression, and almost half have considered suicide in the past year. Laws that restrict sports participation worsen psychological stress for transgender youth, and the Bell Policy Center’s website highlights that Prop 134 would cut off transgender students from the benefits organized sports provide. It also notes there is no sound evidence that transgender participation in youth sports negatively impacts the well-being of cisgender youth.
For parents like Hannah, whose daughter has always been athletic and loves to be active, it’s heartbreaking to even consider. “Every body is different. There’s different athletic abilities, talents. Different heights, some kids are fast, some are clumsy. But learning how to win, how to lose, how to compete… It’s the one time for her that, for just a little while, she just gets to be like everybody else,” she says. “It’s this tiny moment in her life that she’s allotted to just be a kid.”
* Hannah is an alias. The family requested anonymity due to increasing safety concerns.
[post_title] => When a Kid Just Wants To Play Sports
[post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to Colorado's Proposition 134 this election.
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Why you should pay attention to North Carolina's Require Voter Identification Amendment this election.
This article is a part of Down-Ballot, a weeklong series highlighting state measures worth watching in the 2026 United States election.
Since 2018, North Carolina law has required photo identification for in-person voting, as do 24 other states. This November 3, however, state residents will vote on the North Carolina Require Voter Identification Amendment measure, a “legislatively referred constitutional amendment,” or referendum, which would alter the state’s constitution. It would require all voters—including absentee and mail-in voters—to provide a photo ID in order to participate in elections.
Whether voters reject or pass the amendment, the current voting requirements in the state of North Carolina would remain the same.
You’re not alone if you’re wondering why it’s even on the ballot. But North Carolina policy experts are concerned about it, warning that a ‘Yes’ vote would likely have lasting implications.
Recent changes to North Carolina voting laws
The last time that language about voter IDs appeared on North Carolina’s ballot was in 2024. Since then, a photocopy of a voter’s photo identification has been required for mail-in voting. Currently, there are still exceptions for lost or stolen IDs, or a voter’s disability status, allowing voters to use an alternative method of identification, like sharing the last four digits of their Social Security number.
According to Brooks Fuller, Policy Director with Common Cause NC, a non-partisan network of grassroots state policy experts, the original reason for the proposed measure was to ensure that voters are indeed who they say they are.
This year’s proposed amendment, however, does not include any language on exceptions, and Fuller says this could affect many US voters, muddying its true end goal.
“The only logical conclusion is that the legislators passing these laws want to make it more difficult for people to vote,” he says. “I imagine they can see who tends to vote by mail, and it's voters who they would prefer not to [be able to] vote.”
Data from 2022 analyzed by the non–partisan nonprofit Secure Democracy shows that nearly half of rural voters across the country vote by mail. In North Carolina, while most mail-in voters are white, Asian and Pacific Islander voters are the most likely to request an absentee ballot, while Black voters increased their mail-in participation five-fold in 2020. Black voters are also more likely to have their mail-in ballots rejected, generally for minor errors like a missing signature or address.
Democracy for all, not just a few
President of The League of Women Voters of North Carolina Jennifer McMillian Rubin says the proposed amendment is “troubling.” If passed, it would pose a barrier to North Carolina residents who are serving in the military or overseas, and Rubin argues being forced to mail in a photocopy of their IDs would likely keep them from voting.
The Voter Identification Amendment is just one of three referendums that The League is opposing this year. The other two, the Property Tax Levy Limit Amendment and the Reduce Constitutional Income Tax Cap amendments, would reduce the maximum personal income tax rate from 7% to 3.5% and require limits on property tax increases by local governments, respectively. The League is at odds with such changes because they would shift local funding decisions to the state, cement policy decisions into the constitution, and potentially reduce funding for future services, like education or disaster relief.
Altogether, the three propositions ”place policy decisions into the Constitution that are better addressed through legislation, where elected officials can respond to changing needs and voters can hold them accountable,” says Rubin. “It seems like overkill to put additional verbiage that would make this more permanent, more stringent, and less flexible to adapt to changing times and changing requirements.”
Common Cause NC, a nonprofit that works to protect voting rights, is concerned that historically marginalized populations will be most impacted by the proposal. Besides Black voters, Hispanic/Latine residents, disabled or elderly voters, people who work multiple jobs with varied shifts, and residents who simply do not drive could also be affected if the amendment passes.
In 2013, the US Supreme Court removed critical components of the Voting Rights Act, including requiring that certain districts obtain federal clearance before changing voting laws or practice due to previous racial discrimination. North Carolina’s legislature responded by decreasing accessibility to voting through tactics like closing down polling locations predominantly used by Black residents and limiting early voting. Four years later, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit blocked components of a North Carolina voting law that singled out Black voters in the state, stating that it “target[ed] African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”
Legal proceedings about racially motivated barriers in voting have been ongoing since, including arguments about redistricting. In 2025, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais rendered gerrymandering legal. This led two North Carolinian residents to drop their appeal to the Supreme Court after years of pushing the courts to reconsider district lines in favor of the Voting Rights Act. After the latest ruling, Rep. Rodney Pierce told Daily Tar Heels that the decision “left no path open to protect the voting rights of Black citizens in the state.”
Fuller is concerned that the latest proposed amendment is yet another attempt at creating additional barriers for historically marginalized populations.
“[It would] cement a part of our law that tends to suppress voter turnout and votes, particularly in vulnerable communities, and would do so even more egregiously than it already does,” Fuller says.
