A Common Assumption

Hi friend,

A lot is happening this week, to put it mildly. This includes the Stargate Project, a newly announced effort to build “the largest AI infrastructure project by far in history” in Texas. (This has been in the works for months, apparently.)

According to OpenAI, Stargate “will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world.”

Hmm, nice and vague. But wait. One of the men involved with the project gave a specific example of what might be accomplished after hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. Oracle founder and chairman Larry Ellison described how, using AI and blood tests, we could essentially cure cancer. A worthy goal, given how many people are affected by cancer, and how rates are rising amongst younger demographics – women in particular.

"Using AI, you can do early cancer detection with a blood test and using AI to look at the blood test, you can find the cancers that are actually seriously threatening the person,” he said during a press conference. “Once we gene sequence that cancer tumor, you can design a vaccine for every individual person to vaccinate them against that cancer. And you can make that vaccine, that mRNA vaccine robotically, again, using AI, in about 48 hours."

It remains to be seen how this sort of vaccine-friendly optimism from the tech industry will fare in the MAHA age (so far, not well); or how these sorts of solutions will be priced for the average consumer; or if any of this will actually materialize; or if Elon Musk, whose AI initiative was not included, will sabotage the project. But it’s telling that cancer vaccines are the only tangible example given of how Stargate will innovate.

After all, longevity is an obsession in Silicon Valley and the pursuit of a longer life is big business. “High-end health and longevity clinics are ballooning,” according to the Times, and men “in particular” are focused on immortality. According to Business of Fashion, the biggest wellness trends of 2025 are “‘well-aging’ and longevity, bolstering interest in supplements and alternative therapies” with longevity being “perhaps the most dominant theme.” (Women tend to live longer than men, but as a new podcast from the Stanford Center of Longevity illuminates, those extra years can be plagued with health issues.)

Along with wellness and longevity, in 2025 we anticipate more conversation on women and gender roles. That brings us to this week’s feature, which is pulled from Nancy Reddy’s brilliant new book, The Good Mother Myth. It’s a blend of memoir, cultural criticism, and history that explores ingrained beliefs about motherhood.

An excerpt of the book is below, plus a few recommendations for your weekend.

Bye,
Your friends at Gloria

Neither my husband nor I knew anything about babies before ours was born. But I was the one who carried the baby; I was his mother. I’d expected to be transformed. I’d absorbed such deep messages about the magic of motherhood, how once the baby was born, my deep love for him would make all the sleepless nights worth it, how my maternal instincts would teach me how to care for him. That was what I understood a good mother to be: someone who’s capable, because of biology and love, of caring for the baby totally on her own. And that was what I saw all around me, in those early years, all those good mothers, who certainly would have identified as feminists, and yet, as soon as they had babies, they were in a world of women. I watched them, walking in the farmers market, sitting at the café with their tea and their babies sleeping in slings. Where were their husbands? I didn’t once wonder. The mother and her baby made a complete world all their own.

This is the way attachment theory is still with us. Though I didn’t know the name John Bowlby when I first became a mother, his ideas were in the air all around me: the smart, ambitious women I’d worked with in my twenties, who’d left their careers when they had children because they wanted to be really present for all those early moments; the focus on bonding in the earliest weeks of a child’s life as a time to forge a connection that would last a lifetime; the belief that mothers had special, innate knowledge of their children’s moods and needs. Attachment theory has had a powerful influence on what we think makes a good mother, and because it’s so pervasive, that influence has been nearly subterranean. Of course a child does best with the devoted care of his mother, of course the first years set a child on a trajectory that will be all but impossible to alter later. Once those ideas have taken root, they’re hard to even name, much less resist.

Bowlby certainly didn’t invent unrealistic expectations for mothers. Each era has had its own impossible ideal. You could think of the Victorian-era image of the Angel in the House, or the Revolutionary War-era Republican Mother, whose education and intellect were valued only because they allowed her to shape the character of the next generation of citizens. Those ideals, of course, only held for white women; in the same era, Black and Brown women were subject to forced sterilization, and enslaved women had long had their children stolen from them. For Bowlby and others, it was really only white middle-class mothers who were worth researching and improving.

Bowlby’s particular genius was to draw together research from multiple fields, including the natural sciences, which held a higher status than his home field of psychology, and hand pick the pieces that best supported his ideas. Bowlby and Harlow both excelled at using the popular press to circulate their ideas, and journalists were eager to promote the science that so nicely aligned with the cultural imperatives of the day. Together, Bowlby and Harlow took ideas about motherhood that had long been ambient in the culture and encased them in the durable shell of science.

And, of course, if it’s true that a child’s physical and psychological health, their present and future well-being, all depend on the mother’s total devotion, if it’s true that “the future of a child’s mind is determined by her mother’s heart,” as one scholar characterized Bowlby’s work, then it makes a certain sense to accept that becoming a mother means setting aside all your own interests and needs. With the approach of the Cold War, the private work of mothers took on public stakes: it wasn’t just about raising healthy individual children, but about ensuring a future generation that could fight Communism and win the space race. No sacrifice could be too small in safeguarding the future of your child and the nation.

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TO STREAM The Netflix spy thriller The Night Agent is kinda cheesy, but also extremely bingeable. Now there’s a new season out. And we just raced through the SNL50 docuseries on Peacock (episode three is particularly entertaining), so we’ll probably also give Ladies & Gentlemen … 50 Years of ‘S.N.L.’ Music a go.

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TO LISTEN Pamela Anderson sat down with Fresh Air’s Tonya Mosley recently, and the resulting episode is a nice listen. They talk about her work, but also how supportive Anderson’s children have been, particularly of her career in this phase of life.

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Middle-aged clubbing and millennial complaints. • What’s going on with new executive orders on gender and diversity, and what to watch for when it comes to abortion. • Mom influencers secretly have a lot of paid help. • The rise of women’s sports bars. • Some interesting reading on Tulsi Gabbard.

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