Sundance 2026: Olive Nwosu’s Haunting Lagos-Set Drama ‘LADY’ Asks What Happens When You Can No Longer Tune Out the World

PUBLISHED 2/18/2026 by

LADY is a film about perspective—about choosing what we see and how we see it, as well as what we decide is important. It’s also a film that consciously balances discomfort with bravery, weaving a tale about a woman on the cusp of a sea change, uncertain whether or not she’s willing to be taken up by its current. 

Winner of the 2026 Sundance World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Acting Ensemble, LADY is, according to the jury, “a film full of depth and texture and with a rhythm all its own, with an electric ensemble cast that brings life and humor and insight to a story about day-to-day challenges and finding safety in unexpected friendships.”

(This is one in a series of film reviews from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, focused on films by women, trans or nonbinary directors that tell compelling stories about the lives of women and girls.)

The Intensity and Perfectionism That Drive Olympic Athletes Also Put Them at High Risk for Eating Disorders

PUBLISHED 2/18/2026 by

Olympians—athletes at the top of their sport and in prime health—are idolized and often viewed as superhuman. These athletes spend their lives focusing on building physical strength through rigorous training and diets that are honed to provide the nutrients necessary to excel at their sport.

However, athletes are at considerable risk for eating disorders and having an unhealthy relationship with food and their bodies.

Lindsey Vonn Redefines The Limits of Possibility 

PUBLISHED 2/18/2026 by

Last Sunday, I woke before dawn to watch 41-year-old ski legend Lindsey Vonn race Olympic downhill at the Milano Cortina Games—the oldest woman ever to start the event and the first to do so with a knee replacement. Nearly seven years after retiring, she returned to the Olympic start gate with a torn ACL and decades of accumulated injuries, propelled by the same resolve that once made her the most decorated female alpine skier in history.

As I watched her charge down the course, cheered on by teammates, family and a global audience, I found myself asking the same question reverberating across sports media: Could she once again defy the limits imposed on her body, her age and her ambition?

When Vonn crashed seconds into the run, the reaction revealed just how persistent those limits still are. While elite skiers—men and women alike—routinely crash when pushing for hundredths of a second, her fall was framed by some as proof that a 41-year-old injured woman had overreached, rather than as the calculated risk that defines downhill racing. What moved me most wasn’t just the loss of a potential medal but the familiar scrutiny that followed: critiques of her age, her body and her decision to try at all. Her return alone had already stretched what we imagine is possible for women in sport. The fall, though painful to witness, underscored something more enduring—her insistence on defining her own limits in a world still unsettled when women refuse to accept theirs.

Josh and Erin Hawley’s ‘Love Life Initiative’ Signals the Next Phase of the Antiabortion Fight

PUBLISHED 2/18/2026 by

Erin and Josh Hawley’s new dark-money group, the Love Life Initiative, arrives at a moment when abortion opponents are shifting tactics. With Roe overturned and sweeping bans already in place across much of the country, the focus is now on cutting off the remaining paths to care—through ballot measures, advertising campaigns and state-level policy fights designed to reshape public opinion and law from the ground up. The Hawleys frame this effort as a moral crusade to restore a national “culture of life.”

But in practice, it is an escalation of a post-Dobbs strategy that has already restricted access across wide swaths of the United States.

The consequences of that strategy are increasingly stark. Pregnant women in states with abortion bans are dying after being denied care, and people living in those states face significantly higher risks during pregnancy, with women of color bearing the brunt.

At the same time, public support for abortion rights has grown, and abortion-protective states have moved to shield providers and patients from out-of-state enforcement.

The Love Life Initiative reflects a movement determined not only to defend its legal victories but to reverse that growing acceptance—by reshaping the political and cultural terrain on which the abortion debate now unfolds.

He Called Me ‘Doc.’ I Called Him ‘Rev.’ Remembering Jesse Jackson’s Moral Leadership

PUBLISHED 2/17/2026 by

I knew Rev. Jackson beyond the conventions. He married me and my husband, Gregory Shaffer, almost 25 years ago. He always showed up and gave graciously of himself when I called—whether it was to host a convening on HIV/AIDS at Rainbow PUSH in the early 2000s, or to bring together hundreds of working-class residents from the South Side of Chicago to engage on matters of national healthcare, or to meet with (mostly women) academics coming together to figure out the intersections of law, family and reproductive rights at the University of Chicago Club 20 years ago. 

