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Summoning mothers to their power to fight climate change and inequality
On the Shelf
Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “the Apocalypse”
By Emily Raboteau
Henry Holt: 304 pages, $30
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As the Northern Hemisphere slowly emerges from the dark days of winter, we welcome the extra hours of daylight. In Emily Raboteau’s New York City neighborhood, a different kind of daylighting may happen; the enormous proposed civic project to daylight Tibbetts Brook, from where it was buried underground, will provide flood control and create natural beauty. (Similar projects, in which paved-over streams are brought back to the surface, are occurring in various places in California.) For Raboteau, it’s an exciting project but also a reminder that her Bronx neighborhood is living on borrowed time. In Raboteau’s book of essays, “Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against ‘the Apocalypse,’” her care for her neighborhood and her maternal care for her children are connected as she faces an uncertain climate future.
The rising sea levels that threaten the California coast will have a greater impact on New York City, submerging the areas near Raboteau’s house. Daylighting Tibbetts Brook spotlights how climate change lives in the same ecosystem as race and class and the continuing effects of colonization. During our March interview via video chat, Raboteau reminds me, “The Lenape called [Tibbett’s Creek] Mosholu.
“[The project’s] messy,” Raboteau continued. “If it comes to pass, it will be the most expensive [$130 million] green action in New York. [But] should we be spending that much money on this climate mitigation act that is in a sense an act of reparation? Or should we be spending it to think about a managed retreat for the poorest people, in the low-lying areas, who know we’re living on borrowed time now?”
In New York, anxiety about an uncertain future and economic pressure are expressed in art. One of the essays follows Raboteau’s travels to document a local artist’s warning signs about the coming catastrophe in multiple New York City locations. She journeys to see many of the city’s public art projects — including a gorgeous photo essay on murals commemorating birds likely to be extinct soon — and other calls to action to mitigate climate change. The birds, it turns out, are also a way for Raboteau to distract herself from chronic pain — both physical and metaphysical — her body’s response to the weight of our changing world.
As the result of that wandering, she comes into contact with a broad swath of people, documenting their environmental fears but also their suspicion that such art projects are signs of gentrification and additional economic disparities. Raboteau calls our attention to the ways in which environmental pressures will create even more social inequality between those who can afford to move, and those who are rooted by economic necessity and lack of access to alternatives.
Living on land that has seen multiple generations of inhabitants creates another pressing question for Raboteau, whose book of connected essays is about moving through our new 2020s reality as a mother. She is deeply conscious of a challenge posed by Jonas Salk, who insisted that our obligations to future generations should be our biggest priority — not just the ancestors of the two sons she and her husband, writer Victor LaValle, are raising.
She’s aware that many of us don’t think beyond our immediate present. “[It requires] thinking about ourselves in the past as we consider the future generations, like that edict of the Iroquois law thinking seven generations ahead. That’s very abstract and challenging for us.”
As a scion of her Black ancestors, and the mother of a new generation, Raboteau keeps photos in her workspace to remind herself that she is the result of her family’s past struggle. “It’s a story commonly told in the Black tradition, and it was told to me by my dad at some point: ‘Your great-grandfather was a slave so that his child could be a preacher so their child could be a teacher so that their child could be a politician so that you could be an artist.’ I like being reminded that you are actually the fruit or the flower of a long process of ancestry that toiled so you could do this.”
Raboteau writes poignantly about her recently deceased father, scholar Albert Raboteau, whose work on the religious traditions of slaves is seminal in the field of Black studies. He came from an area of Mississippi devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and today, Raboteau’s family has left due to its aftereffects. While environmental catastrophe has scattered her people, so too have the effects of racism and poverty.
“When [my father] was in his mother’s womb, his father, who was a grocery store clerk, was murdered by a white man. This was in 1943 and the man was never tried and certainly never prosecuted for the crime. So my grandmother fled the Jim Crow South to save the life of my dad, who was not yet born, and his older sisters and they went to Michigan.”
