“Tomorrow afternoon, around twenty people will gather in my living room to watch Australia play in the World Cup,” Dan Foster recently wrote in Backyard Church. “Some will wear green and gold. We’ll cheer the same goals, complain about the same referees, and experience the same emotional rollercoaster that accompanies supporting a national team in a major tournament.”

The World Cup, he writes, is a tournament that brings a nation together and fills a greater need for human connection. It’s the same instinct that has driven the growth of religion and civilization.

“Alone, a human being was vulnerable,” he writes. “Together, humans became one of the most successful species on the planet.”

In this issue, let’s come together and support our community — Medium writers — and see how they are processing the World Cup.

For a month, millions like me will believe impossible things. That’s the real magic of the World Cup.

— Malky McEwan in E³ — Entertain Enlighten Empower, What Americans Don’t Know About the World’s Greatest Tournament

The great cultural exchange

As World Cup tourists start making their way to North American institutions like the local deli counter, Buc-ee’s, and Texas Roadhouse, Americans have been embracing them in return — including some writers, like Dan Fredman, on Medium.

This great cultural exchange is actually the point of the World Cup and other sporting events like it. Medium writer Dr. Lauren Tucker likes to liken them to a “giant family reunion” for people around the world. But, she writes in Reframing Democracy: The World Cup Reminds Me Why I Still Love America, there’s something different about this year’s tournament:

When America hosts a World Cup match, something remarkable happens. American fans arrive wearing jerseys from Mexico, Nigeria, Brazil, Japan, Germany, Argentina, South Korea, Morocco, England, and dozens of other countries.

The world, in all its diversity, is already at home in the U.S.; the World Cup makes that diversity visible. This isn’t a repudiation or contradiction of Foster’s argument about identity and team sports. Just the opposite, she argues: “This is American identity.”

It’s an especially striking contrast now, in 2026, when “fear merchants” and nativists have made deporting immigrants the foundation of their governing platform. For Tucker, seeing a U.S. team full of players with diverse last names, or seeing the celebrations from the people who make the United States home, has been reassuring.

“I see Americans celebrating differences that some politicians insist should divide us,” Tucker writes. “Most importantly, I see proof that the American experiment still works.”

Sports and nationalism have been connected since the beginning of the nationalist era in the 19th century. International sports competitions like the Olympics and World Cup were established, in part, to steer nationalist impulses in a positive direction.

— George Dillard, Bad Nationalism vs. Good Nationalism

Wearing pride on your kit

Community manager Kassandra @ Medium has been following Haiti’s first performance in the Cup since 1974. It’s been an exciting, prideful time for Haitians around the world, but as she writes, not a time without its indignities.

A few weeks ago, FIFA officially banned Haiti from using their jerseys in the World Cup:

Why? Because a corner of the jersey depicted the Battle of Vertières, the final battle of the Haitian Revolution, where Haiti won their independence. Saeta, the kit manufacturer, argued that the jerseys were meant to demonstrate “the pride, resilience and spirit of the Haitian people.”

Haitians fully embrace their revolutionary history, Kassandra writes, but “the first successful Black revolution is still too dangerous to commemorate on a jersey.” It’s not even the first time this has happened to a Haitian sports team this year — the Haitian Winter Olympics team was forced to cover a portrait of General Toussaint L’Ouverture.

“But here’s the thing about Haitians,” she writes, “we’ve never needed permission to be proud.”

Predicting the winner?

Can you build a model that will predict the winner of the World Cup? One that isn’t an octopus, that is (RIP Paul the Octopus). It’s been a recent trend among football fans and programmers to see who can build a model that will give the most accurate results, and several writers on Medium have built their own attempts.

In Can Machine Learning predict the World Cup Winner?, writer Stephanie Hohenberg competitively tested two models before determining a winning model, and a winning team, Argentina. Victor Adams used Monte Carlo simulation to add probabilities to his model, which eventually pointed to a winner among “France, Spain and Argentina, with England not too far behind.” Sander Lam is going to try to beat the office betting pool by vibecoding a model onDatabricks. The result of his 20,000 simulations? The final will be “Spain 1–1 Argentina, Argentina on penalties.”

But before you start making bets, it might be good to keep the reason Hohenberg loves the World Cup so much in mind: its unpredictability. As she writes, “Underdogs emerge, favourites collapse, and every tournament produces surprises about how far a team can really go.”

A final thought

Ahead of this upcoming Juneteenth in the U.S., educator TheHonestInfluencHER writes in Juneteenth Is the Lesson America Still Has to Keep Learning about what she wants her students to take away from the holiday’s history. Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union troops arrived at Galveston Harbor in Texas and informed the last remaining enslaved population in the United States about the Emancipation Proclamation more than 2 years after it had been signed.

“But the history is not just about the date,” she writes. “It is about the delay.”

