iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Maybe they could go windsurfing together?

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Wrote a thing Monday. Got held back and is a weekend read at the Guardian today. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

While the criminal justice system should address reports of rape, we know that rates of conviction are appallingly low for a number of reasons. Although, thanks to feminist interventions, the legal system is better equipped to understand this crime and less prejudiced against victims, we will not change the world through that means.

After rape allegations at Cornell University, why are women again being urged to talk to their sons? Why not men?
Gaby Hinsliff
Gaby Hinsliff
Read more
Sexual assault arises in part through both the entitlement and the desire to abuse and dehumanize women, which is in part about definitions of both masculinity and femininity: masculinity in that domination, violation and degradation are seen as status-enhancing, femininity in the perception that women’s bodies are for men to use, women’s voices and rights to be ignored.

The most compelling thing I’ve read in response to the Cornell case is in an essay by feminist writer Soraya Chemaly. She cites anthropologist Peggy Sanday, who told her that there are “rape-prone” and “rape-free” societies: “She found that in rape-free cultures, women have far more authority, status, safety and freedom.”

They’re societies in which women’s rights to bodily and social self-determination are respected, and a man who violates those rights would face severe consequences. “Rape-prone cultures, on the other hand, treat rape as an entitlement in a system that revolves around masculine contests and hierarchies.”

rest at link

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

An honor to witness your courage and perseverance in this moment.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Big fan of this book (obviously): www.sonorajha.com/how-to-raise...

Sonora Jha

HOW TO RAISE A FEMINIST SON

A love story that will resonate with feminists who hope to change the world, one kind boy at a time

From teaching consent to counteracting problematic messages from the media, well-meaning family, and the culture at large, we have big work to do when it comes to our boys. This empowering book offers much-needed insight and actionable advice. It’s also a beautifully written and deeply personal story of struggling, failing, and eventually succeeding at raising a feminist son.
Informed by the author’s work as a professor of journalism specializing in social justice movements and social media, as well as by conversations with psychologists, experts, and other parents and boys, this book follows one mother’s journey to raise a feminist son as a single immigrant woman of color in America. Through stories from her own life and wide-ranging research, Sonora Jha shows us all how to be better feminists and better teachers of the next generation of men in this electrifying tour de force.
Includes chapter takeaways, and an annotated bibliography of reading and watching recommendations for adults and children.

Praise For How To Raise A Feminist Son

"Jha issues an urgent, fervent plea to raise feminist sons in this trenchant guide. At times touching and always impassioned, this is an excellent resource for like-minded parents."
—Publishers Weekly

“You can’t punish your way to a more feminist world, I’ve long believed; you have to create, encourage, invent that world, especially in how you raise kids, but that’s only one reason Sonora Jha’s book is exhilarating and inspiring. It’s a beautiful hybrid of memoir, manifesto, instruction manual, and rumination on the power of story and possibilities of family I can’t wait to put in the hands of everyone raising kids or thinking about how we do it and how it could be different.”
—Rebecca Solnit, author of The Mother of All Questions

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Wrote about Cuomo during the NYC primary: www.meditationsinanemergency.com/on-feminism-...

I went back to James's report on Cuomo's serial sexual harrassment and it is gross, disturbing reading in which woman after woman came forward with accounts of --well, read the report for yourself at this link. Here's just the first of the thirteen women who went on the record. She remained anonymous publicly but was known to the makers of the report as she described: "touching and grabbing of Executive Assistant #1’s butt during hugs and, on one occasion, while taking selfies with him; and comments and jokes by the Governor about Executive Assistant #1’s personal life and relationships, including calling her and another assistant 'mingle mamas,' inquiring multiple times about whether she had cheated or would cheat on her husband, and asking her to help find him a girlfriend. These offensive interactions, among others, culminated in an incident at the Executive Mansion in November 2020 when the Governor, during another close hug with Executive Assistant #1, reached under her blouse and grabbed her breast. For over three months, Executive Assistant #1 kept this groping incident to herself and planned to take it 'to the grave,' but found herself becoming emotional (in a way that was visible to her colleagues in the Executive Chamber) while watching the Governor state, at a press conference on March 3, 2021, that he had never 'touched anyone inappropriately.' She then confided in certain of her colleagues..."
“In my mind, I never crossed the line with anyone, but I didn't realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn,” Cuomo said at the time. In translation, he's saying he was exercising what were formerly considered his rights, in a world where women lacked the right to not be touched and spoken to inappropriately, in which the workplace could be and often was a hostile and degrading place for women, and in which men were free to make it so. rest at link/2000 word limit