Her father died of dementia in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic. Her grief began before he died, as her sharp solastalgia for the man he was before illness mirrored her feelings about the changing Earth and all that has already been lost. “We see that solastalgia grafted on the landscape, but there’s also a kind of bittersweet element in parenting [in watching children grow and change].” She now sees her father’s image on the ancestor wall. “The wall reminds me to think about what’s come before, where we fall in this lineage and what we owe the next generation.”
During a research trip to the Arctic, she found herself sleeping in a tribal council office under an ancestor wall like the one in her office. It was a reminder of all that has already been lost, and just how perplexed she is by feelings of climate rage and grief.
“I was encouraged to speak to elders in that community who remembered the land, what it was like before the warming began, and I asked one elder, ‘What do we do with our anger?’ And he said, ‘That’s easy. We take care of each other.’”
Taking care of each other means moving toward collective action. It’s one way of combating the individual sense of being powerless. Raboteau is working with multiple groups across New York City that are combining social and economic justice with climate action. Tied to New York because they’re dependent on the income she and her partner earn in the city, they stay. She writes that her children, like many urban kids, suffer from the asthma associated with rising carbon levels. But the solution to stay and fight only works up to a point, Raboteau says. “I learned from my grandmother’s story the lesson of the fugitive. If something’s gonna kill you, you run when it gets to that point.”
Climate crisis is not the only variable she must parent her children through. As the mother of two Black sons, the murder of George Floyd added to her already vigilant state. During the Black Lives Matter protests, she noticed graffiti near her building: “All mothers were summoned when he called out for his mama.”
“There’s something metaphysical when it hits your heart like that,” she says. “[George Floyd] called out to his mother in the last moments of his life. It was an appeal for mercy. Not just air but mercy. It hit a lot of us, whether we’re mothers or not. You’re part of this pain and you have the power to be merciful and caring. It moved me to tears because it summons mothers to our power.”
Summoning mothers to their power is a way forward in climate survival strategies and in fighting for equality. Although Raboteau is quick to point out that you don’t have to be a mother — or a parent — to feel the same impetus and passion. “Saidiya Hartman says that ‘care is the antidote to violence.’ I don’t want to suggest that motherhood is the only doorway to which you arrive at care because certainly it isn’t. But for many of us, like me, motherhood has been a complete alteration of my experience in the world, like the shattering of your identity. There’s a loss there too; I feel a little nostalgia about myself as a person without kids and the freedom that came with it. But motherhood has been very politically activating.”
To replenish her energy, Raboteau finds great pleasure in gardening, another reminder of her family roots. Putting our hands in the dirt and bringing forth beauty is a way to acknowledge previous generations unable to access both bread and roses in the struggle to survive. Gardening has created community, and Raboteau feels a deep connection to others. She says joy and beauty are part of the struggle.
She tells me of one such moment in the South Hebron Hills. “When I was in Palestine, I spoke to one mother through a translator. She had had a hard life. She’s a Palestinian woman. Her home is more or less a tent that could be bulldozed by the IDF. But she had filled an abandoned tire with dirt and she grew roses. She found the time to do that, and I found that act really remarkable. This isn’t for sustenance. This isn’t to eat. It’s not growing olives to sell. It’s just for the pleasure of having bright pink.”
Pink connotes dawn, the promise of coming daylight. It reminds us that daylight often looks like hope.
NEW YORK (OSV News) – As America’s Catholic bishops prepare to mark the semiquincentennial by consecrating the nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a French docudrama that can aid viewers in understanding the full significance of such an action makes its timely appearance.
A Fathom Entertainment presentation, “Sacred Heart: His Reign Has No End” will have a limited theatrical run June 9-11 and June 14. The version screening on June 10 will be dubbed in Spanish.
Following its initial release in France last fall, the film proved to be phenomenally popular, with ticket sales reaching the half-million mark in a country usually regarded as deeply secular. This unusual development clearly indicates that the movie resonated with audiences in a way that even its creators may not have expected.
