After seven seasons of American Horror Story, show-runner Ryan Murphy is pretty much master of the fake-out. In advance of each new season, he keeps fans guessing about what is actually going to go down during the eerily named new series with strategically timed. However, we do one thing about the September premiere of American Horror Story: Apocalypse: It’s going to be the season of long-awaited crossover of AHS‘s Murder House and Coven seasons, meaning Emma Roberts will be back to reprise her Madison Montgomery character. And one other thing: it’s going to get “insane.”
“I’m not allowed to say a word, but . . . it’s so insane. It’s just so insane,” actor Billy Eichner revealed on Twitter at the beginning of August. With just weeks left until the season eight American Horror Story premiere, here are a few things we do know for sure about the return of our favorite scary television show.
1. The “apocalypse” may not be quite what we think.
Alexis Martin Woodall—the show’s executive producer—revealed during the Television Critics Association press tour (TCA) that, “The story begins with the end of the world, and then our world begins. It starts in the real world. It’s very tangible.”
Moreover, actress Adina Porter dropped her own little kernel about what the apocalypse means during an interview with Golden Derby. “I thought, because of The 100 and Apocalypse, that I knew everything about what life after an apocalypse would be—but Ryan Murphy and the writers of American Horror Story have shown a whole other side of an apocalypse,” Porter said. “So, I think people will be surprised and intrigued and yet again, I think, blown away by the performances that I’m seeing.”
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2. A ton of people from the show’s past are returning for this epic season.
During the show’s TCA presentation, actress Sarah Paulson told the crowd, “I have the great pleasure of letting you know [Jessica Lange] will be back.” Paulson also shared that she will be playing both Billie Dean and Cordelia in the upcoming season.
For her part, Roberts noted that her character will get even nastier. “I was told by the director to be bitchier this season,” she said. “So it’s delicious to get to play her this season for sure.”
Beyond Roberts, Eicher, Lang, and Paulson, Vanity Fair reported that Cody Fern, Evan Peters, Connie Britton, Kathy Bates, and Billie Lord are all confirmed to return. Joan Collins and Billy Porter will also make their first appearances this season. And in, a now-deleted tweet Murphy shared, “All the witches are being asked back.” If that is true, it could mean the return of Angela Bassett, Taissa Farmiga, Jamie Brewer, Gabourey Sidibe, and Lily Rabe, though they have yet to be announced.
3. Paulson’s character Cordelia is still the Supreme. “For now.”
According to Paulson herself, Cordeilia will still be the Supreme, at least for episode one.
“At the beginning of our story that is the title she still holds,” she received at the TCA. “I don’t know how long that’s going to last, and enjoyment is not possible at this juncture in the story,” she added. However: “She’s not running around like her mother and snorting cocaine and throwing young witches against the wall.”
4. Season eight will come with lots of hair.
According to the stars of the show, there will be plenty of amazing hair this season. As Entertainment Weekly reported, Bates’ hair will be shaved on the sides and dyed black.
Bates didn’t exactly mind, as she noted at the TCA event: “It’s not essential to the plot. But it’s fun. I turned 70 this summer, around the same time they did this to me, and it certainly eased the blow. So I’m thinking about keeping it.” Paulson added, “You have a birdcage on your head at some point.”
5. The show returns on September 12.
There truly aren’t any more spoilers floating around, but one other thing we do know is the show is set to premiere Wednesday, Sept. 12, at 10 P.M. ET. Set your iCal reminder now, everyone.
Just over a year-and-a-half into Donald Trump’s presidency, Ivanka Trump announced that she’s shuttering her namesake fashion line.
In many ways, it’s been a long time coming. Marketed as a purveyor of affordable basics for working women since it launched in 2007, with its face being Trump herself, the brand—once valued at $100 million—has experienced a considerable decline since its founder left to join her father’s administration in January 2017. Ivanka Trump, the brand, has taken one hit after the next as many shoppers and retailers have distanced themselves from its products, with pieces increasingly popping up on the resale market post-election.
Then, there were the boycotts.
