I enjoyed the audiobook of this weird, charming, and on occasion deeply disturbing novel. Eleanor is a one-of-a-kind protagonist, not easily likable, yet I was immediately invested in her journey. She’ll stretch your imagination in unexpected ways. —Anna Lind-Guzik
If there's a new translation of Annie Ernaux out in the world, you best believe I'm getting my hands on it ASAP. Her first since she won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, this is Ernaux at her best: sexy, a little melancholic, complex, intimate. It's a wonderful meditation on desire, on aging, and on what drives an autobiographical writer to write about themselves. —Gina Mei
This month I reread a short story by Claire Keegan, "So Late in the Day." I heard of it on the New Yorker Radio Hour; the author George Saunders chose it and thought that Keegan could be compared to Anton Chechov. If that does not get your attention, Saunders also commented on how every line in the story had meaning, so it was worth reading once and then going back to notice its layers.
Keegan had challenged herself to come up with a story that was super tense but where that tension and suspense were not driven by the narrative. What she came up with is a story about misogyny and gender roles in relationships. I'm obsessed with it on so many levels—the writing, the craft, the message. It's a story that stays with you. —Elyssa Dole
This month, I delved into Wonderful Ways to Love a Child by Judy Ford with the goal of enhancing my relationship and communication with my daughter. This insightful book offers a plethora of practical and creative techniques for building stronger connections with children. Through relatable anecdotes and heartfelt wisdom, Ford underscores the importance of spending quality time, being an attentive listener, and maintaining positive communication to nurturing these essential relationships. Whether you're a parent or caregiver, this book serves as an invaluable guide to enriching the bonds you share with the children in your life. —Loleta Ross
How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures has been one of the best books I've read this year! Sabrina Imbler explores their queer and cultural identities through shimmery life in the ocean in 10 essays. Once I started to read the first chapter, about how goldfish can actually thrive in wild waters (some growing as heavy as bowling balls!) and how this reflects their experience coming out, I couldn't put it down. This book is a beautiful reflection of life and acts as a reminder that every goldfish has the tenacity to live if only given the chance to escape their small bowl. —Kiera Wright-Ruiz
[post_title] => What We Read in September
[post_excerpt] => The staff's recommendations for your fall TBR pile.
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How can any institution be ethical when it's an obsequious representation of the values of its extraordinarily rich funders?
Follow the money. That was the dictum that propelled Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men; it was also the hunch Andrea Fraser followed when she published 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics—essentially the museum world equivalent. This latter work touts a cast of familiar characters—Basses and Sacklers and Kochs, oh my!—navigating finger food in evening wear, far from the madding pillories of MSNBC, but still dedicatedly pushing the same agenda through their presence on museum boards. This is America: Perhaps it’s only natural that Harlan Crow, the same hand that greases Clarence Thomas, has built a Dallas museum of Asian Art (to say nothing of his so-called “Garden of Evil”). Or that it took Laura Poitras’s 2022 documentary about Nan Goldin’s crusade against the Sackler family getting all the way to Oscar season for their misdeeds to actually come to light. Follow the money—at any museum or in any national political campaign (because yes, it’s the same money, as Fraser deftly and exhaustively points out)—and it will only lead to one familiar place: disappointment.
Or, in this case, a multimillionaire’s doorstep.
Shelby White, whose money built the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Greco-Roman wing, visited by more than 3 million people annually, is in a pickle. An avid collector of antiquities, White is no stranger to law enforcement, having previously cooperated in repatriating artifacts she had purchased to their countries of origin, including Yemen, Turkey, and Italy. Yet little could have prepared her for the sublime institutional irony of the scandal that unfolded in her living room earlier this year. According toThe New York Times:
[The police] showed up, unannounced, with a search warrant at her spacious Sutton Place apartment in Manhattan at 6 a.m. The rooms inside were filled with antiquities, some of which had been purchased from dealers who would later be accused of trafficking in illicit artifacts. Many were displayed in their own nooks or cabinets, and set off by lighting that enhanced their appeal. “It is literally a museum,” said Matthew Bogdanos, the head of the district attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit, which visited the apartment several times.
The collection removed from her apartment included were four stolen sections of an Anatolian columned sarcophagus valued at $1 million, a bronze statuette of the emperor Lucius Verus valued at $15 million, and a Roman bronze bust of an unknown man valued at $3 million—by any definition, a veritable trove. Rather than marvel at the secluded museum she’d amassed, however, I found myself wondering: What is a museum if not a rich person’s living room someone deigned to open to the public? And what, exactly, is the point of putting all of this stuff in one place?
Most of the objects we see displayed in museums grapple with the Big Mysteries. Whether oriented toward art, culture, ethnography, or science, a museum enshrines systems of understanding it all. These institutions collect, constellate, and disseminate a narrative of perceived truth. The problem inherent to any of this is the same as with any narrative: the limitations (and biases) of the narrator. Humans are blinkered by the boundaries of their own perception and countless barriers to understanding imposed by the context and times in which they live. Heap on top of this the basic problem of who has the privilege to curate or collect in the first place, and—last but not least—who holds the aforementioned purse strings that keep the lights on at any institution in question, and the narrative gets muddy. Joan Didion famously wrote that we tell ourselves stories in order to live, but what are we keeping alive?
At its core, an art museum is essentially a narrative of empire. If, as Napoleon quipped, history is a set of lies agreed upon, a museum is their physical manifestation. Aptly, the Met—the grandest, most august museum in a city that likes to think of itself as the center of the world—boasts all the baubles that connote having made it, including a few once owned by Napoleon himself. Cleopatra’s needle, the Temple of Dendur, Greek goodies faded polychrome or ghostly blanched, Persian carpets, Old Masters, Estruscan jewels, Japanese lacquer, South Asian sacred sculpture, Chinese vases, Senegalese masks, Polynesian canoes. The good, old stuff! All in one place, the best of it all from every corner of the globe.
But the best according to whom? The Met is a museum of objects rich people, like Shelby White, value; it is a narrative of wealth and what signals it. Accordingly, the place has no shame at trafficking in stolen goods, and enlisting lawyers to stonewall the looted parties (e.g., Greece) with reams of contracts and receipts to establish provenance. It’s a Red State mentality with Blue State wall text. The institution has the dirty opioid moneyand the dirty oil money. Its worldview is unabashedly human-centric, each wing featuring a different culture trying to figure out what the hell it all means—most often, a whole lot of fucking, being born, and dying. Religious fanaticism is rife. Social hierarchy abounds. Women are mostly subjugated and objectified. The Hall of Arms and Armor would make any 2nd Amendment enthusiast blush with delight. Inveterate elitists, the Met celebrates the winners. It doesn’t have time for the downtrodden or the poor because they didn’t leave nice enough shit behind. Or any shit at all.
This is the tale nailed literally and metaphorically by Andrea Fraser in her book and throughout her career as a performance artist. As a writer, similar institutional critique has been my own stock and trade: Recently, I was engaged by artists Caitlin McCormack and Kat Ryals to write text for their exhibit at Elijah Wheat Showroom, Souvenirs of the Wasteland. The show imagines what a museum would look like after the apocalypse, specifically imagining objects more akin to the Met’s cousin across Central Park, the American Museum of Natural History. In a sense, the show is a museum of unnatural history—a curated glimpse of the world left behind after human intervention. In this installation, microplastics have usurped the Hall of Gems; the Great Pacific Garbage Patch drifts triumphant as a continent—terra firma on a planet mankind has rendered uninhabitable. McCormack and Ryals offer a survey of what thrives in the Anthropocene’s wake: mutant lifeforms melded with garbage, eerie radioactive hues, and dark odes to effluvium, ephemera, fast fashion, and immortal trash.
Contributing wall text for this show gave me the chance to think about how the AMNH presents another model of institutional storytelling: What, one may ask, is a museum of natural history attempting to catalog? And why and how is this very peculiar blend of objects in it? How do we get from, say, a tree stump from the Redwood Forest to a Chinese wedding chair? The museum-hopping visitor will notice the same object that is considered “art” on the east side of Central Park becomes a “craft” once it has migrated to Central Park West. “Folklore” presents a thorny problem as a catch-all term when it refuses to elevate a cultural practice to literature, organized religion, or art, thus othering whichever culture it is attempting to include. The AMNH is a blind spot, enshrined. And despite seeming more innocent than the Met, the AMNH is also on the take from the Brothers Koch; Richard Gilder, for whom the museum’s new wing is named, specialized in short-selling.
Still, the AMNH attempts a more science-centric—ergo, necessarily progressive—worldview. True to progressive form, it also cannot see why its stances are problematic. It is a paean to preservation full of dead, endangered animals. There are literal dinosaurs. Its Hall of Human Origins is named for the family of an unevolved former NY governor. Everyone claims they are there for some granola story of the Earth’s origins, but really, the whole operation is funded by the Hall of Gems—containing some of the bloodiest of diamonds and other problematically sourced stones in the world, much of it tracing back to America’s echt-capitalist, J. P. Morgan.
AMNH is also a core sample of outmoded notions of progressivism layered on top of one another and bisected in vitrines, from problematic conservationist Teddy Roosevelt (whose hats are on display downstairs) to present patron saint of PBS and New York native son Neil deGrasse Tyson. It makes one wonder not only about the vastness of the universe but how our own NPR perspective on it will soon become invalid. Margaret Mead was undoubtedly what would have passed as “woke” in her own time, but her legacy is displayed in a way in the AMNH that means the only name and face in the whole area of the museum that concerns Oceania is that of a white woman. She is further celebritized in a warren of rooms strictly about her, and while there are attempts to correct the narrative, they are inconsistent and frequently at odds with one another. On the first floor, the diorama of Peter Stuyvesant meeting unnamed Leni Lanape (Hackensack) has an incredibly powerful treatment of corrective scholarship on the glass. Meanwhile, upstairs, we find “exotic” cultures othered in dioramas depicting far reaches of the globe from Tashkent to Timbuktu; but we don’t see, for example, a diorama populated by a blonde Swedish family arguing over which allen wrench to use in front of some IKEA furniture.
Both the Met and the AMNH are flawed. One model tells the story of the human perception of meaning and our quest to make the mortal coil a bit more bearable; it is a story of status and hierarchy, and the ugly, inescapable truth that inequality and the suffering of most are the cost of beauty and luxury for few. The other model tells the story of the impact of humans on Earth, with the great caveat that it’s the world’s most unreliable narrators telling it: humans. (And, again, the ones footing the bill to even tell the story in the first place are arguably some of the worst among us—many of whom directly profit from the planet’s degradation.)
No matter how intricate or well researched a palimpsest—at any cultural institution—it will never solve the problem of perspective. We can never escape ourselves or the times in which we live. Maybe this is the best we ever do—and maybe that’s fine. Maybe seeing museums as deeply flawed but instructive monuments to that attempt at understanding, rather than as definitive catalogs, is the best way to allow them to teach us about ourselves. Sometimes, we need the reminder not to believe something just because it’s written on the wall.
[post_title] => There's No Such Thing as an Ethical Museum
[post_excerpt] => How can any institution be ethical when it's an obsequious representation of the values of its extraordinarily rich funders?
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An exclusive excerpt from Anne Elizabeth Moore's "Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes."
