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4 min read

Other storms

—and working inside them.
my desktop: a small arrangement of pale yellow flowers on a white desk, surrounded by archival file folders in a magazine holder, black post-it's, a black hourglass, a black candle, an iMac
2026.09.04 // desktop
Hello and a brief introduction: this is a newsletter written by me, Melissa Gira Grant, journalist and author. Currently I'm at work on a book called A Woman Is Against the Law, which will be published by Little, Brown and Company. I'm also a staff writer at The New Republic, where I've spent the past seven years reporting on sex, gender, race, and the law. You can find me most often on Bluesky.

Missed you the last two weeks, while I've been reporting a new story on ICE and getting through my own edits to the book.

Which means for days I have been immersed in the 1910s, and then get pulled forward again reluctantly:

Titled “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?,” the “study” was something that the department had “commissioned,” according to an August 26 press release. HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Brian Christine said the publication “raises important questions” and that “the association between sex-rejecting clinical beliefs, authoritarian attitudes, and the justification of political violence warrant serious scientific scrutiny.” Here, the department has unwittingly raised another “important” question: Why has HHS decided to commit public resources to investigate an alleged “association” between support for transgender people and political violence? That question demands actually serious scrutiny...

... Don’t mistake this publication for science. Functionally, it has more in common with the president’s anti-trans and anti-left executive orders than it does with any scientific paper subject to peer review. Its authors position the report as an intervention, countering existing literature that regards “opposition towards ‘gender affirming’ norms” as “a symptom of prejudice,” as well as challenging work that “assumed” that “authoritarianism was primarily a right-wing phenomenon.” This is not much more than a lightly sourced remix of common right-wing talking points, amounting to the same old thing: Have you considered that the right are unfairly painted as bigots, when it’s the left that are the real aggressors?... [read on]

It feels like a collapse because it is: the far right in power & anti-gender movements on the rise, the criminalization of dissent & the repression of the left. It's the same story, even if it still isn't being told that way.

Nothing is new, it all just comes every day now. What do you do? Like I said yesterday, “Let me tell you how liberating it is to just put events that mean something to you on a timeline. To pick one and ask, what else was happening that day?”

It's just that everything is happening that day now.

This week was also the anniversary of Hurricane Ida's remnants arriving in New York. That was just a few days after I fled New Orleans, ahead of Ida making landfall.

That's where the book began. I took the train from New York, and I shot instant photos all along the way. A day after I made these two, around when I was crossing Lake Pontchartrain, Ida was announced.

a frame askew leaning on a wall: two mini polaroids on a black mat, of books open on a train, the window outside. a star map above the frame, the folder with the lion logo for the NYPL to the left.
Crescent polaroids, August 2021

This is part of what I wrote here, on the one year anniversary of that storm:

... this is where the book really started: watching the march of productivity go by from the remove of my anxiety. How do you work through disaster and crisis? Arguably, I already had been and we already have been.

The intervening years have felt like still living in those rushed intervals: storm sighting to storm naming, storm arrival to storm return. I know I could remember them that way; I'm not sure that I do yet. That same summer I started my garden. It's still here:

a hand reaches out to hold a lime and pink zinnia, against a backdrop of strawflowers, shadows, and brick
"Queeny Lime," 2026.08.31

Noted

  1. Already thinking up next year's garden, even though many of my plants will keep going through election day. New York City was designated officially “subtropical” before this summer, but the city greenery's “voracious growth” this season has been “frightening” to some.
  2. Stars of my desk work lately, some pictured above: 30-minute-hourglass; brass pen hook clip to hold my notebook open; gold clamps for 150-plus page print outs. (all made by Hightide)
  3. Realized I am coming to the end of my term at the Allen Room at the New York Public Library (pictured below). If you have any literary work in progress that would benefit from their collections (and the collections they have access to), apply!
  4. Also realized I am almost done with the expired black and white Instax film that Red gave me to go with the Instax they also gave me in........ 2018. I should get some new expired film.
  5. When it was announced Gloria Steinem died this week, for some reason, the first thing that came to mind was the time I was in her bathroom fifteen years ago and spotted the tiny TV across from the tub. Luxurious, broadcast nostalgia.
  6. re: things broadcast, I've been looking at getting another weather radio, a nice-looking one that's not stashed away in a bag. This was one possibility, but I want a SAME model so I don't get woken up by faraway weather.
  7. The flowers on my desk this week are lisianthus. Queens Perennial, like a farm CSA, offers a local flower harvest each week. This year they're working with Luna Family Farm, an immigrant and family-owned and operated farm in New Jersey.

(n.b.: none of these are sponsored links, just things I use and like.)

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Melissa Gira Grant