By Leah Dolan, CNN

(CNN) — There are three things Amaarae can’t tour without — and no, it isn’t coke, ketamine and molly, despite what her song “Starkilla” suggests. Think more along the lines of a sauna, daily stretch routine and a bathroom floor so clean she could eat off of it. “Because I’m a huge germaphobe,” she said over the phone from her home in LA. “The slightest thing will put me off, and if I can’t shower because the bathroom is not clean, bro, my whole day is ruined.”

These mindful measures are key, since, in reality, Amaarae is a self-described homebody. But listen to her new album “Black Star,” which she’s promoting with a tour across New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles and Toronto, and you wouldn’t know. Between lyrics about sex, drugs and spiking drinks, the Ghanaian-American’s public persona is built on being in the club. But the moment she is away from her natural habitat, “it just starts to mess with my mind.”

Now, the rising star may be on the cusp of something big.

Following her critically acclaimed sophomore album, “Fountain Baby” (2023), “Black Star” was breathlessly reviewed across the music press in August, with Rolling Stone calling it a “masterclass in controlled hedonism.” In the last two years, she has toured with Childish Gambino, the musical alter ego of Donald Glover, Kaytranada, and was personally requested by Sabrina Carpenter to open her viral Short N’ Sweet tour in September 2024. This summer she performed at Glastonbury, the UK’s largest music festival, for the first time, and made her Jimmy Kimmel Live debut earlier this fall. It was also the year Amaarae became the first solo Ghanaian female act to perform at Coachella — a lifelong dream, according to the artist. “It’s one thing to dream of something, then it’s another to be forever etched in history as the first person to achieve it from your country,” she said.

Born Ama Serwah Genfi, Amaarae grew up between New Jersey, Georgia and Ghana’s capital Accra. And while each of her hometowns has shaped her music in some way, it’s her West African roots that informed this record. Blending influences from bacardi, a form of South African dance music, and the fast percussion of the French Caribbean zouk scene with “ghetto tech” (a Detroit-style electronic mash-up of house, techno, bass and hiphop), Amaarae is recontextualizing African music, making it pop with high-pitch vocals, samples from Cher, and a guest feature from Naomi Campbell. And if you aren’t sonically adept enough to pick up on all this, the message is explicit in her album cover — the bold tricolor Ghanaian flag remade with Amaarae, dressed in a latex catsuit, as its black star.

It’s a sartorial vibe she intends to bring with her on-stage. “I think about how I want the show to feel. I want it to be really gritty, dirty drums, dirty guitars, just lots of bass. So when I think about clothes, I think about leather, latex. I think about having on dark shades. I think about skirts, mini skirts. I love boots,” she said. “That’s what it feels like to me, just holding that energy of what it means to just be f***ing black, head to toe.”

She opened her performance in New York wearing a sports jacket by Martine Rose and a tulle skirt by Simone Rocha — two cult favorite British designers only the truly fashion-forward would know of. When asked about designers she’d like to work with today, she nodded to Haider Ackermann’s recent collection for Tom Ford at Paris Fashion Week last month. “I think that was definitely the show of the year,” she said.

Breaking the pop star mold

While some may struggle to define Amaarae’s genre-bending music, she knows exactly who she is. “To me, I’m a pop star,” she said, though she is keenly aware that those higher up in the industry might not “put me in that category.”

“Let me choose my words carefully, because I was about to say something crazy,” she continued. “I think the term of what a pop star is has changed completely, and is almost exclusively reserved for White girls.” Missy Elliott, Janet Jackson, Tracy Chapman, Queen Latifah — these were the pop stars of her generation, at least to Amaarae. “We just don’t live in that world anymore,” she said. “Music is so fragmented now. There was a time where hip hop, alternative, RnB were all co-existing in one cauldron, and you were seeing collaborations directly with these artists.” It’s a complaint that has long plagued the pop genre. In 2021, the Filipino-American artist and the three-time Grammy Award winner Olivia Rodrigo made headlines when she told an interviewer she grew up believing pop stars could only be White. Normani voiced similar issues in a Harper’s Bazaar cover story in 2019, where she asked why pop music “had to be so White?”

