Oct 03, 2026
3 min read
Hello dear readers!
Tonight's post is going to be a quick one, as I attended a matinee performance today of Kramer/Fauci at St. Ann's Warehouse and I've got to pop back out for another event tonight.
However, I just had to share this picture of my sweet little void himbo, also known as Radamés The Spoiled Princeling of Bed-Stuy. I like to think he's telegraphing his solidarity with student protestors in Paris.
Via the Guardian:
Many school students protesting have accused the state of disengaging from secondary education, describing difficult conditions in classrooms with ceilings partially collapsing during class, leaks, cockroaches and buildings in disrepair. Others have spoken of excessively long school days and a lack of teaching staff.
Children and young adults know when they're being shortchanged, all over the world, this generation is telling us they're fed up. Stateside, the revelations of what appears to be gross malfeasance and just plain, good old fashioned rape culture at Cornell University has once again put sexual assault in the headlines. I want to highlight this essay from my friend and fellow feminist Soraya Chemaly, a writer I've long trusted and admired. Chemaly provides valuable context about what makes fraternities a feature, not a bug, in "rape prone" societies:
Low-income, transgender, nonbinary, disabled women, and ethnic and racial minority women almost always face significantly higher rates of assault. Rapists can count on their being disadvantaged by status and restricted access to resources, meaningful barriers to pursuing accountability. What’s notable about fraternities is that they tend to be racially and ethnically homogeneous and to do the work collectively of not only institutionalizing male-dominant gender segregation but of enforcing hierarchies of race, class, ethnicity, religion, and more among men. So, in historically white, wealthy fraternities, for instance, it’s peer women — white, middle- and upper-class: same-social-circle academic competitors — who face higher risks.
We're going to be talking about rape culture and its ubiquity for quite some time as the Cornell case—first broken by the diligent, principled, and fearless Cereese Qusba of the Cornell Daily Sun—continues to unfold. Like so many women and fellow survivors, I am furious, but not surprised by the many ways Jane Doe was failed by multiple institutions: her university, its campus police, and the Tompkins County District Attorney. Kate Manne, a philosophy professor at Cornell who writes the must-read More To Hate newsletter, excoriated the university in a piece for The Cut.
"As things stand, students who commit infractions like plagiarism — which typically has no real victims — are often punished more harshly than the male students directly responsible for making the campus dangerous for female ones," Manne wrote. "Until there is zero tolerance for sexual assault on campus, women will not be protected here. And that is inexcusable."
I also wanted to share this piece from Perry Bacon of the New Republic, doing the righteous work of calling out the New York Times for its (in my opinion, highly irresponsible) allegiance to false equivalencies:
The paper’s coverage of higher education and transgender rights in particular leans into the idea that the left has gone too far, as opposed to centering the right’s authoritarian conduct on those issues (e.g., bans on gender-affirming medical care and the study of ideas like critical race theory). The overall product is a factually accurate portrayal of American politics that misses the big story: The Republican Party is a far-right entity at war with democracy; the Democrats are a normal party in a liberal democracy.
It feels like we're due for an epochal shift in American media, particularly in the wake of the Paramount-Skydance-Warner Bros-Discovery merger, set to close October 6. The new company will be called Skydance. Corporate media consolidation is the opposite of competition, and I am not optimistic about what this new mega-conglomerate augurs for the future. I just know we're going to have to keep nurturing and growing independent media if democracy and the truth are meant to survive. These days, my eye is on John Oliver and the indispensable Last Week Tonight. Peep the warning Oliver issues about ex-president Viktor Orbán enlisting right wing media consolidation as a means of clinging to power in Hungary:
Variety reports that Oliver recently extended his contract with HBO through 2027. I grow queasy thinking about the fate of the show after that, but I sure know I'll be extremely seated for whatever he has to say when the show airs tomorrow night. Be easy, ya'll, and more soon. As always, thanks for reading.