The Rise of Millenial Retirement Panic
May 4, 2025
Business Insider, May 4, 2025 I want to retire like my boomer parents. I'm skeptical I ever will. By J. Lester Feder To celebrate my father's 80th birthday, my family rented a lovely farmhouse in Tuscany and spent a week gorging ourselves on epic meals and fine Italian wines. It was a fitting cap to […]
Read MoreThe Pursuit of Gender Justice
September 22, 2024
The New Yorker, September 22, 2024 For the first time, the International Criminal Court has concluded that an armed group specifically targeted women. By Jina Moore Ngarambe and J. Lester Feder In the spring of 2012, members of a militia known as Ansar Dine seized control of Timbuktu, in Mali. The militia, which was working with […]
Read MoreRussia’s New Queer Purge
August 6, 2024
Foreign Policy, August 6, 2024 In March, a little-known volunteer organization dedicated to “reviving the religious and secular unity of the Russian people” escorted agents from the Internal Affairs Ministry and the Russian National Guard on a raid in the remote city of Orenburg, a city of 500,000 near the Kazakh border. Their target was […]
Read MorePutin Is Showing Us What Homophobia Looks Like as a Weapon of War
March 15, 2024
The New York Times, March 15, 2024. Oleksii Polukhin’s 64 days in detention began when Russian soldiers stopped him at a checkpoint. They found that he’d been gathering information about Russian military positions to share with Ukrainian forces; they also discovered he was gay. Mr. Polukhin gave a detailed account of his detention to Projector, an […]
Read MoreHow Russia’s War Against Ukraine Is Advancing LGBTQ Rights
March 7, 2023
Originially published in Politico Magazine, March 7, 2022. KYIV — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has galvanized Ukrainian society in many unexpected ways, but perhaps one of the most remarkable is how it has advanced the rights of LGBTQ people. On Tuesday, in a move that would have been nearly unthinkable a year ago, a Ukrainian […]
Read MoreGay Couple Struggles to Stay Together as War in Ukraine Rages On
June 22, 2022
Originally published by Rolling Stone, June 22, 2022. Russian bombs brought Stepan and Maxim together. Now Russian bombs have driven them apart. The men, now both in their early thirties, were living almost 20 miles apart in the eastern Ukrainian region called the Donbas, where Russian-backed separatists went to war in 2014. They likely would […]
Read MoreBetween Dances
February 2, 2022
A community of urban ballroom dancers in Detroit has been decimated by covid. But the survivors aim to keep on dancing. Posted originally in The Washington Post Magazine on February 2, 2022. Charlotte Andrews has hazy memories from the three weeks she spent on a ventilator in the early part of the pandemic: struggling so hard to […]
Read More'They Just Launched a War'
June 7, 2021
Protesters took to the streets last summer to protest police violence. Lawsuits making headway in Columbus and other cities are showing that the police crackdown helped prove their point. Posted originally by Politico Magazine on May 9, 2021, at 07:00 a.m. EDT. Tammy Fournier-Alsaada was addressing a crowd in front of Ohio’s domed Capitol building […]
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