The Other Side of Power: White Women, Male Survivors, and the Accountability Hollywood Has Yet to Confront

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Written By Jordannah Elizabeth Graham-Mayer

Thank you, Tarana for your courage and work.

Hollywood has a problem it has never adequately investigated: what happens when the person accused of sexual misconduct, stalking, or abuse is a woman whose professional standing, wealth, whiteness, or proximity to celebrity makes her difficult to challenge? The entertainment industry has spent years examining the sexual exploitation of women by powerful men, exposing the professional networks, financial incentives, and institutional silences that allowed misconduct to continue. Yet a corresponding investigation into the experiences of men who report sexual harassment, coercion, stalking, and other forms of abuse by women in positions of influence remains underdeveloped. Actors, musicians, comedians, producers, executives, and other prominent men can occupy positions of extraordinary public power while still having their privacy, bodily autonomy, and personal safety threatened. Their professional success does not make them immune to abuse, and their gender should not determine whether their accounts receive serious consideration. The question this investigation asks is whether Hollywood has developed a consistent standard of accountability—or whether that standard changes when the alleged perpetrator is a powerful woman.

The subject requires precision from the outset. The argument is not that women are responsible for most sexual violence, that women and men experience identical patterns of victimization, or that the evidence establishes a criminal pattern among white women as a group. It does not. The argument is that female-perpetrated misconduct exists, that men experience sexual violence and stalking, and that entertainment institutions should be examined for how they respond when allegations involve women with professional influence, money, social standing, or reputational protection. Race is relevant to this investigation because whiteness can intersect with institutional privilege and cultural assumptions about innocence, desirability, and credibility. But the claim that white women in Hollywood perpetrate these acts at a particular rate would require evidence that is not currently established by the available industry-wide research. A serious investigation should pursue that question through documented cases, interviews, legal records, and comparative analysis rather than present a conclusion before the reporting is complete.

The history of #MeToo provides an essential starting point. Tarana Burke founded the original me too movement in 2006 to support survivors of sexual violence, particularly young women and girls of color. Her work centered on empathy, community support, and helping survivors understand that they were not alone. The movement became a global cultural force in 2017, when the hashtag spread rapidly amid extensive reporting about Harvey Weinstein and other powerful men accused of sexual misconduct. That visibility helped expose the ways professional dependence, intimidation, nondisclosure agreements, and institutional protection could suppress reports of abuse. But the distinction between Burke’s original movement and the mainstream campaign that followed matters. The movement’s roots were in survivor support, not celebrity public relations, and its history raises a legitimate question about what happens when an institution adopts the language of accountability without extending the same seriousness to every person who may need protection.

The concern here is not that women who spoke out during #MeToo were wrong to do so, nor that the movement should have diverted attention from women who experienced sexual violence. It is that a movement organized around bodily autonomy and freedom from sexual exploitation must be able to address misconduct without making gender a prerequisite for recognition. Men who report unwanted sexual contact, coercion, or stalking should not have to prove that their experiences are sufficiently unusual or dramatic to deserve attention. Nor should a woman accused of misconduct be presumed guilty because she is powerful, wealthy, or professionally connected. The same principles must apply in both directions: allegations should be investigated, evidence should be evaluated, and organizations should respond to documented risks. A movement’s credibility depends on whether its core principles can survive beyond the cases that first made them culturally visible.

National data demonstrate why male victimization deserves attention. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s research on sexual violence, intimate-partner violence, and stalking among men reports that approximately one in four men in the United States has experienced some form of contact sexual violence during his lifetime. The CDC also reports that about one in 17 men has experienced stalking. The sex of the perpetrator varies according to the type of violence. In its national survey findings, 79 percent of male victims who reported being made to penetrate someone identified only female perpetrators, as did 82 percent of male victims of sexual coercion. Among men reporting unwanted sexual contact, 53 percent identified only female perpetrators. Among male stalking victims, 46 percent reported only female perpetrators, while 43 percent reported only male perpetrators and 8 percent reported perpetrators of both sexes.

These findings establish that women perpetrate some forms of sexual violence and stalking against men; they do not establish the racial identity of those perpetrators or the prevalence of such conduct in Hollywood. They also should not be misrepresented as evidence that women are responsible for most sexual violence overall. The CDC’s findings distinguish among types of victimization for a reason: rape, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, and stalking are not interchangeable categories. Nevertheless, the data make it untenable to dismiss female-perpetrated abuse as merely hypothetical. If entertainment institutions are serious about consent, they must be prepared to investigate these experiences when they arise, including when the person reporting them is a prominent man and the person accused is a woman. The absence of industry-specific statistics about this particular pattern is a reason to conduct further research, not a reason to presume that the problem does not exist.

The workplace evidence is also significant. A 2020 study by Kathleen C. Basile and colleagues, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, examined sexual violence by workplace-related perpetrators using data from the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. The researchers found that approximately 2.5 percent of men in the United States reported some form of sexual violence by a workplace-related perpetrator during their lifetimes. Male victims reported perpetrators of more than one sex, and the study documented fear and other adverse impacts associated with workplace-related sexual violence. This research was not restricted to entertainment, and it cannot tell us how often a female producer, casting director, comedian, or music executive sexually harasses a male colleague. It does, however, demonstrate that workplace-related sexual victimization of men is measurable and that a gender-neutral investigation of workplace safety is warranted.

