motherjones--2020-03-25--“It Will Look Like a Depression”: A Financial Expert Warns Us About What’s Coming Next for the Econo

“It Will Look Like a Depression”: A Financial Expert Warns Us About What’s Coming Next for the Economy

For the past year , economists and policy experts had been warning of a coming economic downturn .
But the screeching halt the economy has experienced in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic isn ’ t that , says Mike Konczal , who studies financial reform and unemployment at the Roosevelt Institute , a left-leaning think tank .
“ It is so difficult to describe how this is not the next recession that would have eventually happened , ” Konczal tells me .
Recessions , Konczal explains , tend to unfold slowly ; during the 2008 crisis , unemployment rose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ losing their jobs in one month during the worst of it .
But under current conditions , Konczal predicts we ’ ll see 3 or 4 million newly unemployed people this month alone .
The second and third quarter of this year , he believes , will look like a depression .
“ This is such an absolute stop and such a shock across so many businesses—there really isn ’ t a good parallel , ” he says .
Konczal says that the federal government needs to do everything it can to keep @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wiped out ” —particularly those in the service sector that won ’ t reap the benefits of pent-up demand when life goes back to normal .
On Wednesday morning , Senate leadership and the White House announced a deal on a $ 2 trillion relief package that addresses some of this : It includes $ 350 billion in loan forgiveness grants to small businesses and $ 10 billion in emergency grants to provide up to $ 10,000 per company in immediate relief .
But will it be enough ?
“ I worry about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to work , and whether it ’ s going to get overwhelmed , ” Konczal said .
The funds “ might have a problem where it ’ s going to run out pretty quick , and smaller firms might not be in a position to take advantage of it in time or with the sophistication that ’ s needed.
” Beyond the immediate economic emergency , Konczal says the crisis has highlighted structural issues that also warrant attention .
The stressors that health care workers already endure—dangerous work done in unsafe conditions for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the pandemic .
The way we do education and child care , Konczal says , is also worthy of a second look .
Sectoral bargaining—the unionization of an entire industry , as opposed to just one company or workplace—could do a lot to address those concerns , since it can strengthen bargaining power and , in turn , help workers achieve more uniform pay and benefits .
It would also provide a venue to arrange temporary furloughs and unemployment benefits for large numbers of employees when the companies they work for are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ health emergency .
“ A lot of people have been talking about sectoral bargaining lately , and the fact that it could help prevent a cascade of business failures during a global pandemic was not part of that selling point , ” Konczal says .
“ I hope this reinvigorates the case for a much more sane and humane labor policy.
” As the details of the Senate negotiations came together , I asked Konczal what he thinks the federal government should do to jumpstart the economy , what could hinder an effective @ @ @ @ @ @ @ last recession could apply to this one .
Economists predicted that we ’ d experience a recession sometime in the next 18 months .
Did COVID-19 help it come earlier than expected ?
It is so difficult to describe how this is not the next recession that would have eventually happened .
Let ’ s say that there ’ s a big corporate debt bubble and it collapsed , or let ’ s say that there was a big slowdown in a bunch of different countries at the same time .
Think of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bad .
Unemployment went to 10 percent , and every month in the last half of 2008 through 2009 , unemployment would go up about a third of a percent .
In the worst month , I think there were one million newly unemployed .
We will almost certainly have between 3 and 4 million [ newly ] unemployed this month alone .
The severity of what ’ s coming is not like anything we have documented .
For [ the increase in ] unemployment , I ’ m hearing 2 percent , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that .
This is such an absolute stop and such a shock across so many businesses—there really isn ’ t a good parallel .
In terms of the second and third quarter of this year , it will look like a depression .
Now there ’ s a debate about how quickly you will recover .
Maybe we will recover much faster , because it doesn ’ t have that sluggish recession to it—it ’ s just everyone stopped for a few months , and everyone ’ s gon na pick back up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a really good question .
But in the immediate short-term , I think the hit ’ s going to be much bigger , so this will not feel like whatever recession would have happened without the coronavirus .
Now , that doesn ’ t mean we don ’ t know the tools we need to use to fight it .
And what are the impediments to economy getting back to normal once we ’ re all allowed to congregate together in public spaces again ?
A really useful comparison is the Great Recession @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Recession—in my reading , and I think increasingly , the view of many economists—is that it was less about the Wall Street financial crisis , like your AIGs and Goldman Sachs , which were bailed out very effectively , very quickly , and largely stabilized very quickly .
The real problems of the Great Recession pertained to the 5-to-6 million foreclosures that happened .
There was this very influential way of viewing the housing crash .
People would say , “ Look , at the end of day , it ’ s not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , while the value of homes has gone down , the price of future housing has also gone down .
So even though your house lost half its value , the next house you ’ re going to buy also lost half its value .
So are you really worse off ?
” But what actually happened was : It really did matter that people were underwater in debt and were being swamped by bad debts .
Foreclosures would drive down whole neighborhoods , and there was a cascading effect where one foreclosure @ @ @ @ @ @ @ neighborhood being worth less money , which would then further decrease economic activity .
I think the same thing could be true if we screw this up .
If all these small businesses went under a huge wave , they don ’ t just magically pop back up .
That ’ s why there ’ s a lot more interest in backstopping businesses , particularly small and medium businesses .
Because , for example , if you run a plumbing firm with five people , over the next few months , your van @ @ @ @ @ @ @ aren ’ t going to disappear .
But if the business goes under , it ’ s not easy to just start it back up .
You need money to do the advertisements , maybe store things—that kind of infrastructure of everyday economic relationships is really important to preserve .
The second part is : In manufacturing , you can move things forward or backwards .
Maybe you were going to buy a car , or a house , or a couch this spring , and now you ’ ll just do it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going to go out for a restaurant meal last night , and you did not , you ’ re not going to make that up in the fall .
Maybe everyone will be very excited to go out , but you ’ re not going to triple-up on your yoga classes or whatever .
We ’ re not going to make up all the service sector work that is a large part of our economy .
That ’ s why people are extra concerned about small business and the service sector .
There @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the daily ups and downs of the stock market—particularly from the White House .
Do those daily fluctuations matter ?
What other economic indicators should politicians be looking at ?
The stock market is obviously reflecting serious concerns that are being reflected across every economic variable .
The thing to watch closely are unemployment starts—people who are filing for unemployment for the first time , which has jumped something like ten-fold , depending on where you ’ re looking .
Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute had a blog post last @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at unemployment , but the total percent employed , because you may see a lot of people fall through the cracks in the short term .
Unemployment is only people who are actively looking for a job , and since many people will not look for a job under quarantine—and many people will not be hiring under quarantine—the percentage of people who are employed might be an extra important metric in the next month .
Another thing I ’ d emphasize is long-term government rates , so-called “ real interest rates , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ zero or negative over the 10-to-30-year horizon .
The bond market is telling the government that it is willing to effectively pay the government to take on debt with negative real interest rates .
Also , the fact that they have collapsed directly says that we ’ re not going to have an inflationary crisis .
The government has plenty of room to take really bold action , and it should do it .
A lot of the conventional numbers will not be correct for several months .
Unemployment numbers , GDP numbers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one of the problems we had in the Great Recession was that policymakers did not understand how bad it had gotten until after , say , the Obama stimulus had passed .
Then , you could kind of look back and say , “ Oh , wait , the recession was like 10 percent worse than we had understood .
Everything should have been 10 percent bigger , and it wasn ’ t. ” Here , I think people are aware that it ’ s going to get quite bad , but it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ round of government data has a lot of estimates and models and imputed values , depending on what you ’ re looking at .