The Coronavirus. People who aren’t worried about the coronavirus. People who are too worried about the coronavirus. The possibility that I am not worried enough about the coronavirus. Case counts. The reliability of case counts. The vaccines. People who aren’t vaccinated. The reasons people aren’t vaccinated. Getting vaccinated. The mRNA vaccines. My thyroid gland, thrown into disarray by the mRNA vaccine and apparently increasing my blood pressure to dangerous levels. Convincing a pharmacist in a rural red county to give me a booster that is not an mRNA vaccine. Convincing a pharmacist in a rural red county to give me a booster at all. Convincing a pharmacist in a rural red county that the coronavirus is real. Convincing a pharmacist in a rural red county to give me a booster as an immunocompromised person. Explaining to a pharmacist in a rural red county what being immunocompromised means. Convincing my doctor that the mRNA vaccine caused my thyroid disruption, the first I’ve experienced in over a decade, occasioned exclusively and to the day by my second mRNA vaccine booster. A new coronavirus strain. The effectiveness of masks. Buying more masks. Masking at outdoor gatherings. Transmission at outdoor gatherings. Outdoor gatherings. Being around other people. Not being around other people. The large and embarrassing zit that emerged on my cheek a few days back despite the fact that I am an adult, wash frequently, and do not consume sugar. My autoimmune diseases. The medications for my autoimmune diseases. The vitamins and supplements I take to counteract the medications for my autoimmune diseases. The likelihood of accruing more autoimmune diseases. The likelihood of accruing other diseases because of my autoimmune diseases. Being immunocompromised during a pandemic. Buying clothes during a pandemic. Going outside during a pandemic. Remaining inside during a pandemic. My left forefinger, currently swollen. My blood pressure, still high. My concentration, largely shot. Oh man, a buncha stuff. So much stuff!
What comes flooding in when I have a moment to breathe. The dead tree outside my window, and the path it will take when it falls. Mowing the lawn. Trimming the lawn. The survival of the monarch butterflies. What will happen to my cat if I don’t take her to the vet soon. What will happen to my cat if she keeps eating leaves from my fig tree. What will happen to my cat if I have a heart attack. Writing a will. Finding someone to sign my will as a witness who won’t freak out about my impending death. Refinishing my furniture in a pleasing enough manner that the beneficiary named in my will won’t just throw it away. The calcium supplements I have been taking, triple the recommended dosage, which turns out to cause high blood pressure. New lab results. More lab tests. Where to drop my sharps container. Paying for lab tests. My dwindling grant funding. Inflation. Winter heating bills. Utilities costs. Author-website maintenance costs. The cost of a new computer. Word processing software subscriptions. Book prices. Food prices. Cat food prices. Finding time to run. How running will affect my achy right knee. How running will affect my left leg. Not finding time to run. Where I can go to swim. Where I can go to swim during a spike in case counts. Focusing on my personal physical health during a global health crisis. Going out to eat with my food restrictions. Going out to eat during a period in American history where setting boundaries around personal health is unwelcome. Cooking for myself, again. Another new coronavirus strain. A new vaccine. Getting the new vaccine. This sore throat. This persistent cough. This fatigue. This diminished capacity to smell. This negative coronavirus-test result. Coughing in public after a negative coronavirus-test result. Coughing in public for any reason. People casually mentioning that they just tested positive for the coronavirus but feel fine. People who would never test for the coronavirus but clearly do not feel fine. This essay. Other essays. Writing. Not writing. Publishing. Not publishing. The publishing industry. The state of this nation’s democracy, such as it is. The avowed white supremacist who lives down the road. The Civil War reenactor up the block. The guy at the edge of the village with the flag outside his house that reads, “TRUMP 2024 FUCK YOUR FEELINGS.” The guy on the internet who tells me my feelings don’t matter. The guy on the internet who tells me I am stupid. The guy on the internet who responds to every post by telling me how hot I am. The guy on the internet who tells me he knows where I live. That my house sits on a hill that is visibly eroding. The oxycodone manufacturing plant in my village. The environmental repercussions of the oxycodone manufacturing plant in my village. The social repercussions of the oxycodone manufacturing plant in my village. The sheer volume of oxycodone that passes through this village. The sheer volume of guns within a five-mile vicinity of my home. How the vast majority of gun owners in this village fundamentally disagree with me on most basic matters. Not owning a gun. Owning a gun. A civil war. The current Democratic president. Any potential future Republican president. My blood pressure, now both too high and too low. Weaning myself off blood pressure medication. Getting enough calcium in my food without consuming dangerous supplements or dairy. The vitamin D supplements I have been taking too frequently, another cause of high blood pressure. How to get more vitamin D without supplements. Finding time to google every single thing I need to know more about just to survive the week. Remembering to google everything I need to know about to survive the week. Google knowing too much about me. Amazon. Amazon’s influence over publishing. Amazon’s move into housing. Amazon’s move into healthcare. That the calcium supplements I was taking at three times the dose I ordered and which substantially contributed to my high blood pressure were due to an Amazon shipping error. My Amazon rankings. Sales numbers of my current book. Sales numbers of this book. Sales numbers of my next book. Finishing my next book. Finishing this book. Writing books. Reading books. The surprise bill I just got for something that should be entirely covered by my insurance. Calling the insurance company, who tells me to call the billing department. Calling the billing department, who demands I call my RN. My RN, who was fired for refusing to get vaccinated against the coronavirus and then rehired after a couple of months out of desperation and who never got vaccinated. Calling back the billing department, who failed to file my paperwork with the insurance company because they were “too busy” and who asks me to file it myself. That my very complicated disease- maintenance program relies entirely on a medical facility who will charge me three hundred dollars for a fully covered five-minute doctor visit because they’re “too busy” to send the same paperwork to someone else. Dobbs v. Jackson. The women I know who will be affected by Dobbs v. Jackson. The nonbinary and trans people I know who will be affected by Dobbs v. Jackson. All the people I will never meet because of how severely their lives will be affected by Dobbs v. Jackson. Whether my political organizing in response to Dobbs v. Jackson will impact my own political career. Whether or not I can have a political career in a world where people with uteruses have no bodily autonomy. Whether or not I want a political career in a world where people with uteruses have no bodily autonomy. Whether or not I want to live in a world where some people have no bodily autonomy. The kind of people who want to live in a world where some people have no bodily autonomy. Republicans. Democrats. Being told to vote in response to bad policy. Being told to vote by a political party that has more money than god. Being told to vote by the people I voted for. Being told to vote in a world where voting rights are being stripped away from increasing numbers of people. That two out of four times I have tried to vote in this village I have been told I could not. This sudden, inexplicable grief that has no identifiable origin and no end, but some days recedes while I am in the shower and stays in the background for a while, perhaps days, but at other times emerges while I am washing dishes or doing yoga or placing a forkful of salad in my mouth and causes intense chest pain and sudden tears and colors everything gray and that no amount of crying or meditating or talking to friends or sitting in the woods can alleviate in any way. Why my sunflowers have not yet opened. What is going on with my beans. The organic content of the soil in my garden. Why my herb bed isn’t filling out. Why my plum trees keep dying. What to do with all this compost. Where to get more raised beds. Wild parsnip. Buying a chain saw. Using a chain saw. Accidentally killing someone with a chain saw. And then wanting to do it again. Purposely murdering someone with a chain saw. Running for elected office. Running for elected office and then having nude pics unearthed on the internet. The kinds of people who run for office. The kinds of people who will never, ever run for office. The weird tendency my left leg has after I’ve been walking for a mile or so to sort of peter out, to stop performing at peak function, to bend less easily and not lift as high with each step, and how this appears to be a neurological, not a physical, symptom of my medications. Any neurological disease or symptom. Long COVID. Catching the coronavirus as an immunocompromised person and passing along a mutated strain. Accidentally killing someone—oh wait, that’s already listed. Mpox. Pretty much all straight white cis men. Straight white cis men who want to play devil’s advocate. Straight white cis men who just want to ask me one question about feminists. Straight white cis men who assure me they’re not racist. Straight white cis men who speak only to other straight white cis men. Introducing straight white cis men to one another in a professional capacity given the likelihood that they will develop some kind of lucrative project together, leaving me out entirely, often forgetting they ever knew me, that I introduced them, that I used to be their friend. Introducing straight white cis men to music I like. When straight white cis men express interest in my work because they are working on a similar subject. People who too aggressively want to befriend me. Obviously also people who have no interest in me. Engaging with elders in the community during a pandemic. Engaging with elders in the community in a collegial manner and immediately being treated as a sycophant. Becoming an elder in the community. Aging. Trying to behave as normal. Behaving as normal. Trying to remember what normal was. What normal was. The inexplicable knot in my stomach when I wake up every day that takes several hours to dissipate but seems really out of place because actually right now everything is fine, you know, relatively speaking. My dreams, which are often just more of the same. Sleeping, therefore. What will happen next. What will not happen next. How we will recover. Who will recover. Who will not recover.
J.K. Rowling could have died a hero, but will instead be remembered by millions of her most ardent fans as a villain.
At first, it seemed subtle enough: Rowling would “like” tweets that framed trans women as men, toeing the line of support for transphobic rhetoric. Then, in 2019, she shifted from passive implied support to active commentary. She tested the waters by voicing support for Maya Forstater, the plaintiff in a UK employment lawsuit claiming she had been discriminated against for “gender-critical” tweets. On her website, best known for its charming Harry Potter-related Easter eggs, Rowling published a nearly 3,700 word essay decrying trans activism. She has even gone so far as to compare her opponents to Death Eaters, a Nazi-esque terrorist organization in the Harry Potter universe. Today, the author’s brand is practically unrecognizable to many longtime fans; if you emerged from a coma you entered in 1997, you might look at Rowling’s Twitter and assume that policing trans lives was her day job.
As one of the leaders of Fandom Forward (formerly The Harry Potter Alliance), an international nonprofit that helps Harry Potter fans and members of other fan communities become real-life heroes through activism, I had a front row seat to Rowling’s shocking transformation. I wasn’t just angry; I was heartbroken, especially since so many of my friends and collaborators in the Harry Potter fandom are trans. Having grown up in the Catholic school system, where people simply didn’t come out until adulthood, many of the first openly trans people I ever met were people I knew through this fan community.
Whether she accepts it or not, J.K. Rowling is fighting to destroy a safe haven that she helped create. She isn’t just collecting royalty checks or rolling around in champagne: She is using the power of storytelling to enact significant political and cultural outcomes for trans people who are merely trying to live freely, without the threat of violence or death.
Fortunately, fans who support trans rights are doing the same thing. I am one of them. As a child, pop culture was the lens through which I understood the world and myself. I didn’t just consume stories. I devoured them, and made them my own. I was born in the early ’90s, and grew up with the Hogwarts trio: The night in 2001 that my grandmother and aunt took me to see Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, then set me up with a copy of the book, changed my life forever. I spent countless hours imagining myself at Hogwarts, fighting alongside my favorite characters. Would I be great at Quidditch like Harry and Ron? An intellectual like Hermione? Great with magical creatures like Hagrid? The ability for readers to place themselves in this magical universe and learn something about themselves in the process is part of why the story has endured for so long.
Like many children of my generation, I also understood the Harry Potter universe not as an escape from reality, but an invitation to tackle the world’s injustices. After all, Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger were never passive bystanders. Even at age 11, they stepped up to fight evil, often without the support or knowledge of the adults around them.
Today, I am part of a community of fans using the lessons we learned from Harry Potter to combat a rising tide of transphobic violence in the U.S. and U.K. The fandom’s response to Rowling's comments has been swift and impactful, creating a path forward that challenges Rowling’s ideas and fosters trans acceptance, all while offering options beyond a mere boycott. The Gayly Prophet, a Harry Potter podcast with a queer and trans lens, created a guide to firing J.K. Rowling that features countless suggestions for engaging with the franchise ethically, and even supporting trans rights through the purchase of fan-made merchandise. Fandom Forward’s Protego Toolkit provides resources and actions fans can take to lobby against anti-trans legislation, attend protests, volunteer for trans rights organizations, and make community spaces trans-friendly. A consortium of fan organizations called HP Fans Against Transphobia has collected thousands of signatures petitioning HBO against further enriching Rowling through the creation of a new Harry Potter television series. And our heroes themselves have even stepped up to be a part of this activism, too: Recently, Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe moderated “Sharing Space,” a Trevor Project web series featuring discussions with trans and nonbinary youth.