Hollywood offers particular reasons to examine how these experiences may be handled. The industry is organized around professional access, reputation, personal relationships, and recurring opportunities to work with the same people. A casting director can influence an actor’s prospects; a producer can affect a project’s future; a manager can shape a musician’s professional relationships; and a comedian with industry connections may influence who receives opportunities on a tour or at a venue. Power in these environments is not exercised solely through formal job titles. It can also operate through introductions, recommendations, financing, publicity, access to influential networks, and the ability to affect someone’s professional standing. These structures can make it difficult for workers to challenge conduct they experience as unwelcome, particularly when the person involved is socially influential. Whether these dynamics affect male survivors of female-perpetrated misconduct in the same ways they affect other survivors is a question that requires direct reporting.

The Hollywood Commission’s research offers a foundation for investigating that question. Its 2022–23 survey gathered responses from 5,259 entertainment workers across television and film, live theater, music, talent representation, public relations, broadcast news, and related settings. The Commission found that workers continued to lack confidence that powerful people would face accountability for misconduct. At major studios, 71 percent of respondents believed it was unlikely that a powerful person would be held accountable. The survey also found differences in perceptions of workplace progress among demographic groups. These findings do not establish that powerful white women routinely abuse men, and they should not be used to imply that they do. They do establish that doubts about accountability persist across the entertainment workplace and provide a compelling basis for examining whether the industry’s systems respond consistently to allegations involving powerful people of different genders.

The issue of whiteness should be investigated as a question about power, representation, and institutional response—not as a substitute for evidence about individual conduct. White women have held prominent positions in Hollywood’s professional and cultural networks, including as performers, producers, casting directors, executives, comedians, and talent representatives. Their influence varies enormously, as does their economic security and institutional authority. It would be inaccurate to assume that all white women possess equivalent power or that whiteness alone determines whether someone is believed. But it is reasonable to investigate whether cultural expectations about white femininity, sexual desirability, innocence, and respectability influence how allegations against certain women are interpreted. The central question is whether institutions apply their standards consistently when the accused person is a woman whose reputation is commercially valuable or whose relationships place her close to the center of an influential network.

That inquiry must also consider the possibility that female-perpetrated misconduct is framed differently from comparable conduct by men. Unwanted sexual attention from a woman may be dismissed as flirtation or humor, particularly when the recipient is a man who is assumed to welcome sexual attention. A persistent attempt to establish contact may be described as romantic determination rather than a boundary violation. A public disclosure about an intimate relationship may be treated as celebrity gossip even when the underlying circumstances raise questions about consent, privacy, or professional retaliation. These are plausible patterns of cultural interpretation, but they should be tested through evidence rather than asserted as universal facts. A rigorous media analysis could compare how journalists, entertainment publications, employers, and audiences describe similar conduct across cases, paying attention to differences in language, sourcing, and the distinction between allegations and established findings.

The music industry provides a particularly important case study because musicians’ public identities are often built around intimacy with audiences. Songs, interviews, concerts, and social media create a sense of personal familiarity that can blur the boundary between public performance and private life. That visibility can make performers vulnerable to unwanted approaches, repeated contact, and intrusion into their personal relationships. In some cases, conduct may escalate beyond unwelcome attention into behavior that warrants a stalking investigation. In April 2026, the Los Angeles Times reported that a woman accused of stalking and attacking former Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham had been arrested and faced seven criminal counts. Earlier court filings described Buckingham’s allegations of repeated unwanted contact, threats, appearances near his and his family members’ homes, and a false emergency call that led police to respond to his residence. The case illustrates the seriousness of alleged stalking involving a prominent male musician, although the allegations must be distinguished from a criminal conviction and the available reporting does not establish the accused person’s race.

Buckingham’s case matters because it moves the discussion beyond an abstract debate about whether men can be victims. It demonstrates how allegations of stalking can involve a person’s home, family, reputation, and sense of physical security. It also illustrates why a celebrity’s professional success should not be confused with an absence of vulnerability. A musician may have the resources to seek legal protection, yet still face unwanted contact or alleged threats that require intervention. A case like this cannot establish how prevalent stalking by women is in the music industry, but it can inform questions about threat assessment, security procedures, documentation, and legal remedies. A broader investigation should examine additional cases through court records and independently corroborated reporting, while taking care not to infer a pattern from a single example.

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PAIRINGS: Bob Weir, “The Ground Don’t Want Me” & Abbey Lincoln, “Throw It Away”

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PAIRINGS: Albums & Singles — How Music Intersects
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Written By Jordannah Elizabeth Graham-Mayer

The earth is supposed to take us back. It is where we build our homes, bury our dead, plant our histories, and imagine that something of us will remain. But what happens when the ground beneath us offers no promise of belonging? And what happens when the things we have spent our lives trying to keep become the very things we must learn to release? Bob Weir’s “The Ground Don’t Want Me” and Abbey Lincoln’s “Throw It Away” approach these questions from different directions. Weir’s song evokes the unsettling prospect of a world that offers no guarantee of shelter; Lincoln’s composition considers the freedom that becomes possible when we loosen our grip on what we cannot keep. One confronts the ache of belonging denied, while the other asks us to reconsider the attachments through which we define ourselves. Together, they reveal a tension at the heart of being human: we want the world to hold us, yet we must learn to live without the assurance that it will.