Juneteenth asks us to sit with a difficult truth: freedom was not simply announced and complete. It had to be heard. It had to be claimed. It had to be protected. It had to be lived into, even in a country still struggling to honor the full humanity of Black people.

And even now, it still has to be taught.

Are you following the World Cup? See what everyone is writing about, and contribute your own stories, under the World Cup tag!

Deepen your understanding every week with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by brandon echter, Scott Lamb, and Carly Rose Gillis.

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⚽🤖 Using AI to predict the World Cup winner was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“That’s what fiction is for,” author Tim O’Brien said at a 1999 lecture at Brown University. “It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.” On Medium, that’s exactly how writers use fiction — as a mirror for telling the truth about the world. There is a full-on thriving fiction scene, from the literary pieces in The Mad River, to the little tales of Lit Up, to the genre work from The Kraken Lore — all of which explore the human experience.

Some of the most popular stories on the site over the last year are classic, literary short fiction: Loren Kantor’s coming of age period tale The Lethal Snakes of Mulholland Drive, for example, or Jonatha Czajkiewicz’s courtroom comedy One Son of a Bitch, Two Sons of Bitches, and Three Sons of a Single Bitch. But that’s just a small sample of exactly how Medium writers are using fiction to illuminate life. In this issue, let’s take a look at a few of those other ways — and how you can join in the fun.

My name is the Boogeyman. I have collapsed the sanity of grown men with a single shadow. I have haunted the dreams of kings, generals, and at least two popes. And I have been living under your child’s bed for eleven months without a lease

— Chris Turner in Jane Austen’s Wastebasket, The Boogeyman Under Your Son’s Bed Will Not Be Ignored

Knock, knock

What’s in a joke? For many writers on Medium, satire is a way to illuminate the truth of the modern world.

Lisa Martens, for example, uses satire to pointedly describe the rapidly changing political landscape. She Married A Conservative Man 10 Years Ago — one of the most popular fiction pieces on Medium so far this year — takes a look at a marriage over the course of a decade. Initially, the woman of the title thinks it would be “like a sitcom — the more liberal, carefree wife and her rock of a husband,” but by the end of the decade “it was turning into a horror film” that threatens to consume her and her child. “We Really Thought He Would Snap Out Of The Trump Thing” shows a brother’s shift to hard right politics over the course of conversations.

Not all take on topics as serious as politics. Slackjaw has humor writing that run the full gamut of culture, from Danielle Koenig’s I, Timothée Chalamet, Just Want To Play A Guy Who’s Not Good At Anything (lampooning the actor’s penchant for taking roles that require quite a bit of training) to Sam E. Sutin’s We’re The Job You Applied For Seven Years Ago, And We’re Afraid You’re Not What We’re Looking For At This Time (which is pretty much what it says on the tin).

People reach for words like best friends and the words aren’t wrong but they’re not quite right either. Like trying to describe a colour by comparing it to another colour. You can get close but you keep missing the thing itself.

— Christopher Sampson, Seasons: A Love Story

Short, sweet, unforgettable

Sometimes, a handful of lines can grab you and not let go — just ask Ernest Hemingway. The flash fiction writers on Medium understand this intrinsically, challenging themselves to create distilled pieces of only a few lines each. Publications like Teaser Tales, Microcosm, and Fiction Shorts are dedicated to hosting and curating this art form.

Because it’s so short, flash fiction is also an extremely popular way for would-be and lapsed writers to kickstart their writing habits. Many of these publications offer prompts to get writers started. Tantalizing Tales, for example, is prompting writers to write stories about their dreams. Story Lamp Reviews offers two: Stories inspired by a tantalizing photo, or stories about decisions that cannot be undone. These prompts — usually offered weekly or monthly — are instrumental at starting habits, playing a key role in building the fiction writer community. Who knows, maybe your work could appear in a future anthology organized by editors of publications?

A final thought

This week, Jaime DeLanghe, EVP Chief Product Officer at Slack, reflected on the changing measurement of work. In The Work is the Conversation, she compares “thick work” — the documents, files, and other deliverables — to the fuzzier conversations and meetings of “thin work.”

Traditionally, the output was most important. But the rise of AI is making the actual, chunky production of work materials much simpler. Now, output is cheap. The most important work is not the production, but the brainstorming:

The conversation is actually the thick stuff. It’s layered. It’s contradictory. It changes over time. It understands the organizational intent that no document ever fully captures. It’s where the real thinking happens, where bad ideas get killed and good ones get refined, where trust gets built or broken. The document is thin. It’s a snapshot. It’s one moment of apparent consensus pulled out of a process that was actually messy and alive.

Take that with you as you work this week.

Contribute to the fiction renaissance on Medium! Submit a short story, write a satirical short, and support your favorite fiction writers by reading and engaging with their work. Find a prompt to get started, or you can check out the Fiction tag and dig in.

