The Witches Are Coming

You don’t have to “hear both sides” perpetually—you can hear them once or twice, make a decision, and move on into the future.

Our propensity for always, always, always choosing what is comfortable over what is right helped pave the road to this low and surreal moment in US history.

It’s about who feels at home in the workplace and who feels like an outsider—which, by extension, dictates who gets to thrive and ascend,

A few creepy men losing their jobs, a few women managing to clamber to the top—those things matter, but they don’t actually change how people think and behave on a large scale. Fuck, they don’t even change how people think and behave on a small scale toward those individual men and women.

Why do I like this? Where is this impulse coming from? Am I telling the truth to myself about myself?

“Just a joke” is context dependent. Certain topics, such as rape, can be “just a joke” to some, but to others they require a degree of self-negation far beyond any reasonable cost-benefit analysis.

Eliminating abortion access for poor folks is an instrument of class and racial warfare. When reproductive freedom becomes a class privilege, the human rights of our political body are negated.

Women, already impeded and imperiled by sexism, also have to carry the social stigma of being feminist buzzkills if they call attention to it. People of color not only have to deal with racism; they also have to deal with white people labeling them “angry” or “hostile” or “difficult” for objecting.

he brought not just his showbiz sensibilities but his reality TV instincts into the Oval Office: a savant’s understanding of Americans’ hunger for “reality” over reality, for the outrageous, for the cruelty of Simon Cowell and the brazen individualism of “I’m not here to make friends.”