He called me “Doc” or “Doctor Michele.” I called him “Rev.”

A week ago, by his father’s bedside, Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-Ill.) and I spoke by phone. He had just delivered a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast calling the president to account—to be more humane and just, and to “do what is right.” It was clear that Rev. Jackson’s legacy is already living on.

‘A Deliberate Attempt to Terrorize’: Former FBI Agent Asha Rangappa on What Real Law Enforcement Looks Like—and What ICE Is Not

PUBLISHED 2/17/2026 by

ICE is the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in American history—its budget larger than the FBI, ATF, DEA, U.S. Marshals Service and Bureau of Prisons combined. Its agents wear masks, drive unmarked vehicles and operate with an impunity that has drawn comparisons to secret police forces around the world. Multiple federal courts have refused to trust the agency’s own statements of fact. And in Minneapolis, ICE agents shot and killed Renee Macklin Good and Alex Pretti in front of their neighbors’ cameras.

Asha Rangappa has seen this movie before—just never in America.

A former FBI special agent who spent years in the bureau’s New York division, specializing in counterintelligence, Rangappa was trained to monitor threats to America. Her job required surgical precision, behavioral psychology, extraordinary patience and, above all, trust.

“The bread and butter of your work as a law enforcement agent is that you need the community’s help,” she told me. “You actually can’t do your job without it.”

In a Scorching Order, Federal Judge Rejects Trump’s Attempt to Trample the First Amendment and Rewrite America’s Antebellum Past

PUBLISHED 2/17/2026 by

In a sharply worded order, U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe instructed the Trump administration on Monday—George Washington’s birthday—to reverse course and restore exhibits that depicted and paid homage to the enslaved people who labored at Washington’s home in Philadelphia. Citing George Orwell’s novel, 1984, Judge Rufe (first appointed by President George W. Bush) chastised the administration for operating as if the U.S. has a “Ministry of Truth” whose motto is “Ignorance is Strength.” 

The panels in question were installed at the President’s House in the early 2000s, after years of advocacy by local Black leaders and activists, to commemorate the nine men, women and children enslaved by Washington there: Ona (Oney) Judge, Hercules Posey, Richmond Posey, Christopher Sheels, Joe Richardson, Austin, Giles, Moll and Paris.

However, last month—a week before the start of the United States’ 100th anniversary of Black History Month—NPS workers arrived unannounced at the historical site in Philadelphia and removed these panels and video exhibits.

This case is not just about the erasure of slavery—which on its own is historically important. It’s also about the separation of powers and the First Amendment, which the Trump administration repeatedly violates.

Sundance 2026: ‘Barbara Forever’ Chronicles the Life and Work of Experimental Lesbian Filmmaker Barbara Hammer

PUBLISHED 2/17/2026 by

Prolific lesbian feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer’s refusal to be written out of history paid off, and Barbara Forever is full of evidence of the impact Hammer, both herself and her work, made on those around her. Beyond just telling the story of the life of a trailblazing lesbian filmmaker, the documentary is an intimate portrait of a fascinating and indomitable woman who treated life as the ultimate adventure.

Barbara Forever received Sundance’s Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award for U.S. Documentary (the film’s editor is Matt Hixon), with its whirling, dynamic and comprehensive array of film and archival footage from an artist who voraciously documented her own life and the lives of others.

(This is one in a series of film reviews from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, focused on films by women, trans or nonbinary directors that tell compelling stories about the lives of women and girls.)

The Strange Hopefulness of Growing a Human While the World Burns

PUBLISHED 2/14/2026 by

As I write this, I’m in my third trimester, anxious and excited for my daughter’s arrival, which feels imminent.

Yes, it’s an extremely dark time, but that’s not exactly a historical outlier. People have been making babies throughout the worst of them. And nothing motivates me more to build a better future for all of us than this little girl—who, like every child, deserves safety, stability, love and care, and a world equipped to give it to her.

I can’t wait for her to see it.