Filmmakers Sabrina and Steven J. Gunnell examine the origins, meaning and enduring relevance of devotion to the Sacred Heart. They begin their exploration even before the landmark revelations received in the 1670s by St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, a Burgundian Visitation nun, showing that earlier saints had focused on the subject in medieval times.
Using reenactments, interviews and archival images, the Gunnells also highlight the theological connection between the Sacred Heart and the Eucharist. This is done, in part, by recounting a few of the many Eucharistic miracles granted to the Church over the centuries.
By profiling contemporary devotees of the Sacred Heart, including formerly inactive Catholics, the picture demonstrates the impact the insights given to St. Margaret Mary continue to have on the lives of people around the world. Locations visited range from the gang-infested streets of a Parisian suburb to the once war-torn Central American country of El Salvador.
An excellent and enjoyable catechetical resource, the feature is also both moving and uplifting. It can be recommended for all but the youngest kids.
For theater locations and showtimes, go to: sacredheartfilm.us
Dubbed into English.
The film contains gory images of the Crucifixion. The OSV News classification is A-II — adults and adolescents. Not rated by the Motion Picture Association.
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Copyright © 2026 OSV News
According to data from the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, Pratt’s supporters include two members of the record industry’s most powerful family who have donated the maximum amount allowed by law.
Los Angeles’ music industry, in recent years, has generally supported progressive causes. But as the primaries for the city’s mayoral race and California‘s governorship wrapped up Tuesday, some music executives and performers have supported and donated large amounts to Spencer Pratt, the right-leaning activist and reality TV star running for mayor.
According to data from the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, Pratt’s supporters include two members of the record industry’s most powerful family who donated the maximum amount allowed by law.
Pratt is a registered Republican whose heated rhetoric about homeless “zombies” and AI-created advertisements have rankled progressives and delighted conservatives. He has received support from President Trump, who told reporters that “I’d like to see him do well. He’s a character. I don’t know him, I assume he probably supports me… I heard he’s a big MAGA person.”
In response, Pratt told TMZ that “Everybody wants me to succeed because L.A. is the most important city in the country. The only support I need is from moms that wanna feel safe in Los Angeles. I’m laser-focused on that.”
Universal Music Group is home to some of music’s most outspoken progressives, including Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish, whose brother and collaborator Finneas O’Connell donated $250 to the progressive mayoral candidate Nithya Raman on May 6.
Earlier this year, UMG’s chairman and chief executive Lucian Grainge presented Rodrigo with the company’s Universal Music Group x REVERB Amplifier Award, which advocates for “social and environmental nonprofit campaigns through the cultural power of music,” according to a release.
On May 9, Grainge (listed as a resident of Pacific Palisades, where Pratt lost his home in the 2025 fires) maxed out with an $1,800 donation to Pratt’s campaign, as previously reported in The Times. A representative for UMG did not immediately return a request for comment on Grainge’s donation.
He’s not the only Pratt donor in the family.
Grainge’s son Elliot ascended through the record industry with his 10k Projects label, and now heads UMG’s competitor Atlantic Records. Vocal progressives like Cardi B, the Marías and Charli XCX are some of the label’s most high-profile acts.
On May 8, Elliot Grainge also gave $1,800 to Pratt‘s campaign. A representative for Atlantic did not immediately return a request for comment.
Last month, the record producer and composing titan David Foster and his wife, singer Katharine McPhee, performed at a fundraiser for Pratt where they crooned a version of Tina Turner’s hit “The Best” to the mayoral hopeful. “Spencer, you’re simply the best. Better than all the rest. Better than Karen Bass and Nithya Raman,” McPhee sang.
At Warner Music, Gabz Landman, the senior vice president for A&R at Warner Chappell, its powerful music publishing wing, who has worked with Dua Lipa, Laufey and Amy Allen, gave $105.24 to Pratt on Feb. 4. Through a Warner Music representative, Landman said the donation was for merchandise given to a friend, and was not intended as support for Pratt’s campaign.
