The tech bros are brawling
Oh no, it’s escalating. I thought the cage match news would be the end of it. I thought we’d all spend a few minutes laughing about Elon Musk challenging Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight and then swiftly move on. After all, the odds of this cage match actually happening are almost nil: Musk has a history of making wild promises and not following through. He also has a history of asking people who would almost certainly slaughter him in a fight to get into fights. Remember when he challenged Vladimir Putin to single combat? The stakes, he announced grandly at the time, were Ukraine.
Anyway, rather than this tech-bro brawl-fest dying down, it’s ramped up. Another potential competitor has stepped into the ring: the Airbnb CEO, Brian Chesky, told the Bloomberg writer Dave Lee that he’d “challenge any leader in tech to bench press. Cage matching seems to cross a line that I don’t need to cross.” He added: “I’ve been waiting for these physical battles in tech. It’s just so funny.”
Really? Have you really been waiting for these physical battles, Brian? Is it so Airbnb can swoop in and host these events (CageBnb) then ask all the participants to clean up after themselves while also charging them a completely bonkers cleaning fee? Because that’s not a bad business plan actually.
Speaking of plans, here’s a challenge for us all. How do we channel all this billionaire competitiveness into more constructive avenues? Right now all this excess money is going into billionaires comparing the size of their space rockets, building mega-yachts and undertaking hardcore training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. How do we get them all to compete to fund public services instead? Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of boasting about who can beat who in a cage fighting match, they all boasted about who’d paid the most tax that year? Now that’s a billionaire brawl I could get behind.
A year ago Roe v Wade was overturned: grieve for the new America
“Dobbs created a two-tiered class of American citizenship,” Moira Donegan writes. “One for those who are trusted to plan their families and control their bodies, because they are male, and one for those who are not, because they are female. It is a generational tragedy.”
Most Americans disapprove of Roe being overturned
A year on, 61% of American voters remain opposed to the supreme court removing the federal right to an abortion, according to a new NBC News poll. Nearly 80% of female voters aged 18-49 disapprove; even a third of Republican voters say they disapprove.
The faces of the 1,572 US politicians who have helped ban abortion since Roe fell
It’s not exactly news that the people responsible for legislation controlling women’s bodies are mainly men. Still, this graphic from the Guardian is shocking.
Purr the love of god: children are not ‘identifying as cats’
Regrettably, we have reached the stage of the culture wars where schools are forced to put out statements clarifying that none of their students identify “as a cat or any other animal”. What fresh hell is this? Well, conservatives in the US, who excel at getting outraged over imaginary things, have long been claiming that the woke brigade “are putting litter boxes in schools for people who identify as cats”. This is nonsense. They’ve taken an urban myth and used it as a way to attack LGBTQ+ rights: if you respect trans people, they want you to think, it’s a slippery slope that results in people identifying as cats. Now it seems that nonsense has spread across the Atlantic and infiltrated the UK, which has been running headlines about children identifying as cats for days now.
There is actually one school in the US with cat litter on site
It’s nothing to do with identity politics; it’s in case students are locked in a classroom during a shooting.
Nearly 80% of women’s jobs could be disrupted by AI
That’s compared with 58% of working men, according to a new study from the University of North Carolina. But don’t worry, at least we’ll have billionaire cage matches to watch while we’re all unemployed.
The women who run Antarctica’s ‘penguin post office’
An all-women team is currently running the most remote post office in the world. Part of the job is counting penguins. Which seems pretty tough … I mean, no offence, but they all look the same?
Pregnant MEPs demand ability to vote on maternity leave
Members of the European parliament (MEPs) cannot vote if they’re out on parental leave because there is official policy around parental leave and remote voting. “It’s 2023. If you’re forced to choose between your votes and your child that’s a really bad signal, especially for young women,” Lara Wolters, a Dutch MEP, told Politico.
Why are so many women still suffering with endometriosis?
The World Health Organization estimates endometriosis affects one in 10 women and girls globally. Yet the National Institutes of Health allocates just 0.038% of its research resources to the disease. “It’s a perfect storm of undervaluing women and women’s health, inequities in healthcare, menstrual taboo, gender bias, racial bias and financial barriers to healthcare,” the director of a new documentary about endometriosis told the Guardian.
The week in podtriarchy
If you’re looking to win friends and influence people with feminist orca facts then you’ve come to the right place. Did you know that orcas “learn matrilineally, and postmenopausal females assume the greatest importance in individual pods?” Grandmothers are super influential in the orca world and help the little baby killer whales survive. There’s a theory floating around that a grandmother orca called White Gladys is teaching the young ’uns to attack boats because she’s traumatized from a former encounter with a boat. There’s a valuable lesson in that: don’t make enemies with a grandma.