To qualify now, in Amaarae’s eyes, stars must be “broadly appealing, but also a kick ass performer,” as well as having enviable musical ability. “It’s just not entirely based on talent,” she said. Besides herself, is there anyone she can think of that is deserving of this ever elusive label? “One of my recent favorite pop stars is Doechii,” she said. “Because she checks all those boxes and I respect that. I can see the effort and the work that has gone on over the various years.”

The job description has changed, too. Amaarae is clearly nostalgic for a pre-social media past that seemed to allow artists more creative freedom. She is no longer on the social media site X, after a poorly received Ozempic joke she posted got her called “all types of stupid” by people online. The internet, she said, is “out for blood.” The musician also resents the idea that “artists have to become content creators.” Her peers feel the same: Halsey, FKA Twigs, Florence Welch and Charli XCX have all spoken publicly about record labels pressuring musicians for viral TikToks since the app reached mainstream popularity during the pandemic. “It’s unfortunate,” lamented Amaarae, who thinks this type of overexposure “is the reason why we don’t have mega stars the way that we used to.”

For her current tour, she is eliminating the noise and putting herself center stage, with no backing dancers and no on-screen visuals. The show is just her. “I’m holding up the entire performance,” she said. “I’m really excited about that. It’s never just been me, lights and music.” To her, the experience is freeing. “This is my favorite kind of performance.”

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From warm meals to harm-reduction kits, the Emerald's updated guide spotlights South End (and beyond) mutual aid groups keeping Seattle neighbors cared for — through solidarity, not charity.

Tressie McMillan Cotton weighs on the Graham Platner Nazi tattoo debate with some well deserved frustration over how the left and Democrats more broadly (and let’s be honest, this is a problem across the political spectrum) see the working class as inherently white guys instead of what the working class actually is, which is the most diverse part of the nation. So by tying authenticity to white working class men talking about economics, it becomes real easy for too many people to handwave away a Nazi tattoo (and really FFS, there’s lots of people with dumb tattoos, but not a lot of people with Nazi tattoos).

These senators are demonstrating a willful blindness that has become endemic in the Democratic Party. Their rhetoric — and the conventional wisdom that flows from it — suggests that we cannot talk about economic solutions without abandoning our commitment to the Black, Latino, gay, transgender and female poor that are the lifeblood of the Democratic Party’s base. The conceit at the heart of that belief is that poor white people are too racist, and too uniquely ignorant of their racism, to vote in their best interests. Therefore, Democrats have to accept a little racism to win the working class.

It is an old argument. History will tell you that negotiating with racism or fascism or authoritarianism never ends well.

It is also a cop-out that can sound like political pragmatism: The idea that we simply must learn to overlook bad behavior as mere human foibles. Who among us, it is implied, has not said or done or etched a hateful symbol of exclusion and oppression into our minds or bodies? If Democrats are to win back the “working class” that they have lost to Trump, they have to look beyond silly things like Nazi iconography or a little casual racism or a soupçon of sexism and anything else that the “woke” left of the party cares about.

I find it hard to imagine that we would be having this conversation at all were Platner anything other than a fit middle-aged white guy who dresses like a stock photo of a “real man.” Our culture is built to eternally forgive men, generally, and white men of means, especially, for their mistakes. Every single time, they were young and immature and it would be a shame to hold them accountable for anything they did wrong. The rest of us just need to be strong-armed into the forgiving and forgetting portion of the program.

That is how you get to the place I found myself this week, reading apologia for a hateful symbol pretending to be sound, hard-nosed political analysis.

….

Once, at a meeting with tenant organizers in the center of white American poverty in Appalachia, a young white guy showed up to a meeting with his Stars and Bars tattoo on display. The poor white rural women and working-class Black women who run those meetings took this guy to task. They told him (colorfully) to get himself together. And the next week they all protested their landlord together.