Grab Your Wallet and similar campaigns against Trump’s products, which have gained steam thanks to the power of social media, have contributed in part. Their goal is to be “a centralized resource for the flexing of consumer power,” specifically as it pertains to Trump-affiliated companies. Shannon Coulter, a San Francisco-based digital marketing expert, is at the center of Grab Your Wallet—as the initiative’s co-founder, she and Sue Atencio helped launch this movement in 2016, encouraging people to use their spending to protest then-candidate Trump following the release of that now-infamous Access Hollywood tape (hence the name). The hashtag quickly went viral, and the Grab Your Wallet website was launched as a resource for customers to check whether the places they shopped had a relationship with the Trump family, as well as to provide tips for people who wanted to call companies with ties to them. When the first Women’s March took place in 2017, 350,000 people visited the site during a 24-hour period, according to the New York Times.
A year-and-a half later, Coulter and Grab Your Wallet have what she described on Twitter as “a win.”
PHOTO: The Washington Post via Getty Images
Shannon Coulter, co-founder of Grab Your Wallet.
“All over the world, women have so much consumer power and influence and their awareness of that influence is growing,” Coulter tells Glamour. “I’ve watched so many individual women successfully get companies to make significant, positive changes over the last twenty months simply by communicating with them. It’s been dazzling to behold and it makes me believe we could use that power to help remake the world into one that puts a premium on equity, peace, education, and care. I think that’s only a dream for as long as we fail to roll up our sleeves and do it.”
Coulter, for one, doesn’t believe Ivanka Trump, the person, when she says the decision to close Ivanka Trump, the brand, had nothing to do with sales. “I don’t think any Trump would willingly shut down a profitable company with a bright future,” she argues. “I’ve seen several indications that Ivanka Trump’s line has probably been performing poorly for some time on several measures, especially brand. I think Ivanka likely wanted to avoid the embarrassment of more retailers dropping her line in the future. At the consumer level, the Trump brand has become permanently politicized and she knows it.”
In 2015, the Ivanka Trump line was reportedly raking in $100 million annually, per public statements from G-III, the company that made its clothing. Then, the election happened: Ivanka joined her father in Washington, and formally stepped away from the company’s day-to-day operations—though, she never divested her ownership, and still made $5 million from the company in 2017, according to financial disclosure documents.
That’s when things started to take a turn, as consumers increasingly found it difficult to separate Ivanka Trump, the product, from Ivanka Trump, the political operative.
PHOTO: MANDEL NGAN
Ivanka Trump.
In an interview with Refinery 29 from early 2017, Abigail Klem, president of Ivanka Trump, claimed the brand had its best-performing weeks in its history following President Trump’s inauguration. According to the e-commerce search platform Lyst, sales of the brand spiked by more than 700 percent in February 2017, compared to February 2016.
Around that same time, the backlash began to strike Ivanka Trump’s stockists. Nordstrom became the first major U.S. retailer to announce it would no longer carry the brand, in February 2017, citing poor sales: “We’ve said all along we make buying decisions based on performance,” a spokesperson told Racked at the time. According to an e-mail sent to employees that week, though, Nordstrom executives reportedly did express disagreement with President Trump’s policies—his executive order restricting travel from seven Muslim-majority countries, in particular, writing: “We currently employ more than 76,000 people who comprise different races, ethnicities, and genders. It’s important that we reiterate our values to all of you and make it clear that we support each of our employees.”
PHOTO: MANDEL NGAN
Trump, wearing an Ivanka Trump dress.
“By then, a dozen companies had already announced they had severed ties with the Trump brand, but when Nordstrom announced it was dropping Ivanka, I knew the movement had achieved real momentum,” Coulter says, noting how a New York Times news item quoted an anonymous source from a third-party consumer data company who said that Grab Your Wallet kept coming up in Nordstrom customer feedback.
Other retailers were feeling the heat, too. A source at TJ Maxx tells Glamour that the retailer received hundreds of angry letters and phone calls in 2017 because it sold Ivanka Trump products; the retailer instructed its employees via a note to throw out signs promoting the label in stores. And for those stockists that continued to carry Ivanka Trump in the post-#GrabYourWallet landscape, the pressure never really eased up: Just this month, Canada-based Hudson’s Bay announced it was dropping the brand—in a statement, it offered: “As part of our regular course of business, we review our merchandise offerings and make appropriate changes.” Coulter says that Hudson’s Bay was the 40th company to be removed from Grab Your Wallet’s master list.
