The past few months
Emma's lockdown reporting highlights
Hi everyone. Thanks for signing up for my (other) newsletter! (If you don’t get the first one it’s Fortune’s the Broadsheet, a daily missive that analyzes the day’s news through a gender lens, from the powerful women making news to issues like pay equity and the fight against sexual harassment across business, politics and culture. I’m a co-author with Fortune’s Kristen Bellstrom and Claire Zillman. Subscribe at: broadsheet.fortune.com).
This will be a more informal newsletter, tentatively titled The Emma Report, just to catch up—for those who care!—on what I’ve been up to each month. I usually share most of this stuff on Twitter, but that pretty much just gets seen by fellow journalists—I’d like to make sure those who are not on Twitter (amazing work, keep it that way) can stay in the loop. I’ll include stories, interviews, media appearances, favorite editions of the Broadsheet, and more. Plus, maybe, some thoughts + book + TV recommendations. Recipes? Other newsletter recs? My important thoughts on the celeb gossip of the month? Should I rank the famous Emmas, a la the Chrises? Who knows!
I asked friends for some recommendations for Emma puns (not involving the word dilemma) to name this newsletter. The top submissions were:
-Her Emmanence
-I’m In Your Emmail
-The Emma Mema
-Emmalgamation/Emmagine/Emmanent/One In Emmalion
-And from the troll, Phlegmma
Any favorites? Should I stick with The Emma Report?
Anyway, here are your highlights from my past few months of reporting from lockdown:
The politicians + politics:
-In June, I spoke to Stacey Abrams about her new book Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America. She laughed at me when I asked a question about VP!
-Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s bill to get stimulus money to parents of this year’s newborns (See a stealth photo of our Zoom interview below.)
-The fight for the ERA (in real life)
-The fight for the ERA (on TV)
The #whyaremen beat (there’s always something!):
-1 in 4 men think women’s equality has come at their expense
Racial justice:
-Why the workplace is such a hotbed for racist behavior. 45% of Black women say it’s the place they’re most likely to encounter racism in their lives.
-The real meaning of corporate America + Juneteenth
-The white female founders who faced a reckoning over their racism (attn: Ref heads)
-The economic recovery leaving Black women behind
Business + female founders
-The continued collapse of The Wing
-The rebirth of Outdoor Voices
-The female founders who raced to respond to coronavirus test shortages
-CEOs cut their salaries to signal they were sharing the pain of the economic downturn, but it didn’t last
Media appearances:
-I talked about my story about the white female founders called out for racism on Cheddar
-I contributed a tiny bit of reporting (Instagram sleuthing) to Kelsey Weekman’s discovery of Ben Affleck’s finsta (this was huge for me)
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OK, and I promised some fun stuff too. Current watch: The Baby-Sitters Club. Please, if you have the same taste in TV as me and my TV soulmate, the sweater-whisperer Nicole Gallucci (examples of the genre: Hart of Dixie, Gilmore Girls, Younger), you must. I’m about to order Claudia Kishi’s sweater. Show I’m the most glad I finally got to in quarantine: Unbelievable (I had to fast-forward through some of the most intense parts about assault, but the detective story is incredible—and depicts detective work, often impeded here by the failures of policing, in a way that doesn’t glorify police like so many other shows do.) Book I’m going to brag I finally read in quarantine: Anna Karenina. Favorite book of quarantine and the motivation for previous brag: Anna K, aka Anna Karenina but make it Gossip Girl.
That’s all from me. Tell me: What else would you like to see here? (I would like to include links to work by people other than me, but we’ll start that next time.) See you next month!