It took me a full decade to realize I was part of a multilevel marketing scheme. I should have seen the signs: the business model was unclear, my participation was so costly I fell into debt, and when I needed help meeting quotas, I was forced to rely on family members and recruit other women. It didn’t feel like multilevel marketing (MLM) at first; I never had to sit in an arena and listen to Rachel Hollis tell me to clean my face. I wasn’t selling “butter-soft leggings” or shilling Amway — I was a part of Motherhood in America.

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Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vázquez issued an executive order on Monday to prioritize ending the island’s epidemic of violence against women. Proactive measures to curb the crisis are long overdue…

The kidnapping and murder of 20-year-old Rosimar Rodríguez has given new urgency to Puerto Rico’s epidemic of gender-based violence. Hundreds took to the street on Monday to protest the government’s lack of action on this crisis. As I reported for GEN back in June, more than 150 women have been killed by their current or former intimate partners in the past decade. The murder of several transgender women, the unsolved gang rape of a young woman, and the number of missing girls and women have also shaken the U.S. territory.

On September 4, 2019, Gov. Wanda Vázquez announced she was…

We’re five years out from what Time magazine deemed the “transgender tipping point,” and in some ways, the world has fundamentally changed.

In the past five years, thousands of us have come out as trans or nonbinary and started living more authentic lives (myself included). There are far more out trans actors, musicians, writers, and performers than there ever have been before. Some of those out trans performers (particularly the white, thin ones) are getting celebrated for their bravery and beauty, getting high-profile acting roles and magazine covers.

Today, our existence is acknowledged (and milked for revenue) in commercials, toy…

Freakonomics Radio

In 1991, the actress Geena Davis starred in a movie that made her superfamous: Thelma and Louise. She played a timid housewife who goes road-tripping with her not-at-all timid friend, played by Susan Sarandon. As Hollywood films go, it was a huge outlier: two female leads, a female screenwriter, and the kind of raucous, thorny story that is usually reserved for men. Also, a wild gut-punch of an ending.

Making Thelma and Louise changed Geena Davis from the very beginning. She and Sarandon were asked to attend a meeting with Ridley Scott, the film’s director, to give feedback on the…

Inequality rises all the way to the top.

Earlier this year, Gabriel Zucman, a prominent economist at the University of California, Berkeley, came to a grim conclusion about inequality in the United States: The concentration of wealth has “returned to levels last seen during the Roaring Twenties.” This trend has not escaped politicians’ attention, and the now-historic levels of income and wealth inequality have emerged as central issues in the Democratic presidential primary. Several candidates have put out ambitious proposals to tax wealth and address the country’s staggering racial wealth gap.

Yet for all the research and all the chatter…

“It’s the birthrates, it’s the birthrates, it’s the birthrates.”

So reads the first line of the manifesto by Brenton Tarrant, the terrorist who slaughtered 51 Muslims at the Al Noor Mosque and a nearby cultural center in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March.

Throughout the screed, which he posted to the internet sewer known as 8chan shortly before his killing spree, Tarrant espoused portions of a theory known as the “Great Replacement.” …