While a statement from the Ivanka Trump brand insisted on strong sales through 2018, when the company launched its own e-commerce, the numbers publicly available—the company is privately held, so not many are—suggest a different story.
PHOTO: Spencer Platt
Ivanka Trump shoes, available for purchase.
Following the reported surge that followed the Inauguration, Lyst reported that order growth for Ivanka Trump dropped to 288 percent in March 2017, then to 114 percent in May 2017, and then to 6 percent in July 2017; in August 2017, order volume was down negative one percent compared to August 2016. This downward spiral continued into 2018, as sales for Ivanka Trump products online at Amazon, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Zappos fell almost 45% in June 2018, compared to June 2017, according to data from Rakuten Intelligence reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Simultaneously, Trump couldn’t distance herself from allegations that she was using her new political capital to profit unethically from her White House role. For instance, she wore a $10,800 bracelet from her fine jewelry collection for an appearance on “60 Minutes” in 2016 promoting her father’s presidential win—and the Ivanka Trump brand sent out a press release for it, presumably to drum up sales. Then, when news broke that Nordstrom was dropping the label, President Trump sent out a Tweet blasting the retailer for the decision on his person account, which was then retweeted by the official @POTUS Twitter handle. As recently as May 2018, there were reports that the First Daughter had won new trademarks from China—13 in three months—which set in motion a firestorm from ethics experts questioning whether Trump was using her influence with foreign governments for personal gain. Meanwhile, the brand contended with controversies of its own unrelated to its founder’s political affiliations: In the spring of 2017, news broke that the factories in China where Ivanka Trump products were being produced were facing labor violations.
PHOTO: Bloomberg
Trump, wearing Ivanka Trump shoes.
To be sure, the Ivanka Trump brand is far from the first company to be at the receiving end of negative attention—Uber, United, and Chick-fil-A are but a handful of examples—but not all consumer-driven boycotts have had nearly as big impact on a company.
“Social media provides a platform for people to have these conversations that didn’t exist 10 years ago,” Barbara E. Kahn, a professor of marketing at the Jay H. Baker Retailing Center at The Wharton School, says. Still, negative attention doesn’t necessarily mean the death knell for a brand: “There could be lot of negative activity on social media, and that doesn’t necessarily translate into changes in purchase behavior or sales.”
Think of how Chick-fil-A enraged many after it publicized its anti-gay marriage position in 2012—the company barely registered a hit, beyond some bad PR. Many fashion brands and retailers have faced accusations of sweatshop labor that have resulted in boycotts, but it hasn’t truly affected their bottom lines much.
“Boycotts are not created equal,” Bruce Hicks of The Alliant Group/Houston, a longtime public relations and crisis management consultant, explains. “What comes into play is how important the product is to people lives. Is it a crucial product? Is it an important brand to people? With Ivanka Trump you have a brand that is insignificant, it’s not a commodity product. People don’t need to buy her shoes, there are a lot of choices out there. Mix that up with emotion over President Trump, and it’s easy for people to make the decision to spend their dollars elsewhere.”
PHOTO: Chip Somodevilla
Trump, wearing an Ivanka Trump dress.
With the Ivanka Trump brand closing its doors, the Grab Your Wallet campaign strikes off one of its main targets. What comes next? According to Coulter, the fight isn’t over—not even close.
“The Grab Your Wallet community seems really excited to continue doing this,” she says. “Our goal now is to develop a more comprehensive, sophisticated knowledge base about the moral and ethical dimensions of consumer brands and then disseminate that information in highly impactful ways. We’re also looking at the possibility of partnering with organizations that advocate for fair wages, labor rights, and equity in hiring in order to continue making an impact.”
The retailers that remained on the Grab Your Wallet boycott list for continuing to carry Ivanka Trump through its final season will be removed, per Coulter, “although we will be making a note that they failed to divest from the Trump brand prior to Ivanka’s company being shut down.”
Instagram is the perfect place to see what’s going on with on-and-off celebrity couples, and let’s just say The Weeknd’s account has been quite telling lately. As preserved by Instagram account @bellahnews, Bella Hadid made plenty of cameos in her ex’s Instagram Stories on Sunday.
