How Can We Get More Young People to Vote? Start Registering Them in High School

PUBLISHED 8/9/2026 by

This year, about 4 million Americans will turn 18, just in time to vote in November’s midterms. However, fewer than 30 percent of newly eligible young voters are currently registered to vote—half the number of students who go to college—and that percentage is only going down. In 2024, by comparison, 44 percent of U.S. 18-year-olds were registered, compared to approximately 75 percent over voters aged 45 and up.

For midterm elections in particular, not much more than a quarter of eligible 18-year-olds vote—meaning about 2 million young people are missing the chance to let their voices be heard.

A common refrain from some is that the younger half of Gen Z isn’t interested in voting or politics, but the data doesn’t back this up. According to research from The Civics Center, among 18-year-olds who are registered, voter turnout is high. More than 75 percent of registered young voters 18 through 24 have turned out to vote in every presidential election going back to 2004—suggesting the issue isn’t with young voters themselves but how they’re (not) being registered.

“Young people are told so frequently, ‘Your vote doesn’t matter, what you say doesn’t matter,’” Laura Brill, The Civics Center’s founder and CEO, told Ms. “And these things have a negative impact, because actually young people probably do know that they matter, and we don’t want to have a future where people are just feeling cynical and as if they’re intentionally being left out of the process.”

From Selma to Todd Blanche, U.S. Democracy Is Being Tested

PUBLISHED 8/8/2026 by

Sixty-one years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law—one of the most consequential victories of the Civil Rights Movement and a landmark affirmation of the principle that democracy belongs to all of us.

But the Voting Rights Act was not simply handed down from Washington. It was won through years of organizing, resistance and extraordinary courage—by people who marched, registered voters and risked their lives demanding that the federal government enforce a right already promised by the Constitution.

The lesson of Selma is not that the fight was won. It is that our rights survive only when people are willing to defend them.

We are seeing another test of that principle right now in the Senate.

Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Todd Blanche—his former personal defense attorney and now acting attorney general—has spent weeks struggling to secure enough Republican support for confirmation. The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced his nomination this week on a party-line 12-10 vote, only after Blanche made (non-binding) concessions to Republican senators concerned about a proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund connected to a settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS.

At Ms., we have been following Blanche’s record closely—from his role in the Justice Department’s horrific mishandling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, to his threats involving medication abortion and the Comstock Act, to larger concerns about whether as the nation’s top law enforcement officer he will ensure the independence of the Justice Department and defend the Constitution or the political interests of the president who appointed him.

Blanche’s confirmation is all but assured, with Senate GOP leadership planning to take up his nomination before leaving Washington for its August recess. His confirmation does not resolve the serious questions surrounding his independence—it makes vigilance and accountability all the more important.

Accountability is also at the center of another troubling story unfolding in Washington. Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) is facing allegations of domestic violence and child abuse from his former wife. His former father-in-law, Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno, has gone so far as to say Miller should not serve in Congress, while lawmakers and advocates have called for investigation and accountability. The standards we demand from our leaders—and whether institutions are willing to enforce them—tell us something fundamental about whose safety and dignity we value.

These stories may appear very different: the Voting Rights Act, the nomination of a corrupt attorney general, allegations involving a member of Congress. But they are connected by a basic question: What does democracy require? And what does it require of us?

My Hysterectomy Was a Gift. Dr. Kemi Doll Shows Why Women Need to Share Our ‘Womb Stories’

PUBLISHED 8/8/2026 by

Determined to prevent uterine cancer deaths, Dr. Doll published A Terrible Strength: The Hidden Crisis of the Black Womb and Your Survival Guide to Healing in May. Both comprehensive and compassionate, the book focuses on individuals of African descent, showing how everyone will benefit.

Upon finishing A Terrible Strength, I took its message to heart: One need not have a womb to prioritize womb health. We can all join Kemi Doll’s Womb Sisterhood through the “deliberate telling and sharing” of “womb stories” with “our true friends.” 

Fortunately, women have already started talking. Personal testimonies changed health outcomes in the 1970s and ’80s—and they’re doing the same now. Earlier generations suffered through perimenopause in silence, but today, women in their 20s, 30s and 40s hear about not only hot flashes but also itchy ears and frozen shoulders. And, as a woman in my early 50s, I’m not completely in the dark about hormone replacement therapy (HRT).

