Atlanta: 61°, Cloudy — the gray ceiling sits low and smug, high of 66, the kind of sky that's neither committing to rain nor the courage of its convictions.

Detroit: 41°, Light rain — drizzle that won't commit to snow, just like MAGA promises that never become policy: wet, cold, going nowhere.

Kansas City: 53°, Sunny — deceptively bright for a country this dark; enjoy it, because Friday's snow doesn't give a damn about your optimism.

New York: 39°, Light rain — cold drops tapping the pavement where Randy Fine's decency once stood, somewhere just south of absolute zero.

San Francisco: 44°, Partly sunny — fog still threading the Bay like a last argument against despair; catch it before the rain arrives by nightfall.

Miami: 75°, Partly sunny — warm, gorgeous, and about as concerned with the republic as a man on a jet ski wearing a MAGA hat.

The republic is rotting from the jawbone out — and conservatives are finally naming the corpse. Meanwhile a sitting congressman ranked Muslims below dogs, our planet bleeds through our wardrobes, and Europe just voted that trans women are women. Pull up a chair. New here? Join the Gathering.

Editor's note: Florida Rep. Randy Fine — this turd-munching ass-waffle currently occupying a congressional seat — posted on X: "If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one." That's a direct quote. That's a sitting U.S. Representative. Randy Fine is a fucking racist piece of shit, full stop, and every silence from Mike Johnson's chamber makes him complicit in the same disease.

Rick Wilson — Lincoln Project co-founder, lifetime conservative, man who knows where the bodies are buried because he dug a few himself — looked at Super Bowl weekend and said what many of us have been screaming from the margins: MAGA is "the rotting carcass of the MAGA era, its shrieking insecurities, its pathetic resentments, its festering hatreds."

📸 [Worn-out MAGA hat abandoned in sand — the visual metaphor Wilson didn't need to write.]

What he said: "Fascism wants to scare you into silence, but sometimes, fascism trips on its own lies and absurdities and pratfalls onto its sneering face."

This is the man Trump's people once called an enemy. Now he's doing the most honest cultural autopsy of this administration that anyone on either side has managed to write.

The numbers don't lie: Bad Bunny pulled 134 million Super Bowl viewers. Kid Rock — Trump's handpicked cultural champion, his proof that MAGA had the vibe — pulled roughly 4% of that. Four percent. That's not losing a culture war. That's the culture war calling 911 on itself.

And Joe Rogan. Oh, Joe Rogan. The man who built a decade-long brand out of performing independence — who made "just asking questions" into a $200-million Spotify contract, who nodded along to every "free thinker" talking point until Trump handed him the throne at a rally and he sat in it grinning — is watching those youth approval numbers quietly unravel and saying nothing coherent. He endorsed a shit-ramming cunt-socket administration because it felt powerful in the moment. Power is a bad substitute for a conscience, and the polling is starting to reflect that.

Action: Stop treating MAGA as invincible. Wilson's full piece is the clearest read on this moment — LGBTQ Nation

The carcass still bites. But it's scared.

Fast fashion has its hands around the throat of the global water table and its boot on the neck of the atmosphere. The numbers read like an indictment: 10% of global carbon emissions — more than every commercial flight and every cargo ship combined. Rivers in Bangladesh run teal and cobalt with synthetic dye. A single load of laundry releases 500,000 tons of microplastics into the ocean annually.

📸 [Mountain of discarded clothing, Atacama Desert, Chile — where unsold fast fashion goes to fossilize.]

How it works: Zara pioneered the fifteen-day design-to-shelf cycle in the early 1990s. Shein industrialized that impulse into something closer to a planetary eating disorder — new drops daily, prices so low the brain stops calculating the true cost.

Breaking it down: Dyeing and finishing alone account for 36% of the industry's pollution load. Cotton cultivation — the fiber production stage — drains freshwater systems that took millennia to build. 85% of all textiles end up in landfill every single year. They don't decompose. They accumulate.

The system connection: Trump's shit-filled fuck-trophy administration gutted EPA enforcement and actively incentivizes the cheap overseas manufacturing chains that make this model profitable. Environmental regulation is not an obstacle to industry — it's the only thing standing between your grandchildren and a textile-dyed watershed.

Action: Buy secondhand. Repair before replacing. Track the data and find solutions at earth.org

They made it cheap so you'd throw it away. The planet doesn't have a trash can.

On February 11, the European Parliament voted 340–141 — 68 abstentions — to formally declare that trans women are women. The resolution, adopted for the 70th UN Commission on the Status of Women convening in New York next month, called for the "full recognition of trans women as women" as essential to any functioning gender-equality or anti-violence policy framework.

What's at stake:

Legal shift: While most EU resolutions aren't binding on member states, their passage shapes domestic policy across the bloc in ways that compound over years. This one lands with particular weight.

Pattern: Journalist Erin Reed described the vote as placing Europe on a "direct collision course" with the Trump administration, which will also attend the New York UN session representing a government that has signed executive order after executive order targeting trans existence since January 2025.

The fracture: UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer declared in the same period that trans women are not women. The continent is splitting at this exact seam.

What the fuck is happening to our world when a legislative body of 340 people has to cast votes — on record, with their names attached — simply to confirm that a human being is a human being? That is the measurable cost of ten years of coordinated anti-trans disinformation: we are now debating existence itself.

