OPENING SALVO // LOCAL ACTION COULD KEEP BIG TECH IN CHECK
The Elephants in the Room
To keep Big Tech in check, we need a healthy local ecosystem
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
Volume 7 // Issue 2 // Fall 2025 // Conservation
As my mother likes to remind her liberal daughter, it was a Republican president—Richard Nixon—who signed the Education Amendments of 1972 that included Title IX protections providing parity for girls and boys in educational spaces, including in sports. Sports were a major part of my life growing up—swim team, field hockey, and soccer. Being an athlete helped me to know my body and test its outer limits, and it helped me become a resilient person who loves being on a great team.
My mother, being my mother, used the opportunity of helping us to advocate for formation of a girls soccer team in 1991 to give us a senior-year high-school practicum in civics. She told us we had to get on the school board agenda, collect signatures, identify a coach, and work out how to share the fields with the boys, who already used them in fall—all problems I and my future teammates surmounted with our plan. //
For full text and images, consider reading RQ in print, on a Sunday afternoon, sun streaming through your window, coffee in hand, and nary a phone alert within sight or in earshot… just fine words, fine design, and the opportunity to make a stitch in time. // Subscribe or buy a single issue today. // Print is dead. Long live print. //