Whether it comes from the fandom or “Harry” himself, Rowling faces a powerful storm of collective action, rooted in love and community for trans lives. Because the truth is this: Fans have power, and as a collective, we can make a difference—sometimes even bigger than the thing that brought us together in the first place.
Media scholar Henry Jenkins defines fan activism as “forms of civic engagement and political participation that emerge from within fan culture itself, often in response to the shared interests of fans, often conducted through the infrastructure of existing fan practices and in relationships, and often framed through metaphors drawn from popular and participatory culture.” Simply put, fan activism allows fans to channel their creative energy and imagination into civic action—and it’s effective.
As an innovative practice, fan activism can take many forms, though many were popularized by what was once The Harry Potter Alliance, which I joined as a college sophomore in 2012. What started amid a rich ecosystem of transformative works on Harry Potter became a guiding force and community hub for hundreds of thousands of fans. The organization was founded in 2005 to address human rights violations in Sudan and raise money for Amnesty International at local wizard rock concerts in the Boston area. Today, we’ve turned our sights toward countless other causes, too.
In nearly 20 years, fan activists have developed innovative, powerful campaigns on a global scale. As a longtime volunteer and now as the co-chair of the board of directors at Fandom Forward, I have witnessed thousands of volunteers, often young students from various backgrounds, recognize and own their collective power through pop culture. Together, we have donated over 400,000 books and built libraries in underserved communities globally through Accio Books (now Book Defenders), connected with activist mentors at our Granger Leadership Academy (also known as Camp GLA), raised funds to bring three planes (aptly nicknamed Harry, Ron, and Hermione) full of rescue supplies to Haiti during the 2010 earthquake disaster, and even successfully lobbied Warner Bros. to use Fair Trade-certified cocoa products through our Not in Harry’s Name campaign.
The real magic and legacy of fan activism, however, is that it challenges corporate assumptions about what fandom is. The world’s greatest “superfans” are more than just passive media consumers who will buy and stream whatever you put in front of them. They are active participants who will remix and reinterpret your brand through the lens of their own experience. And they aren’t afraid to walk away from the brand itself when its creators do not align with their morals. The swift response to J.K. Rowling’s commentary on trans rights, as well as commentary on fatphobic, racist, and antisemitic tropes in the Harry Potter series, illustrates that pop culture is no longer a top-down hierarchical structure, with audiences waiting to absorb whatever studio executives have decided the masses should consume. Fans have willed ideas about their favorite stories into life. If they don’t agree with the harm a creator has caused, they can—and will—go elsewhere.
This trend is extraordinary not because it is new, but because it brings us one step closer to the heart of what storytelling looks like outside the shadow of corporate greed: not a means by which a few companies could reap profits endlessly, but a modern mythos by which our collective memory passes from generation to generation. Storytelling is one of the key elements that makes us human. For thousands of years, humans have told stories in order to survive. As our species evolved and circumstances changed, stories have shifted in purpose, meaning, and interpretation, but ultimately still exist to help us survive and build community. Fandom, and fan activism by extension, is simply a part of the storytelling evolution.
The passion, joy, and power of fandom is immeasurable. It is a magic that cannot be contained or tamped down, even as brands attempt to wrest control over the meaning and messaging behind their intellectual property. Organizing can still seem daunting, and those in it for the long haul will need plenty of ways to take care of themselves and their community. For fan activists, the hard work of organizing is often accompanied by opportunities to experience joy and self-care at community events, from wizard rock concerts to meditation retreats. In the fight against fascism and anti-democratic practices, my ability to engage in sustainable, joyful activism with other fans has given me hope beyond measure.
While Harry Potter has fostered some of the most popular forms of fan activism, the possibilities are endless, spanning countless other fan communities. The Fan Organizer Coalition, founded in 2021 and co-directed by Fandom Forward and Black Nerds Create, has sparked numerous cross-fandom collaborations. From ending voter suppression with Star Trek fans, to celebrating Indigenous geek culture, to educating Disney fans on how to fight the climate crisis, our civic imagination as fans and as storytellers knows no bounds.
[post_title] => Don't Underestimate Fan Activists
[post_excerpt] => No one knows how to organize like a fandom.
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After my daughter was born, I struggled to produce milk. Why did I feel like I had to keep trying?
When I was sixteen, I went to see my mother in a community theater production of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Though Mom performed a chilling death scene as Grandma Joad, it was the character at the center of the play, a young woman named Rose of Sharon, who ended up haunting me. In the third act, Rose has just given birth to a still born baby—a particularly cruel fate given what the Joad family had already endured on their journey West. But then, grieving and broken, the family encounters a young boy and his father, who is dying of starvation, in an abandoned barn. Rose of Sharon, with her milk having just come in, unbuttons her blouse and nurses the dying man back to health.
Even as a teenager, I sensed some great superpower, a gift that I couldn’t wait until it was my turn to receive.
~
A few years later at a coffee shop, I watched a young mother, dressed in a blue tube top with light brown hair hanging down to her waist, wrestle with her hungry baby. I stared transfixed as she casually pulled down her top and popped out a small, perfect breast. Her baby immediately latched on. The woman was sitting in the window, warm afternoon light flooding behind her, and for a moment, she seemed to occupy a holy air: her long hair curtaining them off as the baby nursed with a practiced ease, a profound sense of calm flowing outward from them.
~
In December 2021, a few days before Christmas, I gave birth for the first time. Immediately after cutting the umbilical cord, my daughter was put to my breast; I felt a little pull and suddenly she was working away. I gasped. We stayed like that for about an hour, completely still except for her suckling. Her cheeks and my breasts were both so large at that point it was hard to know where she ended and I began. It would be the last time that breastfeeding was easy for us.
Two days later, I was told by a nurse that my daughter's weight had dropped and that she probably wasn’t latching correctly. A lactation consultant kindly showed me a better angle to hold the baby while nursing. I adjusted. My daughter latched on. “Everyone thinks the cradle way is easiest,” she said. “But that’s because of what we see in the movies.” And in literature, and plays, and paintings, and in coffee shops, I thought.
I believed everything was going fine until around 3 AM the following morning, when I was awoken by another lactation consultant, this one much harsher than the last. Standing over my bed, she sported a neon fanny pack and a buzz cut on one half of her head, her vibe much closer to Nurse Ratched than Mother Theresa. I honestly can’t remember most of what she said, except for one phrase that she repeated over and over: “This is an emergency.” She told me that my milk hadn’t come in yet because I’d had a c-section and my body was prioritizing healing. Strike one against mama, the c-section. Strike two, bad nipples.
My husband and I were directed to feed the baby tiny bottles of formula while I was put on a pumping schedule of every two hours for fifteen minutes at a time. By the time I left the hospital, my nipples were cracked and bleeding, looking like a pair of skinned knees. According to Ratched, the clock began when I started the pump, not when I finished, which, after the obligatory clean up and sterilization of the pump’s various parts, meant that I was sleeping in bursts of an hour to an hour and a half. I started to lose my grip on reality from the sleep deprivation. All the while, nothing was coming out.
Once we got home, I became obsessed with solving the riddle of my broken breasts. I saw a total of six lactation consultants. According to these experts, I had already done so much wrong: taking Dayquil when I came home from the hospital with a cold, sleeping through a couple of my pumping alarms, not being hydrated enough, not eating enough calories, being too stressed for the oxytocin to release and help the milk flow. So I ate all the lactation cookies, drank all the teas they recommended, and even went to an acupuncturist. I created Excel spreadsheets to track my progress, which I made my husband and mother fill out in detail every time they fed the baby. I continued the relentless pumping schedule that had been prescribed to me.
To make matters worse, I was spending less and less time with my baby. I was still trying to nurse her, still trying to recreate every beautiful feeding scene I’d witnessed, but the reality was that until I started to produce milk, she still needed to eat, and the bottle kept her from being interested in the breast. I’d always heard that newborns were like breathing, dreaming appendages, attached so firmly for the first few months that they don’t feel like separate beings. But whenever I looked down, instead of seeing my baby, there was only a mess of wires, and a buzzing pump always alerting me that I was more machine than mother. Over the constant noise, I’d strain to hear her cooing and crying from the other room, where my husband and my own mother held her, and changed her, and fed her.
~
One morning, I woke up with a breast infection so painful it made me forget the intense abdominal surgery I’d just undergone to remove my daughter from my womb.
I’d known about mastitis and blocked ducts, but this felt like broken glass inside my nipples, now shiny and hot as though they each had their own intense fever. One nurse told me she thought it could be thrush, a type of fungal infection, but another was suspicious since my baby didn’t have it in her mouth. A third said I just needed to “toughen my nipples up” and suggested dipping them in black tea. But the more I pumped and tried to nurse, the worse the pain became. I had stopped taking the powerful painkillers prescribed for my c-section recovery, but started taking them again to deal with this new agony. (Later, after I moved to formula feeding exclusively, the pain lessened but still took months to go away altogether.) It seemed to me that my body was saying something important, something it had long been trying to tell me but that I wouldn’t let myself hear. I walked around in a cloud of such sadness that I felt like my soul had the flu.
My pregnancy had been difficult. Almost immediately, I’d developed hyperemesis, which is like morning sickness on steroids. It had landed me in the emergency room twice with dehydration, and once at the dentist when a molar, weakened by copious amounts of stomach acid, disintegrated and fell out of my mouth. I had imagined myself as a pregnant glowing earth mama, all supple curves, completely in tune with nature and myself, but there were times the vomiting was so extreme that I just wanted to die. Then, I had a c-section, further cementing the idea that my body wasn’t meant to do this at all. That my breasts could not “correctly” produce milk was the final nail in the coffin.
The internet, unfortunately, agreed with me.
At the same time that I was struggling to produce milk, America experienced a terrifying formula shortage after a contaminated batch at an Abbott plant led to a widespread recall, revealing the fragility of the formula supply that so many families depend on. But for every woman who was vocal about how the shortage should be considered a national emergency, there was someone, usually a man, asking why women couldn’t “just breastfeed.”
Suddenly total strangers from around the world were chiming in to validate my inadequacy. But in the midst of this turmoil, my breasts still vibrating with mysterious pain, rather than feel rage or frustration, I felt a perverse relief. The world seemed to agree with that little nagging voice in the back of my head. I simply wasn’t meant to be a mother.
~
How much of the breastfeeding debate is really about the health of the child, and how much is about the control of women's bodies and, moreover, about the performance of successful womanhood?
I found myself thinking about this question a lot in my baby’s first months of life. The internet’s unsympathetic reaction to the formula shortage further demonstrated that many believe the difficulty of breastfeeding to be a modern predicament; that as women have gotten more agency, and more rights, they’ve abdicated more of their motherly duties. But breastfeeding has been complicated since the beginning of time. Women have always experienced issues like mastitis, which before the advent of penicillin was an often fatal infection. And babies have always experienced tongue ties, premature births, and trouble latching. Add to that centuries of malnutrition, as well as external traumas like giving birth in famines, war zones, or while enslaved, and the body’s ability to produce milk becomes less and less likely. We’ve always needed alternatives.
Before formula, parents searched far and wide for methods to replace breast milk. Author Carla Cevasco notes in The Atlantic that early options ranged from cow’s milk to bone broth and nut milk—some of which provided hydration but not necessarily nutrition, and could be deadly due to contamination and poor food preservation capabilities. Historically, the surest way to keep a baby fed was a wet nurse, another woman who had also recently given birth and could breastfeed. Wet nurses were commonly poor or enslaved women who were forced, either by poverty or slaveholders, to feed other’s babies as their own starved at home.