Resources for eligible voters
According to 2024 research led by the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland, almost 21 million US citizens of voting age lack a valid driver’s license. The Center’s research also reveals that almost 29 million voting-aged US citizens have a valid license that does not match their current address or name, which means they couldn’t use it to verify their ballots. These findings support Fuller’s concerns surrounding racial inequities, as both Black and Hispanic voters are more likely to be without a valid license than their counterparts.
“That's the point,” Fuller says. “This is just doubling down, making it harder for those folks when they have already, by registering, proven that they are who they say they are.”
For those eligible to vote but without valid photo identification, Fuller encourages them to visit their County Board of Elections, a seldom used resource that is less cumbersome than securing a DMV appointment. He also suggests using VoteRiders for voters who need extra support procuring their IDs and transportation to their polling place.
Low on supporting data
Myths surrounding voter fraud fuel proposed amendments like this one, bolstering the idea that additional requirements would ensure voting accuracy. Yet Rubin says voting fraud in North Carolina is almost non-existent, and a 2024 social media campaign dedicated to busting voting myths, led by the North Carolina Board of Elections, confirms it.
“There is not an ‘election integrity’ reason to require a photo ID, especially not through a constitutional amendment,” argues Fuller. Instead, what is needed is voter education across party lines.
“It is cliche, and I hear it a lot, especially from my elders,” says Fuller. “But it is true: They would not be trying so hard to take away your vote if it didn't threaten their power. They just wouldn't.”
[post_title] => Why Ask Voters to Provide ID If It's Already Required?
[post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to North Carolina's Require Voter Identification Amendment this election.
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Conflict is inevitable. Parker's latest book is a helpful guide on how to better navigate it.
There are plenty of self-care books out there, but what about group-care books? Who’s looking out for the health and wellness of friend groups, work colleagues, neighborhoods, families, and other communities that fill our cups and sustain us in our personal and professional lives?
I think about this topic a lot. As the director of our small but mighty team at The Conversationalist (itself a global network of writers and artists!), as well as a neighborhood potluck organizer, a dedicated friend to my long-distance besties, and a mom/wife/sister/daughter/cousin who doesn’t always see eye-to-eye with loved ones, I know that conflict is inevitable for any group. But I also know how hard it can be to actually address conflict when we’d rather run for the hills and pretend it’s not happening.
Priya Parker’s new book, The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict, is a manual to help us navigate those inevitable bumps, kerfuffles, and painful rifts. It’s a collection of anecdotes and prompts that remind us that conflict is not only natural but essential for healthy, long-lasting groups. Parker also provides some other useful tools—often in the form of asking open-ended questions and really listening to the answers—meant as guides rather than prescriptions. Because even if we know that conflict is inevitable, it can be hard to know what to do with that awkward energy that seemingly comes out of nowhere in a work meeting or family holiday gathering or group chat with friends.
We could just take the easy route and try to ignore it. Let it simmer and deal with it later, or hope it goes away on its own. Because who has the time and energy to navigate complex social dynamics?! I’m too tired and you probably are, too. (Everything is on fire and somehow we still have to cook dinner tonight, am I right?)
But if we really want long-lasting relationships, and to build vibrant, diverse communities like we say we do, then we have to do the work. And in order to do that work, we need to have tools in our collective pockets to move through the inevitable conflict that comes with being a part of living, breathing, and ever-evolving groups of people.
“Healthy heat” is a term and idea Parker uses in the book that really stuck with me. “Healthy heat is the willingness and ability to hold tension, with care, long enough for it to become clarifying and generative. Heat is energy. It is information. It tells us that something, or someone, matters,” Parker explains. “Hold it long enough, with care and without judgment…pause before deciding whether it is good or bad.”
For starters, we can name this heat when we notice it. When we validate what we’re seeing, it often helps other people feel validated in what they’re seeing, too. This alone can help diffuse some of the heat.
From there, Parker says we usually need to take a step back and consider what she calls the “us-ness” of the group, as a way to bring the group back to itself. What makes us us?
“It can be helpful to tap back into your group’s central motivation force,” she writes. “Set aside the particulars of the conflict at hand. Step back and do a check-in with yourself and your sense of the group: When it gets bad, is there still juice here? …Is there still relevance and energy that comes from this collection of individuals contributing their time and energy to one another?”
Parker offers questions to ask yourself to get to the heart of the underlying issues causing the group tension. (Is this conflict touching on a core value of mine? Do I care enough about this group? What are we not saying right now? How might not facing this conflict hurt the group?)
Sometimes, this can help a group reach a resolution. But sometimes, the answers might reveal it’s not worth facing the conflict at all. You might still be able to lighten some tension, but as Parker attests, there’s also validity in strategic conflict avoidance.
“Sometimes fighting happens because, if we’re honest, the group has reached the end of its natural life,” she writes. (She recommends hosting a funeral event for the group in this scenario.) Other times, individuals don’t have the emotional infrastructure to process what’s actually happening in a group conflict. A conflict might even point to deeper clashes in worldviews or inherent racism and other bigotry, which of course is not a small or quick fix.
Parker points to another book, Constructive Conflicts: From Escalation to Resolution by Louis Kiesberg and Bruce W. Dayton, to provide a framework for whether a conflict even can be addressed. “First: More than one person needs to see a problem. The second: They need to be connected to each other. Third: There needs to be an addressable party, responsible for that grievance, that can be changed. The fourth: They need to believe that they could actually bring about that change.”
