I am a member of the National Wildlife Federation, having certified my backyard as a wildlife habitat; and as such I receive their quarterly magazine. So I decided to start out by sharing one of their photographers with you. These works are a palate cleanser when we’re feeling discouraged:
Deirdre Denali Rosenberg is a “conservation photographer creating long-term, place-based stories about misunderstood wildlife and fragile ecosystems across desert, alpine, and sky island landscapes.” Note that she has been involved in multiple conservation photography projects, explored on her website. She also volunteers, raises money for wildlife, and packs out trash from wild areas. Click on her link for beautiful photography. BUT NOTE: She is not squeamish about snakes and bugs, which I know can be problematic for some of our readers!
She wrote about and provided photos for The Spectacular Madrean Sky Islands for NWF, Summer of 2025.
In Other News
Tech
Big tech companies are profiting off revenge porn.
There is no world where two companies with a combined market cap of nearly eight trillion dollars can feign any kind of reasonable ignorance on this. The best thing they can say for themselves is this is criminally lax negligence.
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This is another example of how women are made to be disposable in order to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. It’s not hard to imagine how differently this issue would be treated if AI deepfake apps were being used to create images and videos en masse of heterosexual men engaging in homosexual acts with one another. This is a genuine crisis, and the tech companies are treating serious oversight of it as an afterthought, at best. They are waiting for far less resourced journalists at CNBC and TPP do their jobs for them, then doing a smol bean routine of how could three companies who helped build the greatest surveillance apparatus in human history possibly know that they were advertising CSAM generators to children.
OTOH, there are women working to encourage a stronger presence of women and minorities in AI, such as Black in AI:
AI is a technological revolution. It’s also an expanding opportunity — to advocate for Black representation in policies and practices, to mirror the global diaspora we live in and serve, to remedy technology’s exclusionary past and demand an equitable future.
As a collective of academics, entrepreneurs, thought-leaders, engineers, researchers, executives, advocates and subject matter experts in this ecosystem, Black in AI has recognized AI’s possibilities and cautioned its biases from its very beginning.
Most of their leadership and staff are women.
Violence
Trump Condemns Ilhan Omar. An Hour Later, She’s Attacked in Minnesota:
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar attacked by a man who threw a substance (it looked like urine but was later identified as apple cider vinegar) on her.
He is a $Rump fan:
The president bears responsibility for inciting these attacks on Omar, a four-term congresswoman. But he has a long history of refusing to take responsibility for his words and actions, and his initial response to the attack on Omar was to pile on.
Politics
I'm not a huge fan, but you might recognise this author, and I liked some of what she had to say here:
Editorial in The Atlantic by Hillary Clinton: MAGA’s War on Empathy. Such as:
That compassion is weak and cruelty is strong has become an article of MAGA faith. Trump and his allies believe that the more inhumane the treatment, the more likely it is to spread fear. That’s the goal of surging heavily armed federal forces into blue states such as Minnesota and Maine—street theater of the most dangerous kind. Other recent presidents, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, managed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants without turning American cities into battlegrounds or making a show of keeping children in cages.
“The cruelty is the point,” as
The Atlantic’s
Adam Serwer memorably put it during Trump’s first term. The savagery is a feature, not a bug. By contrast, as Serwer
noted recently in these pages, the people of Minnesota have responded with an approach you could call “‘neighborism’—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from.”
Resistance
Time and again, those videos also show reason for hope: Ordinary people are refusing to comply. They film Noem’s secret police, blowing whistles and making a fuss, even as those masked cowards attack them. They calmly reply, camera in hand, “Go to church,” as ICE officers bellow violent threats at them. Crowds gather and run ICE agents off — just by being peaceful but annoying. In one incident, a woman at home with her baby gives sanctuary to her DoorDash driver, yelling at officers outside that she will not open the door until they return with a warrant.
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People are realizing that the only heroes coming to save us are us: regular folks in their leggings and puffer jackets, armed only with iPhones and understanding that we are Americans, and we do not put up with this. It’s unfair that it has to be this way, that so many of the elites are unwilling to give back by sticking their necks out. And it’s incredibly unfair that Renee Good is dead, that her wife is a widow and her son an orphan. It shouldn’t have to be this way.
