We asked healthcare professionals about their face masks of choice for everyday use

New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported Friday emphasizes the importance of wearing the right mask while in a high-risk setting.

According to the data, surgical masks reduce the risk of testing positive for COVID-19 by 66 percent. More effective masks, like N95 and KN95 masks, decrease the risk of infection by 83 percent. A KN95 filters 95 percent of particles, and so does an N95. A KF94 filters 94 percent of particles. The difference between the letters is the government standard certification.

“These data from real-world settings reinforce the importance of consistently wearing face masks or respirators to reduce the risk of acquisition of SARS-CoV-2 infection among the general public in indoor community settings,” the CDC said in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The research was conducted by the California Department of Public Health between Feb. 18 and Dec. 1, 2021 — before the omicron variant wave took off. The researchers surveyed 652 people who recently tested positive for the coronavirus and 176 who had tested negative. All of the participants were asked whether they had been in schools, restaurants, stores, churches or another public indoor setting within 14 days before getting tested, and whether or not they had worn a mask.

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This research adds to the evidence that surgical masks, N95 and KN95 masks, are better than cloth masks. Nearly two years into the pandemic, guidance on masking has changed quite a bit. In the beginning, public health officials told the public not to buy masks because they should be saved for medical professionals. Then, any kind of mask was advised, including cotton and cloth masks that many sewed at home. Most recently in January, the CDC updated its guidance on face masks, saying loose cloth masks offer the least protection against COVID-19. While their stance is still any mask is better than no mask, it has become more clear that cloth masks are less effective.

So, does that mean that everyone should wear surgical masks, N95 and KN95 masks all the time?

“My recommendation on masks obviously depends on context, even though it may appear that we’re peaking with respect to the current omicron wave, we’re still at a level where infections are high, and more importantly, hospitalizations have not completely fallen off yet,” Dr. Jahan Fahimi, who’s the Medical Director for the emergency department at the University of California–San Francisco (UCSF), told Salon.”And so whether it’s hospitalizations for or with COVID, what we’re recognizing is that it is still posing a pretty significant burden on the healthcare system, and so for that reason I would continue to recommend pretty liberal use of masks for all indoor spaces.”

Fahimi said as numbers fall, that can be reevaluated. For low-risk people who are vaccinated and boosted and around other low-risk people who are vaccinated and boosted, outside of their households, Fahimi said he’d recommend wearing surgical masks.

However, if you’re in a crowded space with little ventilation — like an airport — an N95 is appropriate. For Fahimi, as an emergency physician, he always wears an N95 at work. Outside of work, he wears a surgical mask.

“I wear regular surgical masks, and I just make sure that I have a good sort of seal on that surgical mask, that makes sure that the nose bridge is high and, and well fitted on the top of my nose, and obviously, I don’t take it down, I don’t let it slide down,” Fahimi said. “And to be totally honest, when I see folks who are wearing a cloth mask that slides down below their nose, I keep six feet of distance.”

Dr. Monica Gandhi, infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the UCSF, told Salon that there are six masks that she believes fit well and filter out the coronavirus effectively.

“I always recommend one of these six: an N95, KN95, FFP2, KF94, double mask (cloth plus surgical) or a cloth mask with a pocket for a filter,” Gandhi said. “I wrote a paper with Linsey Marr where we explore the protection of the latter two options and find strong protection.”

Gandhi said her personal favorite is the cloth mask that has a filter inside.

“The filter made of polypropylene material physically repels the virus (the polypropylene is negatively charged and so is the virus),” Gandhi said. “It is the lightest, thinnest option with the best protection and I find it the most comfortable. Moreover, you can wash the cloth mask and change the filter regularly; I change the filter every 2 days and wash the mask every 3-4 days.”

Dr. Amesh Adalja, who works in an intensive care unit, said when he is required to wear a mask he wears a surgical one that he usually obtains from the hospitals where he is on staff. He changes his mask everyday.

Read more on the omicron variant:

“The walls are closing in on Trump” and his operation is “in a meltdown” now: Former GOP lawmaker

Mike Pence’s rebuke of Donald Trump on Friday was the beginning of the end for the former president, according to former GOP Congresswoman Barbara Comstock.

“I think what you’re seeing is, the Trump operation is in sort of a meltdown,” Comstock told CNN on Saturday. “Of course, Mike Pence is right — Donald Trump was wrong — and he basically also called him un-American, and he did it in front of conservative Federalist Society members who gave him a standing ovation.”

Comstock noted that Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, also appeared at the event and was spotted speaking with former Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany — “who has turned over apparently, reportedly, a lot of her documents to the (House Jan. 6) committee.”

“You have Mike Pence staff meeting with the committee, talking to them, turning over documents now while the (National) Archive(s) documents are being turned over,” Comstock said.

“The walls are closing in on Trump, and I think this was a desperate audience-of-one resolution from the RNC,” Comstock said, referring to the Republican National Committee’s censure of Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) and Liz Cheney (R-WY), which referred to the Capitol insurrection as “legitimate political discourse.”

“Let’s not call it the Republican Party,” Comstock said of the RNC. “It’s 168 members who obviously are intimidated by Donald Trump.”

“But I think you’re going to have not just Mike Pence, but people like (former Attorney General) Bill Barr and other Justice Department people stand up,” she added. “If they interview people from the White House counsel’s office — they all told Donald Trump he was wrong. And then as we’ve talked about repeatedly, those Jan. 6 emails and contacts in the weeks and days leading up to it, all of that contemporaneous documentation is going to come out and spill out, and show that not only was Donald Trump wrong, he was engaged in what I think could very likely be criminal activity, but certainly was unconstitutional and impeachable, which will make people like Liz Cheney be more than right in what she’s doing, and (is) why the Jan. 6 committee is so important.”

After CNN host Jim Acosta played a clip of GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz criticizing Pence on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Comstock unloaded on the pair.

“These are the lowest of the low, these are the only people left in the Trump circle,” she said. “Look at who didn’t speak up yesterday. There were not people out on Fox (News) all day defending this resolution or pushing back on Mike Pence, or defending the former president and his talk of (Jan. 6) pardons. Republicans are now silent. So if you’re Donald Trump, that means you don’t have a lot of support. You may intimidate people, but these are all people who really ultimately hope you go away.”

“It’s all closing in on him, and these desperate people who he still has around him themselves may be in need of, hoping for, pardons or power from Donald Trump, something that will never come because he never will be re-elected,” Comstock said. “But it is a pathetic group who is still around him, and Republicans should not fear a man who has people around him you wouldn’t hire to run for a dog catcher’s race, so why would you fear these people now?”

Watch on YouTube.

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The bumblebee’s decline shows how we get conservation wrong

In a time of unprecedented species extinction, when seemingly every day brings news of yet another animal or plant on the precipice of population collapse, one of the creatures society depends on the most is fading with little fanfare: the humble, neighborly bumblebee. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, 12 of the 50 bumblebee species in North America are listed as at-risk, some declining by almost 90% in the last two decades.

As an avid honeybee keeper and environmental journalist, I don’t take any bee’s place within the world of pollinators lightly. But whereas there has been much ado about honeybees in recent years, there has been less angst over bumblebees. While their popular counterpart is making a comeback, several bumblebee species are now at risk of extinction. This contrast in fates says a lot about the different environmental pressures facing the two types of bees, but it also reveals a lot about our own, flawed ideas about conservation.

There isn’t a single cause to blame for the decline of these bumblebee species. Like so many other species making the slide to nonexistence, the insects have suffered from an amalgamation of habitat loss and degradation, exposure to pesticides — especially neuro-active insecticides known as neonicotinoids — climate change, and more recently, contagious disease.

Still, it is not too late to save the imperiled pollinators. For proof, one need look no further than the example of honeybees.

When beekeepers began reporting, years ago, that domesticated honeybees were dying off in large numbers — a phenomenon now known as colony collapse disorder — it sparked a massive public awareness campaign. And for good reason. Honeybees serve an essential purpose in our world, and their exploits and challenges are well-known at this point, including providing of one of the most delectable gifts on earth: honey. Even for the casual observer, it’s easy to see what’s at stake in the fight to preserve honeybees. Today, we are constantly on high alert to indicators of their health — their numbers, their care, their ecology. Every time I mention to someone that I am a beekeeper, I am met with such a disarming amount of goodwill it’s sometimes jarring.

But bumblebees don’t get such good word of mouth. That may be because we seemingly need nothing from them — nor them from us, except to be left alone to their fields and flowers.

Except, that’s not quite true.

Bumblebees provide us with a bounty. They are responsible for doing the majority of pollinating for potatoes, one of the most widely available foods around the globe. The bugs are also are important pollinators of raspberries, blueberries, cranberries, tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers. And let’s not forget the household garden, a delight to bumblebees, with their preference for comfrey, lavender, and honeysuckle. The list could go on. The 4,000 species of wild bees remain “understudied, undervalued, and left in the dark,” Jess Tyler, a staff scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, told me in an email. Yet we depend on them to pollinate wild plants all over the world. (Other unsung pollinators — bats, moths, beetles, and native bees and wasps the world over — are also essential workers to our food systems and ecologies. There would likely be no tequila without the few species of bats that at twilight visit agave plants.)

But in many ways, all the talk of what bees can do for us misses the point. I believe there needs to be space for non-transactional relationships between humans and the natural world — an idea that is at the heart of the Endangered Species Act. We must be willing to protect a species for its sake, for no other reason than to keep as much of the biodiversity within the world as we can muster.

And if we are going to be entirely honest about it, we don’t even know what many creatures of the world can offer us, and that’s okay. We are meddling with the forces of nature when we think animal A needs to provide us thing B; we may be missing a whole alphabet in between.

To that end, it’s imperative that more research and funding are dedicated to understanding what can be done about species declines, especially those driven by disease and pesticide exposure. Already, there are encouraging signs. Recent research shows decreased pesticide use attracts more wild bees, resulting in higher watermelon yields. And the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed into law by President Joe Biden last November includes funding to be set aside for pollinator roadsides.

However, the most critical step to protecting threatened bumblebee species will be to place them on the Endangered Species List. Last February the Center for Biological Diversity and the Bombus Pollinator Association of Law Students of Albany Law School filed a petition to do just that for the American bumblebee, Bombus pensylvanicus. In September, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced a year-long assessment of the species’ status. Woefully, however, the Fish and Wildlife Service often falls behind its deadlines to list species; a petition filed in 2015 to list the western bumblebee is still classified as “under review” six years later.

“Whether a species like the American bumblebee or the western bumblebee or the monarch butterfly get protected comes down to the government’s willingness and courage to take bold action to address species extinction,” said Tyler.

If bumblebee populations do continue to dwindle, most assuredly, we will be worse off for it. The honeybee may get all the glory, but the bumblebee deserves our fight.

Carly Nairn is a beekeeper and freelance environmentalist journalist.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

On “Cheer,” Jada Wooten is a role model, despite the narrative of “too much”-ness spun around her

In the second season of “Cheer,” Netflix’s popular documentary series about the world of competitive college cheerleading, one person out of many emerged as the most compelling, with a story and a competitive edge, the obvious main character in a sea of potential stars.

Jada Wooten.

The first season of “Cheer” centered on Navarro Junior College, a Texas community college whose team is the nearly un-beaten champion of the National Cheerleaders Association (NCA) College Nationals, Advanced Large Co-ed Junior College division. Nearly.

In its second season, the show widens its focus to include Navarro’s rivals, a fellow community college just up the road, Trinity Valley Community College (which originally turned down filming the first season of “Cheer,” wanting to focus on their athletics with no distractions). If Navarro is Goliath with its multi-thousand dollar, custom stage and athletes with agents and reality show appearances, Trinity Valley is the underdog with less of everything (money, support, renown) except talent.

Significantly, the Trinity Valley team also has more athletes of color “on mat” (meaning: competing when it counts), especially more women of color. That includes Wooten.

Wooten is a lead tumbler and flyer on the Trinity Valley team this season. She seems like one of those veritable athletes who can do it all, and do it all well. “She’s the Michael Jordan of that team,” Greg Whiteley, director of “Cheer,” said in an interview with ET.

But Wooten was dropped from planned appearances with Rebel Athletic, a leading athletic gear company, and said she was never invited to be on the “Cheer” Live Tour at all. In an Instagram post, Wooten, who was asked to sign with Rebel Athletic before the second season of “Cheer” aired, said the company had cut her from scheduled appearances at a mall, NCA and Cheersport.

“Their reason for this was my language in the show was bad and I don’t fit their brand,” Wooten wrote, sharing screenshots of an email exchange with a representative from the company. “She told me ‘moms won’t want their daughters taking pictures with you.'”

I watched the entire run of “Cheer,” and Wooten’s language doesn’t stand out. She doesn’t cuss more than other athletes — or their coaches. It’s also important to note: “Cheer” is not a kids’ show. After the arrest of first season star Jerry Harris on child pornography charges, the show devotes an entire episode to the subject of child sexual abuse, an episode that was difficult for me to get through. Other regular topics on the show include physical abuse and substance abuse.

It’s not for children. “Cheer” is rated MA.

But Wooten is a female athlete of color, and as such, is held to different standards than everyone else. The language is an excuse, as is attributing her passion, drive and success to “attitude,” a coded word ascribed to Black women and girls.

As Jennifer Farmer said in an interview with Salon: “Black women have been taught from the time that we were little girls, you cannot be angry. You cannot show emotion. They’re going to call you an angry Black woman, so you better be careful how you show up.”

And in “Cheer,” Wooten shows up incredibly, time and again: sticking her landing, soaring in stunts, pushing through and modeling excellence, both on and off the mat. Despite critics like Rebel Athletic, Wooten is, on the contrary, the best role model on the show.

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Wooten is persistent. She fell in 2019, an injury that required serious recovery, both physically and mentally. Like Simone Biles and the “twisties,” Wooten dealt with “mental blocks” that interfered with her sport. “It took me three years to fully get back to where I was . . . You can depend on coaches and your family all you want, but they can’t do it for you. So, at the end of the day, mentality is the hardest thing to beat,” she said in an interview with POPSUGAR.

But Wooten returned to competitive cheerleading and — spoiler alert — led her team to victory in 2021.

Wooten has the follow-through many of the athletes on “Cheer” lack. After competing with and studying at Trinity Valley Community College, Wooten has gone on to Sam Houston State University (so did her teammate DJ Burleson). If one of the goals of a junior college like Trinity Valley or Navarro is to potentially prepare students to enter four year-colleges to obtain Bachelor’s degrees, why are many of the Navarro athletes returning year after year? A central plot point on both seasons of the show is whether the athletes are “coming back.”

Importantly, as their previous year’s season was cut short due to COVID, Wooten is one of the only veterans on a team of rookies in “Cheer.” That vaulted her into a position of leadership on the team, a position we watch her grow into in real time, becoming more comfortable with responsibility, and turning into a person the others trust.

Wooten is supportive, not only a good athlete but a good teammate. She calls her team “the most talented team I’ve ever been on . . . [we’ve] got kids who can do all of it.” But she’s also not afraid to admit weaknesses, and to help her teammates if they come to her for advice, which they do. She shows them videos on her phone, coaching them like a coach herself.

Her coach Vontae Johnson calls her a teacher while other coach Khris Franklin says, “You really just need the one person that’s going to get to you the right way. And that’s Jada,” citing her as the reason fellow athletes had a breakthrough. She also keeps teammates on task with college coursework (something other athletes on “Cheer” notably neglect).

“This semester, I feel like a mom,” Wooten says on the show. “I think rookies changed a lot about me . . . And I have a soft spot for all the rookies here. All of them. You just gotta try to understand people. And some people need that, like they need people to prove to them that they actually care.”