Belonging is something we seek from the world. Freedom, however, may begin with what we are willing to release from ourselves.

Weir’s “The Ground Don’t Want Me” emerged from the sessions for Blue Mountain, his 2016 solo album, before being released as a previously unheard recording in 2026. Written by Josh Ritter, with music by Ritter, Josh Kaufman, and Weir, the song belongs to a musical world shaped by American roots traditions, where the landscape often serves as both setting and state of mind. Its eventual release also introduces a temporal dimension: a recording made years earlier enters a new moment, inviting listeners to consider how music acquires meaning beyond the circumstances of its creation. The title alone unsettles our relationship with the earth. The ground is supposed to be dependable. It receives our footsteps, supports our dwellings, and gives physical form to the idea of home. To imagine that it does not want us reverses this familiar arrangement. The land becomes something other than refuge; it becomes a presence against which we must measure our own vulnerability.

American music is full of travelers. The blues wanderer, the country drifter, the folk singer on the road: each carries a different version of the desire to leave something behind. The open road promises reinvention, suggesting that another life might be waiting beyond the limits of the present one. Movement becomes an expression of possibility, a declaration that our circumstances need not determine our future. Yet the mythology of movement contains a contradiction. Leaving is not the same as arriving. Distance does not necessarily produce freedom, and a person can travel indefinitely without resolving the reasons they felt compelled to depart. The American West intensifies this tension. Its vastness has long served as a metaphor for self-invention, a place where the individual might imagine beginning again. But the landscape does not owe the traveler a happy ending. Its openness can be exhilarating precisely because it is indifferent. The world can offer space without offering welcome.

This is what makes Weir’s song a compelling meditation on belonging. The question is not simply whether we can find a place to settle, but what happens when the places we seek cannot provide the security we expect from them. A landscape may be beautiful without being hospitable. A community may shape us without continuing to accommodate us. A home may remain physically unchanged while becoming emotionally unfamiliar. There is a particular vulnerability in discovering that the things we depend upon do not necessarily depend upon us in return. We may build our identities around a place, a relationship, or a community, only to discover that our attachment cannot guarantee permanence. The resulting disorientation is not merely about losing something external. It can unsettle our understanding of who we are.

Abbey Lincoln’s “Throw It Away,” heard here in its 2007 interpretation on Abbey Sings Abbey, approaches this problem from another direction. Rather than asking whether the world will hold us, Lincoln asks us to examine what we insist on holding ourselves. Lincoln was a composer and vocalist whose work consistently connected artistic expression with self-determination. Across a career that encompassed jazz, film, political engagement, and songwriting, she developed a voice that could be intimate without becoming submissive, confrontational without sacrificing tenderness, and emotionally direct without surrendering complexity. Her music made room for the realities of the world while insisting upon her right to interpret those realities on her own terms. Abbey Sings Abbey, released in 2007, returned to her compositions through an intimate musical setting informed by acoustic folk and country textures as well as jazz. It was the final studio album of her recording career, and its performances carry the perspective of an artist revisiting her own work after decades of experience. The songs do not feel detached from the life that preceded them. They sound newly illuminated by it.

Lincoln’s reflections on songwriting offer a useful lens through which to understand “Throw It Away.” In an interview with All About Jazz, she described the process of expressing what she felt and witnessed through music, then releasing the burden rather than continuing to carry it. Her understanding of creation suggests that expression can transform an experience without erasing it. This distinction is essential to the song’s philosophy. Letting go is not the same as indifference. It does not require us to deny that something mattered, pretend that suffering never occurred, or abandon the lessons that difficult experiences have taught us. It asks us to consider whether the meaning of an experience must remain inseparable from the pain it caused. We hold on for reasons that are not always apparent to us. Sometimes we preserve a relationship because its survival seems to validate the years we invested in it. Sometimes we cling to a place because leaving would mean acknowledging that the person we were there no longer exists. Sometimes we keep carrying an injury because we fear that releasing it will diminish the seriousness of what happened.

But pain is not proof of devotion. We do not have to remain wounded to demonstrate that something mattered. We do not have to keep a person in our lives to honor what they once meant to us. And we do not have to preserve an old version of ourselves simply because we recognize the person we used to be. Lincoln’s wisdom lies in the possibility of transforming experience into understanding. The past remains part of us, but it need not dictate every decision we make. We can remember without remaining confined to memory. We can acknowledge what was lost without making loss the organizing principle of our lives. For Lincoln, songwriting itself offered a model of this process. An experience enters the artist’s consciousness, acquires a form, and becomes available to others. The resulting work can carry the emotional truth of its origins without requiring the artist to remain permanently inside the experience that inspired it. Music becomes both testimony and release.

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The Guide to “Review of Books”

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Written by: Jordannah Elizabeth Graham-Mayer

There is something almost ceremonial about the words “Review of Books.” The phrase suggests a publication concerned with books, but its real territory is much larger: literature, history, politics, philosophy, art, culture, identity, memory and the arguments that emerge when people take ideas seriously. A review can tell us what a book contains, but criticism at its best asks what the book reveals about the world that produced it. That distinction has allowed the Review of Books to survive dramatic changes in publishing, from the decline of newspaper book sections to the rise of digital media and the fragmentation of contemporary audiences. Today, the form exists in many versions, from major international magazines to regional journals, identity-based publications and specialist academic periodicals. What unites them is not a particular political position or literary taste, but a belief that books remain worthy of sustained attention.

