THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF NEVER THE PRETTY ONE (The Daily Whatever Press) — Megyn Kelly on Monday unveiled a bold new standard for sexual consent, and it is your arms.

Under the Kelly Doctrine, a woman’s ability to say no shrinks as her bicep circumference grows, and any woman rated below a 7 is legally presumed flattered. Here’s how she justified it: on SiriusXM, Kelly looked at a 20-year-old who told Cornell police she was “100% sure” she’d been raped by members of the Chi Phi fraternity and announced that she’s “not the most attractive gal.” She called her “extremely beefy in her arms and her legs” and said she “clearly didn’t grow up the incredibly beautiful one.” She even brought up a video where the young woman talks about her cankles, which means a 55-year-old with a law degree went digging through a stranger’s ankle content for material.

Megyn’s conclusion: the plain girl was just so thrilled to be wanted, “and that’s why she kept saying yes.”

Now, I’m not a violent person. But those words make me want to gauge Megyn’s eyesballs out with my beefy, not-incredibly-beautiful arms and shove them down her pick-me-girl throat to Shut. Her. The. Fuck. Up.

The accused men deny wrongdoing; that’s expected, and it’s their right. Grading a rape accuser’s calves for four million YouTube subscribers is, apparently, Megyn’s.

Fuck all the way off with that math, Megyn. I’m a red-haired GenX woman with arms that hauled groceries, toddlers, laptops, and a decade of indie-rock merch. I was never the “incredibly beautiful” one, and I’m still not. I’ve been the not-pretty girl at more parties and shows than you’ve had bad takes, and every one of us learned the same lesson by 1987: being beautiful and being sexually assaulted are two different, not related fucking things. Rape is not discriminatory and it impacts all of us. Elderly dementia patients get raped, FFS.

We already watched your theory play out, Megyn. It was called Sixteen Candles: Jake Ryan hands his passed-out girlfriend to the Geek, he presumably drunkenly rapes her in the church parking lot in that Rolls Royce, the theater laughs, cue the birthday cake. GenX spent 40 years unlearning that scene. You just pitched the sequel and called it “oh, but I enjoy being admired.”

Because that’s the real kicker: Kelly framed all of this as protecting women. Calling Doe a victim, she said, is “disempowering to all of womankind… to our daughters.” I’m raising two daughters. Know what disempowers them? A millionaire with a microphone telling them their “yes” can be read off the size of their thighs.

A new, fake Daily Whatever poll finds 94% of women who’ve ever been called “beefy” would like a word, and the remaining 6% are currently lifting something heavy in Megyn’s general direction.

And the topper: Kelly said that if Jane Doe’s identity comes out, she’ll name her herself.

Jane Doe was 20. She said she was raped, and she was sure. Megyn Kelly answered with a review of her body and a promise to say her name out loud the second it leaks.

Some of us were never the pretty one.

All of us can see exactly who’s ugly here.

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Hi, I’m Dana — and I Write Out Loud

I Write Out Loud is my primary home for cultural memoir, personal essays, and live conversations about the strange, brave process of becoming yourself in midlife. If you like essays with a point of view and a pulse, you’ll find plenty to read there.

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Grand Island, Nebraska (The Daily Whatever Press)—Y’all, I’m so tired. But I couldn’t let Monday night end without reporting on the latest fucking disaster, this time out of freaking Nebraska, where the President of the United States offered up two American cities to Iran like he was splitting a fucking dinner check.

“They could take out a city,” Donald Trump told a rally crowd at the State Fairgrounds. “Let ‘em take out Los Angeles. Let ‘em take out San Diego.”

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The crowd cheered. Then Trump called it “a very small price to pay.”

A small price for what? Human decency? No—gas. He was talking about gas. He launched a war with Iran in February, Iran choked off the Strait of Hormuz, the price of filling up our tanks skyrocketed to high heaven, and his closing argument four weeks before the midterms is that pump prices are “just artificial”—and besides, think how much worse it would be if two California cities got vaporized. Which he then volunteered. Out loud. Into a microphone in front of the presidential seal.

Was he technically “calling on” Iran to do it? There’s a garbled thought in there somewhere, and that seemed to be the gist of it, especially as the intelligible words he uttered were “let ‘em.” That would be gross enough. But then the room heard permission and applauded him.

And that’s beyond gross. It’s fucking despicable. It’s obscene. It’s inhumane. We’re gonna need a bigger thesaurus, because I can’t find the words to capture the depravity of the goddamn President of this goddamn country calling for the goddamn destruction of two cities and then having thousands of other goddamn Americans applaud him.

God-fucking-damnit.

Here’s who lives in San Diego: the Navy. Naval Base San Diego, with Camp Pendleton right up the coast. The spouses and kids of the sailors and Marines currently fighting your war, you absolute ghoul. You offered up their zip codes for an applause line in an expo hall.

The rest of the speech? An executive order letting anybody fill up on red-dyed diesel—the untaxed stuff normally reserved for tractors—a promise that gas prices will drop so fast you’ll beg him to slow down, that “we’re kicking Iran’s ass,” and that the war was nearly done. Sure we are, and sure it is, Donald. No one with a stitch of sense believed you the first 40 times you said it. We sure as shit don’t believe it now.

Then the topper.

Gov. Jim Pillen inducted Trump as an admiral in the Nebraska Navy—an honorary fleet belonging to a state with no ocean. The man accepted a ceremonial naval commission from a landlocked state on the same evening he offered up the city that hosts the actual Pacific Fleet. I didn’t make that up. I couldn’t. It’s on tape.

(And yes, I can Google, so I know this is a tradition in Nebraska but I don’t care; it is still SO FUCKING ABSURD GIVE ME THIS MOMENT OF REVELING IN THE LUNACY OF IT ALL.)

Gavin Newsom called him “deranged and dangerous.” The White House didn’t bother to respond. I mean, why would they? They already know.

I have a list of grievances against every president of my lifetime, and it is long. But I grew up under Ronald Reagan—the guy whose finger on the button gave my whole generation nightmares—and even he stood up and said a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.

The floor used to be that the President of the United States didn’t root for American cities to get annihilated, not any of the cities, no matter how they voted. We had that baseline of civility and decency. We took it for granted. So now we want what, for Iran to nuke Los Angeles and San Diego? Like if that happened, would Trump and his MAGATs be on Team Iran? And my fellow Americans are okay with this??

Y’all, as mentioned at the start—I am so, so tired.

Can’t we agree other countries nuking our cities is a bad thing? And if we can’t—what does that leave us?

Gen X learned this lesson from a computer named Joshua in 1983: the only winning move is not to play.

Where’s Matthew Broderick when we need him?

Hi, I’m Dana. And I Write Out Loud.

I Write Out Loud is my primary home for cultural memoir, personal essays, and live conversations about the strange, brave process of becoming yourself in midlife. If you like essays with a point of view and a pulse, you’ll find plenty to read there.

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Yeah, us too. wrote the article below to address what we know, what we wish we knew, and what to look for. Then we had this conversation to bring the story to life.

We hope you find it helpful.

We’re not panicking. Concerned, but not panicking. More to come as this story unfolds…

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Thanks for stopping by!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every Friday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

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THE WEST WING ANNEX (FORMERLY THE FOX NEWS GREEN ROOM) (The Daily Whatever Press)—Karoline Leavitt, President Trump’s former press secretary who left the White House in August because Trump dumped her on a decoy plane to spend more time with her family, announced Monday that after eight weeks of deep personal reflection, her family is Fox News.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Karoline home,” I’d like to imagine a Fox News executive gushing, gesturing at a desk where her White House briefing binders had already been installed for reuse. “Honestly, she’s worked here since January 2025. Now we just get to pay her for it.”

Fox announced Monday that Leavitt starts as an on-air contributor on November 1, and Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott promised viewers “authentic and sharp insight,” which is a hell of a phrase to hang on a woman whose last job was turning “I’m not going to answer that” into a contact sport.

The timing is chef’s-kiss perfect. Roughly 24 hours before the announcement, her old boss was on Truth Social raging that Fox ignored his Ohio rally, calling whoever makes decisions there a “loser,” and declaring that “MAGA, and REAL Patriots, will never like Fox!” So she’s going to work for the loser. Sounds about right—she certainly has loads of career experience in working for losers.

Her own statement promises, “the unique perspective and candor that defined my tenure with the Trump administration.” Candor. From the press secretary. Somewhere in DC, a White House correspondent laughed so hard that Leavitt, out of pure muscle memory, blurted out, "Next question." Or he's weeping into his notebook of a year and a half of unanswered questions, which is now so waterlogged it legally counts as a wetland and this administration will have it opened for drilling by Friday.

Or both.

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Little Karoline’s dream comes true

Here’s the detail buried at the bottom of her bio: in college, Leavitt applied for an internship at Fox News. She didn’t land it. She ended up writing letters in the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence instead, and then took the scenic route—through the actual executive branch of the actual United States government—to the job she wanted at 21.

“We apologize for the delay,” reads the form letter Fox HR finally sent this week. “Your application has been accepted. Please report to Outnumbered.”

I made that up. The pipeline didn’t need me to.

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The conveyor belt nobody bothers to hide

Dana Perino went from George W. Bush’s podium to a Fox anchor desk. Kayleigh McEnany went from Trump’s podium to Fox in 2021 and now co-hosts Outnumbered and hosts Saturday in America. Sarah Huckabee Sanders went from the podium to a Fox contributor gig to the governor’s mansion in Arkansas. And the belt runs in both directions, because Pete Hegseth went from the Fox & Friends Weekend couch to running the Pentagon, and Sean Duffy went from Fox Business to the Department of Transportation.

It’s the “Hotel California” of employment, except the checkout desk is a makeup chair.

So why is the shitbag-to-broadcaster pipeline so fucking profitable, and so goddamn established that nobody even pretends to be surprised anymore? Follow the money, because it’s sitting right there in an SEC filing. Fox’s cable division, the one that houses Fox News, pulled in $7.35 billion in revenue last fiscal year and $3.10 billion in EBITDA. Distribution revenue went up thanks to contractual price increases, even as subscribers walked out the door.

Translation: the cable company pays Fox per household, the cable company passes that cost to your bill, and you fund the whole operation whether you’ve watched a minute of it or not.

Inside that model, a former press secretary is the perfect hire. Pre-trained. Pre-scripted. Zero onboarding. Fox doesn’t have to teach her the talking points, because she wrote the motherfucking talking points—then delivered them from a taxpayer-funded podium to an audience Fox was already monetizing.

