Hi!
You may recall my recent foray into basket making - and in particular, I made a Nantucket Basket, which is a gorgeous tight-weaving style that sometimes people use to make purses (a style which has been trending for a couple years). Four Winds Craft Guild is a shop in downtown Nantucket that sells said baskets. The business has been in John Sylvia’s family since 1927. The baskets take months to weave by hand and run from about $325 to $3,200, they are a wonderful American art form. This month Sylvia commissioned a local artist to carve him a traditional wooden sign, gold script on dark wood, and hung it from the ceiling right above the baskets.
It says NO INFLUENCERS.
The store posted it on Instagram with the caption “Came for the friendship baskets, stayed for the shade,” and THE DISCOURSE has been potent.
Paige Paul, the founder of Dairy Boy (a very trendy Gen Z brand with a brick & mortor store on the island) left the comment that lit the match: “If you call yourself a feminist but proudly put up a ‘No Influencers’ sign, it’s worth asking who you are attempting to delegitimize, and why.” She hung an “Everyone Welcome” sign in her own shop.
The most shared take came from creator Levi Coralynn, who argued that “hating influencers has become a socially acceptable way to hate women.” Paige aruged, the island fills up every summer with bankers, lawyers, and developers, and nobody has ever carved a sign about them. The one profession that got a sign is the one built almost entirely by women.
When men do it, they are called creators, after all.
About 72 percent of creators are women, and the creator economy is headed toward half a trillion dollars. And of course, some of the commentary is sneering misogyny, full stop. I’ve read enough comment sections to lose a little faith in humanity.
But not all criticism is bullying, and this is something that is coming up more and more in my conversations with my friends - one of the ways in which current social norms are reinforcing the polarization and tribalization that is tearing our politics apart.
The complaint from the store owner was twofold: (1) people come into his small store to film content instead of to buy things, and (2) “A lot of people are tired of feeling like extras in someone else’s video,” he told The Cut. His store makes money when someone buys a basket an artisan spent four months weaving. It makes nothing when a group crowds in to film in front of the basket wall and leaves (though it’s marketing..?). A shopkeeper wanting customers instead of content is a business model. (But perhaps a bad one!)
But I think like many things, social media is flattening a conversation (you either hate women or you don’t) that has some validity. I totally understand people feeling frustrated about their home becoming a set. And I think the panopticon of social media, the feeling that people are living just to post but not to experience, is more pervasive than the boundaries of Nantucket island.
However, is this a feminist fight that should monopolize the discourse? When maternity wards kept closing across the country, Medicaid cuts kept landing on the women least able to absorb them, and a nurse says ICE agents broke her kneecap while she was giving people health care outside a detention center. Choice feminism keeps inviting us to litigate whether every individual woman’s choices (and every criticism of those choices) count as feminist acts. And while we’re busy doing that, the structural stuff gets decided without us.
So, do I think the public loves to hate on women? YES! Is influencing considered denigrated because it’s a predominantly women-led profession? Absolutely? Is there validity to the argument that the way social media is changing our physical environment may not be for the better? Definitely, yes.
Are all of these people getting the attention that they want in a rage-bait economy? Indeed.
Be kind to yourself, don’t buy into the rage bait if you hate it (I do), and let me know what you are doing that fills your cup! I’ll be working on my newest basket.
The Blanche Confirmation Vote Is Actually Stalled. (The Guardian) Republican Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis are blocking the Attorney General nomination of Trump’s personal lawyer. Tillis is retiring and Cornyn lost his primary to a Trump-backed candidate. They’be asked for written limits on the IRS settlement shielding Trump from tax scrutiny. The hearing was postponed and Trump said Thursday he may “temporarily” pull the nomination. (!! WOULD BE GREAT !!)
Mass Voter Challenges Are Back. (Ms. Magazine) Election denial groups are reviving a Jim Crow era tactic: bulk challenges to voters’ registrations built on sloppy data matching. The Brennan Center’s Sean Morales-Doyle traces the lineage and explains what it could mean for the midterms, including a 2025 episode in which DOGE team members communicated with a group seeking to overturn state election results.
Maternity Ward Closures Are Becoming a Campaign Issue. (The 19th) Maternity ward closures are accelerating in battleground states, and the community backlash is turning maternal health access into an election year force. Millions of women of childbearing age live in counties where there's no place to give birth. Nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts could devastate labor-and-delivery services in already struggling hospitals.
Preteen Suicide Rates Are Rising, and Experts Are Alarmed. (Stateline) Preteen suicide deaths hit 194 in 2025, the highest since at least 2001, with rates rising an average of 8.2 percent a year since 2008 and fastest among Black, Hispanic, Native American, and girls. Experts point to social media, sleep loss, and bullying, and outline what early screening can catch.
The MAGA Civics Charity Where the Money Goes to Its Founder. (ProPublica) Nick Adams’s Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness raised $7.7 million claiming to teach kids civics, but tax filings show little documented educational spending, roughly $587,000 in compensation to Adams and his mother, and a $1,000,000 sweepstakes prize no one can document ever being paid.