Deepen your understanding every week with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by brandon echter, Scott Lamb, and Carly Rose Gillis.

Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and join a community that believes in human storytelling.

Fiction as a mirror for truth was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Pride Month, writer Rand Bishop says, has a lot in common with the Fourth of July.

Independence Day in the U.S. is a time for celebration: hot dogs, fireworks, quality time with family and friends. But it’s also a time for reflection. “After 250 years,” he writes, “we are still working on becoming ‘a more perfect union.’”

The same could be said of Pride Month. Since the first Christopher Street Liberation Day shortly after Stonewall, Pride has been a celebration of LGBTQ+ people around the world with parades, dancing, drag, and festivals. “But,” Bishop writes, “as we party in the streets, we mustn’t forget that our struggle is far from over.”

In this issue, we take a look at the reflections on where LGBTQ+ rights have come from and where they are today.

“Kelly, my husband, has been dead for four months. Just last week I finally started sleeping in our bed again. I’ve been sleeping on the couch. I couldn’t bring myself to lie down in our empty bed. I miss the weight of him next to me, and the sound of his breathing. I miss being able to reach out and know he’s there.

“My visitor is Bubba. That’s what I call him, short for Beelzebub. My sleep demon.”

— Ladi Loera, Beelzebubba: A Gay Man’s Demon, Dog, and Grief

The state of the world

The struggle for rights moves in fits and starts; sometimes rights progress before snapping back. In the United States, there were over 400 anti-LGBTQ+ bills advancing across 47 states this past May alone, according to the Movement Advancement Project.

Writer Felicity Azura looks at the back and forth in a Pacific Island nation in Queer rights for Tonga. Despite signaled support from the Tongan monarchy, the struggle for rights continues to see pushback: homophobic murders and attacks on activists; the ouster of the first openly gay judge; Tongan queer people applying for asylum. “Tonga was the only Polynesian country to not sign the United Nations joint statement to end queerphobic violence in 2011,” she writes.

In the United Kingdom, the April 2025 Supreme Court ruling that “man,” “woman,” and “sex” refers to biological sex at birth has upended the lives of Britain’s trans people. Recent guidance from the publicly-funded Equality and Human Rights Commission suggesting that trans people refrain from using men and women-only spaces has only added to the confusion. In As a Member of the Trans+ Community in the UK, Where Do I Piss Now?, nonbinary writer Sarah TC explains how “trans+ people in the UK are being forced out of public life, by, ironically, an equality and human rights body.”

Devian Maside, a trans man, awoke the morning of the ruling to find himself legally classified as a woman. Very suddenly, his life was upended. He is out to his colleagues; would any of them report him for using men-only spaces like the locker room or bathroom?

“But, I still look like a man,” he writes. “If I walk into a women’s changing room, I am doing exactly what this ruling was supposed to prevent. And a question settled with fear in the pit of my stomach: Where do I go now?”

Until the EHRC reverses the ruling, Masside declares, “I will find refuge in the community that has always held me and cared for me — and I will keep on saying fuck it to this ruling. And trying my best to push doors open.”

“Honestly? I never knew what it feels like not to love a woman!

“Maybe because loving women was always the only answer to me for the ever-lurking question, Love!”

— Echos of Swarnali, I never knew what it feels like not to love a woman!

Clues from the past

In 1933, just days after Adolph Hitler was sworn in as chancellor, the Nazis burned books in Berlin. But it wasn’t just books on any topic; as Grace Ann Hansen points out, the kindling was the papers and records from “the largest sexological library on the planet.”

Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was the foremost research institution on gender-nonconforming patients in the early 20th century. Hirschfeld was an early champion of what we now call the LGBTQ+ community: He lobbied for decriminalization and rights, coined terms like transvestit, and performed gender-affirming care on patients from across Europe. Berlin was “the world’s leading city for LGBTQ+ life,” according to the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, and a whole corpus of cultural knowledge was lost to the fires.

For Hansen, there is no coincidence between what happened with Hirshfeld and what’s happening with LGBTQ+ protections today. “I am not predicting Stage 9,” she writes. “I am pointing out that we have an annotated map of these stages, drawn by people who walked the route for the first time.”

That threat inspired Joe Guay - Dispatches From the Guay Life!, to look back at the queer art of the past. Upon the recommendation of some fellow Medium writers, he picked up Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown. The 1973 book follows Molly Bolt, a young woman in the South who is not struggling to come out; instead, he writes, “here you had a lead character fully cognizant of her gayness, frustrated by the confines of the world, sure, but not once apologizing for it or showing a hint of shame.”

Another book from the time, Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner, tells the story of Billy Sive, a gay man that shares Molly’s self assuredness:

What a slap in the face, realizing this book was on shelves the year I was born and yet the adults in my life raised me through the ’80s and ’90s as though “this gay thing” was a new development and no such pride was allowed or ever even existed.