There is no single “Review of Books,” and there never has been. Instead, the name describes a living family of publications that have developed different editorial personalities according to their locations, readerships and intellectual communities. Some are among the most established cultural magazines in the English-speaking world, while others were created specifically to fill spaces left by shrinking newspapers and disappearing literary supplements. Some publish primarily in print, some exist principally online, and others deliberately combine both forms. Their subjects can range from novels and poetry to political theory, history, science, religion, visual art and current affairs. Taken together, they form a remarkably useful map of contemporary intellectual life. To follow them is to see not only what people are reading, but what different communities believe is worth discussing.

THE NEW YORK MODEL

Any serious consideration of the contemporary Review of Books tradition begins with The New York Review of Books. The Review was launched in 1963 during the New York City newspaper strike by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein, working with Jason Epstein, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick. Its founding purpose was ambitious: to create a publication in which distinguished writers could discuss books and current issues at length, rather than treating reviews simply as consumer guidance. The experiment succeeded almost immediately, and the publication became an independent voice in American intellectual and literary life. Today, The New York Review of Books publishes twenty issues each year and continues to combine discussion of books with politics, history, science, literature and the arts. Its longevity is partly explained by a simple editorial principle: the book is often the beginning of the conversation, not its conclusion. 

The importance of that model is difficult to separate from the history of modern literary criticism. The New York Review helped establish a recognizable form in which a review could become an essay, an essay could become an argument, and an argument could move well beyond the book under discussion. A biography could become a meditation on political power; a history book could provoke a reconsideration of national memory; a novel could become a lens through which an entire society is examined. This approach made the serious review something closer to a literary genre of its own. It also created a publication in which readers could encounter writers and thinkers across disciplines without being confined to a single academic field. More than six decades after its founding, that remains central to the Review’s identity. [1]

THE LONDON REVIEW

The London Review of Books emerged sixteen years later under very different circumstances. It was founded in 1979 during the management lockout at The Times, after Frank Kermode proposed in The Observer that a new magazine could occupy the space created by the temporary disappearance of the Times Literary Supplement. The first issue appeared four months later under founding editor Karl Miller. The publication subsequently developed its own independent identity and became one of Europe’s most influential magazines of culture and ideas. Today, the LRB is published twice a month and ranges across literature, politics, history, philosophy, science, technology, art, fiction, poetry, memoir and reportage. Its continued emphasis on long-form intellectual writing demonstrates how expansive the idea of a book review can become. 

The relationship between The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books is useful because neither publication treats criticism as a simple exercise in ranking new titles. Their reviews can be lengthy, argumentative and highly contextual, asking readers to consider books alongside the historical and political circumstances in which they appear. The LRB has also built a broader cultural ecosystem around its magazine, including a bookshop, podcasts, events and a substantial digital archive. This matters because the modern review is no longer simply a printed object arriving at a reader’s home. It can be a magazine, archive, conversation, event series and intellectual community at once. The review survives, in part, by becoming more than a review. 

DUBLIN, SYDNEY AND THE REGIONAL REVIEW

The regional Review of Books demonstrates another important truth: literary culture does not have to be organized from the largest international capitals. The Dublin Review of Books was founded in 2007 as an online journal offering a space for reflection on literature, history, arts, society, politics and culture. Its essays and shorter pieces are generally connected to recently published books, while its editorial interests extend particularly toward Ireland, Europe and their cultural and political histories. The publication describes itself as a journal of ideas, and its purpose is not simply to catalogue Irish publishing but to create a forum in which Irish and international questions can be examined together. Its continued activity illustrates how a regional publication can develop an international readership without surrendering its particular point of view. 

Australia’s Sydney Review of Books offers another version of the regional model. Founded in 2013 in response to the diminishing opportunities for critics in the mainstream press, it has become a significant Australian venue for long-form reviews and literary essays. The publication publishes new work weekly and supplements its digital presence with print anthologies, podcasts and public programs developed in partnership with cultural institutions across Australia. Based at the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University, the SRB explicitly treats criticism as a cultural practice rather than simply as consumer advice. Its stated mission emphasizes intellectual rigor, diversity, participation and the importance of disagreement within a healthy literary culture. In that sense, the regional review becomes more than a publication: it becomes infrastructure for criticism itself. 

The Montreal Review of Books offers an especially clear example of how geography can determine editorial purpose. The publication is a free, nationally distributed journal devoted to reviews, features and essays about English-language books by Quebec writers and publishers. Its coverage includes literature, nonfiction, poetry, memoir, history, graphic novels and children’s books, giving it a broad mandate within a clearly defined cultural territory. Published three times a year in print by the Association of English-language Publishers of Quebec, the mRb also maintains an active digital presence. Its existence is a reminder that a literary community can require its own critical forum even when its publishing market is part of a larger national system. The Review of Books, in this form, becomes a means of making a particular literary culture visible to itself and to the outside world. 

THE REVIEW AS CULTURAL IDENTITY

The boundaries of the Review of Books become even more interesting when community is defined by culture or identity rather than geography alone. The Jewish Review of Books, first published in spring 2010, is a quarterly print publication with an active online presence devoted to serious discussion of Jewish literature, religion, culture, politics, fiction, poetry and the arts. Its contributors include writers and scholars working across contemporary Jewish intellectual life, while its editorial approach is intended to be serious without becoming inaccessible. The publication is issued by the Jewish Review of Books Foundation and has developed a substantial readership since its founding. Its model demonstrates that a review can become a cultural meeting place, where books are considered not in isolation but in relation to history, memory, religion and identity. 