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Not sure what # but this one drew on academic work by disaster sociologists at a time when none of it seemed to be available to a general readership and also included firsthand research with Katrina and 9/11 survivors as well as primary material from the 1906 earthquake, etc.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Seventh was on Muybridge who worked at the intersection of photographic technology, railroad money, and the development of the west/Indian wars. There were no good books on him, though curator Philip Prodger would publish one simultaneously and we'd both contribute to an academic volume after.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Second book: I got to write about the history of Western Shoshone land rights and the representational genocide of Yosemite's indigenous population in the absence of almost anything substantive on those subjects except primary material (and racist Yosemite crap).

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Your "Adult Content" is tragically hidden, but I send

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

If you want to talk conquistadors on horseback in the Americas, you can start with Mexico. This pre-1848 Mexico, where the styles and skills of western cowboy arts were refined and codified and mythologized as vaqueros became buckaroos.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Happy to have done that thing that draws a thread away from its original ugly subject on to, well, greener pastures. Small herd of mustangs on the edge of Reno when I was doing GOTV there in 2024.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I learned to ride western up the dirt road behind my childhood home, which abutted a little quarter horse stud farm; the woman who taught me on an appaloosa, a quarter horse, and a wonderful half-Arab half-Welsh pony was the wife of a farrier in our town full of girls who barrel-raced.

Me and a very handsome fellow in Flagstaff earlier this month. Don't really ride but still love being around horses.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Always and forever, thank you for bearing witness/ speaking up.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Never mind but now I want to rewatch it myself. I hope you have a swift and complete recovery and are well stocked with ice packs.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

But I just did what nearly all writing about the issue does: talked about the percent of women on campus who will become victims without talking about the percent of men on campus who will become perpetrators. Most campus rape victims know their assailants.

1 in 8 students experiences sexual violence during college.
The 2019 Campus Climate Survey found that 13% of undergraduate students experienced rape or sexual assault after enrolling in college.

That’s about:

• 1 in 4 undergrad women (26%)

• 1 in 14 undergrad men (7%)

who experienced nonconsensual sexual contact by physical force or inability to consent since enrolling at their school.

from: https://rainn.org/red-zone/campus-sexual-violence-statistics/

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

For people sharing the above without context, I'm critiquing by analogy all the things women are asked to do to be safe in reply to a guy normalizing rape culture. Special bonus from @sorayachemaly.bsky.social's new essay.

Sanday is perhaps best known for identifying cultures as “rape prone” and “rape free.” Based on her study of more than 150 tribal societies, she identified what makes a society or culture “rape prone,” “rape free,” or something between the two. It still may come as a surprise to some that “rape free” is even a possibility. She found that in rape-free cultures, women have far more authority, status, safety, and freedom. When a woman says no, a man stops, an idea that many people struggle to think men are capable of. If a man proceeds to rape, he might, for example, be exiled. Rape-prone cultures, on the other hand, treat rape as an entitlement in a system that revolves around masculine contests and hierarchies.

