Jessica Bennett

Mom ❤️

Mom passed away just before Xmas. We decorated the hospital room with lights and drank Slivovitz (Croatian brandy) as she slept.

She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just over two years ago and given a couple months to live. What a crazy way to exist. But she decided to do chemo, took it day by day, and with my dad’s help was able to go on vacation to Hawaii, visit my brother in Miami, see my other brother get his Croatian citizenship. She embraced a cropped gray haircut and a few months ago for her 80th, she and her bestie went to Canliss — old fancy Seattle restaurant where they’d gone on their 21st bdays and a coupla guys they’d never see again bought their drinks. (This time they bought their own drinks.)

Between mom and Charlie, politics etc, a lotta loss this year, but also grateful to have been able to spend so much time in Seattle. Mom was a Croatian line dancer, a tradition I partook in until I was about 13 (see photo 😱) and declared it utterly lame (and also my parents’ utterly lame) but somehow I have reembraced it in the form of q***r line this year — a strange little ode to my mother (and sooo hot and fun). Also: I WILL write in my mother’s obituary that she believed, in true Seattle tradition, that foil should be reused (see photo) and sandwich baggies washed out, which I mocked relentlessly until I inadvertently found myself doing it the other day. Mom also believed that Seattle would always be grunge if you have a grunge mindset (see photo 3), that you’re never too old or even too cynical (!) to receive valentine’s day treats and handwritten notes from your mother, and that you can build the kind of independent life you want however you choose. Mom was ancient by Boomer standards when she had kids (40!); she was traveling solo back when that was rarely a thing young women did: working on a vineyard in Croatia, hitchhiking from Munich to Florence, swimming in the Dead Sea, and of course, line dancing…… So I guess what they say about becoming your mother isn’t always so bad. ❤️ 💃🏻

Veronica Mratinich, 1944-2024 ✨

My algorithm is already f*cked from reporting this so might as well give it a grid slot

They call themselves the Sisterhood of the Strange Sorority. There are 19, or 26, or 67 of them, depending on who’s counting. They are the women who accused Tr*mp of sexual assault — and whose stories, at one point, it seemed might matter.

I’ve been talking to these women for years now; since they started zooming with each other in the pandemic. Recently, I traveled with a few of them to the DNC.

This is a political story, but it’s also a story about how narratives move; about who is deemed credible; about who gets written out of the story; about the remarkable time we are living in where it is so easy to forget — there’s so much else happening! — and ultimately, about the women with an unusual bond who are making one last effort to be heard.

I hope you’ll give it a read; gift link below (avoids paywall).

Opinion | They Call Themselves the ‘Strange Sorority.’ Trump Was Their Initiation. (Gift Article) The world has moved on. They haven’t.

A LOT HAPPENED 2NITE!!!

I red light lazered my knees
While chatting w some v smart gender sociologists
While writing a piece
Taylor endorsed
And I sent my students tweets about Britney stans who counting down the days til K Fed stops getting child support thx 🤣

But for real politics is a retro masculinity contest and Kamala is straight up slicing through it in a way that is so fascinating to watch

From now on “the future is female” is once again reserved for second-wave le***an separatist communes only!!!!

Wrote about how Kamala is not falling into the trap — and how it is in fact quite brilliant as a strategy

Linked in bio!

Jock insurance!!!!! I could write a thesis on it I love it so much. Also why are ppl carrying around vials of JD Vance’s faux s***m? Truly weird.

RIP Francine Pascal, the woman who gave us the world’s most popular chick-lit series, arguably launched a generation of millennial body dysmorphia (or at least mine lol), and was an absolute legend.

I had the pleasure of profiling Pascal in 2011. We sat in her living room in midtown, where this lifelong Jewish New Yorker from Queens — who, fun fact, had never set foot in California when she birthed her California beauties — paged through stacks of hand-typed manuscripts, and the book’s original pitch letter, to Bantam Books, in 1982, where an editor told me the arrival of her book’s manuscript caused a flurry of “squealing women” in the office.

She also showed me the Sweet Valley “Bible”—a thick guide to all things Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, down to the color of Jess’ legwarmers, their aquamarine blue eyes and their “perfect size 6” frames.

The girls may have been shallow, sure, but the books also tackled issues like date r**e, drugs, and divorce. “There were many superficial things about them, but when it came right down to it, readers were getting my politics, my ethics, my morals,” Pascal told me then. “And I wanted these girls to drive the action.”

It has always irked me the way E. Jean Carroll is referred to as a “former advice columnist.” Far before she was writing columns, which she is still doing, and before she became known as the wacky old lady who sued Trump, she made her name as a gonzo-style journalist that The New York Times once called “feminism’s answer to Hunter S. Thompson” — who she once lived with, by the way, for her biography of him.