For both Hansen and Guay, the clues from what came before them provide context for the future. Queer people are not new; instead, their stories have been actively hidden from the people that need them most.

“Either way, I’m still here,” Guay writes. “We’re still here.”

A final thought

James Dale was the Eagle Scout at the center of the 2000 U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the Boy Scouts could expel homosexuals. In He Said, “Over my dead body.” I’m the Gay Boy Scout Who Finally Went Back, Dale returns to the Boy Scout summer camp more than three decades after its camp director declared that “James Dale will never step foot in this camp again.”

This moment, when Dale goes on a hike to a nearby waterfall, feels particularly apt:

The Boy Scouts had their policies and lodges, their rituals and awards, all created to elevate or separate. The cool mist of the falls sprayed across my face. They could never own Darlington Falls.

Many of the stories from this newsletter come from Prism & Pen, a publication focused on LGBTQ+ voices. If you’re looking for more stories from the greater community, we suggest checking out the LGBTQ, Queer, or Pride Month tags. And if you find a great Pride story this month, submit it to us through this form!

Deepen your understanding every week with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by brandon echter, Scott Lamb, and Carly Rose Gillis.

Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and join a community that believes in human storytelling.

How Pride is like Independence Day was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Want to find some of the most interesting and best writing on Medium? Go to the publications. Publications are the backbone of Medium. They’re the ones who do the heavy work of reading, editing, and curating some of the most interesting writing on the site.

For this issue of the Medium Newsletter, rather than covering a topic or specific piece, we want to highlight some of the publications that make those pieces possible in the first place.

Interested in culture writing?

Take a tour of these publications: Counter Arts features writing from the broader cultural world; Books Are Our Superpower for books; Frame Rated and Cinemania for film; The Riff and Rock n’ Heavy for music; Tastyble and The Rooted for food; Full Frame and Live View for photography. And if you want to just read conversations about general pop culture, you can always check out Fanfare or The Ugly Monster.

Where to get started

The great thing about publications (the vast majority of which are run and organized by Medium users) is that there are literally thousands of them on just about any topic under the sun. But if you’re having trouble finding them, never fear — finding a great publication is as simple as finding a great story you like. You will always see what publication it is featured in directly above its title, right by the writer’s name.

There are a few more places you can go to find great stories and publications. First, log in and check out your home page. These individual picks are determined by what you and the people you follow read and connect with. You can control what you see in your home feed by interacting with the stories you like and want to see more of through signals you send to us — so always be sure to clap, highlight, comment, and repost.

Second, you can find them by exploring specific topics. Head to the Explore Topics page and click on any of the specific topic pages. This will bring you to a list of recommended stories, which can help you discover publications related to those topics! (Conversely, if you do not want to see stories recommended to you about specific topics, you can now mute topics.)

The Medium staff also maintains a massive list of publications that are currently accepting submissions — a good way to find publications that are currently active. (And if you want to submit something you’ve written to a publication, check out this guide from The Medium Handbook by Zulie @ Medium so you can set yourself up for success.)

Once you’ve found your new favorite publication, make sure to follow it so you can find it easily from your home page!

Do you want to read deep, moving creative nonfiction?

The Memorist, as its name suggests, focuses almost entirely on memoirs. Age of Empathy publishes monthly prompts that will help you understand other points of view. Frazzled and The Parenting Portal feature writing aimed at those raising kids, while Life Without Children has essays for those who choose to be child-free. For women who are approaching middle age, there’s Middle Pause. The Grief Book Club shares essays and opinions on the grieving process. Fourth Wave, Bitchy, Modern Women, and The Virago have writings from a feminist point of view, while Prism Pen elevates voices from the LGBTQ+ community.

Celebrating editors

None of these publications would be anything without their editors. That’s why we here at Medium want to reward these unsung heroes of the writing process.

The newly announced Editor Partner Program makes sure we can reward editors at qualifying publications for the work they do. Here’s how it works:

“Once a publication is in the program, editors will be able to claim stories in the submissions queue to indicate they’re working on them. When the story is published, the editor will earn 25% of what the story earned.

Writers won’t see any drop in their story earnings. For example, if a writer’s story in a publication would earn $100, the writer still will earn that amount — the editor will get a 25% bonus on top of that. We’ve increased the total amount of Medium subscriber funds we pay out to our community to make this program happen.”

We’ll be opening up the Editor Partner Program for a small group of publications in June, with a sitewide launch coming later in the summer. Make sure to follow the Medium Blog (also a publication, by the way!) for the latest updates.

Want to learn something new?