Their coalition-building wasn’t the kind of kumbaya that Platner apologists are talking about, where a room full of people were expected to swallow their outrage to preserve one man’s feelings. There was accountability. There was education. And there was meaningful action. There was not a college degree or a political donor among them, and yet, somehow, actual poor people figured out how to handle racist iconography without scapegoating minorities or making excuses for a white man’s mistakes.

Here’s the thing. The Democratic Party has a problem. The party’s leaders think they have a problem with Trump voters. Some polling says white men without college degrees don’t like them, don’t trust them and won’t vote for them, so they think the only logical way forward is to pander. Their polling addiction ignores more complex political instruments telling them that the working class isn’t just white men and that centrism isn’t enough to bring white voters back into the fold.

It is going to take hard politics. The kind that shows up in communities between elections and solves problems that don’t sound glamorous on television talk shows. It looks like facing down the Klan in a trailer park, not complaining about racism while doing far too little to avert it. It means believing that racism is not a natural condition of poverty but a political weapon that rich men use to constrain poor people’s political power. And — most critically — it looks like not wanting, even for a second, to be confused with the people who would do that. You don’t wear a red hat as a joke. You don’t fly the ironic flag of historical hate to get a rise out of people. You don’t wear the cool tattoo for over a decade that maybe, kind of, possibly, probably looks like something horrible and hateful.

This is pretty well correct on all points. It’s not just your usual suspects here either, as Michelle Goldberg joins the Platner Rehabilitation Tour. It seems to me that guys with Nazi cosplaying histories is probably a good reason to move on. And look, this also relates to the John Fetterman story. For years, people through the Pennsylvania left told everyone they could never to trust Fetterman, that he was a charlatan and a self-promoter with no core values. But as a white man who could present certain values, he became the beloved darling of the online left during his Senate primary (and to be fair Conor Lamb also had rather obvious Joe Manchin traits, though unlike Fetterman, he’s not a lunatic) and then became the worst Democrat in the Senate shortly after his election. The stroke has something to do with this, sure, but then again, people talked about this in PA for years. I’ve had to learn again and again over the years to believe folks on the ground when they tell you that someone who seems good is full of shit and a bad person (John Edwards is another example of this, when my NC friends said back in 2008 that he was an absolute shell of a man with no personal character and don’t believe his attempts at economically populist language). No one has a Nazi tattoo for 20 years without knowing what it is.

Yes, we need to be forgiving of folks in the online age. Yes, young people screw up and say stupid things. But this feels a big step beyond that. I don’t want Janet Mills to be the Democratic nominee for the Senate, but I struggle to see how Platner can survive this and I am not sure he should.

The post The White Left’s Blind Spot on Race appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

I, like a lot of trans guys, wasn’t sure if I wanted a penis. 

The post Phalloplasty Is a Long Road. I’m So Happy I Chose It appeared first on Autostraddle.

Hi everyone, this week is Halloween, which is probably my favorite holiday, mainly because I like the easy access to junk food everywhere I go. If you’re on Instagram, check out my “Scary Nonprofit Stories,” including the one about the meeting that begun with a never-ending round of introductions.  

While we scare ourselves for fun this week, there are some seriously scary things out there that we do need to think about. This week, I want to talk about the awfulness that’s going on in the tech world.

I’m sure you’ve probably heard of the GoFundMe fiasco, where GFM decided to automatically create pages on its platform for 1.4million nonprofits, without asking for any of these orgs’ consent, and with setting the default tip to GFM at 16.5% for each donation. Of course, this has been causing outrage across the sector.

For its mistake, GoFundMe has issued an apology and reversed its decision, making it opt-in for nonprofits to have a page on its site.

While we’re focused on tech malfeasance, though, there are far more awful and evil issues we need to pay attention to and act on the way we have been with GoFundMe:

Salesforce, which many nonprofits use, has renewed its contract with ICE, the enforcement machine the fascist Trump administration has been using to round up and disappear people. As reported here by Jonathan D. Ryan:

“Salesforce provides the digital infrastructure that allows the state to track, sort, and deport human beings with algorithmic precision. The same tools that let a corporation follow its customers now let ICE follow a child. The same software that helps a company predict a buyer’s behavior can predict a family’s movements. In the name of ‘customer relationship management,’ Salesforce has built the architecture of erasure.”