“She cares so deeply,” director Whiteley said.

Wooten holds back tears as she pep talks her team. “She’s somebody you can look up to,” Johnson says on the show. “She’s not gonna be the type of leader that you don’t see setting a good example.”

If you think it’s shocking that athletic professionals would vilify someone with obvious athletic talent, scholastic drive and leadership skills, maybe you don’t know the reality of Black woman athletes, how they’re dehumanized, targeted and dismissed, perpetuating a long history of anti-Blackness. Possibly you missed when Biles was called a “childish national embarrassment” for putting her mental health issues ahead of Olympic acclaim. Or the threats Naomi Osaka has faced, official threats from the organizers of her sport. Or the drug-taking rumors that followed Florence Griffith Joyner her whole life.

Denying Wooten planned media appearances is not only preventing daughters from getting their pictures taken with an athlete of color they can look up to, it’s denying Wooten income and future opportunities. As a woman of color, Wooten is already destined to make much less income her whole life.

And competitive cheerleading is not a sport that athletes can do after college. Theirs is an event with no professional counterpoint, no longtime future. They can’t go pro. Their season ends in Daytona. While Wooten certainly seems to be planning ahead with her collegiate plans, she deserves to have just as many opportunities, media and otherwise, as white cheerleaders do.

As Gabrielle Union wrote about Wooten: “I see a young woman who seems to be suffering consequences for being a passionate athlete in a way the other girls who expressed themselves, similarly, have not. I see a woman that understands her worth and refuses the constant shape shifting to appease folks who find unapologetic Black women to be inappropriate.”

And Wooten wrote herself: “I won’t ‘clean up my language’ to appease them in order to fit in. Because you know what? It never stops there. There will always be one more ‘too much.'”

More stories like this:

Flammable and deadly: America’s unknown housing crisis speaks to larger problems

This past week, with President Biden’s visit to New York and sit-down with Mayor Eric Adams, after the murder of two NYPD officers, the news coverage was all about the need to reduce street crime and the flow of illegal guns into America’s urban neighborhoods. There was much said about the need for more aggressive policing to suppress street crime — and only passing references to addressing the underlying socioeconomic preconditions for violent lawlessness.

Largely ignored, however, was the role our economic system plays in letting so much of America’s housing stock in those communities fall into complete disrepair. This too is a crime, but as we saw with the Great Recession’s Wall Street residential mortgage heist, there’s never a perp walk for these landlords and hedge-fund types who profit from the scarcity of affordable housing.

After all, this is the campaign donor class that rents Congress.

The sorry state of so much of America’s housing stock has resulted in deadly tragedies that are invariably reported as one-off events, but when considered in the aggregate should inspire a national call to action.

“Studies show poverty is the single most important factor related to unintentional injuries in children,” according to FEMA. “According to the U.S. Fire Administration, fires and burns were the third leading cause of unintentional fatal injuries to children 14 or younger. In addition, children from low-income families have been found to be five times more likely to die in a fire.”

Last month in the Bronx, a high-rise fire that killed 17 people — eight of them children — was blamed on a faulty space heater and the failure of two apartment doors to close automatically, as required by the city building code.

In multiple press reports, tenants were quoted as complaining that the building was plagued by poor maintenance. They said they regularly relied on space heaters, boiling water and leaving their stoves on to supplement inadequate building heat.

Rep. Ritchie Torres, a newly-elected Democrat who represents the district where the blaze occurred, said the tragedy was emblematic of “a tale of two cities,” telling WNYC radio, “If you live in a luxury building in Manhattan, you can take fire safety for granted. But if you live in an affordable-housing complex in the South Bronx, there’s no guarantee your building will have a sprinkler system. There is no guarantee you will have functioning fire alarms, smoke alarms, self-closing doors or safety knobs on your stove.”

Zombies that kill

Last month, three Baltimore firefighters were killed fighting a fire in a “zombie home” that had been unoccupied for more than a decade and collapsed on them. Firefighters Kenny Lacayo and Kelsey Sadler and Lt. Paul Butrim were working on the first floor when they were trapped after the drywall and framing gave way. A fourth firefighter was also trapped but survived.

The Baltimore Sun reported that in 2015 a fire at the same vacant home left three firefighters injured and resulted in the house being condemned. It had been put up for tax sale four times but had no takers.

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“The homeowners had also received a citation in 2020 from the city housing department for failing to complete a required annual registration,” the newspaper reported. So the house that would kill these firefighters continued to stand for years as a monument to the multifaceted failure at every level of our “stuck nation.” It’s a political economy completely rigged to protect even decrepit property, even when it presents a clear and present danger to the neighborhood and to firefighters and other emergency workers.

With that fire we lost three selfless individuals who were dedicated to protecting life and property. Yet the community, state and nation they swore an oath to serve lets zombie homes stand, even as millions of Americans are homeless or shelter-insecure.

Everything but the actual cause

In 2009, Elizabeth, New Jersey, Fire Captain Gary Stephens, 57, was mortally injured when he was run over by a fire truck while responding to a fire in a vacant home in that city which had been the subject of numerous neighborhood complaints. Two homeless men who were living in the zombie home were arrested. One of them admitted to starting the fire to stay warm, pled guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to three years in jail. The second was convicted of trespassing and was sentenced to time served.

Because the incident was a line-of-duty death, the New Jersey Division of Fire Safety did an investigation that generated a 21 -page report captioned “career firefighter killed upon being run over by fire apparatus.”

“The purpose of firefighter casualty investigations is to report the causes of serious firefighter injuries or deaths and identify those measures which may be required to prevent the future occurrence of deaths and serious injuries under similar circumstances,” according to the report. “In some cases, new information may be developed, or old lessons reinforced, in an effort to prevent similar events in the future.”

There’s a passing reference to the cause of the fire being “vagrants who gained access into the home and ignited combustible materials found in the home for a warming fire.” The rest of the report puts the fire apparatus, the Elizabeth Fire Department’s training and its record keeping under a microscope and offers lessons learned, none of which included addressing the life-and-death consequences of letting homes sit vacant as community complaints pile up.

These stories are invariably datelined in poor neighborhoods of color that remain, more than a decade later, visibly scarred by the Great Recession.

Rotting from below

As has been widely reported, none of the Wall Street malefactors were ever held responsible for the collapse of residential property values on Main Street or MLK Boulevard that their greed engineered.

This hollowing out of so much of America was a bipartisan achievement that included tax cuts for the top tenth of the one percent even as America’s housing crisis deepened. Beltway politicians ignored the human and housing fallout even as they bailed out the same banks whose greedy speculation had created the crisis in the first place.

Of course, the national inattention to the zombie home crisis left the matter up to local and county authorities, who have all too often been compromised by local real estate and banking interests.

Letting these structures rot in place had dire consequences for surrounding neighborhoods, which saw their home values plummet. Squatters and drug dealers break into them and make them their own while the banks do their best to avoid taking responsibility for ownership. And this willful neglect.informed by systemic racism, has deadly consequences for the most vulnerable among us.

Collateral damage

Consider the 2012 blaze in the Vailsburg section of Newark, New Jersey, where a vacant house caught fire and the flames spread to an adjoining residential property, killing an adult and three children: a 3-year-old, a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old.

Vacant homes in varying levels of disrepair remain a major problem in New Jersey, with thousands of vacant zombie residential properties not just in the state’s urban core, but in suburban and rural areas as well. One national real estate tracking service reported that as of the fourth quarter of 2021, there were 1.3 million vacant residential properties in the United States.

Meanwhile, the Pew Research Center reports that almost half of those responding to a survey last October believe that finding affordable housing is a “major problem” in their community.

“The survey reflects the steep rise in home prices and rents during the pandemic that are intensifying an existing housing crisis, particularly in major cities, where demand for housing outpaces available supply,” according to Pew. “Cities and states are scrambling to implement policies that stimulate housing production and encourage increased density in hopes of relieving pressure on the overheated housing market.”

This housing squeeze was a precondition of the pandemic and no doubt helps drive that horrific statistic often cited by the Rev. Dr. William Barber: Every year in the U.S., before the pandemic, 250,000 Americans died from causes related to health care disparity and substandard housing.

Meanwhile, Biden had to throw in the towel on his $1.8 trillion dollar Build Back Better agenda because he couldn’t even get all of his own party’s senators to embrace it.

From within the Beltway things may look fine. But in the streets where zombie homes haunt the block, it’s always marginal — and it’s often the poor and our firefighters that pay the price. Restoring communities is not just about apprehending violent offenders. It’s about addressing the damage done by an economic system that feeds off the scarcity of basics — like a clean, safe and affordable place to raise your kids.

We need to address the crime wave in the corporate suites too.

Read more from Bob Hennelly on labor, inequality and our “Stuck Nation”:

Judge halts oil and gas leases in Gulf of Mexico; the largest offshore auction in U.S. history

On Thursday, a federal judge threw out the Department of Interior’s decision to lease more than 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas production — the largest offshore auction in U.S. history. The sale, which came just days after Biden vowed to “lead by example” in cutting emissions during U.N. climate talks in Scotland, could have resulted in 600 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions, according to a Guardian analysis of Interior Department data.

In a lawsuit filed by Earthjustice and others, the groups argued that the environmental analysis conducted under the Trump administration violated the National Environmental Policy Act by vastly underestimating the proposed sale’s climate impacts. In its assessment of the five-year leasing plan, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management concluded that the climate impacts would be worse if the leases went unsold because it would result in an increase in less-regulated development overseas.

In his decision, Washington D.C. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras agreed, ruling that the Biden administration relied on a faulty analysis of greenhouse-gas emissions that would result from the sale, violating federal law.

“This is a victory for all Gulf communities impacted by the onshore pollution from offshore drilling in the Gulf,” said Cynthia Sarthou, executive director of Healthy Gulf, one of the environmental groups that brought the lawsuit. “Today, we can look forward to the day when we stop selling off our public waters for pennies on the dollar when a just transition to a clean energy future is critical to our very survival.”

Environmental groups have routinely blasted the Biden administration for pledging to end fossil fuel development on federal lands and waters while simultaneously selling leases and approving drilling at a rapid clip. Earlier this month, the Bureau of Land Management released data showing that the Biden administration had approved 3,557 permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands, outpacing the Trump administration’s first-year count of 2,658 permits. More than 360 conservation and environmental-justice groups last week petitioned the administration to phase out oil and gas production on federal lands and waters to near zero by 2035.

In the first round of Gulf leasing, companies including Shell, BP, Chevron and ExxonMobil offered a combined $192 million for drilling rights on 308 tracts of seabed totaling more than 1.7 million acres. Although the sale had gone forward as planned, those leases had not yet taken effect, according to court documents.

In a statement, Interior spokesperson Melissa Schwartz reiterated the department’s position that it was “compelled to proceed” with the sale because of a previous court ruling that blocked Biden’s executive order to pause the federal leasing program. An August memo from the Department of Justice, however, contradicts those claims.

The Biden administration must now perform a new environmental analysis if it plans to resurrect the offshore leasing plan.

“Biden’s runaway drilling approvals are a spectacular failure of climate leadership,” said Taylor McKinnon, a senior public lands campaigner with the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement. “Avoiding catastrophic climate change requires ending new fossil fuel extraction, but Biden is racing in the opposite direction.”

Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

Paid leave for all: Worker advocates demand expanded protections

Economic justice advocates and Democratic lawmakers on Saturday issued fresh demands for comprehensive paid leave for the nation’s workers, saying such protections would address crucial gaps in labor law that the ongoing pandemic has underscored.

The calls came on the 29th anniversary of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which provides eligible employees with up to 12 weeks of job-protected leave to care for a new child or take care of one’s own or family member’s illness. But, worker advocates say, the groundbreaking law is sorely insufficient, because the leave is unpaid and FMLA doesn’t cover all workers.

“It’s been 29 years today since the FMLA was passed—the first federal protection for people to take time off work when they need it most. But about 10.5 million need leave and don’t take it,” tweeted the National Women’s Law Center.

“All workers should not only be covered,” the group added, “but be able to afford to take their leave.”

29 years ago today, the Family and Medical Leave Act was signed into law, allowing workers to take time off without being paid.

After a global pandemic and economic recession, it's past time we catch up with the rest of the world and deliver paid leave in this country.

— Rep. Mondaire Jones (@RepMondaire) February 5, 2022

The House Education and Labor Committee similarly noted that “millions of workers are not eligible for FMLA. And unpaid leave is not practical for most Americans.”

“We must build on the FMLA by expanding access to PAID leave for workers across the country,” the panel added.

Such expansion would also help advance racial equity.

According to NARAL Pro-Choice America: “The 44% of Americans not covered by the FMLA include 48% of Latinx workers, 47% of AAPI workers, and 43% of Black workers. Every American should be covered by the FMLA.”

This #FMLA anniversary reminds us that paid family and medical leave is a racial justice and human rights issue. Working people of all races and tax brackets need leave for themselves, for their children, for their parents, esp those on the frontlines.

🇺🇸 needs #PaidLeaveforAll https://t.co/qFgd65YTyU

— National Urban League Washington Bureau (@NULpolicy) February 5, 2022

In a Friday statement, Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who heads the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said the lack of guaranteed paid leave is especially problematic in light of the ultra-contagious Omicron variant.

“American parents still can’t take paid time to care for a seriously ill child. Patients can’t take paid time to recover from surgery or cope with a cancer diagnosis. And workers with a cold, the flu, or even Covid-19, can’t take the time to get well and keep their coworkers safe—because they would risk losing a paycheck or even their job,” said Murray and Gillibrand.

In addition to harming families and the economy, the pair said the absence of paid leave and sick days is “hurting our ability to fight this pandemic. If we want to stop the spread of Omicron, be ready for whatever this pandemic brings next, and prepare for future public health crises—then we need paid leave.”

Pointing to recent polling showing overwhelming public support for such protections, the lawmakers added that “the call for paid leave has never been clearer or louder from all corners of our country” and urged their congressional colleagues to help enact such a measure.

President Joe Biden, for his part, said in a Saturday tweet marking the FMLA anniversary that he is “committed to continuing the fight for national paid family and medical leave.”

That vow was welcomed by Center for Economic and Policy Research co-director Eileen Appelbaum, who expressed hope Biden would “push for it when bills to provide it are introduced in the Congress.”

“People are desperate for paid leave,” she said, calling it “policy that is needed and popular.”

My reading from hell: A writer’s road to self-promotion is paved with live, in-person disasters

“Spit that gangsta s**t, D. Watkins!” Twizzle yelled at the top of his lungs from the middle of a chorus of guys who looked just like me. “Tell them about the f**king block!”

I took a hard pause, looked out at the small group of anxious listeners gathered for this impromptu reading, and extended my hand toward Twizzle. “Lemme get that Black.”

Twizzle dug in behind his ear, plucked out a wood tip Black & Mild and passed it to me. I cracked the plastic, pointed it at the group like an angry instructor, then let the flame from my Bic illuminate its tobacco-packed tip.

“Man, keep reading,” a teenager who looked 40 yelled. We were standing in Old Town Mall, a mostly boarded-up shopping center. In its heyday, Old Town Mall was the hub where we bought the newest Nikes, Coogi sweaters, Triple F.A.T. Goose coats and Starter Jackets, but now only two convenient stores and a barbershop remained. “Come on, D! Read, man!”

