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Without further ado, here’s what’s on deck this week:
🏈 The new Netflix show on the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleading team is infuriating — and surprisingly cathartic
🕋 Why the Hajj is becoming more and more dangerous
💃 What anthropologists can teach us about losing ourselves
But first, here’s a closer look at what’s been going on around the world lately:
Kelly Kimball For Frame. // Wikimedia Commons
1,300+ — The number of people who died last week from heat exhaustion during this year’s Hajj, a five-day religious pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Temperatures soared to around 120 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the Saudi National Center for Meteorology.
A map of the Hajj pilgrimage // Source: Center for Disease Control
Understand how extreme heat is changing in the Middle East: Even if the world acts now to tamp down on the most drastic effects of climate change, Saudi Arabia will experience increasingly extreme heat over the coming years. An MIT study in 2019 found that the Hajj will occur in an “extreme danger threshold” between 2047 to 2052 and 2079 to 2086, and that “aggressive adaptation measures will be required” to protect religious pilgrims. It appears as though we’ve already met that extreme danger threshold in the 2020s, and more protections need to be put in place for future Hajj pilgrims.
Per this chart, the months of August through November will present dangerous to extremely dangerous temperatures during the Hajj (the Hajj occurs around 11 days earlier each year). // Source: MIT
The recent Hajj fatalities is not the deadliest incident to happen during the pilgrimage. In 2015, a stampede killed more than 2,400 pilgrims in Mina.
2045 — The year by which Hawaii has agreed to take action to decarbonize its transportation system, per a lawsuit they settled with 13 young people. In what has become the world’s first youth-led constitutional climate case addressing pollution from the transportation sector, the children and teens alleged Hawaii was violating their rights under its constitution by enabling the construction of infrastructure that contributes to climate change.
$365.63 — The meager cost it took for 404 Media’s Emanuel Maiberg to operate an AI-driven news website called Prototype Press over a few days. In an experiment revealing the extent of generative AI’s abilities, the journalist outsourced the creation of dozens of articles and professional website to a Fiverr freelancer using ChatGPT.
“What I learned from this experiment is that flooding the internet with an infinite amount of what could pass for journalism is cheap and even easier than I imagined, as long as I didn’t respect the craft, my audience, or myself.” — Emanuel Maiberg in 404 Media.
The experiment is just one way that generative AI is making it easier than ever before to “convert clicks to dollars at the expense of quality journalism and information,” writes Maiberg in 404 Media.
More AI innovations may be ahead: According to CB Insights, 2023 saw breakout investment in generative AI startups. // Source: CB Insights
400 — The number of Kenyan police officers that arrived in Haiti on Tuesday in a U.S.-backed security intervention meant to clamp down on gang violence and lawlessness that has taken the Caribbean country by storm. Kenyan activists are critical of the deployment, stating that Kenyan police themselves have carried out brutality in their own country, including a fatal shooting of protesters in Nairobi on Tuesday. Another 600 or so Kenyan police officers are expected to be deployed in Haiti.
And now onto the main course. — Since retiring my competitive drumline days in high school, I haven’t really followed the world of football. So, to admit that I spent my weekend ripping through a seven-part docuseries about the nation’s most prestigious professional cheerleading squad feels almost out of character — at least on the surface.
Dig deeper, and anyone who finds themselves hours deep into the nexus of beauty, athleticism, and America’s most beloved sport will realize the surprising universality of Greg Whiteley’s latest documentary, “America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.” The 36 members of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (DCC) team almost eerily embody the hallmarks of the idealized American woman: beautiful, thin, radiant, patriotic, and endlessly amicable. I was struck at once by their sheer skill and athleticism, as well as the stratospheric standards placed upon them.
Perry Lentine Photography, circa 2011.
It’s in this tension that I began to feel connections to the DCC women. I, too, am a woman in a man’s world who has spent years of my life perfecting a craft with little professional and financial stability guaranteed. I, too, have had to toe the line of being agreeable yet self-advocating in workplaces that were not built for my comfort. I, too, have worked at grappling with the fact that what I will receive from institutions in return is disproportionate at best. Throughout seven episodes, the women of DCC graciously absorbed the daily frustrations of being a woman in the U.S. — all while mastering hip-damaging jump splits with un-smeared makeup and a pearly-white smile.
"America's Sweethearts" pulls the curtain back on the world of the 2023-2024 DCC cohort — from auditions, to training, and throughout the football season.