Nevertheless, deadly silence remains.

I am childfree by choice, so pregnancy never fueled my concerns, but I became preoccupied with gynecology in 2017. Fibroids were wreaking havoc in my life, and I pursued a hysterectomy to end my suffering. As Doll puts it, this “definitive treatment” is “welcomed by some and mourned by others.” Though I very much welcomed a hysterectomy, I couldn’t secure one until May 2021, despite my best efforts. 

From now on, I will participate in the “deliberate telling and sharing” of “womb stories.” Doing so is difficult but necessary. As Doll explains, sharing our experience requires us to “shift away from a strength that withstands suffering, silence and pain.” It requires, in her words, “a strength that embraces our vulnerability and can demand better care from the larger world.”

The Feminist Case for Loving ‘Charlie’s Angels’

PUBLISHED 8/8/2026 by

I don’t remember how old I was when I first heard the term “jiggle TV,” but I know it was decades after I was a devoted, starry-eyed fangirl of the genre. And I do mean “girl”—Wonder Woman came into the world just a year after I did, Charlie’s Angels two years after, Three’s Company the year after that. I watched them all—first in weekly nighttime installments, later in endlessly imbibable reruns—as I was learning to walk, talk, dress, eat, interact with other girls and other boys, and understand how the world saw me and where I fit into it.

The term “jiggle TV” was coined in the mid-1970s by NBC exec Paul Klein to describe and deride rival network ABC’s successful lineup of shows starring women who wore excessively revealing clothing, with Charlie’s Angels as its prime example. Whatever age I was when I first heard the term, I was old enough to immediately grasp its demeaning, objectifying implications. I remember it hitting me like a ton of bricks: The fictional world I’d been gazing at with such awe and reverence was, in the eyes of others, somewhere between a turn-on and a joke.

Without making a big thing about it, I tucked my childhood obsession away in a remote-storage corner of my brain and, for decades, lived an Angels-free life.

Until this year, when Charlie’s Angels turned the big 5-0.

I decided to attempt a full-series rewatch. I wanted to see if immersing myself in the series again after all these years would pull my memories out of remote storage and give me a more detailed picture of how the show’s storylines and messages had affected my pliable young mind.

What had I picked up and taken away from the show besides starry-eyed fangirl devotion?

The answer was: plenty.

‘Starving to Death’: Young People in Cuba Tell of the Toll of Trump Administration’s Sanctions

PUBLISHED 8/8/2026 by

No food, no water, no electricity—and, increasingly, little hope for the future. Cuba’s humanitarian crisis has deepened dramatically as the Trump administration escalates a decades-long U.S. sanctions regime that has already strangled the island’s economy and access to basic goods. The embargo was supposedly intended to promote democracy, but after more than 60 years, no regime change has come. Instead, ordinary Cubans are living with blackouts, fuel shortages, collapsing public transportation, scarce medicine and food that cannot even be kept cold.

When I studied at the University of Havana in 2024, blackouts and water shortages were already part of daily life. Now, friends I met there tell me the situation has become almost unrecognizable. Paula and Lupita, two women in their twenties, say electricity may come for only two or three hours a day—sometimes in the middle of the night, forcing people awake to cook, wash clothes and charge their phones. Without electricity, there is often no running water, no refrigeration and no relief from the Caribbean heat. Food spoils, preserved food costs more, and even cooking has become a challenge as gas grows scarce and families turn to charcoal.

Children, pregnant women and families are bearing some of the crisis’s heaviest costs. Schools have closed early or shortened their days, hospitals are operating through blackouts, medicines are increasingly difficult to find, and women are giving birth in darkened, understaffed facilities. Menstrual products that were once subsidized are now largely available only in private stores many women cannot afford. And after dark, entire neighborhoods are pitch black, making already-expensive transportation harder to access and leaving young women feeling less safe simply walking outside.