She works in a hospital and did not recognize her own heart attack. (The Guardian) A first-person account of atypical heart attack symptoms in women. Here’s what she says to look for:
For women, the list of possible symptoms is longer than men: chest pain or pressure in lower chest, upper abdomen, jaw, neck and upper back; nausea or vomiting; fainting and shortness of breath; indigestion or extreme fatigue. Chest pain or pressure is not always present.
In addition, issues such as high blood pressure during pregnancy, menopause, hormone replacement therapy and use of birth control should be considered in evaluating overall risk. Women should be prepared to look into other areas that may not stand out as symptomatic. For instance, the heart and stomach share nerves, and many women do not know that indigestion, nausea and GI distress can also be heart disease symptoms.
What to do if your estrogen patch is out of stock. (The New York Times) Practical navigation of the menopause hormone therapy patch shortage: substitutions, pharmacy strategies, and what to ask your prescriber.
Call around to other nearby pharmacies to see if it’s available.
Depending on the type of estrogen patch you use, you may be able to cobble together your dose by using the patches pharmacies have on hand by cutting them in half
Try a gel, spray, ring or pill instead.
Nine things experts wish you would do in midlife. (The New York Times) An expert sourced, no woo midlife longevity checklist: strength, screenings, social connection.
A sane system for kids’ activities. (She Is a Paige Turner) A practical framework for the extracurricular arms race: how many activities, how to decide, and how to keep the family calendar from eating you alive.
The “domino chains” quietly transforming kidney donation. (Reasons to be Cheerful) Algorithm matched chains let incompatible donor and recipient pairs give to strangers so their loved ones get kidneys too, making an estimated 20 to 30 percent more transplants possible.
Engineers just recovered lost music from Ma Rainey, the Mother of the Blues. (Smithsonian Magazine) A century after she recorded them, restoration engineers recovered lost instruments and vocal detail from Ma Rainey’s catalog.
Emily Wilson reviews Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, and takes no prisoners. (London Review of Books) The most celebrated living translator of the Odyssey reviews the blockbuster: “The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation.” And: “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.” She even concedes, wryly, that the movie is selling copies of her translation. The literary assassination of the summer, complete with a Slate rebuttal and its own discourse cycle.
→ see also, the New York Times article about the article
→ Joyce Carol Oates’ take on it (!!)
The Return of the Monarch. (The Atlantic) Vann R. Newkirk II follows three tagged monarchs north from Mexico as the species stages a surprising recovery, through climate chaos and cartel-adjacent avocado farming.
A CZ tennis necklace. I want the ring concierge version, but it’s out of budget. Sami Jewels’ round bezel tennis necklace in silver, delicate enough for every day and shiny enough for date night. Shop it here.
Its turquoise cousin, for the wrist. Same bezel magic, but turquoise, and somehow even better stacked with everything you already own. Shop it here.
The cuff that finishes an arm party. Sami’s twisted bangle is the structured piece that makes the whole stack look on purpose. Shop it here.
The necklace everyone will ask about. Dorsey’s lab sapphire Clemence reads like a family heirloom at a fraction of the cost. My fave DBTY. Shop it here.
Turquoise for the home stretch of summer. BaubleBar’s gold and turquoise Fallon earrings are the pop of color August outfits keep asking for. Shop them here.
The collar necklace with main character energy. BaubleBar’s crimson crystal Lindsey collar, this is giving italian riviera. (NOT PICTURED, WHOOPS) Shop it here.
The everyday gold bracelet. BaubleBar’s Stephanie 18k bracelet, i’ve been wearing it every day! Shop it here.
The ring I keep staring at. A cornflower blue step cut lab sapphire from The Emerald Holiday, like a tiny swimming pool for your hand. I AM OBSESSED WITH THEIR STUFF. Shop it here.
CAKES is having its annual sale. 30 percent off the nipple covers with a cult following, through Sunday only. Shop the sale here.
The bralette I love. EBY’s sheer Material Girl, soft, zero underwire drama, disappears under every summer top. Shop it here.
The at home facial I am weirdly obsessed with. Shark’s FacialPro Glow, the hydro facial machine that makes your bathroom feel like a med spa. Shop it here.
The sleep chocolate. oHHo’s CBNight dark chocolate with salted caramel, dessert that tucks you in. Shop it here.
→ they also have fun CBD drinks (I may have already had one today, sorry for the spelling errors) and creams.
The top that does meetings and martinis. M.M.LaFleur’s Aperitivo top is polished on Zoom at 3 and out to dinner by 6. Shop it here.
The carry-on for the last trips of summer. Antler’s expandable spinner in indigo, with room for the extra stuff you always come home with. MY FAVE! lifetime warrenty. Shop it here.
*most links are affiliate!
Every week I give away a book to paid subscribers (US only). This week I have a copy of Micki McElya’s Liberation Summer: The Moment That Changed the Women’s Movement and the Future of American Politics (Avid Reader Press, out this week). In September 1968, feminists protested the Miss America pageant on the Atlantic City boardwalk while the first Miss Black America pageant crowned its winner just blocks away, and McElya argues that modern feminist politics (and the backlash we are still living through) was born that weekend.
→ COMMENT LIBERATION down below for a chance to win.
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