If you believe you can bring about the change, and decide to face the conflict, good for you and buckle up! You’re not alone, and this book will be your friend, so keep it handy.
I already know this won’t be a one-time read for me. Parker’s first book, The Art of Gathering, is another one I keep on my shelf and flip through when I’m looking for inspiration and guidance. Confronting conflict and hosting gatherings like my weekly potluck are two muscles I try to exercise on a regular basis. They also work hand in hand — in order to create vibrant gatherings within our communities, we need to navigate the inevitably bumpy roads that come with group dynamics. This takes practice just like anything else, and often, a little sense of humor can go a long way.
Parker shares an example of a leadership summit where employees practiced “healthy heat” through some “heavy topics.” They started with one guaranteed to get people riled up.
PINEAPPLE ON PIZZA. YES OR NO?
The group of colleagues divided into smaller groups and debated, then presented their arguments to the bigger group. Parker says “to grow heat, grow warmth.” If you want to get better at fighting, start with getting better at banter. “Banter is the secret sauce of pro-social conflict,” she writes. “It gives people a way of fighting with each other that feels playful rather than fatal.”
So your homework—whether you read Parker’s book or not, and if you’re ready for some healthy heat—is to do some bantering, a.k.a. some low-stakes fighting, and keep growing your own conflict resolution muscle. The communities we love depend on it.
[post_title] => Book of the Month: "The Art of Fighting" by Priya Parker
[post_excerpt] => Conflict is inevitable. Parker's latest book is a helpful guide on how to better navigate it.
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Overnight, I lost some of my capacity to think and write. After fighting to get it back, I cannot imagine choosing to give those faculties over to a machine.
It started with a pain that felt—and sounded—like a crack of thunder at the base of my skull.
I had been prescribed a medication by my cardiologist that was meant to raise my blood pressure, which it did; so much that when I went to bed that night, I experienced a dangerous bout of supine hypertension, or raised blood pressure from lying down. Unaware of what had happened, I took my migraine medication as normal and went to sleep, not knowing that staying horizontal was the worst thing I could have done.
The next morning, I found myself unable to speak. I felt weak in my body, and even sitting up in bed took enormous effort. I lift weights regularly, but just bringing my hand to my head felt heavier than any deadlift. I have had migraines for almost 30 years, so I assumed I was just having one that was presenting differently. Over the days and weeks that followed, however, I felt progressively worse. I don’t remember the details well, but in my health diary, I diligently tracked every detail: My body was numb, my right side hurt, and I spent more time lying down than not. I also continued struggling to speak or even think. When I saw my headache nurse a month later, she was shocked by the state I was in. I was shaking and sobbing, trying to convey to her just how sick I felt. But while I have always had some difficulty with translating my thoughts into speech, all of a sudden, I found that my thoughts weren’t there, either. They were no longer trapped in my brain—I just didn’t have anything to say.
It took a few weeks for me to realize that the medication was to blame, and when I did, I stopped it cold turkey. Still, it took many months to recover. I wasn’t able to work or write unless the tasks were very straightforward and required no creative input, but even then, everything took me far longer than it once had. More than that, I suddenly couldn’t enjoy the things that had always made life worth living—reading, listening to music, watching movies. If an activity required any degree of focus or interpretation, it felt impossible.
After weeks of struggling to get out of bed or talk, I went to the doctor and asked for an MRI, which showed a white patch indicating brain damage. I took the results to my neurologist, who I regularly see for migraines and related disorders. He suggested that, based on the MRI and my symptoms, I may have had a transient ischemic attack (TIA), or “mini-stroke.”
In the months that followed, with aspirin and support from my medical team, I worked hard to be able to do the things I had previously loved, but still found no joy in them. Things that were once intuitive and essential felt insurmountable, like writing about how I felt or what I was experiencing. Reading—something that had provided escape and pleasure for my entire life—was newly boring. Relating things to others, even things I was ostensibly interested in, felt torturous; every conversation was excruciating.
My recovery has now taken years, but I am finally at a point where I feel almost as strong as I once did and as confident as I used to in expressing myself. Coincidentally, it is over these last three years that I have seen many people around me, even those I respect, struggle with the same things I found so difficult when I was re-learning how to think for myself.
Rather than being struck down by a neurological event, however, the main reason they have struggled with these things is because they have outsourced their faculties to AI.
There may be some application of so-called Artificial Intelligence, sometime, that benefits the lives of everyday people. Yet it is currently being forced into every area of art, marketing, and education, none of which have seemed to benefit. The Atlantic recently reported that film students (I studied film for both my BA and MA) now struggle to sit through entire movies. Many schools don’t believe that students can, or should, be assigned to read full novels. Many office workers increasingly use AI for every little task, while professional writers admit to using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Gemini to generate text instead of actually writing it themselves. (Not just ones you haven’t heard of, either: Nobel prize winner Olga Tokarczuk recently gushed about the benefits of AI, too.)
Advocates for LLMs promote them on the basis that they make everything easier, friction-free. But art is not supposed to be friction-free, nor the same as something anyone else could have produced with access to the right program. This is part of why it was so painful to lose my own ability to write after my TIA. Writing is how I make sense of the world, of my own thoughts, of what has happened to me. It is that combination of my own experiences, perspective and cultural input that makes my work unique. You might not like my work, or relate to it, and that’s OK: Nobody will ever write or create or interpret from the exact same place as another person. That is what makes writing worth reading, and what makes it worth the time and effort, not a randomly generated string of words. Learning and education, too, should be somewhat challenging, because the challenge is a significant part of what makes it so rewarding—something I would soon experience firsthand throughout my recovery.