Paddy Chayefsky wrote Network as a warning. Rupert read it as a pitch deck.

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Blame the ladder before the climber

Leavitt is 29 and climbing exactly the ladder that was built for her. MAGA Inc., the White House, back to MAGA Inc., now Fox: every rung is a different logo on the same paycheck, and every rung pays better than the one below it. The career path for stonewalling the press has never been clearer, more lucrative, or more openly advertised.

Here’s what that costs. The White House press secretary is paid by us to answer to us. The whole point of the briefing room is that the public gets to ask the most powerful office on earth what the hell it’s doing, and someone has to stand there and respond. When dodging that room becomes the audition for a cable contract, every ambitious 22-year-old in a political internship is watching today and learning exactly what the job is for.

Leavitt starts at Fox on November 1.

Set your DVRs. Or don’t—you’re paying for it either way.

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Hi, I’m Dana. And I Write Out Loud.

I Write Out Loud is my primary home for cultural memoir, personal essays, and live conversations about the strange, brave process of becoming yourself in midlife. If you like essays with a point of view and a pulse, you’ll find plenty to read there.

And if you enjoyed this story — why not buy me a coffee?☕
{Make mine a decaf iced oat milk mocha, please!}

Thanks for stopping by!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every Friday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

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WASHINGTON DC, U.S.A. (The Daily Whatever Press) — Every Gen Xer knows the first law of the mixtape: you make it for somebody else. You agonize over the track order, you hand-letter the J-card, you hand it over and hope. A mixtape you make for yourself, with somebody else’s money, is a cry for help with a cassette attached.

The president just made one for $20 million.

The Department of Homeland Security has tapped $20 million to pay for campaign-style ads glorifying President Donald Trump, with the contract going to a marketing firm called LMD Agency for a national media campaign. In the first ad, Trump urges Americans to defeat communism and brags about his economic record and personal resilience while a choir in the background sings “Love me.”

Seriously satire is dead, y’all. This shit writes itself and I’m just here to capture it.

The song is by JMSN, and his attorneys already send the White House a cease-and-desist letter. Because OF COURSE no one bothered to secure the rights for the song. Aside to JMSN: if you need money for legal costs, I’d donate to the GoFundMe in a half a second. We all would.

The second is a black-and-white spot closely resembling a 2024 Trump campaign video, in which Trump warns of a “final battle.” The third shows Mount Rushmore while Trump narrates about American exceptionalism. All three carry the disclaimer “Paid for by the U.S. Government” and have run during NFL and college football broadcasts.

So somewhere between third-and-long and a beer commercial, an 80-year-old man is asking America’s football fans to love him — then sending them the bill.

Every woman alive has dated this guy. He buys himself flowers on your credit card and calls it romance.

The money came from roughly $175 billion that the One Big Beautiful Bill gave DHS for immigration enforcement and deportation, and it was meant for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. House Democrats say OMB director Russ Vought moved it from Homeland Security into the ad campaign. That’s just a little weird, until you remember what else the Big Beautiful Bill did, which was cut Medicaid and food stamps, which means the same law that took health care and groceries away from millions of Americans also built the deportation fund that bought the president a choir. Oh. Oh no.

Then it’s not just weird — it’s despicable.

Meanwhile, Trump’s own political committee, MAGA Inc., is sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars that it could spend during the midterm season. He has his own a valentine budget. He just likes yours better. When my daughters want something they could pay for themselves, they at least ask first and look a little ashamed. The Lover-in-Chief skipped both steps.

The White House insists the spots are “educational and unapologetically patriotic.” Edu-fucking-cational. The only lesson on offer is that you can apparently launder a campaign ad through a border budget as long as it airs during a punt. Critics in both parties call the ads a blatant misuse of taxpayer dollars that likely violates the anti-propaganda law, and George W. Bush’s former White House ethics attorney Richard Painter even said it could be an impeachable offense.

As if impeachment even matters with this guy anymore.

Even some Republicans can see it. Thom Tillis — who announced his retirement last year after clashing with Trump over the megabill, and good for him — compared the ads to the ones Hungary’s authoritarian former leader Viktor Orbán used. It took a Republican with no reelection left to lose to speak up, so forgive me if he only gets minimal applause for finally growing something that resembles a spine. Then there’s Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who told reporters, “I like the message … but it shouldn’t be paid for with taxpayer dollars.”

Now it that’s not the entire modern GOP in one breath: love the song, hate the receipt, do absolutely fucking nothing about either.

My senator, Patty Murray, is at least doing something. She and Chris Murphy wrote to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and gave him 48 hours to explain how the president is “literally stealing their tax dollars” to air ads celebrating himself. I’ve enthusiastically voted for her year after year, and this is just one example of why.

AdImpact estimates more than $2.5 million went out the door in the first seven days. That leaves roughly $17.5 million of love in the tank, seven weeks before the midterms.

Cool, cool.

In 1989, Lloyd Dobler stood in the rain holding a boombox over his head for a girl who had just dumped him. It’s still the most desperate romantic gesture our generation ever produced, and he paid for the batteries himself.

Buy your own fucking batteries.

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Hi, I’m Dana. And I Write Out Loud.

I Write Out Loud is my primary home for cultural memoir, personal essays, and live conversations about the strange, brave process of becoming yourself in midlife. If you like essays with a point of view and a pulse, you’ll find plenty to read there.

And if you enjoyed this story — why not buy me a coffee?☕
{Make mine a decaf iced oat milk mocha, please!}

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Thanks for stopping by!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

Irkutsk, Siberia (The Daily Whatever Press)—I’m going to do something unusual here (for me) and try to play this one as straight as I can.

Annie Jacobsen is a science reporter, an investigative journalist, and an author. Several years ago, she published the best-selling Nuclear War: A Scenario. It was the inspiration for Kathryn Biglow’s Netflix hit: A House of Dynamite, showing the precariousness and the peril of our aging nuclear weapons fleet and the very many ways in which things could go wrong.

She followed it up several months ago with Biological War: A Scenario. I devoured the book the moment it came out. It’s my kind of thing. It’s educational, it’s deeply researched, and it’s full of facts. I learned things constantly; for example, the fact that the wild marmot population is apparently a really capable plague carrier and has been the bane of Siberian existence since time immemorial.

Also, the bubonic plague, if left to fester, can turn into the pneumonic plague, which is a highly transmissible version of plague, guaranteed to kill you if not treated with antibiotics within three days.

Also, this tidbit: the former USSR had a highly advanced biological weapons research program, which included creating a chimeric plague bacteria that makes the people who fall ill feel euphoric as they are most contagious, and they fused into it the genetic code for horse encephalitis so that the moment the plague is treated by antibiotics, it triggers a secret second disease making the cure worse than the disease.

You die from plague, infecting everyone around you, or you die from massive brain hemorrhaging. It’s two, two, two killers in one!

Part of what I love about Jacobsen’s work is that she wraps all the science and details around a fictionalized scenario. I say fictionalized because, even though the scenario she offers is not true in its whole, it is true in its parts. Everything she writes about in her fictional scenario has happened individually. The thing that makes the scenario plausible is that none of it is unrealistic. Every part of it has already happened, just piece by piece, not all at once.

What Margaret Atwood did for theocratic authoritarianism, Annie Jacobsen does for nuclear war and biological war.

See how calm I’m being?

My original paragraph was going to read like this: “Buckle the fuck up, because Russia just ran the opening chapter of Annie Jacobsen’s Biological War: A Scenario as a live table read, and the only thing missing was the part where somebody says the name of the disease.”

The current situation in Irkutsk

Almost none of what follows comes from anyone in charge. We learned about it on the internet.

On September 25, Daria Shipilova, a 28 year-old lab assistant at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute broke a test tube full of live bacteria. Oooops!

Anti-Plague. It’s right there on the building. The Soviets founded the place in 1934 for the single purpose of keeping Yersinia pestis inside the marmots of Siberia and out of the apartment blocks, and for ninety-two years it seemed to do that job well.

Four days after the accident, Shipilova was admitted to the district hospital in Shelekhov, a few miles down the road, where doctors diagnosed her with “severe pneumonia”—which is exactly how pneumonic plague presents. She died on Thursday, October 1.

The public found out on Friday, from a regional website and a Telegram channel, which is to say, basically the same way you find out your ex got re-married.

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The word they won’t say

Governor Igor Kobzev went in front of the cameras and announced “a full range of anti-epidemic measures” against what he called “a particularly dangerous infection.” He has still not said plague. His colleague next door in Buryatia, Alexey Tsydenov, posted that she died of plague, and then, presumably after a phone call from the Kremlin that made his ear sweat and fall off, he edited the post to say she “may have.” A man edited the bubonic fucking plague into a maybe.

Picture the meeting. “Igor, the lab with PLAGUE on the sign had an accident.” “What kind of accident?” “A plague kind.” “Call it a particularly dangerous infection.” “Sir, the sign.” “The sign is not a doctor!”

The numbers so far (if they’re telling the truth)

One hundred ninety-seven contacts. One hundred eighty-nine of them under observation, more than a hundred in hospital beds. At least one district hospital sealed, no one in, no one out. No uses of the six-letter word by anyone with a title.

And, wouldn’t you know it, one criminal case reportedly opened, under the article for sanitary violations causing death, into the technician, and not the institute, or into the protocol that put a live culture in a glass tube in a twenty-eight-year-old’s hands. The dead woman. Ambulances in Shelekhov, according to local reports, now roll with an FSB (the rebranded KGB) escort, because the thing you want most during a plague scare is for the paramedics to feel spied upon.

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The good news, which is real

As far as we can tell, the bug is ordinary, “normal” plague, and not an engineered chimera bacteria. That’s insanely good news. Wild plague has been curable since streptomycin showed up in the forties, and every one of those contacts is almost certainly swallowing handfuls doxycycline right now.

Kobzev says they’re testing negative. If that’s true, and if it holds, Daria will be the only grave, and I hope for that ending with everything I’ve got. A twenty-eight-year-old is dead because somebody’s safety culture was a laminated poster and maybe nothing else.

But look at what failed first. Not the antibiotics. Not the lab. The telling. Six days of silence, a euphemism, a deleted post, a cop car behind the ambulance. Jacobsen’s whole book is about what happens when a pathogen gets a head start because the people holding it would rather protect the regime or the building than inform the town, and Russia just demonstrated that the head start comes standard, no superweapon required.

Our biggest hope is that what was in Daria’s tube was plain, ol’ normal plague.