This is one of the most important characteristics of the modern review: it creates context. A novel may be reviewed as literature, but it may also prompt discussion about migration, language or memory. A history may lead to an examination of how a community remembers itself. A work of religious scholarship may become part of a conversation about contemporary politics. The review creates the space in which those connections can be made without forcing every subject into a single category. In that sense, the strongest publications do not merely tell readers what books to buy. They teach readers how books participate in larger cultural conversations. 

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Discover Fun Hobbies That Boost Wellness, Growth, and Connections

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By: Alyssa Strickland

Photo by: Ragnar Axelsson

Busy adults juggling work, home responsibilities, and a social life that’s gotten quieter often want something enjoyable again, but the options can feel intimidating or oddly lonely. The core challenge is finding accessible hobbies that actually stick, ones that fit real schedules, feel welcoming for a general audience, and don’t turn into another self-improvement chore. When a hobby doubles as a wellness activity, it can bring steady mental health benefits like a calmer mind and a clearer sense of momentum. Even better, the right pastime makes social connection feel natural instead of forced. 

Why Hobbies Build Growth, Calm, and Community 

Hobbies are more than “something to do.” Personal growth through hobbies comes from learning small skills over time, which boosts confidence, steadies your mood, and gives your week a clear thread of meaning. That sense of progress makes it easier to show up consistently, even when life is packed.  This matters because a lot of adults are running on autopilot and craving real connection. 

When 41 percent of adults feel lonely, a shared activity offers a low-pressure way to be around people with a built-in topic. 

Think of a beginner pottery class: you focus on shaping clay, your mind quiets, and you leave with a tangible “I made this.” Over a few sessions, names become familiar, and conversations happen naturally while hands stay busy. With your “why” clear, it’s easier to turn curiosity into a skill plan that fits your goals. 

Build Tech Skills on Your Schedule With a Flexible Online Track 

When you want the confidence and connection that hobbies bring, having a clear path can make it easier to keep showing up. Going back to school online is one practical way to turn curiosity into real, usable skills, especially if you’re aiming to learn something you can build on over time. It helps to choose a track that feels fulfilling or supports your career goals; for example, if you aspire to work in tech, you may be the perfect candidate for a degree in information technology, and exploring accredited online technology degrees can help you see what that path could look like. Online programs can also be a strong fit for busy professionals, since they’re designed to be flexible around work and life responsibilities. 

Beginner-Friendly Hobbies You Can Start Online or With Friends 

Pick one hobby that fits your energy, schedule, and social comfort level, then make it easy to show up consistently. A simple weekly plan (and a clear “why”) turns curiosity into a routine you can actually keep.

  1. Learn one instrument with a micro-practice plan: Choose a “starter instrument” you can play quietly at home (keyboard, ukulele, or a practice pad for drums). Set a 20-minute block three times a week: 5 minutes warm-up, 10 minutes on one skill (chords, a scale, or rhythm), and 5 minutes playing a simple song. If you like company, schedule one virtual jam or in-person meet-up each month so you have something to practice toward. 
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Still Here: The Trouble With Having Nowhere to Go

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Written By: Jordannah Elizabeth Graham-Mayer

We have become very good at being between houses.  The Colorado house has become my mother’s house, at least for the moment, which is one of those sentences that sounds temporary until you start counting the boxes. Some of the children are further south, and that arrangement has its own logic, including the small but necessary reminder that children eventually become people with houses, one mine and John’s  who can kick us out when they want to “redesign”, (and not keep the house “dry” of mini-kegs when their father is over a decade sober). Another one is in Cape Cod, where independence has become less of an abstract virtue and more of a practical requirement, particularly where John is concerned. Our daughter can’t quite sleep without him, so she’s got a cottage, and an old Silverado to drive until she forgets about him. 

So here we are, two married people with several homes between us and nowhere to sleep. I have to admit there is something almost comic about it, although I am not laughing at all.

Money has a way of making philosophy less interesting. John’s accounts are blocked, my part-time teaching work has dried up, and suddenly the difference between having bills and having money feels like a distinction invented by someone who has never paid a bill. The bills themselves are managed, which is important, but there is no mysterious person waiting behind a curtain with a checkbook when something unexpected happens. We have reached that peculiar adult territory where everything is technically handled and everything still feels precarious. I have always thought of security as something you build slowly, but lately it feels more like something you carry carefully from room to room. You put it down for a second and discover that the floor has moved.

Marriage is interesting under these conditions because romance becomes very difficult to perform. Nobody looks particularly cinematic while trying to solve logistics. John can be funny in the middle of it, which is one of the reasons I married him, although sometimes his humor arrives at precisely the moment I am trying to remain serious. I can become organizationally tedious to the point of irritation, which is another way of saying that I sometimes confuse his anxiety within his organization.

Between the two of us, we have developed a small economy of glances that usually means, Are you seeing this? followed by, Yes, unfortunately. There’s also, “You’re good looking” and “No divorce”.

