Sophie Gilbert
LightNews LightNews
banner
sophiegilbert.bsky.social
Sophie Gilbert
@sophiegilbert.bsky.social
30K followers 310 following 170 posts
Staff writer at The Atlantic: TV, books, culture, women. GIRL ON GIRL is out now: https://bookshop.org/p/books/girl-on-girl-how-pop-culture-turned-a-generation-of-women-against-themselves-sophie-gilbert/21683668?ean=9780593656297
Posts Replies Media Videos
Pinned
sophiegilbert.bsky.social
Sophie Gilbert @sophiegilbert.bsky.social · Apr 29
Girl on Girl is out today! And got the review of my literal dreams from the Washington Post—I am truly a bit emotional at someone seeing what I was trying to do with the book so clearly. wapo.st/3ECIW0t
Review | How 2000s pop culture taught us that sex is a currency
In “Girl on Girl,” Sophie Gilbert turns a critical eye on misogyny without settling into outrage or pity.
wapo.st
sophiegilbert.bsky.social
On Melania www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026...
The Melania Trump Documentary Is a Disgrace
The exorbitant film captures the rotten state of our entertainment industry.
www.theatlantic.com
January 30, 2026 at 6:33 PM
sophiegilbert.bsky.social
My Melania screening is canceled for a “technical issue.”
January 30, 2026 at 12:06 PM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
wolvendamien.bsky.social
Please read this extremely thoughtful & careful post on Tim Walz, Anne Frank, & the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from Martin Shuster, philosopher, Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, former Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellow, & scholar of genocide, the Holocaust, & authoritarianism:
Martin Shuster sdSreptoon1hm9t97235g2u5796glgh0435l6iaf05it1l232lc20cllf4g0 · So apparently on Sunday Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, said in a press conference that "we have got children hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside ... many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.” Then on Monday--one day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day--the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tweeted in response that: "Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges." As someone who spent a year at the Museum as a fellow doing research, I feel embarrassed for the institution. First, it is very clear that Walz wasn't drawing an equivalence, he was drawing an analogy. So this kind of response reminds me of the atrocious positions that the ADL has started to carve out, and why it has become mostly a sycophantic joke, now seemingly mostly geared towards currying favor with MAGA. Not unrelatedly, I am noticing that a lot of--oftentimes even well-intentioned--people are spending time trying to delineate exactly which historical referent best captures what's going on now, as if we have to pick only one. There is the now well-circulated meme that says: no, ICE isn't the Gestapo, it's actually American--it's slave catchers. But this is a kind of odd distinction: the Nazis were themselves influenced by the Americans (if you're curious read the excellent book by James Whitman, _Hitler's American Model_). Nazis came here and studied American legal systems and statutes ... and remarkably a group of "liberal" Nazis decided that they couldn't make German laws as *extreme* as American ones (and this "liberal" group in fact won the day; German laws weren't as extreme as many of ours). Equally, Nazi jurists and theorists like Carl Schmitt were deeply influenced by American notions of manifest destiny. So the Nazi and American contexts were already fused. The idea of foreign/domestic is already quite complex in this context. (And this is before we even speak of the many actual Nazis that existed here and the many people who materially supported Hitler and the regime). We can complicate this picture more by noting that Nazism itself, even apart from these American influences, wasn't something that sprouted up out of thin air: it, too, had a(n experimental) history. Many of its barbaric practices and aims were developed and tested on colonial and imperial victims (as I have written elsewhere: there is a direct line from Shark Island concentration camp [called frequently simply "Death Island" where the Germans committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people] to the entire Nazi camp system). Thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire drew our attention to this already in the middle of the last century. In noting this, let me be clear that this does not erase or make less relevant the centuries of European antisemitism that fed into the Nazi project. That's the whole point: these are all related phenomena. European antisemitism influenced the way in which European colonialism and imperialism operated against indigenous populations in the Americas. Strikingly, as innovations mounted in "administering" the Americas, antisemitic policies also evolved in Europe. Administrators (oppressors) would sometimes even move from one sphere to the other and back. They were all synergistic (a brilliant examination of some of this is María Elena Martínez's _Genealogical Fictions_). (And one could, btw, also tell an important story about the development of Islamophobia in this very same