More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Each year, I review my monthly Reads for the Rest of Us lists and choose my favorite books of the year. It is such a wonderful challenge to narrow them down. I read so many books I enjoy, but there are always those that rise to the top, the ones I won’t—or can’t—forget.
A roundup of the best feminist fiction on TV this year—including Girls5eva on Netflix, Quiz Lady on Hulu, and Americanish on Apple TV.
The year 2024 had promised an era of women rising to the top. This was spectacularly highlighted by the historic presidential run of Vice President Kamala Harris, who had mounted an unprecedented campaign in just over 100 days. Sadly, Harris fell short of the necessary votes.
2024 nonetheless demonstrated that women still hold powerful sway across our popular culture, even as they struggle for the highest political position. We continue to hold onto hope for a feminist future with more opportunities for gender and racial breakthroughs, which are still possible because they have been imagined and envisioned in our pop culture. Here are our picks for the year’s top 10 feminist moments.
In a year filled with groundbreaking storytelling, feminist documentaries released this year inspired, educated and sparked vital conversations. Here are some of the best feminist documentaries streaming in 2024.
When November’s announcement by the CDC that our infant mortality rate remains abysmal did not make even the tiniest of dents in the post-election news cycle, my thoughts pivoted from the patient’s I’ve lost as a doctor who cares for critically ill newborns to Miranda July’s blockbuster summer novel All Fours.
As I read, I could not help but wonder how to help parents like this narrator, the same parents I care for daily, feel in real time that NICU stories are a mainstream part of comprehensive reproductive healthcare.
Music feels healing, but can it actually heal us? The answer is a resounding yes—according to Sound Health, a collaborative project run by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
The Sound Health Network began in 2016 after a chance meeting of Dr. Francis Collins, the former NIH director, and Renée Fleming, the globally renowned and five-time-Grammy-award-winning American soprano. Over the past eight years, the partnership, in association with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), has raised awareness about the healing benefits of music and advanced research at the intersection of arts and wellness.
Ms. recently spoke with Fleming and Collins about their journeys to connecting music with health, what we know so far about music’s effect on the brain, and how we can use that knowledge to heal ourselves.
The Democratic Women’s Caucus (DWC) this week announced the election of Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) as DWC’s chair for the 119th Congress, which starts in January. Leger Fernández served as the DWC vice chair in the 118th Congress and will now lead the largest ever DWC, which includes a record-breaking 96 members in the new Congress.
Ms. executive editor, Kathy Spillar, sat down with Rep. Leger Fernández, to discuss priorities for the DWC—both to fight back against what will be repeated attacks by the Trump administration on women’s rights and programs benefiting women and their children, as well as strategies for moving forward toward equality.
In her new documentary, Bread & Roses (available now on Apple+), filmmaker Sahra Mani reveals the fierce and courageous resistance of Afghan women defying the Taliban—who wish to make them disappear.
It’s a documentary about Afghan women, by Afghan women, at a time when the world had stopped seeing them.
Yolande Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni Jr.—poet, writer, feminist and civil rights activist and educator—has died. Born June 7, 1943 , Giovanni was the author of more than 25 books and subject of the award-winning 2023 documentary Going to Mars.
A poem written in her honor:
“Nikki Giovanni,
Black poetic angel extraordinaire
who wrote to us
and for us;
gave us Black folk,
and the world,
a legacy of words
that exuded courage:
words of truthtelling
words of Black magic
words of inspiration
words of your life
words of your vision
words of love
for us,
your global Black community.”
Young women are the avant-garde of political expression online, developing expressive forms of political communication that collapse traditional distinctions between personal and political, aesthetic and substantive, emotional and analytical. Their approaches suggest new possibilities for political discourse that acknowledges rather than suppresses the role of affect, identity, and visual rhetoric in political mobilization. This piece draws from research presented in the authors’ new book, Not Your Parents’ Politics: Understanding Young People’s Political Expression on Social Media (Oxford University Press, 2024).