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Meanwhile, back at the ranch

A lab accident at a Siberian plague institute used to be the kind of thing the United States noticed on purpose. We had people for it. The global health security team at USAID, which Trump and Elon and DOGE dissolved. The surveillance networks we ran through the World Health Organization, which we finished walking out of in January, owing it $287 million on the way to the door. The disease detectives at CDC, fired on a Friday and un-fired on a Monday because of “a glitch in the system.” Remember that?

We learned about Irkutsk from a Siberian blog and a governor’s typo, which is exactly how Jacobsen says we’ll learn about the next one, and America under Trump and RFK Jr. just spent the whole year making sure of it.

Russia built a building that says ANTI-PLAGUE and then wouldn’t say plague. America had the people who would have said it and fired them to save money. Pick your idiot. But handy tip, pick your idiot while you’re at Costco stocking up on water and freeze-dried meals and antibiotics, just in case.

Let me drop the volume for a second. Somewhere in Shelekhov there is a hospital full of nurses who found out from the news what they had been breathing for a week. They are the ones who always find out last, in every country, in every scenario, in every chapter Jacobsen wrote.

I’m not saying we won’t make it to the Midterm Elections. But I am saying that Annie Jacobsen’s book did a damn fine job of postulating a doomsday scenario that just might be coming true in Siberian hospitals right now.

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We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every Friday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

A Smoke-Filled Back Room (The Daily Whatever Press)—Sam Alito told CBS News that he thought about retiring this year, decided to stick around for another term, and will keep thinking about it “every term.” Then the man who wrote Dobbs said the quiet part out loud: “It’s too hard to predict what the political situation will be and what any president might do with respect to a replacement.” Ahhhhh, here we go…

A Supreme Court justice who swears he’s above politics just admitted he’s reading the polls like a fucking bookie. That one sentence is the whole shitshow. And if Democrats take back the Senate on November 3, the Republican Party has already shown us exactly what it will do with the eight weeks it has left.

The Door Alito Left Open

Start with the math. Republicans hold the Senate 53 to 47. Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take it back. If they pull that off, the new Senate doesn’t show up for work until January 3, 2027. Donald Trump is still president until January 2029.

That gap is the whole ballgame. If Alito retires after a Democratic Senate is sworn in, Trump can nominate whoever he wants, and a Democratic majority can do to that nominee exactly what Mitch McConnell did to Merrick Garland. But if Alito announces his retirement after the election and before January 3, the old Republican majority is still in charge, and a beaten party gets one last shot to lock in a seat for thirty years.

That stretch between Election Day and the new Congress is called the lame duck. It’s when the people voters just fired keep their keys to the building. And this lame duck runs from November 4 to January 3. Eight weeks. Mark it on your calendar like it’s a court date, because it’s the next big thing to watch.

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The Garland Rule (Void Where Inconvenient)

Anyone who thinks Republicans wouldn’t dare should remember 2016. Antonin Scalia died in February of that year. Within hours, McConnell announced that “the American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” so the seat should wait for the next president. Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland in March. Garland waited 293 days. He never got a hearing. He never got a vote. Senate Republicans sat on that seat like a goddamn dragon on a pile of stolen gold until Trump took office and handed it to Neil Gorsuch.

Lindsey Graham, meanwhile, went on the record that year and said, “I want you to use my words against me.” If a vacancy came up in the last year of a Republican president’s term, he said, let the next president fill it.

In 2020, a vacancy came up in the last year of a Republican president’s term. Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18. Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed on October 26, eight days before Election Day, while millions of Americans had already voted. Graham ran her confirmation hearings himself. The American people’s precious “voice” lasted exactly as long as it was useful, and not one fucking minute longer.

So the Garland rule was never a rule. It was bullshit with a press release. When Republicans control the Senate and the White House, the seat gets filled at warp speed. When they don’t, it gets stolen. The only principle is power, and these shameless motherfuckers will look you dead in the eye while they swear otherwise.

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The Eight-Week Window

Here’s what makes the lame-duck play so dangerous: Republicans don’t need a single Democratic vote. In 2017, McConnell killed the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees so Gorsuch could get through with a simple majority. Fifty-one votes, or fifty plus J.D. Vance, and the seat is theirs.

And they don’t need much time, either. Barrett went from nomination to confirmation in about a month. The lame duck gives them roughly two months. That’s twice the runway they needed last time, with enough left over for an office Christmas party and a smug fucking toast.

They’ve already picked out the curtains. In April, Majority Leader John Thune said that if a vacancy happened, “we would be prepared to confirm.” Chuck Grassley, the ninety-something Judiciary Committee chairman who has outlived several presidents, said he’d suggest Mike Lee or Ted Cruz for the job. Both are in their mid-fifties. Either one could sit on the Court until the 2050s. Picture Ted Cruz deciding your rights until your grandkids are old enough to vote. That’s not a crazy nightmare…that could be our reality in two fucking months.

And nobody has to announce a damn thing ahead of time. Alito can keep “thinking about it every term,” let the election happen, and drop the retirement letter on November 4 like a Black Friday doorbuster. That’s the same playbook they already ran twice, with the dates swapped to the 2026 calendar.

It’s Lucy and the football, except Lucy has a lifetime appointment, a book tour, and a Senate majority holding the ball. Democrats run up to kick. The country votes for change. And then the same people the voters just booted out of power grab the one prize that lasts longer than any election, and we’re all fucked, forever.

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Win Big, Then Watch Closely

None of this means the election doesn’t matter. It means the election is the first half of the fight, not the whole fight. A Democratic Senate stops the next Garland-style theft cold. It just can’t stop anything until January 3.

So Democrats in the Senate need to say it now, loudly, before November 3: a lame-duck Supreme Court confirmation would be an illegitimate seizure of a seat by a majority the voters just rejected. Every Republican Senate candidate should have to answer one question on camera: Will you vote to confirm a Supreme Court justice after you’ve lost your majority? Make the cowards say yes. Make them say it out loud. Then make them own it.

Because this isn’t paranoia. Paranoia is when you imagine a threat. This one comes with receipts, a timeline, and two names already floated by the Judiciary Committee chairman, and all of us perfectly able to imagine the assholes running this exact play, because we’ve seen it before.

Win on November 3. Then watch November 4 like your rights depend on it. Because as always under this MAGA Nazi extremist regime, the most certainly do.

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We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every Friday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

ITHACA, N.Y. (The Daily Whatever Press) — I was editor-in-chief of my high school paper, and the toughest battle I fought there was over a headline. We’d written a feature about Chris Jones, a junior who was a phenomenal debater, and wanted to run “Chris Jones Master Debater” as the headline. Our advisor refused. We negotiated and eventually he relented and approved our use of “Chris Jones: Masters Debate.” Or maybe it was the other way around. I’ve been an adult for a long time now, and I still can’t tell you why one of those was acceptable and the other wasn’t.

That was my hill.

The editors of The Cornell Daily Sun picked a much, much bigger one.

Last month, according to Editor-in-Chief Sophia Dasser, the paper’s lawyer looked at their plan to print the names of seven fraternity men accused of gang rape and called it “kind of a risk.”

Dasser and team printed the names anyway, in a red box on the front page, under a headline Dasser came up with during her constitutional law class: “Cornell Won’t, We Will.”

Somewhere, Ben Bradlee is lighting a cigarette.

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Give these warriors all the flowers they’re due and maybe a Pulitzer, too.

The least I can do is echo what they did, so here are the names, as the Sun ran them: Matthew Ingalls. Johnathan Newell. Winston Lee. Gillio Lopes. Diego Sarabia. Scott Norris. Scott Kretzschmar.

All seven are defendants in a civil lawsuit filed in September by a former Cornell student who says they drugged and gang-raped her at the Chi Phi house in October 2024. None of them has been criminally charged. The district attorney previously found insufficient evidence but now plans to take the case to a grand jury. Kretzschmar’s lawyer told the Sun, “We wholeheartedly deny the allegations in the complaint against Scott Kretzschmar.” The Sun couldn’t reach the others for comment.

Cornell knew about all of this. It ran its own investigation, decided what it decided behind closed doors, and moved on. The Sun broke the lawsuit story on September 21, and it could only do that because one of its reporters had refused to let it go for nearly two years.

That reporter is Cereese Qusba, a 22-year-old senior. She started chasing the story in November 2024, when a campus sexual assault alert went out and she decided it deserved more than an alert. She spent 23 months on it. She earned the trust of the woman at the center of the case and her lawyer. She sat across from administrators and asked how they discipline students accused of assault. When she left to study abroad in Sydney, she called the incoming editor-in-chief from the other side of the planet to make sure the story stayed alive while she was gone.

23 months. Nearly half her college career spent in pursuit of the truth.

Then came the part I’ll be telling my daughters about. On September 19, the Sun was celebrating its 146th birthday. In the middle of the party, Dasser asked the room: “Can we just put the names on the front page of the paper?”

That’s what a newsroom sounds like when it works.

Someone asks the scary question, and the room answers it instead of tabling it until next semester. They called the lawyer. They heard the risk. They weighed it against the alternative, which was letting Cornell’s silence stand as the final word. “Our main obligation is accountability,” Dasser said. I’ve watched grown media executives with corner offices fail that test faster than you can rewind a VHS tape.

Dasser didn’t make the call alone, either. She signed the editorial alongside Associate Editor Sophia Romanov Imber ’28 and Opinion Editors Zara Cheek ’28 and Rayen Zhou ’29.

On September 18, 2026, they shipped that story. Four bylines, four names on the line, and every one of them still had a transcript, a GPA, and three more semesters at the school they had just called out by name.

I’m in awe of their audacity.

Just look at what they were up against. Cornell sent its Vice President for University Relations to say the university takes sexual violence “extremely seriously,” then explain that federal privacy law kept it from saying much else. One side had a crisis-communications apparatus and a privacy shield. The other side had an off-campus office (the Sun keeps its headquarters off university property to stay independent), a staff so bleary-eyed that week that at least one reporter skipped class to get the paper out, and the nerve to do the damn job anyway.

Then the dominoes started falling. The district attorney reopened the criminal case. Governor Hochul announced that Cornell has agreed to an independent review. Chuck Schumer wants an exhaustive investigation. Letitia James’s office took over the case. None of it happened during the two years Cornell spent taking things “extremely seriously.” All of it happened within two weeks of a student newspaper hitting publish.

And then the part that should keep every administrator in Day Hall up at night: Dasser’s and Qusba’s inboxes filled with emails from other students describing their own assaults and their own Title IX dead ends. One front page story, and suddenly a whole campus realized there was somebody who’d listen.

