Atlanta: 33°, partly sunny — like democracy itself: still technically present, but you're not warm yet and the high is only 51°.

Detroit: 22°, iron-grey clouds — a city that knows what it means when powerful men decide your paycheck doesn't matter today.

Kansas City: 47°, overcast — the Great Plains holding steady at room temperature while Washington burns the furniture for warmth.

New York: 25°, mostly sunny — crisp enough to wake you up, cold enough to make you wonder what they'll take from you by spring.

San Francisco: 55°, cloudy with 68% rain chance — the fog rolls in the same way bad policy does: quietly, until you're soaked through.

Miami: 54°, sunny — DeSantis-land basking in 63° sunshine while trans people's healthcare disappears one hospital at a time.

Someone in Washington is using your Global Entry membership as a chess piece, Trump is about to give a State of the Union that will make every vein in your neck stand up and salute, and coal plants just got permission to dump brain-damaging mercury into the air you breathe. Welcome to Tuesday, beloved — stay the fuck in it.

First time here? Pull up a chair. The Gathering is your daily companion for the burning world.

Editor's note: The news gods are absolutely unhinged today — even for them — and I wrote this with my second coffee going cold and my jaw set hard against the morning.

The smell of a hostage negotiation is unmistakable — metallic, transactional, and reeking of bad faith.

That's the aroma wafting from Washington this week as the White House, in what Sen. Tammy Duckworth called "chaotic, poorly-coordinated" gamesmanship, announced it would suspend both TSA PreCheck and Global Entry amid an 11th-day DHS funding lapse — only to reverse the PreCheck suspension within hours after airlines screamed bloody murder. Global Entry? Still gone. FEMA? Limping on skeleton operations. The Coast Guard? Running on fumes and duty alone.

What they said: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem framed it as "making tough but necessary workforce and resource decisions." Yes, using 20 million travelers as political leverage is definitely the vibe of someone "making tough decisions" and not, say, a shit-stained ball-sack using innocent people as props.

The damage:

Human cost: Roughly 61,000 TSA workers — 95% of the workforce — report without pay. Many live paycheck to paycheck. Deputy Administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill warned Congress directly: workers unable to pay rent call out sick, checkpoints close, flights get delayed. A cascading national economic hit, her words.

Pattern: Democrats note that in the 43-day fall shutdown, neither PreCheck nor Global Entry was touched. This time, the Trump administration chose to reach deeper into your travel life — a deliberate escalation designed to shake Democrats loose from their demands for ICE reform, following the federal shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.

Action: Contact your Senator today and demand a clean DHS funding bill with ICE accountability. The Center for Constitutional Rights is actively monitoring: ccrjustice.org.

The DHS shutdown has no clean exit ramp — and the White House just made it dirtier by design. Read the full Hill report here.

What was once a breath of air regulated to protect babies and children is now, under this administration, an offering to the fossil fuel altar.

Last Friday, the Trump EPA finalized the repeal of Biden-era Mercury and Air Toxics Standards — stripping rules that limited how much brain-damaging mercury, arsenic, nickel, and lead coal-fired power plants can pump into the air. Coal plants are the single largest human source of mercury pollution on Earth. Mercury doesn't just make air dirty — it devastates the nervous system, the digestive system, the kidneys, the immune system. It lodges in fish. It gets into children's developing brains and does not leave.

Evidence:

Relationship breaking: EPA Deputy Administrator David Fotouhi announced the repeal from inside a Kentucky coal plant — the Mill Creek Generating Station on the Ohio River — a staging choice that was less press conference and more performance art for extraction capitalism.

Scale in felt terms: The standards being gutted were first issued in 2012 and updated by Biden in 2024 to match advances in pollution control. They weren't radical — they were the floor. Now even the floor is gone.

Expert voice: Surbhi Sarang of the Environmental Defense Fund called it "needless cruelty," noting coal plants can reduce pollution through readily available means at reasonable cost. Hayden Hashimoto of the Clean Air Task Force named it "unprecedented, unlawful, and unjustified."

This is what "restoring American energy dominance" means translated from ass-barnacle to English: your kid's lungs are the operating cost. Legal challenges are incoming — and you should fund them.

Action: Donate to the Environmental Defense Fund's legal battle at edf.org. Demand your representatives reverse EPA rollbacks. Read

Tez Anderson didn't know what was happening to him — the nightmares, the cascading isolation, the sense that time itself had fractured — until he gave it a name: AIDS Survivor Syndrome.