There ’ s a real chance that it ’ s going to severely understate how bad things have gotten .
Lawmakers predict this is only the first in a series of bills to address this crisis .
What are the longer-term , structural economic remedies you ’ d recommend to better prepare for future disasters like this ?
Two things really jump out at me .
One is the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in this country .
I think it ’ ll come under a pretty serious reevaluation .
I think people having to do makeshift day care and school , and also there ’ s severe hardship that frontline nurses and health care providers are facing right now—often for very low pay .
Home health care providers and many other people on the frontlines of our health care system are all under such severe pressure .
I hope that it makes us really understand how we need to provide for those systems in a much @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we ’ re thinking pie-in-the-sky here , this really shows the need for something like sectoral bargaining , or the additional benefits of large-scale unionization in this country .
We are looking at other countries like Denmark , which are having really great responses and can coordinate 75 percent of people staying at home while the government pays their salaries .
So they ’ re not going to lose all their businesses , people are going to be taking care of , and the system ’ s not going to collapse because they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people have been talking about sectoral bargaining lately , and the fact that it could help prevent a cascade of business failures during a global pandemic was not part of that selling point .
I hope this reinvigorates the case for a much more sane and humane labor policy .
What , today , is the thing most worrying you about the economy ?
One worry is that , because of a flubbed response by the federal government , we ’ ll end up repeating the cycle many times , and that will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ make the economy much worse .
You ’ re already seeing this , like , “ Oh , of course we ’ d be willing to sacrifice people to keep the economy whole.
” Beyond the sheer evil of it , people will not want to leave their house and spend money if the government is exposing them to a pathogen .
And that would just delay the recovery .
Second , I worry that a lot of small and medium businesses are going to essentially be wiped out and not recover and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which means we ’ ll have a much different economy afterwards .
I think that is preventable .
But it would require us to have institutions in place that we don ’ t have , and it would require political will and imagination .

For the past year, economists and policy experts had been warning of a coming economic downturn. But the screeching halt the economy has experienced in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t that, says Mike Konczal, who studies financial reform and unemployment at the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “It is so difficult to describe how this is not the next recession that would have eventually happened,” Konczal tells me.
Recessions, Konczal explains, tend to unfold slowly; during the 2008 crisis, unemployment rose steadily, with roughly a million people losing their jobs in one month during the worst of it. But under current conditions, Konczal predicts we’ll see 3 or 4 million newly unemployed people this month alone. The second and third quarter of this year, he believes, will look like a depression. “This is such an absolute stop and such a shock across so many businesses—there really isn’t a good parallel,” he says.
Konczal says that the federal government needs to do everything it can to keep small and medium businesses from getting “wiped out”—particularly those in the service sector that won’t reap the benefits of pent-up demand when life goes back to normal. On Wednesday morning, Senate leadership and the White House announced a deal on a $2 trillion relief package that addresses some of this: It includes $350 billion in loan forgiveness grants to small businesses and $10 billion in emergency grants to provide up to $10,000 per company in immediate relief. But will it be enough? “I worry about whether the SBA loan backstop is going to work, and whether it’s going to get overwhelmed,” Konczal said. The funds “might have a problem where it’s going to run out pretty quick, and smaller firms might not be in a position to take advantage of it in time or with the sophistication that’s needed.”
Beyond the immediate economic emergency, Konczal says the crisis has highlighted structural issues that also warrant attention. The stressors that health care workers already endure—dangerous work done in unsafe conditions for low pay—have multiplied exponentially on the frontlines of the pandemic. The way we do education and child care, Konczal says, is also worthy of a second look. Sectoral bargaining—the unionization of an entire industry, as opposed to just one company or workplace—could do a lot to address those concerns, since it can strengthen bargaining power and, in turn, help workers achieve more uniform pay and benefits. It would also provide a venue to arrange temporary furloughs and unemployment benefits for large numbers of employees when the companies they work for are forced to suspend operations in a public health emergency. “A lot of people have been talking about sectoral bargaining lately, and the fact that it could help prevent a cascade of business failures during a global pandemic was not part of that selling point,” Konczal says. “I hope this reinvigorates the case for a much more sane and humane labor policy.”
As the details of the Senate negotiations came together, I asked Konczal what he thinks the federal government should do to jumpstart the economy, what could hinder an effective recovery, and what lessons from the last recession could apply to this one.
Economists predicted that we’d experience a recession sometime in the next 18 months. Did COVID-19 help it come earlier than expected?
It is so difficult to describe how this is not the next recession that would have eventually happened. Let’s say that there’s a big corporate debt bubble and it collapsed, or let’s say that there was a big slowdown in a bunch of different countries at the same time. Think of the Great Recession, which was quite bad. Unemployment went to 10 percent, and every month in the last half of 2008 through 2009, unemployment would go up about a third of a percent. In the worst month, I think there were one million newly unemployed.
We will almost certainly have between 3 and 4 million [newly] unemployed this month alone. The severity of what’s coming is not like anything we have documented. For [the increase in] unemployment, I’m hearing 2 percent, and we’ve basically never seen that. This is such an absolute stop and such a shock across so many businesses—there really isn’t a good parallel.
In terms of the second and third quarter of this year, it will look like a depression. Now there’s a debate about how quickly you will recover. Maybe we will recover much faster, because it doesn’t have that sluggish recession to it—it’s just everyone stopped for a few months, and everyone’s gonna pick back up. Maybe not. It’s a really good question. But in the immediate short-term, I think the hit’s going to be much bigger, so this will not feel like whatever recession would have happened without the coronavirus. Now, that doesn’t mean we don’t know the tools we need to use to fight it.
And what are the impediments to economy getting back to normal once we’re all allowed to congregate together in public spaces again?
A really useful comparison is the Great Recession and the housing crash. The Great Recession—in my reading, and I think increasingly, the view of many economists—is that it was less about the Wall Street financial crisis, like your AIGs and Goldman Sachs, which were bailed out very effectively, very quickly, and largely stabilized very quickly. The real problems of the Great Recession pertained to the 5-to-6 million foreclosures that happened.
There was this very influential way of viewing the housing crash. People would say, “Look, at the end of day, it’s not going to cause a severe recession because, while the value of homes has gone down, the price of future housing has also gone down. So even though your house lost half its value, the next house you’re going to buy also lost half its value. So are you really worse off?” But what actually happened was: It really did matter that people were underwater in debt and were being swamped by bad debts. Foreclosures would drive down whole neighborhoods, and there was a cascading effect where one foreclosure would lead to other houses in the neighborhood being worth less money, which would then further decrease economic activity. I think the same thing could be true if we screw this up.
If all these small businesses went under a huge wave, they don’t just magically pop back up. That’s why there’s a lot more interest in backstopping businesses, particularly small and medium businesses. Because, for example, if you run a plumbing firm with five people, over the next few months, your van, your equipment, and your knowledge aren’t going to disappear. But if the business goes under, it’s not easy to just start it back up. You need money to do the advertisements, maybe store things—that kind of infrastructure of everyday economic relationships is really important to preserve.
The second part is: In manufacturing, you can move things forward or backwards. Maybe you were going to buy a car, or a house, or a couch this spring, and now you’ll just do it in the fall. If you were going to go out for a restaurant meal last night, and you did not, you’re not going to make that up in the fall. Maybe everyone will be very excited to go out, but you’re not going to triple-up on your yoga classes or whatever. We’re not going to make up all the service sector work that is a large part of our economy. That’s why people are extra concerned about small business and the service sector.
