With such a statement for a name, you’d expect Men I Trust to come out swinging with the activist content. Instead, they give you hazy dream-pop and let you listen closely enough to hear what they’re saying. Their latest release, “Lucky Sue,” follows a woman as she perseveres through devastating loss, which we’ll take as allegory for, you know, all this. All that drama hiding underneath the band’s easy cadence is sort of the sonic equivalent of that saying about ducks— you know, looking calm on the surface but paddling furiously to stay afloat. Depressing. Get into it.
When you see the headline, “The Essential Shoes of Essential Workers,” do you feel you’re being sold something? Specifically, exploited labor as grounds for fashion? Vox just ran this piece explaining, as they do, why nurses and cooks and other people who are on their feet a lot have formed sort of cults around Danskos, Blundstones, and Crocs, which is fine, but like… we know? The only difference between this truth now and this truth a year ago is that now we have a category for the professions who tend to rely on supportive shoes: “Essential Workers.” While the piece does take pains to interview said workers about how and why they select their footwear, watching this digital journalist refer to a multi-industry swath of people as a singular “they” makes her work feel almost like an ethnography, which is… not the best look for the website whose shopping arm will repeatedly try to sell those shoes to the nonessentials among us who are casually trolling the internet instead of saving fucking lives.
Remember when office perks used to be catered to 24-year-old boys? Foosball! “Unlimited” time off that you will never take! SANDWICHES! Well, being that the online workforce is grown now and very much at home, office perks are finally catching up to people’s* actual needs. Since everyone went home, the Pinterests and Salesforces of the world are now offering free access to therapy, financial planners, and parenting coaches; subsidized child care and compulsory time off. Don’t get too comfy with these promises, though— benefits are expensive and companies are planning to figure out who gets which ones as soon as people come back to the office. But I feel like if it’s lunch vs family support, you can predict who’s going to stay home (that is, WOMEN) and who’s going to reap the benefits of IRL face time. Sick.
*including women’s!
While we’re here, let’s touch on reproductive rights, shall we? Was anyone else super confused by the SCOTUS decision on abortion pills in Jan? Can we or can we not get them by mail? (The people in charge still aren’t clear on the answer, so you’re not alone in wondering.) Unwrapping the legislative confusion makes you wonder how we got here in the first place. Lucky for us, Kate Kelly and Jamia Wilson have been exploring the history of abortion on their show, “Ordinary Equality,” which is kicking off a new season on Wonder Media Network. They review the political, religious, and social forces (and the systemic racism and misogyny) that have informed reproductive policy through US history, from colonial America through Roe v. Wade and all the way to now. This is one bit of abortion content that’s easy to understand. Find it wherever you get your pods.