These women’s experiences should remind us that the history of formula feeding is not a stain against a woman’s ability to mother, but in fact quite the opposite: a testament to the incredible act of keeping one’s baby alive.
I knew all this, so why couldn’t I let myself believe it? I thought of every poster hanging in every doctor’s office, waiting room, and maternity ward that depicted mother and child in complete harmony with the tagline “breast is best”—a mantra made popular in the 1950s by a group of Catholic women who called themselves La Leche League and believed breastfeeding was “God’s plan.” And I couldn’t stop seeing that young mother in the coffee shop from my twenties, how she had no problem nursing her infant, the two of them a recreation of every painting I’d ever seen of Madonna and child come to life.
Even before getting pregnant, I had already internalized the cultural messages surrounding breastfeeding so deeply, it had become something much bigger than a simple act. It had bloomed into a dangerous omen.
~
During my maternity leave, my husband and I spent the late nights re-watching the entire seven seasons of Mad Men. In one episode, a pregnant Betty Draper, played by January Jones, gets asked by a nurse whether she intends to breastfeed. Betty answers with a bored “no” and the nurse nods in agreement. My husband was shocked. Here we were, struggling so intensely, and there was Betty, not even intending to try. What’s more, no one seemed to have a problem with it.
Where my husband saw a kind of permission for formula feeding, I saw something different: an inverse reflection of the very expectations I had failed to live up to, and that are placed on so many birthing parents, regardless of gender. In the 1960s, formula feeding became the norm, with, as historian Amy Bently writes, only 20-25 percent of babies starting their lives being fed breast milk. The primary reason for this shift was the urging of pediatricians who were intent on lowering the infant mortality rate, and saw formula feeding as a more consistent and regimented way to keep babies fed and alive. More women were also working outside the home and needed to be able to leave their infant with a caregiver as they went into the office.
Little of this was relevant to Betty, a wealthy housewife who didn’t work—and so her reasons for bottle feeding were probably similar to the reasons I wanted to breastfeed: It was a cultural marker of being a “good woman.”
~
After six excruciating weeks, the end of my breastfeeding journey was sudden, unexpected. Eventually, when calling the nurse for the umpteenth time to describe a new pain in my breast—a swelling lump that hurt to touch—I received the kindest advice I’d been given thus far. “Honey, just give up,” she said. “You don’t need to do this.” Her tone was frank but measured; her South Boston accent rough but comforting. I didn’t know how much I’d needed her permission to stop.
I was free—almost. For a couple more weeks, I still tried to nurse, but then during a blizzard that lasted the weekend, I gave up cold turkey. I made my husband run out into the storm to collect little baggies of snow that I would then sneak into my bra sandwiched between cabbage leaves, an old wives’ remedy for weaning. Lying on the couch, icing my swollen breasts, I thought about how on New Year’s Eve, just a few days after we’d returned from the hospital, my husband and I had waited for the clock to strike midnight, my baby in my arms. While giving her a bottle, I started to cry. “Why can’t I feed my child?” I asked him. “Look at you right now,” he replied. “You are literally feeding your child.”
I glanced down at my daughter, her eyes wide, slowly blinking, and saw her taking in all of me. The Christmas tree lights glimmered behind us, lighting us both up with a starry glow. How long had she been staring at me like that? I wondered. Her tiny hand wrapped around my finger, her skin pressed against my skin. I felt like I was seeing my baby for the first time, and noticed that I was, in fact, feeding her.
[post_title] => A Personal History of Breastfeeding
[post_excerpt] => After my daughter was born, I struggled to produce milk. Why did I feel like I had to keep trying?
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How social media influencers are challenging stereotypes both within and outside of Muslim communities—just by being themselves.
In this very digital age, I wouldn’t describe myself as much of a social media person. Despite my active Twitter presence, which I attribute to work, and the occasional procrastination scroll on Instagram, which always ends up longer than expected, I’ve just never really found much joy in it. Even back when most people dreamed of becoming bloggers, I never saw the appeal: I couldn’t relate to their desire to share their lives so publicly, and felt a disconnect with their content as a result.
Then, around January last year, I discovered With Love, Leena. The account follows the day to day life of Texas-based content creator Leena Snoubar, covering everything from fashion to parenting to all things lifestyle. In one video, she gives a tutorial on how she removes makeup stains from her hijabs. In another, she shares an intimate day out with her mother and sisters, where they grab brunch and go wedding dress shopping for her youngest sister. Scrolling through her account, I found myself feeling—for the first time—like I was actually getting something out of my Instagram experience: I’d never come across a Muslim influencer who was so visibly Muslim and yet didn’t feel the need to justify or be bound by their religion.
It was only when I came across Leena that I realized my feelings of disconnect on social media had less to do with the platforms themselves, and more to do with the kind of content I was seeing. Maybe it was the algorithm or just my lack of social media engagement, but I was almost exclusively served either general fashion and beauty content—which I assumed was because of my gender—or Islamic videos, with little in between. It made me feel alienated in terms of my other interests, and like I had to separate my religious identity from the rest of me, or else somehow justify their intermingling.
For a lot of young Muslims, being online as a visibly Muslim person creates a pressure to either always be preaching Islamic content or advocating for our religious identity. When I first started out as a journalist, I often felt a heavy responsibility to justify my identity, and to prove, somehow, that Muslim women were not limited to the stereotypes projected onto us. But constantly having to justify my identity also meant constant emotional labor, and as I quickly learned, this only ever led to burnout. It’s a pressure that content creator Maliha—who says she’s been an “internet girlie” since before influencers became popular—is very familiar with. “I started out with my YouTube channel, and then Instagram, and because a lot of my content was cosplay I became the ‘hijabi cosplayer,’” she says. “But I’m not very good with having a niche, and when I moved to TikTok, I started making content that I connected to more, mostly rants and healing—social justice-y stuff.” Despite pivoting directions with her content, though, she soon found that her audience hadn’t changed or expanded at all: Maliha says that even though her content wasn't Islamic, TikTok’s algorithm was almost exclusively showing her videos to other Muslim users.
This sort of systemic stereotyping, that comes from both outside and within Muslim communities, is exactly what some influencers like Leena and Maliha are challenging with their diverse content. Despite living continents apart, I immediately felt a connection to Maliha—one that came from so many shared experiences, not just as Muslims, but also as young women. She’s just an average twenty-something, sharing her everyday thoughts, laced with a little humor and, often, a lot of sarcasm. I’m not the only one who has felt a connection to her work, either: Maliha says that her role as a content creator has helped her make friends across the globe.
For 20-year-old Younis AlZubeiri, this sense of community has played a big role in his own content creating journey. “My overarching goal with my content was to also be that outlet for other Muslims on the internet that didn’t really have someone to look to online,” he says. “In the world of Andrew Tates and [other] horrible role models to young kids, especially Muslims, I tried to just be a source of good to them.” He first started creating content at 14, making videos about comics just for himself. But slowly, his focus started shifting. “When I had followers who looked like me tell me about my impact on them, there was a light that switched,” he shares. Now, he has over 100,000 followers on TikTok, where he shares videos exploring culture and entertainment and diversity within both.
Along with creating spaces of acceptance for Muslims from all walks of life, many of these influencers are also challenging what it means to be visibly Muslim in 2023. This means fighting stereotypes offline, too: Amira Rahmat, a food and travel blogger, often embarks on solo trips and says she’s always met with surprise when people see a young Muslim woman traveling alone. “When I post content on my page, a lot of the comments I see are, ‘Oh, you’re so brave to travel alone,’” Amira shares. But likewise, she says many of her commenters are inspired by her videos: For many Muslim women, who have to fight back stereotypes that Muslim women’s pardah or religious restrictions keep them confined to their homes, seeing women like Amira and being able to share in her experiences has become a crucial part of shaping their confidence and self reflection.
It may seem like these are just a bunch of random creators covering various topics, but that’s the point. In this age of growing Islamophobia, they’ve begun to play a very important role in humanizing all of us beyond our hijabs and beards and masjids. They’re creating their own spaces, where being Muslim doesn’t impact or influence all the other parts of themselves. This is just as pivotal within our community as it is outside of it: Muslims who find themself stuck between proving themselves to other Muslims and justifying themselves to non-Muslims seeing creators just being honest and unapologetic about whatever topic they’d like can give us a lot of strength on the days we most need it. “It’s such a fine line to be a Muslim artist in any capacity,” says Dubai based content creator Emad. Whether or not you talk about religion, he continues, you’ll be judged by Muslim and non-Muslim creators alike, and pigeonholed by both. “For someone like me, I wanted to get into Muslim content because it’s fun. [But] so many times it happens that you become a ‘Muslim creator’ and then you do a fun TikTok dance and suddenly you’re not a Muslim creator because you’ve apparently done something wrong.”
This isn’t always easy. But when the polarized opinions and criticism become too much, Younis says that humor helps—especially when met with harmful alt-right and other extremist narratives. “I can’t just post about being a leftist and expect them to change,” he says. “You have to go about it in another light and try to convey the point you’re trying to make through humor.” These are baby steps, he adds, but making viewers laugh can challenge pre-existing notions that all Muslims are the same and that they don’t exist outside of a one-dimensional identity.
These small steps go a long way, and are already making a difference for creators (and viewers) around the world. Pakistan-based food blogger Emon Malik says the content creator economy has been growing in her country, and credits that to the growing diversity of creators. And the number of Muslim content creators is only growing.
“With more [diverse] content creation, people are more informed,” Amira says. “It comes from personal experiences, not Google, and it’s more raw and authentic.” It’s also more relatable—and for me, inspiring. When I see content creators like Leena or Maliha or Amira, it gives me the push I need to be more unapologetically myself. As these content creators have shown me, I’m more than my religious identity, but I don’t have to hide it away, either.
[post_title] => The New Faces of Being Visibly Muslim Online
[post_excerpt] => How influencers are challenging stereotypes both within and outside of Muslim communities—just by being themselves.
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Their stories, in their own words—and why you should be paying attention.
Rode Wanimbo’s aunties welcomed her back to her ancestral village in the usual way—with a song of lament. This, in her Lani tribe’s language, is known as leendawi, somewhere between singing and crying. And whenever she visits for a vacation, or when a family member passes away, her aunties greet her with it.
On this occasion as always, Rode followed her aunties into a traditional honai, a roundhouse built with natural materials, and sat to hear their stories, told through song. Her village has witnessed an unspeakable horror. In 1977, a year before Rode was born, the Indonesian military swept into West Papua in a hostile takeover, killing swathes of villagers. Rode’s family fled to the town of Wamena, her mother pregnant with Rode and already caring for an infant son. Others were forced to flee on foot, either seeking refuge in neighboring Papua New Guinea or becoming internally displaced people (IDPs) and clutching at survival in the forest. On her last trip home, Rode’s aunties sang tales of these atrocities. They spoke of how they were raped by the Indonesian army, of witnessing loved ones die, and how others crossed the border to live as refugees.
As Rode recounts this, her voice begins to tremble, as it does for much of the interview. The first time she heard the leendawi, she was 11 years old.
“That’s the way they express what they have been going through. I think that in our culture, that’s the only way they try to pass a message to me, through that leendawi,” she says. Women are not allowed to speak in front of men, Rode adds, making it hard for them to express their feelings. Yet across West Papua, thousands of Indigenous women are dealing with trauma after trauma after being displaced from their homes, with no outlet to speak on it.
“We thought about how to create a safe space for women, so women can talk,” Rode says.