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After her decades-long global ethnographic studies, she turned her sights on American college campuses, studying roles, initiations, party behaviors, hazing, gender attitudes, pornography, male bonding rituals, and more across institutional settings — Greek systems and also athletics. She compiled her findings into an influential book, Fraternity Gang Rape,first published in 1990 and rereleased in 2007, with ongoing work in between. In it, she described how and why some fraternities are rape-prone while others are rape-tolerant or rape-free. She found that fraternity gang-rape shows recurring patterns in which a group of men targets one “party girl,” typically a woman who is already vulnerable.*

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

And this passage in her powerful essay touches on something I was talking about earlier here: the constant insistence that victims and not perpetrators work hard at stopping rape, always with an absence of recognition we need the collective solution that is social change.

Many people think of privilege and entitlement in positive terms, such as discrete additive benefits, but they are primarily defined by something else: the elimination or reduction of obstacles and costs that others incur. Is the Red Zone an entitlement?

Just before my daughters were about to set off for college, we got emails from their high school offering a self-defense class for new graduates, $100 a person. Only girls and their families got the emails. The message seemed clear enough: before sending your daughters off to college, make sure they can fight off aggressors. My knee-jerk instinct was to ask: who do girls have to defend themselves against? Mainly boys like the ones they grew up with. Boys were not also being offered a class, at a rate of $100 per person, but by the logic of the offer, they were the ones who might be accidentally or purposefully assaulting someone. All worry instead tends to focus, as preparation, on the possibility of false allegations, despite their rarity.

I understood why a self-defense class made sense and appreciated the effort. However, the class, as well-intended as it was, made me angry. The offering was yet another example of an institutional default: expecting young women to privatize the cost of preventing their assaults instead of preparing men, holding them accountable, or, in this case, suggesting they incur an actual financial price to supplement their education, socialization, and college preparation.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Climate change affects everything. "These threats are not regarded as some far-off or remote contingency: disastrous impacts, for instance on the UK’s food supply, could be expected as soon as 2030, it warns."

What is the report?
In the first report of its kind, the UK’s spy chiefs set out stark warnings of the catastrophic risks to the UK from the collapse of vital ecosystems around the world, driven by the climate crisis and our failures to protect nature. The Guardian has seen part of the report and has spoken to a large number of people familiar with its contents, which warn of food shortages, conflicts, mass migration and other threats to the UK’s national security, including going as far as the risk of nuclear war or the breakdown of society. These threats are not regarded as some far-off or remote contingency: disastrous impacts, for instance on the UK’s food supply, could be expected as soon as 2030, it warns.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Commenting on this rubbish from Jensen Huang of Nvidia.

If you want to turn a corner on climate change, if you want a future that’s sustainable, lean into A.I. It is the best opportunity we have to get there.

But we need to build the energy faster to do that.

That’s right. That’s right. I mean, that’s just life, you know?

There’s a market for it all. But you can subsidize it, and you can make it easier to build.

Yeah. It’s kind of like, in order to save you, they’ve got to hurt you first — that’s the nature of surgery. They’ve got to cut you open to save you. They’ve got to inflict an enormous amount of pain and suffering on you so that they can save you. And so I think A.I.’s kind of like that.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

What gets you booted from Substack? Andrew Tate still seems to have a newsletter there while charged with: 10 counts of rape, 3 of trafficking for sexual exploitation, 3 of assault occasioning actual bodily harm, & making/distributing indecent images of a child. possessing extreme pornography.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

This by @petridishes.bsky.social is one of the most memorable responses to the situation. Thanks for giving it some thought.

This has to stop. Instead of saying, "You cannot smoke in here," we are telling every woman, "there is going to be smoke in the restaurant, so encase yourself entirely in protective sheeting." Instead of saying, "Do not go around lighting people on fire," we are telling women, "Don't be flammable." But you can't be human and not be flammable. This is not like walking down a dark alley and getting mugged, because for that to be true you have to have the option of not walking down the dark alley.