The Academic is a publication that publishes science papers, or get more focused with others like Microbial Instincts (microbiology), Fossil et. al (paleontology), or The Environment (environmental science and climate). Tech-focused publications like AI Advances, Code like a Girl, and Mac O’Clock produce some of the most-read stories on Medium. Curious about the origins of words or how we communicate? Go to Language Lab. Interested in authentic Japanese culture? Read Japonica. For news, politics, and social justice, check out, Momentum, Policy Panorama, or An Injustice!

A final thought

This week we were struck by How To Quit Everything and Make Stained Glass from Poor Steward, with Katlyn Roberts. This story, published in mental health publication Invisible Illness, is a wonderful perspective from someone who feels different but still feels the urge to “create something beautiful.”

One thing to keep in mind, as sometimes we fight the urge to have everything perfect before we create:

Spiders weave their webs anywhere, right? They’re pretty famous for it. Whatever sticks, sticks, whether they mean for it to or not. Sometimes, this is what sustains them. Sometimes, it weighs them down. But they get to just focus on the weaving — on the obsessive, monotropic, locked-in weaving.

Weave on, writers and editors.

Deepen your understanding every week with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by brandon echter, Scott Lamb, and Carly Rose Gillis.

Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and join a community that believes in human storytelling.

There’s a publication for everything was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Where can you go to learn a new skill, gain a new perspective, or make a new connection, all in one place? Join us for Medium Day 2026!

We’re hosting our annual free, live, virtual expo on Friday, September 18th, from 8 a.m. ET to 8 p.m ET. This year, we’ll bring together community speakers alongside external experts. Expect a full day of sessions dedicated to two things: learning from people who genuinely know their subject, and becoming a better writer. Registrations to attend will open in July.

Do you have something to contribute to those areas? We’d love to invite you to apply to speak at Medium Day.

Apply here.

Why speak at Medium Day 2026

Over 15,000 people register each year from all over the world. We’ve heard from speakers in previous years that speaking at Medium Day is a great opportunity to reach new readers, grow your audience, and network with the Medium community.

Attendees are an audience of highly motivated Medium readers and writers actively looking for new voices to follow, and it’s a great opportunity to highlight in your speaker portfolio. Previous speakers tell us that speaking at Medium Day is a great professional opportunity to present to an interested, engaged, curious audience. We also hear that it’s an incredibly rewarding way to get to know both those in your existing network, as well as meet new readers.

Medium Day 2026 tracks

This year, we’re asking speakers to choose to categorize their talks into one of three tracks: Craft, Perspectives, and Community.

• Craft is for writers who want to teach writing. If you have a teachable, distinctive process or approach on the craft of writing, we want you.
• Perspectives is for experts in any field who want to share what they know. Topics can be as broad ranging as science, health, technology, culture, society, finance, and beyond. What all talks in this track have in common is that you’ll be teaching attendees something they didn’t know before, as someone who has lived it, studied it, or built something related to it.
• Community is for editors and writers who want to bring people together. If you love hosting spaces for attendees to connect around a shared interest or subject related to writing, and you know how to hold a room, pitch us on your meetup idea.

We’re also open to other proposals like networking activities, games, and collaborative exercises, if you have a specific idea to bring people together in a fun and useful way.

Tips for applying to speak at Medium Day 2026

We’ve been fortunate enough in previous years to get hundreds of fantastic proposals, so we wanted to give some advice on which proposals are most likely to get an enthusiastic yes from us.

• You have a specific angle, not just a topic. Not just “mental health,” or “food,” but a specific insight, lesson, or argument within that topic. Try to articulate your session’s central idea and the value to attendees in one sentence. If you’ve got that ready, you’ve got a great shot.
• Your perspective comes from direct experience. You’ve done the thing, studied it, lived it, or built something related to it.
• You can make it useful for someone else. The best Medium Day sessions leave attendees with something they can take away and apply elsewhere.
• Your work is on Medium. We give strong preference to writers who are actively publishing on Medium, and we’ll read your work as part of our review. Your writing, alongside your application, is the best material we have for how you think and communicate.

What else do you need to know?

Applications close June 19th. Here’s the link to apply.

Once you’ve applied, sit back and relax! We review applications on a rolling basis. If you’re selected to speak, you’ll get training and prep support for the event.

Any questions? Email events@medium.com. We can’t wait to see your application.

Join us for Medium Day 2026: Friday, September 18 was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

So often, as the cliche goes, history is only told by the victor. What does that mean in practice though, especially when there aren’t necessarily clear winners and losers, but many sides of a story to be told?

For many groups in the U.S., being part of the story remains a struggle. The labor movement in the U.S., for example, is rooted in part in the work of Asian Americans, even if their role isn’t widely known. In Hollywood, too, the visibility of Asian Americans remains muted, despite recent advances. And the enduring “Asian American success frame” is complex, raising the question of why and whose framing it actually is.

For AAPI Heritage Month, we’re highlighting a few of the many essays from this community on Medium so that we can better understand why certain stories get told, and what happens when others don’t.

Labor history and immigrant rights

Miles Kim of Hidden History: Beyond the Books traces the essential role Asian Americans played in the U.S. labor movement. In 1867, Chinese railroad workers staged one of the earliest labor actions in the American West, striking for fair wages and an 8-hour workday. The 1903 Japanese-Mexican Labor Association became the first successful multi-racial agricultural union. In 1965, Filipino labor leader Larry Itliong organized the Delano Grape Strike, which merged with Dolores Huerta’s movement to form the United Farm Workers. And in 1982, 20,000 Chinese garment workers in Manhattan struck for fair wages — an action that led to the creation of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, which continues to fight for workers’ rights today.

This also extends to immigrant rights. Advocacy organization Advancing Justice – AAJC recently shared a story about how, in 1898, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Wong Kim Ark, a cook who had been detained in San Francisco three years earlier upon returning from a trip to China, blocked from re-entering his own country under the Chinese Exclusion Act — affirming birthright citizenship for anyone born in the U.S. “of whatever race or color.”

Today, that right is under threat: an estimated 1.8 million U.S.-born children could be impacted by current attacks on birthright citizenship. The AAJC also highlights how language access in schools is being targeted — while Title VI protections for English Learners remain law, federal funding has been slashed to zero and the Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA) faces shutdown.

Whose stories get told?

Another trend of stories that caught our eye is about representation in U.S. media. In The Value of Hollywood Portraying Asian Men as Attractive, Jessica Lim writes about how Asian men are historically cast as nerdy sidekicks, yet rarely as romantic leads. There are signs of progress: the TV show Heated Rivalry marks a shift, with half-Korean Canadian actor Hudson Williams being marketed as a heartthrob rather than a sidekick. “I hope that little Asian kids are like, ‘Ooh, I want to become an actor,’” Williams said. But setbacks persist — the film 21, based on the true story of Asian-American MIT students who beat Vegas casinos, was recast with white actors, erasing the real people’s identities entirely.

Even when representation appears to improve, questions remain about whose stories get told. While many in the AAPI community celebrated Crazy Rich Asians as groundbreaking, others raised concerns. Academic Sheng-mei Ma argues that 99% of Asian Americans are “neither crazy, nor rich, nor Asian” in the way the film portrays. This debate reflects ongoing conversations within the community about what authentic representation looks like. Meanwhile, Asian artists are often encouraged to lean heavily on ethnicity rather than craft. As one Medium writer put it: “We cannot afford to promote works based solely on who made them, rather than what they say and how well they say it.”

Disrupting the “Asian American success frame”

Stephen Chen, Associate Professor of Psychology at Wellesley College, critiques what he calls the “Asian American success frame” for The Conversation U.S. Based on his work with Asian American families for over two decades, he describes how it narrowly defines success by attaining elite credentials, Ivy League degrees, and select occupations like medicine, law, or finance. These expectations are often rooted in immigrant parents’ own experiences of discrimination and scarcity, then internalized and reinforced by U.S. society’s obsession with prestige and credentialism.

Drawing on the ancient Chinese philosopher Laozi and the Daodejing, Chen offers an invitation to look at that endless pursuit of status through another lens: “The more you desire, the more it costs. / The more you hoard, the more you’ll waste.” Chen also shares research that backs this up: the perception of “low” relative status takes a real toll on both the parents (reports of more depressive symptoms), and their children (reports of more loneliness).

Although Laozi suggests our truest desires can only be uncovered when freed from those imposed by society, systemic escape is hard to attain. But Chen offers a powerfully subtle disruption for families facing these expectations: permission to question the success frame, ancient wisdom that validates that questioning, and research showing that many families are already rewriting the script.

A final thought

Megan Zapanta, Richmond Organizer Director for Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), shared this roundup of children’s books on AAPI themes. One example is the Caldecott Medal-winning A Different Pond by Bao Phi, a refugee from Vietnam, which shares lessons from his father’s life through the act of fishing. Zapanta shares her direct experience with each book based on her work with APEN, and teaches us how taking a moment to reflect on your kid’s bookshelf can lead to change:

“Reading these books, cuddled in bed with my kids, helps our family not just make sense of the moment, but to think about what action we can all take.”

What have you seen?

We urge you not to stop with these stories — this issue features just a sampling of the variety of perspectives and unique personal stories that relate to AAPI Heritage Month. Search for related identities and topics on Medium to find stories that highlight other communities and themes. Be sure to follow/subscribe to the writers and publications you find, so you can continue to support them all year long.

When it comes to this and other heritage months, we’d love to know what stories you’d like for us to highlight. Use this form to submit stories you’re seeing that are connected to this and other heritage holidays, and we may include them in Medium newsletters or lists in the future!

Deepen your understanding every week with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by brandon echter, Scott Lamb, & Carly Rose Gillis

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Which stories get told? was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Whether you edit at a big or a small publication, you might see some low-effort submissions in your submissions queue.

Starting today, you can now manage those submissions a little more easily with the ability to bulk-block writers and bulk-decline stories.

To bulk-decline stories, you can select as many stories as you want, and then choose “decline.” To block writers from being able to submit to your publication again, just select those stories in your submissions queue and click “block.” This both declines all submissions from those writers and blocks those writers from being able to submit stories to your publication again.

Editors could already block writers from submitting to their publications, without blocking the writer from their personal account or from reading stories in the publication. But we heard from editors that you wanted an easier way to deal with writers and submissions that didn’t fit your publication.

What’s the history behind this change?

We’re balancing two desires: to make managing publications a joy for editors, and help writers access great publications.

On the one hand, we want writers to easily access the huge number of publications that give stories a great home and audience on Medium. Last summer, we released a streamlined submission system with that aim. For publications that choose the simple submission system, all writers have to do is follow that publication to submit to it.

Previously, every publication had a different system to manage new writer submissions — some required writers to fill out a form, others needed a draft emailed, still others asked that aspiring writers follow the pub, the editor, and leave a response on the submission guidelines. New writer and existing writer submissions were handled in different inboxes. Now, many editors use open submissions to make that workflow simpler for them.

On the other hand, we also heard from editors who turn on open submissions that they quickly get flooded with low-effort stories from writers who aren’t a good fit for their publication. We want to make sure the tools we build help, rather than hinder, the work of running great publications.

That’s why we were eager to invest in ways to help editors manage their submissions queue. We hope that the simpler we make it for editors to manage submissions and get stories from writers they’re excited to work with, the more editors will turn on open submissions and the more writers will be able to take advantage of the benefits writing for a publication offers them.

What’s next?

We’ve already taken steps to make submissions higher quality for editors — for example, many editors have told us that tightening the Partner Program application process helped curb the worst of the spam. These submission management tools are another stepping stone.

While these new features are just a small tweak in the submissions queue, we are looking forward to making submissions even easier for editors to run, in as many ways as we can. Feedback, thoughts, or questions, as always, are welcome in the responses.

FAQ

Why would I block a writer from submitting to my publication?

Block a writer when their submissions consistently don’t fit your publication and you don’t want to keep declining their stories individually. Blocking prevents them from submitting again, so you spend less time managing the queue.

How can I block more than one writer at a time from submitting to my publication?

In your submissions queue, select the stories from the writers you want to block, then click “Block.” This blocks all selected writers at once and declines their pending submissions.

What happens when I block a writer from submitting to my publication?

All pending submissions from that writer are declined, and the writer can no longer submit new stories to your publication. They can still read stories in your publication.

What’s the difference between declining a story and blocking a writer?

Declining removes a specific story from your queue but lets the writer submit again. Blocking both declines all their pending submissions in your publication and prevents them from submitting to your publication in the future.

Does blocking a writer from my publication affect their overall Medium account?

No. Blocking only applies to submissions to your publication. The writer can still publish on Medium, read your publication, and submit to other publications.

Will a writer know they’ve been blocked from submitting to my publication?

The writer doesn’t get a notification, but your publication will no longer show up in their publication selection page.

Can I unblock a writer after blocking them?

Yes. In Inbox > Settings > Blocked Users

How many stories or writers can I select for bulk actions at once?

Up to 100 at a time.

Do I have to block a writer to decline their stories in bulk?

No. You can bulk-decline stories without blocking the writers. Select the stories and click “Decline.” This removes them from your queue without preventing future submissions.

Does blocking a writer from submitting also block them from reading my publication?

No. Blocking only restricts submissions. The writer can still follow and read your publication

Editors, you can now more easily decline and block low-effort submissions to your publication was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We try to make sure every story we recommend to you is a delight. But we know sometimes there are just topics you’re not interested in seeing stories about. We want to give you more ways to make sure the stories that show up on your home page and in your digest emails are to your taste.

Now, when you hit the thumbs down button on a story you want to see less of, you’ll be able to choose to mute any of the topics that story was tagged with. You can do this on any story you see in your feed, as well as on the three-dot menu on the individual story page.

How muting topics affects your feed

One theme we’ve seen coming up again and again these past few years is that human taste wins, and that human curation matters, both that of others and your own. That’s why we’re investing in paying editors, that’s why we’re giving you more ways to recommend stories to your network with reposting, and that’s why it’s so important for us to build tools to let you have as much control over the stories you see as possible. While readers could already mute writers and publications from their recommendations, we’re excited to add topic muting to the mix as well.

Muting topics can be useful for any number of reasons. Sometimes, you’ve fallen victim to hateclicking. We often hear from readers that they don’t understand why a story about AI, or politics, or relationships was recommended to them. But when we look at their history, we see they’ve engaged with stories like that in the past.

It’s difficult for any system to differentiate, “Hey, this looks interesting, let me read and leave a response” type of engagement from, “Oh wow, they have it so wrong, I need to click on this and let them know how wrong they are in the comments!” engagement.

It’s also useful because your tastes and circumstances change. Today, you might be a grad student, or fresh on the dating scene, or trying to learn Javascript — and tomorrow, that’s no longer true. Muting topics gives you a way to leave behind the stories that no longer serve you, and bring fresh, new, and better stories to your feed.

Early results show how powerful muting topics can be

Fun fact: There are more active writers on Medium than at any other point in our history. That means there are more possible stories than ever before that we could recommend to you.

We rolled this out to users only a week ago, we’ve already seen how much muting just one topic can affect the kinds of stories you see. On average, muting one topic can replace around 10% of stories from your feed from that topic to other recommended stories.

If there’s a topic you want to see less of, try it out and see how different your feed can feel. And if you want to fine-tune your recommendations, you can always adjust your mute settings here, adjust your follows here, and clean up your reading history here.

Feedback to share? Let us know what you think in the responses.

Muting topics: A new way to control the stories you see on Medium was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ever read a great story and wish you could share it with your community on Medium with a single click? With reposts, you can do exactly that. Any time you stumble across a story that you want to spread more widely, just click the repost button to help bring that story to your followers on their Medium home feed.

Note: Make sure you update to the latest version of the app to get access to this feature on mobile.

Share meaningful stories with readers who trust you

We developed reposts as a way for readers to share the stories that move you. Medium is full of stories that make you chuckle, consider something from a different perspective, or teach you something new. We want readers to have more ways to bring those stories to light.

Our recommendation system is pretty good at matching stories to your interests, but we know that more and more readers want to get story recommendations from people they know and trust.

I’ve experienced this myself already — while we were testing the feature, we opened up a temporary Slack channel for staff members to repost stories into. I got to read stories that never would have crossed my feed, like one about making yourself uncomfortable on purpose, or about the fate of a car designed for women, by women, or about how to worldbuild a fantasy economy. But I know and trust my coworkers, so I gave them a shot and I loved them.

Note: If you see your story already has reposts from before we launched the feature, that means one of our staff members saw your story and wanted to share it more widely! Thank you for writing that story.

How does reposting work?

You may already be used to seeing a touch of human-led curation across your home feed lately. When someone in your network claps for a story or highlights it, it can cause that story to show up in the home feed recommendations:

Right now, reposting a story does the same thing. It’s a simple way to share stories with your Medium community.

Readers have also asked for more ways to catalog and come back to stories you love. Now, you can use your Activity feed and filter to your reposted stories to see any stories you’ve reposted to your community.

What’s next?

Today, more writers are writing on Medium than at any other point in time during Medium’s history. We want to bring more ways to make sure those stories are finding their readers. Expect more to come to reposting as we continue working on better ways to bring delightful, thoughtful, meaningful stories to readers through as many different channels as possible. In the meantime, we can’t wait to see what stories you most enjoy reposting.

FAQ

What is a repost on Medium? A repost lets you share any story on Medium with your followers. When you repost a story, it appears in your followers’ home feeds, like how retweets or reshares work on other platforms.

How do I repost a story? Click the repost button on any story. The story will then appear in the home feeds of people who follow you.

Where does a reposted story appear? When you repost a story, it shows up in your followers’ Medium home feed recommendations, as well as in the activity tab on your profile.

Who can repost stories? Any reader of any story can repost it (other than your own). Remember that if you repost a paywalled story, that story will still only be accessible to Medium members.

Can I repost my own stories? No, you can only repost the stories of others.

How many stories can I repost? As many as you like.

How do I see all the stories I’ve reposted? Go to your Activity feed and filter by “Reposted stories.” This shows every story you’ve shared with your community.

Will the writer know I reposted their story? Yes, the writer will get a notification.

Can I undo a repost? Yes, just hit the repost button again.

Why does my story already have reposts if the feature just launched? During testing, Medium staff members could repost stories into an internal channel. If your story already has reposts, that means a Medium staff member shared it because we loved it and thought our colleagues would enjoy it, too.

How is a repost different from clapping, highlighting, or leaving a response? Claps and highlights can help bring a story to your followers’ feeds, but they serve different purposes. A clap is more like a signal that you liked that story; a highlight can be a way to collect your favorite ideas about a piece. A repost, meanwhile, is an explicit, intentional share. Its primary function is to bring it to other readers.

Does reposting affect how Medium recommends a story? Right now, reposting works similarly to other social signals like claps and highlights. When you repost a story, that story could appear in your followers’ home feed recommendations.

Can I repost stories behind the paywall? Yes, although remember that only Medium members will be able to read those stories.

Reposting: A new way to share stories you love with your followers was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.