As part of her role as the coordinator of the women’s department for the Evangelical Church of Indonesia, she’s done just that. Alongside her team, Rode has created what she calls “storytelling circles,” where women can openly share their experiences and emotions with each other. Currently, Rode runs a handful of sessions a year, taking long journeys across tricky terrains to reach different communities.
At these sessions, around 20 women come together. They start with body mapping, where each woman lies on a large sheet of paper, as her body is outlined on the page by a partner. Using this silhouette as a guide, the pair asks each other which parts are sick or need attention. Sometimes the women, forced to walk for hours each day to collect food and water, share how it impacts their bodies. Other times, the women share what they’ve survived.
In another session, the participants use time periods as a way into their stories, the steady concept of dates and seasons opening a door to the traumas they’ve never spoken aloud. The women share their experiences, first with a partner and then the group, revealing how the military and police burned down their villages. They talk about their homes and gardens being destroyed, yet how they still long to go back. How they want to be in a place where they belong, the place of their ancestors.
Alongside these safe spaces, Rode—who has also sent joint submissions to the UN on the issue of IDPs in West Papua—is collecting an oral record of these women’s testimonies. She shared some of their stories with The Conversationalist, originally spoken in local languages and written down from memory. The stories here have been collected by Rode, and the names have been changed.
At this time, international journalists are not allowed into West Papua.
The women of Nduga
When Yohana and her family were forced from their home in Nduga, Yohana’s husband walked with her as far as the region’s border. He parted with sobering words.
“He said, ‘If you find a man who is able to make a garden and make sure you and our children have a meal every day at the shelter, I give you permission to marry him as if I was dead, for I will go back to join the National Liberation Army to protect our homeland,’” Yohana told the storytelling circle. She has been living in an IDP center in Wamena for around four years, and has survived by gardening on land borrowed from the local community.
Yohana was forced to flee her home after an incident that displaced hundreds of people in her community. It occurred in 2018, during a celebration of what many Indigenous Papuans consider their independence day: when their elders declared their freedom from Dutch Colonial rule on December 1, 1961, before Indonesia took over in 1969. According to Rode, as members of the West Papua National Liberation Army (a rebel civilian organization) celebrated this day in Nduga, some construction workers took a photograph. The liberation army believed the workers to be police informants, and violence broke out. Some of the workers—reportedly up to 31—were killed. According to those displaced, army and police raids followed in retaliation: They burned down houses, churches, and schools, and dropped explosives from helicopters.
An eyewitness to an aerial attack in West Papua shares recovered ordnance. (Photographer anonymous by request.)
Life before the conflict, according to some of Rode’s friends, was peaceful and centered around community, family, and gardening. Now, this particular community in Wamena is host to around 200 women and children displaced from Nduga. There are eight other such communities in the region. Most of the men have either gone to the jungle to join armed rebel groups or have stayed behind to look after their villages, leaving them behind. There is no clean water nearby, no electricity, no hospital access, and no school. When babies are born, it is often in the IDP centers themselves.
“Some [women] spend sleepless nights because they don’t know the situation of their children,” Rode says, many of whom were separated from their mothers during the military attacks. There is no internet connection to trace them.
Displaced in Ilaga
At around 7 a.m. one morning, Irene and her husband were in front of a village office in Ilaga when she heard the fatal gunshot. She didn’t see who had fired it—only that it had come from the direction of the trees, and that it had killed her husband. She did not cry.
“My children are living with trauma as I did, but I pretend to be strong in front of them,” she told Rode. The violence has only continued: One night during her stay in Ilaga, Rode heard gunfire at the Indigenous settlement. She claims the source was the Indonesian security forces. She lay awake all night, thinking of her own two children.
The day-to-day life for these women is no easier. For many of the women in Ilaga, hours every day are spent walking to gardens and rivers, hours away, just to collect sweet potatoes and clean water. Along the way, soldiers stop them at regular army posts, where they have to report on the purpose of their travel. According to Rode, the reason for these checkpoints comes down to the army being suspicious of the IDPs—they believe they might be providing information and food to armed separatist groups. The women told Rode that they know it is dangerous to travel these distances, but that they have no choice. To stay still is to starve.
Beyond tensions around independence movements, there is another driver of conflict in the region. The island of New Guinea is home to the world’s third largest area of rainforest, and its natural resources are highly sought after. Indigenous communities, the guardians of this environment, have been further displaced from their homes as companies seek gold, minerals, or space for palm oil monocultures. Freeport’s Grasberg Mine—one of the world’s largest gold mines—has been the most famous example. But there have also been plans to build a mine in the gold-filled mountains of the Wabu Block, which have been met with huge concern from groups like Amnesty International.
In Ilaga, one mother told Rode, with anger in her eyes, “If the Indonesians want to have our gold from our mountains, they could just take it. Why did they treat us like animals? They came into our homes without permission and uprooted us from our ancestral land.”
For Indigenous communities, Rode explains, this removal feels especially painful, because of their spiritual and cultural connection with the mountains, rivers, and land. To remove the people is to destroy their identity.
“We view mountains as our mother who nurtured the plants, which become food for the animals, and we get the milk from the animals,” she says. “When our mountains are being exploited, it’s like a rape to our mother. We have to protect our mother.”
A view of the Papuan highlands near Kiwi. (Photographer anonymous by request.)
The root of West Papua’s problems
West Papua’s problems go back to 1898, when it was colonized by The Netherlands, along with the other islands that now form Indonesia. When the country became independent in 1949, however, it was without West Papua, which stayed in the control of the Dutch. Instead, West Papua prepared for its own independence throughout the 1950s, and by 1961, that moment had arrived: A congress of people declared independence and raised their new Morning Star flag for the first time in what is now called Jayapura. The Indonesian government, however, was not happy with this arrangement, and soon invaded. In a bid to end the conflict between Indonesia, the Netherlands, and Indigenous Papuans, the US government encouraged the Dutch to hand control of West Papua to Indonesia. The New York Agreement gave control of West Papua to first the United Nations, and then, by 1963, to Indonesia, which became the temporary administrator of the country, with the stipulation that West Papuans would have the right to self determination.
But a promised independence referendum in 1969, as part of the transition after the end of Dutch rule, was not a democratic event. Instead, 1,000 people were given a vote by the Indonesian army, and told to make a very specific choice under threat of being shot. Yet this vote was still approved by the UN—cementing West Papua’s place under Indonesian rule.
“The Papuans were just outside the room, while the rest of the world decided their future,” says Naomi Sosa, founder of Papua Partners, an organization that supports training and global links in the country. “The root goes down to the political contestation. They were supposed to have a vote for self determination, but it was controlled by Indonesia.”
Eventually, in 2000, West Papua was given special autonomy, with their own government looking after their affairs, but without independence. In reality, Naomi says this special autonomy wasn’t implemented properly, with all the powers being taken back to Jakarta. Today, there is a movement demanding self determination, where West Papuans could determine their own future through a referendum. But in stark contrast to this desire, the Indonesian government is focusing on the decentralization of provinces. Under Indonesian president Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, things have become more difficult for West Papuans, with UN experts saying that since violence escalated in 2018, there are now 100,000 displaced people and humanitarian aid is being blocked. Naomi says Indigenous communities, particularly those in the highlands, are under severe threat. Any form of protest is met with brutal force. Now, the government wants to make further divisions, which Naomi says makes it harder for the 250 tribes to unite and weakens the independence movement.
More districts also means more military posts—which makes many IDPs uneasy. Rode says when displaced women in particular are encouraged to go back home, they feel they have no guarantees of their safety because of the increased military presence.
“Please tell them to leave our homeland so we can go back home,” they tell her.
Still, Rode has not given up hope, and neither have the thousands of people displaced throughout the country, whether they are part of independence movements or staying strong to keep their families alive in IDP camps. As the final call with her ends, Rode makes a plea: West Papuans need solidarity from the international community. They are experiencing settler colonialism, and it cannot be separated from global politics. Papuans do not want to be forgotten.
“We are powerless,” Rode says. “We really need help.”
[post_title] => The Forgotten Women of West Papua
[post_excerpt] => Their stories, in their own words—and why you should be paying attention.
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In praise of a Valentine who never ghosts, and what our crushes tell us about ourselves.
I have a type and always have.
It’s a broad one, but it’s terribly specific: my knees go weak for a charismatic creep. Romeos come and go, but I’ll crawl on broken glass through hell for a Mercutio. Leading men leave me cold. It’s not merely the wrong guy, it’s the one whose entire personality is built upon being the wrong guy. He’s often the life of the party, mostly a pain in the ass, and always, always, always the kind of trouble that takes my goddamn breath away. Which is why, if St. Valentine has set aside a day each year for us to pander to our sweethearts and confess our affections, I’ll do my turn: I have a crush on Death.
Can you see it? A strong cleft chin beneath gallows’ black-brown eyes, liquid eyes all the better to drown you as you lunge at the receding spark therein. His style is arresting, heart-stopping, even: the tailored hood, the cape, the leather! Gloves that send shivers down your spine. Gloves that make your throat seize. Oh, and Google tells me Ekerot’s birthday was February 8, which means Death is also an Aquarius. To be sure, he’s no Matthew McConaughey. But guess what? I’m no Kate Hudson, either.
Of course, I blame my parents. Warm-hearted snobs and Criterion Collection aficionados, Nancy and Lou made a fatal lapse in judgment when they forbade Beverly Hills 90210 in our home, but allowed me to watch Sex, Lies, & Videotape and Goodfellas when they were released. I was in the second grade. Instead of nursing a normal crush on Luke Perry or Jason Priestley, I fell hard for James Spader and Ray Liotta. I’ve been a lost cause ever since. By the time I watched The Seventh Seal in middle school, I knew I had arrived at the bad boy reductio ad absurdum: Death.
Valentine’s Day offers a rich opportunity to think about how we are conditioned to crush and to whom these feelings are assigned. What do our crushes tell us about ourselves and what we yearn for? Whom do we chase and what qualities do we crave? How do we see ourselves as incomplete? What kind of attachment style do our romantic fantasies portend? As we suffer so much discourse around the making and breaking of patterns, it is important to dissect the evolution of what we want.
While I readily accept that I first fell for Death as an insufferable pre-teen aching to have a movie crush just a bit edgier than Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, as I have matured, I can now see my crush on Death is actually quite healthy. I recommend it. First of all, as an American, I hail from a notoriously death-avoidant culture. Secondly, as a woman, I have been raised around ideas of Hollywood romance and romantic expectations that are arguably more dangerous than Hollywood violence. My crush shields me from these pitfalls—and he excels in the ever after.
How does he do it? What’s his trick? Well, I hope it doesn’t take Esther Perel to explain: He shows up. Let us return to the rom com’s most fertile stomping ground, the beach—here, of course, emptied by Bubonic Plague. The beach, as a liminal space, is an ideal metaphorical home for romance. Beneath the horizon, we have the waxing and waning of tides upon the shore, the ephemeral shapes in the sand. Death, the master of liminality himself, strides on in. And yes, he does play games—don’t they all?—but it’s a game, and it’s chess, which is, like, so sophisticated (and honestly fucking annoying but I’ll drop it because no one is perfect).
Still, Death is not like the others, and I’ll tell you why: He’s reliable. There are countless ways to get a hold of him. And, when all the other men have let you down—all the other ones whose faults you have compromised yourself by entertaining—he will be there, waiting for you. There are few things more humiliating in life than being attracted to straight men, but waiting for Death will never make you play the fool. Death will never ghost you. And, though typically associated with the long game, he’s full of surprises: He might pop in anytime at all. He’s always got the time for you, his girl, or his guy, or, really, his anyone. (New love is such a jealous thing, but not with my crush! Death, be not toxic.)