Facebook, meanwhile, has decided to give itself permission to scan the camera rolls of many of its users and index all their images and videos, to provide suggestions for posting, and to train its AI system. Without realizing it, you may be allowing it to see all your pictures and videos, including any you take of medical records, intimate moments, and so on. And its policy confirms it will share with third-parties, who are allowed to do whatever they want with these images.

I just checked my phone’s setting, using instructions from this article here, and saw that the default was for it to access my images and videos. This is evil enough, but it’s also concerning when many of us use our personal phones for work, including taking pictures and videos of clients, including of kids. AI specialist Clara Hawking sounds the alarm and recommends taking several precautions, including banning all Meta products (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Whatsapp, etc.) from all work phones and prohibiting the use of personal phones for work-related activities.

While we’re dealing with that, ChatGPT and AI in general have been exacting horrific prices on people in other countries. I’ve been seeing more of my colleagues using AI engines to create images and videos, including a friend who sent me a fake commercial for a “Vu Le action figure” that comes with a unicorn floaty. Over the past few years, our sector has been increasing its use of AI and discussing ethical issues, such as using AI-generated images, which steal from artists.

But there’s more for us to think about with AI. In this post, Uchechukwu Ajuzieogu summarizes the harrowing toll that takes place each time we use AI, including content moderators having to watch sickening, violent videos in order to train AI systems:

“While OpenAI is valued at $157 billion, Fasica processes 700-1,000 horrific videos per shift. That's 7 seconds per decision on whether a murder stays online. Over 200 of her colleagues now have diagnosed PTSD. Here's what's mentally shattering: OpenAI paid contractors $12.50/hour per worker. Workers received $1.50. The middleman captured 88% while workers bore 100% of the trauma.”

Above he is referring to Fasica Berhane Gebrekidan, who wrote a detailed report on the experience she and other content moderators endured. It’s called “Content moderation: The harrowing, traumatizing job that left many African data workers with mental health issues and drug dependency.” I could only skim through it before the horror of the death and violence Fasica describes having had to watch as part of her job, left me shaken and forced me to stop.

I couldn’t even fully handle reading about it. I can’t imagine thousands of workers being paid $1.50 an hour watching hundreds of graphicly violent videos daily. Along with children forced to work in mines, and youth inhaling carcinogens while burning circuit boards to retrieve copper. All so that we can have cute little AI-generated videos, or that we can write that annual appeal letter faster.

GoFundMe, Salesforce, Meta, and OpenAI aren’t the only problematic tech companies. It seems everything that we use is involved in some sort of inequity, and extracting ourselves from them completely is difficult if not impossible.

Still, as a sector that prides itself on its collective mission of fighting inequity and injustice, we also cannot absolve ourselves of the responsibility of grappling with difficult conversations about the tech we use and how we may be complicit in furthering the things we’re seeking to counter.

There are people much smarter than I am in this area who can provide more comprehensive recommendations. At the least, I think all of us need to be more informed on these issues and engage in more conversations about them. We also need to act when we can, such as researching other alternatives to Salesforce and switching when possible, having thoughtful policies to protect clients’ privacy and safety, and avoiding creating images and videos with AI.

We also need to raise our voices and organize and mobilize, the same way that we saw people do with the GoFundMe situation. We can see what happens when our sector gets angry enough. Let’s channel that energy towards changing many of these platforms for the better.

--

Vu’s new book will be coming out. Order your copy at Elliott Bay Book Company, Barnes and Nobles, or Bookshop. If you’re in the UK, use this version of Bookshop. If you plan to order several copies, use Porchlight for significant bulk discounts.

Net proceeds from the sales of the book from now until end of 2026 will be donated to organizations supporting trans rights, immigrant rights, and/or are fighting fascism.

Karine Jean-Pierre feels that Democrats were so mean to Biden that she is becoming an Independent.