There’s been a lot of attention on the daily ups and downs of the stock market—particularly from the White House. Do those daily fluctuations matter? What other economic indicators should politicians be looking at?
The stock market is obviously reflecting serious concerns that are being reflected across every economic variable. The thing to watch closely are unemployment starts—people who are filing for unemployment for the first time, which has jumped something like ten-fold, depending on where you’re looking. Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute had a blog post last week about the employment ratio—not just looking at unemployment, but the total percent employed, because you may see a lot of people fall through the cracks in the short term. Unemployment is only people who are actively looking for a job, and since many people will not look for a job under quarantine—and many people will not be hiring under quarantine—the percentage of people who are employed might be an extra important metric in the next month.
Another thing I’d emphasize is long-term government rates, so-called “real interest rates,” which are adjusted for inflation and are zero or negative over the 10-to-30-year horizon. The bond market is telling the government that it is willing to effectively pay the government to take on debt with negative real interest rates. Also, the fact that they have collapsed directly says that we’re not going to have an inflationary crisis. The government has plenty of room to take really bold action, and it should do it.
A lot of the conventional numbers will not be correct for several months. Unemployment numbers, GDP numbers are revised all the time. And one of the problems we had in the Great Recession was that policymakers did not understand how bad it had gotten until after, say, the Obama stimulus had passed. Then, you could kind of look back and say, “Oh, wait, the recession was like 10 percent worse than we had understood. Everything should have been 10 percent bigger, and it wasn’t.” Here, I think people are aware that it’s going to get quite bad, but it’s worth remembering that the first round of government data has a lot of estimates and models and imputed values, depending on what you’re looking at. There’s a real chance that it’s going to severely understate how bad things have gotten.
Lawmakers predict this is only the first in a series of bills to address this crisis. What are the longer-term, structural economic remedies you’d recommend to better prepare for future disasters like this?
Two things really jump out at me. One is the way care and health work is done in this country. I think it’ll come under a pretty serious reevaluation. I think people having to do makeshift day care and school, and also there’s severe hardship that frontline nurses and health care providers are facing right now—often for very low pay. Home health care providers and many other people on the frontlines of our health care system are all under such severe pressure. I hope that it makes us really understand how we need to provide for those systems in a much more comprehensive way.
Two, if we’re thinking pie-in-the-sky here, this really shows the need for something like sectoral bargaining, or the additional benefits of large-scale unionization in this country. We are looking at other countries like Denmark, which are having really great responses and can coordinate 75 percent of people staying at home while the government pays their salaries. So they’re not going to lose all their businesses, people are going to be taking care of, and the system’s not going to collapse because they have sectoral bargaining.
A lot of people have been talking about sectoral bargaining lately, and the fact that it could help prevent a cascade of business failures during a global pandemic was not part of that selling point. I hope this reinvigorates the case for a much more sane and humane labor policy.
What, today, is the thing most worrying you about the economy?
One worry is that, because of a flubbed response by the federal government, we’ll end up repeating the cycle many times, and that will endanger and kill many people unnecessarily and make the economy much worse. You’re already seeing this, like, “Oh, of course we’d be willing to sacrifice people to keep the economy whole.” Beyond the sheer evil of it, people will not want to leave their house and spend money if the government is exposing them to a pathogen. And that would just delay the recovery.
Second, I worry that a lot of small and medium businesses are going to essentially be wiped out and not recover and not come back in any form, which means we’ll have a much different economy afterwards. I think that is preventable. But it would require us to have institutions in place that we don’t have, and it would require political will and imagination.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.


motherjones--2020-03-25--Chani Rising or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Astrology

I ’ m munching nervously on this hotel ’ s gourmet gummy bears , and I keep wondering when she ’ s going to do it .
This is embarrassing .
I don ’ t know how to ask , and now things are weird .
I ’ m treading water , struggling with what to say next to Chani Nicholas , the sort-of-famous astrologer , whose impressively high cheekbones suggest that if the stars had aligned differently , she might have been an actress or a model .
Instead , on this Friday in late January , she is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a midtown Manhattan hotel lobby , talking to me about the zodiac .
It ’ s a very different vibe from Monday , when Chani ( it rhymes with Annie ) held the packed audience of the 92nd Street Y in rapt attention .
I don ’ t think I looked at my phone for a full hour .
But now Chani is the talent—and also the subject .
Gone is her control from Monday night , the popular high school art teacher vibes .
In oversized black reading glasses she sat on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a small stack of papers spilling across her lap , her shoulder-length brown curls bouncing excitedly as she shook her head in recognition , reading the astrological chart of her friend , the filmmaker and Women ’ s March co-founder Paola Mendoza .
She ’ s swapped Monday ’ s black satin jumper and strappy black flats for a red-and-black plaid shirt and some chunky black boots .
She ’ s wearing hoop earrings with her hair pulled tightly back , giving off a faint chola vibe , minus her blue-and-green socks spotted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ They are definitely queer socks , ” she later laughs .
In the lobby , she ’ s predictably warm as she answers my questions about the book tour she just started for You Were Born for This : Astrology for Radical Self-Acceptance .
We do a stilted who ’ s-who guessing game of mutual friends , the small , overlapping worlds of queer Bay Area and Brooklyn .
( Though she ’ s based in Los Angeles , she , like me , spent a chunk of her young adulthood in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ struck on Monday night by how intimate the conversation was about Mendoza ’ s life , based on how the stars were aligned at the moment she took her first breath .
Her life story , according to her chart , existed almost before she did .
The two asteroids in her first house presaged the mother-daughter relationship that would be the focus of her first film ; her sun being in Sagittarius and ruled by Jupiter helps explain the work she ’ s done collecting migrant women ’ s horror stories on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Leo and the fourth house means that she likely has had a hard time receiving attention and praise .
And , wouldn ’ t you know it , she studied acting in undergrad before finding a more comfortable spot behind the camera .
I ’ d found myself nodding along .
She was using the stars to describe the alignments of a personality .
It turns out there ’ s something about hearing about someone ’ s past that makes you more willing to show up for the collective present .
I share @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her public appearances to date have been astrological readings .
Maybe it ’ s strategic ?
A way to change up the power dynamic between interviewer and subject ?
She seems taken aback for a moment and then insists it ’ s her way of democratizing astrology for people , particularly those who may think of astrology as something just short of whitewashed witchcraft .
“ I ’ m hoping to use astrology as the context for the interview , ” she says , “ to see what story comes out when they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chart is a whole series of prompts.
” I think about how her publicist actually promised my own astrological reading , and I ’ m surprised at how embarrassed I am to admit that I really want it .
Would it be too much of an imposition to ask for it ?
I wonder .
Would it make me any less of a journalist ?
Why am I so desperate ?
Do I believe any of this ?
Why am I so scared ?
I already know I ’ m a Leo , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I ’ ve even jokingly deployed the Zora Neale Hurston quote— “ how can any deprive themselves the pleasure of my company ” —in conversation .
But I ( perhaps like Chani ) actively avoid being the subject .
And while I don ’ t always prefer it , I ’ m inclined to be somewhat solitary , at home with my animals ( including my dog named , obviously , Zora ) .
That ’ s when our podcast producer , Molly , who ’ s there with me , says with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were gon na read Jamilah ’ s chart.
” And then Chani responds like I ’ ve asked her for a stick of gum .
“ Oh !
Why didn ’ t you say anything ?
” she laughs .
“ That ’ s easy , let me get my phone.