I took a long, lung-clutching pull, and read my next paragraph through the dissipating smoke: “But in 2014 it feels the same as Bush, or Clinton, or any other president. The rich are copping new boats and we still are using the oven to heat up our houses in the winter, while eating our cereal with forks to preserve milk. America still feels like America, a place where you have to pay to play, any and everywhere even here at our broke-ass card game.”

Twizzle didn’t let me finish. Not because he didn’t like my story. He loved it — as a matter of fact, he loved it too much, and so did the rest of the audience. Hearing the names of our people, our neighborhood, now published was overwhelming to them, enough so that Twizzle and others kept interrupting. Of course they had seen our names in the papers before — for sports or crime. This was different. This was art. That rowdy impromptu reading was one of the craziest I’ve ever given. But it wasn’t the worst.

When you’re an established author, people see your articles and books come out, they hear about your awards and see you on TV, but what they didn’t see — literally, because the audiences were that small — is you earning your stripes first in the world of unpaid and underpaid art events. Creative writing students know that grind. It goes with submitting your work again and again after thousands of rejections from journals with tiny audiences, reading pages of feedback from people who don’t get your work and sticking it out at wild mixers.

Now that I’ve published a few books and hundreds of articles, I’d like to celebrate by sharing some readings from hell. This is my toast to the MFA students out there, especially those coming out of virtual classrooms to engage with the public for the first time. Keep submitting your work. Keep doing the readings. You’ll keep getting better. And I promise you, it will pay off.

But don’t get the wrong idea. Crazy readings don’t stop once you’ve published a book. I could start with the time I read at a nursing home for gunshot survivors on Roosevelt Island, and one of the community members hurled up a puddle of brown chunks on himself, a nurse and my new sneakers. But I won’t, because that reading ending up going really well. So I’ll begin with an event at my own alma mater, the University of Baltimore.

“I read in front of those 15 people as if there were 10,000 in the crowd.“

I thought my audience for this reading would be standing room only. My last event at the school had pulled in about 150 people, and I expected at least 100 to show from the 250 reservations. But it was raining that day, cold like a Chicago winter — and it was May. I imagine people thought about coming, then landed on, hell nah. About 15 people showed up that day. I’m a sport. I didn’t complain. I’m still amazed anyone would spend their time to come see me in the first place. So I poked out my chest, hovered above the podium, and I read in front of those 15 people as if there were 10,000 in the crowd. I read as if I would never be able to read again. I even sold about eight books.

The last person in line for the book signing was a young woman with about 2,000 pounds of infinity scarf wound around her neck. She hung around until the very end, even looking around to make sure everyone else had gone before she stepped up with her copy of my book.

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“Write a special note in my book,” she said.

“Thank you for coming out,” I said. “I know just what to write.”

Here’s my usual special note for people I don’t know: Stay strong and you can beat the devil. She handed me her book and as I opened it to the signature page, she yanked it back before I could start writing, jerking the signing table back with her.

“Too quick!” She laughed absurdly loud, at herself or my confusion or both.

“Excuse me?”

“You can’t come up with something special that quick, Mr. Man,” she countered. “I’ll tell you what — take my number, and maybe you can think of something by the time I let you take me out on a date.”

“That’s nice, but I’m about to go on tour,” I said. “So it could be a while.”

“HAAAAA! The publishing industry is a sinking ship,” she laughed, whipping the massive scarf around her shoulder. “I’m sure you won’t be gone that long.”

The nerve, I thought, but I took her number and told her I’d catch up when I got back.

Like the hungry, ambitious writer I was, I hit every stop on my tour hard, as if each reading could be my last. Some were great and some were terrible, but I did my job, happy to be in front of people who love words. About two months later, I had made my way back to Baltimore and things were slowing down. One July day I posted up in Artifact Coffee Shop, and Captain Infinity Scarf waltzed in — without the scarf, but I recognized her — and sat down, uninvited, at my table.

“Hey, Mr. Man,” she said. “I need to buy a copy of your book. I heard it was really good.”

“Nice seeing you,” I said. “Didn’t you grab a copy from that signing? Did you give it away?”

“The bookseller was Barnes and Noble,” she said. “And one day I was in the store having a coffee, looked in my bag and saw your book. And since I thought we were never going on that date, I returned it and got my $20 back.”

And maybe this is why my industry is a sinking ship.

“So if I don’t date you, you can’t own one of my books?” I said.

“Not saying that,” she said. “But when are we going to go on that date? Do you like Thai?”

I laughed, told her to enjoy her coffee, and gave her my table. Imagine me pimping myself out like that to sell a book. But that wasn’t the worst reading by far, even with the delayed punchline.

* * *

When my third book came out a couple of years ago, my very pregnant wife Caron and I drove to Busboys and Poets, the restaurant and bookstore on 14th Street in Washington, D.C., so I could give a reading. Busboys has long been one of my favorite spots, and since I gave two packed readings there for my previous books, I assumed this one would be more of the same. RSVPs were strong. The manager said it would be a night to remember.

I couldn’t wait. I really needed the win, too, because promotion for this book wasn’t going that well. I felt like I wasn’t getting any love from the publisher. But the people who read me, and who read the book, were generally happy with it. And that’s who I write and perform for.

On the way over, Caron told me her good friends Kevin and Jill would be at the reading.

“They’ve never seen you read before,” she said. “I can’t wait for you to meet them.”

“Maybe we can all go out afterwards,” I suggested.

“They were all probably there for me, I thought. Tonight is going to be epic.”

I love making my wife proud. I was ready to put on a show, thinking about how I would customize my talk for the crowd, even insert some new jokes, as I pulled into the special parking spot reserved for visiting authors. I was lucky to have that spot, too, because the street was jammed with Liberalmobiles — Volvos and VW wagons from corner to corner. They were all probably there for me, I thought. Tonight is going to be epic.

We walked in and the place was completely empty. How? There were literally no parking spots outside. This spot is normally crowded at this time, too, with people at the bar, strolling through the bookstore looking for new titles, grabbing cups of coffee, and then a huge section filled with folks eating dinner. That night it was so empty you would think they had just had a bomb threat.

“Mr. Watkins, I’m not sure what’s happening,” the store manager said, walking over me with her hand extended for a shake. “Let’s give it about ten to 15 minutes, and I’m pretty sure people will start rolling in. Are you hungry?”

“I can eat. My wife probably can as well — she’s eating for two.”

Caron and I took our seats near the stage and ordered some food. I had the catfish. Shortly after, her friends Kevin and Jill walked in and I got the chance to formally meet them. We began to joke and have a good time, but I kind of checked out, because the venue around us was still empty. What was happening? Am I canceled and don’t know it?

Then my good friend Jason Reynolds — bestselling, award-winning author, literature superhero, All Star of our writer’s group chat — walked in. Jason had been telling his friend Aaron about some of my work and thought it would be a great time to introduce us.

“Yo, where is everybody?” I asked myself and Jason at the same time. “This has never happened to me in D.C.”

“Oh, you didn’t know?” Jason replied, with an eyebrow raised. “Coates and Kendi are having an event around the corner right now. Their event had so much of an overflow last night they had to do another.”

F**k.

The store manager came running from the other room to make me aware of the bomb Jason had just dropped. Authors Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi — the Jordan and Pippen, the Magic and Kareem, of anti-racist rhetoric, two of the biggest voices on race in the history of voices and race — were holding a last-minute surprise event about a block away from Busboys, completely blowing my reading out of the water.

That explained the fleet of Volvos and VWs.

About five people in total attended my reading. And I read to those five people as if there were 10,000 in the room. I read as if I would never be able to read again. And I enjoyed myself, because as much as it stung in the moment to lose my audience to bigger names, I knew it could have been worse, because it had been worse.

* * *

Which brings me to the reading from hell.

“Yo dummy, I know you come to homecoming!” my friend Light Skin Larry from high school said. “Big time New York Times bestselling author times something else, back on the football field down the jects, we takin flicks, we throwin money, we layin it down. Everybody gonna come out to see you, stupid!”

“Writers don’t really throw money. We are better at being owed money,” I laughed. “I really wanna come, man. Not to show off, I really miss everybody. But I gotta speaking event in Charlotte. Gotta hit the road and sell these books, bro.”

About a month before the legendary Dunbar Poets Homecoming, I had received a message from a woman on Twitter, saying that she loved my book “The Beast Side,” really enjoyed watching my interviews, and would love to bring me to Charlotte so that I could read and speak in front of a packed house.

We spoke on the phone and I told her it sounded amazing. I couldn’t wait to come. Two days later, I forwarded my information, and she responded with a Southwest confirmation number and booking reservation for The Dunhill Hotel.

“Awe, man, stupid,” Light Skin Larry breathed into the phone. “I already told everybody you was comin. You gonna make me look like a liar.”

“You definitely known for lying,” I shot back. “So it’s on brand.”

“Have fun in Charlotte, blockhead,” he said before hanging up.

The day before homecoming, I drove past my old high school football field, imagining the laughs, good times and memories my old friends would be creating the next day. I really wanted to be there with them, but books don’t sell themselves. On the way to catch my flight to Charlotte, my phone buzzed as I pulled into the airport’s short term parking lot.

“Mr. Watkins,” the woman from Twitter said in a soft but direct voice. “Just making sure you will be on time for your flight. You are checked at A5. I also looked up the status and it’s not delayed.”

“This is like VIP service,” I laughed. “I’m parking at the airport now. I’m looking forward to meeting you and all the great people who put this event together.”

“You are too kind. The limo will pick you up right outside of the airport. The driver will be holding a card with your name,” she said. “There is a delicious restaurant in the hotel that you will be staying in. I took the liberty of making you an 8 o’clock reservation. That should give you time to change, relax and have a drink.”

“Wow. It’s just a reading. You didn’t have to go through all of that trouble,” I said. “I’m D. Watkins, not Drake.”

“You are too funny,” she said without laughing. “What kind of alcohol would you like left in your room? Vodka, scotch, cognac?”

I told her I didn’t need liquor left in my room and that I’ll be looking forward to the event. Everything happened as she said it would. The flight was on time, and a driver greeted me with a big white card that said WATKINS in bold, black letters. He drove me to the Dunhill, which was really nice. There was a big bottle of Grey Goose that I didn’t even ask for on the desk in my room, accompanied by a hand-written note that read, “Good Luck D. XO”

I went down to the restaurant attached to the hotel for my dinner reservation, and after I decided to wander the streets of downtown Charlotte. I spent the rest of the night and early the next day writing, working on a new book, before it was time for me to figure out what I would be reading to the packed crowd waiting for me.

“It looked like something they’d display at my funeral.”

I threw on my favorite black T-shirt, black slacks and a pair of Air Force 1s. The limo driver took me to the venue. To reach the room where the reading was to be held, I walked through a nice pastry shop full of people eating croissants and sipping espressos, then past a few open doors until I landed at one with a sign attached, showing my latest book’s cover art. I walked in and saw a huge banner for “THE BEAST SIDE” stretched across the wall behind a wooden lectern. To the left, about 150 copies of my books were stacked into a beautiful pyramid. To the right, an easel holding up a giant photo of my face. It looked like something they’d display at my funeral. It was about 5 p.m., the event was scheduled to start at 5:30, and the room of books and banners was empty. Not even any staff. No bookseller. Who knows who arranged the pyramid of books and photo of my face? I sat down and waited.

About an hour passed. A young woman walked in and asked me if I’d be a guest on her podcast that hadn’t launched yet. The studio was down the hall.

I said sure, even though I probably wouldn’t need the promo for “The Beast Side” by the time the podcast came out, because the book would be old by then. But I thought maybe while we were recording the podcast someone would come through who knew what was going on at the reading. Maybe they would want to buy some books, if anyone showed up who could take their money.

That didn’t happen.

If you think reading to only five or ten people is bad, imagine a reading so empty the organizer doesn’t even show up.

But the limo driver was still outside. I hopped back into the car and dialed the organizer’s number only to get her voicemail. I thanked her for everything and asked her to give me a call when she got a chance. There was no need for me to hang out in Charlotte for an extra day, so I switched my flight to one heading out around five in the morning, which meant I had to be at the airport by 3:45 a.m at the latest.

“Bro, can you take me to the airport around 3, 4 in the morning?” I asked the driver.

“Can’t do it, champ,” he said. “You may have to get a cab or one of those U-Burr things.”

I called an Uber around 3 a.m. and they cancelled. I called another, who made me wait about 10 minutes before cancelling too. I finally found a driver willing to take me. The app said he was about 10 minutes away. He arrived about half an hour later, bolting past me then banging a hard U-turn and skidding to a stop in front of the hotel.

“Aye, young fella, you good?” the driver, an older Black man, yelled. A Kangol hat hugged his gray Afro, and he wore tinted frames even though it was jet black out. An unlit cigarette dangled from his bottom lip. “Where you goin, young fella?”

“It should tell you on the app,” I replied. “The airport!”

“That’s all you had to say, young fella!” the driver replied. “Hop in!”

I tossed my bag in the back. I was really missing the limo driver at this point. The old dude peeled off before I got the door shut. The inside of his Cadillac smelled like a bottle of Hennessy had exploded.

“Where you headed?” the driver asked again, looking back at me and not the road.

“Airport, man!” I yelled. “Turn around and watch the road!”

“No, where you from, young fella!” he said, turning around.

“Baltimore. East Baltimore.”

“You know where I’m from, young n***a!” the old head spat. “Da real Charlotte!”

At this point I couldn’t do nothing but laugh. I looked down at my phone, hoping and praying the guy didn’t kill me. Dying after an empty reading sounded horrible. I opened Twitter and typed something like, “My Uber driver is wetter than a goldfish in the ocean, I hope he don’t kill us both #drunk.”

Uber instantly responded to my post, asking me if I was OK, wanting me to report the car. I didn’t want to get the guy in trouble. Maybe he just smelled like alcohol? I wasn’t sure if he was drunk or not, so I just deleted the tweet.

“Aye man, you drunk?” I asked as I put my seat belt on. “If you drunk, I can drive. I can’t miss this plane, old man!”

“You wont miss the plane young n***a!” he yelled as he whipped past the exit and sent us down into a slight ditch instead. “Oh sh*tttttt, nephew!”

Dude apologized repeatedly as he backed the car up and hit a sharp right back onto the exit we missed. The excitement from the embarrassing mistake made him switch up his tone. Maybe it even sobered him up, if he was actually drunk. The old man dug his hand around near the floor mat on the passenger side and whipped out a couple bottles of water, taking one for himself and tossing me the other. We guzzled in silence as we reached the airport. And then, limo style, he hopped out and opened my door for me.

“Take ya old ass home,” I said. “You need some rest, and you almost made me miss my plane!”

“No five star?” he grinned. “Well, get the f**k back to Baltimore!”

And I gladly did. Because at home, I know — no matter what else happens in Baltimore — I can always count on at least 10 people showing up when I read.

More stories about the writing life:

America’s infrastructure, bridges are falling apart: report

A substantial number of the United States’ 620,000 bridges need major improvement or replacement, a new report reveals.

According to Axios, the report published by the American Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) suggests 36% of America’s bridges —which is equivalent to approximately 224,000 spans— are in need of repairs. The report also recommends that an estimated 78,800 bridges be replaced.

These infrastructures are critical because vehicles cross these infrastructures approximately 167.5 million times a day.

Per Axios: “Chunks of concrete fall from bridges with some regularity, and routine inspections often reveal problems that prompt authorities to shut down lanes of traffic or close off a bridge to heavy vehicles, to reduce the weight burden.”

Speaking to Axios, Alison Premo Black, the senior vice president and chief economist at ARTBA, weighed in on the progress being made to repair bridges. She also expressed corner about incidents like the one that recently occurred in Pittsburgh, Penn. As previously reported, a bridge in Pittsburg collapsed just hours before President Joe Biden was scheduled to visit the city to discuss infrastructure updates.