At some point during the slow crawl through this period, I realized that the skills I’d lost might not come back to me without intervention and tremendous effort. I started to read books and articles again, very slowly, despite struggling to retain any information. I wrote just for the sake of it, even though it wasn’t as easy, rewarding, or even readable as it had once been. I started playing the piano, hoping that learning something new would spark something in me. I focused on studying Spanish. None of these things came easily, but they felt essential if I was to return to the person I had once been. Without my memory, without the capacity to be curious about the world, I was not myself. To come back to her, I had to force myself to do those things, no matter how difficult.
Maybe there were easier routes to normalcy, or at least a facsimile of it. Early in my recovery, if I had turned to AI, maybe I could have given the impression to my editors and friends that I was working at full capacity. But even when I was struggling most—even before I fully understood what had happened to me—it never occurred to me to use it. If anything, my experience made me double down on my aversion to LLMs, particularly in my line of work.
I personally boycott AI for a few reasons; the environmental impact is one. As an author, the wholesale theft of artists’ creative output is another, and something I find abhorrent. The end result of AI-generated text and images pretty much always sucks, and as a person who likes to look at and read things that don’t suck, that’s important. But I’m also old-fashioned: I write by hand, I paint, I take film photos, I listen to vinyl. I like things that are made by people, things that I can touch. I also think art matters, even when it’s imperfect or when it isn’t something I personally enjoy, because it was made by a person transmogrifying their experience into something that we can all share. “Art” made by a machine, then, is not art.
What I find most worrying, though, as a person who shares the world with so many heavy LLM users, is the impact on their brains’ ability to function—especially as someone who temporarily lost a degree of mine. In 2025, a study by MIT found that people who used ChatGPT to “write” showed less brain activity in neural networks associated with cognitive processing. The study divided 54 18- to 39-year-olds into three groups, and asked each to write SAT-level essays using ChatGPT, Google, or nothing. Using an EEG, the researchers found that of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and consistently underperformed at “neural, linguistic and behavioral levels.” This isn’t really surprising news—after all, the LLM users in the study didn’t actually use their brains for the study. What is far more alarming is that their level of effort degraded over the course of several months, and they got lazier with each essay.
If you stop doing something because it’s hard, you will eventually lose the ability to do it entirely. Maybe turning to ChatGPT as a one-off for a late assignment won’t affect you, but the science shows that turning to it time and time again will. Think of other technological leaps, like the shift from writing by hand to typing on a typewriter or computer. Studies have found that handwriting activates a broader network of brain regions involved in motor, sensory, and cognitive processing. While I type for work, I have kept a handwritten diary since 2004, because I don’t want to lose that skill. In almost every area, doing things the hard way enables you to think and engage with ideas more deeply. Reading an article or a book yourself and determining its point will help you to remember the information in a more meaningful way than looking at a summary on Google.
There are many writers who are not luddites like me. There are writers, filmmakers, and artists who once produced great works without AI, who now vouch for the technology. But as someone who, overnight, lost some of their capacity to think and write, I cannot comprehend why a person would choose to give that faculty over to a machine.
Your thoughts are all you have. Your experiences, your unique way of seeing the world, your tastes. These are hard-won, often over decades of exploration. You may have to read hundreds of books or watch hundreds of movies that you don’t even like to arrive at what you do. If you’re a writer or artist, you might have to spend years being bad at the thing you love before one day, you aren’t so bad anymore. That work is worth doing.
When I was in the midst of my recovery, I was accepted into an artists’ residency in the dry, water-starved mountains of southern Spain, in an area currently blighted by wildfires. I was to spend two weeks in a house that was so isolated it took 15 minutes just to drive off the property on a dirt path. It took even longer to reach anything that resembled a store. This meant I was trapped, for two weeks, with no excuse to do anything but write. I was still very unwell, struggling to get out of bed and get myself together. But I didn’t want to let the opportunity pass.
There were several people in my residency—a poet, three other longform writers, and a photographer—in addition to the two people running it, who were both visual artists. I found writing very difficult over this period, but I managed to start working on some pieces that I was close to proud of. Each day, I would spend hours chained to my laptop just to produce something, even if it was something that would be edited or scrapped wholesale tomorrow.
It was on this trip that I gained new respect for the craft of writing—the fact that it is hard and takes so much time is part of its value. That struggle is how we figure out what we mean, what we think, what we really believe. I became more cognizant than ever of the importance of processing thoughts, words, and emotions myself. Prompting an LLM to produce text, meanwhile, does not require any effort, insight, or cognition whatsoever.
Writers and journalists who rely on AI often say that they only use it for this or that: only research, only editing, only outlining, not the actual writing. But it is all the writing. The time I spend swimming and working over an idea in my head is also writing, even if there isn’t a laptop in sight. When I am lazily cuddling my dog on the couch and suddenly realize how I’m going to write the next part of a story, I am writing. When I am in the bath and remember the exact right word for a feeling, I am writing. The fact that writing—that any form of art—requires so much of us is a part of what makes it so valuable. The fact that it is by a person, with their own experiences of the world, makes it even more so.