” She starts and matter-of-factly reads my chart .
It takes only a few minutes before she breathes in and tells me my Leo is in a house associated with grief .
And now I ’ m like , Shit , did @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in one of two worlds : In one , you ’ ve literally never heard of Chani Nicholas .
In the other , you ’ ve seen her everywhere over the past few months .
In the New York Times , Vogue , Glamour .
On Twitter , where she maintains a lively , favorite-aunt presence .
On Spotify , for the legions who listen to her popular astrological playlists every month .
With her first book—part self-help workbook , part astrology 101 explainer—out in January .
Maybe you saw an Instagram post @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this month , put up the day after the coronavirus was deemed a pandemic , that gently implored people to “ Listen to and learn from folx that have lived with disability and chronic illness , ” and to “ Stay in touch with your loved ones , stay as relaxed as possible , stay in joy whenever and for however long you can , ” and to “ Wash your hands.
” In this world , Chani is officially having her moment .
Of course , so is astrology .
In the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ waves of popularity , most recently in the 1970s .
It then receded a bit , as with most other things considered New Age , though astrology has come back in a serious way in the past decade .
Still , with only a few well-known exceptions like Puerto Rican astrologer Walter Mercado , reading the stars has often been more closely confined to with witchy white women with decidedly apolitical stances .
Chani Nicholas is not that type of witchy white woman .
The day before we meet , she sat on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a filmmaker and queer activist named Tourmaline and read the charts of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera , two pioneering transgender activists whose contributions Tourmaline has helped unearth .
“ It ’ s just it ’ s so poetically potent in terms of the work that [ Tourmaline ] does , ” Chani tells me about doing those readings .
“ Because it really is about working with folks that are left out of the system or incarcerated or criminalized because of who they are .
And it has so much to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ different kind of woman or gender or representation or what have you.
” This is the type of thing that makes me cringe a bit .
It sounds nice , it ’ s certainly the right thing to say , but it also feels so…predictable .
In fact , everything around astrology makes me roll my eyes sometimes ; at a certain point it feels like a game of logical propositions ( if this is true then this and this ) .
But I have to say , it feels different with Chani @ @ @ @ @ @ @ design—she appeals to a very specific crowd .
It ’ s a crowd that ’ s populated by coastal queer activist-types who likely saw one of her motivational quotes while scrolling through Instagram .
They are optimistic but endlessly critical people , the kind who avoid saying Trump ’ s name out loud like he ’ s Voldemort ( “ 45 ” is fine ) but are quick to point out that President Obama deported a record amount of people , too .
They talk endlessly about the importance of chosen family , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ historical trauma , and would rather you not use assigned gender markers with their children .
Everything is a construct—race , class , gender—and if you challenge this , they will probably instruct you to read Toni Morrison ’ s Playing in the Dark : Whiteness and the Literary Imagination .
In fact , they might even offer to loan you the worn copy that sits dusty but centrally located on their bookshelf .
The current state of our country ’ s divisive and polarized and toxic political climate isn ’ t an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a predictable next chapter for a nation that has relied too heavily too often on piecemeal change .
Yes , We Can—but if you ’ re not asking why , you ’ re not really doing any meaningful work .
If you can ’ t already tell , I know these people well .
They might just be me .
So I admit , after hearing about Chani and her socially conscious strain of star reading , I wanted to know more not just about her but about the brand she ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has apparently filled some unaddressed need , bringing together a notoriously fickle audience of activists and organizers and social justice–minded folks who agree on absolutely nothing , except , apparently , her .
Her followers include Chase Strangio , the ACLU attorney who famously represented Chelsea Manning , along with Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza and MacArthur “ genius ” award winner Ai-jen Poo , who affectionately called her “ Chan-Chan ” on their new podcast .
They also include plenty of frontline organizers I ’ ve met over the years reporting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rise represents the extent to which a generation raised on Obama-era platitudes has gone to reimagine hope .
It ’ s angry but actionable .
And in an era when we can ’ t stop talking about the importance of self-care but do very little beyond follow some ( mostly white , affluent ) influencers , Chani ’ s work is now anchoring the hope , the motivations , and the work of ( mostly young , progressive , Black and Brown ) people who are reaching for something a little extra to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the ugliness and division , even on the left , that ’ s come with it .
When I first connected with Chani , I ’ d wanted to talk to her about these people , about how they ’ d found in her astrology a language for addressing their thwarted hope .
A few months later , a pandemic gripped the world , and the questions at the heart of her work became more urgent , not just for the activist set but for everyone .
How do you heal yourself without @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the world that need healing ?
“ I don ’ t think there ’ s an astrologer out there that didn ’ t look at this year and swear under their breath a little bit , ” Chani tells me , “ because it is a year that is just stacked with one challenging astrological setup after another.
” It ’ s Monday , and Chani is explaining just what in the possible hell this moment is that we ’ re living in .
“ One of the main themes of the year @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the year and then the second half of the year , Mars is very highlighted in the astrology in a very challenging way .
And Mars does things like create aggravation , is the god of war , is related to heat and inflammation and fears and things that get damaged from excessive temperatures .
And so right now , what ’ s happening is Mars is about to make a conjunction with Saturn .
And Saturn is the opposite of that .
Saturn is cold and withholding , and Saturn creates boundaries @ @ @ @ @ @ @ isolation .
“ It feels eerie to be living at a moment that is about those two very things and those planets are making a conjunction on March 31 , and so that seems to be us moving towards the most difficult point .
I ’ m not saying that ’ s it , because Mars also makes really difficult aspects come September and October and November—haha—so I thought it was going to be much more about the election , which it still probably will be , but I didn ’ t expect @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” She ’ s calm as she lays all this out for me , and in a weird way there ’ s something hopeful about it .
The story of our fates is plotted .
The action will rise and then fall .
Even if so many things aren ’ t in our control right now , in her telling there is at least a structure being obeyed .
From the start Chani was driven by a need to see something bigger than her immediate circumstance .
She has said her father has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and her mother was from the Bronx .
Her childhood was a chaotic blur of addiction and sporadic violence , moving around a lot before landing in British Columbia .
She was often alone and terrified .
But a couple of chance encounters with astrologers—aren ’ t they always by chance ?
—showed her there were larger forces at play .
But while she dreamed about the stars , that instability made her want to do something practical with her life .
Nothing quite fit .
Not the domestic violence counseling she tried @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and acting she did in LA .
She dropped out of three master ’ s programs , taught yoga .
She balked at being part of what she calls in her book the “ Yoga Industrial Complex ” —think Lululemon-clad white women bowing and saying “ namaste ” atop hundred-dollar slip-proof yoga mats .
That was around 2013 , when she decided to give professional astrology a shot after fighting it for years .
She offered paid readings and wrote horoscopes on her personal blog .
It started small .
But these weren @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from Seventeen magazine back in the day .
The key was connecting attributes of a person ’ s chart to what was happening in the world politically .
For instance , part of my chart , she tells me , is similar to that of Frida Kahlo , who used personal tragedy to shift people ’ s political perceptions through art .
It ’ s these types of models , and the stories she writes about them , that have drawn people in .
Around this time , she also fell in love @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whom she met and married within the span of two months .
Passi , a feminist activist who now runs an anti-domestic violence organization called FreeFrom , is a pragmatist with an eye for detail .
Before long , the two began building out a business , with Passi editing every horoscope and Instagram caption .
They created a series of guided online workshops .
An early workshop , one in late October 2016 , was called , “ Awaken Your Witch : Rituals for the New Moon in Scorpio.