Death is the crush who crushes all the competition. He makes your heart skip far more than a beat. What’s more, Death doesn’t care about diet culture and he isn’t on Instagram or any of the apps. He will take you as you are. He will swipe right with that scythe—in real life. After all, when we are bullied into believing our single shot at happiness hinges (pun intended) on how we’ve lit, sequenced, and captioned half a dozen selfies, what’s wrong with lusting after the eternal? What’s wrong with wanting something real? And what’s realer than Death?
Our digital dating culture is predicated almost entirely on shallow snap judgments. The Seventh Seal, on the other hand, is about the silence of God in the moments before The Last Judgment. The movie opens with the following quote from the Book of Revelations: “And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour," referring to what is surely the greatest 30-minute cliffhanger in all of history—film, human, cosmic, spiritual. Ingmar Bergman portrays God as silent before human suffering, deaf to the torments of faith. The question then, regardless of belief or perhaps even in spite of it, is how do we fill that silence? The film is absolute in its suggestion: not fear, not awe, but love. Love is the only way to lend meaning to the void. And spoiler alert: The cute acrobat family are the ones who make it out alive. They elude Death because they believe in and trust one another.
This, to me, is a tall order.
Besides, some of us are not trying to escape Death. Some of us are actively combing all the beaches, certain that meet-cute moment is out there somewhere. Knowing, without a doubt, it will happen someday. Someday, I can be certain, my Dark Prince will come, with a strong jawline and a black cape and all the time in the world for me.
…Now, who says romance is dead?
[post_title] => I Have a Crush on Death
[post_excerpt] => In praise of a Valentine who never ghosts, and what our crushes tell us about ourselves.
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Over 20 years after the first "Princess Diaries," the writer is still sticking up for romance.
In the opening scene of 1999's cinematic classic 10 Things I Hate About You, guidance counselor Ms. Perky (Allison Janney) sits pert in her cardigan and pearls, tip-tapping away at her computer. "I'll be right with you," she tells a student, turning back to her PowerPC…on which she is crafting a magnum opus of a romance novel. In the film, Ms. Perky’s novel is played for laughs—a running joke, with key words like “pulsating” and “bratwurst” used to portray the luridity of her side hustle. But around that same time, in real life, an administrator at a New York University dormitory was living out a similar scene: tucked away in her office, tapping away at romance novels in between wrangling angsty students. Only this time, she was the main character.
Her name was Meg Cabot.
"It was exactly like that," Cabot told The Conversationalist shortly before Thanksgiving. Over Zoom from her longtime home in Key West, Florida, she talked a mile a minute, the charming, real-life embodiment of the chatty early-aughts heroine she's most known for: The Princess Diaries’ Mia Thermopolis. "All the kids in the dorm knew that was exactly what I was doing. I'd be on my computer when they would come in and they'd be like, 'I don't want to interrupt you, but there's a fire.'"
Cabot would put out the fires, of course. It was from that desk, though, in her tiny corner of NYU, that she'd write her first "ten or eleven" novels. At the age of 31, she’d begin publishing steamy, “pulsating” adult historical romance, before breaking into the public consciousness in 2000 with the back-to-back publication of her first young adult novels, The Princess Diaries and The Mediator: Shadowland. The rest is history. Following Disney’s smash hit movie adaptation of The Princess Diaries, Cabot's name fast became synonymous with the fun, romantic "chick lit" of the time. You an Anne Hathaway fan? You also have Meg Cabot to thank for her breakthrough role.
More than twenty years (and over 80 published novels) later, and with another Princess Diaries bookandmovie on the way, Cabot remains a powerhouse. That's not just because she's more prolific than Stephen King, who's published a comparatively paltry 65 novels in more than twice the amount of time. And it’s not just because The Princess Diariesstill makes headlines. It’s because she created something that made waves for an entire generation. For those who came of age during the early 2000s, Cabot helped redefine what books for girls and women could look like: She wrote them funny, messy—and so horny they're still getting soft-banned all over the country.
To get there, though, Cabot had to push past the judgment that's long hovered like a cloud over women's literature. At Indiana University in the 1980s, while working towards her degree in studio art, Cabot started taking creative writing classes, where professors and peers alike passed judgment on the topics she was interested in writing about. "People really looked down on romance," Cabot said. "I was writing commercial genre fiction and [my classmates] were writing literary fiction. Theirs had a lot of suicide and mine had lots of going to the mall and meeting boys." Now, she jokes that those who once mocked her choice of genre were just jealous: The kind of books she'd been working on forever turned out to be lucrative. But at the time, their response was frustrating.
The reaction, though, was nothing new. For as long as there's been literature marketed towards women, there've been people looking down on it. Because of this, Cabot kept her work to herself for years. Her first published novel, a steamy adult romance called Where Roses Grow Wild, came out in 1998 under a pen name: Patricia Cabot. She’d go on to write seven more under the same name. "I was worried about the smut factor and my grandma finding out," she remembers. From the start, Cabot proved expert in writing women and girls who were not just strong, but varied and complex; which was precisely what drew her to the genre in the first place. "Romance novels have really strong female characters, and that was hard to find [for a long time],” she said. But her entry into life as a romance author proved revelatory. Unlike those college classmates, romance readers and writers welcomed her with open arms. "It was really fun, such a supportive community," Cabot said. "That was where I belonged."
Her grandmother did eventually find out about her secret second career, too, but the smut didn't bother her. "She loved it," Cabot recalled.
For a long while, Cabot kept her day job at NYU. It was stable, and offered health insurance. She made great friends, many of whom she's still tight with to this day. Then, right as the century turned, The Princess Diaries changed everything: When Disney came knocking, Cabot knew it was her chance to jump full-time into life as an author. She took it.
"There still weren't a whole lot of funny books for girls," Cabot said about the late '90s, when she first started writing for teens. She name-checked exceptions, like Judy Blume, and Cabot's contemporary Louise Rennison, whose hilarious Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging came out in '99. But at the time, she says that most of the genre “was very message-y”: "There really wasn't this idea that YA could just be for entertainment and be fun." Cabot saw an opportunity to help shift that. Her characters weren't without morality: Cabot's books contained messages, in that they had characters with a point of view. At the same time, though, those characters got to be awkward, swoony, and feminist as fuck, too. Her characters felt real.
Cabot's adult work is well worth exploring—sharp, comedic, with a deep love of banter—but it’s her first works in YA where she really found her stride. It's also where she's had the most impact, acting as millions of millennial readers' introduction to romantic comedy, many of them through Mia Thermopolis. In The Princess Diaries series, Mia is a teen outcast who finds out she's heir to the throne of a small country called Genovia. The character went mainstream in 2001, when the Disney adaptation introduced the world to Anne Hathaway’s portrayal of her as a dorky and sweet girl just trying to survive high school. But while the movie version of the character is rightfully beloved, it's worth remembering how Cabot originally crafted her. In the books, Mia is a sunny bleeding heart, who only agrees to undergo "princess lessons" after the monarchal side of her family agrees to donate $36,500 a year to Greenpeace. The Mia of the books is progressive, a kid with a massive political streak, whose big desire—aside from kissing Michael Moscovitz—is how badly she wants to help push the world into a better place.
But while Mia had staunch political values, The Princess Diaries was never about them. Mia was just a girl flailing her way into adulthood. Just like her readers, she was deeply insecure. She was also chaotic, and yearny, and horny as hell—a wonderful throughline for many of Cabot's most memorable characters. There’s ballsy psychic Jessica Mastriani, who works with hot, motorcycle-riding bad boy Rob to track down missing children in 1-800-WHERE-R-U. In Cabot’s popular The Mediator series, we’re introduced to tough, leather-clad Suze Simon as she solves murders while flirting with the 19th Century ghost haunting her bedroom. There's also Katie Ellison in Pants On Fire, so-titled because its heroine 1) can't stop lying, and 2) can't stop cheating on her boyfriend to make out with new boys.
Cabot’s most sexually liberated YA novel, though, is Ready Or Not, the sequel to All-American Girl, in which a teen girl named Sam Madison saves the president from an attempted assassination. She falls for the president's son, and in the sequel, they decide to have sex. The book follows Sam on her path to readiness—including securing contraceptives and learning to masturbate with the bathtub faucet.
"Still to this day, All-American Girl and Ready Or Not are my most-banned books, because they deal with sex very frankly," Cabot said. "It's surprising to me, because my mom was a Planned Parenthood volunteer. In my house it was very open." Sexuality, after all, is part of every coming of age in one way or another. And who in this world is juggling those thoughts more than a teenager?
Of course, the now-56-year-old wasn't the first in YA to portray horny teen girls. "If you read Judy Blume, you know that's been going on for years and years," she said. But Judy Blume’s books also weren’t adapted into blockbuster movies by Disney, and part of the backlash for Cabot may have come from how ubiquitous she was for romance-loving teens of the early 2000s. The Princess Diaries adaptation became an instant classic, funneling an eager audience towards her books.
"People started buying the books expecting them to be G-rated like the movie," Cabot recalls. They were not—and some parents didn't love that the book version of The Princess Diaries' first scene involved kissing.
Still, for plenty of young girls, Cabot's work was (and continues to be) vital and illuminating. Her novels are chatty and personable, her characters flawed, and her stories casually sex-positive. Even when her young characters weren't actually having sex, the acknowledgement of desire affirmed something bigger, something deep inside. A feeling that her readers, like her characters, were still exploring. And if those readers were so inclined, Cabot's adult novels were right there, full of the "smut" she once feared would disappoint her grandmother—but also so much more.
Romance is often written off as empty-headed porn for women, a stereotype Cabot wholeheartedly rejects: What the form's critics ignore is everything that surrounds the lust. Romance is about yearning, sure. About sex. Cabot's books, though, are also about dynamic friendships. About history—she's written plenty of historical fiction—and mystery. About the way women and girls are seen by their society, and the effects that has on them. Ultimately, all of Cabot's novels are also about the inner lives of interesting young women navigating challenging times in their lives.
This is something Cabot knows intimately. Though her family home growing up was frank about sex, in other aspects, her childhood was "very dark." Her father was an alcoholic, and to escape, she buried herself in books. "There were many times I felt there was no hope," Cabot recalled. "Romance was always where I could turn to. Those books, where there was an empowered woman who got what she wanted in the end, guaranteed."
"That's what pulled me out of despair," she continued. "Knowing I can put that out there for someone else is the greatest thing." To Cabot, writing is the skill she has that she can share with people. “I'm not going to be a brain surgeon,” she joked.
But even if her books were just a horny escape, wouldn't that be OK, too? "It's just misogyny," Cabot exclaimed when asked about naysayers of her genre. "People look down on anything that women like, and anything involving women."
For her younger readers, Cabot's work was an education—not just in sex, but in how rewarding it can be for readers when an author is skilled at seamlessly blending genre. Wrapped in a shiny "chick lit" package—books more recently known as "beach reads" because, well, the former had been so dragged through the sexist mud that it needed a rebrand—Cabot’s work is multi-faceted and wide-ranging. She’s written epistolary novels, murder mysteries, sci-fi, fantasy, middle-grade, YA, adult, historical fiction, and more. Fittingly, she has no patience for those who try to one-dimensionalize her corner of women's fiction. She often hears from readers afraid to be seen reading "chick lit" in the office because coworkers make fun of them. "I tell them to tell their coworkers to go fuck themselves," Cabot said. "Those people have clearly never read it."