“We know that we are inside of a dictatorship,” says Paula. “We need help to change the government. It has been 70 years without us being able to actually do something about it, like 70 years of brainwashing, of indoctrination, of exile, emigration. The population that we have left, [is] not strong enough to face the government. If you don’t have the basic needs covered, or at least [enough] power to sleep at night, you wouldn’t have the strength to actually face the government.”

For young Cubans, the crisis has become inseparable from the question of whether there is any future for them on the island. Paula told me that nearly everyone she knows between 20 and 30 is trying to leave. She is painfully clear-eyed about the Cuban government’s repression and failures—but also about the failure of decades of U.S. sanctions to produce the democracy they supposedly seek. Cubans are caught between a government that will not change and a U.S. policy that has not forced it to, while ordinary people are left exhausted, hungry and desperate. After seven decades, it is past time to confront the human cost.

Holding Dr. Fauci In Contempt Is a New Low For the Rule of Law

PUBLISHED 8/7/2026 by

Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted Aug. 6 to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt, for invoking his constitutional right to invoke the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution during a highly contentious and jarring hearing, which lasted nearly three hours. 

The hearing marked a chilling day for health, science and medical memory—one more concerned about retribution and retaliation than truth and the deaths and devastation brought about by the global pandemic. Despite the decorum expected of the nation’s highest government officers, the hearing devolved into a type of vile theatrics unfitting members of the Senate.

Much of the news coverage of the hearing primarily focused on Fauci, the former White House chief medical adviser, invoking the Fifth Amendment 111 times.

Little ink was spilled on what should have been the most important point of a hearing: keeping people in the United States and around the world safe from past, present and future domestic and global health threats. 

Instead, COVID-19 was reduced to science fiction, making a mockery not only of the deaths brought about by the pandemic, but also the devastating, lingering harms.

That Fauci remains a focus of Republican scrutiny while Congress faces urgent healthcare challenges to Americans, ensuring clean air and water, reducing the cost of medical bills, addressing the affordability of medications, addressing environmental impact and focusing on staggering maternal and infant mortality, says much about the grave state of affairs in U.S. healthcare. 

The Political Boys’ Club: A Long List of Politicians Accused of Domestic Abuse—and a Short List Facing Consequences

PUBLISHED 8/7/2026 by

This powerful political boys’ club in the U.S. seems always willing to embrace new members. 

The latest addition—and currently the loudest denier—is Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) who denies his former wife’s claims of physical abuse as well as child abuse of their daughter. He also recently claimed it was his former spouse who was violent, not him. 

Former spouse Emily Moreno and her father, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), refute his denials, as his former father-in-law is calling for his resignation, and the House Ethics Committee is investigating the charges.

In the meantime, Miller recently maintained his innocence on social media, saying his ex-wife requested making him dinner—supposedly proof he never assaulted her, held a gun to her head and threw scalding water on her.

Research shows abuse survivors—myself included—practice appeasement as a survival tactic and will attempt to de-escalate a tenuous situation with an abusive partner any way they can to stay safe. Dinner included.

Even without accountability—or even a federal public-health website free from political caveats—there is no denying the prevalence of abuse allegations involving political actors across age, race and party lines.

‘To Be Forgotten Is to Die Twice’: The Fight to Protect the Graves at Ireland’s Bessborough Mother and Baby Home

PUBLISHED 8/6/2026 by

Survivors and advocates in Ireland are fighting to stop the construction of luxury apartments on the grounds of the former Bessborough Mother and Baby Institute, where hundreds of infants who died in state- and church-run custody are believed to remain buried in unmarked graves. 

At a national rally on July 18 outside the Cork City Library—the site of the former Bessborough Mother and Baby Institute—survivors and their families warned building over the site would erase one of Ireland’s darkest chapters. There, survivors and their families spoke about their experiences. Advocates held a banner with the names of infants who died at Bessborough and others marched with signs reading “to be forgotten is to die twice.”

Bessborough is part of a system of containment institutes first founded back in the 1760s as places to help sex workers pursue more “moral” forms of employment. 

By the 1800s, these institutions—called the Magdalene laundries, or mother and baby homes—effectively became prisons for “fallen” or “immoral” women who deviated from strict social norms. Run by Christian religious orders and institutions, mother and baby institutes kept unmarried pregnant women hidden from public view in a Catholic country where unmarried pregnant women and girls were and are deeply stigmatized.