” Days after @ @ @ @ @ @ @ elected president .
That event caused nothing short of a generational stampede into a world that is alternately called wellness or Just Trying to Figure This Shit Out .
It ’ s hard to quantify exactly how many people have turned to astrology for solace in recent years , but apps like Co-Star and Sanctuary are part of a billion dollar investment in what venture capitalists call the “ mystical services market.
” It also created a boom in business for Chani .
In 2017 , the Los Angeles Times estimated her annual @ @ @ @ @ @ @ range ” ; it ’ s almost certainly grown since then .
She ’ s moved on from posting horoscopes on Blogspot .
Now they go on her sleek personal website , which , she has said , has over 1 million regular readers .
Last year , she teamed up with Spotify to create monthly astrological playlists and host a series of live events ; at one she gave Lizzo a reading .
Chani ’ s typical Instagram posts have also became more streamlined : clean white backgrounds with inspirational quotes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ They often have meanings that could work in both personal and collective contexts .
Take this , from mid-January : Then there was her first horoscope for 2020 : Jupiter and Saturn will come together for the first time in 20 years , and since the 1800s this convergence has happened in earth signs .
“ Thanks to the institutionalization of white-supremacist , patriarchal , colonialist capitalism that set the stage for this age , excessive waste has been celebrated up until now , ” Chani wrote .
Though she ’ s now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ first and foremost a writer , and that ’ s how she still spends the bulk of her days : writing horoscopes and pondering .
This all resonated with Candace Kita , the cultural strategy director at the Asian Pacific Islander Network of Oregon .
Kita was originally skeptical of astrology , but she reconsidered it after the political upheaval of 2016 .
Chani “ offered a new way to look at the internal narrative that I had fashioned around who I was , what my role was in the world and how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me .
“ That really helped build a community for me , not only in terms of people , but also with folks who shared my values .
“ I hadn ’ t seen anyone else pair astrology with social justice , ” she adds .
“ The apolitical nature of astrology didn ’ t appeal to me.
” Kita got so into Chani ’ s work and astrology more broadly that she has actually became a professional astrologer .
She now runs Astroradicals , a business that offers astrological readings that “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ possibility.
” Jasmine Brock also started following Chani shortly after Trump ’ s election .
At the time she was a second-year law student .
Today , as a public defender in Brooklyn ’ s family court system , her work often involves parents who are fighting for custody of their children .
“ I get really wrapped up into things , ” she says , “ but [ astrology ] reminds me to take care of myself because the truth is that if I ’ m not in a good place , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can help any parent that I ’ m working with.
” Chani ’ s book tour for You Were Born For This drives home how significant a player she has become in the market of astrology-curious or -devoted activists : Not long after the event with Tourmaline in Brooklyn , she was in Oakland , co-hosting a reading slash book event with Fania Davis , a well-respected restorative justice activist who is also Angela Davis ’ sister .
She knows her crowd .
Now , in this moment , Chani is doing her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her audience in a new way : walking the line between what might be helpful in this age of fresh uncertainties , and what might just add to everyone ’ s peaking anxieties .
“ Sometimes when we frame things astrologically , we ’ re also framing them in a time frame , ” Chani tells me .
“ A beginning , middle , and end .
So to remember that this is just a moment , and we will get through it , and we will be changed by it , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I press Kita to understand what about Chani ’ s work and the larger field of astrology really , deep-down appealed to her .
“ It started to make sense to me , ” she says , “ that astrology was a way that I would rewrite and re-examine the story I ’ d been telling about myself.
” And that ’ s when something clicked for me .
What I want isn ’ t the Chani story , but my own .
That ’ s what I was so embarrassed about before @ @ @ @ @ @ @ selfishness is always at play somewhere in our work , but we—millennials , journalists , queer people of color who dabbled in community organizing—are not conditioned to acknowledge it .
Instead , we look at the collective .
The team .
The community .
What of my story can be of service to others ?
But selfishness and self-awareness are two different things .
Sometimes it ’ s okay to want a space that ’ s all our own .
Right now medical professionals and , increasingly , local governments are telling people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ safe .
Even if you ’ re not showing symptoms , the fact that you could pass along the virus to someone else for whom it could prove deadly is a wake-up call unlike any we ’ ve seen in modern history .
Now , taking care of yourself , creating your own space , isn ’ t just a social luxury .
It ’ s a matter of public safety .
While we can be so focused on the world outside ourselves , Chani provides the opportunity to look in , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ re not alone .
And while there ’ s much we can ’ t change , it ’ s how we respond to the world—whether it ’ s a healthy one , an infected one , an uncertain one—that matters .
I of course do not realize any of this on that January Friday in the lobby , when Chani finally takes out her phone and pulls up my chart on her website .
She tells me I ’ m a Capricorn rising with a sun in Leo , which means , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and want to be acknowledged for it .
I nod .
I find great satisfaction in making lists .
It ’ s what makes me feel seen .
I make them before bed and when I wake up .
When I ’ m on the train to work and once I get to the office .
It ’ s a small thing that I ’ d never paid all that much attention to until recently .
Then Chani takes that pause and she tells me that my Leo is in a house associated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
And I don ’ t just feel seen .
I feel exposed .
I laugh , because that ’ s what I do when I ’ m uncomfortable .
It ’ s true that in one decade nearly half of my family died .
A shooting , a fire .
A bad heart .
A bad breast .
I ’ ve often carried the cumulative grief of those losses like an overstuffed bag on the beach of life .
Everyone ’ s running around in the sand , weightless .
And then @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all my dead .
I can trace my desire to be a writer back to high school , when my mother was featured on the front page of my hometown newspaper , urging witnesses to come forward with information in a family member ’ s murder .
That was part of the story , I thought then .
But there was a different story to tell , too , of people who were always the subjects but never protagonists .
Chani tells me that societies once dealt better with death , but we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Your chart speaks to remembering or knowing it in a way , ” she says .
“ And so something about your work brings that knowledge through and is so necessary and needed.
” I ’ m not sure if that ’ s what I wanted to hear , but I did feel a helluva lot less alone listening to it .

I’m munching nervously on this hotel’s gourmet gummy bears, and I keep wondering when she’s going to do it. This is embarrassing. I don’t know how to ask, and now things are weird. I’m treading water, struggling with what to say next to Chani Nicholas, the sort-of-famous astrologer, whose impressively high cheekbones suggest that if the stars had aligned differently, she might have been an actress or a model. Instead, on this Friday in late January, she is posted across the table from me in a midtown Manhattan hotel lobby, talking to me about the zodiac.
It’s a very different vibe from Monday, when Chani (it rhymes with Annie) held the packed audience of the 92nd Street Y in rapt attention. I don’t think I looked at my phone for a full hour. But now Chani is the talent—and also the subject. Gone is her control from Monday night, the popular high school art teacher vibes. In oversized black reading glasses she sat on stage in an oversized beige chair with a small stack of papers spilling across her lap, her shoulder-length brown curls bouncing excitedly as she shook her head in recognition, reading the astrological chart of her friend, the filmmaker and Women’s March co-founder Paola Mendoza.
She’s swapped Monday’s black satin jumper and strappy black flats for a red-and-black plaid shirt and some chunky black boots. She’s wearing hoop earrings with her hair pulled tightly back, giving off a faint chola vibe, minus her blue-and-green socks spotted with what look vaguely like vaginas. “They are definitely queer socks,” she later laughs.