Anderson was 25 when he moved to San Francisco in 1986. Two weeks after his HIV test, on the heels of his 26th birthday, a doctor told him he had 18 to 24 months to live. He began planning his death. Instead, he watched friends die while he kept living. Decades later, approaching 50, he realized: "I'm going to be an old man with AIDS." In 2013, he held a town hall expecting 40 people. Over 250 showed up. They wrote their fears on giant paper sheets pinned to the walls — and discovered community in their survival.

Stakes:

Pattern: Anderson is now 66 and leads Let's Kick ASS (AIDS Survivor Syndrome), the nation's first and largest organization dedicated to long-term HIV survivors. His collaboration with Dr. Ron Stall at the University of Pittsburgh has tracked the psychosocial effects of HIV in over 7,300 gay and bisexual men — a population the medical system had largely assumed would be dead.

Timeline: 40 years post-crisis, an entire generation of long-term survivors carries compounded trauma, neurological effects, accelerated aging, and a healthcare system that does not know what to do with them. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is slashing HIV programs, gutting PEPFAR, and closing clinics. The 4,496 Americans who died of HIV-related illness in 2023 represent the tip of what's being abandoned.

What the fuck does it mean to survive something the government let happen, watch your community rebuilt brick by painstaking brick, and then have the same government begin demolishing it — again — in real time?

Movement: Let's Kick ASS is organizing survivor support networks across the country. Find your chapter or support their work at lkass.org. Read the LGBTQ Nation deep dive here.

Survival is not the same as living. These men built a world from grief. We owe them more than we've given.

Survival wisdom — how you carry this forward: That light Lorde speaks of — it's not ambient. You have to aim it, deliberately, at the things that are being done in the dark. Today, they're poisoning air and erasing queer elders and strapping people's travel documents to a political chess board. The light you bring is attention. It's showing up. It's naming what you see with unblinking precision, even when your hands are shaking. That's the fucking work. Don't let them operate in the dark.

Team LGBTQ+ at the Winter Olympics: 49 publicly out athletes competed in Milan — 19 of them won medals: 5 gold, 2 silver, 4 bronze. The team finished 13th overall, punching hard above its weight in a field of nations. Gold went to Hilary Knight, Breezy Johnson, Guillaume Cizeron, Amber Glenn, and Mathilde Gremaud. Elis Lundholm became the first trans man to compete at a Winter Olympics. — Why it matters: When the world is shrinking their rights, queer athletes keep expanding what's possible. PinkNews

VUMC Ends Gender-Affirming Surgery: Vanderbilt University Medical Center — Middle Tennessee's dominant healthcare provider — sent patients portal messages Friday confirming it will no longer perform gender-affirming surgeries for adults. No new appointments, no new consultations. A key plastic surgeon has already departed. One patient facing an upcoming surgery asked: "What if there are complications? Are my options now to travel elsewhere?" — Why it matters: VUMC is Tennessee's only Level 1 Trauma Center. Capitulating to political pressure here signals a healthcare desert forming around trans lives. Nashville Scene

Solar Storms and Earthquakes: Scientists at Kyoto University have proposed a physical model linking intense solar flare activity to fault zone instability — when the sun supercharges the ionosphere, electrical pressure may penetrate fractured rock and nudge already-stressed faults toward rupture. It's not a cause-and-effect claim. It's a "holy shit, space affects the ground we're standing on" claim. — Why it matters: Earthquake forecasting could be transformed by integrating space weather data with seismic monitoring. ScienceDaily

Congo's Ancient Carbon is Leaking: Africa's largest blackwater lakes — Lac Mai Ndombe and Lac Tumba — are releasing CO2 from peat that has been locked underground for thousands of years. ETH Zurich researchers found that up to 40% of the CO2 bubbling out is ancient, not recent. As droughts intensify under climate change, the leaking accelerates. — Why it matters: The Congo Basin stores a third of all tropical peatland carbon globally. If it tips, climate models break. ScienceDaily

Cost Drain: Prescriptions → Use GoodRx or Cost Plus Drugs (Mark Cuban's pharmacy) before paying full price — savings range from 30% to 80% off listed pharmacy prices on common generics. A drug that costs $180 at CVS may be $11 elsewhere. Feeling: What relief actually feels like when the math stops being an emergency.

