As the month comes to a close today, the scope and power of Black Philanthropy Month continue beyond the confines of any calendar or designated stretch of days; it’s running all year long at #BPM365. This month’s haul was its largest in history, measured not just financially but in the impact of livestreamed events, media coverage, and community service projects, thanks to the movement’s founder, Jacqueline Bouvier Copeland, and its architects, Tracey Webb and Valaida Fullwood. They see the campaign less as a finite financial pitch than as a movement to cultivate acts of giving and support, compiled in this year’s list of stories.

The very word “philanthropy” evokes a range of structural challenges. It’s also a call to action. A sharp essay on the subject was written days ago by Hawwa Muhammad, founder of Pink Trumpet, on the Tides Foundation’s website. Give it a close read; she outlines three pillars of the campaign’s future and ways to think about sustained giving as a lever of real, not just gestural, change.

The month launched in 2011 as a commemoration of the United Nations proclaiming that year International Year for People of African Descent, and with Copeland’s, Webb’s, and Fullwood’s efforts, it’s reached nearly 17 million people, with a new organizing concept each year. Check out the highlights and reach us at recharge@motherjones.com with stories about the campaign’s impact far beyond the backend of August. And follow Copeland, Webb, and Fullwood for initiatives throughout the year.

Do you remember the hysteria of the “culture wars”? In the 1990s—across magazine pages and college campuses and in books (Arthur Schlesinger Jr., hello!)—there was a growing concern about the culture. Ah, that vague noun. Much like today, discussions of the problem with the discourse or the culture fit the eye of the beholder. In grasping for facts that fit a feeling of anxiety, thinkers lumped in anything they could find.

This led to one of my favorite sentences I’ve read in our archives—as I pull from it each week to give you a boost into the weekend: The opening line in Louis Menand’s 1995 piece “Mixed Paint.”

The “culture wars”—the metaphor into which campus hate-speech codes, school prayer, Afrocentric school curricula, abortion, politically correct language, family values, affirmative action, the racial distribution of intelligence, deconstructionist literary criticism, sexual harassment policy, the Great Books, hardcore pornography, publicly funded art, and many other fractious things, are currently stuffed—are misfigured.

I found comfort, and maybe you will too, in realizing how “stuffed” terms can be when they mean, in fact, whatever you want them to.

The rest of Menand’s piece might not be worth the read. I don’t agree with much of it. Its best parts point out that these discussions over “culture” have occurred for a long time. He quibbles that the misconfiguring fear for liberalism in the “culture war,” much like the fear of “cancel culture” ruining free speech today, is actually a series of attacks (from every angle, all across the political spectrum) over who has power. Gripes about the end of the melting pot, and the end of liberalism, are misplaced. That’s all interesting, and worth remembering.

But Menand, who now writes at the New Yorker and published the fantastic history of American pragmatism The Metaphysical Club, spins that out as a grand vision of liberalism as saving America. He believes that all this friction of ideas means America is actually finally doing some mixing, as real integration occurs. (I disagree!) He says liberalism is to thank for that. (I disagree, again!) And it drones on from there, with more than a vague hint of condescension.

His most fascinating (and wrong) point, to me, is that the problem is that “liberalism has nothing substantive to say about culture.” While “liberals, like anyone else, have views about culture,” he writes, “liberalism doesn’t.” Think of the “cultural vacuum” of the SAT, as an example, he writes.

Liberalism’s faith is that groups are fundamentally equal in capacity, so that bracketing race and gender to eliminate bias will produce demographically proportional results. There is no reason to believe that, in the cultural vacuum tests like the SATs are supposed to provide, people will score lower or higher just because they have breasts or darker skin. Holding cultural background constant, liberals believe we can measure, and reward, excellence and excellence alone.

I think many would find the SAT example laughable. The test’s false neutrality is the problem. In a racist society, you cannot, as liberalism would hope, just keep “cultural background constant.” Menand holds out hope for the triumph of a neutral meritocracy that liberalism will create. Well, it hasn’t happened.

But, at the same time, I think Menand is aware of how capitalist democracies are prone to complain about “culture” as a code for battles over inequality.