If someone were standing on a corner throwing mud at passersby, we would not say to the passersby, "Well, my aunt didn't get any mud thrown at her, and she never wore nail polish, so try that." We would say, "Get that idiot somewhere where he can't throw mud at people." Do you want to hear a story? One of the things I was wearing when somebody tried to do something I did not want them to do was a Jabba the Hutt suit. Don't talk to people about what they were wearing. A, Hutts are asexual, and b, no. It is not what you are wearing. https://www.metrowestdailynews.com/story/opinion/columns/2017/10/22/men-world-you-are-not/18180221007/

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

And the precautions put the full burden on the victims as part of a society that accepts that normalization and doesn't want to address the need for change.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Governor of Utah, vetoing a bill against trans girls in sports: "Four kids and only one of them playing girls sports. That’s what all of this is about. Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something."

Finally, there is one more important reason for this veto. I must admit, I am not an expert on transgenderism. I struggle to understand so much of it and the science is conflicting. When in doubt however, I always try to err on the side of kindness, mercy and compassion. I also try to get proximate and I am learning so much from our transgender community. They are great kids who face enormous struggles. Here are the numbers that have most impacted my decision: 75,000, 4, 1, 86 and 56.

75,000 high school kids participating in high school sports in Utah.
4 transgender kids playing high school sports in Utah.
1 transgender student playing girls sports.
86% of trans youth reporting suicidality.
56% of trans youth having attempted suicide.
Four kids and only one of them playing girls sports. That’s what all of this is about. Four kids who aren’t dominating or winning trophies or taking scholarships. Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something. Four kids trying to get through each day. Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few. I don’t understand what they are going through or why they feel the way they do. But I want them to live. And all the research shows that even a little acceptance and connection can reduce suicidality significantly. For that reason, as much as any other, I have taken this action in the hope that we can continue to work together and find a better way. If a veto override occurs, I hope we can work to find ways to show these four kids that we love them and they have a place in our state.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Wrote about it back then, in an essay about the postmodern old west.

This is what Jim Jarmusch was trying to get at in his 1996 Western, Dead Man, in which Johnny Depp eventually becomes the notorious gunman he is initially mistaken for as he wanders across a West where wanted posters bearing his likeness have preceded him--and the rock star Iggy Pop in a cameo role cross-dresses, in a calico-and-sunbonnet cameo. For all its ethos of manliness, gender became as malleable as any other aspect of identity in the West whose foundational document was Jessie Fremont's ventriloquism. In the 1870s, Calamity Jane was following George Armstrong Custer's Seventh Cavalry dressed as a man. Elizabeth Custer was wearing a wig made from her husband's golden ringlets. Custer himself was writing articles celebrating Wild Bill Hickok as the quintessential plainsman, and Calamity Jane made up a story she had married Hickok and claimed him as the father of a daughter eventually demonstrated to have been born four years after his death. Both Hickok and Buffalo Bill did stints with Custer's Seventh Cavalry at various times, but Hickok was shot in a bar 1876 shortly after playing the part of himself in a three-act entertainment entitled Scouts of the Prairie, the same year Custer and cavalry were wiped out by the Oglala Sioux at Little Bighorn. In Son of the Rising Star, Evan S. Connell tells the tale of a much-married laundress of the Seventh Cavalry who was posthumously discovered, by her fellow female camp followers preparing her for burial, to be a man. (During the California Gold Rush, dances were often held in which some members of the all-male society took the part of, or dressed as, women, and Western newspapers of the era tell of same-sex couples of both genders.) The berdaches--the gay men who took on female roles in plains Indian society--are another story; Crazy Horse, one of the Oglala leaders who creamed Custer, was said to have a berdache wife.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

New (well, updated) anniversary essay on what really happened in New York City and the, well, hijacking of what that day meant by the Bush Administration to justify its wars at home and abroad.... www.meditationsinanemergency.com/9-11-the-c/

The Bush Administration did not want a heroic public. They wanted a cowed, obedient public and they set about creating one, telling people to stay home, to fear their neighbors and report them for anything suspicious, to go shopping (stupid shopping bags with American flags and "America: Open for Business" were everywhere while other things, such as civil liberties were being closed down), to accept a loss of those liberties in the name of wartime patriotism (and we are still suffering from that sabotage of our rights), to demonize Muslims abroad and at home (a wave of stupid violence against Muslims, and people who looked Muslim to haters, and even Sikhs erupted in the wake of the propaganda war). The first enemy they had to conquer was us, and in the years that followed people lost their jobs in heartland America for speaking out against the wars.