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Over the past year, the biggest victories against Trump have come not from the elites or institutions, but from college kids and office workers, cat ladies and Uber drivers. When Trump tried to censor Jimmy Kimmel, it was the pumpkin latte drinkers whose ire forced ABC to bring him back on. When the president sent National Guard troops to terrorize cities like Portland, D.C., Los Angeles and Chicago, people who still wear skinny jeans turned off Netflix, inflated the frog and unicorn costumes, and resisted the invasion until Trump finally gave up. And I believe time will show that Good, by pulling her Honda full of stuffed animals onto a street in Minneapolis to bear witness to ICE atrocities, will be remembered as a hero that activated thousands more like her.
Movies
First the ridiculous:
A review of the Melania movie. I know, ick. But she’s a woman, albeit not a particularly sympathetic one. And her movie premiered this week. The reviewer at the above link thinks we should all go watch it, although why is not clear. To see how movies should not be made and how some subjects just do not inspire interest, maybe? Or maybe misery just loves company. Notably, almost all those watching the movie with the reviewer were also journalists.
Now the much more sublime:
The Sundance Film Festival movies are out, and they certainly seem a diverse group! (Note that I was drawn to this article because of a claim that seeing Sundance films at home was “the most overlooked deal in streaming”. I consider it too expensive, actually.)
A couple I would like to draw your attention to, for when they are available later:
Abby Ellis, a Utah filmmaker (co-producer, director, cinematographer, coeditor), is competing for a US Documentary Special Jury Award: Impact for Change prize for The Lake: The quote below is from the review above (bolding mine):
Activists and the authors of climate fiction often lament how difficult it is to craft narrative urgency around the gradual destruction wrought by climate change; the way we formulate stories is almost perfectly ill-suited to raising the alarm about consequences that may not be obvious until it’s too late. But you would think the possibility that Great Salt Lake might dry up within a decade might be enough to grab people’s attention. Abby Ellis’ documentary shows that it’s still not that simple. The scientists in her movie are practically shouting from the mountaintop about how diverting the lake’s water, mainly to Utah’s agriculture sector, threatens to send it into an irreversible decline. But they’re dismissed and waved aside, even when they warn that the rapid changes in the lake’s ecosystem are generating clouds of toxic dust that could easily make their way to major cities. What makes this more than a standard issue-driven documentary is Ellis’ subtle but insistent tracking of the role religious faith plays on both sides of the debate. Ben Abbott, the Mormon head of the activist organization Grow the Flow, invokes a sense of stewardship over god’s creation, while one farmer counters that “when deity needs to fill that lake, it’ll be filled.” It’s an area that far more movies on the subject could stand to explore, especially in such a diligent and unassuming way.
For more information, you may prefer the summary provided by Sundance at this link for The Lake.
Filmmaker Sara Dosa (director, co-producer, co-screenwriter) has premiered her new film, Time and Water, also at Sundance. From the review:
Like her Oscar-nominated 2022 documentary Fire of Love, Sara Dosa’s new movie combines awe-striking footage of natural wonders with a human story of love and loss. But this time, her protagonist, Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason, is still around to take part in the process. The movie weaves decades of Magnason’s home movies into the story of his country’s melting glaciers, one of which, Okjökull, was the first to be officially proclaimed dead. Like an ice core whose layers hold bubbles of air from millennia past, Magnason’s narration, adapted from his book On Time and Water, captures the endless battle between permanence and change, and what happens when the things we thought would last forever turn out to be vulnerable to decay. The glaciers can be beautiful even in death—it’s hard to be alarmed by the soothing sound of rushing water—and the inevitable fact of human mortality can feel like a strange fit with the unnatural loss of climate change. But the movie forces us to ponder what remains after we’ve left this earth, and what kind of planet we want to leave behind.
More info in the summary from Sundance at this link for Time and Water.
Enjoy the upcoming movies!
This Week in the War on Women is a group effort! Many thanks to Tara and Angmar for items and discussion this week.
TWitWoW is looking for more authors! Please let us know in the comments or Kosmail us if you’d like to write for us.