I’m raising two daughters who will walk into institutions that promise to take them extremely seriously. What I want them to know is: sometimes the cavalry shows up in a hoodie with a reporter’s notebook and a lawyer saying “kind of a risk.”

Cornell wouldn’t take it. So they did.

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Hi, I’m Dana. And I Write Out Loud.

I Write Out Loud is my primary home for cultural memoir, personal essays, and live conversations about the strange, brave process of becoming yourself in midlife. If you like essays with a point of view and a pulse, you’ll find plenty to read there.

And if you enjoyed this story — why not buy me a coffee?☕
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We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

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This week’s Fucked Up Friday had a common thread, and Libbie Grant named it before the vote: “It’s all misogyny, man.” Dana brought the Cornell 7 case, now in Letitia James’s hands, and one line from Jane Doe that explains why survivors blame themselves first. Libbie, whose new novel The Ended World imagines an AI waking up, brought the developer who built an AI “torture chamber” on GitHub. I brought Angel, the thirteen-year-old who argued his own deportation case alone.

In the room, it gets raw fast. Dana takes apart the right’s favorite talking point—why did she act friendly afterward?—with the answer every woman already knows: we’re trained to blame ourselves. The room goes incandescent over Angel’s judge, and the chat starts crying. Then Libbie, a self-described stoner optimist, makes the case that we are going to come out the other side of this.

• [27:41] Dana reads the line from the New York Times that shows the moment Jane Doe first understood what had been done to her, a week after the party, in an anonymous Greek-life forum.

• [30:27] Lawrence on Julie Roginsky’s Lift Our Voices and its AI tool built to read your NDA and find the ways out, plus the New York push that could carry an NDA ban nationwide.

• [36:42] Libbie on the developer who built an AI “torture chamber,” and the question nobody wants to answer: why someone’s first move with a thing that might suffer is to hurt it.

• [40:46] Lawrence’s story: a thirteen-year-old named Angel, a Texas immigration judge, and a choice no child should ever be handed.

• [50:33] The vote. The chat picks the most fucked up story of the week, and everybody loses.

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We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every Friday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

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Of Course It’s Motherfucking Texas (The Daily Whatever Press)—On Monday, in an American courtroom, a thirteen-year-old boy had to be his own fucking lawyer, and Donald Trump’s government planned it that way.

His name is Angel. He’s from Honduras. He stood before a federal immigration judge in Harlingen, Texas, with no lawyer, no advocate, and no adult in his corner, and argued that he should be allowed to stay in the country where his mother lives. Across the room sat the government’s lawyer, because the government always brings one. That’s the matchup Trump built: a trained federal attorney on one side, a middle schooler on the other, and a judge in between keeping score.

Choose Your Own Deportation

Angel told the judge his mom and almost his entire family are here, and that Honduras isn’t safe for him. The judge wasn’t persuaded and offered him a choice: “Would you like to request voluntary departure, or should I issue a removal order?”

Hahahaha. Wut?

Gen X will recognize the format. It’s a Choose Your Own Adventure book where every page ends with you on a plane being deported away from everyone you love. Voluntary departure means leaving on your own, with no formal deportation on your record. A removal order is an official deportation, and it generally bars you from coming back for ten years. Grown adults with law degrees agonize over that call. Angel got it as a pop quiz. If it pleases the court, may I remind you that Angel is THIRTEEN goddamned years old?

He started crying. “I have no one,” he said. “I have nothing.” The judge ordered him deported and gave him a deadline to appeal—which he also gets to do by himself, because apparently the paperwork is the hardest homework any eighth-grader has ever been assigned which is part of the punishment.

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Why a Kid Has to Be His Own Lawyer

Most Americans assume everyone in court gets a lawyer. That idea comes from Gideon v. Wainwright, the 1963 Supreme Court case that guaranteed a free lawyer to anyone charged with a crime who can’t afford one. Clarence Earl Gideon, a drifter accused of breaking into a Florida pool hall, got one. But Gideon covers criminal court. Immigration court is civil court, so the right doesn’t apply—not to adults, and not to children. Courts have not forced the government to provide one, even for kids.

Congress saw that hole and tried to patch it. In 2008, a bipartisan anti-trafficking law signed by George W. Bush told the Department of Health and Human Services, which takes custody of children who cross the border alone, to make sure those kids have lawyers “to the greatest extent practicable.” Pure Schoolhouse Rock: a bill became a law, and the law said help the children.

For years, that help came through a federal contract with a nonprofit called the Acacia Center for Justice—two hundred million dollars a year, paying about a hundred legal groups to represent more than twenty thousand children.

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How to Kill a Law Without Repealing It

Trump’s people hated that contract on sight. In February 2025, they ordered the lawyers to stop working, then reversed themselves three days later when the public lost its shit. In March, they cut off nearly all the legal services. A federal judge blocked that in April.

So they did the chickenshit thing and waited. When the Acacia contract expired in July 2026, they let it die and replaced it with an emergency contract worth up to twenty million dollars. One-tenth of the money! Same kids. Picture a deputy assistant somewhere at HHS clicking to a slide titled “Efficiencies: $180 Million Saved” while the room politely applauds. (That’s a bit. The math isn’t.)

The results landed in Harlingen. CNN counted twenty-five children in that courtroom. Fifteen had no lawyer. Children as young as two and three now face immigration judges this way. Two. Fucking. Years. Old. Kids who can’t tie their shoes are expected to go toe-to-toe with federal government lawyers.

When I was two I thought my magic blankie was ACTUALLY MAGIC.

This is a policy, not an accident, and the numbers prove it. According to Americans for Immigrant Justice, nine out of ten children without a lawyer get ordered deported, while kids with lawyers are five times more likely to win protection. Trump’s people know those numbers. That’s the whole goddamn point. They didn’t repeal the 2008 law. They didn’t win a vote. They took the lawyers away and let the children lose. Deportation by budget line.

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The “Intends” Defense

And now the bullshit cherry on top. An HHS spokesperson says the refugee office “intends every child in its custody to have counsel.”

Intends. Trump’s HHS cut the money that pays for those lawyers, and now it wants credit for its intentions. That’s an arsonist calling a press conference to announce he intends for your house to stay cozy. This year’s Golden Gaslight Award goes to that sentence, and it isn’t close. Take a bow, you cowards.

In 1963, the United States decided that a drifter accused of breaking into a pool hall deserved a lawyer. In 2026, a thirteen-year-old facing exile from his own mother got a choice between two ways out of the country.

Angel told the judge he has no one. Trump’s government spent almost two years making sure he was right.

Thanks for reading!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every Friday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

PORTLAND AVENUE, MINNEAPOLIS (The Daily Whatever Press)—On January 7, Renee Good dropped her 6-year-old off at school, got back in her Honda Pilot, saw federal agents rolling up on her neighbors, and did what every mom in every drop-off line in America has done at least once: she leaned on the horn.

Then a goddamn ICE agent shot her in the head.

She was 37, a mother of three. Her partner, Becca, was filming. According to the family’s lawsuits, Renee had turned her wheels away from Agent Jonathan Ross and was easing forward slowly when he opened fire. We’ve all watched the video that supports this claim.

A woman, an SUV, and a car horn. That was the threat to national security.

Nine months later, her family is suing, and the way they’re doing it is the best news I’ve read all year—which is a sad fucking sentence to type, but here we are.

The first suit, filed under the Federal Tort Claims Act, is the one you’d expect: wrongful death, battery, assault, false imprisonment, negligence, and emotional distress for Becca, who watched the person she loved die in the driver’s seat.

The second suit. Holy shitballs. The family’s lawyers dusted off the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871—a Reconstruction-era law written to go after organized campaigns of terror—and pointed it straight at the federal government. Their argument is that Renee’s death was exactly what Operation Metro Surge was built to produce: a coordinated effort to target Somali and Hispanic Minnesotans and to shut up anyone who watched, documented, or warned.

People like a mom with a horn.

Somewhere, Ulysses S. Grant is slow-clapping from the afterlife.

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Ross is named, obviously. But so is former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. And White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. And former Border Patrol Commander at Large Gregory Bovino, former acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, border czar Tom Homan, Corey Lewandowski, and 10 John Doe agents. The family is going for it and I am so here for it.

As family attorney Ben Berkman put it, the case “reaches every official who put him on the street that day.”

That’s the whole move, and it’s glorious.

When my daughters were little and one shoved the other off the swing, I didn’t only talk to the shover. I talked to whoever was standing behind her whispering do it. Every mom on earth understands accountability better than the Department of Homeland Security, and this lawsuit is the first time in months I’ve watched someone hand them the parenting manual.

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White House spokesperson Lauren Bis says the administration will “vigorously defend these baseless civil lawsuits.”

Baseless. A woman is dead on a residential street in south Minneapolis. There’s video. There’s a witness who loved her. There’s a bullet—multiple bullets; the three that killed her and a fourth that grazed her, to be precise. The base is right fucking there.

And Renee isn’t the only name. Alex Pretti was killed by DHS agents in January, too. In March, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office and two state agencies had to sue the federal government just to see the evidence in both deaths. Renee’s brother, Brent Ganger, said that since she died, nothing meaningful has changed.

Bull. Fucking. Shit. Not his statement—the fact that it’s true.

Women have always been the neighborhood’s early-warning system: the phone tree, the porch light, the PTA email chain, the casserole that shows up before you’ve told anyone. Renee ran the 2026 version. She saw danger heading for her neighbors and made noise. That’s what we raise our daughters to do. If something’s wrong, be loud.

An agent of the United States answered that noise with bullets, and then the government called her family’s grief baseless.

So fuck that. And fuck every official on that cast list who figured the paperwork would never find them.

Becca Good spoke publicly for the first time on Thursday. “We were all robbed,” she said. They truly were. I have no words strong enough to express how deeply sorry I am to them.

Instead, I will cheer on the way this courageous family is honking back—in federal court, with a 155-year-old law written for exactly this kind of terror.

Lean on it.

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Hi, I’m Dana. And I Write Out Loud.

I Write Out Loud is my primary home for cultural memoir, personal essays, and live conversations about the strange, brave process of becoming yourself in midlife. If you like essays with a point of view and a pulse, you’ll find plenty to read there.

And if you enjoyed this story — why not buy me a coffee?☕
{Make mine a decaf iced oat milk mocha, please!}

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Thanks for reading!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

CORPORATE AMERICA, EVERYWHERE USA (The Daily Whatever Press) — Members of Generation X learned this week that Millennials and GenZ are fighting over who gets to have jobs and who should be forced to give them up and retire, as if that’s a thing people still get to do. GenX had not been invited, consulted, or apparently counted among the living or employed.