According to People, the two are currently on vacation with their friends in Tokyo, and the Stories in question were taken at the Robot Restaurant. In one, Bella can be seen sitting next to him and enjoying an onstage battle between two performers. In another, The Weeknd (né Abel Tesfaye) zooms in to a mirror, where he can be seen embracing Bella as they’re serenaded by their friends during karaoke. Then, there’s the picture on his account of him posing with two friends, which he credited to Bella in the caption.
Naturally, the comments are full of fans taking all these posts as confirmation that “Abella” is back on. These aren’t the only Instagram shenanigans that have led fans to jump to this conclusion. In June, the same jar of pasta sauce appeared in both of their Instagram posts, leading fans to speculate that they were having a dinner date (the paparazzi later took pictures of them hanging out in Paris). Then, in July, Abel was caught liking Bella’s bikini selfie. And a couple weeks later, Bella captioned one of her photos “as long as u know that when I land ur mine… ?,” which is a line from Abel’s 2013 song “Pretty.”
Of course, while these Instagram clues are certainly interesting, none of them mean anything concrete about Bella Hadid and The Weeknd’s relationship — neither of them has spoken publicly about whether they’re back together. Until they do, this is nothing more than “evidence” of two exes hanging out as friends and enjoying each other’s Instagram presence.
Both Jared Haibon and Ashley Iaconetti thought, “Perfect” when they laid eyes on the Neil Lane engagement ring he would propose to her with on June 17.
“After talking to production and Neil Lane, and figuring out what I wanted and what Ashley wanted, as soon as I saw a picture of it, I knew it was perfect,” says Jared.
The Bachelor couple, who announced they were officially dating in an instantly-iconic 44-minute video after years of will-they-won’t-they across a range of the franchise’s series, got engaged while filming the latest season of Bachelor of Paradise in Mexico earlier this summer. For this very important relationship milestone, Jared turned to the ABC-beloved jeweler to bring Ashley I.’s dream engagement ring to life. Before actually popping the question, though, Jared didn’t get much time alone with the Neil Lane ring—only about 15 minutes, he says: “I had pictures sent to me. The ring was being sent down to Mexico before I got there.”
PHOTO: Noel Vasquez
Other than Jared, the first person to see a picture of the ring was Ashley’s sister, Lauren. “I was at [Ashley’s] on Friday—Lauren knew we were getting engaged, and I received the first picture of the actual ring, and showed [it to her] in the kitchen while Ashley was in the bathroom,” he says. “Lauren was like, ‘Holy shit, that ring is perfect. I have to show you something.’ Earlier that day [she and Ashley] were getting their nails done—apparently, somebody who was engaged was sitting next to Ashley, and Ashley tried on her engagement ring that looked exactly like that, and Ashley was like, ‘This is the perfect ring. This is exactly what I would want.’ And it was the ring I was going to present to her two days later.”
It all went down shortly after Jared and Ashley I. arrived in Mexico to film Paradise. “They separated us before we actually went down there, and that was the first time I got the ring,” he remembers. “They gave me a couple minutes alone with it to really let it sink in… It was just a moment you always dream of as a guy, having the engagement ring, the moment before you propose. This is symbol of your love for Ashley, and you’re gonna get down on one knee and present this to her and ask her for her hand in marriage—all those things were just going through my head on the beach where we first met. It couldn’t have been more perfect.” (Ashley I. chimes in: “I love that Jared says things like, ‘This is what guys think of their whole life.’ Like, how sweet?!”)
When Ashley I. saw the platinum ring—which features a 2.4 carat radiant-cut diamond, according to People— she remembers thinking: “Welp, that’s it—that’s exactly what I requested.”
PHOTO: Noel Vasquez
Though the couple says they didn’t look to celebrity engagement rings for inspiration in the design (only the occasional Pinterest sweep, admits Ashley), Jared says he “looked at previous Bachelorette and Bachelor contestant rings for [an] idea of what I think looked good, what didn’t look good… It all came down pretty much to what Ashley wanted, and I talked to production about it.” The final product was a combination of her desires with his research—like the 86 full-cut diamonds forming a halo around the center stone, for instance: “She didn’t really want one, but they said, ‘Listen, I think this would look really good around the diamond,’ so I said alright. I Googled JoJo [Fletcher]’s ring, because I think she doesn’t have a halo, but Rachel [Lindsay]’s does—so I was comparing, and I thought it looked a lot better with the halo, so I said, ‘Put that on.'”