There are parallels to be drawn between the loss of cognitive capability that I experienced and had to work hard to regain and the degradation that cognitive offloading can cause in people who are overly reliant on LLMs. The good news is that being a loyal ChatGPT user doesn’t give you brain damage—at least, as far as we now know. If you want to, there is nothing medically stopping you from regaining the skills you may have lost. If you once knew how to do something that you’ve since spent months handing over to LLMs, it is likely that when you try to do that work alone again, you will struggle without the support of the machine you’ve come to rely on. What worries me more is the people who have never learned to do the work themselves at all, such as students and young people, who may never develop the skills necessary to do anything on their own. Teachers and professors are fighting to change this, and to get students to think for themselves, even tricking them with hidden AI prompts in exercise briefs, but it’s not enough. People have to want to do things themselves, and we have to foster a culture that supports and encourages this.
Those months I spent not being able to read, write, speak, or otherwise communicate the way I had always been able to were frightening and isolating. It took a long time to claw myself back, and it could just take another neurological episode to set me back months, or worse, again. I don’t take those regained skills for granted anymore, because I learned firsthand how much is lost when we can no longer form our own opinions or share our perspective with the world. Finally, I can take great pleasure in reading, in watching movies, in talking and writing about what I think and feel again. Being able to do something yourself, even and especially when it’s difficult, is rewarding. Seeing a paragraph or a painting, however imperfect, and knowing that it came from inside you feels good, even if it’s not where you’d like to be right now. It’s never too late to keep trying—no matter how difficult it is to get to where you hope to be.
[post_title] => In Defense of Difficulty
[post_excerpt] => Overnight, I lost some of my capacity to think and write. After fighting to get it back, I cannot imagine choosing to give those faculties over to a machine.
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[post_modified] => 2026-09-29 17:27:38
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A tour through Europe's past—and what lessons we might learn from its museums to fight authoritarianism today.
Interrupting the skyline in Tallinn, Estonia is a tall gray building, a relic of the country’s Soviet occupation. It looms over the medieval city, declaring its name in giant letters: HOTELL VIRU. Behind these letters is a secret 23rd floor, where the KGB (the Soviet Union’s security agency) would listen to the hotel’s visitors, as unsuspecting tourists sipping drinks in the restaurant just a floor below would point to the windows above them and ask, “Hey, what’s up there?”
Tourists at the hotel were spied on right up until April 1991, when the KGB left the building and shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed. While the KGB cleared away many important details, enough artifacts were left behind, including a room full of monitoring devices, that a museum was opened in 2011. It’s a constant reminder of what once happened here—a reminder of how personal freedoms can so easily be lost, and a reminder of what’s at the end of the road to authoritarianism. A road that several European countries might be on once again.
The Hotel Viru & KGB Museum is the first stop on my tour as I gather up the scattered pieces of Europe’s recent history of authoritarianism and ask whether we are paying enough attention to our present.
(Photo courtesy of Katie Dancey-Downs.)
As you walk into what our tour guide calls the “listening room,” it’s the musty smell that hits you first. “Oh no, it even smells like the Soviet Union,” tourists from neighboring Finland are reported to have said, according to our guide, Margit. In one glass cabinet, there is a selection of microphones, recording devices, and transmitters. In the 1970s, when the hotel opened, around 60 guest rooms were designated as special rooms, with an empty room next door so that one of these KGB microphones could be slotted through a small hole. By the next decade, advances in technology meant more rooms could be monitored, with vases and lamps becoming favorite spots for hidden microphones. Sitting on a glass shelf in front of us, there’s even an old handheld camera, once used as a way to collect compromising photographs when poked through bedroom walls.
The guests were not completely oblivious to any of this, Margit says; KGB monitoring was something of an open secret.
“Tourists in general were very cautious in the rooms,” she explains. Visitors would leave the water running, turn up the television volume, or cover vents with towels for privacy.
The microphones weren’t limited to bedrooms, either. Margit directs us to a circular, speckled-green set of cufflinks, fitted out with a hidden microphone. In another cabinet, there’s an ashtray and a gold-rimmed plate monogrammed with a bold black V, both with hidden microphones, too. Perfect for slipping onto the table in front of people of interest.
While this hotel was a symbol of the free Western world to the people who lived in Tallinn, Soviet citizens knew not to get too close to its front doors, unless they wanted to be dragged to the basement for an interrogation. During its prime, Hotel Viru was not unique—any hotel that welcomed tourists in the Soviet Union or Eastern Bloc had a KGB presence.
It’s easy to forget that Margit lived under this occupation, that she knew exactly what it meant to keep away from Hotel Viru. I won’t go so far as to call Margit yet another artifact, but the memories and experiences held by the woman standing before us, in her Viru-branded gilet, are an important part of the picture. She remembers how Estonians used to hold their hands in front of their faces when they talked to each other in the park to fend away lip readers. She remembers how much people wanted to work at Hotel Viru, because they got access to illicit foreign goods and received gifts from the tourists. She also remembers how the hotel preferred hiring married people, assuming they wouldn’t try and couple up with a foreigner—the only accepted reason for leaving the Soviet Union. (This was an appealing option for many, although it came with complications: Divorce was allowed, but taking children to a new foreign life was not—any child born in the Soviet Union was in effect owned by the state.) This atmosphere, Margit tells us, made people easier to control.
“You are free to leave,” Margit says at the end of our tour. “Nobody takes you to the basement, nowadays.”