“There’s progress being made — it’s just at a very slow pace,” Black said. “It’s just very disturbing that [accidents like Pittsburgh] can still happen despite all the steps being taken to keep the traveling public safe.”

Kevan Stone, executive director of the National Association of County Engineers, also shared his concerns about the improvements needed to America’s infrastructures.

“You just have these cities which are growing to an unprecedented extent, and the infrastructure was never designed to handle the amount of traffic that these structures are expected to deal with every day,” Stone said.

Matti Kuivalainen the CEO of Dywidag, one of the world’s most prominent bridge construction and engineering firms, explained what needs to be done in order to keep America’s infrastructure safe and up-to-date.

“We need to monitor the actual behavior of a bridge versus how it’s supposed to behave,” Kuivalainen told Axios. “That, together with physical inspections, will help DOT to identify bridges at risk and prioritize repairs and replacement projects.”

Kuivalainen also noted that “there is regulation needed.”

22 best vegetarian breakfast ideas to kick off the new year

When you want a healthy breakfast that is totally vegetarian-friendly, we’ve got you covered with nearly two dozen recipes (many of which are vegan!). In some cases, you’ll find that we like using plant-based protein sources like tofu or beans to add meat-like heft to a plate of fried eggs or burritos; other times, we’ll rely solely on vegetables to bring color and crunch. Some recipes, like overnight oats or banana pancakes are naturally vegetarian, but make them with nondairy milk for vegan diners.

Our Best Vegetarian Breakfast Ideas

1. Spinach Quiche

Looking to start the day with a vegetarian breakfast that will feed a crowd? Look no further than this golden quiche packed with baby spinach.

2. Kristen’s Family Banana Bread

We will always turn to banana bread for a speedy sweet breakfast that’s entirely vegetarian.

3. Freezer Breakfast Burritos

You can thank Shilpa Uskokovic for these perfect breakfast burritos. She meticulously tested dozens of variations before landing on the best recipe: instead of bacon or sausage, she packs each burrito with canned pinto beans.

4. Cheddar, Potato, and Caramelized Onion Galette

Come summer, we’re all about using summer squash however, and whenever, we can. And why wait until dinner? Wake up to this veggie-packed breakfast galette. “Potatoes bring a bit of heartiness, while jammy caramelized onions and bold cheddar bring just the right balance of savory and sweet; thin slices of the season’s last zucchini lend a mild sweetness and rich texture that makes a nice counterpart,” writes recipe developer Pierce Abernathy.

5. Game-Changing Muffin Mix

No matter how tight your schedule is, there’s always time for muffins. Make the dry muffin mix in advance and store it in an airtight container. Come breakfast time, quickly combine the dry mix with eggs, olive oil, yogurt, and vanilla and bake a baker’s dozen.

6. English Porridge

Two types of oats — rolled and steel-cut oats — are used for this easy porridge recipe. You’ll need equal parts of the oats, water, and milk (we love simple ratios!). Top it with whatever you want, which for me is sliced almonds, fresh raspberries, and a generous drizzle of maple syrup.

7. Extra-Cheesy Breakfast Tacos

For cheesier-than-ever breakfast tacos, add cheddar cheese directly to the pan and then add the tortilla, so the cheese sticks to the outside and gets super crispy. On the inside of the taco, you’ll get another cheesy bite with even more cheddar, plus feta.

8. Go-To Vegan Pancakes

All pancakes are vegetarian but for an entirely dairy-free recipe, swap in non dairy milk, a little bit of melted coconut oil, and a splash of apple cider vinegar.

9. Avocado Toast

I don’t want to hear that it’s “basic,” that it’s no longer trendy, that it’s “not actually good.” We will eat avocado toast for breakfast, lunch, dinner, midnight snack, noontime snack…whatever your craving, this vegetarian tartine delivers.

10. Cinnamon-Sugar Crusted Zucchini Bread

This is basically dessert for breakfast. But what kind of friend would I be if I kept all the sweet stuff off of this list?

11. Cheesy Spinach and Artichoke Frittata with Arugula

If you’re the type of person who loves pie filling but feels kind of “meh” about pie crust, then you’ll love a frittata. It has all the eggy, veggie goodness of a quiche, minus the crust. Bonus: It means that there’s one less thing you have to prep.

12. Buttermilk Waffles

You may have come to this list to look for protein-packed, plant-based breakfast recipes. And we have them. But when you want delicious, dependable, family-friendly recipes, you’ll find those too, like these beloved buttermilk waffles.

13. Loaded Scrambled Egg and Mushroom Toast

Go beyond basic scrambled eggs with this meaty mushroom recipe that — surprise! — is totally vegetarian. “To make a great thing even better, mushrooms are sizzled in a separate skillet with enough spice to impart extra verve, then piled high onto the eggs, which of course are spooned onto good sourdough toast for the full effect,” writes recipe developer Melina Hammer.

14. Cocoa Coffee Granola and Creamy Cold Brew Bowls

Have your morning coffee and breakfast in one convenient breakfast bowl.

15. Savory Breakfast “Oatsotto” with an Egg

Do you ever wish you could just eat risotto for breakfast? Jammy, soft-boiled eggs lay on a breakfast bowl of savory Parmesan oats for a dream-turned-reality.

16. Olive Oil and Maple Granola

“Granola might be one of those snacks you tend to buy packaged, which is fine, of course, but once I started making my own granola — specifically, olive oil and maple syrup granola — it’s very hard to go back to the store-bought stuff,” writes recipe developer Nekisia Davis.

17. Açaí Bowl

Accessorize this picture-perfect smoothie bowl with sliced banana, kiwi, berries, shredded coconut, and bee pollen.

18. Sheet Pan Eggs

Making eggs for a crowd seems like a nearly impossible feat. But a sheet pan makes it doable and dare I say, fun? Cook the eggs alongside a bunch of greens like asparagus, peas, ramps, kale, or leeks. Don’t forget the hash browns!

19. Bell-less, Whistle-less, Damn Good French Toast

This was voted our readers’ favorite French Toast recipe. Need I say more?

20. Berry Banana Oat Smoothie

When you’re crunched for time, you may think that you have to forgo breakfast altogether. This speedy smoothie not only delivers a balanced breakfast in mere minutes, but it will make you feel energized all morning long.

21. Hot Buckwheat Cereal

Like previous hot cereal recipes, the beauty of buckwheat is that you can dress it up with your choice of fresh or dried fruit, nuts, natural sweeteners, and fiber-rich seeds.

22. Baked Eggs with Mushrooms and Gruyere

Baked eggs are a transformative, luxurious breakfast. If I had it my way, I’d eat them exclusively while enjoying a staycation at a Four Seasons resort (preferably in Maui or along the French Riviera). But I will also take them from the comfort of my $500 Wayfair couch. If I close my eyes, I can almost smell the salty air (or is that garbage day in NYC?).

11 sticky, spicy, sometimes-sweet wing sauce recipes

Even if you don’t know the difference between a touchdown or a field goal, or offense vs. defense, you can appreciate a good batch of chicken wings at a Super Bowl party. After all, you came here for the snacks, right? To kick off your game day festivities, we’re sharing our favorite wing sauce recipes, from the sticky sweet to the fiery.

Buffalo Sauce

When you think of chicken wings, buffalo sauce is probably the first thing that comes to mind, right? A generous coating of Frank’s RedHot with a cool ranch dipping sauce on the side is obviously what the Super Bowl is really about. Pro tip: Food52’s Creative Director Kristen Miglore (and resident Genius) thinks that garlic confit enhances the flavor of buffalo sauce even more, so try incorporating a few cloves puréed roasted garlic.

Mark Bittman’s go-to recipe for Buffalo Chicken Wings starts with wings broiled in the oven until crispy. While the wings cook, he makes the sauce using hot sauce, melted butter, sherry vinegar, and minced garlic. As soon as the wings are browned and crispy, toss them with sauce and broil for a few minutes more.

Recipe: Mark Bittman’s Minimalist Buffalo Chicken Wings

Sticky-Sweet

If you’re not into super spicy wings, the game isn’t over. You can whip up a finger-licking sauce that won’t have you running to the fridge for a glass of milk. Stick to ingredients like soy sauce, brown sugar, and citrus juice for a complex sauce that has none of the heat. Why is this an all-star wing treatment? “The sweetness of the orange is perfectly offset by umami-packed soy sauce, zippy Chinese black vinegar, toasty sesame oil, and a touch of heat from cayenne powder,” says Asha Loupy.

Or follow Sohla El-Waylly’s recipe for chicken wings glazed with sticky pomegranate molasses, warm spices like cinnamon and nutmeg, and cracked black pepper. Her secret to the best chicken wings is dry-brining them overnight. Because why skimp on the opportunity to deliver flavor and moistness?

Recipe: Orange-Sesame Chicken Wings

Recipe: Sticky Pomegranate and Black Pepper Chicken Wings

Hoisin Sauce

I’m sure you were planning on using your slow cooker during the Super Bowl. You were probably thinking of it for pulled pork or layered nachos . . . but why not use it to make chicken wings and keep them warm throughout all four quarters? For this recipe, we’re calling on a combination of hoisin sauce, soy sauce, rice vinegar, and Sriracha to make the wing sauce, but you can follow the same cooking method for buffalo sauce or barbecue sauce too.

Recipe: Slow Cooker Chicken Wings

Barbecue Sauce

You know and love barbecue sauce for smearing on burnt ends, brisket, pulled pork, and baked beans, but don’t underestimate its ability to make delicious chicken wings for game day. Here, we’re talking about a Kansas City-style sauce (aka the thickened sweet sauce with just a hint of heat and tang), but go all out and try this recipe with Carolina gold or Alabama white sauce instead.

Recipe: Dry-Rubbed Chicken Wings with Barbecue Sauce

Recipe: Peach, Bacon, and Bourbon BBQ Sauce

Fish Sauce

“Want the tenderest chicken wings with a sticky glaze and glassy skin?” Why yes, Sohla, yes I do. How does she do it? She starts with a dry brine before roasting the wings. While they cook, make the fish sauce glaze, which is nothing short of a miracle: It’s made with fish sauce, finely grated garlic (but please do not use the pre-minced stuff in a jar), Thai green chiles, and the zest and juice of four limes.

Recipe: Sticky Fish Sauce Chicken Wings with Peanuts and Herbs

Spicy Ginger-Soy Glaze

Craving both the sweet nature of some of the aforementioned wing sauce recipes with the heat of classic buffalo? These Korean Fried Chicken Wings (affectionately nicknamed KFC) are the best of both worlds (cue Hannah Montana). They achieve their remarkable duality of flavors with honey and brown sugar (the sweet stuff), soy sauce and rice vinegar (that savory edge), fresh ginger (a little heat), and chile flakes, or better yet, Korean fermented chile (a lot of heat).

Recipe: Korean Fried Chicken Wings (KFC)

Honey Mustard

This wing sauce is so much more than bottled honey mustard. It’s butter and honey and mustard, yes. But it’s also bourbon and soy sauce and Sriracha. The result is a balanced blend of tangy, sweet, and sticky flavors that is sure to win the Vince Lombardi Trophy (you know, if they’re awarding chicken wing winners).

Recipe: Honey Mustard Chicken Wings

Lime Glaze

I’m certainly not opposed to lime-glazed chicken wings, but I have to admit it wasn’t my go-to wing sauce. But these two recipes changed that for me — and I bet they will do the same for you. Why does this work so well? For Maki Yazawa’s recipe, she says that the “lime enhances the crisp flavor of the tequila in the recipe, while the spicy Thai chilies and agave add balancing heat and sweetness.” You could also skip the tequila and keep it simple with just freshly squeezed lime juice, water, garlic, and chile peppers.

The Italian-American casserole? How tetrazzini became the ideal mix-and-match comfort meal

Chicken tetrazzini is iconic — a classic casserole with a subtly Italian-American spin, a confluence of egg noodles, a rich sauce, a copious amount of mushrooms, chicken, bread crumbs, and cheese. Sometimes it’s dotted with some veggies, such as peas. A rich sauce enrobes all of the ingredients before the whole shebang is baked and then broiled, a bronzed crust atop a cozy bed of creamy, sauced noodles. You really can’t go wrong.

As previously stated, I am a sucker for a good chicken dish, whether it’s chicken parm or some of the lesser known Italian and Italian-American chicken dishes. One of my favorite things is chicken’s sheer versatility, which caused me to think of a traditional chicken dish that could be reimagined or reconstructed in a different format: honoring the original dish, and then flipping it on its end. In addition — and from an efficiency and time management perspective — I also thought it’d be neat to make a “double duty” chicken dish: one dinner with repurposed leftovers the next day for lunch. Easy, breezy, beautiful!

This is where tetrazzini comes in.

The origins

Named after Italian opera star Luisa Tetrazzini, according to The New York Times, the dish originally consisted of “spaghetti, heavy cream, chicken, mushrooms … Parmesan … served with two classic French sauces, chicken veloute and hollandaise.” Today’s verison is a bit more streamlined and is usually held together with a bechamel. The dish began to become popular throughout the mid-1990s. Southern Kitchen notes that Tetrazzini’s nickname was “The Florentine Nightingale,” which adds a bit more to her overall mystique and appeal in the opera world and beyond at that time.

For all intents and purposes, it’s a casserole, the epitome of “home cooking.” It’s a masterclass in comfort food, a reliable standby that is pretty consistent — and always delicious. There are myriad variations in today’s day and age, swapping in and out various ingredients, using different cooking vessels instead of the ol’ bake-and-broil, gussying up the flavor profiles or differentiating it from being Italian-adjacent to something different entirely

For instance, The New York Times notes that chef Brad McDonald makes a version with Irish cheese, green bell peppers, jalapeno, shredded chicken, and guajillo chiles. Yum!

It should also be noted that in many of the original iterations of the dish, chefs opted for turkey over chicken. While it is widely understood that Luisa Tetrazzini is the namesake of the dish, its particular geographic place of origin is hotly contested. Many pieces note San Francisco as the birthplace, such as this one in the The Ann Arbor News, while other articles state that the dish may have actually started in New York City. The book San Francisco: A Food Biography does a deep-dive into the history of the dish, noting that the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, helmed by Chef Ernest Arbogast in 1905, is the person who was so inspired by Luisa Tetrazzini that he created the dish and named it after her. The book even goes so far to specify a particular date, apparently the night that Tetrazzini performed in the city: March 6, 1905.

Interestingly enough, though, a 1908 issue of Good Housekeeping notes that a “restaurant on forty-second street [in New York]… serve[s] a good and easy entree or main course.” One can assume that the dish may have traveled from San Francisco to New York in the matter of only three years.

The magazine continues “it is named after the famous singer. Small, thin slices of cooked turkey in a cream sauce to which some cooked spaghetti was added and a little grated cheese, also some very thin slices of mushrooms cut crossways. This was served in the dish in which it was cooked and some bread crumbs were browned over the top.” The book extrapolates that this restaurant may have been the Knickerbocker Hotel.

The emergence of “comfort food” (by way of the casserole)

Southern Kitchen notes that the Chicago Tribune shared one of the first recipes for tetrazzini in 1911. Southern Kitchen also muses on the iconic casserole and its lasting appeal, including a quote from a 1970 cookbook that states that “the covered-dish supper is becoming one of the most convenient ways for people to get together and have dinner. It works for large church dinners, for gourmet clubs when the menu is planned way ahead, for neighborhood gatherings, and for buffet suppers in honor of special guests.”

