Mattie Kahn

Roxane Gay is the kind of person people turn to for advice. She doles it out on Twitter to her 830K followers. She and the writer and professor Tressie McMillan Cottom cohost a podcast titled Hear to Slay—taglined “The Black feminist podcast of your dreams.” And she is the Work Friend columnist for the New York Times, where she addresses a broad mix of workplace dilemmas. A characteristic kernel of wisdom: When a woman who has been tasked with taking notes and organizing the calendar for her tea…

In June the public radio show and podcast On Being aired a conversation between its host Krista Tippett and writer Isabel Wilkerson. It made sense that Tippett had invited Wilkerson to come on the show, which has been a forum for intimate, sometimes anguished conversations about the human experience since 2003. Wilkerson had a new book, Caste, due out later in the summer. And its themes—the oppressiveness of racial hierarchies in America and around the world, the pernicious, lethal effects of di…

Donald Trump is hard to listen to. That was true even before he was elected president of the United States, but the power he commands now makes hearing from him that much more agonizing. At press conferences and rallies, his words tumble out in a furious clutter. Some of it is hateful and frightening. Some of it is incomprehensible, which is alarming for its own reasons. When he submits to interviews, even well-prepared journalists like Leslie Stahl and Chris Wallace look somewhat agog. He said…

After losing the race for governor in 2018, Stacey Abrams declined to run for another office and instead turned her attention to voter registration. In the time since, she has helped sign up a whopping 800,000 new voters. Now Joe Biden is on the brink of clinching the White House—and Georgia is set to swing blue for the first time in almost two decades. In this interview, published in the summer of 2020, Abrams explains how she sees her work and what America needs to do to live up to its true de…

In the second week of nationwide rallies and marches and a coast-to-coast reckoning with institutional racism, the New York Times reported a shift in Amazon’s best-seller list. Seven of the top 10 books, it noted, focused on race and antiracism work. One of them was a title that’s shown up in dozens of guides for antiracist readers and Instagram roundups the world over: Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race. Released in 2018, the book was intended to be a primer on such entrenched injusti…

Kamala Harris can’t solve all her coworkers’ problems. Her powers of persuasion are impressive, but, like most elected officials, she knows how and when to pick her battles. So she could have just thrown up her hands at this latest scandal. She had bills to write and votes to cast. A pandemic was raging. But that tuna melt. That bone-chilling, earth-shaking tuna melt. Harris, who has represented California in the Senate since 2016, has a nose for injustice (and microwaved fish), and this was an…

It was the first week of April, and CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin had spent the previous weeks reporting on the dire spread of the novel coronavirus in the United States. She’d interviewed former vice president (and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee) Joe Biden about how he’d fight it, if he were in the Oval Office. She’d spoken to people who’d lost relatives and friends. She was all too aware of the havoc that can be wreaked by the disease this coronavirus causes. And then she tested posit…

For the two months that New York has been under lockdown, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has committed to getting dressed (in a real outfit) and putting on makeup (which she now has no excuse for failing to remove before bed) at least once a week. It’s a modest ambition, but for Hannah-Jones—who was just awarded the Pulitzer Prize earlier this month for her groundbreaking 1619 Project in the New York Times—it has paid unexpected dividends. “I love makeup. I love color. And I love to present myse…

In the last week of March, the sitcom Young Sheldon roped in a decent 6.3 million viewers on CBS, making it the second most watched broadcast on the network on the night it aired. Ahead with several hundred thousand viewers was a medical drama (kind of) almost too unbelievable to be true (but it is), and with a woman at the helm to boot: CBS Evening News With Norah O’Donnell. As the coronavirus ravages the United States and homebound Americans look for concise, reliable sources of information, c…

March 8 is International Women’s Day. To celebrate, we asked women like Jackie Aina, Cecile Richards, and these nine former clerks to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to reflect on how other women have lifted them up—mentored them, advised them, represented them, and above all showed them what was possible. It is one of the most coveted jobs not just in the world of law, but across all three branches of government. It is also one of the most invisible. Ahead of each term at the Supreme…

