National

This Holiday Season, Forget Dieting: Commit to Your Communities Instead

For millions of women, the new year rings in a commitment to dieting. With the recent headlines that three quarters of Americans are now overweight or obese, we can expect surging spending on diet products targeting women this holiday season—adding to the estimated $33 billion that Americans already spend on commercial weight loss products each year.  

As an anthropologist who studies how people make sense of nutrition guidelines, I’d like to propose a feminist alternative. Forget dieting: Make a commitment to become involved in collective action—anything that involves joining others in your communities to work for change. It is by working with others that lasting health benefits will come about.

How to Support a Grieving Loved One on Holidays and Special Occasions, According to a Clinical Psychologist

The holiday season, often considered a time of joy and togetherness, can also be one of the most challenging periods for those who are grieving a loss.

As a clinical psychologist and professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences working with cancer patients and their families, I see the profound toll grief takes on people. I’ve also experienced grief personally, both when my mother died suddenly at the age of 66 and when my father passed after a long illness at the age of 84. Those experiences, combined with my research, have driven me to dedicate much of my career to understanding grief and its effects, and to finding effective ways to support those who are struggling with it.

Why the ERA Needs Congressional Action—And How We Can Win

Over these past weeks, I’ve read countless emails, sat through heated meetings, and heard the cries for action directed at President Joe Biden urging him to order the archivist to certify and publish the ERA in the Constitution. I understand the yearning for a decisive stroke. But this path, I believe, is a snare, tangled in legal thorns, dangerous and fraught with risk.

After careful study and consultation with leading constitutional experts, I am certain that Congress must pass joint resolutions to recognize the ERA and remove the arbitrary time limit.

His intervention could set off a chain reaction, handing ERA opponents an opportunity to challenge the amendment in court. A judicial gauntlet with Trump-appointed judges risks obliterating decades of progress, forcing us to begin again, clawing our way back through Congress, where a two-thirds vote is needed in the House and Senate, and three-fourths of state legislatures must ratify any new amendment.

Thought-Provoking, Policy-Changing and Narrative-Shifting: Ms. Magazine’s 10 Most Impactful Print Articles of 2024

Ms. spurred thought-provoking, policy-changing, narrative-shifting change in 2024—and created new feminist strategies and solutions for the year ahead. In a word: “impact.” Ms. commissioned high profile analysis and investigative journalism by some of feminism’s best journalists and thinkers, focusing on key issues impacting women and girls at a critical moment across the globe. Here are the Ms. editors’ top 10 impact articles in the past year, as seen in the print magazine.

(Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get the issues delivered straight to your mailbox.)

2024’s Top Feminist Moments in Pop Culture

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.

When Nothing Bad Happens: Miranda July’s ‘All Fours’ Captures the Importance of Understanding Infant Health

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.