The superstar EDM producer and DJ Kaskade has left supportive messages on Pratt’s social media, commenting on one of the candidate’s posts that “At this point, who is buying in to Bass’s fairytale narrative?! I am still shocked she hasn’t resigned!” The DJ and producer Diplo also left a supportive comment — a prayer-hands emoji and “please” — on one of Pratt’s social media posts. Records do not show any personal donations to Pratt’s campaign from either artist.
Public records do not show any donations to Pratt’s campaign from live-industry executives atop firms like Live Nation, AEG or Goldenvoice.
There’s a photo of me (below) from the mid-1980s, when I was around age 5, standing on the hood of an old Plymouth in the overgrown field behind my childhood home. I’m holding He-Man’s shield in one hand and his sword, made of yellow plastic, in the other. (Unrelatedly, I’m also wearing an Incredible Hulk shirt in the picture.) And I’m grinning with pride because I have thoroughly conquered the jalopy. The vehicle never ran again, probably because I fucking destroyed it with my sword and shield. Around that time, I also had a He-Man birthday cake and a sizable collection of Mattel’s Masters of the Universe action figures. They were my first foray into toys of this kind, later replaced by G.I. Joe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and X-Men. However, my nostalgia for He-Man remains almost nonexistent today, perhaps because, looking back at the material, the mythology remains at once weird and unmemorable, and neither the popular animated series nor the 1987 film, Masters of the Universe, starring Dolph Lundgren and Frank Langella, holds up well.
Over the years, Mattel has tried to revive the toy line and cartoon, but the company’s biggest effort thus far is the new feature from Amazon MGM Studios, which reportedly spent upwards of $200 million on a blockbuster-sized Masters of the Universe. If the 1980s versions of this franchise unabashedly targeted the preadolescent boy demographic, the new iteration has been reconfigured (by a sausage fest of credited screenwriters: Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, and David Callaham) to adopt a more conventional mold. The movie also incorporates the last three decades of ironic reassessment: the series’ very 1980s obsession with bulging muscles; the loincloth-centric costumes, all of which look like rejected designs from Zardoz (1974); the vague eroticism between He-Man and several characters, including his nemesis, Skeletor; and the eccentricities of the cartoon, from the many heads thrown back in laughter to the bizarre characters—all of which started first as action figures (Stinkor, Mantenna, etc.), around which the writers built a lame storyline.
Despite its origins, Masters of the Universe sets out to become a four-quadrant feature, appealing to everyone, and in that, no one in particular. The story is too bloated for little children, with a 142-minute runtime that challenged the attention spans of the kids in my prescreening, who became restless after an hour. Admittedly, so did I. The material’s self-awareness and humor aren’t memorable enough to distinguish it from other, better examples in this genre, such as Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)—a movie that I enjoy more with each subsequent viewing. And director Travis Knight can’t decide whether the audience should take these characters seriously or laugh at their inherent silliness. He attempts both and does neither very well. The result did not rekindle my nostalgia for this chapter of my childhood; it didn’t create an exciting new take for audiences of all ages, either.
A protracted opening establishes the distant realm called Eternia, where sword-and-sandal heroes stand alongside robots and flying ships with laser guns. Eternia’s resident baddie, Skeletor (voiced by Jared Leto, doing an R-rolling master-thespian thing), wants the Sword of Power, which imbues its wielder with, as you might guess, power. But it’s kept in Castle Grayskull, home of King Randor (James Purefoy), who’s disappointed by his son, Adam (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt), a young boy more interested in goofing around than learning to fight. When Skeletor attacks the castle and proves victorious, the Enchantress (Morena Baccarin), the magically inclined protector of Grayskull, sends Adam away to Earth along with the coveted sword. What happens then? Did a couple of farmers adopt him à la Superman? Or did he grow up in the foster system? The writers ignore such practical questions, picking up the story years later, when the adult Adam (now a hulking Nicholas Galitzine) works in corporate human resources. After Adam finally locates his sword, which was lost when he was transported from Eternia to Earth, he eventually finds his way home with the help of his childhood friend, Teela (Camila Mendes), to retake Grayskull from Skeletor.