Home Lifehack: Stop losing your keys/wallet every morning → Designate one single hook or bowl at the exact spot where you enter your home and train yourself to deposit everything immediately on entry. Three weeks of consistency makes it automatic. Feeling: The quiet satisfaction of not tearing your home apart at 7:45 a.m.

Food Sovereignty: Grow Your Own Lettuce Indoors → A small container with potting mix and a south-facing window yields cut-and-come-again lettuce in 3-4 weeks for about $4 of seed. No grocery run. No plastic clamshell. Just food you made with your own hands and a little sunlight. Every leaf you grow is a leaf you don't hand money to Sysco for.

Pantry Quick Meal: Spicy Peanut Noodle Bowl (feeds 4, under 10 minutes) → Boil 12 oz rice noodles (or whatever noodles you have). Whisk together: 4 tbsp peanut butter, 3 tbsp soy sauce, 2 tbsp rice vinegar, 1 tbsp chili oil, 1 tbsp sesame oil, 1 tsp honey, 2 garlic cloves grated. Thin with a splash of pasta water. Toss noodles in sauce. Top with sliced cucumber and scallion. Seven ingredients, one bowl, four people fed. Food doesn't have to be complicated to be good.

Moving forward — your armor for today: You were not made to be palatable. You were not made to shrink yourself into something easier for other people to swallow. Janet Mock built entire ecosystems of trans visibility while the culture was busy insisting she shouldn't exist. The lesson isn't resilience as performance — it's refusal. Flat refusal to disappear. Today, when they pull the rug, when the hospital drops the appointment, when the government grabs your travel pass — refuse to become smaller. Make your damn work. Make it loud. That's the whole thing.

MA RAINEY — "Mother of the Blues" | Queer | Cultural

Between 1923 and 1928, Rainey cut over 100 sides for Paramount Records — raunchy, defiant, irreducible — and sold them to Black Southern audiences who had never heard their own grief sung back to them that raw, that proud, that loud. She was bisexual in a world that didn't have the language to describe her, got arrested in 1925 for hosting an "indecent party" of women in her home, walked out the next morning, and went right back onstage — because her voice was a damn movement and she knew it.

AUDRE LORDE — Poet, Essayist, Warrior | Queer | Progressive

Lorde published 18 books across poetry, prose, and theory, was named New York State Poet Laureate in 1991, won the American Book Award, and wrote sentences — "Your silence will not protect you," "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" — that are still tattooed on the spines of every intersectional feminist movement breathing today. She called herself a "Black lesbian mother warrior poet" and refused every invitation to shrink any one of those words, building the entire fucking vocabulary that activists still reach for when the old language runs out.

JANET MOCK — Author, Director, Showrunner | Trans | Celebrity

Mock's memoir Redefining Realness hit the New York Times bestseller list in 2014, making her one of the first trans women of color to tell her own story at that scale and volume — then she went further, becoming the first trans woman of color to write and direct a television episode, and securing a landmark overall deal with Netflix that put trans creative power in the room where the money is decided. As a writer, director, and producer on Pose, she didn't just represent trans women of color on screen — she controlled the narrative, shaped the camera, and signed the checks.

You Got Your Democracy Back. Now What? — Vox | Various contributors. Ben Stanley describes the "illiberal trilemma" facing post-authoritarian governments: you can act legally, quickly, and effectively — but almost never all three at once. Poland under Tusk is the case study. America is watching closely. Listen/Read at Vox. Law and Justice stacked courts and corrupted media for eight years. Tusk came to power and found that legality and speed couldn't coexist. Sound familiar? Communities across the US are already doing the long, unglamorous legal work: filing FOIA requests, electing local judges, organizing precinct by precinct.

Louisiana's Abortion Pill Showdown — Mother Jones. A Western District of Louisiana court is hearing the next major abortion case this week — 21 states joined Louisiana in suing the FDA to reverse the 2023 mifepristone REMS that allow mail-order abortion. The Comstock Act is being invoked. The stakes are national. Read at Mother Jones. The Trump administration's FDA filed motions to muddy the waters while the anti-abortion movement quietly tries to gut pill access through the courts. Reproductive Justice Action Network is organizing. Nearly 1,000 mail-order abortions occur monthly in Louisiana despite state bans — and someone is trying to make those impossible next.