The women should never have met. Virginia Giuffre lives in Australia with her husband and three children. Teresa Helm, a mother of two, spent time in her 20s in New York and California but now resides in Ohio. Rachel Benavidez moves around for work—she’s a travel nurse. But her home base is in New Mexico. Marijke Chartouni lives in Washington State. Sarah Ransome is in Spain. Still, in late October the five women—four in person, Ransome on the line from Barcelona—gathered in New York to share th…

It’s the app that made getting into a stranger’s car seem normal. Billed as a safer alternative—for women in particular—to one-man taxis, Uber is now responsible for nearly 4 million trips a day. But after almost 21 months of data collection, the platform has released an unprecedented safety report, a record of thousands of reports of sexual assaults and more than 100 Uber-related deaths. The first of its kind across not just ride-hailing apps but most big businesses, the 84-page document is a d…

The four journalists are some of the most practiced reporters and commentators on television. Among them, Rachel Maddow, Andrea Mitchell, Ashley Parker, and Kristen Welker have covered Congress, the White House, presidential races, and the State Department. (Mitchell has herself reported on all four of those beats.) Each is so seasoned she seems to have eliminated verbal tics from her speech—the “um”s and “like”s that mere mortals can’t shake. But in conversation with them, there are phrases tha…

It can be hard to find the words to describe just how frustrating it is that gender inequality is still so pervasive, even in the wealthiest nation on the planet. From compensation to representation, women lag so far behind men that the World Economic Forum estimates it will take more than two centuries to achieve gender equality in the United States. Disparities between men and women have been discussed ad nauseam; it can feel as though we’re out of points to make and tactics to use. But comedi…

A few hours before our interview, Norah O’Donnell decides to sleep in…until 6 a.m. This is new for her—the notion that she might be able to wake up around the same time as the rest of us, and she hasn’t quite adjusted. For the better part of a decade, O’Donnell cohosted CBS This Morning and rose at what is for most people the middle of the night. Next week she shifts gears—and schedules. O’Donnell is about to take her seat in the anchor chair at CBS Evening News, making her the second woman ever…

Happiness—it’s the rare thing that’s not available for free shipping on Amazon Prime, but that doesn’t mean researchers aren’t interested in how much it costs. For decades scientists have tried to pinpoint how much humans need to make in order to feel content on a given day. And for the most part, studies have concluded that number is the equivalent, in the U.S., of somewhere between $60,000 and $75,000. But more recent research suggests that the optimal income for lifetime fulfillment is higher…

The 2011–2012 ski season was the best in Lindsey Vonn’s career. With 12 wins, she crushed her opponents on slope after slope. When Vonn looks back on it now, she doesn’t chalk it up to her practice runs or new tough regimen. She worked as hard as she ever had—fast and resolute. But she’d also just filed for divorce. And therein, her secret weapon. Lindsey Kildow had married Thomas Vonn in 2007. He was a professional skier too and had competed in the 2002 Winter Olympics. Later he became her coac…

At the moment, 68.5 million people are displaced around the globe. Half of them are women, with families and relatives to care for and unique dangers to contend with. When we talk about refugees in the United States, they tend to be invoked in debates on the news—and then forgotten about until the next time their situation turns dire enough to make headlines. But the British Somali poet Warsan Shire tries her best to keep them three-dimensional. Red-blooded. Human. Born to Somali parents in Keny…

Not even the most experienced journalists could resist a hint of scorn: “Trump Meets With Kim. Kim Kardashian West, That Is,” one headline read. Another: “Welcome to 2018: President Donald Trump Just Met With Kim Kardashian.” Kardashian West had gone to the White House to plead the case of Alice Marie Johnson, a woman who’d served more than two decades in prison on nonviolent drug charges. When Trump commuted her sentence a week later, the moment came and went like a season finale. Recapped, cri…

With great engagement comes great responsibility. Just over two weeks after she was sworn in, freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is slated to hold a session for her fellow representatives to teach them how to tweet this week. The House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee has extended an invitation to @AOC—as she’s known to her 2.42 million Twitter followers—to show her new peers how social media can be used “as an effective and authentic…tool” to connect with Americans in…