Guardian reporter Carter Sherman covers abortion rights and gender politics

Carter Sherman reports on abortion rights and gender politics with a sensibility shaped by stories that turn private feeling into public struggle. The Guardian US reporter has also remembered being terrified by Ocarina of Time, a detail that points to why certain games last: they do not just entertain, they teach players how to feel anxiety, wonder, and suspense all at once.

A reporter built around contested lives

Sherman currently covers reproductive health and justice for The Guardian’s US newsroom, a beat that has put her at the center of state-level abortion fights and wider arguments over gender. Her Guardian work has included headlines such as “In Florida, the future of abortion might come down to men” and “Arizona says it will not enforce abortion ban until related lawsuit plays out,” which show how often her reporting tracks the legal and political mechanics of reproductive rights.

Before The Guardian, Sherman was a senior reporter at Vice News, where she focused on reproductive rights, sexual violence, and LGBTQ+ rights. Her bylines have also appeared in Elle, Ms. magazine, and Los Angeles magazine, extending the same reporting through venues that reach readers across politics, culture, and feminism. Publisher bios credit her with a Scripps Howard Award, a National Press Club Journalism Award, and four Emmy nominations, a record that reflects both print reporting and on-camera work.

The public profile behind the byline

Sherman’s own site says she covers gender and sexuality “across all kinds of media,” including print, behind the camera, and in front of it. SXSW has identified her as a US Podcast Host and Creative Director at The Guardian US, and The Guardian’s profile lists her Instagram handle as @heyyymizcarter. Those details matter because her public presence is not separate from her journalism; it is part of how she moves between reporting, hosting, and broader cultural commentary.

Her first book, The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future, was published in hardcover on June 24, 2025 and is listed at 352 pages. The title captures the same territory as her daily reporting: sex, politics, and the way younger generations inherit the arguments of older ones. Even the book fits the pattern of her career, which Northwestern Magazine summed up by saying she focuses on the facts in her coverage of taboo topics.

Why a memory of fear matters in games

That same attention to emotion is what makes Sherman’s recollection of Ocarina of Time useful as more than a nostalgic aside. Early blockbuster games did something modern media still struggles to replicate with the same force: they gave children large, shared worlds in which fear was not a failure state but part of the story. In Ocarina of Time, the feeling of danger sat beside exploration and discovery, so the memory of being scared became inseparable from the memory of playing.

The Guardian has treated that power as more than an individual reaction. In 2018, the paper marked the game’s 20th anniversary with a review that situated Ocarina of Time as a landmark of the medium. That anniversary treatment matters because it shows how firmly the game sits in cultural memory: people do not remember it only as a technical advance, but as a first encounter with a world that could feel enormous, eerie, and emotionally loaded.

Majora’s Mask and the architecture of childhood dread

The same pattern appeared again when The Guardian revisited Majora’s Mask for its 20th anniversary in 2020. The piece described the game as eerie and profound, and singled out its terrifying moon as one of the images players remember from childhood. That description gets at why early Nintendo-era epics remain so vivid decades later: they used atmosphere, repetition, and looming disaster to make tension feel personal.

What survives from those games is not simple nostalgia. It is the fact that they created emotional memory in real time, with a child’s first exposure to fear, time pressure, and narrative stakes wrapped into a playable world. The moon in Majora’s Mask and the unease of Ocarina of Time stayed in players’ minds because the games were asking them to live inside dread, not just watch it from a distance.

What Sherman's career reveals about endurance

Sherman’s reporting career and her games memory point to the same underlying idea: stories endure when they give people a way to understand anxiety before they have language for it. In abortion politics, that can mean watching how law, gender, and personal autonomy collide in Florida or Arizona. In games, it can mean remembering the first time a fantasy world felt unsafe enough to become real.

That is why Sherman fits so neatly into a conversation about Zelda’s cultural afterlife. She writes about the facts of power, body politics, and legal conflict, but her memory of Ocarina of Time also highlights something older and harder to quantify: the way blockbusters shape an emotional imagination. Those games lasted because they did not flatter childhood, they complicated it, and that made them unforgettable.