Then, because life has a sense of humor, I received one of John’s rare texts. It was not about money or houses or children or anything that could be entered into a spreadsheet. It was a message about avoiding boring conversation, about confidence and quick wit, about being playful and keeping him curious, about a little tension and perhaps a little trouble. The funny thing about receiving something like that from your husband when your life is already full of trouble is that you suddenly have to consider the distinction between the kind you chose and the kind you did not. I read it and thought, “The person I married still knows how to interrupt my thinking.”

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The House Party Problem: Fraternities, Sororities, and the Cost of Belonging at Cornell

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By Jordannah Elizabeth Graham-Mayer

At Cornell, allegations of sexual violence have forced students to confront the uneasy relationship between Greek life, campus culture, and the price of belonging.

There is a particular kind of fear that belongs to college life: the fear that the place where everyone is supposed to become themselves might also become the place where they learn how quickly a community can turn its back on them. At Cornell University, that fear has become attached to a fraternity house, a lawsuit, a reopened criminal investigation and a much larger conversation about Greek life. In September 2026, a former Cornell student identified in court documents as Jane Doe sued Cornell University, Chi Phi and others, alleging that she was sexually assaulted by seven men at Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity house in 2024 after being pressured to consume alcohol and drugs. Those allegations have not been adjudicated, and the defendants have not been convicted of crimes. But after the lawsuit was filed, Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten reopened the criminal investigation, saying the allegations in the civil complaint differed significantly from the account the woman gave police in 2024 and warranted renewed examination. 

The chronology itself illustrates why this story requires care. Cornell’s initial November 2024 crime alert said an individual had reported being sexually assaulted and coerced into consuming ketamine and other drugs at a fraternity on Oct. 25, while the later civil complaint describes the alleged encounter as occurring on Oct. 19 and provides a detailed account of the student’s movements that evening. The university temporarily suspended Chi Phi after the report and later temporarily suspended a number of students while its own offices and police investigated. In January 2025, according to the lawsuit, Cornell began a Title IX investigation after Jane Doe filed a formal complaint. Cornell now says its investigation resulted in disciplinary action, including expulsions and suspensions, and that the Chi Phi chapter remains closed, although the university has declined to provide individual disciplinary details. The distinction between an allegation, a university finding and a criminal charge is essential, particularly in a case whose facts are now being reconsidered by prosecutors.

The details of the lawsuit are disturbing, but what may ultimately matter just as much as what allegedly happened inside the house is the architecture around it: the fraternity, the sorority, the party, the drinking, the recruitment rituals, the friendships, the social hierarchies and the pressure placed on young people to enter spaces where everyone already seems to know the rules. Cornell’s Greek system is not a marginal feature of campus life. Cornell says that approximately one-third of its undergraduate students—more than 3,000 students—belong to one of more than 50 recognized fraternities and sororities. The university describes Greek organizations as communities that offer students opportunities for leadership, personal growth, service and belonging, while also acknowledging their long history as part of Cornell’s student and alumni experience. When allegations of sexual violence involve a social system that touches such a large portion of the undergraduate population, the question becomes larger than what happened at one party or inside one house. 

Sam Sifton, writing in The New York Times‘s The Morning, captured some of that uncertainty through conversations with Cornell students on Sidechat, the anonymous campus social platform. In the passage you supplied, Sifton describes students who sympathized with Jane Doe and criticized Cornell alongside others who argued that sexual violence is pervasive across American campuses and that Cornell was being unfairly singled out. He also reported that some students defended Greek life while others said they were now less inclined to rush fraternities or sororities. One young woman told him that someone had handed her an open drink at a fraternity party, prompting her entire friend group to panic. That anecdote is revealing not because an open drink proves that a crime has occurred, but because it demonstrates how quickly fear can enter an ordinary social interaction. For some students, the question is no longer simply whether a party will be fun, but whether they can trust the environment enough to participate in it.

The open drink becomes frightening because the possibility of danger has become imaginable. Suspicion enters the room before anything happens, turning an ordinary social gesture into a calculation about risk. A student has to wonder who handed her the drink, whether she saw it opened, whether she trusts the people around her, whether she can leave and whether someone would believe her if something went wrong. This is one of the quieter consequences of sexual violence: it changes the meaning of ordinary things. A party is no longer simply a party, and an invitation upstairs is no longer simply an invitation upstairs. Even belonging itself can become a risk calculation.

The Greek System as Social Infrastructure

The Cornell case is particularly complicated because Jane Doe was herself connected to Greek life. According to the civil complaint, her evening began at a Tri Delta-associated event before she went to Moonies Bar & Nightclub and later to the Chi Phi house, where she says the assaults occurred. The lawsuit also names Tri Delta entities and the nightclub as defendants, in addition to Cornell, Chi Phi and seven individual men. Those claims are allegations made in a civil lawsuit, and the named defendants have not been found liable simply because they were named. The significance of the Greek-life connection, however, is that it complicates the familiar story in which Greek life is imagined as one undifferentiated block of perpetrators and outsiders. Sororities are not fraternities, and women who belong to sororities are not responsible for the actions alleged against fraternity members. 

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The Sound of Inheritance: Joshua Redman Plays Sonny Rollins

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Influence can be a difficult thing to locate. Sometimes it lives in the obvious places—in the sound of an instrument, a phrase borrowed and transformed, a record repeatedly returned to. Other times it becomes so deeply embedded that it is difficult to separate the influence from the artist who received it. For Joshua Redman, Sonny Rollins is both. Redman discovered Saxophone Colossus at the Berkeley Public Library when he was around ten or eleven, an encounter he describes as his musical “eureka moment.” Rollins became his “gateway” into jazz improvisation and, eventually, his “North Star.”