In the lobby, she’s predictably warm as she answers my questions about the book tour she just started for You Were Born for This: Astrology for Radical Self-Acceptance. We do a stilted who’s-who guessing game of mutual friends, the small, overlapping worlds of queer Bay Area and Brooklyn. (Though she’s based in Los Angeles, she, like me, spent a chunk of her young adulthood in San Francisco.)
I had been struck on Monday night by how intimate the conversation was about Mendoza’s life, based on how the stars were aligned at the moment she took her first breath. Her life story, according to her chart, existed almost before she did. The two asteroids in her first house presaged the mother-daughter relationship that would be the focus of her first film; her sun being in Sagittarius and ruled by Jupiter helps explain the work she’s done collecting migrant women’s horror stories on the border. Her moon being in Leo and the fourth house means that she likely has had a hard time receiving attention and praise. And, wouldn’t you know it, she studied acting in undergrad before finding a more comfortable spot behind the camera.
I’d found myself nodding along. She was using the stars to describe the alignments of a personality. It turns out there’s something about hearing about someone’s past that makes you more willing to show up for the collective present.
I share with Chani an observation that all of her public appearances to date have been astrological readings. Maybe it’s strategic? A way to change up the power dynamic between interviewer and subject?
She seems taken aback for a moment and then insists it’s her way of democratizing astrology for people, particularly those who may think of astrology as something just short of whitewashed witchcraft. “I’m hoping to use astrology as the context for the interview,” she says, “to see what story comes out when they get that prompt, because really our chart is a whole series of prompts.”
I think about how her publicist actually promised my own astrological reading, and I’m surprised at how embarrassed I am to admit that I really want it. Would it be too much of an imposition to ask for it? I wonder. Would it make me any less of a journalist? Why am I so desperate? Do I believe any of this? Why am I so scared? I already know I’m a Leo, and I know all the tropes; I’ve even jokingly deployed the Zora Neale Hurston quote—“how can any deprive themselves the pleasure of my company”—in conversation. But I (perhaps like Chani) actively avoid being the subject. And while I don’t always prefer it, I’m inclined to be somewhat solitary, at home with my animals (including my dog named, obviously, Zora).
That’s when our podcast producer, Molly, who’s there with me, says with a smile: “We thought you were gonna read Jamilah’s chart.” And then Chani responds like I’ve asked her for a stick of gum. “Oh! Why didn’t you say anything?” she laughs. “That’s easy, let me get my phone.”
She starts and matter-of-factly reads my chart. It takes only a few minutes before she breathes in and tells me my Leo is in a house associated with grief. And now I’m like, Shit, did she Google me?
You probably live in one of two worlds: In one, you’ve literally never heard of Chani Nicholas. In the other, you’ve seen her everywhere over the past few months. In the New York Times, Vogue, Glamour. On Twitter, where she maintains a lively, favorite-aunt presence. On Spotify, for the legions who listen to her popular astrological playlists every month. With her first book—part self-help workbook, part astrology 101 explainer—out in January. Maybe you saw an Instagram post of hers, like the one earlier this month, put up the day after the coronavirus was deemed a pandemic, that gently implored people to “Listen to and learn from folx that have lived with disability and chronic illness,” and to “Stay in touch with your loved ones, stay as relaxed as possible, stay in joy whenever and for however long you can,” and to “Wash your hands.”
In this world, Chani is officially having her moment.
Of course, so is astrology. In the United States, astrology has gone through waves of popularity, most recently in the 1970s. It then receded a bit, as with most other things considered New Age, though astrology has come back in a serious way in the past decade. Still, with only a few well-known exceptions like Puerto Rican astrologer Walter Mercado, reading the stars has often been more closely confined to with witchy white women with decidedly apolitical stances.
Chani Nicholas is not that type of witchy white woman.
The day before we meet, she sat on a stage at the Brooklyn Museum with a filmmaker and queer activist named Tourmaline and read the charts of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two pioneering transgender activists whose contributions Tourmaline has helped unearth. “It’s just it’s so poetically potent in terms of the work that [Tourmaline] does,” Chani tells me about doing those readings. “Because it really is about working with folks that are left out of the system or incarcerated or criminalized because of who they are. And it has so much to do with that sense of being a different kind of woman or gender or representation or what have you.”
Chani’s rise represents the extent to which a generation raised on Obama-era platitudes has gone to reimagine hope.
This is the type of thing that makes me cringe a bit. It sounds nice, it’s certainly the right thing to say, but it also feels so…predictable. In fact, everything around astrology makes me roll my eyes sometimes; at a certain point it feels like a game of logical propositions (if this is true then this and this). But I have to say, it feels different with Chani. And maybe that’s by design—she appeals to a very specific crowd. It’s a crowd that’s populated by coastal queer activist-types who likely saw one of her motivational quotes while scrolling through Instagram. They are optimistic but endlessly critical people, the kind who avoid saying Trump’s name out loud like he’s Voldemort (“45” is fine) but are quick to point out that President Obama deported a record amount of people, too. They talk endlessly about the importance of chosen family, are in a constant negotiation with their historical trauma, and would rather you not use assigned gender markers with their children. Everything is a construct—race, class, gender—and if you challenge this, they will probably instruct you to read Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. In fact, they might even offer to loan you the worn copy that sits dusty but centrally located on their bookshelf. The current state of our country’s divisive and polarized and toxic political climate isn’t an anomaly, they argue, but merely a predictable next chapter for a nation that has relied too heavily too often on piecemeal change. Yes, We Can—but if you’re not asking why, you’re not really doing any meaningful work.
If you can’t already tell, I know these people well. They might just be me.
So I admit, after hearing about Chani and her socially conscious strain of star reading, I wanted to know more not just about her but about the brand she’s built into something of a juggernaut—one that has apparently filled some unaddressed need, bringing together a notoriously fickle audience of activists and organizers and social justice–minded folks who agree on absolutely nothing, except, apparently, her. Her followers include Chase Strangio, the ACLU attorney who famously represented Chelsea Manning, along with Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza and MacArthur “genius” award winner Ai-jen Poo, who affectionately called her “Chan-Chan” on their new podcast. They also include plenty of frontline organizers I’ve met over the years reporting on racial justice. Chani’s rise represents the extent to which a generation raised on Obama-era platitudes has gone to reimagine hope. It’s angry but actionable. And in an era when we can’t stop talking about the importance of self-care but do very little beyond follow some (mostly white, affluent) influencers, Chani’s work is now anchoring the hope, the motivations, and the work of (mostly young, progressive, Black and Brown) people who are reaching for something a little extra to get through the Trump presidency and all the ugliness and division, even on the left, that’s come with it.
When I first connected with Chani, I’d wanted to talk to her about these people, about how they’d found in her astrology a language for addressing their thwarted hope. A few months later, a pandemic gripped the world, and the questions at the heart of her work became more urgent, not just for the activist set but for everyone. How do you heal yourself without losing sight of all the things in the world that need healing?
“I don’t think there’s an astrologer out there that didn’t look at this year and swear under their breath a little bit,” Chani tells me, “because it is a year that is just stacked with one challenging astrological setup after another.” It’s Monday, and Chani is explaining just what in the possible hell this moment is that we’re living in.
“One of the main themes of the year is Mars. The first part of the year and then the second half of the year, Mars is very highlighted in the astrology in a very challenging way. And Mars does things like create aggravation, is the god of war, is related to heat and inflammation and fears and things that get damaged from excessive temperatures. And so right now, what’s happening is Mars is about to make a conjunction with Saturn. And Saturn is the opposite of that. Saturn is cold and withholding, and Saturn creates boundaries and barriers and structures and quarantines and isolation.