While DCC prides itself in protecting the well-being of these women, the measures that are meant to keep them safe made me feel woeful for the hyper-protective state of gender norms today: Men are not allowed to touch them when posing for photos, and football players are contractually obligated not to fraternize with them. Throughout the series though, we also learn these women collectively experience stalking, death threats, groping, eating disorders, and all the accoutrements of typical athlete injuries, from rolled ankles to KT-taped arms.
Meanwhile, they are still subjected to incredible working hours — at one point training 21 days in a row amid record heat and asked casually on more than one occasion to take on unpaid work visiting sick patients at hospitals, signing autographs at veteran’s organizations, and arranging bouquets for Dolly Parton. All of this, while making about $750 per football game. (During the 2023-2024 season, the Dallas Cowboys made approximately $1.1 billion in revenue.)
There is no question about where these women's hearts are at: They love what they do. And the Dallas Cowboys institution loves that they love what they do. The women’s support and love toward each other is also unquestionable: If you’re expecting the workplace toxicity of “Selling Sunset,” you’d be wasting your time. The culture fostered among these women is closer to “Ted Lasso” than anything else.
But the tragedy laid bare in this docuseries is the DCC women’s commodification. However three-dimensional these women are, they are in many ways viewed as commodities. At one point, a professional photographer was tasked with taking portraits of the cheerleaders during a game in order to spot imperfections and make sure their hair and make-up were picture perfect in future games.
I won’t perseverate with more details (believe me, you’ll want to watch the whole thing for yourself) but I will leave you with this:
Toward the end of the docuseries, Judy Trammell, the team’s choreographer and former DCC, says: “It’s so dramatic to go from every hour of every day being a DCC to turning in your uniform [at the end of the season], and tomorrow, ‘Who am I?’ But that's the reality. And we're already picking the next [DCC] team."
On Thursday, June 27 — U.S. President Joe Biden and former U.S. President Donald Trump will go head-to-head in this year’s first presidential debate for 90 minutes. This year, the moderators have come prepared: Mics will be muted unless a speaker is actively speaking. There will also be no props or pre-written notes allowed on stage; only a pen, a blank notepad, and a water bottle.
Here’s a closer look at the challenges faced by Afghan women and girls: Ever since the Taliban became the de facto leaders of Afghanistan following the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from the country in 2021, the rights of Afghan women and girls have descended into a kind of “gender apartheid.” Among the countless edicts set forth by the Taliban and tracked by the United Nations Institute of Peace, are:
Professional and working women must stay home.
Girls are banned from attending secondary education.
Offices and schools are segregated by gender.
Women-run business, from bakeries to hair salons, are banned.
Women doctors cannot attend to male patients.
Women are banned from TV dramas and broadcast journalism, and certain topics involving women’s experiences are banned.
Women are banned from leaving their home without the accompaniment of a man.
The Rapporteur’s call for proposals comes amid criticism of the United Nations by human rights groups of being defeatist and soft on the Taliban. Next week marks the first meeting between the Taliban and envoys from 22 countries — but the topic of women and girls’ rights is not on the docket.
Also by Sunday, June 30 — The U.S. Olympic Team Trials end in Oregon. Most notably, track & field star Sha'Carri Richardson earned her spot on the coveted team on Saturday. She placed first in the women's 100m race in just over 10 seconds — which is this year’s fastest women's 100m time in the world .
The U.S.’ track record at the Summer Olympics. // Source: Statista
For the foreseeable future — The trial of Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich will take place in the Sverdlovsk Regional Court in Yekaterinburg, Russia, with human rights experts predicting a “bogus” conviction. The 32-year-old American reporter has been detained by Russian authorities since 2022 on sham espionage charges. He faces potentially up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
The anthropologist Victor Turner is well known for his work on liminality. Turner studied coming of age rituals and ceremonies in the Ndembu community in Zambia and theorized how in rites of passage, adolescents enter a liminal state where their identity gets dissolved, and a new identity as an adult emerges.
This way of thinking about liminality makes me think of how often times in order to reach a new stage of life (a transition between teenagehood and adulthood, a transition from one career to another, a transition from limiting psychological patterns to healthy ones, etc.) we need to dissolve our identity and enter into a liminal state. This could be through an adventure that disrupts our sense of self, internal work and therapy that reprograms our minds, or participating in music or dance that dissolves the ego.
Turner calls this liminal state, betwixt and between, and I think we could all benefit from entering that space more, and seeing how our minds and lives metamorphose.
— Ben
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