She trekked alone across the mountains Papua New Guinea in search of the “primitive man” for Pl***oy; somehow convinced Fran Leibovitz to go camping with her for Outside; profiled Lyle Lovett and Dan Rather in Esquire; appeared in Best American Crime Writing — and did it at a time when there were few women (she was the first woman contributing editor at Pl***oy) and in ways that didn’t neatly jibe with how women of her generation were expected to live their lives.

I’ve always thought age was silently and subtly at play in “former advice columnist,” at least a little — but it was most certainly at play in the way her narrative over the last four years has played out.

Here’s to carrying yourself with the confidence of an 80-year-old woman, a *journalist,* who has the audacity to say she’s still worth something.*

* $83.3 million dollars 💸

Opinion | The Audacity of E. Jean Carroll E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit against Donald Trump was about defamation. But it was also about the worth of a woman, long past middle age, who dared to claim she still had value.

1: Caitlin Moran’s funny but sort of lazy imho take on “men”

2: The best line from the Britney Spears memoir, in which she absolutely drags JT 😂

I launched a podcast with my pal Susie but I need you to know that this was all just an excuse to stay up all night making a zine 🍒✨

New episode on the impact of the cherry red swimsuit on Baywatch — featuring Pamela Anderson, the media scholar Susan J. Douglas and the story of my middle school walkout (it was called “Skirtfest” and we staged it after got suspended for wearing a skirt) — out now.

You can find us , at the link in my bio or wherever you get your podcasts !!!

I remember EXACTLY what I felt like at 13 — I was angry at my parents, sad for no reason, insecure about friends and boys and my body and skin, my feelings too big to articulate in anything other than song lyrics I hung from my wall, bad poetry I wrote and delivered to my two best friends on lined notebook paper we intricately folded into origami shapes, and the sounds of Nirvana’s “In Utero” that blasted from my boombox in my bedroom — which didn’t lock, because my parents wouldn’t allow it, but had a metal sign my best friend and I had stole from the girls’ bathroom at school that said DO NOT ENTER. Occasionally, we’d ride our bikes to the park next to the house where Kurt Cobain shot himself, and burn candles while we scrawled our darkest feelings into the wooden bench.

There’s a meme TikTok these days, about how we are all teenage girls. Maybe we are — this is when identities form, estrogen spikes, when we figure out who we are. It is also, as researchers and journalists from Carol Gilligan to Rachel Simmons to Peggy Orenstein to Donna Jackson Nakazawa have documented, when some girls suddenly revert into themselves, their confidence dropping three times the rate of their male peers.

And that was all before the age of social media.

For the last year, I’ve been following three remarkable 13yo girls — London, Anna and Addi — as they made their way through the minefield that is 8th grade. What happens, I wondered, when the challenges of any teenage girl — hormones and friendships and finding your place — clash with the thing that so many parents and health officials are worried about, which is their phones?

The result is BEING 13, a window into what it is like to be 13 today, from the perspective of three girls.

THANK YOU to these brave and honest and remarkable young women, to their parents, to the incredible designers and editors who made this project happen. This is not an exhaustive account, but it is, I hope, an illuminating peek inside being 13 in the age of social media.

🫶🫶 @22.8miles .graham

✔️ Grabbed
✔️ Semi-public place
✔️ “Not my type”

This was a chart shown to jurors yesterday—depicted by my pal , who I dragged to court!—in Carroll v Trump, in which Trump is accused of ra**ng the journalist E Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room nearly 30 years ago.

Today at 10am, a judge instructed a jury to begin deliberations. The case is civil, which means there’s no jail time at stake, but it’s quite a test for what we have (or haven’t) learned post- .

For those who haven’t followed: Carroll’s lawyers argued that this is Donald Trump’s MO: he moves on women and grabs them without their consent, just like he said in that Access Hollywood tape, and the way that (as he said in his deposition) celebrities have done for a “million years.” (Yes, he really said that. Kaplan asked if he felt that stars could really just grab women by the p***y. He said: “Historically that’s true with stars. If you look over the last million years, that’s largely true, unfortunately or fortunately.” She then asked if he considered himself a star. He said yes.)

Kaplan would also argue that the whole “not my type” thing, his response to accusations against him, was nonsense—which it is, though if you’re going to abide by its logic, it was also quite embarrassing when, during his deposition, Trump pointed to a photo of him with E Jean Carroll and said “that’s my wife,” “that’s Marla,” literally confusing his r**e accuser with his ex-wife, Marla Maples.

Trump never showed up to testify, but his team argued it was all a conspiracy. Essentially: three old broads (Carroll, 79, and the 2 journalist friends she told in the immediate aftermath, who each testified) got together and hatched a plan to bring the President down. They watched Law and Order for inspo, published the accusations anonymously in a book (Carroll’s), repeated it to my colleagues and I in The Times, and then all the way to court.

If you got through this without falling asleep—like at least 4 jurors during Trump’s lawyer’s closing statements—please go check out more of ’s incredible work, she is also one half of , my favorite pottery pop up!