The administration wanted us to pretend that it was the military that protects us when the military was effectively useless that day, to pretend that rather than the act of a small terrorist sect this was an act of war that justified invading Afghanistan and then Iraq, which conveniently had a lot of oil that the administration (headed by oilmen George W. Bush and Dick Cheney) redirected to their cronies, as Trump has with Venezuela's oil. The government was reorganized to create the Department of Homeland Security, and the Third-Reich tones of that word homeland was noted at the time, and to create ICE.
It Could Have Been Different

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

A quarter century ago, 2,600 people lost their lives in Manhattan, and then several million people lost their story. They were only defeated when their resilience was stolen from them by clichés, by the invisibility of what they accomplished that extraordinary morning, and by the word "terrorism"..

The Real 9/11: Citizens Succeeded, Institutions Failed

I wrote this for the eighth anniversary of 9/11, drawing on my 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster; it felt right to revise and reissue for this twenty-fifth anniversary.
A quarter century ago, 2,600 people lost their lives in Manhattan, and then several million people lost their story. The al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers did not defeat New Yorkers. It destroyed the buildings, contaminated the region, killed thousands, and disrupted the global economy, but it most assuredly did not conquer the citizenry. They were only defeated when their resilience was stolen from them by clichés, by the invisibility of what they accomplished that extraordinary morning, and by the very word "terrorism," which suggests that they, or we, were all terrified. The distortion, even obliteration, of what actually happened was a necessary precursor to launching the obscene response that culminated in a war on Iraq, a war we lost, and the loss of civil liberties and democratic principles that went with it.

Only We Can Terrorize Ourselves

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I ignore a lot of these incidents, but this one was a startlingly perfect example of someone telling me what I just said while thinking he was schooling me, and, well, mansplaining is following me around this week in the form of AI slop so....

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Meanwhile, days since mansplaining happened: 0

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

This restating as if it were an original or superseding idea happens to me pretty regularly. To me and us.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Guardian: This week, the Trump administration released a new bombshell. In outlining how it will govern the 2030 decennial census, the Census Bureau has indicated that it plans to stop collecting data about race and only count a subset of the population, contrary to what the constitution requires.

This week, the Trump administration released a new bombshell. In outlining how it will govern the 2030 decennial census, the Census Bureau has indicated that it plans to stop collecting data about race and only count a subset of the population, contrary to what the constitution requires. This is part of the “residence rules” that the Census Bureau produces in the middle of the decade to finalize its operational plan. While purportedly intended to make the census “colorblind” and to protect the privacy of respondents, these proposed changes to the residence rules will ensure that anti-discrimination laws – such as the Voting Rights Act – that are anchored to the census data can’t be enforced

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Soviet Census, 1930s; US Census, report today in the Guardian .

NKVD head Genrikh Yagoda, who had been in charge of the forced
collectivization (as well as Stalin’s poison laboratory), fell out of favor
for reporting the negative public reaction to the show trials. He was
demoted, then denounced, then tried in the third show trial in 1938,
and executed. His replacement underwent a similar fate and was
executed in early 1940.
“Execution was the favored solution to every problem, includ-
ing those caused by previous executions,” writes Adam Hochschild.
“When the national census showed that his reign of terror was
shrinking the country’s population, Stalin ordered the members of
the census board shot. The new officials, not surprisingly, came up
with higher figures. Between about 1929, when Stalin had van-
quished his rivals and concentrated power in his hands, and his death
in 1953, most historians now estimate that he had been directly re-
sponsible for the deaths of somewhere around 20 million people.” --Orwell's Roses