Knight’s main source of inspiration, besides the cartoon and earlier movie, seems to be the similarly themed cult classic Flash Gordon (1980). Masters of the Universe’s music features identical-sounding Howard Blake-style guitar riffs and, to echo the original songs Queen wrote for Flash Gordon, the production uses Queen’s “Princes of the Universe” on the soundtrack. In other areas, Knight directs a conventional franchise movie with choppily edited and CGI-heavy battle scenes full of anonymous violence, lifeless chase sequences, digital backdrops resembling video-game environments, and shameless product placements for Coca-Cola and Amazon. The VFX sometimes look impressive; at other times, they look cheap and generic. Fortunately, Knight’s production also offers practical effects and prosthetics for some characters, most memorably the cyborg Trap Jaw. Knight’s secret weapon is costume designer Richard Sale, who visualizes the inherently absurd look of these characters, for better or worse, in tangible garb. The actors inhabiting the excellent costumes don’t have much to do, though. Ask yourself why they hired Kristen Wiig to voice Roboto, a bland robot character whose dialogue could have easily been performed by anyone else, or even just replaced with the beeps and boops of a Star Wars droid. When you have Kristen Wiig, use her.
Elsewhere, Masters of the Universe attempts to be self-aware in its irony and sexually suggestive underpinnings. There’s a running gag about how practically everyone can’t keep their eyes off Adam after he becomes his heroic alter-ego, He-Man, given his oiled-up muscles and blonde locks. But under Adam’s pink shirt, he still looks buff, making his eventual Hulk-like transformation into a muscle-bound barbarian unremarkable. Elsewhere, I liked the detail of Adam growing up on Earth and forgetting everyone’s names on Eternia, so he makes up their names based on their physical characteristics. A man with a big metal hand becomes Fisto (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson), and another with a metal head-butting helmet becomes Ram-Man (Jon Xue Zhang). The writers take advantage of this with veiled dirty jokes about fisting and Ram-Man “giving head” to Skeletor’s goons. That’s about as clever as the movie gets. As for character development, there’s almost none. Skeletor, for instance, wants to be bad for the sake of being bad. His motivations are nonexistent, resulting in an obvious, uninteresting, and one-dimensional villain.
A key series in the conservative, Reagan-era 1980s, the Masters of the Universe cartoon and previous movie valued strength and power, muscles and might. Today, that message has negative, regressive associations with the political right, which often looks at this period from a fond standpoint. To avoid alienating any part of their audience, the filmmakers desperately try to please everyone with a mild progressive commentary to counter the franchise’s original themes. Adam’s character must learn to “be a man” to please his father, King Randor, and his makeshift father figure, Man-at-Arms (Idris Elba, in a chummy reformed drunk role). But there’s also a half-hearted message that Adam, having worked in human resources, knows the value of empathy and emotional intelligence. For a while there, the movie even claims you can’t solve every problem with muscles—that is, until He-Man resolves the conflict by pummeling Skeletor with his fists. The movie’s message is ultimately nonexistent. The committee making this movie has carefully avoided any line-in-the-sand worldview, all in an attempt to manufacture a box-office hit that will please everyone and offend no one.
That’s exactly the problem with Masters of the Universe. It’s so afraid to have a perspective or be about something that nothing onscreen has an impact. This is not to say every movie must have a substantive message. Sometimes, a mindless adventure is enough. However, even on those terms, there’s no tension or danger here because Skeletor is never all that menacing, and Adam alternates between self-parody and earnest heroism. None of the emotional beats land, not the many father-son dynamics nor the hero’s journey. And the production’s competing tones, from its intentional camp to its sword-swinging adventure, lack the balance of wit and scope that Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves so delightfully captured. For much of the runtime, I felt bored and, aside from a few chuckles at the childish humor, disengaged from everything happening. Perhaps Roboto describes the movie best when referring to life as “a series of absurdities leading to infinite nothingness.”
Photo: Brian the Barbarian
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