If Ever You Would Leave Us (we play for Rollins), due November 20 on Blue Note, is Redman’s way of answering that influence after Rollins’s death earlier this year.

Redman learned of Rollins’s passing on May 25, 2026, while at home in Berkeley after celebrating his daughter’s sixteenth birthday. The next morning, he began calling musicians, unsure at first what the tribute would become but certain that he needed to make something. Within weeks, he had assembled a remarkable group in New York, including Christian McBride, Larry Grenadier, Marcus Gilmore, Kevin Hays, Peter Bernstein, Chris Potter, Cécile McLorin Salvant and Gabrielle Cavassa. The eleven selections draw from Rollins’s repertoire, but the album is not an attempt to recreate the past. Instead, Redman approaches Rollins the way Rollins approached the jazz tradition: by entering it, listening closely and then making it his own. Redman has described the sessions as feeling less like a funeral than an Irish wake, a fitting distinction for an album where grief and gratitude occupy the same space.

The Rollins connection becomes clearest in the album’s sound. Redman returns to the piano-less trio, one of Rollins’s defining formats, with bassist Christian McBride or Larry Grenadier and drummer Marcus Gilmore. It is a configuration Redman has explored throughout his career, most explicitly on 2007’s Back East, but here it carries the weight of direct remembrance. “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” for example, is recast in 5/4, while “Pent-Up House” moves mostly through seven and “Valse Hot” through eleven. These rhythmic choices are not exercises in complexity for their own sake; Redman has said the odd meters have to feel physical, even danceable. That physicality is essential to understanding why Rollins remains such a powerful presence in Redman’s playing: the tribute is not simply to Rollins’s compositions, but to his way of turning structure into freedom.

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P / P Photography – Jordannah’s Lens #1

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Jordannah’s graduate education at Maryland Institute College of Art complimented her 20 years of graphic design, consisting of the intricate color palettes of her early fliers for her promotions and live events via The Process Records, her web design work and the graphic iterations of images for P / P. It may be important to begin including her photography.

The three shots are taken via her iPhone when she’s not interested in vintage XLR cameras. Jordannah loves nature, the city and all that transpires as she traverses the tangible Universe.

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John Mayer’s Continuum at 20 

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Written by Al Shipley

John Mayer Continuum Era

John Mayer’s third major label studio album, Continuum, came out 20 years ago this week during a fertile period for the Connecticut-born singer/guitarist. Though he was at that point fully established as a multi-platinum star and arena headliner, he formed the John Mayer Trio in 2005 to go off the beaten path and play smaller venues. Backed by the seasoned rhythm section of bassist Pino Palladino (The Who, D’Angelo) and drummer Steve Jordan (Keith Richards, Aretha Franklin), Mayer workshopped new material, played covers, and burnished his budding reputation as a serious blues guitarist.  

The John Mayer Trio’s 2005 live album Try! came out 10 months before Continuum, and only two songs, “Gravity” and “Vultures,” appeared on both albums. In a sense it felt like Mayer, a fan and collaborator of several major hip-hop stars, used Try! much as a rapper would use a mixtape to burn off less radio-friendly material on a release that wasn’t subject to lofty commercial expectations. Perhaps it also sharpened his focus on what he did and didn’t want to do on Continuum, which would ultimately become one of his most popular and beloved albums.  

Each of the two albums featured one Jimi Hendrix cover: “Wait Until Tomorrow” on Try! and “Bold as Love” on Continuum. Both songs originated on 1967’s Axis: Bold as Love, the awkward middle child of the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s three albums, which didn’t generate as many hits as Are You Experienced and Electric Ladyland, but is cherished by any true Hendrix fan. Stevie Ray Vaughan was Mayer’s formative blues guitar influence, but Hendrix was Vaughan’s idol, and it seems clear that Mayer was exploring his family tree of guitar heroes. In an album defined by some of Mayer’s most grounded, plainspoken songwriting, though, it’s jarring when he suddenly begins singing Hendrix’s more surreal, imagistic lyrics: “Anger, he smiles / Towering in shiny metallic purple armor / Queen jealousy awaits behind him.”  

Continuum is, technically, also a John Mayer Trio album; Palladino played on every track, and Jordan played on all but one track and co-produced the album with Mayer. It’s arguably more of a guitar/bass/drums record than Mayer’s two previous major label releases – there are just horns on two tracks and keyboards on three – but it doesn’t necessarily sound like it, in part because the guitars don’t always sound like guitars. Mayer bends his instrument into almost unrecognizable, synthesizer-like textures on “I Don’t Trust Myself (With Loving You)” with the Roger Linn Design AdrenaLinn III pedal, which he also experimented with on his 2003 hit “Bigger Than My Body.”  