“We’re right here,” said a 54-year-old woman holding a printout of her bleak AF 401(k) balance. “We have been right fucking here the whole time.”

GenX was never invited to the retirement party, and also — there is no party.

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Here’s what happened: earlier this month, a GenZ TikToker posted a video telling Millennials, “Y’all need to retire so we can have some jobs open for us.” It has since been deleted. Millennials responded the way people raised on AIM away messages respond to everything, which is with a bit. One creator said Millennials have 68 people sharing a single streaming password, so retirement isn’t exactly on deck. A 44-year-old TikToker said she’d leave tomorrow if someone could tell her how to pay for it.

VICE wrote it up. Everybody had a great time.

GenX shows up in that coverage exactly once. It’s a single embedded TikTok from a guy pointing out that GenX had been forgotten, again. So the only mention of GenX in a story about generations fighting over jobs is a clip of a man saying GenX isn’t mentioned. You could not write this timeline, and I write not-quite-fake news for a living, or at least, a side-hustle. Because GenX needs those, too.

It’s Ferris Bueller, except Ben Stein reads the attendance sheet from Boomers straight to Millennials and never even says our name. Bueller?

No. He skips the whole row.

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GenX is now somewhere between 46 and 61 years old, and we’re the first generation that was expected to retire on a 401(k). Our parents got pensions. We got a login, a pamphlet about index funds, and a guy named Chad from benefits who said the market “always comes back.” Then the dot-com bubble burst, then 2008 happened, then a pandemic happened, and Chad probably got promoted.

In 2023 the National Institute on Retirement Security published a major study on how GenX is doing. They titled it “New Report Finds Alarming Retirement Outlook for Generation X.” No shit, we all muttered in unison. No one listened. The study found the typical GenX household had $40,000 in retirement savings. The median for GenX women was $6,000.

Six. Thousand. Dollars. That’s a used Honda Civic with a check-engine light and freaking cassette deck. That’s what a generation of women got for doing the part-time-work-plus-all-the-caregiving shuffle the system was built to extract from us for free. We raised the kids. Now we’re managing our parents’ Medicare paperwork.

And somehow our average retirement plan is a four-digit number.

This year, 49% of GenXers said they think they’ll be financially prepared for retirement. That’s the lowest of any generation, below GenZ, who have barely started. Totally tubular, amirite?

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To the 23-year-old with 300 applications out: you have every right to be pissed. You’re just pissed at the wrong people.

Revelio Labs, a workforce data firm, found that the average age of a new hire rose sharply after 2022 and passed 42 by 2025. Over the same stretch, the share of new hires under 25 dropped from about 16% to single digits. Meanwhile, the share of people 65 and older starting new jobs shot up. Grandpa did not retire. Grandpa un-retired and took the sales job. And Stanford researchers found that employment for 22- to 25-year-olds in AI-exposed fields like software and customer service sits about 19% below where it would’ve been.

Here’s a memo I found in a corporate break room:

“Per our refreshed talent strategy, we will hire zero (0) 23-year-olds this fiscal year. The 38-year-old’s role will transition to an AI agent named Kyle. The 54-year-old will train Kyle, and then RIFed. She will not be thanked. Pizza Friday is canceled.”

I made that memo up. But ask anyone over 45 with a corporate badge how made-up it feels.

The villain in this story isn’t a Millennial hogging a cubicle. It’s the company upstairs that worked out it can skip hiring both of you, once the woman in her 50s has documented every process in a Confluence page nobody will read.

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On the same site, in the same week, VICE published a piece called “Every Millennial Will Remember These 3 Alternative Rock Hits From 1999.” It ran with a photo of the Foo Fighters.

Dave Grohl was born in 1969. He was in Nirvana. He is one of ours. Down the same sidebar there’s a piece on Kathleen Hanna’s favorite albums. Kathleen Hanna, born 1968, invented half the reasons I’m the mouthy feminist killjoy I am.

So let me get the custody arrangement straight. Millennials get our music. GenZ gets our jobs, or would if anyone were hiring. Boomers get to retire, mostly. And GenX gets to be the one generation that both younger groups forget exists, while they argue over the stuff we made.

I spent the early 2000s running a Seattle music website. You can have my job, sweetie. You cannot have Kathleen Hanna. Dave Grohl? Eh, these days he’s still ick.

But you can’t take Nirvana away from us.

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The thing that kills me is that GenX already lived through a youth jobs crisis. It was the early ’90s. Douglas Coupland named the dead-end low-wage gig a “McJob.” Winona Ryder spent all of Reality Bites getting turned down for jobs she was overqualified for while we all thought greasy-haired Ethan Hawke was hot when it fact he was tedious and horrible. We graduated into a recession, got told we were slackers, and then built the internet. You’re welcome.

Nobody retired to make room for us, either. We just got older and waited for the line to move, and it never did. We hit the front and found out the counter had been turned into a self-checkout.

I’m raising two GenZ daughters. I’d give either of them my desk tomorrow, ergonomic chair and all, if retiring didn’t mean living in a 2004 Subaru with a 401(k) worth about as much as said Subaru.

So here’s what I’d suggest instead of a generational cage match. The 23-year-old, the 38-year-old, and the 54-year-old should stop fighting over the same three jobs and go upstairs together. The people up there have spent 40 years turning pensions into pamphlets, entry-level jobs into chatbots, and retirement into a vibe. That’s who owes all of us an answer.

Bueller? Bueller?

Here. Still fucking here.

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Hi, I’m Dana. And I Write Out Loud.

I Write Out Loud is my primary home for cultural memoir, personal essays, and live conversations about the strange, brave process of becoming yourself in midlife. If you like essays with a point of view and a pulse, you’ll find plenty to read there.

And if you enjoyed this story — why not buy me a coffee?☕
{Make mine a decaf iced oat milk mocha, please!}

Thanks for reading!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

Subscribe now

ITHACA, N.Y. (The Daily Whatever Press) — Yessssssss! This just in, Letitia James is taking over The Cornell 7 case! New York’s attorney general, the woman who spent years dragging Donald Trump’s business empire into court, has been named special prosecutor in the alleged 2024 gang rape at Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity house, and the DA she’s replacing would very much like you to know he is a man of evidence, not emotion.

Sure thing, dude. You never went out and, you know, collected the evidence.

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Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the executive order Thursday night, saying she’d lost faith in the local investigation, including Tompkins County DA Matthew Van Houten. So James now owns the case. Translated from Albany: Matt, leave the badge on the desk. No, you can’t keep the mug. The grown-ups are driving now.

Quick refresher. In October 2024, Jane Doe says she was drugged and raped by seven men at the Chi Phi house. Her civil lawsuit says that around 1:42am, a brother posted to the frat’s Snapchat group chat that there was a woman upstairs available for sex. No, that’s too calm. The post read: “Free pussy.” A follow-up asked: “Store still open?” That chat had 57 members, and not one of them intervened.

Attorneys for two of the men deny the allegations. Nobody was charged.

How does a case like that end with zero charges? Editing. Jane Doe told Cornell police she could say with 100% confidence she was raped, according to the interview transcript CBS reported this week. That sentence never made it into the six-page statement campus cops handed the DA.

I have line-edited a lot of essays in my life. I have never once cut the thesis.

Van Houten passed without independently investigating anything. Then the lawsuit dropped, and he went on offense, releasing chunks of her statement to the press, including a bit about her “drunken curiousness,” and declaring that prosecutions must be based on “evidence and not emotion.”

Bull. Fucking. Shit.

Back in 2024, Cornell police sent his office a Snapchat screenshot. He had receipts from that night in his hands, and he went with drunken curiousness? Get outta here with that nonsense.

Cornell, meanwhile, issued a statement supporting the DA when he reopened the case last week, then another supporting the governor when she took it away from him. Cornell supports everything. I suppose Cornell would co-sign a ransom note if the font was nice.

Look, I’m a mom of two girls. When a woman says something happened to her, the question is whether anyone in the system bothers to look. For two years, nobody did. Now it’s Letitia James’s case, and she doesn’t strike me as someone who skips page one.

Evidence, not emotion. She’ll start with the transcript, Matt.

I, for one, cannot wait.

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More about The Cornell 7:

Hi, I’m Dana. And I Write Out Loud.

I Write Out Loud is my primary home for cultural memoir, personal essays, and live conversations about the strange, brave process of becoming yourself in midlife. If you like essays with a point of view and a pulse, you’ll find plenty to read there.

And if you enjoyed this story — why not buy me a coffee?☕
{Make mine a decaf iced oat milk mocha, please!}

Thanks for reading!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

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September 2026 was a month in which we investigated rape, food safety, college parents, dating apps, GenX unemployment, presidential election threats, halal cheese, tainted beef, hairy legs, incest, fake moms, and a 78-year-old rock star yelling at Taylor Swift.

So, basically, a quiet month.

Here’s what we published while the world continued to behave completely normally…

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The South Park Guy Just Put the Cornell 7 on Blast

The Cornell 7 story escalates and now the guy behind South Park says he has names, photos, and documents, which means approximately seven men—and soon hopefully another 50 more—are having a very bad fucking week.

Cornell Gave Gang Rapists a Writing Assignment. Now Ithaca Is Grading Cornell, and It’s Getting an F.

Cornell’s response to an alleged gang-rape case involved essays, Ithaca got involved, and suddenly the Ivy League had its own homework assignment.

Cornell Punished Gang Rape* with a WRITING ASSIGNMENT, and I’m Screaming Into My Composition Notebook

A lawsuit revealed that some of The Cornell 7 accused rapists were allowed to mitigate their conduct with essays, because apparently “write about what you learned” is now part of the criminal disciplinary process.

Todd Rundgren Thinks Taylor Swift Ruined Music. Todd, You Okay?

Todd Rundgren looked at the biggest pop star on the planet and apparently decided the problem with music is her… hair? Big talk from a man who released his last great record in 1978.

The Right Just Discovered Tillamook’s Halal Cheese. They’re About 10 Years Late.

Tillamook changed its cheese-making enzyme in 2016, the resulting cheese happened to be halal, and the right-wing internet has apparently just discovered this shocking development eight years late.

Maryland Found Lead in Your Cinnamon. RFK Jr. Is Out Chasing Chemtrails.

A state health department found lead in recalled cinnamon while federal food-safety staffing was being cut—just in time for fall baking season, too!

The FBI Would Like ICE to Know the Tradwife on Hinge Might Be a Trap

The FBI warned that immigration agents could be targeted by women pretending to be tradwives on dating apps, proving once again that the dating-app ecosystem is indistinguishable from counterintelligence.

