I love playing matchmaker, and Friday’s Live may be the best pairing I’ve made yet: Karen Attiah and Nicole Walters, two of the smartest, most fearless women I know, meeting for the first time, and on my birthday eve, no less. Two Leos and a Scorpio, taking the mics and taking charge. Anything could’ve happened.
What happened was an hour about what it costs to refuse to shrink.
Karen walked us through where things stand with The Washington Post: she was fired in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk killing, after commenting on the political discourse around his death on Blue Sky. The Post’s argument was that she’d endangered her colleagues. The record says otherwise — the threats the Post cited were directed at her, not at anyone else at the paper, and still the institution moved to protect itself rather than her.
She named the pattern plainly: this is the same paper that suspended Felicia Sonmez for factually reporting Kobe Bryant’s rape case the day he died. Punish the woman who won’t perform grief on command for a man credibly accused of harm.
Then there’s her book. Karen was the editor who hired Jamal Khashoggi — worked with him for a year before he was murdered in Istanbul by Saudi agents. She’d finished a manuscript about that year with him, close to the finish line, when the Post quietly stopped the editing process. Three years later, she still doesn’t know why. Now, watching the paper scrub Jamal’s name from its own history at the same time it’s trying to write her out of hers, she’s treating the book as an obligation rather than a project — her word was spiritual. She’s finishing it no matter what happens with the arbitration.
The entire chat blew up with future readers.
Nicole’s through-line was permission, specifically women’s refusal to keep asking for it. She told the story of how she first landed on my radar: the week Andrew Tate hit number one on Substack’s bestseller list to widespread outrage, and Nicole unseated him. Her point wasn’t the ranking. It was what she said when I asked her and Karen why neither of them had a thousand invitations already sitting in their inbox: because we have to work ten times harder for the attention any mediocre white man gets for doing less.
RELATABLE.
Put next to each other, their stories weren’t really about journalism and entrepreneurship as separate lanes. They were the same fight in two rooms: institutions — a newsroom, an industry, your own inner critic — will ask women to make themselves smaller in exchange for safety, and the safety is usually fake anyway. Karen’s fighting that fight in arbitration. Nicole’s fighting it every time she tells a client to send that invoice. Neither one is interested in shrinking to make it easier on anyone else.
If you’re not already subscribed to these women, do not pass go or collect $200. Just got subscribe—and if you can, pay for it. Independent journalism doesn’t run on goodwill.
Thank you Caro Henry, Mandy Ohman, Karen Marie Shelton, Char Sundust, LeftieProf, and many others for tuning in.
Thanks for listening!
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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