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

It's great that there's new information about the dangerous air in lower Manhattan after 9/11, covered up by Giuliani and the Bush Admin. But we knew about the dangers and the lies long ago. I published this in 2009:

Afterward, many immediately recognized the terrible toxicity of the
air from the pulverized buildings. Asbestos, heavy metals, burning PCBs,
and plastics were all fueling a deadly miasma that those on and around
the site would breathe for months. The Bush administration edited the
he e
Environmental Protection Agency reports on air quality to turn alarm-
larm- larm-
ing science- based news into reassuring press releases, and Giuliani went
ani wen ani wen
along with the censorship and propaganda. It was a callous and de and d
decision. Though safety experts made it clear that everyone on the Pile
one one
e on e on
DISTRIBUTION
and deadly
should be wearing a respirator and exercising other precautions against
NOT FOR
recautio ecautio
9780143118077_Paradise_TX_p1-358.indd 214 10/16/19 7:17:46 PM
Nine Hundred and Eleven Questions 215
contamination, few fully followed those guidelines, and the city did not
press for enforcement or other safety standards. Wall Street reopened six
days after the attack, though the air quality there as well was terrible.
When journalist Juan Gonzalez reported on some of the atmospheric
dangers of lower Manhattan in the Daily News, six weeks after the attack,
a deputy mayor called the newspaper’s editors to denounce the story.
The firefighters were lauded as heroes again and again, but they were
not protected, beforehand by a workable system and good equipment, or
after, by sane health standards (and today they remain shockingly under-
paid, so much so that many work second jobs and most live far from the
places they serve). Many of the firemen and other workers on- site devel-
oped what was known as “Trade Center cough,” and for some it would
worsen into serious lung disease and damage and a host of other health
problems. Seven years later, more than ten thousand exposed people had sought treatment just at New York City’s designated treatment centers
and the total number affected remain unknown.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

From @oilchange.org's Africa program, reminding everyone that quite a lot of that profit doesn't go to the people.

$ 1.4 TRILLION
spent on extraction projects
The fossil fuel industry plans to sink USD $230 billion into the development of new extraction projects in Africa in the next decade — and USD $1.4 trillion by 2050.
66 %
owned by international corporations
66% of new extraction projects are owned by international corporations, leaving local communities behind.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Age of machines vs. age of mammals in San Francisco. The mountain lion is/was in Golden Gate Park a few blocks from my old home right in the center of the city. The Waymo story: yeah there's a lot of human labor behind driverless cars and it is not pretty & passengers are apparently often gross.

ALERTSF: A mountain lion has been located in the Panhandle near Fell and Baker. If you see the mountain lion, slowly back away, do not run. Call Animal Care & Control at 415-554-9400 or 911 in a life safety emergency.
If you have a child with you - pick them up - and keep dogs on leash. If the mountain lion approaches - make yourself 'big' wave your arms, shout, throw something, and again, do not run. Animal Care & Control is on site and working with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and City officials to safely resolve the situation. Please avoid the area and stay in your home if you live nearby.
For more information on current emergencies in San Francisco visit sf.gov/ReadySF

Cleaning Up Poop: The Human Labor Behind Waymo
Human feces isn’t even the nastiest thing they’ve found in the backseat.

STEPHANIE REIST https://bayareacurrent.com/theres-a-lot-of-cleaning-up-poop-a-depot-worker-on-the-human-labor-behind-waymos-autonomous-vehicles/

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Help the Internet Archive, which is saving a lot of the data being purged/censored by the Trump Administration (and so much more).....

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

My old bike, which got stolen, so I replaced it with an e-bike with the same excellent wire panniers seen here, at the Heart of the City Farmer's Market in SF in 2022. Biking there was definitely quicker than driving and searching for parking. Could've also taken public transit....

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Did she? 2022, Congress goes after NDAs. Ten states made abortion a right under their state constitutions post-Roe, including NY.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

They send MASS EMAILS! OMG they must spend TENS of dollars on this!