These days, Cabot and fellow children's and young adult author Rachel Vail challenge each other to write five pages a day. The stakes of failure keep them going: If they don't hit their page count, they're forced to donate $5 to Donald Trump. "It's very motivating," Cabot said. Like her most famous character, Cabot is disturbed by the current state of the world. She’s even contemplating leaving Key West, where she's resided with her husband and cats for almost twenty years. She loves her town, and often blogs about her life there, but has been turned off by Florida’s ongoing political turmoil.
It’s there, too, that Cabot's born witness to a new wave of challenges levied against authors and readers alike: angry right-wing parents for whom the problems don't stop at french kissing. “It's a very small percentage of the population, but they're very loud,” she said. It's a nation-wide issue: The New York Times reported in January that parents hell-bent on banning books have become "more organized, well-funded" and "effective" in recent years. The Guardian characterized the efforts as "moral militancy."
"They don't want any reference to sex, race, gender fluidity…," Cabot said of recent attempts to pull books from the library system. "It might challenge the very Christian, neofascist way they want to raise their children.”
Pushback to the kind of books that have defined her career hasn't stopped Cabot in the slightest, though. Most recently, Cabot has published the Little Bridge Island series, an adult series set in her community of Key West, and next up is a new, COVID-set Princess Diaries book, as well as a lot more children's and middle-grade fiction. (Proceeds for The Quarantine Princess Diaries will go to VOW For Girls, a charity aimed at ending child marriage.)
And thank goodness for Meg Cabot. Her naysayers—whether politically lecherous or simply snobby—have no real way to stop the flow of stories from Cabot's brain to readers' hands. Cabot doesn’t take her role lightly. A cornerstone of young adult fiction, she’s no stranger to the pressures of shaping young minds. It's impossible to calculate, in 2023, just how many authors coming up today have been influenced by her work. It’s even more impossible to calculate how many women and girls have become voracious writers and readers as a result of her work. And twenty-five years on from her debut novel, both Cabot and her books remain chatty and cheerful, effervescent and gutsy—an escape from a hellish world, just as she intended. Given all that's happened in the interim, that's certainly a crowning achievement.
[post_title] => Thank Goodness for Meg Cabot
[post_excerpt] => Over 20 years after the first "Princess Diaries," the writer is still sticking up for romance.
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How confessing my grief over my grandad's death allowed me to become a part of the human world again.
“Old Friends” is an ongoing series exploring the many ways that friendship changes shape in adulthood.
When my grandad first told me he was dying, I didn’t tell anyone.
He had first told me he was sick a week earlier. My fiancé Karl, now my husband, had come home to find me sobbing. It was as far as the news got. When my grandad called a little over a week later to confirm that there was nothing that could be done, he asked if someone was home with me. As I cried he cried with me, telling me how he had dreaded telling me most of all. We’ve always been kind of spooky, he and I, wrapped up in each other’s lives. I was born soon after my grandma died and he poured his grief into raising me, giving me space when I needed it and nurturing the things I loved to do.
Simply put, I was his favorite. I knew that. He made sure I knew that. My grandad was the first person to love me unconditionally. I had been let down by a lot of people whose job it was to care for me, but never him. He wanted me to believe that he would never leave me, and he felt as if dying was breaking a promise.
The first thing I did when he told me he was sick was walk into the sea, paddling up to my thighs in the icy May water. An hour later, when I was walking home from the beach, he called to tell me he had good news “for both of us”: He was getting treatment. He promised to live to see my wedding a few months later, a promise that felt hollow when I went to see him a week later and he could barely eat soup.
The dying was a painful, tricky limbo. Nobody could support me the way I wanted them to, by twisting the realities of time and space and death to make him well and keep him with me. I wanted to forever eat lunch with him, drink with him, yell at him over FaceTime to put his hearing aids in. He never answered his phone anyway, but now, he wasn’t ignoring me to hang out at the golf club or eat dinner at his neighbor’s house. He was in the hospital. I half-tried to live my life. Knowing he wanted me out in the world, that he waited in a hospital bed for my stories, was all that got me out of the house.
So, for weeks, I told only my fiancé. Then, in a moment of tipsy grief, I told a friend at a wedding, because I knew she would give me what I needed, a kind of maternal care, the enveloping you get from friends a few years older. I started telling other friends and colleagues when I had to: to say we might rearrange the wedding, to ask for forgiveness when I missed a deadline or canceled a trip. I retreated, keeping my circle small. I spent days swimming in the sea or out on a small boat, nights often at shows where I screamed and cried and sometimes confided in the person I was with but usually didn’t. In hindsight I think that maybe I believed that if it wasn’t spoken, it couldn’t become true.
In June I was told not to cancel a trip to Barcelona: Nothing would change and I couldn’t visit him anyway. Then, everything changed. He was admitted to the hospital for the last time. A family member texted me the words “he’s dying” for the first time, and I burst into tears, surprising a friend who had no idea anything was wrong. She confided in me that a close friend of hers had died recently and she hadn’t had a second to process it. We cried together, holding hands, walking around Barcelona scaring tourists and talking about the people we loved so much. I felt her soft hand in mine and with it the first time the closeness that grief can bring. Before then, I’d felt for a while that nobody could understand what I was feeling. I was walking around the world as a ghost, one foot in his hospital room. By confessing, everyone else’s grief poured out, too. By confessing, I became a part of the human world again, tangible and alive.
My friends would check in, asking how he was, wanting the minutiae beyond “still dying.” In an airport restaurant later that summer, my best friend asked for an update and burst into tears at the table, telling me that it had been a year that day since her own grandpa had died. She apologized for “making it about her”—but I felt only happy that we could reach each other through the thick walls grief had built.
Sitting by the water drinking mojitos, we talked about our grandads, the special men they were. The people they continued to be for us. When I checked my phone I saw updates from a group chat with my family, sharp changes in health. Sometimes I shared them. It was our first vacation in four years, and different from the ones before, but it taught me the ways our friendships change when we age, the ways death and disability and illness shape us and make us new. The way grief can either isolate us or create a cocoon in which to understand and support one another. I had shut myself off, not wanting to ask for anything, not believing that anyone would care or understand that the shock of grief can come even when someone is 92 years old. That the bargaining with death never stops. That you can be closer with a grandparent than your own parents.
He died in late July. The first thing I realized in those busy, sad first days and weeks was that it had become impossible to cut myself off from the human world and the living bodies in it as I would once have done when my grandad had first called me just two months ago.
First came the texts. Not just saying “sorry for your loss”—nothing so easy to ignore as that. No: reams, essays about my grandad, his role in making me, the man he seemed to be to friends who had never met him. I was responsible for his image in the eyes of strangers, and I had painted a noble one. My friends, their parents, too, let that be known.
Whether I responded or not, the check-ins came daily. If I replied, I lied or sent memes, wanting to try and live and avoid making eye contact with the depth of my loss. The first person to love me unconditionally lay cold, and I felt suspicious and undeserving of the love flowing so freely from my friends. But still, they came, and in those weeks, I learned uneasily to accept it.
Then came the flowers.
I couldn’t leave the city, the country, go into hiding as I once might have done. Not when boxes of bouquets were arriving at my door daily. Snapdragons, roses, lilies, hypericum berries. Not just grief flowers, but my favorites, chosen for the modicum of joy they might bring me. They filled the vases we had and then some. They came from Birmingham, from Glasgow, from Atlanta, from Los Angeles. With notes and without.
Then came the bodies.
To my flat, to my sofa bed, to my stretch of beach, the one where I’d spent most days hiding and swimming. Sometimes we talked about it, mostly we didn’t. But they didn’t flinch when we did. One friend dreamed of me, tried to meet me somewhere safe while practicing lucid dreaming. Whether it worked or not, whether they filtered through my nightmares, I don’t remember. My friend Zoe and I opened a suitcase of my grandad’s diaries for the first time since I’d lugged them all home, since he had sat up in his hospital bed to tell me where they were. We laughed at the way he wrote, the things he remembered. Zoe shivered realizing that his handwriting was the same as her own grandad’s.
When I was much younger, I had asked my childhood best friend Joe if he would walk me down the aisle. My father wasn’t, and isn’t, in my life, and I feared that my grandad might be gone by the time I actually found someone to marry me. When I got engaged, my grandad was still healthy, and asked if he could take on the job. My friend took it graciously. When my grandad died six weeks before my wedding, I asked Joe if he would consider stepping back into the role. He took it on with honor, crying on the day and giving a speech that night about what it meant to him. He raised a glass to my grandad, the man who raised me. I felt then the warmth of my friends in that room, warmth my grandad taught me I deserved.
Three days after my grandad died, Karl bought me yet another copy of Joan Didion’s grief memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. It is my favorite of hers, and when my own book was released, Karl bought me a signed first edition. This one was cheap, flimsy, begging to be underlined and re-read in the bath. In the hotel after my grandad’s funeral, I highlighted Didion recalling the way her house filled with bodies after her husband John died suddenly. “How could I deal at this moment with company?” she asks.
I have learned that good company, the kind you need, doesn’t ask if you can or not. It just shows up without asking, arms full of flowers.
[post_title] => "Then Came the Bodies"
[post_excerpt] => How confessing my grief over my grandad's death allowed me to become a part of the human world again.
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Like most train enthusiasts, I’m all for high-speed rail. But there are benefits to taking the slow route.
Everyone had assured me the Nevada desert was the most boring part. Maybe because we happened to be there when the sun was setting, or maybe because my cabin was on the left side of the train, the highway out of sight, I thought it was the most spectacular.
I was heading east on the California Zephyr, an Amtrak train that joins Emeryville, California with Chicago, and all I could see out my window was desert, as vast and inhospitable as it must have looked a hundred and fifty years ago. I had always wanted to take the train through the American West, and a sale on last minute fares meant, for the first time, I could do it. For only slightly more than the cost of an airline ticket, I had purchased an 18-hour trip from the Bay Area to Salt Lake City via private room. By the time the sun was setting, I had about ten hours left in my trip—an hour more than I had been scheduled for, after a delay—but I didn’t care. I could have stayed on for days more and been happy.
Why couldn’t I go everywhere this way?
~
With climate change forcing some difficult decisions, expanding passenger rail transportation seems like one of the easiest ones we could make. Even at less than full capacity, trains emit far less carbon dioxide per passenger than any form of mechanized mass transit. But when national and regional governments talk of rail travel as a climate solution, the conversation inevitably tilts towards a certain category of rail—not trains like the California Zephyr, which are legacies of an earlier era of intracontinental transport and lurch at 80 or 90 kilometers per hour, but high-speed rail, like we see in Japan, China, and much of Europe. In the last two years, new high-speed trains that can run at speeds at or above 300 KPH have appeared in Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Another, connecting Indonesia’s two largest cities, will take its first passengers as soon as next year. The European Union has vowed to triple its high-speed capacity by 2050, and there’s even an ambitious, but struggling, plan to bring actual, Japanese bullet trains to Texas.
Like many (maybe most) rail enthusiasts, I’m all for high-speed rail. But what if we’re missing something by devoting so much attention to this ultra-advanced mode of transport? There are benefits to taking the slow route. When speed is an overriding concern for our mass transit plans, entire towns and regions get left out. We lose more than just scenery, but the people who live outside major cities, or care to visit them. Solving climate change requires building a transit system that serves everyone, and to do that, we’ll need slow trains, too.
~
If high-speed rail is like a taut rope strung between city centers, slow rail is like a chain with many links that branch out into other chains—an often intricate web that connects entire regions. It’s why, in the heyday of passenger rail, when a train was typically the fastest and often the only way to travel long distances overland, it gave rise to entire corridors of human activity. Italy’s formation as a unified nation state, Canada’s consolidation of British Columbia into its burgeoning union, Russia’s conquest of Siberia, and the United States’ settlement of the American West all depended on railroads. Like any high-speed project today, those railroads were also major infrastructure projects. But the simplicity of their components meant they could meander in places, and be extended and adjoined with shorter lines as needed, like creeks feeding into major rivers, finding people where they were.