The obsession with “culture” (as opposed to, say, economics) as the key to our national problems draws on an intellectual tradition which points to culture (high culture, indigenous culture, or folk culture, depending on the theorist) as the element of continuity and moral coherence in a world characterized precisely by its lack of respect for continuity and moral coherence. The trouble with this faith is that in addition to being socially and economically mobile and unstable, modern liberal societies are culturally mobile and unstable, as well. Capitalist democracies are not just permissive about cultural change; they actually thrive on it. A new taste means a new market. A free-for-all is exactly the sort of “culture war” capitalist societies produce.

Even if you hate all of this Menand article, take comfort—hate-reading a long article can be a lovely weekend activity too. Plus, his recent one on affirmative action in the New Yorker has a markedly different series of conclusions. Check that out here.

After a yearslong fight for equal protection in a bathroom access battle that’s made Gavin Grimm a trans hero, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that it’s a violation of Title IX to bar students from bathrooms that match their gender identities. Grimm made national news in 2015 when his Virginia high school refused to let him use the boys’ room. Now 20, he celebrated the “incredible affirmation” not just for him “but for trans youth around the country.”

In a tweet yesterday, he shouted out the relentless solidarity that sustained him: “Thank you to everyone at the @ACLU for inviting me in like family and fighting like hell to make sure justice was served.”

“Fighting like hell” will be familiar if who’ve heard our namesake’s best-known quote, “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living”—and it could use an extra beat: Fight like hell for the living, and mark victories when you score them. The fight doesn’t end, but wins dot its path. The trajectory is best seen by revisiting my colleague Samantha Michaels’ powerful 2017 profile of Grimm and enduring look at one of his attorneys.

The victory, just as schools start up, is perfectly timed for students looking for signs of progress as a counterweight to the self-absolution and snarling discrimination of the revisionists onstage at the RNC this week. The headlines are stacked; they’ll keep elevating chilling reminders of the steep climb ahead. But a major win is a major win. Congrats to Grimm. Share thoughts at recharge@motherjones.com.

If King James’ crossovers and dunks on Donald Trump in tweets and press statements weren’t enough to mobilize voters, the NBA star has another move: He’s leading a group of top athletes to fight voter suppression in heavily Black districts before the election. Collaborating with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, he launched the group More Than a Vote, focusing on Ohio, Georgia, Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states beset by disenfranchisement and disinformation.

Most poll workers are over 60, and many states are looking for younger recruits to join them. More Than a Vote plans to bring aboard paid workers and volunteers of all ages while prioritizing poll safety during the pandemic. The details are here. If you’re a poll worker in one of these states and want a shoutout, or have stories or concerns about ballot access, let us know at recharge@motherjones.com.

Odds are good that the parade of absurdities, fantasies, and bizarreness at the RNC last night didn’t excite you about the Trump-Pence ticket, as surrogate after surrogate studiously tried to rewrite history with soaring racism and flag-draped propaganda. You might be looking for a creative fix. A catharsis. The kind of catharsis summed up in a tweet yesterday by one Pharoahe Monch, hip-hop truthteller celebrated for “Simon Says” and many other classics:

A catharsis is an emotional release. According to psychoanalytic theory, this emotional release is linked to a need to relieve unconscious conflicts. For example, experiencing stress over a work-related situation may cause feelings of frustration and tension.

— PHAROAHE MONCH (@pharoahemonch) August 24, 2020

Can’t wait for y’all to (see) this new album. #Th1rt3en

— PHAROAHE MONCH (@pharoahemonch) August 24, 2020

Th1rt3en is Monch’s latest, with Daru Jones and Marcus Machado, and Monch is busy producing what’s promised to be “the most amazing short film in music history.” Mark your calendar. Monch’s team is shooting visuals this month and next, and his music has always been both catharsis and call to action. To millions of fans he’s an engine of solidarity and stamina; immunity-boosting endurance for, say, another night of the RNC. “I alleviated the pain with a long-term goal,” Monch raps in “Simon Says.” Follow him for recharges all week, whether you’re tuned in to the RNC or mercifully, blissfully checked out.

