More Than A Magazine, A Movement
The 2026 midterm elections are already underway.
Whether you’re voting early, mailing your ballot or planning to head to the polls on Tuesday, Nov. 3, consider these eight free, trusted resources your go-to guide for voting in the 2026 midterms:
Happy voting! Power to the people.
On Monday, President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump presided over a bizarre ceremony in the Rose Garden where she made rare public remarks and he signed an executive order, “Advancing Women’s Health to Improve Outcomes in All Phases of Life.”
Never mind that his executive order has the same primary objectives as one signed by President Joe Biden in 2024—namely, increased research in and knowledge about diseases and conditions that affect women uniquely or disproportionately. Both executive orders make explicit the need to focus on menopause, midlife and aging, with stated priorities such as Alzheimer’s Disease, cardiovascular and heart disease, stroke and osteoporosis.
The biggest difference between the two is that Biden’s tied dollar amounts to these objectives: Though the $12 billion he directed Congress to allocate never materialized, hundreds of millions were activated across several federal agencies.
Alas, that executive order is now officially replaced with the current one.
As much as I want to mean it when I say, This agenda must transcend partisanship, and I want to show up for the millions of women who deserve these hard-won milestones—it was way too large a leap to be in the room where this executive order happened.
Yes, I was invited to the Rose Garden. Yes, I declined.
U.S. voters have legal protections when they cast their ballots, including rights to assistance in certain circumstances. Whether you encounter a long wait, a question about your registration or someone trying to intimidate you, you don’t have to figure out the next step alone.
Here are some common obstacles voters may face this election season, plus recommended next steps from voting rights experts.
On Oct. 17, in honor of No Kings 4.0, I found myself standing at a suburban intersection littered with big-box stores in my once farm-filled Vermont town. There, local organizers with Indivisible gave weekend activists like myself sturdy signs that said “VOTE” on one side, with an American flag on the reverse.
I’m not much given to following rules, or holding signs that other people give me with messages worked out by committee. And I can’t remember a time when I had an uncritical or non-ironic relationship to the flag. But it worked: Despite everything, despite history, even, I was happy to wave my little representation of Old Glory.
What that little flag meant at my demonstration in Williston, Vt.—and others’ in Salt Lake City, Utah; San Diego; Brooklyn; Atlanta; Dallas, Texas, and many other places—was the promise of democracy at a time of genuine peril. It’s hard to have an ironic relationship to that.
No surprise, the Food and Drug Administration now plans to hold off on releasing its so-called safety review of mifepristone—the drug most often used in medication abortions—until March 2027, when the midterms will be safely in the rearview mirror.
It’s not often that an article in a college newspaper becomes national news, but an explosive oped titled “Cornell Won’t, We Will,” has sparked front-page headlines, protests and demands for accountability across the country since its publication in The Cornell Daily Sun on Sept. 21. Authored by the newspaper’s editorial board, the piece highlighted the alleged gang rape of a female student, identified as Jane Doe, by members of the Chi Phi fraternity in October 2024. The op-ed denounced not only the actions of the alleged perpetrators but also what it described as the inaction of Cornell University in response to them.
The authors accused the university of failing to provide transparency and accountability in the wake of Doe’s assault, calling it part of a “morbid pattern” of institutional indifference to campus sexual assault. Despite a finding by Cornell’s own task force that incidents of sexual assault had increased by roughly 40 percent between 2023 and 2025, Cornell had provided “no concrete, feasible solutions beyond the usual passivities of ‘communication’ and ‘understanding.’” The editors argued that the failure to protect the physical safety of students constituted a betrayal of Cornell’s promise to “preserve a higher education community and residential campus where ‘any person’ in the community can pursue their education in a secure and nourishing environment.”
Just over a week later, another op-ed by a Cornell student criticizing the institution reached a national audience. “Cornell Fails Its Free-Speech Test,” authored by Cornell senior Jared Lederman, ran in the Wall Street Journal on Sept. 29. Lederman’s op-ed cited his recent personal experience of being criticized by fellow Cornell students for his views on gender equality as a demonstration of the university’s “culture of intolerance.”
Lederman recounts that after publishing an online essay titled “Men and Women Were Not Created Equal,” which condemned “modern feminism” for “trying to suppress masculinity” and insufficiently appreciating the “irreplaceable beauty in a woman creating the home to which her husband returns and in which her children grow,” his professional fraternity asked him to resign from a leadership position and his social fraternity expelled him. According to Lederman, his experience of “exile” is proof that “expressing heterodox views is socially suicidal” at Cornell, despite the institution’s claims in a recent report to value “‘rigorous deliberation and engaged discourse.’”
The gulf between these two op-eds speaks volumes about what is perceived as a campus crisis, not only at Cornell but across the country.
Sexual abuse is a free speech issue. A campus where students are pressured to stay silent about abuse, where students are doxxed, threatened and swatted for filing complaints, where victims are forced to share classrooms and living spaces with their abusers, is not a campus that respects physical safety or free speech.
When news broke about the Cornell 7 case, author Jennifer Percy looked first at the text messages between Jane Doe and one of the men she accused of raping her.
“I just wanted to apologize for how things went down the other night,” he wrote.
“At the end of the day non [sic] of the sexual stuff was illegal and honestly I really liked being with u,” Doe replied.
Some commentators have pointed to these messages as evidence that the encounter was consensual. Percy’s research offers another explanation: Survivors do not always immediately recognize what happened to them as assault, and their responses can confound public expectations of how a victim should behave.
Percy’s latest book Girls Play Dead: Acts of Self-Preservation describes a number of ways survivors can respond, both during an assault and afterward. These include phenomena like “tonic immobility,” when—similar to animals playing dead to ward off their predator—survivors freeze or even become paralyzed upon being assaulted.
Survivors also frequently “friend” (as opposed to fight or flight) their attackers in an effort to placate them. “I made him chicken soup [after],” one woman recounted to Percy.
Why is it that we can understand why a hostage victim may try to befriend their kidnapper in an effort to survive, or someone being robbed would give up all of their belongings, yet, when it comes to rape, we question what the victim could have done to stop it?
Federal policies shape women’s lives across the country—in our workplaces, schools, healthcare systems and homes, in red and blue states alike. For example, federal workforce reductions undermine economic security and career opportunities for Black women, who have historically constituted a substantial share of the federal workforce. And restrictions on federal funding for reproductive healthcare can also weaken access to contraception and cancer screenings.
Gloria Steinem reminded women, “Voting isn’t the most we can do, but it is the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one.” Let’s also remember that women have been a majority of the electorate for the past two decades. When it comes down to tough choices, voters must demand America gets it priorities straight. After all, as Steinem asked bluntly: “Who needs a ballroom?”
Beth Osborne, a Las Vegas writer and activist, had an abortion as a teenager. Now, she is working to convince Nevadans to approve Question 6 on their November ballots, which would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution and preserve safe, legal abortion in the state.
We hear plenty about technology, AI and the world they’re reshaping, but far less about the women working in and shaping these fields.
There is a palpable “testosterone culture” in tech, which is most obvious in the discourse surrounding it. Many of the powerful roles in the industry are held by women, yet they often play more shadowy roles—you likely don’t even know their names.
That is why Katie Drummond and the team at WIRED decided it was so necessary to talk about women in tech, that they would need an entire issue to do so.
Drummond tells Ms.: Though women remain working alongside and often above men in technology, it is misogynistic in itself to not hold the women of Silicon Valley equally accountable for the harm it causes. To not even get to share the blame is in its own way misogyny. WIRED isn’t asking why we aren’t celebrating these women, but why aren’t we talking about them at all?