Stassa Edwards
@stassa.bsky.social
Features editor at National Geographic. Otherwise, finishing a book on the history of the straitjacket.
The media really needs to come to grips with what SEO demands are doing to the framing of stories (lots of people speculating about editors’ intent rather than the more mundane demands of trending terms on Google)
News media has to do better with headlines that present false and unverified public health claims.
November 30, 2025 at 3:49 PM
The media really needs to come to grips with what SEO demands are doing to the framing of stories (lots of people speculating about editors’ intent rather than the more mundane demands of trending terms on Google)
Idk guys, maybe journalism should be illegal
November 22, 2025 at 1:53 PM
Idk guys, maybe journalism should be illegal
Reposted by Stassa Edwards
turns out Piss Christ really WAS just juvenile edgelordism
This is what male solidarity & collective action to oppress women looks like:
Artist Andres Serrano--successful, but nowhere near the same class as Thiel & other billionaires in the files--stating that he'll vote for Trump, despite his politics, out of *sympathy* with T's sexual assaults on women.
Artist Andres Serrano--successful, but nowhere near the same class as Thiel & other billionaires in the files--stating that he'll vote for Trump, despite his politics, out of *sympathy* with T's sexual assaults on women.
November 13, 2025 at 1:58 PM
turns out Piss Christ really WAS just juvenile edgelordism
Reposted by Stassa Edwards
It is so shamefully dangerous to be a teenage girl in this country. It is so shamefully dangerous to be a child, period. I'm not sure there could be a vaster gulf between the right's worshipful posture towards the capital-C Child and their brutish disregard for actual, living children.
November 12, 2025 at 8:54 PM
It is so shamefully dangerous to be a teenage girl in this country. It is so shamefully dangerous to be a child, period. I'm not sure there could be a vaster gulf between the right's worshipful posture towards the capital-C Child and their brutish disregard for actual, living children.
Only a matter of time before the NYT seriously publishes the old Onion article, “Women: Why Are They So Fat?”
November 6, 2025 at 2:44 PM
Only a matter of time before the NYT seriously publishes the old Onion article, “Women: Why Are They So Fat?”
Reposted by Stassa Edwards
Holy cow! For National Geographic, I went to see the Grand Ole Opry for its 100th anniversary and wrote 4000 words about the longest-running radio show in the world.
Featuring new interviews with Vince Gill, Steve Earle, and Pam Tillis.
Featuring new interviews with Vince Gill, Steve Earle, and Pam Tillis.
The Grand Ole Opry is 100 years old. Here’s why it endures.
We went behind the scenes at the world's oldest radio show to understand how it endured 100 years—and why it might last 100 more.
www.nationalgeographic.com
November 5, 2025 at 5:05 PM
Holy cow! For National Geographic, I went to see the Grand Ole Opry for its 100th anniversary and wrote 4000 words about the longest-running radio show in the world.
Featuring new interviews with Vince Gill, Steve Earle, and Pam Tillis.
Featuring new interviews with Vince Gill, Steve Earle, and Pam Tillis.
I’m fascinated by how Trump is obsessed with monument building (the border wall, remodeling the White House, the National Garden of American Heroes) while simultaneously being so bad at it. Say what you will about fascists, but they usually have the monument building down
October 22, 2025 at 9:36 PM
I’m fascinated by how Trump is obsessed with monument building (the border wall, remodeling the White House, the National Garden of American Heroes) while simultaneously being so bad at it. Say what you will about fascists, but they usually have the monument building down
Being subjected to Hulk Hogan and Lena Dunham discourse again and the blogs are dead
July 24, 2025 at 5:00 PM
Being subjected to Hulk Hogan and Lena Dunham discourse again and the blogs are dead
This is so smart www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
What Did the Pop Culture of the Two-Thousands Do to Millennial Women?
“Girl on Girl,” by the critic Sophie Gilbert, is the latest and most ambitious in a series of consciousness-raising-style reappraisals of the decade’s formative texts.
www.newyorker.com
June 11, 2025 at 2:42 PM
This is so smart www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
Reposted by Stassa Edwards
Paywalled (alas), but if you'd like to learn about the secret Nazi weather stations of Svalbard during WWII and the strange battles that were fought several hundred miles north of Europe, I got you covered over at National Geographic:
www.nationalgeographic.com/history/arti...
www.nationalgeographic.com/history/arti...
The forgotten secret Nazi bases in the Arctic
The last of Hitler’s army to surrender were stationed in a desolate arctic wasteland—a key vantage point in the little-known WWII battle over forecasting the weather.
www.nationalgeographic.com
April 15, 2025 at 5:52 PM
Paywalled (alas), but if you'd like to learn about the secret Nazi weather stations of Svalbard during WWII and the strange battles that were fought several hundred miles north of Europe, I got you covered over at National Geographic:
www.nationalgeographic.com/history/arti...
www.nationalgeographic.com/history/arti...
