#5SmartReads - October 21, 2022

Hitha on the reality of abortion bans, the women on the US quarter, and the music from Selling Sunset

October 21, 2022

Well, that was fast.

After six chaotic weeks, Prime Minister Liz Truss is resigning from her role, and has the Conservative members of Parliament to pick their FIFTH prime minister in 6 years.

Prime Minister Truss’ economic plan of mostly tax cuts failed to stabilize Britain’s economy. It actually did the opposite, panicking the markets and causing the Bank of England to intervene.

This reads like a season of House of Cards, and honestly it’d make for an excellent reboot of the original series.

One of my favorite things about Selling Sunset is the music - the songs played during scene transitions are not what you would hear on the radio, but they are PERFECT for this show. Almost as if they were written just for them…

Here’s the thing - they are.

Songwriters like Ysa Fernandez work with companies like Vanacore Music, who find songwriters to write these hyper specific songs and in turn pitch them to shows.

Ysa has a great attitude about how people react to the music she’s created for Vanacore that have made their way onto shows:

“It's the thing of not taking yourself too seriously, especially coming from the artist side of it. I'm producing these tracks, and I'm singing on them. I love getting to be silly. That's so, so fun. And yeah, my TikTok has been hilarious recently because of these videos, and some people absolutely hate me for it. Some people are like, "Keep doing you girl," and some people are like, "I love listening to you in the morning, da da da." I just think it's so funny.”

Ysa is a really talented performer, and the music she writes and performs herself is equally catchy as her television hits, but has the depth I love in a great song.

Abortion bans will not prevent the number of unintended pregnancies or protect life, as their supporters claim.

They are more likely to take lives than save them. And for every story like this that is reported, how many more women (especially women of color) are dying because they needed an abortion to treat miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, or complications in fetal development that put the mother’s life at risk.

The way these laws are written mean a birthing person must be in dire straits (their vitals plummeting or infection, or the cardiac activity of the fetus stops) before physicians can intervene in states with abortion bans.

Take it from Mylissa Farmer, in Missouri.

"It’s not protecting me. We have to wait for the heartbeat (to stop). There’s no chance for a baby; she’s not going to make it. It’s putting my life in danger. We have to wait for more complications. I’m 41, it’s not something I can recover from quickly. I could lose my uterus, there’s a lot of things that could happen," Farmer said she remembers telling him. "We just want to move on, we just want to grieve."

This did not happen overnight, as much as we are still reeling from the Dobbs decision. If this story affects you, use it to fuel your fire to stay in the fight for all our rights.

If you’ve been here a while, you’ve probably been subject to one of my “Carly Rae Jepsen deserves so much more respect and acclaim and she’s one of the most talented artists and deserves all the good things!” rants.

And if you’re new here, you just got one.

The Loneliest Time is her latest album and excellent (though I’m still partial to Emotion, which I listen to anytime I’m feeling all the feelings). But I’m more taken with the person, who is both brutally honest and finds delight in the little things.

“It’s been a lifelong inquiry that I’ve had with myself about my relationship to loneliness,” Jepsen explains. “The idea that you have to be happy by yourself — like, ‘Go be alone and be happy!’ — that’s bullshit to me. You become really happy on your own when you know you have connections out there.” She finds isolation and connection to be two sides of the same coin: Being lonely can bring people together, hopefully through music like her own. “Loneliness is a similar thing to love,” she says, digging into her “insane” peach-cake dessert. “It’s felt everywhere by everyone at different moments in their life.”

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take a second to listen to The Loneliest Time and hide from my family for a bit.

While news stories like these have me feeling like we are making progress when it comes to representation, I’m also saddened because I never knew who Anna May Wong was.

She’s best known for her roles in Daughter of the Dragon and Shanghai Express (roles she was woefully underpaid for), and left Hollywood and filmed movies in Europe to escape the stereotypical roles that Chinese actors were given (cruel villians).

Wong, along with Maya Angelou, Sally Ride, Nine Otero-Warren, and Wilma Mankiller are this year’s honorees in the US Mint’s American Women Quarters Program, with five new women honored every year through 2025.

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