“It feels eerie to be living at a moment that is about those two very things and those planets are making a conjunction on March 31, and so that seems to be us moving towards the most difficult point. I’m not saying that’s it, because Mars also makes really difficult aspects come September and October and November—haha—so I thought it was going to be much more about the election, which it still probably will be, but I didn’t expect it to be this challenging up front.”
She’s calm as she lays all this out for me, and in a weird way there’s something hopeful about it. The story of our fates is plotted. The action will rise and then fall. Even if so many things aren’t in our control right now, in her telling there is at least a structure being obeyed.
From the start Chani was driven by a need to see something bigger than her immediate circumstance. She has said her father has “one of those hillbilly stories” and her mother was from the Bronx. Her childhood was a chaotic blur of addiction and sporadic violence, moving around a lot before landing in British Columbia. She was often alone and terrified. But a couple of chance encounters with astrologers—aren’t they always by chance?—showed her there were larger forces at play. But while she dreamed about the stars, that instability made her want to do something practical with her life.
Nothing quite fit. Not the domestic violence counseling she tried in San Francisco, or the waitressing and acting she did in LA. She dropped out of three master’s programs, taught yoga. She balked at being part of what she calls in her book the “Yoga Industrial Complex”—think Lululemon-clad white women bowing and saying “namaste” atop hundred-dollar slip-proof yoga mats. That was around 2013, when she decided to give professional astrology a shot after fighting it for years. She offered paid readings and wrote horoscopes on her personal blog. It started small.
November 2016 caused nothing short of a generational stampede into a world that is alternately called wellness or Just Trying to Figure This Shit Out.
But these weren’t the horoscopes you might remember from Seventeen magazine back in the day. The key was connecting attributes of a person’s chart to what was happening in the world politically. For instance, part of my chart, she tells me, is similar to that of Frida Kahlo, who used personal tragedy to shift people’s political perceptions through art. It’s these types of models, and the stories she writes about them, that have drawn people in.
Around this time, she also fell in love with a woman named Sonya Passi, whom she met and married within the span of two months. Passi, a feminist activist who now runs an anti-domestic violence organization called FreeFrom, is a pragmatist with an eye for detail. Before long, the two began building out a business, with Passi editing every horoscope and Instagram caption. They created a series of guided online workshops. An early workshop, one in late October 2016, was called, “Awaken Your Witch: Rituals for the New Moon in Scorpio.”
Days after the workshop began, Donald Trump was elected president. That event caused nothing short of a generational stampede into a world that is alternately called wellness or Just Trying to Figure This Shit Out. It’s hard to quantify exactly how many people have turned to astrology for solace in recent years, but apps like Co-Star and Sanctuary are part of a billion dollar investment in what venture capitalists call the “mystical services market.”
It also created a boom in business for Chani. In 2017, the Los Angeles Times estimated her annual income as “well into the six-figure range”; it’s almost certainly grown since then. She’s moved on from posting horoscopes on Blogspot. Now they go on her sleek personal website, which, she has said, has over 1 million regular readers. Last year, she teamed up with Spotify to create monthly astrological playlists and host a series of live events; at one she gave Lizzo a reading. Chani’s typical Instagram posts have also became more streamlined: clean white backgrounds with inspirational quotes, easy to screenshot and share widely. They often have meanings that could work in both personal and collective contexts. Take this, from mid-January:
Then there was her first horoscope for 2020: Jupiter and Saturn will come together for the first time in 20 years, and since the 1800s this convergence has happened in earth signs. “Thanks to the institutionalization of white-supremacist, patriarchal, colonialist capitalism that set the stage for this age, excessive waste has been celebrated up until now,” Chani wrote. Though she’s now become a brand, Chani considers herself first and foremost a writer, and that’s how she still spends the bulk of her days: writing horoscopes and pondering.
This all resonated with Candace Kita, the cultural strategy director at the Asian Pacific Islander Network of Oregon. Kita was originally skeptical of astrology, but she reconsidered it after the political upheaval of 2016. Chani “offered a new way to look at the internal narrative that I had fashioned around who I was, what my role was in the world and how I should be,” she tells me. “That really helped build a community for me, not only in terms of people, but also with folks who shared my values.
“I hadn’t seen anyone else pair astrology with social justice,” she adds. “The apolitical nature of astrology didn’t appeal to me.”
Kita got so into Chani’s work and astrology more broadly that she has actually became a professional astrologer. She now runs Astroradicals, a business that offers astrological readings that “cultivate liberation, empowerment, and radical possibility.”
Jasmine Brock also started following Chani shortly after Trump’s election. At the time she was a second-year law student. Today, as a public defender in Brooklyn’s family court system, her work often involves parents who are fighting for custody of their children. “I get really wrapped up into things,” she says, “but [astrology] reminds me to take care of myself because the truth is that if I’m not in a good place, there’s no way that I can help any parent that I’m working with.”
Chani’s book tour for You Were Born For This drives home how significant a player she has become in the market of astrology-curious or -devoted activists: Not long after the event with Tourmaline in Brooklyn, she was in Oakland, co-hosting a reading slash book event with Fania Davis, a well-respected restorative justice activist who is also Angela Davis’ sister. She knows her crowd.
Now, in this moment, Chani is doing her best to channel this knowledge into serving her audience in a new way: walking the line between what might be helpful in this age of fresh uncertainties, and what might just add to everyone’s peaking anxieties.
“Sometimes when we frame things astrologically, we’re also framing them in a time frame,” Chani tells me. “A beginning, middle, and end. So to remember that this is just a moment, and we will get through it, and we will be changed by it, but it won’t be forever.”
I press Kita to understand what about Chani’s work and the larger field of astrology really, deep-down appealed to her. “It started to make sense to me,” she says, “that astrology was a way that I would rewrite and re-examine the story I’d been telling about myself.”
And that’s when something clicked for me.
What I want isn’t the Chani story, but my own. That’s what I was so embarrassed about before Molly stepped in. Of course, selfishness is always at play somewhere in our work, but we—millennials, journalists, queer people of color who dabbled in community organizing—are not conditioned to acknowledge it. Instead, we look at the collective. The team. The community. What of my story can be of service to others?
But selfishness and self-awareness are two different things. Sometimes it’s okay to want a space that’s all our own.
Right now medical professionals and, increasingly, local governments are telling people to stay home in order to stay safe. Even if you’re not showing symptoms, the fact that you could pass along the virus to someone else for whom it could prove deadly is a wake-up call unlike any we’ve seen in modern history. Now, taking care of yourself, creating your own space, isn’t just a social luxury. It’s a matter of public safety.
Selfishness and self-awareness are two different things. Sometimes it’s okay to want a space that’s all our own.
While we can be so focused on the world outside ourselves, Chani provides the opportunity to look in, and at each other, and realize we’re not alone. And while there’s much we can’t change, it’s how we respond to the world—whether it’s a healthy one, an infected one, an uncertain one—that matters.
I of course do not realize any of this on that January Friday in the lobby, when Chani finally takes out her phone and pulls up my chart on her website. She tells me I’m a Capricorn rising with a sun in Leo, which means, in short, that I work hard and want to be acknowledged for it. I nod. I find great satisfaction in making lists. It’s what makes me feel seen. I make them before bed and when I wake up. When I’m on the train to work and once I get to the office. It’s a small thing that I’d never paid all that much attention to until recently.
Then Chani takes that pause and she tells me that my Leo is in a house associated with loss, grief, and anguish. And I don’t just feel seen. I feel exposed.