In the end, Ashley thinks he made the right call. “The first thing he said was ‘I know it has a halo, I know you didn’t want a halo…,'” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Believe me, it’s just fine!'”
Oh, and as for the wedding? They’re thinking “within the next fourteen months”—next summer, ideally. Yes, they want a beach-y wedding. (“Not Paradise beach-y, like sailboat-beach-y,” says Ashley. “I would never get married in a cold season.”) No, they don’t know if it’ll be televised yet. (“We have no idea,” explains Jared.) If it’s anything like their The Story of Us entry, we’ll definitely be tuning in. Until then, Paradise!
For six decades Glamour has honored its College Women of the Year, or CWOTY, an award that focuses on young honorees who are already changemakers in their communities. But CWOTY is also our stake in the ground. These women are ones to watch, not just for the headlines they make but for the work they do behind the scenes to make an impact.
And in June, as the nation received word that President Donald Trump was commuting the life sentence of a great-grandmother who was in prison for a first-time, nonviolent drug charge, it was a CWOTY who was part of the machine that had worked to get the woman’s story on headlines across the Internet.
Kendall Ciesemier, a 2014 CWOTY who is now a producer on the Opinion team at Mic, was instrumental in telling Alice Johnson’s story, but the road to freedom started long before this summer. In October 2017 Kim Kardashian West commented on a viral video that Mic produced to illuminate the incredible inequities at work in the case of Johnson. In the months since, Kardashian West tapped her own legal team to work on Johnson’s case and went on to appeal to President Trump directly to intervene on Johnson’s behalf.
What’s unique about Johnson’s story is its staying power. Despite this political moment of endless news and constant distraction, Johnson remained in the public discourse for months, thanks to Mic’s determined coverage, Kardashian West’s involvement, and the work of many other unsung activists and organizers who have long taken on the criminal justice system to fight for her release.
Ciesemier talks to Glamour about what it was like being a part of one of the biggest stories of the year, and a moment that not only changed Johnson’s life but set precedent for the future of criminal justice reform.
Glamour: Tell us a little bit about how you went from a Glamour College Woman of the Year to working on one of the year’s most talked about stories.
Kendall Ciesemier: I actually won the [Glamour College Woman of the Year] grand prize, which was really exciting—and that was largely for my work in starting a nonprofit when I was 11 to help provide basic human needs to children living in Sub-Saharan Africa. Some of the money that Glamour contributed went to building a high school that we were working on at the time. And so it’s different than what I do now in my day job, but I think that the threads are the same. I have always been really passionate about storytelling. And whether that takes the form of telling people about something that they’ve never heard of going on an ocean away, as I did pretty much growing up, or telling stories today at Mic, it’s always been about elevating people’s experiences and people’s voices.
I hate when people say “being a voice for the voiceless,” because everyone has a voice—it’s just who we choose to amplify. And so that, really, I think has been very consistent in my life. What inspired me to start Kids Caring 4 Kids, the nonprofit that I started back when I was 11, was watching a story that Oprah told on her show. And it was that story that inspired me to do a lot for children who were in that circumstance, children who were living without parents because of the AIDS epidemic, who couldn’t go to school because they didn’t have a uniform. It was something so simple and so tangible for me to understand.
And I knew, basically from that moment forward, that I wanted to do that for other people. I wanted to inspire them and create a change in them to do something for someone else. And I still see that as my role today. And I think that’s really what you see in this Alice [Johnson] story, which is so exciting for me as a journalist. I think we always dream of our stories having impact and inspiring other people to rethink the world. And I think that that’s what we saw in Kim seeing Alice’s story—it inspired her to act, like Oprah had inspired me to act.
Glamour: So how did the Alice Johnson story come to you initially and how did you start working on it?
