Culture

Megan Rapinoe, the sometimes blue, sometimes pink-haired star forward on the US Women’s National Soccer Team, announced earlier this month that she will retire after the 2023 Women’s World Cup. Rapinoe is a talented soccer player and an American success story. She grew up relatively modestly and her older brother, her inspiration to start playing soccer, suffered from a heroin addiction and spent time in prison. Rapinoe managed to avoid the all too common injury-to-opioid addiction pipeline that crippled her equally athletic fraternal twin sister’s soccer career.

#UNSUSSEXFUL is trending on Twitter, referring to what Meghan and Harry have reportedly labeled a bout of “bad luck.” A few weeks ago a source claimed that the pair were feeling helpless after their three-year-long quest to reinvent themselves had failed, blaming “the pandemic, financial crisis and family deaths." Now, Cockburn is hearing that they could have found another scapegoat. According to reports, the ongoing strike in Hollywood could affect Meghan and Harry's Netflix deal. The pair, who signed a rumored $100 million arrangement with the streaming platform in 2020, are reportedly finding it "tough" to move forward with their projects due to the simultaneous writer and actor strikes that have halted production across Hollywood.

One of the first things my fiancé and I did after purchasing our first home was install a security system. This included a Ring-style doorbell camera that alerts us when people approach our front door and automatically starts recording video and audio. The resulting clips are saved in a mobile app and can be exported with ease.   Imagine my surprise when I learned this week that wanting to monitor my home is racist!  A new article in tech magazine WIRED says they don’t recommend Ring cameras because they supposedly make it easier “for both private citizens and law enforcement agencies to target certain groups for suspicion of crime based on skin color, ethnicity, religion or country of origin.”  How does WIRED think policing works, exactly?

It is nearly twenty years since the most iconic moment in modern music history: when Madonna, aged forty-five, made out with two women nearly half her age on the MTV Video Music Awards stage. Britney Spears, who was twenty-one, and Christina Aguilera, twenty-two, were pounced on in front of millions of television viewers, along with an uncomfortable looking Justin Timberlake and Guy Ritchie.  Two decades later and Madonna would likely be canceled for sexual harassment, with Britney and Xtina offered therapy and a book deal to “speak their truth.” But in August 2003, Madonna pulling off a garter from Aguilera's leg, frenching Spears and then giving Aguilera a smacker on the lips was a standard Saturday night watch.

It’s been just over a year since the Supreme Court decided in the Dobbs case to overturn Roe v. Wade — and pro-life activists were right when they predicted that the fight against abortion was just getting started.  Of course there was plenty for them to celebrate in the aftermath of Roe, which essentially kicked the issue of abortion back to individual states. Thirteen states had “trigger laws” in place that would almost immediately enact near-total bans on abortion, with some exceptions, in the event Roe were overturned. Other states reacted to the Supreme Court’s ruling by passing gestational bans on abortions ranging between six weeks after conception and fetal viability outside the womb.  The new bans are already saving unborn lives.

Cockburn doesn’t have any acknowledged children, but if he did, he’d like to think that he wouldn’t give them drugs. Any normal parent that gave their kids drugs would end up with a social worker, or potentially prison time. But Jada Pinkett Smith, wife of Will, isn't just any old mother.  Her son Jaden Smith recently let slip that his mom was the reason for their family’s psychedelic drug usage. “I think it was my mom, actually, that was really the first one to make that step for the family,” the rapper said at the Psychedelic Science conference in Denver this week, as reported by USA Today. He added, “It was just her for a really, really long time and then eventually it just trickled and evolved and everybody found it in their own ways.

Another phony Harvard professor? Say it ain’t so! Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino is reportedly on administrative leave with the university amid a review of alleged fraud within her body of research. A group of three professors from other top universities, who collectively run a data blog called "Data Colada," say they first flagged the purported fraud to Harvard Business School in 2021. This group of researchers claimed at the time that at least four papers authored by Gino contained falsified data — and they believed that many more of her papers had similar issues. “In the fall of 2021, we shared our concerns with Harvard Business School (HBS).

As I creep into my mid-twenties something is changing. I’m not quite young enough to be carefree, I pay my bills and taxes on time and worry about the noise pollution level in the area I’m looking to move to. I’ve swapped my six-inch heels for practical sneakers, and I tut at teenagers causing a commotion on the subway. All of which led a friend to accuse me of becoming “something of a Karen.” The charge is a serious one these days. You see, Karen is no longer a playful term used to describe your entitled aunt who complains about slow service in a restaurant, flipping her asymmetrical bob in irritation. To call someone a Karen in 2023 is to wade waist-deep into the culture wars. At some point over the last few years, the word became more than a tongue-in-cheek jibe.