While the president and his cozied-up postmaster general play with the fate and funding of the Postal Service, there’s some good news on the ground of post offices in Florida. A group of postal workers in Broward County took it upon themselves to break protocol in the name of protecting voting rights. Realizing they had stacks of ballots that wouldn’t be processed in time for an election deadline, the employees rushed to get it done by calling the Supervisor of Elections Office and requesting expedited delivery. The supervisor sent special couriers to multiple post offices to grab the ballots and speed them over, rescuing all 1,225 ballots.

Assaults on the USPS and voting rights will continue. Guaranteed. Like the sun rises and pizza is good. Like Publix supermarket soda is delicious. (If you’re in Florida, don’t take Publix for granted.) These are guarantees in life, axioms of American experience, but here’s what else is predictable: unnamed acts of overperformance by and underrecognition of laborers in every industry who do what’s right and routinely do it well (or try to), and almost always without headlines acknowledging them. Relentlessly hard work goes on every minute by workers across public and private sectors, and you know, or are yourself, one of them. Send your story of boostable work to recharge@motherjones.com for a shoutout. Postal workers to the front.

Over the past few weeks, I have begun a long project of trying to read through the Mother Jones archive, piece by piece. You can too, here. (Well, sorry, you can read from January 1995 onward. Don’t fret, that’s plenty.)

If you, like me, do some archive digging, I think you’ll find that magazine articles—both purposefully and accidentally—speak beyond their times. Consensus is conditional. The assumptions of 1995 can be glaringly out of step with today, or surprisingly close. These pieces serve as something like second drafts of history, or maybe first drafts of opinion. They not only tell us the story the author intended but also give us a peek at the world the author assumed the readers inhabited.

A mundane example: We thought our readers would want to know about a private eye who solves ecoterrorist attacks—that is, attacks on environmentalists (or their pets). I think this article speaks to Mother Jones, the ’90s, and the Bay Area just as much as it does to one Sheila O’Donnell, private eye. (It includes a regressive joke involving “Dick Tracy” puns, too.)

Here’s an example I enjoyed from our January 1995 issue, in the more timeless category: an interview with Ntozake Shange, a Black poet, playwright, and feminist writer who died in 2018. She segues from a discussion of batting down race science to an exchange about shifting language and norms. I think it still resonates today. Check it out:

Q: About this Bell Curve business—

A. Oh my God, it made me so mad. Do you believe that just because they can’t control us, they’re gonna say it’s Darwinian—[that] they’re better?

Q: It’s not that they are better, just smarter.

A: Well of course they are—we fed them! They took all the land, all the food—we ate chitlins and they ate beef! But who carried that nice food to them? And who is still talking and thinking? Now all they can say is that they’re better? It’s not even a new idea!

Q: Toni Morrison writes about the ways we try to get over, around, and underneath our slave history, but it’s still there. How do you deal with that?

A: I have spent my life undoing language until it works for me. We must not only repossess the language, we must deslaveryize it.

“Confronted by despair, I’ve summoned hope,” Gabby Giffords said last night, nine years after she was almost killed in a mass shooting as a Congress member from Arizona. “Confronted by paralysis and aphasia, I responded with grit and determination. I put one foot in front of the other. I found one word and then another.” Finding the words to describe despair, let alone overcome it, is a hugely personal project, and approaches differ, but here are three creative reads to get you going this weekend. Watch Giffords first, then dive in:

1) All About Love, by Bell Hooks, or bell hooks, was written 20 years ago. Its insight into distancing is timeless:

Although we live in close contact with neighbors, masses of people in our society feel alienated, cut off, alone. Isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair. Yet they are the outcome of life in a culture where things matter more than people. Materialism creates a world of narcissism in which the focus of life is solely on acquisition and consumption. A culture of narcissism is not a place where love can flourish. The emergence of a “me” culture is a direct response to our nation’s failure to truly actualize the vision of democracy articulated in our Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

All About Love is a poetic collection of critical essays on what resilience looks like, and it looks like bell hooks.

2) The Invention of Solitude is Paul Auster’s moving memoir about his family’s skeletons—a philosophically penetrating book that draws a line between physical and social distance; enforced and chosen isolation; lockdown and evasion. Which of these we invent is an answerable question in Auster’s hands. Describing one family member, he writes: “[His] capacity for evasion was almost limitless…What people saw when he appeared before them was not really him, but a person he had invented…Solitary. But not in the sense of being alone. Solitary in the sense of retreat.”

3) Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues asks and empowers us all to keep the blues at bay. Murray is musical, lyrically questioning what he sees as orthodoxies in pursuit of creativity and freedom. He was a lifelong friend of Ralph Ellison, and a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center. I interviewed Murray for the Village Voice in his New York home in 2003, before he passed away. Drop a line to recharge@motherjones.com if you’re down for a Murray marathon.

Bonus! A dance video. Click the frame to unmute! Giffords here, hooks here, Auster here, Murray here. Dance here.

One of the most powerful speeches at the Democratic National Convention last night was given by health care activist Ady Barkan, who in 2016 was diagnosed with the terminal disease ALS. His spotlight continues to grow—far beyond a single convention: He’s also in the upcoming documentary Not Going Quietly, and an excerpt was shown last night. In almost every speech and interview, he strikes notes of practicality and hope, all too aware of the challenges of revolutionizing a system of power but convinced that the movement for health care is gaining speed. “I look at the freedom fighters past and present,” he told the New York Times before his speech. “People have endured such tremendous suffering, overcome such enormous structural obstacles.”

Overcoming is a recurring theme of the convention, invoked on day one by Michelle Obama, who shouted out “all those folks who sacrificed and overcame so much.” “Hope is not a state of mind. It is a state of action,” Barkan told the Times. “It is in the praxis of resistance, solidarity, and love that we can find a path to” a world of accessible health care. For glimpses of Not Going Quietly, follow the film here and Barkan here. And if you have ALS or know someone who does and wants to share stories with Recharge, drop a line to recharge@motherjones.com.

If you missed Michelle Obama’s powerful speech at the Democratic National Convention last night, catch it here. She vividly summed up “the story of America” by anchoring it in the lives of “all those folks who sacrificed and overcame so much.” “The story of America” is an expansive phrase that calls up endless places, people, and subplots, and it’s the subject of Mark Ruffin’s brilliant short-story collection about justice and equality in baseball and music. Bebop Fairy Tales is his first book in his 40-year career as a radio broadcaster, most recently a SiriusXM host, and it’s a detail-rich work of historical fiction that sets real athletes and artists in imagined circumstances.

One climactic story, “The Sidewinder,” alludes to Lee Morgan’s 1964 album and takes us to Philly, where a 12-year-old explores his passion for baseball and bebop and navigates racial, cultural, and class lines. The story arc is challenging and risk-taking, all the brilliance you can expect from Ruffin (who once wrote a screenplay in which Fats Waller is kidnapped by Al Capone). Michelle Obama here, Ruffin here, “The Sidewinder” here.

The faces, places, and politics of Dorothea Lange’s photos during the Great Depression, Japanese American incarceration, Jim Crow, and other eras of inequality have echoes today, not just in the conditions she captured but in the strength of people she met. More of her work is now online, thanks to the Oakland Museum of California, whose team has digitized her archives. Her greatest themes are powerfully presented, from wealth inequality to wartime challenges, strategies for survival, and resilience. She overcame hurdles of her own, contracting polio at 7 years old and getting stranded in San Francisco after a robbery that took everything. But nothing kept Lange from her focus. She was the first woman awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography, and she gave it up to take a job documenting history in the field.

Lange called herself a journalist first, artist second, but she embodied the storytelling creativity and brilliance of both. Drew Johnson, the museum’s curator of photography and visual culture, tells the San Francisco Chronicle that Lange “hoped her photography would encourage empathy, motivate you to do something about [challenges in the world] and create a popular movement to relieve people of suffering.” Lange’s legacy is right this way (the museum’s archives) and here and here (glimpses from Mother Jones’ archives). Thoughts about her impact? We’re at recharge@motherjones.com.

In a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists shared telescope images of a galaxy so many light-years away, and similar enough to our own, that its discovery challenges prevailing theories of galaxy formation. The bombshell finding “represents a breakthrough” that shows how “structures in nearby spiral galaxies and in our Milky Way were already in place 12 billion years ago,” said Francesca Rizzo of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. Nowhere in the study is there indication of any evidence, direct or indirect, of Trump hotels, steakhouses, golf courses, or resorts. But the galaxy, named SPT0418-47, does include a rotating disk structure similar to ours. Its mass is also similar to the Milky Way’s, and it’s the earliest ever found with a galactic bulge.

