Michelle Obama, human embodiment of “goals,” is the subject of a collection of essays in T Magazine by the likes of author Chimanda Ngozi Adichie, legendary feminist activist Gloria Steinem, actress and writer Rashida Jones, and author Jon Meacham. As all of these people are smart and thoughtful, and Michelle Obama is an inspiring subject, these essays are very good. Meacham and Steinem reflect on Obama’s activism; Jones holds the first lady up as “the modern, American woman”; Adichie, meanwhile, comes for your whole being and more with a piece that centers on her 2008 DNC speech. “She was informal, colloquial, her sentences bookended by the word ‘see,’ a conversational fillip that also strangely felt like a mark of authenticity,” Adichie writes. “She seemed genuine. She was genuine. All over America, black women were still, their eyes watching a form of God, because she represented their image writ large in the world.” It’s a powerful piece. You can go read the rest of it here, and then, maybe, write a letter to Michelle Obama begging her to stick around the broken world of politics, even though we don’t deserve it.