England's National Health Service made the major announcement last week that they would limit the prescription of puberty-blocking drugs for transgender children to clinical trials. A report released by the NHS on June 9 states that "there is not enough evidence to support their safety or clinical effectiveness as a routinely available treatment and that they should only be accessed as part of research." The decision is the latest consequence of a multi-year review into how the medical community in England should treat children who suffer from gender dysphoria.

“Stinky. Sweaty. Hairy. Pimply. Totally Normal.”  That’s the seemingly innocent tagline of the “Puberty Issue” of the New York Times for Kids, which appears in the print newspaper on the last Sunday of every month.  The kids section, which was started in March 2017 as a part of the New York Times magazine department, often looks harmless at first glance. The cover typically boasts colorful and engaging artwork, while inside, children are greeted with cartoons, games, puzzles and mini articles about cool accomplishments by other kids. Past issues covered how kids could spend their summer vacations, interesting facts about bugs and other creepy critters, and how to start growing a garden.

J.K. Rowling’s Twitter feed “creates trans phobias,” writes Washington Post gender columnist Monica Hesse. Listening to Rowling, says Hesse, is exhausting. “It’s exhausting because it requires constant vigilance.” And the constant vigilance, says Hesse, is necessary in order to determine when Rowling’s words stray into “transphobia.” I confess my own “exhaustion” reading opinions like Hesse’s. I understand that “transphobia” has a very extensive Wikipedia page citing supposed medical experts who give the concept a veneer of legitimacy.

One of the most famous lines from the classic 2002 romcom Sweet Home Alabama has leading lady Reese Witherspoon incredulously asking a redneck hometown friend, “You brought a baby... to a bar?” I encounter that incredulity frequently, every time I cart my kids to work events, including those at bars. But a book tour? This was a new one. A book tour with a baby is hard, but babies (and kids) are worth all the hardships. As Scrubs’s wise Dr. Kelso once explained, “Nothing that’s worth having in life comes easy.” That’s a mantra in our home as we wade through the hard times, and it’s a lesson we impart to our kids as we endeavor to raise them into happy warriors and resilient and caring adults.

Reason magazine reported last summer on the rise of sensitivity readers, and publishers have made headlines for their plans to release sanitized versions of Roald Dahl's and Ian Fleming's works. I’m not sure what’s more depressing: the fact that publishers are hiring sensitivity readers to purify these books, or the fact that I probably should have had one review my books before they were published. In an ideal world, sensitivity readers would be in as much demand as Betamax repairpersons. But we do not live in an ideal world. We live in a world full of hypersensitive Twitter users who relish finding offense in the unlikeliest of places. Hence the proliferation of sensitivity readers, or "authenticity readers" as they’re sometimes called.

We live in the Golden Age of Revision. Not everyone has noticed, so let me mention some of the highlights of the art of the Michelangelos and Monets of the revisionist moment. First, of course, we have found the path to revising birth certificates and chromosomes on the matter of an individual's sex, or as we have been taught to say, gender. This is revision par excellence, but only the beginning. Then we have the New York Times in the company of many thousands of American school teachers who have miraculously overthrown the burden of snow-capped mountains of historical evidence and wizened learning of generations of historians. Their revision reveals that the real history of America began in 1619 with the arrival of Angolan captives at Jamestown.

The East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment has thrust rural America into the national spotlight. Town mayor Trent Conaway, a hefty, scruffy figure who resembles many a resident of flyover country, has been all over cable news expressing his “frustration” over how the federal government has handled the disaster. “Frustration” is exactly the word I’d use to describe the predominant feeling I encountered last week during my visit to East Palestine. It’s the same attitude I come across constantly in my rural Pennsylvania homeland. The way the East Palestine disaster has unfolded magnifies the rural perception of government, and both sides of the aisle would be wise to take a closer look and listen.

“D’you know what the acronym MBA stands for?” The twenty-seven-year-old who asked me this had a deep tan and fluorescent teeth. He may have winked, but the eye-twitch was more likely a nervous tic developed from looking at himself in the mirror so much. I responded with a look of indifference mixed with fear. “Married” — he paused for dramatic effect and demonstratively looked at my wedding ring — “but available.” I felt nauseated. I was in my first semester of business school in New York City and had so far learned how to make an educated estimate of a company’s optimal capital structure, how to make a balance sheet look balanced and how to use the word “conceptually” to sound smart in strategy class.