Seeing a lot of posts about the aesthetics of resistance that can’t quite acknowledge that “cringe” is almost always synonymous with “middle age women”
April 6, 2025 at 5:50 PM
Seeing a lot of posts about the aesthetics of resistance that can’t quite acknowledge that “cringe” is almost always synonymous with “middle age women”
I wrote this four years ago, and since then the archive of Trump’s fascist aesthetic has become more expansive, but its purpose remains effective static www.jezebel.com/the-triumph-...
The Triumph of Fascist Aesthetics
Since 2007, Jezebel has been the Internet's most treasured source for everything celebrities, sex, and politics...with teeth.
www.jezebel.com
March 27, 2025 at 3:48 PM
I wrote this four years ago, and since then the archive of Trump’s fascist aesthetic has become more expansive, but its purpose remains effective static www.jezebel.com/the-triumph-...
Just learned that I was a gender studies major at an Ivy
March 24, 2025 at 1:41 PM
Just learned that I was a gender studies major at an Ivy
Thinking a lot about Jenny Brown’s thesis that all Republican policies makes sense if you understand that their only goal is to produce a low-cost workforce with the least amount social of investment. No need for childhood education, vaccines, food or anything that costs money
Nothing will kill more children than the ongoing decimation of CDC, NIH, and USAID work to lift vaccine uptake in the US and world.
Child survival rose 75% in the last 50 years. Vaccines account for 40% of that. Measles vax alone was 60% of the benefit. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
Child survival rose 75% in the last 50 years. Vaccines account for 40% of that. Measles vax alone was 60% of the benefit. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
Contribution of vaccination to improved survival and health: modelling 50 years of the Expanded Programme on Immunization
Since 1974 substantial gains in childhood survival have occurred in every global region.
We estimate that EPI has provided the single greatest contribution to improved infant
survival over the past 50...
www.thelancet.com
March 13, 2025 at 1:42 PM
Thinking a lot about Jenny Brown’s thesis that all Republican policies makes sense if you understand that their only goal is to produce a low-cost workforce with the least amount social of investment. No need for childhood education, vaccines, food or anything that costs money
Reposted by Stassa Edwards
I had the pleasure of writing a bit about the history behind the “faerie smut” publishing phenomenon! www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/arti...
'Faerie smut' is having a moment — just like it did in 1500
Stories like A Court of Thorns and Roses have been seducing audiences with tales of romance and magical danger for hundreds of years.
www.nationalgeographic.com
February 16, 2025 at 1:13 PM
I had the pleasure of writing a bit about the history behind the “faerie smut” publishing phenomenon! www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/arti...
“Imaginary power is a dreadful thing to lose. Their aggrievedness – my aggrievedness – at having had it taken away is endless: it’s MAGA’s reason for being” www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
T.J. Clark · A Brief Guide to Trump and the Spectacle
Trump has annihilated the idea of charisma. The new leader is not above us. He’s on the screen in our hands. We...
www.lrb.co.uk
February 5, 2025 at 1:56 PM
“Imaginary power is a dreadful thing to lose. Their aggrievedness – my aggrievedness – at having had it taken away is endless: it’s MAGA’s reason for being” www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Reposted by Stassa Edwards
Sophie Smith's piece in the LRB on the rape trial, and on men in general, is chillingly, vividly brilliant. Via @helenbarrett.bsky.social
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Sophie Smith · Sleeping Women: On the Pelicot trial
Gisèle Pelicot doesn’t conceive of her now ex-husband or the other men who raped her as ‘bad apples’, aberrations...
www.lrb.co.uk
December 19, 2024 at 3:31 PM
Sophie Smith's piece in the LRB on the rape trial, and on men in general, is chillingly, vividly brilliant. Via @helenbarrett.bsky.social
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Reposted by Stassa Edwards
fucked around and made a new (independent/worker-owned) music and culture website w/my friends :') www.hearingthings.co
Hearing Things
Independent music journalism. No algorithms. We promise.
www.hearingthings.co
October 15, 2024 at 4:03 AM
fucked around and made a new (independent/worker-owned) music and culture website w/my friends :') www.hearingthings.co
I wrote about Victorian photographer Clementina Hawarden and narratives of reproduction, both physical and photographic publicdomainreview.org/essay/throug...
Through the Cheval Glass: Reproduction in the Photographs of Clementina Hawarden
Soon after Clementina Hawarden began taking photographs in the mid-19th century, her eye caught on doubles, reflections, her daughters glimpsed in the mirror. Stassa Edwards examines the role that rep...
publicdomainreview.org
January 24, 2024 at 6:05 PM
I wrote about Victorian photographer Clementina Hawarden and narratives of reproduction, both physical and photographic publicdomainreview.org/essay/throug...
There are too many Substacks. Can everyone just write for The Awl again?
October 6, 2023 at 9:05 PM
There are too many Substacks. Can everyone just write for The Awl again?
Spent some time looking at the French porcelains at the Met and ended up here
September 12, 2023 at 7:18 PM
Spent some time looking at the French porcelains at the Met and ended up here