The highest charting song on Continuum, opening track and lead single “Waiting on the World to Change,” was Mayer’s first attempt at wading into politics in his music, although one might say he was still testing the waters cautiously. Like the Marvin Gaye classic “What’s Going On” that it briefly resembles during the bridge, “Waiting on the World to Change” is less a call to action than a lament that our modern world is plagued with so many problems and so few obvious solutions. More specifically, it represents the perspective of a left-leaning twentysomething who just watched President George W. Bush win a second term despite presiding over a disastrous and illegal war on Iraq and FEMA’s incompetence in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  

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The Parent You Meant to Be

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Written by Alyssa Strickland

Somewhere before the child arrives, most of us create a parent in our imagination. The figure is patient, present, curious about everything, and somehow capable of listening carefully to stories that have no beginning or end. This parent knows when to intervene and when to let the moment unfold, and remains composed through the ordinary chaos of family life. We imagine this person before we know what it means to become them, carrying the idea of this future self almost like a promise. Then the child arrives, and the imagined parent has to make room for the actual one: tired, distracted, occasionally impatient, sometimes bored by the repetition of the very life they love. The distance between those two people can feel like failure, but it may be something else entirely—the beginning of understanding what parenting actually asks of us.

The Parent You Pictured

The imagined parent is a kind of performance written in advance. There is an audience, although no one has bought a ticket yet: perhaps the child we have not met, perhaps our own parents, our friends, or the younger version of ourselves who once decided what kind of mother or father we would become. We carry these ideas into parenthood as if they were instructions, expecting that love and preparation will somehow make the transition recognizable. But actual parenting is not performed in advance. It happens in real time, under conditions no one can completely prepare for, in kitchens and bedrooms, in cars and pediatrician’s offices, during arguments and celebrations, in the middle of the night and at six in the morning. It is repetitive, physical, emotional work performed with incomplete information, and there is no rehearsal for the particular child who eventually stands in front of you.

Much of the culture surrounding parenting is devoted to closing the distance between the parent we imagined and the parent we became. It offers systems, routines, philosophies and, often, reassurance. There is value in reassurance, particularly when someone is frightened by how unfamiliar their own life suddenly feels, but there is also value in looking directly at the distance itself. Sometimes the more honest question is not, How do I become the parent I thought I would be? but Who am I becoming now? That question leaves room for the strange, unfinished quality of parenthood—the possibility that becoming a parent is not the fulfillment of an identity but the beginning of another kind of transformation.

A Name for the Shift

Part of what makes early parenthood so destabilizing is that the change is deeper than behavior. It can feel like an alteration of identity itself, as though the architecture of a person’s inner life has been rearranged while they are still expected to perform all of its ordinary functions. There is a word for this: matrescence. The term was coined in 1973 by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael and later developed into a broader clinical framework by Columbia University researcher Aurélie Athan. The reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks has written about the concept in Psychology Today, describing matrescence as a developmental transition involving the body, mind and hormones, with a scale comparable in some ways to adolescence.

That comparison matters because adolescence is understood as a period in which a person changes physically, psychologically and socially, often without knowing exactly who they will be on the other side. We have language for that transformation, even when we do not always experience it gracefully. Parenthood deserves some of the same generosity. Sacks has also pointed to the number of people who arrive in clinical settings wondering whether what they are experiencing is postpartum depression when, in some cases, they may be experiencing the enormous psychological reorganization that accompanies becoming a parent. These experiences are not interchangeable, and serious symptoms should not be dismissed, but neither should every difficult emotion be understood automatically as evidence that something has gone wrong. Sometimes a person is simply becoming someone new, and the unfamiliarity of that process can be frightening without necessarily being pathological.

Naming that possibility does not make the experience less difficult. It changes the location of the shame. Instead of asking what is wrong with me, a person can begin asking what is happening to me, what has changed, and what kind of support might allow me to move through it. There is something quietly liberating about having a word for an experience that previously existed only as a collection of contradictory feelings. The name does not solve the transition; it simply gives the person moving through it somewhere to stand.

The Exhaustion Beneath the Love

The most socially acceptable version of parental exhaustion is tiredness. We understand the jokes about sleepless nights and interrupted meals, the parent who says they haven’t slept properly in years, the sense that exhaustion is simply the admission price for loving someone this much. What is harder to discuss is what prolonged exhaustion can do to a person’s relationship with the role itself. There is a difference between being tired because you have been awake all night and becoming so depleted that the emotional experience of parenting begins to change. The latter can be difficult to admit because it can feel dangerously close to admitting that love itself has become complicated.

A large multi-country study led by Isabelle Roskam, published in Affective Science, describes parental burnout through several dimensions: overwhelming parenting-related exhaustion, emotional distancing from one’s children, and a loss of pleasure and effectiveness in the role, accompanied by a sense that the parent has become different from the person they once were. The distinction between parental burnout and ordinary occupational burnout is particularly important. A person can leave a job, take a vacation, change careers, take medical leave or simply close the laptop at the end of the day. Parenthood does not offer the same clean boundary. There is no clocking out of the role, and the inability to step away can make exhaustion feel less like an episode and more like a condition of existence.

The research is difficult precisely because it asks us to consider feelings that parents are often taught to keep private. Some parents experience profound ambivalence. Some become emotionally numb. Some wonder what their lives would look like if they had made different choices. A study of Polish parents, published in PLoS ONE, found a meaningful minority who reported that, if given the choice again, they would not choose to have children. That finding does not invalidate parenthood; it complicates our understanding of it. Love and regret can occupy the same human life, as can devotion and boredom, gratitude and resentment, tenderness and the desire to be alone. None of those feelings automatically determines the quality of a parent or the depth of a parent’s love. They are part of the emotional territory created when one person’s life becomes permanently entangled with another’s, and perhaps parents need less instruction in how to eliminate those contradictions than permission to understand them.

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