KC: Topeka Sam, who is a formally incarcerated woman, actually connected us to Alice’s story, after our cofounder Jake Horowitz (who I work really closely with) had attended an event at Google. He actually saw Alice Skype into this event and was just really struck by her story and thought that, at Mic, we needed to elevate it. And so, around six months later, we worked with Topeka to set up a time to Skype with Alice. And this was around my third week at Mic. I joined the [Opinion] team as a producer. And I had the opportunity, at that time, to interview Alice and to connect with her and to produce that piece. So that was how it originally entered into my world—and Mic’s world.
Glamour: When you first interviewed Alice, what made an impact on you about her story? What drew you in?
KC: For me, it was very clear that this was a woman who had endured a lot of hardship. Obviously, she did something wrong and she really owns up to that, but [she] had been hit with this draconian sentence in the nineties, when she was charged and sentenced in 1996, that were really reflective of old sentencing processes. And that she had this kind of spirit about her and hope and faith that was far above her circumstance. Alice told her own story, and I think that is really what ended up impacting people. And it was just about how do we pass the microphone to Alice? And how do we amplify what she had to say? But what really personally struck me was just her unwavering hope and her unwavering faith.
And all the good that she has done under the circumstance that she had. Once she was in prison, she became this model citizen and really worked to be a light for other people. And we heard that. After we told this story, we got just this outpouring of messages on Facebook from other people who had been in prison with Alice, over the years, over the 21 years that she served. And they were really impacted by her. And so it just really became clear to us that this person, she was on all of the criminal justice lists. She was widely known as someone who deserved clemency. And I think, in our interview, we were able to really allow Alice to share her story and just home in on what we felt in that interview, which was that she just had this captivating spirit about her. And that was really what we were hoping to convey.
PHOTO: Getty Images
Kim Kardashian West and Alice Johnson sit down for an interview after Johnson’s release from prison.
Glamour: So you guys put the package together, the story, the video, and publish it. And then obviously at some point Kim [Kardashian West] sees it and tweets it out? So did it just blow up from there?
KC: Yes. So, from what Kim has told us, she saw it after someone that she followed had shared it. It was being shared by a lot of celebrities, within the first 24 hours, I’d say including Sara Silverman and some others. We have just a good group of support. And then I think when it came across her feed, she watched it, and even in one of interviews with Kim, said “I’m not on Twitter all the time. I’m not always scrolling through my feed, but I came across this story and I…” She just believed that she was meant to see it. And so she retweeted it, and that also drove a lot of views and engagement on the story itself. But, at that point, we did not know that she was going to actively get involved in the case.
I think the video was our most-watched Twitter video we’ve ever had.
And then it came out in November, through another article from another news outlet, that Kim was looking into the case of Cyntoia Brown and Alice Johnson. And we read that. We were like wait, what? So that was a big surprise to us. And then, obviously, we wanted to follow up with her and see what kind of stuff that she was planning to do around Alice’s case, and eventually got connected with her and we were able to tell that part of the story too.
Glamour: And then you followed it through the process of the work that Kim and the legal team she had working on the case, and the meeting with the President, and then finally meeting Alice as well. So how was that, to see that story all the way through? You don’t always get to do that as a journalist.
KC: Rarely, I assume. I’m relatively young and so grateful I was able to be a part of this. We were really committed to seeing the story out and following the story through. And so that included traveling really all across the country for about two months I would say, almost nonstop, doing interviews with Alice’s family, her children, her grandchildren. With Kim. Again, following her [Kardashian West] to the White House. And then we were actually with the family as we found out that she had been granted clemency. And so that was also very cool, to be there in the moment, and to be able to share that with this family that we’ve gotten to know, through traveling and documenting their experience.
I think it was such a meaningful thing to witness that, personally and professionally, and to really be able to see…. It wasn’t just a change for Alice; it was a change for her whole family. And she’s got a really big family, like 80 people strong. It was clear that she played a very important role in a lot of people’s lives. So it was certainly impactful in that regard, to be on the ground, and see that, witness that. I think they were in total and utter disbelief that it had happened. We actually drove down alongside the family, three hours from Memphis to Alabama. We were racing to get there in time to pick up Alice.