Clavicular Charged With Rape; Podcast Industry Stunned to Learn Bone-Smasher Was Bad Person

A 20-year-old looksmaxxing influencer was charged with rape after spending September appearing on podcasts, raising the timeless question: perhaps Google your guest before handing him a microphone?

Hey Ladies! Your Doctor Is Letting You Get Septic Over a $30 Cream

Women with recurrent UTIs are still routinely denied vaginal estrogen despite evidence supporting its use, because apparently “aging” is easier for medicine to prescribe than actually, you know, treating women.

Trump Banned CNN and Broke His Own D@#n Press Pool

Trump banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House, and then the press pool basically said, “Cool, then nobody’s playing.”

LinkedIn Has Become a Dating App Because Apparently Hinge Was Too Horny

Americans have apparently decided that LinkedIn is an acceptable place to find romance, because nothing says sexual tension like “Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships.”

Florida Mom Says She Had Sex With Her Son “Only About 100 Times,” Which Is Not How “Only” Works

A domestic-violence call led investigators to an alleged mother-son sexual relationship, a husband with questions, and one truly catastrophic use of the word “only.”

Parents Are Paying $10,000 a Year for a Fake College Mom

College parents are now paying thousands of dollars for professional strangers to swoop in and mother their adult children. Parents, DO NOT DO THIS TO YOUR ADULT CHILD.

Trump Has Supporters Pledge Allegiance to Cheating. Literally.

Trump had supporters raise their hands and pledge loyalty to him while promising to “cheat like hell” in elections, which is one way to make a campaign rally sound like a deposition.

What She’s Learned About Grift

As Erika Kirk stepped into leadership at Turning Point after her husband’s death, the organization experienced a massive surge in attention, money, and new chapter requests—and we took a very close look at the business of grief.

Trump Was Asked If He’d Interfere With the Midterms. He Didn’t Say No.

Asked whether he would declare a national emergency and interfere with the 2026 midterms, Trump answered, “Stranger things have happened,” which is technically a sentence and emphatically not the answer anyone wanted.

Thirteen Men Walk Into a Rape Trial. Her Husband Sent the Invitations.

A Manchester trial put 13 men in court over allegations involving an unconscious woman, her husband, and years of alleged drugging and sexual assault—the offline version of the same nightmare we saw online earlier this year.

Hey GenX: The Job Market Hates You. Have You Tried Journaling?

The labor market is aging GenX workers out, and the proposed solution appears to be journaling about our feelings rather than fixing the systems filtering us out.

Good News: Nobody Died. Bad News: That’s Not How Food Safety Works.

Nearly 30,000 pounds of Argentine beef entered the U.S. without required federal reinspection, nobody got sick, and somehow “nobody died” became the good-news portion of the story.

Sugar Is Up 20% and the Whole Thing Is a F@#king Cartel

Sugar prices are beating the stock market because America has spent decades protecting a handful of sugar producers from the beautiful chaos of capitalism.

Boys Are Finally Getting Their Own Beauty Culture. It Smells Like Piss.

Teenage boys have discovered pheromone-maxxing, which involves refusing to shower, cultivating their natural musk, and apparently deciding that drinking your own piss is a beauty treatment.

A Legion of Children Before the Civil War

Elon Musk reportedly told Ashley St. Clair he needed “a legion of children before the civil war,” proving once again that there is no sentence a billionaire cannot make somehow worse.

BREAKING NEWS: Phoebe Bridgers Has Leg Hair

Phoebe Bridgers showed up in Venice with unshaved legs, 18 photographers apparently lost their minds, and we were forced to remind the internet that women are, in fact, mammals.

Meta Stole Muse’s Handle for a F@#king Beige Plushy

Meta grabbed the @muse handle for its new AI agent, accidentally tagged the actual band, called the whole thing a “bug,” and expected everyone to move along.

Ed Sheeran Discovers Neutral Isn’t a Personality

Ed Sheeran let a billionaire decide who could open his shows and then issued a statement insisting he doesn’t take sides, which is a fascinating way to discover that “neutral” is, in fact, a side.

Ten Points Won’t Survive an Envelope

Democrats were showing unusually strong party-identification numbers, but the real story was whether polling advantages could survive the infinitely sexier battlefield of election rules, ballots, and actual organizing.

The Whole Planet Just Sold Its Bonds, and the Arsonist Wants to Know Why It’s Hot

The global bond market started throwing up, Japan’s yields hit a 30-year high, and the man setting the economy on fire was apparently confused about the smoke.

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May October be kinder to all of us.

We love you, mean it!
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Co-founders and lead rabble-rousers at The Daily Whatever Show

Thanks for reading!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

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I also published three (yes, three) stories already this week on this evolving story, which you can read here, in order of appearance:

This story is gaining traction and visibility because Jane Doe spoke up with her story, and we’ve continued to elevate it—so Cornell and the police and politicians have had no choice but to take action.

Keep sharing these stories.

It’s working.

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Huge thanks to Michelle for sharing her thoughts and wisdom and to , , , , , and so many others for tuning in and sharing your thoughts during my live video with !

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NEW AMERICA, formerly New Mexico (The Daily Whatever Press) — At the end of last month, I published a list of the ten most awful things Donald Trump and his administration did in August, and I believed ten was a responsible number. Ten is how many fingers I have. Ten is a Pearl Jam album. Ten is a huge but at least human-sized container for one month’s worth of atrocities.

September looked at my container and pissed in it.

So here are 13 — yes, thirteen — abso-effing-lutely batshit things Trump and company did this month, in chronological order. I refuse to rank them, because ranking would require me to decide whether lying about 9/11 at a 9/11 event is worse than scheduling a war around an election, and I won’t do that.

Every receipt is linked. Anything I invented, I’ll tell you.

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1. His face on a dollar coin, which is gold-colored, mostly copper, and also not supposed to exist (Sept. 2)

The U.S. Mint started selling Trump $1 coins at $61 for a 25-coin roll and $154.50 for a bag of 100. That works out to about $2.44 per dollar, which is the most honest exchange rate this administration has offered anyone. The coins look gold but contain no gold at all; they’re mostly copper plus small amounts of zinc, manganese, and nickel, and that is also my review of the man.

Meanwhile, the Presidential $1 Coin Act of 2005 limits $1 coins to presidents who have died. The administration’s workaround is a 2020 law about the 250th anniversary, because nothing honors 1776 like putting a living ruler’s face on the money.

The real version, the 24-karat gold proof coin, goes on sale Nov. 5 at noon ET with a household limit of one. That’s two days after the midterms. Hold onto that number.

2. Twenty-four posts before “Happy Labor Day” (Sept. 7)

Between 9:50 and 10:45 on Labor Day morning, the president posted 24 times. Seven were about renaming New Mexico “New America,” and one was an old photo of him arm-wrestling the late Hulk Hogan. When he finally reached the workers, he wished a happy holiday to the “Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, and Dumocrats” and reminded the nation that its “Favorite President (ME!)” knows how to win.

Then the White House posted its official tribute to American labor: a 38-second clip of an automated factory producing a single White House pen, without one human worker in the frame. That same weekend, regular gas averaged $4.15, the highest Labor Day price AAA has ever recorded. Johnny 5 from Short Circuit got more screen time as a worker than any actual worker did. The robot has since been offered a $45,000 holiday bonus.

(That part’s invented. Number 5 on this list isn’t.)

3. The 9/11 firefighter fan fiction (Sept. 8)

At an event honoring 9/11 first responders, Trump said two firefighters grabbed him and carried him away from the site when the nearby One Liberty Plaza began to creak, adding, “I’m not the smallest guy in the world.” Cute, but patently and provably false; on 9/11 he was miles from the World Trade Center, and no one whisked him out of any building near Ground Zero that day. In his 2016 version, the firefighters helped him “a couple of days” after the attack, and afterward he posted that everything he’d said was “exactly accurate.”

This motherfucker told a hero story starring himself to the families of the actual heroes, at their memorial event.

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ITHACA, NEW YORK, OR WHEREVER THESE SEVEN DIRTBAG LIVE NOW (The Daily Whatever Press) — I have now been lapped by this unfolding Cornell story three times. I write a piece, the news moves, I write another piece, and the news moves again. I’m a middle-aged woman with a Substack, two kids, and a day job, and I’m doing my best to keep up but SHEESH. The pace of this news is staggering — and I’m so here for all of it.

So if this is your first read, welcome! Now go catch up:

So here’s where we are:

• On September 14, Jane Doe filed a lawsuit against Cornell.

• On September 21, Cornell issued a statement hiding behind federal privacy law.

• On September 27, Florence Pugh told the world to “Be angry for us,” and AOC stood up at a town hall in Ithaca and ripped Cornell for letting the accused write essays in private.

• On September 28, the DA reopened the criminal case (YES!!!), and the mayor of Ithaca moved to freeze student event permits until Cornell does its homework.

And today, a former South Park writer launched a website: TheCornell7.org.

To which we say: Team Toby Morton—fuck yeah!

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Toby Morton wrote five episodes of South Park between 2001 and 2003, and he voiced Scott Tenorman, the red-headed kid on the receiving end of Cartman’s revenge in the most infamous revenge episode the show ever made. Now 25 years later, he’s finally on the other side of the revenge plot, and this time it’s aimed exactly where it belongs.

The goal is a permanent public record of the case, with the seven men’s names, photos, and employers attached. So it follows them wherever they go, forever.

He says he’s already received names, photographs, documents, and messages. He’s promised billboards “around the country,” and he’s coming for the Cornell administrators he says “failed miserably.” When people reminded him he’s a satirist, not a journalist, he wrote that this makes him “more dangerous,” with “no limits, no boundaries, nobody to tell me I’ve gone too far.”

Good. Fucking good.

Cornell had limits. Cornell had boundaries. Cornell had privacy statutes, twelve hearings, an Office of Civil Rights, a task force, a police department, and a legal team, and it used every one of those boundaries to build a wall around what happened in that house. The DA had limits too, and he used them to call the case “insufficient” and go home. Two years of people with all the boundaries in the world produced an essay as punishment for most of those men. So forgive me if I’m not clutching my pearls because a satirist with a web domain finally showed up to do what the grown-ups wouldn’t.

Morton is the invoice for Cornell’s silence, and Cornell ran up that bill all by itself.

My one ask of Toby is the thing he’s already promised, which is to get every face right, because one wrong photo makes a brand-new victim and could cast doubt on Jane Doe’s case. Beyond that, go, my dude! Build the billboards. Make the website so big it shows up in every background check for the rest of these guys’ lives.

