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Hi All –
(tw: this opening discusses sexual assault)
It should have happened years ago. But watching the former Prince Andrew — ashen, skulking in the back seat of a car leaving a police station — after being arrested for sharing confidential information with Jeffrey Epstein carries a satisfaction that feels almost illicit. So deeply, privately satisfying, in a world where men like him rarely pay any price at all.
And yet even now, “paying the price” feels like too generous a description for what we’re watching. An arrest, a couple of men finally cornered, does not constitute justice. It constitutes a crack in a wall that has held for decades.
Amidst everything the Epstein conspiracy has laid bare, one thing I keep returning to is this: the very public reckoning being led by incredibly brave survivors is doing something. Those of us who grew up in the eighties and nineties were raised in a particular kind of silence. Not the silence of not knowing, we knew. We knew what happened at parties, in offices, on trains. We knew what men were capable of, but we also learned the lesson to absorb it, to move on, to be more careful next time. Speaking up had consequences and we supported women who did, but we also filed our stories away in the place where women store the things they are not supposed to say, and we got on with it.
Even after years of me too, it’s been phenomenal to watch as women — in my life, online, in comment sections and group chats and quiet conversations — come forward with their own stories. Not about Epstein, but about their lives and what happened to them.
I think there is a sense of freedom that has come from knowing that the thing we’ve always imagined, that men are in back rooms conspiring together to subjugate and harm us, was truly happening. The “good men” like Bill Gates, equally complicit.
I remember the first time a man assaulted me, I was 13 and sitting in a window seat on a train. An older guy (I distinctly remember the grandfatherly gray hair) sat down next to me, pinning me in, and stuck his hand up my skirt. I was scared and just looked at him and said, “You should be embarrassed for yourself.” I never told an adult, I never told anyone until today.
What the survivors leading this reckoning have done — at enormous personal cost — is make that silence harder to maintain. Not because the world has suddenly become safe for women who tell the truth. It hasn’t. But because enough voices coming together to demand justice is the work of politics and its consequences.
The justice is slow. Agonizingly, frustratingly slow. The crack in the wall is not the wall coming down.
But it is a crack. But it’s incredible to have been raised in this bridge generation, to have mothers whose lives could be destroyed by merely making accusations, and to see a world in which women are finally taking those men down. It’s not everything, but it’s something.
AOC and Warren join forces in high-profile child care push ahead of midterms. (The 19th) Elizabeth Warren and AOC are pushing the Child Care for Every Community Act which would provide a mandatory federal investment to establish and support a network of locally run Child Care and Early Learning Centers and Family Child Care Homes so that every family, regardless of their income or employment, can access high-quality, affordable child care options for their children from birth to school entry. (see here for more details on the bill)
ICE Barbie’s Alleged Lover Hit With Wild New Leaks About His Blanket Meltdown. (Daily Beast) ICYMI, Kristi Noem is having an affair with her de facto chief of staff Corey Lewandowski, and this is finally coming to public light through this random story about him getting a Coast Guard pilot fired for not remembering to move Noem’s blanket between planes.
Trump wants to run the economy hot, as midterm elections approach (Washington Post) Two weeks ago, the Trump administration officials were predicting an economic boom that will lift Republican prospects in the November congressional elections.
U.S. economic growth slowed sharply at end of 2025, dragging down the year. (Washington Post) The U.S. economy cooled sharply at the end of 2025, with growth slowing to an annual rate of 1.4 percent, as tariffs and a weeks-long government shutdown sapped its earlier momentum. Overall, the economy expanded by 2.2 percent last year, lower than the 2.8 percent growth the year before, according to new data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Supreme Court Rejects Trump’s Tariffs but He Plans a Workaround. (New York Times) In a 6-3 decision, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the court ruled that Trump had exceeded his authority when he imposed tariffs on nearly every U.S. trading partner. “They’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution,” Mr. Trump said. Trump said he is going to use additional trade powers to impose an across-the-board 10 percent tariff, as well as pursue other options.
Punch, a 7-month-old macaque monkey, had no friends.
His mother abandoned him. He wasn’t quite fitting in with the other monkeys at Ichikawa City Zoo, outside Tokyo. The closest thing he had to loved ones were the zookeepers who look after him, and a stuffed animal from IKEA.
But a series of widely shared posts showing his predicament — including a hashtag started by the zoo, #HangInTherePunch — have put Punch in the global spotlight and made him somewhat of an internet celebrity.
The world knows Virginia Roberts Giuffre as Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s most outspoken victim: the woman whose decision to speak out helped send both serial abusers to prison, whose photograph with Prince Andrew catalyzed his fall from grace and now arrest. The book, Nobody’s Girl, tells her story in her own words.
In April 2025, Giuffre took her own life. She left behind a memoir written in the years preceding her death and stated unequivocally that she wanted it published. In it, Giuffre offers an unsparing and definitive account of her time with Epstein and Maxwell, who trafficked her and others to numerous prominent men. She also details the molestation she suffered as a child, as well as her daring escape from Epstein and Maxwell’s grasp at nineteen.
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