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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
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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
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
benphillips76.bsky.social
Plans to invade Greenland have just been cancelled after this
February 9, 2026 at 6:42 AM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
notasaleatorias.bsky.social
Hoje no Globo a Talita Duvanel entrevistou a @sophiegilbert.bsky.social sobre o livro que traduzi para a @todavialivros.bsky.social

Babado para quem acompanhou a cultura pop nos últimos 30 anos. oglobo.globo.com/cultura/livr...
'Diziam para a nossa geração que sexo é poder’, diz autora de livro sobre cultura pop e feminismo na virada do milênio
Em 'Garota sobre garota', britânica Sophie Gilbert analisa como produtos como Spice Girls e ‘Sex and the city' influenciaram as relações entre as mulheres millennials
oglobo.globo.com
February 8, 2026 at 12:04 PM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
clintsmithiii.bsky.social
Was driving my kids to school and the first thing on the radio was reporting about Trump's video depicting the Obamas as apes and I think many people still don't fully appreciate what it means to have to raise Black children in a country where the president is so brazenly and consistently racist
February 6, 2026 at 5:44 PM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
moiradonegan.bsky.social
The pivot to video is a tax on women's time and dignity, I will die on this hill.
kimkelly.bsky.social Kim Kelly @kimkelly.bsky.social · 7d
One thing about the enormous pressure journalists are under to make videos and TikToks and do streams that kills me is that, like… some of us are meant to be read and not seen. Commenters get SO MAD about the way I look whenever my face breaches containment! Just let me write!
February 5, 2026 at 7:46 PM
sophiegilbert.bsky.social
February 5, 2026 at 1:10 PM
sophiegilbert.bsky.social
"We laughed so hard that the New York Times staffers sitting in their office beyond a plywood wall would shush us—for which we would toss pencils at them." www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026...
You Can’t Kill Swagger
My old corner of The Washington Post raised some of the best journalists in the business.
www.theatlantic.com
February 5, 2026 at 1:09 PM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
samadams.bsky.social
the Washington Post effectively blew up its arts section today, dismissing its books, TV, music, and theater critics, features writers, and several editors. (I'm also guessing the vacant film critic position will stay that way.) Just an insane loss of talent and a huge self-inflicted wound.
February 4, 2026 at 9:46 PM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
pbump.com
If you are able, The Post's union has started a layoff fund for those fired by the world's fourth-richest man today. gofund.me/a310d0286
Donate to Washington Post 2026 layoff fund, organized by Rachel Siegel
On Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2026, The Washington Post laid off hundreds of journalists. We ar… Rachel Siegel needs your support for Washington Post 2026 layoff fund
gofund.me
February 4, 2026 at 4:35 PM
sophiegilbert.bsky.social
What you did there was incredible. I'm so, so sorry.
February 4, 2026 at 4:33 PM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
ssacks.bsky.social
This is horrible. The WaPo's Books section has a brilliant band of critics and editors and has developed a genuine identity in the book world. I'm heartbroken for a staff that has done such consistently great and dedicated work.
leahmcelrath.bsky.social Leah McElrath @leahmcelrath.bsky.social · 8d
WaPo also closing Books section and downsizing International and Metro sections
Michael Calderone & • 26m Executive editor Matt Murray just announced a "strategic reset" and cuts in meeting with Washington Post staff going on now Michael Calderone & • 20m The Post will be closing sports "in its current form" Michael Calderone • 17m The Post is shrinking international, restructuring metro Michael Calderone @ @mlcalderone X.com The Post is eliminating Books section 7:44 AM • 2/4/26 • 461 Views
February 4, 2026 at 2:20 PM
sophiegilbert.bsky.social
So monstrous, so stupid
maxtani.bsky.social max tani @maxtani.bsky.social · 8d
In addition to sports, the Washington Post is killing its book section, suspending its Post Reports podcast, restructuring its metro section, and shrinking its international footprint.
February 4, 2026 at 2:20 PM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
andrewjweinstein.com
The Kennedy Center isn’t closing for “renovations.” It’s closing because audiences fled, artists withdrew, and its reputation collapsed under the pressures forced upon it. Cultural trust doesn’t evaporate by accident. It happens when power treats the arts as a tool, not a public good.
February 2, 2026 at 2:20 PM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
joaquincastrotx.bsky.social
Yesterday, five-year-old Liam and his dad Adrian were released from Dilley detention center. I picked them up last night and escorted them back to Minnesota this morning.

Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack.
February 1, 2026 at 3:49 PM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
mtsw.bsky.social
if Musk is doing this for London crime, what do you think he is doing for content about American politics, an issue that affects him much more directly?
hetanshah.bsky.social Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · 12d
Wowsers look at what happened to posts on Twitter/X about London crime after monetisation of posts was introduced…
economist.com/britain/2026...
X Posts about London Crime - large growth in number of likes after monetisation introduced
January 31, 2026 at 11:42 PM
Reposted by Sophie Gilbert
nxthompson.bsky.social
A line from Sophie Gilbert's review of the new Melania movie.

"Melania shows off her custom-made inauguration gown, stark white with black ribbons overlaying it, a dress that now looks unavoidably like the redacted Epstein files." www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026...
January 31, 2026 at 11:51 AM
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
The three other journalists are annoyed
January 30, 2026 at 12:16 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
mollyjongfast.bsky.social
This is what letting RFK jr go wild on health looks like
eileen4ever.bsky.social Eileen Ridge @eileen4ever.bsky.social · 15d
Holy moly this chart: Cumulative US measles cases
January 28, 2026 at 1:14 PM
sophiegilbert.bsky.social
Scheduling issues and they’re not doing screeners
January 27, 2026 at 4:40 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 · 16d
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 · 16d
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