(Photo courtesy of Katie Dancey-Downs.)
An atmosphere of control
Unfortunately, this “special atmosphere of control” is not consigned to museum display cabinets. In Europe today, illiberal ideologies are finding strong ground, with support for populist parties soaring in many countries—my own, the UK, included.
This atmosphere Margit told us about, and the spying on people of interest, is also still going on in Russia today. Soviet (now Russian) state security has had various different names, including the Cheka, then the NKVD, then the KGB. Nowadays, the former KGB is known as the FSB.
I cannot safely travel to Russia to tell you what this atmosphere is like. I’ve criticized Putin and interviewed enough Russian dissidents that I don’t think I would be particularly welcome. But in the same way that seeing the artifacts in Hotel Viru has brought to life the history of intense surveillance and the atmosphere of terror, there is similar evidence in our current times: from school teachers forced to teach propaganda and patriotic lessons to a state-backed messaging app with extensive surveillance capabilities.
The artifacts in Hotel Viru’s listening room show us how surveillance technology developed over the decades, and that it did not stop when the Soviet Union fell in 1991. Instead, we now have even more advanced technologies to contend with.
This isn’t limited to Russia. In the UK, live facial recognition cameras are being rolled out by police across the country. According to Big Brother Watch, a human rights group that campaigns against the practice, there are 10 regional police forces regularly using the technology, but many others use it for large events. Currently, there are no specific rules governing its use.
Here's how it works: Surveillance cameras snap individuals’ faces and make biometric prints, then compare them to a police watchlist for similar matches, with the software flagging people in real time. A tech-smart way to catch criminals, yes, but here the threat to freedom begins. The technology has been deployed in numerous city centers, with hundreds of thousands of faces scanned on the streets as well as at events like Notting Hill Carnival. There have been cases of people being misidentified, and accusations from Amnesty International that the practice “amplifies racist policing,” as Black people are most often misidentified.
Big Brother Watch notes that it’s usually authoritarian regimes that embrace live facial recognition—Russia and China, for example. The UK does not currently have an authoritarian regime. But pair this with growing support for far-right politics and the UK’s rollback on protest rights—including a new provision to limit “cumulative disruption” of protests—and we might have a problem on the horizon.
Silencing critics
Across the border from Estonia, in Latvia’s capital city of Riga, is the KGB building known as the Corner House. Of all the places I see on my museums tour, the Corner House is the most chilling. The one that stinks the most of death. As I walk around the dark and dingy complex of cells, where the paint is peeling off in long strips, the thing that makes my skin crawl is the knowledge that in this very place people had their liberties stripped in the most inhumane ways. Some of them even lost their lives, simply for opposing the regime.
A young guide shows us around the KGB cells which were used during the first and second Soviet occupations (with a Nazi occupation in the middle). He tells us that people could be arrested for reading a banned book, for joking about the Soviets, or for believing that Latvia could be free.
At some point, when we’re standing in the old interrogation room, the guide smacks a rubber stick on the desk and we all jump, a glimmer of what someone under KGB interrogation would face. In one cell, he tells us that 30 people would be inside at once, the window covered so they couldn’t tell what time of day it was, then he flicks on the bright lights so that we’re disoriented like the prisoners would have been. He points to the heating system that would be cranked up high, and the sole bucket used as a toilet and emptied once a day.
(Photo courtesy of Katie Dancey-Downs.)
It's with all this in mind that we are taken to the courtyard. This, he tells us, would have been a reminder to the prisoners of how the free world feels (and a way to make them willing to sign anything, including confessions). Above us there are bars and netting. To stop suicides from the interrogation room, we’re told.
We’re left there for a few minutes, in a space where prisoners would have been allowed to breathe fresh air once a week, walking in circles with their heads bowed, their feet trudging along the same concrete that we stand on now. It is a reminder that not all artifacts live in glass cabinets.
There is worse to come. In what was once an execution room, there are more than 200 bullet holes in the walls, marked with red and yellow stickers. They go back to 1940 and 1941, when prisoners were told to face the very same wall now before us, then shot in the back of the head. Researchers are still trying to find out whether executions continued here during the second Soviet occupation.
“We Latvians know the price of freedom,” the guide tells us. He also reminds us that this type of thing is still happening in Russia today.
Opposition leader Alexei Navalny is one recent, high-profile person to have lost his life while incarcerated by Russia in a penal colony north of the Arctic Circle, where he was killed with a dart frog toxin. But he is far from alone, as many other Kremlin critics or persecuted communities have been imprisoned or killed.
(Photo courtesy of Katie Dancey-Downs.)
This modern unease extends beyond Russia to Baltic states like Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. One person in Estonia told me that her daughter talks about how they would escape if their home was attacked. In neighboring Belarus—where state security is still called the KGB, and Russian influence is strong—more than 4,600 people have ended up as political prisoners since 2020. Many of those people are pro-democracy protesters and campaigners who stood up against dictator Alexander Lukashenko’s rule, including his rigged election win in 2020 and then 2025.
A short walk away from Riga’s Corner House, artifacts in the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia shine more light on the country’s dark history. If you’d forgotten about the KGB building already, your memory would be refreshed by this museum’s display of bullet casings and the keys for the prison cells, now housed in a glass box.