Of course, the dish is also just as welcome on a blustery Wednesday night.

It should be noted that while the dish is named after an Italian opera singer, there is no evidence that it is truly an Italian-American dish — aside from the Parmesan.

Mix and match

While a tetrazzini is usually made with egg noodles, chicken, mushrooms, and bechamel, don’t feel that you need to be tied to that. Only have spaghetti at home? Not eating poultry? Have an inexplicable aversion to bechamel for no reason whatsoever? (It is truly my brother’s kryptonite). Don’t fret — this is a prime dish for mixing and matching. I’d argue that as long as you have noodle + protein + veg. 1 + veg. 2 + sauce + bread crumbs and cheese, you’re pretty much good to go.

Regardless, the dish is a classic for a reason: it is absolutely delicious. Play some opera while cooking and eating this dish and envision enjoying the iconic meal in an opulent theater, being serenaded by Luisa Tetrazzini herself while you savor the dish.

Cook’s Notes

Some quick notes before we get to the nitty gritty:

Taking a cue from Rachael Ray, I always grate some nutmeg into any bechamel or creamy sauce I’m making.
You can also use a rotisserie chicken and just pull or shred it if you don’t want to cook chicken separately
The mushrooms are non-negotiable, but feel free to use any type you like. I usually opt for cremini.
For the bread crumb and Parm topping, amp it up a bit more by toasting the bread crumbs in a few tablespoons of butter,add thyme and season with salt, then pour into a bowl and toss with grated cheese before topping the casserole (this is pre-baking, of course)
Bechamel is a standard tetrazzini go-to, but I harkened back to the tetrazzini of yore with this recipe and instead opted for a veloute of sorts.
I am omitting the peas, but they’re always a welcome choice.
I have an affinity for egg noodles — especially large, flat, wide ones – so I’m using those here, but please feel free to use spaghetti, linguini, fettuccine, rigatoni, or any other pasta you have on hand. Many tetrazzini recipes use spaghetti, but I’ve never been especially fond of baked ribbon pasta

***

Recipe: Chicken Tetrazzini

Yields

4 servings

Prep Time

30 minutes

Cook Time

30minutes

Ingredients

6 tablespoons olive oil, divided
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1.5 pounds chicken breasts (boneless & skinless is ideal)
1.5 pounds mushrooms, cleaned, stemmed, and sliced or quartered
2 shallots, peeled and finely chopped
5 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
1 pound egg noodles (the wider, the better)
3-4 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup AP flour
2.5 cups chicken broth or stock
Nutmeg, grated on a microplane
¾ cup bread crumbs
½ grated Parm

Directions

Preheat oven to 400.
Season chicken generously with salt and pepper. In a large, heavy-bottomed pan, heat half of the olive oil over medium heat and add chicken, cooking for about 5 minutes per side, until lightly browned on both sides. Move to cutting board and let sit before shredding, dicing, or pulling. Once cooled and prepared, reserve half.
In the same pan you cooked the chicken, add the remaining olive oil and the mushrooms. Do not season. Cook over medium-high heat until well browned. Add shallot and garlic when mushrooms are almost done. Turn off heat.
In a large pot, bring water to a boil. Cook egg noodles just a bit less than al dente and drain immediately. Reserve pot.
In a saucepan, warm chicken broth or stock over medium heat.
In a large, deep pot, melt half of the stick of butter. Once melted, add flour and whisk immediately, until a paste of sorts is formed. Cook for a good minute or two – until you can smell a faint toast-like smell – and the raw flour has been cooked off.
In ladlefuls, add warm chicken broth to the pot with the flour-butter mixture, vigorously whisking continuously to avoid lumps, utilizing all of the broth/stock. Season with nutmeg, salt, and pepper. Cook until sauce is thickened to the consistency of heavy cream; if not, continue to cook over low heat until properly thickened. When the sauce “coats a spoon” or is ‘nappe,’ it is ready. Add 1 cup of sauce to reserved, prepared chicken.
In empty pot that you cooked the pasta in, add cooked pasta, remaining chopped or shredded chicken, mushroom mixture, and remaining sauce. Mix well and transfer to a large casserole dish.
Top casserole with a mixture of bread crumbs and grated Parm.
Bake for 20 minutes, then broil until top is bronzed and sauce is bubbling.

Some of our favorite Italian-American recipes:

Yes, you can caramelize onions in the oven on a sheet pan

Patience is not my strongest virtue. When I know something exciting is coming up — an event, a vacation, even just a single day off — I anticipate it with real “kid waiting for Christmas” energy.

Cooking, however, helps train my self-restraint. It’s amazing how a few batches of underdone cookies or a still-too-warm cake with the icing sliding off the sides can push even the most impatient people to slow down, if only for a moment. Over the years, I’ve learned that the best things really do come to those who wait. Case in point: caramelized onions.

Nothing elevates a burger, sandwich or grain bowl quite like jammy, mahogany-brown caramelized onions. They’re sweet, pungent — and they typically take a lot of time and babysitting to get just right. When I want to upgrade a meal with caramelized onions, I know that I need to basically budget an extra hour to stare at onions in a pan and stir. Then stand, stir and stare some more.

The other day though, I had a few back-to-back-to-back student evaluations that didn’t leave me with much time to stand and stir. I, of course, also really wanted caramelized onions to add to what would be a late-night dinner of frozen sausage and pepper pizza. (Try it sometime — it really will change your frozen pizza game!)

It was then that I had an epiphany. Why not put the onions on a sheet pan? I could roast them low and slow, flipping them between my 15- to 20-minute calls. I sliced my onions into uniform pieces, tossed them with olive oil and salt, and spread them on a parchment-covered sheet pan, praying for the best.

Over the course of two hours and 15 minutes, I baked the onions at 250 degrees. I flipped them whenever I had a quick break. Initially, I was concerned they would burn, but about halfway through the bake, I realized that was pretty unlikely. By the time I pulled them out, they could have easily spent another hour in the oven for deeper color and flavor.

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Over time, they transformed from raw, white onion slices to sweet, browned strands with soft centers and slightly crispy tips. Were they as silky and jammy as the internet famous 4-hour caramelized onions? No, but considering the minimal effort (and how the cooking process gelled with my evening’s schedule), the result was pretty ideal.

As with most good things food-related, I’m not the first person to have this epiphany. Notably, Melissa d’Arabian of the Food Network has a method for slow-roasted onions that incorporates balsamic vinegar as a caramelizing agent. Her version, however, recommends cutting the onions in quarters. That doesn’t leave them quite browned enough for my taste, but it definitely cuts down a bit on the prep.

So, the next time you’re craving caramelized onions but aren’t feeling up to the whole stand and stir rigamarole, grab your sheet pan and give onion-caramelized onions a try.

Wondering how to put your caramelized onions to use? Add them to these recipes:

“The Masked Singer” may not normalize Rudy Giuliani, but it’s a crime to even try to make him cuddly

Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying, or screaming, or burrowing into the Earth to live out the rest of your days as a mole person subsisting on roots and grubs. Life is constantly providing reminders of this, mainly in the form of influential entities doing exactly what they should not do. This week’s example was brought to us by the announcement that Rudy Giuliani was revealed as a contestant on the upcoming seventh season of “The Masked Singer.”

At the risk of sounding like America’s angry mom screaming at all your rambunctious toddlers, didn’t we talk about this? What did I say? Did I not warn you several times not to touch the buttons on that image rehabilitation machine over there?

Yes.Yes I did! Here are the receipts: Back in ye olden days of 2018, I humbly requested talk show gatekeepers to refrain from promoting Sean Spicer‘s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad book. Only “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” crossed that picket line which, fine, bygones.

Spicer’s book didn’t go on to be a bestseller but nevertheless, he was invited to participate in “Dancing with the Stars” in 2018. All he did was lie to us about crowd sizes, right?

In November 2020, a few days after Donald Trump lost the presidential election to Joseph Biden, I pleaded to the entertainment powers that be to resist the urge to rehabilitate any of the flunkies with him at that point.

“None of these figures deserve to turn up on celebrity editions of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” or drop in on “The Conners” for a hilarious cameo or to show their faces in any broadcast network entertainment title,” I wrote, “Not Kayleigh McEnany, not Kimberly Guilfoyle, not Mark Meadows, none of them. Not now, not ever.”

Shame on me for assuming a Giuliani ban was a given. After all, by this point Sacha Baron Cohen had broadcast a video that caught Giuliani with his hands down his pants on a hotel bed, appearing to prep himself for what he thought would be a sexual encounter with a young woman masquerading as an interviewer. This happened before his hair color melted off his face on live TV, but after he’d ranted for nearly 40 minutes about supposed election fraud on a landscaping company’s driveway, kicking off the Big Lie.

Giuliani is a mess, and if he weren’t actively involved in destroying democracy, that would make him a terrific reality show candidate. But he is, at this moment, facing multiple legal actions against him, not the least of which is an investigation of his role in the January 6, 2021 insurrection and his leadership of a plot to install illegitimate electors.

He is a central participant in a rolling coup against our democracy that is intensifying by the day, including on Friday, when the Republican National Committee officially rebranded the deadly attack on the Capitol and all the events leading up to it as “legitimate political discourse.”

That’s really enough for any producer with a shred of moral fiber to say, “You know what? I don’t think this man should be featured in any of our hits, let along one with the tagline of ‘The Good, the Bad and the Cuddly.'”

“The Masked Singer” isn’t an entirely unproblematic show, mind you. Its host, Nick Cannon, has made antisemitic remarks. One judge, Jenny McCarthy, is on record as an anti-vaxxer. Another, Robin Thicke, is famous for being a groper and a lech, and ripping off Marvin Gaye. Maybe the exec who opened the door to Giuliani looked at that situation and said to themselves, “Well, you know . . . glass houses and stones.”

And even if we acknowledge that shows like “Dancing with the Stars” have a history of casting polarizing political figures, there’s something extra sinister to hiding Giuliani under a mask before springing him on an unsuspecting audience. The show’s draw is its veneer of family-friendly innocence, and even its most controversial participant, Sarah Palin, has been defanged by the political establishment. She’s still a terrible person, but after she squawked her way out of that bear costume few people gave her a second thought.

Hate on her if you want, and she assumes you do. She did not call for “trial by combat” minutes before insurrectionists invaded the Capitol building and hunted for congressional Democrats. Giuliani did that.

Anyway, if I’m overreacting, I’m in fine company.

“No single headline has captured the national zeitgeist of existential dread combined with ridicustupulocitiness better than this one,” Stephen Colbert joked on Thursday. “That’s right: the criminal goon that we know for a fact is being investigated for trying to overthrow our democracy for his idiot emperor was yukkin’ it up on a reality show!”

Kimmel, who broke the news to a Thursday night audience that howled in disgust, asks “How does this even happen?”

Then he answers his own question. “I mean, a lot of people at Fox had to sign off on this – not one of them was like, ‘Hey maybe we shouldn’t have the guy who’s under investigation for helping to plot an insurrection singing on our show’?”

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He’s right. “The Masked Singer” is not a small title for Fox. It finished the 2020-2021 TV season as the top-rated unscripted series among 18-to-49-year-olds, the viewership most sought by advertisers. It’s also among the top five most popular shows overall in that demographic. That means a lot of people at the top of the corporate food chain who are aware of its popularity gave it a thumbs up, thinking of the ratings potential as opposed to the part it may play in making an amoral goblin seem like a harmless showman.

We should be dismayed at this but not surprised. As I have also previously pointed out – I’m getting tired of repeating myself! – it is their job to make their network money by selling products, even poisonous ones. This also should be a reminder that the Fox broadcast network is still owned by Fox Corporation and the Murdochs.

So while Giuliani may have been banned from Fox News while it contends with Dominion’s $1.6 billion lawsuit against the channel for backing the baseless election fraud claims, transforming him into a man-sized stuffed animal for our amusement is . . . swell?

Ken Jeong acknowledged how wrong this is by walking off in protest. Thicke reportedly followed him but, in a reminder of his spinelessness, later said that he wasn’t taking a stand against a fomenter of fascism. He was just checking on his friend. Just to be clear!

But no matter how long Giuliani gets to stand in that spotlight or what song he sings, it’s a note and a step towards sanitizing a long, dirty ledger that’s still unrolling.

And while I would not go so far as to theorize that sliding the former mayor of New York into a troll suit (or whatever he wore) will be enough to normalize him, it does set a precedent I shiver to game out from here. If he’s OK for this show, who else is acceptable?

Maybe let’s not answer that. We might give somebody new ideas.

This one is bad enough, even if it does make for one hell of a punchline: “One of the most chilling phrases in the English language,” Colbert says, “is ‘Surprise! It’s Rudy Giuliani.'”

More like this:

20 facts about Generation X

After Baby Boomers but before Millennials is Generation X, the people born between the period of 1965 and 1980 and with an age range of 41 to 56 who were the first to get hip to the internet, wore parachute pants, and who may have worried Y2K was going to ruin the world.

But there’s more to this category of humans than ’90s references. Check out some things you may not have realized about the inarguably dopest social construct.

1. Generation X was named after a book

The Baby Boomers were the first named generation, after the kids who arrived — a literal baby boom — when their parents began to settle down after World War II. Generation X didn’t have a war that sparked it. Instead, it was words: Author Douglas Coupland’s 1991 book “Generation X: Tales for An Accelerated Culture”. The novel about disenfranchised post-Boomers struck a nerve and the name stuck.

Collage of paperback version of “Generation X” by Douglas Coupland (Fawcett Gold Medal Book)

2. Generation X also had something to do with Billy Idol

Even though Coupland popularized the term for a social group, he wasn’t the first to coin the phrase. A book named “Generation X” by Jane Deverson and Charles Hamblett was published in 1964 and examined British youth culture — at the time, people who were under 25. The tome found its way into the hands of a young Billy Idol, who went on to form his first band. He named it Generation X.

3. Generation X is also known as “the forgotten generation”

It’s because Baby Boomers and Millennials tend to get all the romanticized media attention, leaving Generation X comparatively ignored.

4. Chad was a popular Generation X name

Certain demographic groups favor specific baby names. For Gen X, the names Chad, Todd, Scott, Tammy, Tracy, and Tonya appeared more often than in babies named during the Boomer or Millennial generations. (Both Todd and Scott were previously common only as last names.)

5. Gen Xers are a comparatively rare group

Compared to Baby Boomers (75 million) and Millennials (83 million), Generation X members are outnumbered. Estimates have placed the population at around 65 million.

6. Generation X had amazing public service announcements

If you were a teen in the 1970s or 1980s, there was danger everywhere. Drug danger. Teen pregnancy danger. Stranger danger. As a result, there was a surplus of public service announcements, or PSAs, that recruited everyone from Pee-wee Herman to Captain America to lecture — we mean, warn — about high-risk activity. “This is drugs,” one commercial narrator intoned as an egg hit a sizzling frying pan. “This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?”

7. Generation X is also nostalgic

Why is everything being rebooted? Credit (or blame) Gen X. The group is likely to wax nostalgic for all of those ’80s and ’90s pop culture touchstones in ways Boomers don’t necessarily share.

8. Generation X is known to be cynical

Thanks to living through a “latchkey” phase in which they came home to an empty house with two working parents, Generation X has become associated with a cynicism that isn’t shared by the Baby Boomers and their predecessors, who had the “Greatest Generation” tag. Films like “Reality Bites” and “Slacker” helped perpetuate the image of Gen Xers as irreverent and jaded.

9. Generation X likes stability

While some people went job-hopping during the COVID-19 pandemic, Generation X largely stayed put. Thanks to some unstable times, the group prefers stability in life and work.