But as mayor, he has also been able to use taxpayer funds to create a sprawling network of hundreds of friendly influencers to boost his priorities, provide positive depictions of his administration and enhance his popularity.

The administration regularly sends the influencers memos on the mayor’s priorities and encourages them to trumpet his accomplishments, all outside of public scrutiny. The missives are delivered in group chats on Signal, an encrypted messaging app designed to shield posts from public review.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I'm just taken aback by how credit cards is what comes up over and over and over as the one thing people seem to know about the status of women in the 1970s. Not that marital rape was legal, women could be fired for pregnancy, etc....

One peculiar thing about the misremembering of the past is that when it comes to women's inequality a whole lot of people almost automatically mention credit cards and that women couldn't get them in their own name, over and over and over. (I don't believe credit cards were as central to economic life then as they are now; checks were widely used for larger transactions). It is true that financial inequality on many fronts greatly impaired women's freedom and equality: "Before 1974, in fact, if you were a single woman, you almost always needed your father, brother, or other male relative to co-sign loans for you, even if you made more money than they did. If you were a married woman, you could not obtain credit cards in your own name—you could only get a card as Mrs. Your Husband’s Name. And then, no matter how carefully you paid the bills and managed the account, the credit history accrued only to him. As a result, if your husband died or you divorced, it was nearly impossible for you to obtain a loan."
But that was far from the worst thing about the status of women before feminism changed everything: women were not just restricted from owning credit cards, they were restricted from owning themselves. Steinem, who married for the first time in her sixties, was asked by a reporter from Pakistan why she had changed her mind about marriage. “I didn’t change,” she told him. “Marriage changed. We spent thirty years in the United States changing the marriage laws. If I had married when I was supposed to get married, I would have lost my name, my legal residence, my credit rating, many of my civil rights. That’s not true anymore. It’s possible to make an equal marriage."

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

But also beyond reproductive rights, stuff like this happened:

Despite the furious backlash, there have continued to be victories. The feminist surge of circa 2013-19 brought about a new era of public awareness and accountability around sexual abuse, harassment, and violence. One remarkable outcome was the prosecution of many abusers for crimes committed years and decades earlier, a reminder of the impunity they'd previously had, and powerful men from Harvey Weinstein to Sean Combs to the gymnastics doctor went to prison. This surge prompted the passage of a number of laws, including some ending the use of NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) to silence victims, and reform of other laws around abuse and statutes of limitations.

Good journalism was central to all this. Ronan Farrow at the New Yorker and Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor at the New York Times exposed Harvey Weinstein's abuses. Julie K. Brown at the Miami Herald reopened the Jeffrey Epstein case in 2019, leading to his arrest and death in jail, Ghislaine Maxwell's long prison sentence, and the ongoing exposure of complicit men. Most recently Heidi Blake's scathing overview of Andrew and Tristan Tate's empire of abuse at the New Yorker this June seems to have prompted the British government to seek their extradition from the US to face renewed charges of abusing women and girls there.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

People have no idea how bad it was. From my book The Mother of All Questions:

In 2015, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg brought up a 1982 Supreme
Court case while hearing the case for same-sex marriage rights.
“Marriage today is not what it was under the common law tradition,
under the civil law tradition,” said Ginsburg when Justices Roberts
and Kennedy began to fret about whether the court had a right to
challenge centuries of tradition. “Marriage was a relationship of a
dominant male to a subordinate female,” she explained. “That end-
ed as a result of this court’s decision in 1982 when Louisiana’s Head
and Master Rule was struck down.”
Ginsburg, the second woman ever to serve on the Supreme Court,
was referencing Louisiana’s “head and master” law, which gave a hus-
band unfettered right to dispose of jointly owned property without
his wife’s knowledge or consent. The test case involved a husband who
mortgaged the house his wife had purchased with her earnings, to
defend himself against charges of molesting their daughter. She had
no voice in the disposal of her home, her earnings, the course of her
life; what should have been hers or theirs was his alone.

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Ms. championed so many new rights.....

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