Catch the telescope images here, and enjoy a weekend free of the fear that galaxies can’t exist without a particular brand of hotels and golf clubs.

It’s no secret that laughter works miracles. It stimulates and relaxes muscles, reduces pain, and improves moods and immune systems. But sometimes when we, women of color, need it the most, it’s hardest to come by. And we need it right now. More than ever, you might say—even if it is always right now, and always more than ever.

Laughter is my superpower. And it is loud. My laughter fills rooms, resonating and expanding from bass notes to mezzo-soprano. When I laugh hardest, it’s a full-body experience, my stomach rounded out, eyes shut, ribs shaking, and one arm reaching to cover my wide-open mouth. The truth is that my laugh is as essential to me as anything else. It’s a form of survival and catharsis in the face of suffering.

But I remember too many times and spaces in which, and people for whom, my laughter has been too loud. Elderly white ladies in almost every kind of setting, particularly restaurants; middle-aged white men in office spaces; extended family.

When I started a career in my mid-20s, I was both embarrassed and indignant at being told to laugh quietly or not at all. To make myself smaller. To take up less space. I would nervously apologize.

Now I don’t. Apology would justify the unjustifiable: the right someone presumes to have to referee my laugh, to tell me to take my place in the background. I might laugh when just a smile would do—but I see no reason to mute my joy or withhold its expression. The foreground is ours to claim by organizing, protesting, voting, running for office, hiking, writing, and laughing.

Comedians Sarah Cooper and Ziwe Fumudoh know it too. They get me laughing by using humor as an act of resistance—to racism and sexism and a culture of racialized misogyny that’s all too familiar in the United States. To laugh loudly is to reject the assumption that women of color must, at all costs, watch our place. Cooper and Fumudoh are in their place and out front. And they are really, really funny.

Photos of Kamala Harris are everywhere this week as we witness her historic rise as a vice presidential candidate. She is smiling big, unabashedly taking pleasure in the moment. I imagine she knows the power of vocalizing, whether she’s at the back of the room or holding the mic; at the edge of power or the center of it; in a moment of rage or a fit of laughter.

Venu Gupta is Mother Jones’ Midwest regional development director. Laugh with her at recharge@motherjones.com.

The power of a single photo to galvanize generations of artists has never been more clearly captured than in the one taken 62 years ago today on the sidewalk of 126th Street between Fifth and Madison in New York City. It’s the most immortalizing image in American music. On August 12, 1958, 57 musicians got together for an extended reunion that doubled as an Esquire cover shoot. Titled “A Great Day in Harlem,” the photo features legend after legend, their collective creativity giving the moment its timelessness. To celebrate, the Billie Holiday Theatre and a production group are inviting artists to reimagine the scene.

The new photo, happening today at the Black Lives Matter mural in Bed-Stuy, will be called “A Great Day in New York.” “We find ourselves at the beginning of another civil rights era,” organizers wrote, adding that artists should wear masks for the re-creation. For a powerful behind-the-scenes look at the 1958 moment, catch this video.

Who’s in the original? In nonalphabetic order: Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Count Basie, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Jimmy Rushing, Horace Silver, Charles Mingus, Mary Lou Williams, Marian McPartland, Hank Jones, Pee Wee Russell, Stuff Smith, Gerry Mulligan, Oscar Pettiford, Red Allen, Buster Bailey, Jo Jones, Benny Golson, Roy Eldridge, Art Farmer, Milt Hinton, Sonny Greer, Bud Freedom, Gene Krupa, Eddie Locke…and many, many others. Here’s the photo and here’s the video. Recharge shouts and more to recharge@motherjones.com.

The 66-foot-tall painting depicts the artist’s 14-year-old daughter, her face covered by a handprint that symbolizes missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, on the side of a downtown Colorado Springs building. Painting as an act of protest and education is artist Gregg Deal’s way of calling attention to “a silent epidemic,” he says. And his mural, Take Back the Power, just won the city’s Art on the Streets award.