10. Generation X plays a lot of mobile games

Thanks to their purchasing power, tech savvy, and work/life balance, Generation X has the time and means to dive deep into mobile gaming. One survey pegged 81 percent of respondents saying their favorite mobile activity was gaming, with 77 percent of those playing daily.

11. Generation X are huge social media users

LONDON, ENGLAND – AUGUST 03: The Instagram app logo is displayed on an iPhone on August 3, 2016 in London, England. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images) (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)

Nielsen research indicates that Gen X is more heavily invested in social media than other groups, spending an average of 40 more minutes per week online than Millennials do. They’re even more likely to bring their phones to the dinner table.

12. Generation X is making up the bulk of leadership roles

If you’re an employee, odds are you’re working for a Gen Xer. Thanks to their work experience, Gen X accounts for 51 percent of leadership roles globally. On the flip side, they’re a little slower to advance in their careers than Boomers or Millennials.

13. Generation X is in more student debt

According to Pew, Gen Xers have seen a marked increase in the amount of student debt over their predecessors. When they were in fourth grade in 1977, only one-third of people were borrowing money for college. By the time younger Xers were entering college themselves in 2000, 65 percent of students were borrowing.

14. Generation X is big on getting a good deal

Surveys have demonstrated that Gen Xers like to know they’re getting the best deal possible, with 88 percent of respondents joining loyalty and rewards programs.

15. Generation X loves prepared foods

Ever wonder who’s snapping up all the premade sandwiches and dinners at grocery stores? It’s Gen X, which favors quick meals for their busy lifestyles.

16. But Generation X isn’t big on salty or sweet

Meat, cheese, and fruit are all preferred options for Gen Xers, who don’t have the same sized sweet tooth as other generations. One estimate puts their interest in treats as being 10 percent less than younger people. For salty foods, it’s 25 percent lower.

17. Generation X may be less likely to eat at restaurants

In 2019, one survey indicated just 23 percent of restaurant-goers were Gen Xers. Millennials are more likely to eat out more often.

18. Generations X is likely to take over Boomers in 2028

That’s when the aging Boomer population is expected to be outnumbered by Gen X for the first time.

19. Generations X used to have a subcategory named Xennials

But no longer. The Xennials group, which was born between 1977 and 1983, was said to have known life both pre-digitally and after the digital revolution, weaned on land lines but coming of age online. The “microgeneration” was coined by Dan Woodman, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Melbourne in Australia. It failed to catch on.

20. Financially, the pandemic has been good for Generation X

Thanks to entering their peak earning years and earning more with equities and pensions, Generation X has been maneuvering through the COVID-19 pandemic without hurting as much financially as other groups. Their aggregate net worth went up 50 percent. If you’re not part of the cohort, don’t get too jealous: Gen Xers also got hit hard during the 2008 financial crisis.

A former ER tech explains what they don’t tell patients about how the emergency room works

“I haven’t opened a newspaper this morning,” Emily Maloney says when I ask if she’s read the latest dire news story about our American healthcare system. Then she adds the kicker: “I’ve actually spent the last two hours on the phone with our insurance company.”

Maloney has experienced the medical world from a variety of angles — as a frustrated, misdiagnosed patient, as an overtaxed ER tech in a Chicago trauma center, as a curious writer. “I had believed that doctors knew everything,” she writes early on in her new collection of essays. And with that trust, she paid a price. “Cost of Living” explores the financial, physical and psychic toll of trying to survive within a broken system, from an itemized tally of Maloney’s medications (one of which ran “a couple of hundred dollars” a month and tasted “like licking a battery”) to the types of restraints used in emergencies (two) to the calculations providers make in assessing addiction risk (unquantifiable). It’s a complicated and intimate tale of the messy healthcare apparatus we’re all at the mercy of.

Salon talked to the author recently while she was recovering from a breakthrough case of COVID-19 about how the system can be saved, and what patients don’t understand about emergency rooms.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I keep coming back to that line in the book where you say what an emergency room is good for and what it is not good for. That’s certainly about my own experience. It’s good if you’re in septic shock. It’s not good if you have a broken arm. What did you mean when you said that, and what do you think you have learned from being on both sides of the equation?

I think the answer lies in several things. One, we need a single-payer health care system. People are coming to the ER because they don’t have a primary care physician a lot of the time, or they’re not getting relief from whomever they’ve seen prior to coming to the ER. We live in a world where there’s just very low health literacy, and we’re operating from an illness-based model instead of a wellness-based model. The notion of preventative medicine, for most people, does not exist, because no one wants to go and see their doctor — provided they even have one — because no one can get the time off from work, or it’s going to cost too much money, or they don’t have health insurance.

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And so we’re in a place where a lot of people show up in the emergency department, and they’re not necessarily going to be helped by being there. That’s especially true now with COVID patients, who are flooding the ER. The patients who are non-COVID patients, a lot of those folks are not able to get the help that they need. You see that in terms of outpatient surgeries being canceled or delayed, basic medical decision-making being impeded by patients who are flooding the ER.

I do think that it’s a really good place to go if you’re acutely in danger of dying. It’s not a great place to go if you’re not. And I think that very few people seem to understand that.

I think of myself as a fairly health-literate person who tries to make good choices in life, but it’s also there is this sense of, “Well, what am I supposed to do if I broke my arm? Where am I supposed to go if I’m not dying but there’s a problem, or I don’t know if I’m dying?”

Right. People can’t understand whether or not they’re dying. If you see people in the ER, you see them on the worst day of their lives, usually. But the worst day of their life might not result in death. It might just be a really bad day. They come by different names, but using an urgent care or fast-track or doc-in-a-box, which has a really bad reputation and connotation, there are certain sections of the emergency department that might be devoted to orthopedic injuries like broken arms, or people who need sutures but didn’t have a loss of consciousness, that sort of thing.

When we talk about health literacy, we’re not really taught to or encouraged to do great self-assessment, even though we’re all patients. There is this sense of embarrassment and shame. There is this sense that they’re going to turn me away. There is this sense that I can’t afford it. There is all of these other personal, and financial, and mental obstacles getting in the way of us getting the care we need for the situation we’re in. What is a way around that for us as a system? Or what do you see maybe in other parts of the world that works better as a system?

Emily: A lot of people like to rag on the NHS, but they’re doing a pretty good job. I think PBMs should be illegal. I think big health insurance should be illegal. Everyone’s just trying to do the best they can with the resources they have, and the resources they have are not enough. There needs to be massive investment in infrastructure in terms of the health care system, a complete overhaul, in order to get to a point where we can actually help people.

I think that happens in terms of health literacy. This is something that should be taught in school, honestly. How to know what’s wrong with you, and how to be able to navigate for basic systems, but also not to have so many systems that you have to be sufficiently educated to navigate them. That’s the other problem, that we’re both unable to access the health care that we need, and also hopelessly mired in bureaucracy at the same time. So health literacy is huge.

We need to be sending a lot more people to medical school. The road to being a doctor is a very long one, and it’s a very expensive one, and it should be neither. We should have more residency spots. There’s just not enough residency spots for people to match into residencies. Even if you graduate from medical school and you’re reasonably well-qualified to become a physician, you passed your step one and you have good scores or even okay scores, you’re still unable to match, especially if you attended medical school outside the U.S., which a lot of people end up having to do in order to get into medical school. That adds an additional cost.

I know lots of people who have gone to medical school in the Caribbean, and they’re great doctors. They’re still an MD or a DO. They still provide the same level of care that people who are educated in the U.S. provide, yet they had to go elsewhere to seek an education, in large part because they didn’t score well enough on the MCAT. That does our country a real disservice, because patients should have access to physicians, and the fact that we don’t even have enough physicians to go around is sort of wild. The idea that we’re living in a world where people don’t have access to basic preventative health care is crazy.

I want to talk about pain. You write in the book about this idea of “safer” medication and “safer” pain management, and the slippery slope that we are all on — that balance between listening to patients and taking their pain seriously, and over-medicating or letting them manage it themselves DYI in a way that’s always going to be disastrous. What have you seen from that side of it, and what do you wish we as patients knew about the way that pain is managed in the ER?

Pain is managed poorly. Pain is an acute problem. If you go to the ER for chronic pain, that’s a real problem, because no one’s going to be able to help you with that. That’s a real issue that unfortunately is not going to resolve itself any time soon.

What happens is frequently patients present to the ER with real problems. Their pain is still real, even if they are taking too much of their medication by diversion. Diversion is the most common way to take medication. So you might save some it for later. You might take it in a different way than what was prescribed or directed to use. You might take more than what you’ve been prescribed or allotted for a particular time period. There’s lots of different ways to participate in diversion of your medication. But what’s really important to understand is that regardless of whether or not patients are engaging in diversion, regardless of whether or not patients are feeling like they’re getting the help they need, their pain is still real. Whether you’re an addict or not, whether you are using your pain medication incorrectly or not, whether you’ve been on a safe dose of OxyContin since you came home from the first Gulf War or not, unfortunately we are operating from a space where we’re unable to help those patients.

It’s two things. One is that we continually don’t pay for coverage of things that would be useful. A better way to say that is oftentimes, generally, health insurers don’t want to pay for acupuncture. They don’t want to pay for biofeedback. They don’t want to pay for massage therapy. They don’t want to pay for physical therapy. They don’t want to pay for occupational therapy. And these are all things that can help patients manage their pain better. When you take away all the other options except for medication, of course you’re going to have more patients who are taking medication, and who are dependent on medication.

The refrain among the pain patient community is, “dependent but not addicted.” A lot of pain patients are dependent on their medications. They don’t view themselves as addicted, and honestly the evidence suggests that very few pain patients become, quote unquote, “addicts.” There’s a lot of genetic evidence that certain kinds of patients with certain gene markers are more likely to be sort of prone for addiction or primed for addiction, but among the general public, a lot of patients are stable on the same amount of drug for a long time.

We had the CDC’s guidelines come down and attempt to regulate the amount of drug that is being dosed to people. the CDC should not be in the practice of medicine, really. It’s really up to doctors and their patients to decide what’s best for them on an individual basis. Patients who are on a certain amount of a drug should not be taken off that drug because that amount arbitrarily exceeds whatever value that has been set by the CDC, or the DEA, or anything like that.

More of Salon’s healthcare coverage:

From Kanye’s documentary to the return of Leatherface here’s what’s new on Netflix in February

February is the month of love and the perfect time to curl up with bottle of wine and binge-watch all the sappy romances your wee heart desires. Whether you’re single or happily taken, Netflix has a collection of new titles waiting for you to swipe right or swipe left on.

If “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette” are your cups of tea, don’t miss out on the second season of “Love is Blind” and the premiere of its Japanese counterpart. “Sweet Magnolias,” the feel-good series set in South Carolina, picks up with Maddie, Dana, Helen and friends in its second season. And the upcoming Korean language film, “Love and Leashes,” is a must-watch for fans of kinky workplace rom-coms.

And even Ali Wong has joined in the fun in her own, unique way.

Cheeky love stories may be on brand for this time of year, but they’re not the only genre Netflix has to offer. In fact, crime dramas are also quite popular. The docuseries “Catching Killers” returns for another season of heart-pounding investigations, this time surrounding the BTK (bind, torture, kill) killer, a Toronto-based cannibal and other heinous criminals.

Keep in mind that time flies by quick, especially during the shortest month of the year. “Rain Man,” “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” “Total Recall” (2012) and “Labyrinth” are just a few noteworthy titles to watch before they are gone by the end of the month.

Here’s a look at what’s coming this month:

“My Best Friend Anne Frank,” Feb. 1

Based on Alison Leslie Gold’s 1997 memoir, “Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend,” Ben Sombogaart’s war film tells the story of Hanneli Goslar (Josephine Arendsen) and Anne Frank’s (Aiko Beemsterboer) tragic friendship from Goslar’s point of view. The film premiered in the Netherlands over a year ago and took home the Golden Film award in October.

“The Tinder Swindler,” Feb. 2

Before West Elm Caleb became an infamous dating horror personality thanks to TikTok, there was Shimon Hayut, better known as the Tinder Swindler. Hayut, who went by the name Simon Leviev on the popular dating app, posed as a charming billionaire and conned his matches out of millions of dollars. From the creators of “Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer,” the documentary unveils Hayut’s ploys and focuses on the women who are working together to seek revenge.

“Murderville,” Feb. 3

Will Arnett stars as Senior Detective Terry Seattle in this whodunit comedy series based on BBC3’s sitcom, “Murder in Successville.” Each episode features Seattle cracking a new case with a different celebrity guest star. The catch, however, is that Seattle’s partners in crime are given no script and must improv their way to determine who the killer is.

All six episodes start with police chief Rhonda (Haneefah Wood) introducing Terry to his superstar partner. Medical examiner Amber (Lilan Bowden) then outlines the crime scene before Seattle and his partner delve into their case. And finally, Rhonda returns to close out the investigation and reveal the solution. Annie Murphy, Conan O’Brien, Ken Jeong, Kumail Nanjiani, Marshawn Lynch and Sharon Stone guest star.

“Ms. Pat: Y’all Wanna Hear Something Crazy?” Feb. 8

In her first hourlong Netflix special, stand-up comedian Ms. Pat finds humor in pain as she reminisces on growing up in poverty during the Reagan era, spending time in juvenile detention and other “crazy” personal tales.

“This is my story and I’m gonna tell it,” she proudly proclaims in the preview below.

“Ali Wong: Don Wong,” Feb. 14

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the comedian who brought us “Baby Cobra” and “Hard Knock Wife” takes to the stage without a baby bump for her third stand-up installment. The timing on the most romantic of holidays is no accident for the “Always Be My Maybe” co-producer and star. According to Netflix, the special reveals Wong’s “wildest fantasies, the challenges of monogamy, and how she really feels about single people.” What else can you expect from someone whose book for her daughters turns out to be a wierdly scatalogical love story? Can’t wait.

“jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy,” Feb. 16

The intimate three-act documentary compiles archival footage from the past two decades of Ye’s life as a solo artist, fashion designer and father. Key moments focus on the acclaimed rapper’s successful creative career, relationship with his late mother Donda and unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign.

Part I of the documentary premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

“Forgive Us Our Trespasses,” Feb. 17

Set in 1939 Germany, Ashley Eakin’s short film follows a physically impaired farm boy, played by Knox Gibson, whose life is suddenly in great danger after the implementation of Hitler’s Aktion T14 — a campaign to mass murder individuals with disabilities.

“Downfall: The Case Against Boeing,” Feb. 18

Rory Kennedy’s documentary revisits the two major Boeing Max 737 crashes that took place within five months of each other. In October of 2018, Lion Air Flight 610 crashed 13 minutes after taking off in Jakarta, killing all passengers. The same happened in March 2019 with Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. Investigators expose how the multinational aerospace company and Wall Street placed profits over safety and tried to cover up the devastation.

“Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” Feb. 18

Leatherface is back to terrorize a new group of victims. In the ninth installment of the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” franchise, the cannibalistic murderer targets four young friends who arrive in the quiet town of Harlow during a business trip. Sally Hardesty, the only survivor of the 1973 massacre, also joins the gang to finally put an end to Leatherface’s legacy. Olwen Fouéré stars as Hardesty alongside Mark Burnham, Sarah Yarkin, Elsie Fisher and Jacob Latimore.

“Vikings: Valhalla,” Feb. 25

The “Vikings” sequel follows the Vikings and their bloody battles with the English royals a 100 years later. Laura Berlin, Sam Corlett, Bradley Freegard and Frida Gustavsson star in this epic historical drama.

