Editor’s note: this is the full PW members’ edition, featuring your weekly horoscopes, the Create feature, Planet Waves FM and more.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Amidst all the week’s typical news (White House contentiousness and Congressional budget-wrangling; a large earthquake in Taiwan; the tasteless use of a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., to sell trucks during the Superbowl; war and tragedy, and so on), one story caught my eye for its unique relationship to Aquarius themes. Thanks to cutting-edge DNA analysis, we now know that “Cheddar Man” — Britain’s oldest complete skeleton — had dark skin and blue eyes.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

In last week’s edition, called Take a Step Back, I did my best to explore the different angles of what aspires to be a feminist awakening. I’ve heard that saying “we must also protect boys” is an allegedly false equivalency to “we must stop the abuse of girls.” To me it seems more like an actual equivalency than a false one, and I asked my readers to explain this to me in language that a child can understand.

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Communion by Lucinda Abra.

Dear Friend and Reader:

It’s taken me a while to figure out what’s really going on with the #MeToo movement, at least so far as I can tell. I don’t accept as valid what I don’t understand, or what I see serious problems with. I might, when I gain an understanding, and see past the problems.

The #MeToo movement has been chaotic, and there are some issues, which I’ll get into in a moment. Finally, about five drafts into this article and after consulting many women in my life, I spoke with an old friend named Megan O’Connor, who was well on her way to being a midwife when I knew her as a journalism colleague 20 years ago.

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Editor’s note: this is the full PW members’ edition, featuring an expanded lead essay, your weekly horoscopes, the Create feature, Planet Waves FM and more.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Tomorrow night the Sun leaves Capricorn and ingresses Aquarius. That this sign change happens each year within a few days of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday (which was on Monday) feels fascinatingly appropriate, even though King was a Capricorn.

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Editor’s note: this is the full PW members’ edition, featuring your weekly horoscopes, the Create feature, Planet Waves FM and more.

Dear Friend and Reader:

The astrological traction that has been available to you all week (and which you’ve hopefully used to move some project or facet of life forward) is still in force. Though as we head toward the weekend, there are a couple of shifts in the energy.

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Editor’s note: this is the full PW members’ edition, featuring your weekly horoscopes, the Create feature, and more.

Dear Friend and Reader:

Even if the New Year’s Day Full Moon did not herald any major events in your personal life, this first week of 2018 still managed to begin with exceptional drama: namely, Pres. Trump’s incendiary, innuendo-loaded tweet taunting North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and Michael Wolff’s tell-all book describing the insanity in the current White House. We have some juicy astrology brewing, which means you can expect things to get stranger.

People in Seoul, South Korea, watch a TV news program showing President Trump’s tweet about North Korea. Photo by Ahn Young-joon / AP.

Just in case you’re on a January news fast and cleanse, here are the basics of what’s just unfolded: Earlier this week Kim Jong-un announced the reopening of the hotline with South Korea’s leaders (which Trump is now claiming credit for). Jong-un also mentioned in his New Year’s address that he will only use North Korea’s nukes defensively, and that “the entire mainland of the U.S. is within the range of our nuclear weapons and the nuclear button is always on the desk of my office.”

Not to be outdone, Trump took to Twitter on Jan. 2, announcing, “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un (sic) just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

For real. This is what the President of the United States just proclaimed in public. It smacks of penis anxiety; except, well… “button”? Does Trump actually have clitoris envy?

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Dear Friend and Reader:

It’s time to sign off from 2017, a memorable year if ever there was one.

Let’s see, the women’s march on Washington was in January; there were the hurricanes, after which people are still sitting in the dark; the California fires from which people are still evacuating; the trillion-and-a-half-dollar-plus tax cuts for billionaires, added to the federal debt; the killing of internet neutrality rules; and a hundred top entertainers, politicians, reporters and business executives being revealed as sexual harassers or rapists.

Terraced rice paddies in China; photo by Thierry Bornier.

There were the extremely strange, still unexplained mass shootings one night in Las Vegas; one Muslim travel ban after the next; the firing of the FBI director, and the president’s accusation that the Trump-appointed Justice Department is somehow Trump’s enemy; the indictment of four Trump campaign officials; North Korea making good on its nuclear ambitions; Russians still infiltrating the U.S. election apparatus; executive rule by Tweet Fiat; and so on.

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“Pegasus” by Christine Yates.

Dear Friend and Reader:

For the past two months in this series [see part one, and part two], we’ve been looking at the outer planet transits that take hold in 2018 and last years into the future. Saturn entered Capricorn on Dec. 19, which will be followed by Chiron entering Aries on April 17 and Uranus entering Taurus on May 15.

Just these three events, in such close proximity, describe a rapidly changing world. Distant outer planets describe the energy coming from the ground, as in figure-ground. They’re a background environmental factor that gradually manifests in tangible ways — or as the case may be, instantly.

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