Inside mother and baby institutes—which received public funding and were run by religious orders—unmarried pregnant women and girls were hidden away and faced intense violence. According to the Irish Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation, 11.4 percent of the people incarcerated in these institutions were minors. After their children were born and babies at least partially weaned, these women were forcibly separated from their children who would be taken for adoption. But many children died in these institutes because of systemic neglect and abuse.

Another Blow to Women’s Equality at Work: The Trump Administration Is Trying to Weaken a Key Workplace Discrimination Protection

PUBLISHED 8/6/2026 by

The Trump administration is attempting to weaken one of the nation’s most important workplace discrimination protections—a legal standard that has, for decades, allowed workers to challenge hiring and promotion policies that unfairly exclude qualified people, even when those policies appear neutral on their face.

A new opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), issued in June, argues these longstanding interpretations of Title VII’s “disparate-impact” standard are unconstitutional, and contends certain Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidance improperly allows employers to be held liable based on discriminatory effects rather than intent. The opinion is meant to guide executive branch enforcement.

Civil rights advocates are pushing back, arguing the new OLC opinion misstates decades of Supreme Court precedent and congressional action.

Below is a joint explainer—issued by the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), Democracy Forward, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC), Equal Rights Advocates, and LatinoJustice PRLDEF—originally published as “The Office of Legal Counsel’s Opinion on the ‘Constitutionality of Disparate-Impact Liability Under Title VII’: What You Need to Know.”

The organizations argue that the opinion does not change federal law. Instead, they emphasize that only Congress can amend Title VII and that courts—not the executive branch—determine how the law is interpreted. Employers, they say, remain legally obligated to comply with existing anti-discrimination protections.

“Across America, workers are struggling to find living-wage jobs to support themselves and their families. Too often, qualified workers are blocked from getting hired and promoted due to employer policies that screen out applicants based on factors unrelated to whether the applicant could do the job, from unnecessary college degree requirements and credit checks to commute-radius limitations and AI resume reviews. The Trump-Vance administration is making this problem worse.

“For decades, under Supreme Court precedent, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), and other legal authority, workers have been able to challenge exclusionary policies like these using a legal tool known as “disparate-impact liability.” That tool has resulted in employers adopting more thoughtful, rigorous standards in evaluating their own selection criteria and advancing their business objectives. The administration is now attacking this tool, encouraging employers to ignore the harms caused by their own policies while denying workers the ability to question whether those policies are justified and fair.

“In its latest move, the Trump-Vance administration’s Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) released an opinion claiming that longstanding U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) guidance on disparate-impact liability under Title VII is unconstitutional. The OLC opinion is wrong on the facts and wrong on the law. Only Congress and the courts have authority to change the law or its impact.”

On the Voting Rights Act’s Anniversary, Short Film ‘Selma Sisters March On’ Captures 1965’s Fight for the Right to Vote

PUBLISHED 8/6/2026 by

Aug. 6, 2026, marks the 61st anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, the VRA sought to end Jim Crow-era voter disenfranchisement. Particularly in Southern states, voting officials routinely required Black voters to jump through hoops such as “literacy tests” or arbitrary rules such as having to name every county in the state before voting. Even if a Black voter managed to make it this far, election administrators sometimes intentionally sent them to the wrong location to vote, ensuring their vote never actually got counted.

The Voting Rights Act made it illegal for states to discriminate against voters by race, color or language-minority status, thereby reaffirming all U.S. citizens’ constitutional right to vote. The VRA also introduced additional changes to make voting more widely accessible, such as ballots in languages other than English and protections for blind, disabled and illiterate voters.

However, the VRA only became law after decades of struggle and widespread civil rights protests, including the famous marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in March 1965. Protesters, many of whom were young students, faced violent attacks from law enforcement, from tear gas to imprisonment, as they fought for their right to vote.

Sisters Alice and Denise Thomas were only 16 and 14 when they joined the Selma to Montgomery marches and other protests in their home state of Alabama before the VRA became law. In the new short documentary Selma Sisters March On, the Thomas sisters describe in their own words the fateful events of 1965 as they experienced them as high school-aged civil-rights activists.