Here’s the full list of everything coming to Netflix this month:

Coming Soon
“Business Proposal”
“Juvenile Justice”
“Love, Life & Everything in Between”
“One Piece: Episode of Chopper: Bloom in the Winter, Miracle Sakura”
“One Piece: Episode of Alabasta”

Feb. 1
“Gabby’s Dollhouse” Season 4
“Raising Dion” Season 2
“The Addams Family” (1991)
“Anaconda”
“Batman Begins”
“The Book of Eli”
“The Bourne Ultimatum”
“Caddyshack”
“Caddyshack 2”
“Countdown”
“The Dark Knight”
“Despicable Me”
“Despicable Me 2”
“The Devil’s Advocate”
“Donnie Brasco”
“The Exorcist”
“The Foreigner”
“The Hangover”
“Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole”
“The Last Samurai”
“The Lucky One”
“The Negotiator”
“The New Guy”
“New Year’s Eve”
“The One”
“The Other Boleyn Girl”
“The Other Guys”
“Patsy & Loretta”
“Transformers: Dark of the Moon”
“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”
“Warrior”
“Watchmen”

Feb. 2
“Dark Desire” Season 2
“MeatEater” Season 10, Part 2

Feb. 3
“Finding Ola”
“Kid Cosmic” Season 3

Feb. 4
“Looop Lapeta”
“Sweet Magnolias” Season 2
“Through My Window”

Feb. 8
“Child of Kamiari Month”
“Love is Blind Japan”

Feb. 9
“Catching Killers” Season 2
“Disenchantment” Part 4
“Ideias à Venda”
“Only Jokes Allowed”
“The Privilege”

Feb. 10
“Into the Wind”
“St. Vincent”
“Until Life Do Us Part”

Feb. 11
“Anne+: The Film”
“Love Tactics”
“Bigbug”
“Inventing Anna”
“Love and Leashes”
“Love Is Blind” Season 2
“Tall Girl 2”
“Toy Boy: Season 2”

Feb. 12
“Forecasting Love and Weather”
“Twenty Five Twenty One”

Feb. 14
“Devotion, a Story of Love and Desire”
“Fishbowl Wives”

Feb. 15
“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”
“Love is Blind Japan”
“Ridley Jones” Season 3

Feb. 16
“Blackhat”
“Secrets of Summer”
“Swap Shop” Season 2

Feb. 17
“Erax”
“Fistful of Vengeance”
“Heart Shot”
“Mo Gilligan: There’s Mo to Life”
“Young Wallander: Killer’s Shadow”

Feb. 18
“The Cuphead Show!”
“Rabbids Invasion Special: Mission to Mars”
“Space Force” Season 2

Feb. 20
“Don’t Kill Me”

Feb. 21
“Halloween” (2007)

Feb. 22
“Cat Burglar”
“RACE: Bubba Wallace”

Feb. 23
“UFO”

Feb. 24
“Karma’s World Music Videos”

Feb. 25
“Back to 15”
“Merlí. Sapere Aude”
“Restless”
“Tyler Perry’s A Madea Homecoming”

Feb. 28
“My Wonderful Life”
“Two Sentence Horror Stories” Season 3

How the “critical race theory” moral panic morphed into book-banning frenzy

The moral panic currently sweeping America about critical race theory (CRT) has been covered ad nauseam by the press and commentators across the political spectrum. That’s what typically happens with moral panics (more on that in a moment).

What nobody is talking about, though, is the why of this particular issue at this particular time. As a result, we’re mistaking the tool for the goal.

Moral panics, when driven by politicians, are usually just tools. This CRT moral panic is a tool being used by a coalition of interests to achieve their own goals, none of which have anything to do with teaching or not-teaching the history of race in America.

Here’s how it works:

Imagine you’re part of a group of libertarian billionaires who don’t believe in public education and who see any such sort of taxpayer-funded effort to improve “the underclasses” as an absurd waste of the tax dollars you “worked so hard to earn” and the “gummint” now wants to take away from you “at the barrel of a gun.”
Imagine you’re a leader in the Republican Party who’s seeing the average age of the Fox audience — 70 — as a threat to your own political longevity because old white people don’t go into politics and you need 30- and 40-year-olds to learn their basic political skills locally (like on school boards) so you can groom and propel them up into state or federal politics.
Imagine you’re a multimillionaire white evangelical preacher who’s looking for an issue you can use to more tightly bind your congregation — your donors — to you by portraying yourself as a crusader who’s going to save their children from a horrible fate.
Imagine you’re a white supremacist militia leader who’s looking to expand his base by bringing in white middle-class adults and therefore you need an issue to get yourself into the headlines “taking on authorities” but that won’t end with you going to jail.
Imagine you’re a Republican politician who’s looking at a serious challenge in the upcoming primary elections and you need an issue that’ll be both popular and energizing for your base voters, even if the larger population doesn’t much care, because base voters are all you care about in the upcoming primary.

These are the goal-oriented “crisis actors” who’ve brought us the moral panic around CRT that has now morphed into a book-banning frenzy.

It has deep roots.

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Talk radio in the 1970s (I was in the business then) was often dominated by arguments against unionized public schools funded by property taxes, with the mantra, “I understand about paying taxes for police and fire, but I don’t have kids so why should I pay?” or “My kids are grown now, why should I pay?”

The movement to entirely privatize public education in America began in a big way after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that ended legal racial segregation in our public schools. Entire counties shut down their schools and a new industry of all-white “Christian academies” popped up all over the country.

The charter school industry evolved out of this with Reagan’s encouragement, and in some parts of America now dominates the education scene. And a moral panic about CRT is made to order to take down what’s left of our taxpayer-funded unionized-teacher-run public schools.

This is now big business. In Washington, D.C., for example, there are now as many charter schools making profits for their investors as there are public schools. The continuing existence of free public education represents a lost profit opportunity.

As billionaire former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos recently wrote for Fox News, it appears she believes the best solution is just to kill off unionized public education because it can never be reformed:

Because wokeness is the left’s religion, “banning” critical race theory or the 1619 Project won’t fix the problem. The liberal education establishment will simply rename, rebrand, or repackage these insidious ideas to get around so-called bans.

These are the very simple and easily identified goals of the Republican movement to “ban” critical race theory. The tool they’re using is a new moral panic.

If you’re old enough to remember the 1980s, you can recall when Tipper Gore and James Baker’s wife Susan were worried that song lyrics were going to corrupt a generation of Americans (tell that to Ari Melber). Or the Satanic ritual abuse hysteria that ran for much of the decade.
In the 1990s, after a young British girl died of an ecstasy overdose, there was a moral panic around “Rave Culture,” and much of the multi-million-dollar advertising campaign that kicked it off was funded by alcohol companies that saw the upswing in drug use by young adults as a threat to their bottom lines.
Since then we’ve seen national panics that just happened to politically or financially (or both) benefit Republican politicians, ranging from Islamophobia to Donald Trump’s “birther” claims against Barack Obama to Southern border caravans to the “bathroom hysteria” directed against trans schoolchildren just a few years ago.

In this context, we can understand how a disparate group of billionaires, Republican politicians, televangelists, media outlets and white supremacist militias might find common cause around a new and exciting moral panic.

Thus, today’s CRT hysteria.

Each group wins something substantial — particularly the billionaires and Republicans, as is usually the case — and the only losers are Black people and schoolkids. And, of course, objective real history, which is just a throwaway casualty to the people funding and promoting the hysteria.

Because “history” and schoolkids don’t vote, and Republicans have figured out how to make it very, very hard for Black voters to overcome everything from being purged off voting rolls to having to stand in line for hours to being given “provisional ballots” that are never counted.

By December of 2024 — and maybe December of this year — the elections will be over and the whole freakout around reinventing American history will have gone away, the same way nobody today is seriously working to push “bathroom bills” in state legislatures.

But don’t worry: It’ll be replaced by a brand new Republican moral panic that targets another convenient and vulnerable group.

Will it be Hispanics (ethnicity and language)? Sikhs (religion)? Lesbians (gender/sexuality)?

You can bet that today’s version of Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz are focus-grouping it right now.

Read more on the “critical race theory” panic and the wave of book bans:

Beyond the Winter Soldier: Sebastian Stan has always played roles that exist outside the binaries

If you only know Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes, the stoic Winter Soldier, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you’re likely not alone. His turn as Steve Rogers’ (Chris Evans) loyal best friend turned brainwashed assassin turned traumatized hero has elevated the actor to impressive heights and kept him busy for a decade. But if that’s been your only exposure to Stan, you’re missing out on a fascinating body of work that spans both film and television (plus the odd Instagram video or two) and has long been defined by the 39-year-old actor’s ability to not just disappear into roles, but make even the most unsavory characters appealing.

Unlike some of his Marvel co-stars, Stan has never fit into a particular mold. His résumé includes everything from recurring roles on fan-favorite TV shows like “Gossip Girl” and “Once Upon a Time” (his turn as the Mad Hatter was devilishly good at times and happened before the fairy-tale drama went off the rails) to small parts in Best Picture contenders like “Black Swan” and “The Martian.” His choices have always been interesting, but rarely have they been predictable.

Now, with three projects debuting around the same time — Hulu’s limited series “Pam & Tommy,” the Sundance thriller “Fresh,” and even the spy drama “The 355” — he’s finally starting to receive some of the attention he’s arguably always deserved.

Last year, Stan anchored the Marvel two-hander “The Falcon and The Winter Soldier” opposite Anthony Mackie, marking a return to television for the first time since a 2017 appearance in the pilot of Showtime’s “I’m Dying Up Here.” He hadn’t been a regular presence on television since 2012’s “Political Animals,” Greg Berlanti’s compelling behind-the-scenes look at a former First Family. Unfortunately, “The Falcon and The Winter Soldier” was hamstrung by a middling and uneven plot that attempted to merge a far-reaching political story about vigilante refugees with the intimate character-driven narratives of Bucky and Sam Wilson (Mackie). However, despite the messiness of the series, Stan showed flashes of the greatness we’ve known him to be capable of for years.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (Disney+/Marvel Studios)

In “Political Animals,” he wowed audiences as the anguished T.J. Hammond, the gay son of a former president (Ciaran Hinds’ philandering Bud Hammond) and current Secretary of State (Sigourney Weaver’s Elaine Barrish), the latter of whom has designs on the presidency herself. T.J.’s ongoing struggles with addiction contrasted sharply with the actions of his more stable twin (James Wolk), who served as their mother’s chief of staff and was perceived by the media and the political structure of Washington as “the good son.” It also served to underscore the brutal cost of his parents’ ambition and penchant for putting the nation ahead of their family. As one might expect, the role provided meaty material for Stan while giving the limited series an emotional throughline. However, T.J.’s relationship with his grandmother — a former Vegas showgirl with no **ks left to give (Emmy winner Ellen Burstyn) — offered opportunities for him to break out of the character’s persistent darkness and flash an easy smile, showing off an innate charm, too.

Although Stan received a Critics Choice nomination for his work on “Political Animals,” it is not his only memorable TV role. A few years prior, in 2009, he starred in the short-lived NBC drama “Kings.” The Michael Green-created series was loosely based on the story of King David and lasted just one season despite being a bold and visually engrossing modern retelling of the biblical tale. Ian McShane starred as King Silas, a powerful and commanding man who believed he was chosen by God to rule, while Stan portrayed his spoiled son Jack, whose womanizing ways hid the fact he was secretly gay. Landing somewhere between charismatic antagonist and tragic anti-hero, Jack is another entry on Stan’s résumé that reveals his talent has always been there but gone underappreciated outside of certain circles.

You can make an argument that Stan’s best work has always been on TV. The long-term nature of the medium is well suited for the depths he’s capable of reaching. But it’s not as if his film work has been lacking either. Even in brief appearances, like in Steven Soderbergh’s 2017 heist film “Logan Lucky,” or 2008’s “Rachel Getting Married,” in which he appears as a patient at the clinic where Anne Hathaway’s Kym begins the movie, he manages to leave lasting impressions. You can add to that list some of his more substantial roles as well, like Blaine in “Hot Tub Time Machine,” or Jeff Gillooly, Tonya Harding’s (Margot Robbie) abusive and criminally dumb husband in “I, Tonya.” While Robbie and co-star Allison Janney rightfully received the most attention for their work in the latter movie (Janney won an Oscar for her effort), Stan and his perfectly terrible mustache deserve credit for giving a performance that straddled the line between slimy and chilling.

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If there’s one thing that links Stan’s work, it’s that there’s no obvious or discernable pattern to the projects he chooses. His three most recent are as dissimilar as one can get. Hulu’s “Pam & Tommy,” which reunites him with “I, Tonya” director Craig Gillespie, takes a page from the film’s playbook and comedically dramatizes the events surrounding the infamous Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape scandal in order to reexamine them. The eight-episode limited series details how the stolen recording violated, exploited, and harmed Anderson (portrayed by Lily James in the show) while simultaneously raising Lee’s status, and it makes everyone from the media to the curious public complicit.

Sebastian Stan as Tommy Lee in “Pam & Tommy” (Hulu

For his part, Stan underwent a significant physical transformation, not just in terms of the Mötley Crüe drummer’s trademark tattoos, which were reapplied every few days by the makeup team, but his natural physique as well. The effect was such that Stan seamlessly disappeared into the role — much like he had as Gillooly — and gave an engaging, if not always sympathetic, performance (probably rightfully so).

His uncanny ability to slip into almost any character and make them alluring is again at play in the stylish Sundance thriller “Fresh” (streaming in March), a film framed as commentary on the horrors of modern dating that quickly gives way to actual horror. Stan, who plays a surgeon named Steve, received rave reviews for his performance and is said to be at his most endearing and most terrifying in the film, as he imbues the character with all the charisma of a romantic leading man and the insidiousness of a psychopath.

In some ways, it feels like Stan has been preparing for this type of role for a while. He’s played villains and countless misunderstood men who own the depths of their darkness, but rarely has he had the opportunity to take it quite this far. We’ve seen hints of a man unhinged in previous roles, but he’s never been able to fully embrace this type of madness until now. Maybe if he had, we’d have had this conversation much earlier, because he easily carries the film.

Jessica Chastain and Sebastian Stan in “The 355” (Robert Viglasky / Universal Pictures

Stan’s third and final project, the action flick “The 355,” features the actor in a smaller role than the previous two. The movie — which was filmed in the summer of 2019 and is finally making the rounds — is an ensemble film starring Jessica Chastain, Stan’s co-star in “The Martian.” She leads an international group of female spies (played by Diane Kruger, Penélope Cruz, Fan Bingbing, and Lupita Nyong’o) who team up to prevent all-out war. Stan portrays Nick, a CIA agent with ties to Chastain’s character who may not be all that he appears to be.

You could say the role is business as usual since Stan long ago mastered the subtle art of playing characters who exist beyond the binaries of good and evil, hero and villain. He’s methodically built a career out of portraying captivating men who are more than they appear to be on the surface. It’s no doubt a welcome sight to see that more and more people are beginning to see and/or appreciate this. But the truth of that matter is, it’s been happening for more than a decade if you’d only known where to look.

“Pam & Tommy” releases new episodes weekly on Hulu. “The 355” is available in theaters and on demand. “Fresh” streams March 4 on Hulu.

More stories to check out:

West Elm Caleb and the rise of the TikTok tabloid

Can you believe Makayla was dropped from Bama Rush? Do you think Couch Guy was cheating? Did you see Gabby Petito’s last post before she went missing?

If you don’t spend much time online, you may not recognize these names. But on TikTok, their stories became sensationalized, memeified, hashtagged and rehashed.