Movement: Trans organizations across Europe mobilized in the lead-up to this vote. Stateside, ahead of the UN session: Transgender Law Center and the ACLU Trans Rights Project need your dollars and your noise now. Full breakdown: PinkNews

📸 [Trans pride flags outside EU Parliament building — the flags they'll carry to New York.]

They voted. Now we make it mean something.

Survival wisdom — how you carry this forward: Rich knew the particular exhaustion of watching the world demand your quiet. She also knew its cost. You wake up and the morning news is another fist in the chest — another vote to defend, another racist ass-waffle trending, another planet statistic that lands like a gut punch. And the temptation is to go still. To stop making noise. Silence doesn't make you safer. It makes you smaller. One sentence of truth, spoken aloud, costs the machine more than a year of careful quiet. Today: speak.

Keke Palmer is "almost 100% sure" she's asexual — In an Instagram post the day after Valentine's Day, the 31-year-old Emmy winner wrote simply: "I like no one and I'm almost 100% sure I'm asexual." She came out as attracted to women back in 2015. This lands quietly, honestly, and exactly as it should: a woman naming herself on her own terms. — Why this matters: ace visibility has a visibility gap a mile wide, and Palmer just narrowed it. LGBTQ Nation

When you're an introvert performing confidence in a world that won't stop screaming — Brandon Ellrich's new Substack piece on being a shy queer man in a loud world is the quiet permission slip you didn't know you needed. — Why this matters: your shell isn't a defect. It's a foundation. Read it

Scientists can now track a single water molecule across the entire planet — A University of Tokyo ensemble of eight climate models decoded the isotopic fingerprint of water vapor across a 45-year record, mapping global circulation with unprecedented accuracy. Storms and droughts just got more legible. — Implication: every flood, every drought, every wildfire season has a traceable origin story. ScienceDaily

We've been undercounting Arctic snow loss — massively — Official data showed Northern Hemisphere autumn snow cover growing by 1.5 million km² per decade. It was a satellite illusion. Corrected analysis: snow is actually shrinking by half a million km² per decade. The Arctic is warming faster than our instruments admitted. — Who pays: every coastal community downstream. ScienceDaily

Fast fashion bleeding your wallet and the watershed? → Before buying new, check ThredUp, Poshmark, or your local Buy Nothing group first. An H&M shirt that costs $40 requires 2,700 liters of water to produce and ends up in a landfill within 18 months. A secondhand version: ~$6, same garment, $34 back in your pocket. Feeling: small sovereignty is still sovereignty.

Decision paralysis the second you walk through the door after work → On Sunday, write three "pantry combos" — what you have, what you can make — and tape them to the fridge. Monday night is not the time for creativity. Your future self will stop cursing at your past self. Feeling: your brain finally stops running the "what's for dinner" loop on repeat.

Regrow your scallions forever → Root ends of grocery store scallions in a glass of water, sunny windowsill. New growth in 3 days. Full stalks in 10. Cost: zero. Every bunch you regrow is a middle finger to the supply chain. You don't need permission to take your food sovereignty back.

Emergency pantry pasta — feeds 4, under 10 minutes: 1 lb pasta, 4 garlic cloves, olive oil, 1 can white beans, red pepper flakes, salt, lemon zest. Sauté garlic 90 seconds, add beans with a splash of pasta water, toss cooked pasta in, finish with lemon and heat. Seven ingredients, one pan, zero excuses.

Moving forward — your armor for today: Rivera didn't wait for ideal conditions. She showed up while bricks were still in the air, while the building was still smoking, while nobody had written the script yet. What she gave us isn't a blueprint — it's a dare. Be present in the fucking moment, especially the ones that scare you. Put your body in the room, your voice in the meeting, your name on the petition. The revolution was always built by people who couldn't afford to miss it. Today: don't miss it.

And now, your people —

Alok Vaid-Menon — South Asian nonbinary poet whose sequined, brown-skinned defiance lands somewhere between testimony and incantation, each line insisting the gender binary was always a cage and they've already walked through its bars.

Laverne Cox — Black trans actress who turned Orange Is the New Black into a beachhead for trans visibility; her grace on red carpets a slow, steady dismantling of who gets to be seen.

Grace Lee Boggs — Chinese-American Detroit organizer who planted gardens in abandoned lots and revolutions in young minds with the same patient hands, organizing until the age of 100, her voice soft as bedrock.

None of them waited for the invitation. They became the room. All three operated in territory that hadn't yet agreed they belonged — and they showed up anyway, consistently, with their full selves on the table. That is the only formula that has ever actually worked.

The movement isn't built by the loudest. It's built by the ones who don't stop.

The Country That Beat Its Trump — Vox | Zack Beauchamp. The concrete of Brasília still carries the memory of January 8, 2023; Bolsonaro sits in a cell while Trump sits in the Oval. Brazil's fractured multiparty system — too chaotic for any single authoritarian to fully capture — held. America's two-party structure made the capture easy. Read Trump exported his authoritarian playbook south; Brazil's messy, weak, paradoxically durable institutions told it to go to hell.

AI Panic — We Need to Recalibrate — Sweaty Spice | Geoff Anderson. You can feel the dread humming through every knowledge-worker Slack: junior jobs dissolving into algorithm. Anderson, a senior PM who actually uses these tools daily, gives you the numbers without the hysteria or the false reassurance. Read A Tech CEO declared the abiogenesis moment for AI coding; workers are already doing the adaptation math before anyone in power is asking the right questions.