I land at a small bottle and blister pack of pills which turn out to be chlorprothixene and other antipsychotics used to “treat” dissidents imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals. This practice is not history, but still happening in Europe as I stand looking at these artifacts. I am reminded of Russia’s punitive psychiatry, where medicated treatment is forced onto political activists who have been sent to psychiatric units in response to their activism, and where they are brutalized.
And then we come to what might be one of the most terrifying tools of Soviet oppression: the concentration and forced-labor camps known as the Gulag. A quilted jacket with the number F358 sewn on the back is hanging up on display, this particular one having belonged to a woman called Leontīne Kriviņa, who in the 1950s was arrested for participation in a youth resistance group and sent to the Norilsk Gulag camp, 400km above the Arctic Circle, where temperatures could drop to -50C.
The personality cult
I’m now standing before a KGB-sponsored weekly newspaper, called Dzimtenes Balss, which translates as Voice of the Homeland. It was written specifically for Latvians in Western exile and—if we were in any doubt about its purpose—published by the “Committee for the Return to the Homeland” between 1958 and 1989. The Soviets wanted to repatriate Latvian émigrés, and propaganda like this was a vital tool in making that happen.
The Soviet Union had a well-oiled propaganda machine. Posters, films, lectures, theatre, newspapers, and radio were ways to shape the collective consciousness, and control society. Among these was the personality cult—which brings us to our next artifact: a small statue from the 1960s of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the USSR, set inside a black display cabinet. The personality cult around him developed after his death, the description says, with many streets named after him and every significant town home to a monument. The “Lenin Cult” replaced the “Stalin Cult,” an information board explains, around three years after Stalin’s death, when the new leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s policies as a “departure from Lenin’s ideals.”
(Photo courtesy of Katie Dancey-Downs.)
There’s another artifact in this museum that speaks to this history of authoritarianism—a copy of Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s memoir and manifesto. It’s chilling to see it in real life, something so feared and despised across the continent, and indeed the world. Something that represents the personality of the man who led a genocide and brought terror to Europe.
In today’s Europe, we have a personality cult problem once again. But the personalities in question don’t even need to bother writing a book: They have social media at their disposal.
The scapegoats
There’s one more thing that I want to show you in the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia. A fabric Star of David, faded with time, which would have been used by the Nazis to identify Jews. It’s one thing knowing about these yellow stars and how they were used, but it’s another to really see one, imagining who it might have been pinned on. Next to it, there are a couple of strings of numbers on what look like badges. One is brighter, and says 8533. They are identification numbers worn by Jews held in the Kaiserwald Concentration Camp or the Lenta factory in Riga. Tens of thousands of Jewish people were murdered in Latvia during the Holocaust.
While relatively short compared to their Soviet occupations, Estonia and Latvia were both subjected to Nazi occupations during World War II. Many people even welcomed the Nazis, hoping they would save them from the Soviets. What people soon learned is that no authoritarian regime is “better” than another. All are bad.
I went to Kraków, a medieval city in Poland’s south, which felt the full weight of a Nazi occupation from 1939 to 1945. Up to 20,000 Jews were forced into a purpose-made ghetto, before Heinrich Himmler ordered their deaths in 1943 and they were either shot, sent to labor camps, or sent to concentration camps where they remained as prisoners or were exterminated.
In Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory, the permanent exhibition Kraków Under Nazi Occupation tells this story. In one of the first displays, there is a circular wooden construction painted in yellows and blues, like something that might belong in an old-fashioned penny arcade, with pairs of binoculars set into each panel. It is a carousel of photographs, the images rendered in 3D, each one frighteningly immersive as it takes my whole field of vision. I have never seen Hitler’s face this close, as he shakes hands with another Nazi, or holds hands with a smiling girl—in the latter, they might even be dancing. Another shows a woman smiling and saluting in a Sieg Heil. Flags are draped from buildings and swastikas plastered on armbands. Not just seeing these photographs from over 80 years ago, but being inside the photographs, makes it all frighteningly real—which of course it was. The people smiling is what’s really terrifying.
As we face our own dangerous political shifts today, it scares me to think about the photographs that our generation’s great grandchildren will look at. Will they also sit in a museum like this, immersing themselves in the artifacts we’ve left behind and ask, “How did they allow this to happen?” Will they struggle to understand how so many people could welcome the far right rallies and shake hands with the populist leaders of today, the way I now struggle with the same? Or will ours be a generation that truly learns from its history, so that we do not allow the most atrocious things that have happened in the past to happen again?
(Photo courtesy of Katie Dancey-Downs.)
At the end of the Schindler Museum exhibit is a glass case containing two spirals of barbed wire. They are from KL Płaszów, a camp in Kraków built on Jewish cemeteries, which housed up to 25,000 prisoners at a time. It began as a forced labor camp and later became a concentration camp, a place of terror for Jews, Poles, Roma and political prisoners. Although it wasn’t an extermination camp, prisoners were indeed also executed here.
Many concentration camps have been preserved across Europe as a reminder of what happened during the Holocaust, when the Nazis murdered six million Jewish people, as well as other persecuted groups. Decades ago, I visited the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, north of Berlin, on a school history trip. I still remember, vividly, the “Arbeit Macht Frei” lettering on the gates, that awful, twisted phrase that translates as “Work Makes You Free.”
On the other side of Kraków, there is a blue and white striped uniform hanging up in the People of Kraków in Times of Terror exhibition, part of Muzeum Krakowa. A woman named Anna Pieczarka-Mikulskaw wore it while imprisoned in the German concentration camp KL Ravensbrück between 1942 and 1945. Her grandson gave it to the museum.