Where slow trains are the progeny of a 19th century legacy, high-speed trains are descendents of a completely different mode of transportation. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, passenger jets were just taking off and threatened to dominate long-distance travel all over the world. Fearing the end of long-distance overland travel, Japanese planners wanted to maintain a role for passenger rail, but the only way to do so was to make trains that were just as fast as the emergent passenger network in the sky. The realization led to the development of the world’s first high-speed train network, the Shinkansen. As Bob Gwynne, a curator at the British Railway Museum, explains in a video tour of one early Japanese bullet train, the Shinkansen’s designers—many of whom engineered military aircraft during World War II—wanted their trains to look their part as passenger jet competitors by adapting the same aesthetics, like bulbous nose cones and front windows that joined at sharp angles to resemble cockpits.
Even today, high-speed rail enthusiasts still talk about their favorite trains like earthbound passenger jets. It’s a comparison that invokes not just an image of speed, but also a certain kind of passenger—namely, business people who travel frequently and value comfort, but mostly just want to get from the center of one major city to another fast and with space to work on their laptop. For these travelers, high-speed rail is very nearly the perfect mode of long-distance transportation. But reworking the rail network to suit them hasn’t exactly benefited everyone else in the same way.
The reason is cost. High-speed trains à la the Shinkansen or France’s TGV not only cost more to ride, they also cost a lot more to build. Since they can’t run on slow-speed tracks, they need dedicated infrastructure, and that necessitates some enormous capital investments—often with very little return. A 2019 report from the European Court of Auditors found that various EU governments have spent enormous amounts of money on high-speed rail lines for often marginal gains. The Madrid-Galicia route, for instance, opened in 2019 and cost almost €14 million per kilometer to build. Its trains are designed to reach 300 KPH, but its average speed is only about a third that fast. Other routes, still under construction, have come at a higher cost with more questionable benefits. An incomplete Munich-Stuttgart route costs around €40 million per kilometer to save passengers, on average, less than an hour of travel time. These figures don’t even account for the enormous amount of power required to keep high-speed trains rolling. Even the most committed environmentalist can be forgiven at this point for wondering if the costs of tripling the size of the European network, as EU member states plan to do, would not outweigh the benefits—and whether the money might be better spent on some other, slower part of the rail system.
Even as humanity becomes an increasingly urban species, with a greater proportion of people living in cities than ever before, slow rail continues to link small and mid-sized towns to metropolitan centers, distributing the benefits of economic growth across a region. Riding the train across the American West today, one can begin to appreciate the vastness of the region and rail’s essential role in making it a single place. The train crosses farmland, mountains, and desert, with stops in big cities, like Sacramento, and small towns, like Colfax, California (population: 2,000) and Winnemucca, Nevada (7,400)—towns that were founded as railroad stops, and still benefit from Amtrak’s service.
By contrast, the extraordinary cost of high-speed rail means planning any but the most direct route can make a project unviable. In California, the French national railroad operator reportedly walked away from one of the biggest high-speed rail projects in the world partly because the state insisted on running a San Francisco-Los Angeles route inland through the Central Valley, instead of a more direct route closer to the coast. The Central Valley has been neglected from California’s development plans for decades, and the idea was to use high-speed trains to join four of its metro areas with a combined population of 2.5 million people to the rest of the state. Yet what would have made perfect sense for a slow rail project has made California’s high-speed rail plans so expensive, the entire project is now in doubt. The latest figures put the final bill at around $113 billion—more than four times the budget voters had originally approved, a figure likely to rise again before the trains are finally rolling.
By contrast, in 2021, Amtrak released a proposal for a systemwide upgrade. Among other advances, the plan called for new cars and more fuel-efficient locomotives, along with new stations in 160 areas their trains currently do not serve. Upgrading the service would increase revenue and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Amtrak said, and all for the cost of $75 billion over fifteen years. (The US Congress eventually gave Amtrak $66 billion as part of a major infrastructure bill.)
Perhaps it’s time we reconsidered our obsession with high-speed rail entirely. Instead of fixating on speed at the expense of just about everything else, we could demand a system which makes the breadth of its reach and the depth of its connection its leading ambitions. We might even retool our expectations of overland travel itself. When the time of our arrival is no longer the only thing we care about, we can turn our attention to other things—the view, the company, the book in our hands. On a trip like that, you might not think about where you’re going at all, or even care.
[post_title] => In Defense of Slow Rail
[post_excerpt] => Like most train enthusiasts, I’m all for high-speed rail. But there are benefits to taking the slow route.
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Meet the artisans and designers who want to change where you think "luxury" comes from.
Forty years ago, in a small workshop in Sabzazar, Lahore, a young boy watched colors come to life in the form of peacocks, traditional Islamic patterns, and various depictions of his favorite Mughal stories, and fell in love with cotton printing. It was a process Aslam Mirza could watch for hours: the workers extracting natural dyes, sometimes even from vegetables; placing the stencils down for block printing; painstakingly stamping out each design; and creating rows and rows of unique patterns. He was fascinated by the way the machines and artisans came together to turn curtains, table runners, and more into usable art. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
For Mirza, this art was also a connection to his ancestors: Under the name of Punjab Calico Printing, his family had been bringing beautiful tapestries and Mughal artwork to customers since 1868, helping to keep these delicate art forms alive. From a young age, Mirza knew that he wanted to carry on his family’s legacy, and today, he is the fourth generation in a business that has won multiple awards and accolades for their talent. But despite this rich family legacy, when he first expressed an interest in joining the family business, his father discouraged it; and by the time he was old enough to work, the once popular, 40-worker strong printing house had been left with almost nothing. “Pakistani handicrafts have long been left behind,” Mirza says. “When I attend small scale exhibitions I see that the younger generation wants nothing to do with [it] anymore.”
Despite his father’s wishes, Mirza took over Punjab Calico Printing in 1982, and with a small team of workers, he continued to create the designs that had always awed him. He also made contact with brokers and middlemen who could get his work to larger cities where he thought more people might be interested. Still, despite their best efforts to stay on top of trends and keep prices low to attract more customers, it became pretty clear to Mirza and his fellow artisans that individual efforts could only go so far. State corruption, which Mirza describes as the mismanagement and at times pocketing of funds attributed to his sector, and a lack of attention given to artisans and their needs, meant there were no areas for growth and almost no platforms for artisans to feature their work and connect with customers, or even each other. It was only when Mirza was approached by Zain Ahmad some two and a half years ago that things started to change.
Ahmed had then just started Rastah—a luxury urban wear brand fusing streetwear and traditional Pakistani crafts—and was looking to bring Mirza’s skill with Mughal art to his designs. For Ahmad, the main goal was to elevate a timeless talent to an international trend, and doing that meant challenging a lot of norms. Amidst local fashion trends having moved away from traditional crafts and a lack of access to international platforms, perhaps the biggest hurdle Rastah faced was challenging the decades old notion that anything made in Pakistan was automatically subpar. “Countries where artisanship can thrive have a very negative connotation with the tag ‘Made In Pakistan,’ which is controversial because if you look at luxury heritage brands globally, many are inspired by South Asian crafts but they won't acknowledge it,” Ahmad says. “You'll see block prints, hand woven fabrics, and more, but they're white washed to fit the narrative that sells abroad.”
Challenging these perceptions on a global scale was difficult enough on its own, but according to Ahmad, it has been just as difficult locally. Last year, the brand was embroiled in online controversy when customers accused them of exploitation due to their high prices compared to other Pakistani brands. It was only after Rastah made it into the wardrobes of high profile names like Hollywood’s Riz Ahmed and Bollywood’s Karan Johar that the criticism stopped. “We live in a Pakistan where people still live in a colonial hangover, and it shows us consumer psychology,” he says. “We need outsiders to validate things for us.”
As Ahmad explains it, the high price point is meant to be a counter to the norm of middlemen exploiting artisans by buying their products for low prices, then upselling them and pocketing the profits. It’s a practice experts and activists in the industry have long been looking to end, but hasn’t proven easy—and not just for Rastah. Sara Ejaz, the head of business developments and partnerships at Vceela, an online marketplace promoting Pakistani handicrafts, says that despite wanting to make the selling process as direct as possible, the organization has faced multiple hurdles. For one, the lack of financial inclusion for women in Pakistan has been a major barrier for women artisans who want to take their skills (and profits) further. “We’re trying to get rid of the middleman process and when we get an order on Vceela, it directly notifies the artisan who is registered as a seller,” she explains. “But we ran into an issue where many of the women artisans who were registered would put up their brother’s, father’s, or husband’s account to receive payments because they didn’t have their own.”
Still, it’s a start. Platforms and brands like Rastah, Vceela, Kaarvan Crafts Foundation, and Khudkaar are all examples of how Pakistani crafts can be amplified and made more desirable with the right structures in place, and in their own way, each of them is challenging social perceptions and inequality in order to champion the “Made in Pakistan” tag. Through these online marketplaces, artisans can access both local and international consumers directly, which otherwise wouldn’t have been possible for them.
Thus far, most of the “Made in Pakistan” movement has been about perception and innovation. But while "artisan," "heritage," and "sustainability" have all become buzzwords across Pakistan’s newly "woke" fashion landscape, a sustainable movement needs to go beyond greenwashing and putting certain words on their labels, and instead focus on investing in the people behind the products. As founder of sustainability focused organization Zuka and long time PR head at Kaarvan, Mehr Husain explains that the ultimate goal is for artisans like Mirza to be able to retain customers on their own and achieve financial independence. “Just because one engages with artisans does not mean it is sustainable,” she says. “You need to train them so they are able to earn independently and you need to go beyond just creation of fashion products. This means you raise awareness and be advocates of highlighting what is wrong with the current models of fashion and work to protect local heritage, be it fabrics, skills, or craft. Sustainable support ultimately means upward social mobility for artisans.” So far, it seems to be working: Rabia, an artisan in Layyah—a small town in South Punjab, Pakistan—who works at Khudkaar, says the organization's online marketplace and marketing has been crucial in empowering artisans to believe that they, too, can create international level products with the right training and access.
For Rastah, having their artisans have a direct stake in the products they create has played a major role in doing this, too. Building off of the hype from their initial collaboration, Ahmad decided to move past just fashion, and stock unique handmade products like Mirza’s tapestries directly onto his website. “When it comes to the products they create themselves, all the money earned on those goes to the artisan directly," Ahmad says. "We keep no part of it, we simply act as a connector between them and consumers." Before his collaboration with Rastah, Mirza’s tapestries would often sell for PKR 4000 to 5000, or $20 to $25 USD. “When I first told Aslam Saab [a term of respect used for elders] that I would stock his tapestry and price it at $300, he told me I was making a huge mistake and that no one would buy it, but it sold out.”
As the impact of these individual efforts comes together, benefiting from the accessibility that digital bridges provide, a somewhat unintentional movement is slowly starting to uplift those who have struggled in poverty for generations at the behest of their craft. Rastah—and Vceela, and many others—are proof of what artisans like Mirza have always known: that these crafts and traditions are undoubtedly unique, they just need other people to see it, too. But it can only happen working from the inside out, and it needs to be a collaborative effort. “Pakistani artisans are no less than anyone, they are just restricted because of their poverty,” Mirza says. “When people visit from abroad, they love our things but we don't like them ourselves. We need to start changing that.” Championing a “Made in Pakistan” label, and marketing it with pride, might just be step one in getting there.
[post_title] => Made in Pakistan
[post_excerpt] => Meet the artisans and designers who want to change where you think "luxury" comes from.
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