orbit, since policies stumbled on in the Americas came back to oppress both Jews and Muslims in Europe). This is all to say: Walz's analogy is not at all far fetched. The history of oppression doesn't move in any kind of neat or purely linear fashion. It is oftentimes recursive, shifting, necessarily granular. Neither is it a competitive history. It is, in the words of Michael Rothberg, a *multidirectional* history. Drawing these analogies in fact *helps* us understand all the involved phenomena better. At least this is what "Never Again" has meant and means to me: it does not mean only never again for me or other Jews. And it does not mean never again only something that looks exactly like the Nazi genocide. I think also, btw, that this is what it meant for Otto Frank, who spent time *editing* his daughter's diary so that it could be available to anyone, not only to Jews. For ultimately the Nazi genocide--any genocide--is a highly mediated phenomenon: it consists of many diffuse events, marshals an immense amount of people and institutions, relies on sometimes conflicting or contradictory cross-sections of society, and, indeed, emerges out of a process that does not neatly, especially as its happening, have a clear beginning, middle, and end, but rather arranges for itself a kind of constellation that harnesses a range of actors, perspectives, and also histories (this is one way to understand how German colonial projects or anti-communism or ableism were no less crucial to Nazism than European antisemitism). The genocidal outcomes emerge from the structural forms society adopts. And all of this without in any way eliding the special role that Jews played in the apocalyptic Nazi worldview.
January 30, 2026 at 1:24 AM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
himself.bsky.social
From an Ezra Klein show recorded on Friday, before the killing of Alex Pretti and all that has happened since. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/o...
"I do think that a lot of the power of the powerless comes from the creation of a consensus — and, bluntly speaking, a moral consensus. A moral consensus that what is happening is wicked, what is happening is wrong, what is happening is, in a fundamental sense, evil. To the extent that what the Trump administration is doing gets on the wrong side of that, either internationally or domestically, it does create a way for people to start pushing back."
January 27, 2026 at 4:23 PM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
mollyjongfast.bsky.social
This is what letting RFK jr go wild on health looks like
eileen4ever.bsky.social Eileen Ridge @eileen4ever.bsky.social · 2d
Holy moly this chart: Cumulative US measles cases
January 28, 2026 at 1:14 PM
sophiegilbert.bsky.social
A gardening account I follow posted this morning: "Let me be really clear. I HATE this administration. I HATE every evil, hypocritical, lying, gaslighting, self-serving fucker in it to a person."
January 27, 2026 at 2:14 PM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
robdelaney.bsky.social
Printing this out so I can salute it.
adamserwer.bsky.social Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 3d
Last week in Minnesota, I watched ordinary people risk their lives to protect their neighbors. In the process, they not only won a significant—though not final—victory against authoritarianism, they proved virtually every MAGA social theory wrong. (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
Every social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of Minnesotan resolve. The multiracial community in Minneapolis was supposed to shatter. It did not. It held until Bovino was forced out of the Twin Cities with his long coat between his legs. The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.
January 27, 2026 at 1:16 PM
sophiegilbert.bsky.social
Justice for Keith Porter www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
Family of man killed by off-duty ICE agent in LA demands charges: ‘The ache will never go away’
After Renee Good’s killing in Minneapolis, calls grow for accountability in the shooting of Keith Porter Jr on New Year’s Eve
www.theguardian.com
January 27, 2026 at 9:58 AM
sophiegilbert.bsky.social
All of these tickets have been bought by journalists being paid to see the movie so it’s a full circle
eliothiggins.bsky.social Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · 3d
UK cinemas being paid to play Amazon's pro-Trump propaganda film to near empty rooms
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
January 27, 2026 at 7:40 AM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
daveweigel.bsky.social
The bar for "worst British disaster in America" is very high but Will Lewis is practicing his vault.
jayrosen.bsky.social Jay Rosen @jayrosen.bsky.social · 3d
From Paul Farhi at the other site. Former media reporter there.
January 26, 2026 at 8:13 PM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
sarahkaplan48.bsky.social
My @washingtonpost.com colleagues worked round the clock this weekend to expose the truth of what's happening in Minneapolis and bring urgent weather news to millions facing dangerous cold and snow.

If you value this work, tell Jeff Bezos to #SaveThePost
www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...
