We said goodbye to someone remarkable this week. Gloria Steinem, who spent more than fifty years pushing our country to treat women as equals, passed away Wednesday at 92, at home in New York, surrounded by people who loved her. If you grew up with a mother, sister, or daughter who had more doors open to her than the generation before — a little of that is Gloria’s doing. She co-founded Ms. Magazine at a time when that kind of plainspoken advocacy for women wasn’t just unusual, it was risky. She never really stopped. Watching the tributes roll in this week from people across the political spectrum, it’s clear how many lives she touched, often without those people ever meeting her.
It’s the kind of loss that makes you pause and think about what gets passed down — not just in families, but in a country. Progress rarely arrives all at once. It’s usually one person deciding to say the plain, obvious thing out loud when everyone else is staying quiet. Gloria did that for decades, and we’re better for it.
On a different note, but one that touches nearly every family in America: there was genuinely hopeful health news this week. Moderna and Merck announced that a new, personalized vaccine — built from a patient’s own tumor and paired with an existing cancer drug — succeeded in a major clinical trial for melanoma, one of the more aggressive skin cancers. Over a thousand patients took part, and the vaccine meaningfully reduced how often the cancer came back after surgery. The companies say they plan to seek approval within months. It’s easy to get numb to headlines about medical “breakthroughs,” but this one is the real thing: a treatment tailored to an individual’s own biology, not a one-size-fits-all approach. If you or someone you love has weathered a cancer diagnosis, this is the kind of news worth holding onto.
Meanwhile, the economy is giving us a mixed picture, the way it often does. Stocks had a strong week after a Federal Reserve official signaled the central bank isn’t in a rush to raise interest rates again — welcome news if you’re carrying a mortgage or a credit card balance. But it comes against the backdrop of a July jobs report that surprised almost everyone: the economy actually lost jobs that month instead of adding them, and pay raises have slowed to their weakest pace in years. It’s a reminder that the numbers on a screen in New York don’t always match how things feel around a kitchen table in the rest of the country — and that a little patience, and a little grace for each other, goes a long way when the ground feels uncertain.
We lost a giant this week, and we got a real reason for hope from the world of medicine. Somewhere in between, most of us are just trying to keep the lights on and look out for the people around us. That’s worth remembering too — the small, steady things matter just as much as the headlines.
Take care of each other out there.