Power Trip

In This Moment, Who Really Has the Power?

Big tech, the government, #metoo—Medium magazine explores the major vectors of power all month long

Last week, I was sent an unpublished essay by a woman who was sexually assaulted over two long years by a yogi so famous that his photograph still sits at the altar of countless renowned yoga centers.

It was not the first time she’d come forward about her abuse, but now she wanted to tell her own story unmediated — to be heard in full, in her words, as opposed to through a journalist.

The essay is chilling. It’s a tough read. And we’ll be publishing it next week as part of our latest issue of Medium’s monthly digital magazine. This month’s theme: Power Trip.

Power, as the woman I mentioned above makes clear, is personal. It’s about how we conceive of it, how we express it, how we get it — and sometimes, how we are subjected to it. October 15 marks a year since the #metoo moment became a movement, and the conversation rages on about who we believe, how we behave, and why. The events of recent weeks — the Kavanaugh hearing and its fall-out, the very public falls of very public bad men — is part of it.

But power, we know, is also political. In November, the U.S. midterms will be a referendum on the power of an unprecedented female-led electoral resistance, the power of the presidency, the power of the media, and the power of… tweets. We’ll talk about Jeff Flake, and Nancy Pelosi’s money machine, and Joe Biden’s third presidential run (will he/won’t he?), and what Mike Pence does all day.

So we’ll spend the next month examining power in all its forms, from the intersections of the political and the personal to exploring how government wrangles with Big Tech and looking at how the media and activists are changing what it means to be in charge.

The question we face is simple: Who has the power?

You can follow this all month long here: Power Trip.