Federal agent secured gun from Minn. man before fatal shooting, videos show
A Washington Post analysis of videos sheds light on the encounter that left 37-year-old Alex Pretti dead.
www.washingtonpost.com
January 26, 2026 at 4:15 PM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
wrigleyfield.bsky.social
This is one of the things that I find is most shocking to people outside Minnesota who don’t realize it yet—the scale at which everyone who isn’t white has been forced into a spectrum of hiding.

Very good article drawing out the Tahrir Square comparison.
Knutson mentioned in passing that his neighbor had “an adopted brown kid down there; they hid her in the basement yesterday.” This kind of thing no longer sounds weird in Minneapolis. Many people are hiding indoors—so many that, in a city with a substantial minority population, I hardly saw any Black or Latino faces on the street.
January 26, 2026 at 4:01 AM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
clarajeffery.bsky.social
This is a really incredible piece. Share it widely 🎁https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/01/minneapolis-uprising/685755/?gift=C-rzmQ8PsUHt15odxTKJDn7xrpPNxSpotkNz_P27oI0
Welcome to the American Winter
In the frozen streets of Minneapolis, something profound is happening.
www.theatlantic.com
January 26, 2026 at 5:29 AM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
mattmfm.bsky.social
ICE is now responsible for 66% of the homicides in Minneapolis this year.
January 24, 2026 at 4:51 PM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
dieworkwear.bsky.social
This can have consequences for how agents see themselves. If they put on clothes designed for war, they are more likely to see cities as hostile terrain and citizens as enemy combatants, which can increase the chance of violence. Link to the story here:

www.politico.com/news/magazin...
The Problem With Greg Bovino’s Overcoat Isn’t What You Think
The head of Border Patrol isn’t referencing the Nazis — but he is sending a message.
www.politico.com
January 24, 2026 at 4:21 PM
sophiegilbert.bsky.social
Um
January 23, 2026 at 1:36 PM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
espiers.bsky.social
This is so stupid and crazy it wouldn’t have passed muster in the Veep writer’s room. Also demonstrates that they’d be insane to share any real intel with Patel.
January 23, 2026 at 12:42 PM
sophiegilbert.bsky.social
Never change, WSJ www.wsj.com/real-estate/...
January 23, 2026 at 8:05 AM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
nxthompson.bsky.social
Violent crime rates haven't been this low since the '60s. They've dropped in cities ranging from Baltimore to Seattle—with many police departments short on staffing. Why? It might be the result of Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
January 22, 2026 at 10:03 PM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
brianphillips.bsky.social
The staging of this performance is neither particularly subtle nor particularly complex. Weiss will typically define "elites" exclusively as left-leaning academics and journalists, then depict the billionaires who feel aggrieved by those academics and journalists as the leaders of a bold grassroots rebellion against the tyranny of liberal groupthink. (Here she is, for instance, calling Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance's billionaire mentor and the chairman of the powerful surveillance technology company Palantir, the "vanguard" of an "antiestablishment counter-elite"; in this view, the establishment elite would be, like, a Middlebury professor.) Billionaires, not a flattery-averse demographic overall, love it when she writes lines like "He's beholden to no tribe but himself, no ideology but his own"-that's Weiss on Thiel again-and reward her by funding her projects and giving her jobs.
January 21, 2026 at 5:48 PM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
kateconger.com
We set out to determine how many images of women and girls Grok created during its nudifying spree. What we found was “industrial-scale abuse,” experts said. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/t...
Musk’s Chatbot Flooded X With Millions of Sexualized Images in Days, New Estimates Show
www.nytimes.com
January 22, 2026 at 2:56 PM
sophiegilbert.bsky.social
I've been thinking about this a lot with regard to romance onscreen. People love it! They're starved for it! Give them more!
January 22, 2026 at 1:12 PM
sophiegilbert.bsky.social
I have a lot of questions! www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
Barron Trump may have saved woman’s life with police call, London court hears
Youngest son of US president raised alarm after woman was allegedly attacked during video call last January
www.theguardian.com
January 22, 2026 at 9:53 AM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
thehighsign.bsky.social
Sounds like a you problem, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella
January 20, 2026 at 4:49 PM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
shanpalus.bsky.social
I wrote about RFK Jr.'s war on moms slate.com/technology/2...
RFK Jr. Is Waging a War on Women
And on moms in particular.
slate.com
January 20, 2026 at 1:27 PM