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Now let’s talk about all the other men in the Chi Phi house.

According to the lawsuit, at 1:42 a.m. that night, a fraternity member posted a message to the chapter’s Snapchat group chat, called “Chi Phi Actives.” The message advertised “free pussy” upstairs. She was offered up to a group chat like leftover pizza.

Later that night, one of the brothers wrote back: “Shop still open?”

Shop. Still. Open.

A whole group chat full of “actives” saw that message. But they sure were passive. Not one man in that chat did a goddamn thing. No one called 911. Nobody called campus police, an RA, or her friend. Nobody walked upstairs and said get the fuck out of that room. The most engaged response the lawsuit describes is a guy checking on availability.

Every single man who saw that message and did nothing is culpable.

You don’t get to be the good guy because you read the message and opted not to um, visit the shop. The only viable option here was to speak out and take action, to take steps to stop the atrocity being committed inside your home

And the DA? Van Houten called the messages “disgusting, vulgar,” then said they “had nothing to do with the issue of consent.” Sir. A group chat advertising an incapacitated woman as free is the most on-the-nose piece of consent evidence imaginable. It’s practically a signed confession, a direct indication of how those men dehumanized and violated her.

Better still, the DA told ABC his office never got the Snapchat screenshot. Cornell now says its police department handed a screenshot to the DA back in 2024. One of those two institutions is wrong about the single most important piece of evidence in this case, and both of them are asking us to trust them with the next one.

So subpoena every phone in that chat. Put every “active” in front of that grand jury and make each one of them explain, under oath, what he saw at 1:42am. and why he went back to sleep.

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So is this finally it?

In 2016, Brock Turner got six months for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman and served three. Chanel Miller’s victim impact statement tore the country open, California changed its sentencing law, and voters recalled the judge. It mattered. And ten years later, an Ivy League school allegedly handed out essay assignments as punishment instead.

That’s the fear under all of this. The internet gets furious, the news cycle crests, and everybody goes home.

But this time, nobody’s going home. The DA is back in the case. A city is choking off the party permits. A lawsuit is going after Cornell’s money. And a guy who has nothing to lose and a whole lot of billboard space is making sure seven names can’t disappear into a transfer application.

So is this finally the story that changes things? It is if we refuse to let it go. Keep posting. Keep calling. Keep sending Toby Morton everything he needs to get it right.

And to the men of Chi Phi Actives, from all of us: the shop is fucking closed.

Hi, I’m Dana. And I Write Out Loud.

I Write Out Loud is my primary home for cultural memoir, personal essays, and live conversations about the strange, brave process of becoming yourself in midlife. If you like essays with a point of view and a pulse, you’ll find plenty to read there.

And if you enjoyed this story — why not buy me a coffee?☕
{Make mine a decaf iced oat milk mocha, please!}

Thanks for reading!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

Subscribe now

Kauai, Hawaii (The Daily Whatever Press)—Todd Rundgren, 78, certified musical genius, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, and the man who wrote “I Saw the Light,” looked upon the most successful touring artist in human history and saw… her hair. Fuck that. Fuck it from the karaoke stage to the nosebleeds, and fuck it twice for dragging Pearl Jam into it.

I love Todd. I’ve belted “I Saw the Light” into a sticky bar microphone more times than my liver would like me to admit, and I’ll do it again.

It’s a perfect song — three minutes of bright-yet-contemplative pop built so well that even an amateur holding a drink can’t break it. I’ve loved Todd Rundgren for most of my life. He’s a genuine genius, a songwriter and producer whose fingerprints are all over the records GenX grew up on.

So it pains me to report that Todd has become the old man standing on the lawn and shaking his fist at the sky.

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What Todd said

In a recent interview with Vulture, Rundgren was asked who he’d target if he made an album today designed to mock another artist, the way he’s said his production on Bat Out of Hell was a send-up of Bruce Springsteen. He didn’t have to think about it. Taylor Swift, of course. He floated the idea that she “ruined music,” called her “the apotheosis of mediocrity,” and added that she doesn’t do anything particularly great except grow hair.

Before I begin with my nuanced analysis, I need to interjection with a throaty, full-chested FUCK YOU, TODD — from the bottom of my feminist heart and the roots of my great hair.

A woman with more than a dozen Grammys and a spot in the Songwriters Hall of Fame got reduced to her hair. I can’t let that stand without leading with a raw, unadulterated eff bomb.

You can dislike her music. Plenty of people do, and that’s their right. But when a man reaches past the songs, the records, and the most successful tour in history to land on her appearance — he’s telling you what he thinks women are for.

I just asked my pal, the brilliant music essayist Stewart Mason whether he’d read this story. His response? “I had not, but Todd says a lotta shit for someone whose last good record came out in 1978.”

Now I’ll defend Something/Anything? until my last breath — but I laughed for a solid minute at that comment.

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The video game theory

The hair comment is the headline. The part that actually made my jaw drop came next.

Rundgren said we’re living in the era of female artists, and he had an explanation for it: in the ’90s, boys stopped spending their money on records and started spending it on video games. The industry looked around, noticed all those teenage girls with allowances, and pivoted.

Put a feminist lens on that and it gets ugly fast. In Todd’s version of history, women didn’t earn the top of the charts. They inherited it, the way you get the last slice of pizza after everyone else has left the party. Female artists are what’s left over when the real audience leaves the room, and the girls buying their records are a fallback market rather than a force.

I’ve heard this logic before. When Sarah McLachlan wanted to bring Paula Cole on tour in the ’90s, promoters told her two women on the same bill wouldn’t sell, and they had a crude industry term for it: a pussy package. She built Lilith Fair instead, and it outgrossed every touring festival that year. The music business has never quite believed that women and girls are the audience. It keeps finding new theories for why they showed up anyway.

And “teenage girls ruined music” is about as fresh as a Sinatra bobby-soxer. Girls screamed for the Beatles, and serious men wrote serious columns about how that proved the Beatles were a fad.

Every generation, girls fall hard for something, a man explains why it doesn’t count, and 20 years later the same kind of man is citing it as canon.

Todd, meet the mirror

Rundgren gave the game away in the same interview. He called Swift a role model for a generation of young women — and now their daughters, too, since mothers and daughters go to her shows together. Then he talked proudly about his own audience spanning second- and third-generation fans, very old and very young.

So when parents hand Todd Rundgren down to their kids, it’s a legacy. When mothers hand Taylor Swift down to their daughters, it’s a symptom. The only variable I can find is who’s in the crowd.

He also praised Lady Gaga as a “real musician,” a classically trained pianist. I don’t doubt his admiration is sincere. But it’s the oldest move in the book: find the one woman who meets your criteria, hold her up as the exception, and use her to prove the rest of them are lacking.

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I used to be Todd

Here’s my confession: I dismissed Taylor Swift for years.

I assumed she was the kind of commercial pop a self-respecting GenX indie kid was supposed to sneer at. I lived under an indie-rock; I’d built a whole identity around that sneer. What I didn’t notice was how much more harshly I applied it to women. Men who sold millions got to be craftsmen. Women who sold millions were products, and the girls who loved them were proof of how shallow the product was.

My daughters fixed that, and they didn’t do it with an argument. They just played her over and over, in the car and in the kitchen, until I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t listening. Somewhere in there — “All Too Well” was the one that finally got me — I realized she’s a brilliant songwriter, and that the voice in my head insisting otherwise was internalized misogyny wearing a flannel shirt. I’d been so wrong about her. I’ve been atoning for it ever since.

Now I karaoke “Betty,” too. It’s a story song from folklore, told from the point of view of a teenage boy trying to apologize to a girl he hurt, and it’s as carefully built as anything on a Todd Rundgren record. Anyone who thinks she can’t write should try singing it in front of a room and see how many people know every word.

The lesson’s still available

What I learned from my daughters wasn’t complicated. I had to notice that my assumption about Taylor Swift was an assumption, ask where it came from, and admit that a lot of it came from the same place that taught me to roll my eyes at anything teenage girls loved.

Todd Rundgren is 78, and he’s one of the most curious, restless musicians of the last half-century. He spent decades chasing new sounds and new technology before most people thought to. It’s a shame that curiosity stops at the edge of a stadium full of women and girls.

He doesn’t have to love her. He just has to question why he’s so sure. It took me years and two teenagers to get there, and I’ve never been happier to be wrong.

Next time I’m at karaoke, I’m singing “I Saw the Light.” Then I’m putting my name down for “Betty,” or perhaps “Shake It Off.”

Todd, you’re welcome to take the harmony.

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Hi, I’m Dana. And I Write Out Loud.

I Write Out Loud is my primary home for cultural memoir, personal essays, and live conversations about the strange, brave process of becoming yourself in midlife. If you like essays with a point of view and a pulse, you’ll find plenty to read there.

And if you enjoyed this story — why not buy me a coffee?☕
{Make mine a decaf iced oat milk mocha, please!}

Thanks for reading!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!

Ithaca, New York (The Daily Whatever Press)—Two years after a Cornell student reported being drugged and gang-raped at a fraternity house, the Ithaca Police Department finally found out about it. From the news.

I had to put my phone face down on the counter for a full minute after I read that. Then I picked it back up and swore at it, and then I wrote this.

If you missed the first round, I wrote about the Cornell gang-rapists who got slapped on their wrists with essay sanctions just yesterday, and the story has moved so fast since my fingers can barely keep up. On Monday alone, Tompkins County DA Matthew Van Houten reopened the criminal investigation and said he’d take it to a grand jury. By Monday afternoon, the mayor of Ithaca had decided he was done asking nicely.

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The city found out from the news

Here’s the receipt that made my eye twitch. Ithaca police say the incident was never reported to them, and that they learned about it through recent media coverage.

Please indulge me whilst I scream into the void because OH MY GAWD THE ITHACA POLICE ONLY FOUND OUT ABOUT THE GANG RAPE ON THE INTERNET, just like the rest of us slobs, and I CANNOT WITH THIS YOU GUYS I JUST CAN’T.

Cornell has its own police department, the Cornell University Police Department, with badges and cars and everything. Back on November 26, 2024, Cornell’s official statement said CUPD “continues to pursue its criminal investigation.” So for two years there was a criminal investigation into an alleged gang rape in the City of Ithaca, and nobody picked up the phone and called the City of Ithaca.

My teenagers text me when they get to a friend’s house three blocks away. An Ivy League police department, meanwhile, couldn’t be bothered to loop in the cops in their own town about an alleged drugging and gang rape of one of its own students.

What the actual fuck were they doing with their phones, playing Candy Crush?