“Some of them came back home in the uniform,” the museum’s curator Grzegorz Jeżowski tells me.
The Holocaust is perhaps our starkest example of where scapegoating can lead. That barbed wire and that prisoner uniform in Kraków are reminders of what happened in Europe’s darkest hours. And yet today, far-right politicians are still villainizing minority groups, in particular Jews, Muslims, refugees, and LGBTQ+ people. It is not comparable with what the Nazis did, of course it isn’t. But we must never forget where this road can lead.
Today, in countries including Russia, Germany, Italy, and Georgia, there are growing political movements pushing for “traditional family values” and against LGBTQ+ rights. In Bulgaria, too, it is illegal to discuss LGBTQ+ topics in schools. There is a question mark over Hungary, which made global headlines for banning Pride marches under recently deposed strongman, Viktor Orbán. Recently in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won the state election, just falling short of gaining a majority, and leaving the rest of Europe shaken.
(Photo courtesy of Katie Dancey-Downs.)
Why we must visit the museum
Let me caveat what I’m about to say: I am not carrying the weight of lived or generational trauma, as others whose families have been persecuted by authoritarian regimes. But I believe it's vital we go to these museums and face the evidence head on, that we look at Mein Kampf, at the shoes of people murdered by the Soviet secret service units found in burial sites, at the microphones slipped into hotel rooms. Not just to remember what has happened in the past, but to make sure that we develop the necessary critical thinking required to understand and prevent what is already emerging in our present.
The museums I visited are just a handful of those dotted around Europe, with countless artifacts to remind us we are not immune to the possibility of ending up under authoritarianism. In Europe today, there are flickers of these tendencies—and not just in Russia and Belarus.
In Serbia and Turkey, journalists critical of the government live under serious threat, and protesters have faced violent clampdowns in Georgia since the Georgian Dream party claimed victory in the 2024 election—a result which Western pollsters said did not match exit polls. Both Turkey and Georgia’s leadership has been described as authoritarian.
And then there are countries where populist or illiberal politicians are waiting in the wings, steadily growing in popularity. Like in the UK, where there is an ever-growing personality cult around the anti-immigration Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, a man who has been accused by former schoolmates of antisemitic and racist bullying (which he denies) while more recently getting caught supporting a neo-Nazi event and using extremist slogans in personalized Cameo videos. As of May 2026, Reform UK was the most popular political party in the country, before a series of financial scandals consumed discussion around the party, dropping them to second place by August.
Similarly in France, Marine Le Pen’s far right National Rally is the country’s most popular party according to the most recent voting poll. And perhaps most shockingly, as of June 2026, the most popular political party in Germany is the far right nationalist AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), which is shaped by xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and hostility to LGBTQ+ people.
Tyrants-gone-by echo in our current world, and illiberal politics serve as fertile ground for authoritarianism.
With all this in mind, the artefacts of terror and extremist politics in Europe’s museums are frightening, quite rightly. But in these same buildings, there are also always artefacts of hope.
In the Vabamu Museum of Occupations and Freedom in Tallinn, there is not only evidence of the oppressions Estonians faced, but also of their resistance. Hanging up on the wall, a brown leather briefcase that belonged to Enn, an Estonian dissident who was arrested by the KGB numerous times, tells the story of a petition called the Baltic Appeal, calling for the independence of the Baltic states. The briefcase was big enough to carry a secret typewriter, which could be used to make and copy prohibited materials—and there’s one of those here too, a large clunky machine with a teal-colored carriage. They were considered so dangerous by the Soviet Union, that each typewriter had to be registered, but dissidents found ways to trick the authorities. This particular typewriter belonged to Irene, who, according to the museum’s digital guide, exchanged her tent to get it and then used it to make copies of the banned The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an autobiographical work about life in the Soviet labor camps.
(Photo courtesy of Katie Dancey-Downs.)
Sitting proudly above the typewriter and the briefcase is a piece of samizdat, which dissidents were producing in the decades after Stalin died. These were self-published copies of prohibited texts—novels, journals, cookbooks, anything people wanted to read and couldn’t—which were passed around hand-to-hand, secretively.
There is a letter on the wall, too, signed by 40 Estonian figures from the cultural and scientific communities, against Russification. They collected these signatures in secret and sent the open letter to newspapers—even though ultimately, it resulted in many of them being punished, interrogated, or forced to publicly apologize.
Lastly, in the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, there’s one incredible artefact that I sit in front of for a long time. It’s a video of people—ordinary people—holding their linked hands up high along the side of the road. It is a singing revolution. In August 1989, 1.5 million people across the three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—created a 410-mile chain from Tallinn to Riga to Vilnius, held hands, and sang for their independence. A few months later, the Berlin Wall fell, and by 1991, all three countries were independent and free of Soviet occupation.
So much of authoritarian control is about isolating people, making them afraid of what they say and to whom they speak. These movements of resistance, then, these items that bond people, these relics, are all precious reminders of how people have resisted before. But we must go to the museum to truly see them. We must go to the museum to find hope in what can be overwhelming times. And we must go to the museum to arm ourselves with the lessons of history in the fight against a repeat of our worst moments.
[post_title] => Warnings from the Museum
[post_excerpt] => A tour through Europe's past—and what lessons we might learn from its museums to fight authoritarianism today.
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[post_modified] => 2026-09-23 00:12:35
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