I laugh, because that’s what I do when I’m uncomfortable. It’s true that in one decade nearly half of my family died. A shooting, a fire. A bad heart. A bad breast. I’ve often carried the cumulative grief of those losses like an overstuffed bag on the beach of life. Everyone’s running around in the sand, weightless. And then there’s me, lugging around all my dead. I can trace my desire to be a writer back to high school, when my mother was featured on the front page of my hometown newspaper, urging witnesses to come forward with information in a family member’s murder. That was part of the story, I thought then. But there was a different story to tell, too, of people who were always the subjects but never protagonists.
Chani tells me that societies once dealt better with death, but we’ve since sanitized it. “Your chart speaks to remembering or knowing it in a way,” she says. “And so something about your work brings that knowledge through and is so necessary and needed.”
I’m not sure if that’s what I wanted to hear, but I did feel a helluva lot less alone listening to it.


motherjones--2020-03-25--A Top Restaurant Retools to Feed Front-Line Workers Fighting COVID-19

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When the coronavirus struck Washington state hard , a restaurant once named the top destination in the world by National Geographic Traveler joined so many others in closing .
Since then , the Herbfarm has retooled as a kitchen feeding doctors , nurses , and medical staff at five hospitals on the front lines of the coronavirus fight .
Repurposing the restaurant helps everyone , co-owner Carrie Van Dyck told The Stranger .
“ We @ @ @ @ @ @ @ eat .
And the farmers , fishermen , foragers , ranchers—they have food that they ’ ve produced and their normal outlet is the farmers market and restaurants , and all of that is closed , so they have nowhere to send that , ” Van Dyck said .
“ We wanted to help out the [ vendors ] who ’ ve been supporting us , and think of ways to continue to buy from them , and also help out these people who are doing an amazing job [ in hospitals ] @ @ @ @ @ @ @ effort is funded by a GoFundMe drive to help the medical staff at these hard-hit hospitals .
“ One thing COVID-19 teaches us clearly , ” said one appreciative ER doctor , Jonathan Scheffer : “ We are all , most definitely , in this together !
” Here are more Recharge stories to get you through the week : Get me to the judge on time .
Just after New York City ’ s marriage bureau got shut down Friday , a couple found a judge and got hitched .
Alex Brook @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gloves , were married in a one-minute ceremony outside the marriage bureau .
Judge Kevin McGrath followed the pronouncement with this : “ May you [ elbow ] bump each other.
” A second couple , wearing masks , happened upon the ceremony—and McGrath married them , too .
Honeymoon plans for Lynn and Levy ?
A walk in a park in the Bronx , Lynn said , then back to their home in downtown Manhattan to shelter in place .
“ I did not think my wedding would be like this , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ You kind of roll with what is going on.
” ( New York Post ) A world singing .
Defiant people self-quarantined across the globe are following Italians ’ lead by taking to porches , balconies , and rooftops , lifting their voices to stand together against the pandemic .
In Montreal on Sunday , residents united to sing Leonard Cohen ’ s “ So Long , Marianne ” from their homes ; in Mallorca , Spain , dancing and guitar-playing police led a locked-down neighborhood with songs ; in Dallas , tenor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Withers ’ “ Lean on Me ” from the windows of an apartment building .
Readers , what did we miss ?
Let us know if your community is rising up as one in song .
( CBC ) Helping the wallaby .
Last we checked , Australia ’ s wildlife was fighting to survive against some of the worst bushfires in modern history .
Now , marsupials that have survived face a challenge—many of the plants they feed on have been destroyed .
People have stepped up to drop water , carrots @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It ’ s helping .
( New York Times ) Followup .
Last week , we told you about senior citizens in their cars , terrified to buy groceries for fear of catching the coronavirus .
Now , several supermarket chains have set up special hours for seniors and those with underlying health conditions .
Veteran journalist John Schwartz joked that he was bummed he wasn ’ t carded upon arrival at a special early-morning entry to one grocery .
I asked a cashier at another store on Sunday if the early @ @ @ @ @ @ @ later customers .
“ Both , ” she replied .
( Mother Jones ) I ’ ll leave you with a bit of perspective : the light shining through ancient forests that have grown amid centuries of world crises .
This image comes from Washington ’ s Olympic National Park , via the Interior Department ’ s Twitter feed .
Remember , this land is your land .
See you next week !

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When the coronavirus struck Washington state hard, a restaurant once named the top destination in the world by National Geographic Traveler joined so many others in closing. Since then, the Herbfarm has retooled as a kitchen feeding doctors, nurses, and medical staff at five hospitals on the front lines of the coronavirus fight.
Repurposing the restaurant helps everyone, co-owner Carrie Van Dyck told The Stranger.
“We’re going to still need to eat. And the farmers, fishermen, foragers, ranchers—they have food that they’ve produced and their normal outlet is the farmers market and restaurants, and all of that is closed, so they have nowhere to send that,” Van Dyck said. “We wanted to help out the [vendors] who’ve been supporting us, and think of ways to continue to buy from them, and also help out these people who are doing an amazing job [in hospitals] right now.”
The bulk of the effort is funded by a GoFundMe drive to help the medical staff at these hard-hit hospitals. “One thing COVID-19 teaches us clearly,” said one appreciative ER doctor, Jonathan Scheffer: “We are all, most definitely, in this together!”
Here are more Recharge stories to get you through the week:
Get me to the judge on time. Just after New York City’s marriage bureau got shut down Friday, a couple found a judge and got hitched. Alex Brook Lynn and Adam Levy, wearing plastic gloves, were married in a one-minute ceremony outside the marriage bureau. Judge Kevin McGrath followed the pronouncement with this: “May you [elbow] bump each other.” A second couple, wearing masks, happened upon the ceremony—and McGrath married them, too. Honeymoon plans for Lynn and Levy? A walk in a park in the Bronx, Lynn said, then back to their home in downtown Manhattan to shelter in place. “I did not think my wedding would be like this,’’ the bride said. “You kind of roll with what is going on.” (New York Post)
A world singing. Defiant people self-quarantined across the globe are following Italians’ lead by taking to porches, balconies, and rooftops, lifting their voices to stand together against the pandemic. In Montreal on Sunday, residents united to sing Leonard Cohen’s “So Long, Marianne” from their homes; in Mallorca, Spain, dancing and guitar-playing police led a locked-down neighborhood with songs; in Dallas, tenor Danzel Barber began a singalong of Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me” from the windows of an apartment building. Readers, what did we miss? Let us know if your community is rising up as one in song. (CBC)
Helping the wallaby. Last we checked, Australia’s wildlife was fighting to survive against some of the worst bushfires in modern history. Now, marsupials that have survived face a challenge—many of the plants they feed on have been destroyed. People have stepped up to drop water, carrots, and sweet potatoes for starving wallabies. It’s helping. (New York Times)
Followup. Last week, we told you about senior citizens in their cars, terrified to buy groceries for fear of catching the coronavirus. Now, several supermarket chains have set up special hours for seniors and those with underlying health conditions. Veteran journalist John Schwartz joked that he was bummed he wasn’t carded upon arrival at a special early-morning entry to one grocery. I asked a cashier at another store on Sunday if the early crowd was nicer or ruder than the later customers. “Both,” she replied. (Mother Jones)
I’ll leave you with a bit of perspective: the light shining through ancient forests that have grown amid centuries of world crises. This image comes from Washington’s Olympic National Park, via the Interior Department’s Twitter feed. Remember, this land is your land. See you next week!