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Party’s over, Delta House

Enter Mayor Robert Cantelmo, who called the allegations “heinous and sickening” and said Cornell administrators and police “failed to contact or coordinate any response with the Ithaca Police Department.” He called the whole thing “a miscarriage of justice” and an “appalling response from university administration.”

GOOD.

Then he reached for the only lever a city has over a university on a hill, which is paperwork. Cantelmo called for an immediate moratorium on all student event and special event permits, “including, but not limited to Greek life and other student group gatherings.” Those are the permits for the big stuff, the events with street closures, tents, noise, and crowds that need the city’s cooperation.

My favorite part is: Cantelmo has a master’s degree from Cornell, class of 2020. It took a Cornell grad sitting in City Hall to act like the grown-up Cornell kept failing to find in Day Hall.

I’ve waited my whole life to see the plot of Footloose happen with the town as the good guy. In 1984, the town of Bomont banned dancing out of grief and fear. In 2026, Ithaca is pausing the parties because a university never called the local police about an alleged gang rape. John Lithgow was wrong. Robert Cantelmo is right. I’m punching my card, y’all.

There’s one caveat. The Cornell Daily Sun reports the directive won’t take effect until Ithaca’s Common Council passes the resolution, and three council members told the Sun they’ll vote yes. Other outlets describe the directive as already in effect, with the council voting to endorse it.

Either way, the mayor has made his move, and Cornell’s fall social calendar is about to get a lot shorter.

Again I say, GOOD.

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Show your work, Cornell

The moratorium lasts until the university “conducts an accounting of its protocols to prevent and prosecute crimes of sexual violence and publicly releases new standards and practices to keep our community safe.”

The mayor of Ithaca gave Cornell a writing assignment.

According to Jane Doe’s lawsuit, some of the accused were allowed to mitigate their conduct by submitting essays. Now the university gets a prompt of its own, with no page limit, no private grading in Day Hall, and a public release requirement. The whole city gets to read this one, and the whole city gets to grade it.

Cornell, of course, is mad at the rest of us. It now says nobody was offered an essay as their only punishment, and that the “false narrative that there were minimal consequences” is irresponsible and will make survivors feel less safe.

Oh, please.

The essays came from Doe’s own lawsuit. The university that told us “federal privacy law prohibits” it from disclosing any individual sanctions is now scolding the public for not knowing what those sanctions were. You can’t hide the receipts behind a privacy statute and then yell at people for failing to read them. Pick one, you tweed-jacketed motherfuckers.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in town for a Sunday town hall, picked hers. She hit Cornell for temporarily suspending student protesters while making the accused “write an essay in private.”

So Cornell knows exactly how to suspend students when it wants to. Somebody over there should write an essay about that.

It worked

Van Houten has assigned a senior prosecutor to prepare the grand jury case, a woman with significant experience prosecuting sex crimes, including trials of college students accused of assaulting other college students. That person should have been on this two years ago, and I’m furious that she wasn’t. I’m also grateful as hell that she is now.

None of this happened because Cornell had a change of heart. It happened because one woman filed a 101-page lawsuit, the Cornell Daily Sun kept printing, strangers on the internet refused to let it scroll by, a congresswoman said it out loud in a town hall, and the mayor of a small upstate city decided that the biggest institution in town doesn’t get to keep its own secrets anymore.

So keep going. Keep posting, keep sharing, keep calling your own city halls about your own universities, and keep making noise until the institutions that pull this shit decide the noise is more expensive than the truth.

Jane Doe was assigned the hardest essay there is, which is telling the world what happened to her. She turned it in.

Now it’s Cornell’s turn. Pencils down in public, assholes.

Oh and PS, Cornell? I’m a pretty damn good writer. I’d be happy to grade those rapist essays, should you need another red pen to review them…

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Hi, I’m Dana. And I Write Out Loud.

I Write Out Loud is my primary home for cultural memoir, personal essays, and live conversations about the strange, brave process of becoming yourself in midlife. If you like essays with a point of view and a pulse, you’ll find plenty to read there.

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UPDATE, September 28, 2026: I had this piece written, titled, and my finger on the damn publish button when the story changed out from under me. The news is moving so fucking fast I cannot physically keep up. So here’s the latest: Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten is reopening the criminal investigation, and he plans to take the case to a grand jury.

That is GREAT fucking news.

His explanation for the two-year shrug is that the allegations in Jane Doe’s lawsuit are “dramatically different” from her 2024 statement to police, which he says didn’t allege she was drugged without her knowledge or that she didn’t consent. I’m not a prosecutor. I’m a writer, and I know the first draft of the worst night of your life is never the whole story. A grand jury is exactly where that gets sorted out, which is the entire point of the section below called “Insufficient.”

Cornell, meanwhile, now says it “supports” the DA’s decision to let “the victim’s story” be heard by a grand jury. Victim. Look who found a noun. Its new statement also recaps the sanctions as “expulsions and suspensions” and somehow forgets to mention the essays. Weird. Must be a privacy thing.

To every one of you who posted, shared, wrote editorials, and refused to shut the hell up about this: it worked. Keep going. Two weeks of people speaking out did what twelve hearings and a “thorough review” never did. The original piece runs below, because every word of it is still true.

Ithaca, New York (The Daily Whatever Press) — In 1985, Principal Richard Vernon locked five kids in a high school library on a Saturday and made them write an essay about who they think they are. Their crimes included a flare gun in a locker and a cutting class. In 2025, Cornell University looked at seven fraternity brothers accused of drugging and gang-raping a 20-year-old student and reached for the same fucking disciplinary tool.

Cornell. The freaking Ivy League. The one Ezra Cornell founded so “any person can find instruction in any study.” Apparently that includes a whole new study, which is how to turn an alleged gang rape into a homework assignment.

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Twelve hearings and a homework assignment

Here’s what the complaint says. Jane Doe alleges that on October 19, 2024, members of Cornell’s Chi Phi chapter pressured her into taking what they called ketamine and then sexually assaulted her over several hours. About three weeks later, she reported it to Cornell police. The university temporarily suspended the chapter and the seven men and opened a Title IX investigation. That investigation produced at least twelve hearings.

Twelve hearings. According to the lawsuit and her attorney, two of the seven men were expelled. The rest got suspensions, workshops, and, in the lawsuit’s own words, the opportunity to “mitigate their conduct by submitting essays.”

Mitigate their conduct. With prose. I have been writing essays for most of my adult life, and I want to tell you what that word means, since Cornell apparently forgot. It comes from the French essayer, which means to try. Montaigne invented the form to put his whole unvarnished self on the page. An essay is where you go when something is too big for a sentence and too true to leave unsaid. It’s the hardest honest thing I know how to do, and women in particular have used it for centuries to drag the truth out of the dark and into daylight.

Cornell took that form and handed it out like a coupon. Knock some time off your sanction, champ. Show your work. Somewhere in Day Hall, a grown adult with a salary and a lanyard presumably read those essays. Did they grade them? Did they circle a comma splice? Did anybody write “good insight!” in the margin of a document submitted to mitigate an alleged gang rape? I don’t know, and Cornell won’t tell me, which brings us to the part that made me put down my coffee and say a word my mother would ground me for.

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Only those who perpetrate

On November 26, 2024, Cornell put out a statement about these very allegations. It included this sentence: “Only those who perpetrate sexual violence benefit from its concealment.”

That’s a great sentence. It has a thesis, it has moral clarity, and I would have loved to write it myself.

On September 21, 2026, responding to the lawsuit, Cornell said that “federal privacy law prohibits Cornell from disclosing specific information regarding individual students.” Then it added that it takes sexual violence “extremely seriously.”

So in 2024, concealment was the thing perpetrators benefit from. By 2026, concealment is federal compliance. Same university, same case, twenty-two months apart. Follow your own thesis to its conclusion, Cornell, because I’m a writer and I just did. Who benefits now?

And the Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault? Cornell launched it in spring 2025, and it issued its report in March 2026, after the hearings that ended in essays. That’s the fire department showing up with a clipboard and a strategic plan for the smoking hole where the house used to be.

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“Insufficient evidence”

Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten’s office says it “conducted a thorough review of the police investigation” and found “insufficient evidence to support criminal charges.” Doe’s attorney, Thomas Giuffra, put the result more simply: “Not one of these guys was arrested. Not one.”

Insufficient. That’s the word your bank uses when you try to buy groceries on the twenty-ninth of the month. It’s a hell of a word to lay over a complaint alleging seven men and one incapacitated woman.

An attorney for one of the seven disputes her account and says the defense has documents, witness statements, and scientific evidence that contradict it. Fine. That’s what a courtroom is for. That's the whole goddamn point, too, because until this week, no criminal courtroom was ever on the table. An allegation of gang rape ran through a police department, a district attorney, and a dozen university hearings, and the most rigorous output any of it produced was a writing prompt. Doe sued in civil court, where the standard is preponderance of the evidence, because for two years that was the only door anybody left open for her.

Meanwhile, Chi Phi national wants you to know its founding principles are “Truth, Honor, and Personal Integrity,” and its mission is “Building Better Men.”

How’s that going, fellas?

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Who got shut down

I have two daughters. One just started college, the other is at the age where college brochures start landing in the mailbox, glossy ones with stone buildings and golden leaves and kids laughing on the quad. Jane Doe was 20 and at what her lawyer calls her dream school.

She doesn’t go there anymore. Her lawyer says she’s barely hanging on.

Chi Phi is banned from Cornell’s campus, with the Chi Phi website calling that chapter “currently dormant.”

The chapterhouse got expelled.

The Cornell directory still lists two of the seven men as current students.

But she lost her school. Some of the rapists*, according to her lawsuit, were given a chance to write their way out of it.

So here’s my essay, Cornell. It runs about a thousand words, and I tried, in the old French sense, to tell the truth. Grade it however you want. Unlike some people you’ve read lately, I’m not asking you to mitigate a fucking thing.

One more assignment while you've got the diploma printer warmed up: an honorary degree for Jane Doe. She taught your entire institution a course it clearly needed, and she did it without a task force.

Leave the name line blank. You, of all, people understand privacy.

*Alleged, of course, throughout.

Hi, I’m Dana. And I Write Out Loud.

I Write Out Loud is my primary home for cultural memoir, personal essays, and live conversations about the strange, brave process of becoming yourself in midlife. If you like essays with a point of view and a pulse, you’ll find plenty to read there.

And if you enjoyed this story — why not buy me a coffee?☕
{Make mine a decaf iced oat milk mocha, please!}

Thanks for reading!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!