His daughter helped him paint it; she wanted to help her father give voice to the many who are voiceless. “As a Native person, I get to be up there representing Native people and this epidemic,” she told the Gazette. “I think it’s very important that we get that type of representation.” To create the mural, her father partnered with the Haseya Advocate Program, a nonprofit resource for Native survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. “Any amount of awareness” is essential, says Monycka Snowbird, an advocate with the program. “We’re hoping people see this, google it, and get more background.”

Watch the 5-minute video of the mural’s creation, with inspiring comments from the artist and his daughter. A Recharge shoutout to the Gazette’s visual team, including Katie Klann, for the powerfully produced video.

After spending nine years in prison for selling $30 of weed—0.69 grams—to an officer in Louisiana 12 years ago, Derek Harris will be released. He’d initially faced 15 years for the sale, but a life sentence came down under a habitual offender law that allows judges to impose even harsher sentences. Harris was recently resentenced to time served. Whether you count this as encouraging news of a kind or just another page in a perniciously unjust, cruel criminal justice system, a wave of national attention is increasingly focused on the need for course corrections like Harris’, and the celebration of his release is spreading. His lawyer says Harris will move closer to his family in Kentucky and looks forward to spending time with his brother. The broader movement to improve the scales of justice is growing, including in Nevada and Los Angeles, where 66,000 cannabis convictions were scheduled to be dismissed earlier this year. If you have personal stories of progress, broadly defined, drop a line to recharge@motherjones.com.

Frans Schellekens/Redferns via Getty

Abbey Lincoln was told, again and again, who to be, by Hollywood promoters and imagemakers, scriptwriters and producers, all eager to sculpt her career and influence what she’d wear and when, how she’d sing and to which audiences, and the lane they urged her to take as a supper-club singer in midcentury movies, she told me in 2002, before she died eight years later as a thoroughly self-determined, brilliantly original musician (who never followed formulas). Lincoln invented herself. Her birthday was yesterday; she would have turned 90. Listeners of all ages continue to discover her sound—she alternated between acidic and sweet, melodic and percussively phrased, unconfined to any category. When she sang with fire, it was pointed; when she went with joy and ease, it was impossible not to step inside her voice and go wherever she led.

Lincoln took amusement in the “Black Marilyn Monroe” trope that publicists tried to shoehorn her into, a formula so persistent and tiresome that it intrigued her before she rejected it. (She famously wore Monroe’s dress in a 1956 film before starring with Sidney Poitier in “For Love of Ivy” in 1968 and earning a Golden Globe nomination.) Lincoln changed paths and names, from Anna Marie Wooldridge to Gaby, Gaby Lee, Abbey Lincoln, and Aminata Moseka, but she never changed her self-definition, and she took up jazz and justice over film and fashion.

“My manager named me after Abraham Lincoln. He told me, ‘Since Abraham Lincoln didn’t free the slaves, maybe you can handle it,’ and I’ve been Abbey Lincoln ever since,” she said, quick to credit Billie Holiday’s behind-the-beat phrasing as a foundation. “You know why they love Billie Holiday? Because she sang ‘Strange Fruit’ when they were lynching people in the South. She sang the stories of her life, just as I do,” Lincoln told me in her New York City apartment at 72 years old in 2002. “I’m at my leisure, free as a bird.”

The phone rang seconds later, interrupting our conversation with the news of pianist Mal Waldron’s death. “There’s a bunch of us dying,” she said after the call. “I heard somebody say to Max once, ‘Is jazz dying?’ And Max said to him, ‘Are we dying?’ We are the music.” (She’d recorded We Insist! Freedom Now Suite with Roach, her then-husband, in 1960.) Years later Alice Coltrane passed away and Lincoln told me for an oral history, “Alice Coltrane now. A lot of us are dying and already gone. I hope I’m prepared, but no matter how we may dread it or be afraid, that’s what it is.” (Lincoln would leave this planet in 2010.) “There’s a song I wrote and I want to say a few of the lines: There are some folks I used to know who used to smile and say hello, and spin the world and turn the page, entertaining from the stage. Father Time forever true, love its own and me and you, disappear just like the sun, when the day is done.”