Watching her walk across the street and see her family across from the prison was pretty powerful. I think, as a journalist, you’re taught to just do your job—but you’re also a human being. I don’t think I processed all of that experience until a good four days after. But you’re just trying to do your job and document and amplify the story as much as possible. Mic was on the story for a really long time. And, obviously, it became a national story. So it’s one of those things that was really exciting to see. But Mic has been reporting on criminal justice issues far before Alice, and we’re going to continue far beyond Alice.
Glamour: What’s next for you on that topic of criminal justice reform? Because, of course, this is a case that became very famous, but it is one person.
KC: It is one person, exactly. I think, yes, Alice is a symbol, but we are certainly not under the misconception that she’s the only one with this story. There are around 3,500 other people in the federal system serving a life-without-parole sentence, for first-time, nonviolent drug offenses, which is just a crazy amount of people for something that could be so minor as the possession of marijuana.
And so I think we’re looking forward. There are so many stories and there are so many people with such deserving stories. As we continue to cover these issues, we’re really looking at how can we take the story that people nationally have been interested in, which is the Alice Johnson story, and how can we explain other things about the criminal justice system. Like bail or sentencing reform. Things that are systemic and affect a large swath of people in the system. And how can we break down these complex topics.
We’re really thinking about how do we elevate and understand, break these larger issues down for people now that they’re listening in this way. We’re always committed to using human stories, and that’s always the best way to communicate the impact of policies. So we’re just going to continue to find people who can really shine a light on what’s happening. We always say at Mic that we cover change, the movements, and the makers. And so I think we’re in the process of figuring out what our next criminal justice [project] is going to be. We’re in active research and having conversations around that now.
Glamour: What other issues are you working on and passionate about right now?
KC: On our team specifically, we’re going to continue doing criminal justice stories. We’re going talk about mental health. We’re looking into gender identity and sexuality. And then, also, we’re going to look at the midterms. We’re also looking at how we tell the stories that are bubbling up ahead of the midterms, because I do think that we could see some really interesting things.
For me personally, the focus is always about those who are suffering from some kind of injustice or oppression. I think my own personal background, and my own personal story, has always led me to be innately interested in people who are struggling with something.
That’s what I identify with and what I think can unite people and create understanding. And so, to me, it’s not tied to a specific issue because there’s struggle everywhere, and it’s more about finding that unique story that people can really relate to and understand.
This interview has been shortened and edited for clarity.
Today truly is a day for rejoicing, because Ashley Iaconetti and Jared Haibon from The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, Bachelor in Paradise, and The Bachelor Winter Games—so, yes, every iteration in the franchise—are finally dating.
This will come as a shock to anyone who watched Haibon friend zone Iaconetti, who’s best known for being the biggest crier in the Bachelor franchise (a mix of her own behavior and show producing, no doubt), over the course of seasons two and three of Bachelor in Paradise. Iaconetti seemed to finally move on during Bachelor Winter Games, when she fell for Canadian Kevin Wendt, but it seems that spurred Haibon to realize what he was missing.
Because now Haibon and Iaconetti are officially a thing. More than a thing, really: The couple announced their relationship with a splashy photo shoot for People magazine and an episode of Iaconetti’s web series The Story of Us, where they gushed about their love for each other for 44 straight minutes. That’s the 2018 equivalent of opening up a joint account, to be honest.
Iaconetti has never seemed happier. And Haibon looks happy, too, though it’s a little hard to discern because the patchiness of his beard is so distracting. Make a decision: go clean-cut or grow it out! Troubling facial hair aside, their episode of The Story of Us is quite sweet. “I’m living proof that you should listen to your gut, and that it’s not too late. The person I wanted to be with most was right in front of my eyes,” Haibon said, according to People.
“He’s written me other letters and filled my apartment with flowers. He tells me every day that he’s the luckiest man alive,” Iaconetti added. So happy! So blissful! And no crying! Just kidding: There’s definitely crying in the video.
Anyway, check out Iaconetti and Haibon’s Story of Us episode, below:
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And you know these two had something to say on social media about all of this. “I love my boyfriend,” Iaconetti posted last night, alongside of pic of Haibon kissing her. In his own post, Haibon stole a line from When Harry Met Sally, “I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”
Bachelor Nation’s going bananas over Haibon and Iaconetti’s relationship, naturally. Below, the best responses we found:
