9/16 to 9/21, 2025

Welcome back to This Week, Basically, I’m Robyn Davies — here to condense another week of high politics, human stories, and the restless pulse of art and ambition. This one swings from Kabul to the Bronx, from the United Nations to 53rd Street. Let’s start where the lights are dimmest.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban’s education ministry issued a new decree this week: all books by women are to be banned from universities. Librarians were ordered to pull works by Afghan and foreign women, poets, scientists, and historians alike, from shelves. Some professors refused; others quietly boxed them up overnight. The edict builds on years of restrictions since 2021: women barred from classrooms, then from teaching, and now from being read at all. One Kabul professor compared it to “erasing half the alphabet.” Students are already circulating PDFs of banned texts over encrypted apps, risking arrest. The regime calls the purge “moral cleansing.” Critics call it cultural annihilation.

A world away, a different kind of resistance is unfolding quietly inside Myanmar’s jails. A group of Catholic volunteers, aid workers, and ex-prisoners has been organizing a clandestine effort to free nuns detained by the junta. The “plot,” as one priest called it, uses bribed guards and fake medical transfers to spirit them out to safe houses on the Thai border. The women had been arrested for sheltering protesters and students during the 2021 coup crackdown. In interviews, several rescuers said they were inspired by the same moral logic that drove 20th-century monastery smuggling networks in Nazi-occupied Europe. In a war that has crushed hope, this underground network is small but growing.

The United States, meanwhile, spent the week pulling back from the United Nations — and China was quick to move in. As the U.S. delegation boycotted two General Assembly committees and cut funding to human rights programs, Beijing filled the vacuum, pledging money and leadership in development and peacekeeping. Analysts warn the shift could cement China’s influence in U.N. institutions that shape global standards on trade, tech, and censorship. In essence: while America argues at home, China is writing the new rules abroad. “We left the table,” one former diplomat said, “and Beijing sat down in our seat.”

Domestically, the president is again leaning on the machinery of justice to target opponents. In Florida, Donald Trump privately urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to “move now” on prosecutions of several Democratic state officials. The conversation, caught in staff notes and later confirmed by two Justice Department sources, marks the latest escalation of his push to weaponize federal law enforcement. Bondi’s office has neither denied nor confirmed the directive, but internal memos show prosecutors told her it would be “ethically untenable.” The episode underscores the uneasy convergence of personal grievance and state power, the same axis defining much of Trump’s second term.

Overseas, a commemoration in South Korea marked the 75th anniversary of the Incheon Landing, the turning point in the Korean War. U.S. and Korean officials stood side by side at the harbor where General Douglas MacArthur’s gamble in 1950 changed the course of history and forged the alliance that still shapes Asia. President Yoon used the occasion to warn that Pyongyang’s partnership with Moscow and Beijing echoes the “pacts of old wars.” Meanwhile, American commanders vowed that the U.S.–Korea bond “remains unbreakable.” The symbolism was clear: even as Washington drifts from the U.N., it’s clinging tight to Seoul.

But not all alliances are noble. In Georgia and Alabama, hundreds of migrant workers who thought they’d been recruited for “taste of America” hospitality internships discovered instead they were trapped in exploitation. Promised resort jobs and cultural exchange visas, many ended up cleaning poultry plants for 12-hour shifts under fake contracts. Their passports were confiscated. Some were threatened with deportation if they complained. Federal investigators have now opened a criminal probe into the labor brokers who ran the scheme. “They told us we were family,” one worker said, “then locked the doors.” The program’s slogan, “Work, Learn, Experience”, now reads like cruel irony.

The culture of intimidation surrounding American politics is metastasizing online. In North Carolina, a 23-year-old student posted a short, sarcastic blog mocking Charlie Kirk’s gun rhetoric. Within hours, hundreds of death threats flooded his inbox. What followed was doxxing, vandalism, and a local pastor condemning him from the pulpit. The author, who asked not to be named, says he’s now in hiding. Civil rights lawyers argue that the incident shows how far-right influencer ecosystems can convert outrage into real-world menace in hours. In a landscape where every tweet feels like a spark, it’s getting dangerously easy to light a fire.

But let’s shift gears to a story about building instead of breaking. In the Bronx, a group of teenagers turned a high school project into a fully-fledged streetwear brand called EVNTLLY. Working out of a charter school with a basketball-themed curriculum, the students designed, trademarked, and pitched their line (bright orange hoodies symbolizing gun-violence awareness) to executives at Fanatics and the NBA Store . Against all odds, they landed the deal. Their teachers called it “a master class in applied learning”; the teens just called it hustle. It’s a reminder that sometimes, the antidote to cynicism is enterprise; not as a buzzword, but as survival.

And finally, to Midtown Manhattan, where Glenn D. Lowry’s three-decade reign at the Museum of Modern Art has come to an end . Lowry transformed MoMA twice — physically, through billion-dollar expansions, and intellectually, by redefining what “modern” means. He took over when contemporary art was derided as elite distraction and leaves it at a crossroads: richer, smarter, more global — but also more vulnerable to political headwinds. In his farewell gala, Lowry warned donors that “if we believe in pluralism and dissent, we’ll have to defend them.” It was an unusually urgent note from a man long seen as a diplomat of taste. The question now: can museums keep speaking boldly in a world increasingly hostile to nuance?

Books vanish, governments threaten, nuns disappear, and workers are betrayed. But also: teenagers invent fashion in the Bronx, and an art museum remembers its soul. That’s the tension running through this week — repression and reinvention, side by side. Every crackdown seems to spark a counter-creation, every silence a louder voice somewhere else.

That’s This Week, Basically. I’m Robyn Davies. Thanks for listening — and for remembering that even in the most controlled stories, there’s always someone rewriting the script.