Take this three-minute tour. Raise a glass to Lincoln this weekend, or get some sushi; she swore by sushi. She also swore by typewriters and fax machines, well into the 21st century. Crank your fax machine and send a note to recharge@motherjones.com, after you take that birthday tour.

Nearly four full years after the 2016 presidential election, US Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) still can’t bring herself to call Donald Trump her president. Instead, she prefers the phrase “the 45th occupant of the White House,” which she considers to be more factually accurate. It’s also, she argues, a testament to leadership ability, the lack of which has become more pronounced as the country slogs its way through a devastating pandemic that’s halted the economy and put into focus glaring racial disparities in health and everyday life.

On August 6, I chatted with Rep. Lee as she hunkered down on Capitol Hill. Our discussion was part of an ongoing summer series of livestreamed events hosted by Mother Jones with changemakers including Stacey Abrams and Diane Guerrero. When Lee and I spoke, she was gridlocked with Republicans. Congress was trying—and mostly failing—to broker a bailout deal that could provide at least temporary relief to the millions of people in America who’ve lost their jobs and face the imminent threat of being evicted from their homes. In our wide-ranging conversation, Lee reflected on her decades of experience in public service and the life of her dear colleague Rep. John Lewis to paint a picture of real leadership that’s informed, empathetic, and steadfast.

Check out our conversation on YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter, and if you’re able to, consider supporting Mother Jones with a donation to keep our reader-supported conversations and investigative reporting going strong as the elections near.

The erosion of voting rights across the country is a chilling fact of our moment, exacerbated by the pandemic and a president whose administration is doing all it can to weaken ballot access and throw fair elections into question. But there’s good news out of Iowa: The governor signed an executive order yesterday reinstating the voting rights of almost everyone who’d completed a felony sentence.

Iowa, the last state with a lifetime voting ban of this kind, joins the rest of the country, an overdue moment but cause for celebration. The executive order is “at best a temporary solution,” Gov. Kim Reynolds said, and “something that is fundamentally right should not be based on benevolence of a single elected official.” The order follows public pressure from advocates and Des Moines Black Lives Matter activists, and it’s a “tribute to the legacy of Congressman [John] Lewis,” said Democratic state Rep. Ako Abdul-Samad, one of the state’s few Black lawmakers.

If you vote in Iowa, do you think this will fundamentally change any upcoming elections in your state? Share your thoughts at recharge@motherjones.com.

Michael Ciaglo/Getty

To everyone working tirelessly around the world to hold together splintering democracies, I have a question: Why do people keep asking Donald Trump if he’ll “accept” the outcome of the election? I’m 46 years old and can’t remember any time we’ve asked this of any candidate for any office. I’m not an elections expert or a constitutional scholar, and I know that Trump’s obstinance and possessiveness are dangerously real, but I’m 100 percent sure the election results aren’t up to him. They’re not his to “accept.” Just like with kids and ice cream.

If I ask my 8-year-old every day for months, “Will you get upset if I don’t buy you ice cream on November 3?” and, in the way of children, she answers, “I don’t know. Maybe I will,” I know I’ve already lost.

November 3 rolls around and my child asks for ice cream, and I say no. I would be surprised if she didn’t get upset. Wouldn’t you? I’ve basically reinforced for her that I’m expecting she’ll be upset. This was her cone, after all. Even though my daughter has more impulse control than Trump, she knows that I anticipate she’ll throw a fit and she’ll negotiate, insult, whine, scheme, and scream at me in public—and, if she feels I’ve withheld her cone unfairly, she may resort to violence (dear god, I hope that phase is over).

Even if she makes it exceptionally difficult, the good news for me and the bad news for my daughter is that she doesn’t get to decide if the ice cream is hers. I do.

Donald Trump does not get to decide the election or whether its results are acceptable. We do.

P.S. I know that parents and journalists and media workers of all kinds don’t have identical roles in a (democratic) society, but we’re all suffering a kicking-and-screaming child-adult in the White House, and we might witness worse in November. Remember to stay strong—parents, journalists, parents of journalists, everyone.

Venu Gupta is Mother Jones’ Midwest regional development director.