The most recent is “#WestElmCaleb.” Women took to TikTok to share their experiences of being peppered with affection, strung along and ultimately ghosted by a New York City-based designer named Caleb, who became the exemplar for the worst aspects of online dating culture.

Together, these stories represent the emergence of what I call the “TikTok tabloid,” in which users collectively manufacture and dramatize stories like an investigative gossip reel. Traditional tabloids place the lurid limelight on celebrities and public figures. But the TikTok tabloid targets everyday people.

How did we get to the age of the TikTok tabloid? As someone who studies digital consumer culture, I see it as an outgrowth of the dynamics of social surveillance: using digital technologies to keep a close watch on one another, while producing online content in anticipation of being watched.

Shocking! Exclusive! Scoop!

Tabloid journalism isn’t new. Common tabloid genres of stars, sex, scandals and slayings have been cultural guilty pleasures since the early 1900s.

In the U.S., early tabloid newspapers like The Daily Mirror and New York Daily News ushered in an era of sensationalist reporting. These papers were particularly popular among working class readers who reveled in the speculative shenanigans of high society.

In the 1970s, glossy tabloid magazines like People and Us Weekly picked up the helm with behind-the-scenes celebrity exclusives and human-interest stories. Tabloid journalism migrated to the small screen in the 1990s with television shows like “Hard Copy” and “Inside Edition.”

And in the 2000s, the internet churned out round-the-clock celebrity gossip with clickbait headlines on websites like TMZ.com and PerezHilton.com.

Previous eras of tabloid journalism were marked by highly curated content with a focus on lifestyles of the rich and famous. The brokers of attention were editors, publishers, paparazzi, journalists and publicists. Tabloids filtered information to the masses, and in turn the masses influenced celebrity behaviors.

But now we are witnessing a new iteration of tabloidization playing out in real time on TikTok, where digital technologies enable everyday consumers to play the roles of armchair experts, investigative reporters, digital paparazzi, talking heads and celebrities themselves.

Watching and being watched

Traditional tabloid journalism is predicated on surveillance dynamics of “the many watching the few“: an obsession with a relative handful of selected stars and scandals. The emergent TikTok tabloid relies on dynamics of social surveillance, or “the many watching the many” – a network of everyday people watching and being watched.

According to media scholar Alice E. Marwick, social surveillance is defined as “the ongoing eavesdropping, investigation, gossip, and inquiry that constitutes information gathering by people about their peers, made salient by the social digitization normalized by social media.”

Classic views of surveillance envision a prison state – a Big Brother-esque panopticon where a guard in a tower can watch prisoners in cells but the prisoners in the cells cannot see into the tower.

In social surveillance, everyone online is both a guard and a prisoner, constantly consuming online content and producing content for others to see.

This always-on dynamic works to control behavior. Everyday people have the power to orchestrate what other users see, read and believe – not only about traditional celebrities, but also about regular everyday people.

In the case of Gabby Petito, who went missing in September 2021, TikTokers developed theories about her disappearance based on her final Instagram post and her Spotify playlists, claimed to psychically track her and scrambled to be the first to report #GabbyPetito breaking news.

Such deep-diving into people’s private lives for public entertainment is a function of social surveillance only further accelerated by the interactive features of TikTok.

“Like for part two”

TikTok’s unique features and storytelling culture make it the perfect social media platform for making everyday people fodder for tabloid-like coverage.

First, interactive features of the platform allow TikTokers to collectively contribute to the TikTok tabloid in real time. TikTokers can directly respond to comments with new videos, curate and follow content via hashtags and sounds, stitch videos together with other content, caption them for context, and use a green screen effect – just like a real news studio.

Second, TikTok’s algorithm serves users content based on a combination of their interests and what seems to be generally trending. Watching a few videos about West Elm Caleb easily triggers a stream of West Elm Caleb content on the “for you page,” or #FYP: the TikTok version of front page news.

Third, storytelling practices on the TikTok platform mimic exclusive reports, hot takes and cliffhanger media. TikTokers dangle tantalizing bits of stories in front of viewers with caveats of “like for part 2” or by serializing their content. These stories then take on lives of their own, becoming culturally embedded memes.

Social media can be a useful mechanism for accountability. On Twitter, for example, users voiced outrage over racist actions of the Central Park Karen and found solidarity in sharing experiences of sexual harassment through the #MeToo Movement.

But where platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook enable users to tell stories, TikTok enables users to create full-fledged narrative rabbit holes. A nugget of content can be collectively transformed into an epic drama.

The promise and peril of publicity

The TikTok tabloid democratizes access to fame while fueling America’s cultural penchant for gossip.

The TikTok tabloid may seem fun and frivolous – an entertaining live action, participatory role-play version of TMZ playing out in real time. But there can a dark side to this form of public shaming and internet sleuthing.

The constant churn of sensational news can take a toll on well-being, particularly for those most directly involved. In November 2021, Sabrina Prater became unwitting front-page news of the TikTok tabloid when her mundane dancing video spiraled into conspiracy theories of being a serial killer. She later posted a tearful video pleading for the emotional attacks to stop.

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In contrast to traditional celebrities, few everyday people have publicists, spin doctors and social media managers who can help them handle the stresses of scrutiny.

Who manages the public images of people who didn’t choose to become public figures?

It would be easy to say they should just stay off TikTok. But it’s not that simple. Social surveillance ensures we all have the potential to become headline news – beholden to the TikTok tabloid taste-makers.

Jenna Drenten, Associate Professor of Marketing, Loyola University Chicago

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Biologists surprised to discover that some “random” mutations may not be so random

A peculiar study into malaria resistance in humans, and where and how it occurs in the population, has unexpectedly spurred a re-evaluation of the neo-Darwinist understanding of evolution.

Neo-Darwinism refers to any branch of science which combines Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s discipline of genetics. The overwhelming majority of biologists and geneticists are neo-Darwinists, and one primary tenet of neo-Darwinism is the idea that the genetic mutations which cause living creatures to evolve occur randomly. For humans, this means that mutations from the entirely beneficial (opposable thumbs) and the undesirable (say, those which cause obstructive sleep apnea) can be attributed to chance rather than some kind of purposeful direction. The ones that get passed on permanently do so through natural selection — that is, because they just so happen to help their hosts, who then survive longer and have more opportunities to perpetuate the mutation via reproduction.

At least, that was the prevailing assumption. A new study led by researchers from Israel and Ghana and published in the journal Genome Research reveals that, in fact, at least one helpful genetic mutation was not random at all. They specifically studied the HbS mutation, which protects people against malaria, and found that it arose more frequently within a population where malaria is endemic (Africa) than within a population where it is not (Europe). This might cause some of neo-Darwinism’s tenets to be revised.

“The results showed that the malaria resistant HbS mutation arises more frequently in the population and gene where it is of adaptive significance,” Dr. Adi Livnat from the University of Haifa, the study’s lead researcher and corresponding author, told Salon by email. “This shows empirically for the first time a directional response of mutation to a specific long-term environmental pressure. This sort of result cannot be explained by neo-Darwinism, which is limited to explaining minor, gross-level effects on average mutation rates, not responses of specific mutations to specific environmental pressures. Therefore, the implications are that here there is an empirical finding that neo-Darwinism really cannot explain, which challenges the notion of random mutation on a fundamental level.”

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Speaking to The Jerusalem Post, Livnat speculated that evolution could actually be shaped by a combination of “external information” through natural selection and “internal information” that is picked up in the human genome from generation to generation and leads to the creation of mutations.

“The research tells us many things, including the fact that the origination rate of the HbS mutation cannot be explained from the perspective of neo-Darwinism,” Livnat told Salon.

Livnat and the team of scientists were able to learn something this monumental once they had developed new technology for detecting de novo mutations, meaning those which are not passed down to the child from either parent. With a higher resolution, the scientists were able to count individual novel mutations on specific areas of the genome where they might find something instructive. The human hemoglobin S mutation (HbS) was chosen as their subject of study; neo-Darwinism contends that it originated randomly in a sub-Saharan African individual and spread in that region through natural selection because (despite being associated with sickle-cell anemia) it conferred malaria-protecting benefits. Yet if that theory were accurate, the mutation would still be random and therefore appear in roughly equal numbers between a population that is not heavily exposed to malaria (Europe’s) and one that is (Africa’s).

This was not the case.

“The HbS mutation originated de novo not only much faster than expected from random mutation but also much faster in the population (in sub-Saharan Africans as opposed to Europeans) and in the gene (in the beta-globin as opposed to the control delta-globin gene) where it is of adaptive significance,” the University of Haifa announced in a statement.

In addition, the study gives scientists strong reason to reconsider their current practice of measuring mutation rates as averages across a multitude of positions on the genome.

“We can definitively see that the picture of mutation origination that is obtained once we examine the resolution of specific mutations could not have been expected from traditional theories or previous empirical studies,” Livnat explained. “This suggests that most of the signal of mutation rates is not in the averages of mutation rates across many positions but is rather mutation specific. This means that there is an enormous amount of research to be done on how mutations are generated, and that already at the first time mutation origination is observed at this high resolution, we obtain results that challenge the central neo-Darwinian assumption on a fundamental level.”

More Salon articles about evolution:

My friend recently became a nurse — what timing, right?

A friend and former colleague spent the last few years studying and training to become a registered nurse. Recently, she succeeded in passing the boards.

Congratulations — and what a time to begin!

What would be analogous? The first thing that comes to mind is helping the wounded and dying in a time of war — which is how the profession began, whether one considers its origins as being Florence Nightingale helping British soldiers in the Crimean conflict in 1854 or, a decade later, nurses trained to help fallen soldiers in the U.S. Civil War.

The great majority of those dying in today’s modern hospitals are soldiers, wittingly or not, in a culture war headed by militant Republican leaders, like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and lesser lights, like our attorney general in Missouri, Eric Schmitt, who is doing the red portions of the Show Me State proud — and serving his candidacy for U.S. Senate — by suing the state’s large urban school districts for maintaining mask mandates in the ongoing pandemic.

It’s a war out there, and you’ve got to accept a certain level of American carnage. But what an unnecessarily tragic level: As I write, nearly 900,000 of our fellow citizens have died as a result of coronavirus. With the previous administration’s response to the pandemic, by turns political, ignorant, truculent, mendacious and hyper-politicized, by the end of summer 2020 the United States, with just over 4% of the world’s population, accounted for nearly 25% of the global total deaths — a terrible mark against what was once considered a leading “First World” country. (With the Biden administration’s push to get shots in arms, even as Republicans do all they can to undermine the effort — that proportion appears to have declined to around 14% of the 6.3 million dead worldwide.)

Infections may blessedly be coming down across the country, but with the omicron variant they remain far above what was seen in any previous surge. Hospitals across the country continue to be inundated, largely by unvaccinated people. Many health care professionals — physicians, nurses and other front-line workers — have long since maxed out emotionally and physically, suffering exhaustion, depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome. It is estimated that 20% have left the profession, with even a higher percentage saying they are considering leaving — on top of the fact that a serious nursing shortage existed even before the pandemic.

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Some health care leaders speak of a resilience that has grown among their staff members. That may be wishful thinking, but it is all we can hope for — that the battle-weary doctors and nurses and medical technicians who remain are even more stubborn than the virus and are willing to stay on the front lines.

My friend Kerry accomplished this change in careers later in life through great effort and dedication, continuing to work as a freelance copyeditor of medical journals while also putting in massive hours of study and hands-on work with patients. I happen to work for a science, technology and medical publisher (where she and I met) and some top-flight nursing preparation books come through one of the web-based submission systems I manage. A while back I read the introduction to one of these National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX) titles, and then started reading through some of the sample questions. I literally started perspiring — flop sweat — as if I were taking a final exam in a language I only partially recognized.

So as a thought-leader like Sarah Palin dines “outside” in a New York restaurant two days after testing positive and a health expert like Joe Rogan says he will try to do better after spewing disinformation about vaccines and “alternative therapies” on his massively popular podcast, Kerry and her classmates who managed to pass the NCLEX-RN find themselves as newly-minted nurses in hospitals still overwhelmed by the COVID-19 pandemic, omicron edition. It truly is a war out there, on multiple fronts, with death counts in this country now surpassing even the toll from the Civil War.

Speaking of which, along with some 20,000 men and women, poet Walt Whitman signed up to become a nurse at the outbreak of that conflict. He wrote of the horrors of the battlefield, of seeing amputated limbs piling up by field hospitals, of watching young men die. And he wrote of the mental and emotional toll of loss and the witnessing of death, as in this passage from “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d“:

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men — I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest — they suffer’d not,
The living remain’d and suffer’d — the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child, and the musing comrade suffer’d,
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.

Given that Republican politicians and many of their pals in media have made the meliorations of the pandemic era — vaccines, masks, social distancing — into cynical culture-war issues to advance their own political interests, perhaps treatments should be modeled after what patients experienced before the era of vaccines, without the use of anything high-tech. You think that is uncivilized? Republican leaders remain adamantly opposed to universal health care, devoted to keeping the U.S. standing nearly alone in the world in pursuing its expensive and wasteful FFY (Fend for Yourself) system. We could call taking a pre-vaccine era approach to vaccine-deniers the MAGA (Make America Grim Again) treatment protocol.

Providing health care to all citizens in need is one definition of a civilized country, and the people who devote themselves to service to others would never turn anyone away. Nurses and doctors will always strive to give you care ASAP, no matter how badly you have behaved and how exhausted they are. They’ll listen patiently (for the nth time) to those who come to realize that their favorite politicians and “news” organizations led them to this crisis and who speak — haltingly, out of breath — of their regrets.

Perhaps one day, historians will refer to surges in the coronavirus pandemic by those who eagerly spread the most disinformation up to the upward turn: the Trump Surge, the Carlson Surge, the Rogan Surge. (Better yet, they could highlight the ownership: the Putin Surge, the Murdoch Surge, the Spotify Surge.)

Bless you, Kerry, and all your fellow graduates willing, and now able, to step into the breach in this unconscionable political battle in the face of a health care crisis that continues to take more American lives and puts the rest of us at greater risk for infection and for facing new variants. I hope one day you can join a class-action lawsuit against the politicians and media corporations who knowingly and ceaselessly lied to the public about the critical importance in a pandemic of wearing masks and getting vaccinated.

Read more on America’s health care system, pushed to the breaking point:

The Gold Rush returns to California

On the outskirts of the northern California town of Grass Valley, a massive concrete silo looms over the weeds and crumbling pavement. Nearby, unseen, a mine shaft drops 3,400 feet into the earth. These are the remains of Grass Valley’s Idaho-Maryland Mine, a relic from the town’s gold mining past. Numerous mines like this one once fueled Grass Valley’s economy, and today, Gold Rush artifacts are part of the town’s character: A stamp mill, once used to break up gold-bearing rock, now guards an intersection on Main Street, and old ore carts and other rusty remnants can be spotted in parking lots and storefronts around town.

Gold still exists in the veins of the abandoned mine, and Rise Gold, the mining corporation that purchased the mine in 2017, has reason to believe that reopening it makes financial sense. When the mine shut down in 1956, it wasn’t because the gold was drying up; it was because of economic policy. The 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement had established a new international monetary system to create stability in exchange rates. As part of the effort, the price of gold was fixed at $35 per ounce. Gold mining became unprofitable in the U.S.

Today, the price of gold is no longer fixed, and prices have risen in response to the economic uncertainty wrought by Covid-19. At the start of the pandemic, the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates in an effort to stimulate the U.S. economy and encourage borrowing money. But those record-low rates decreased the returns on bonds and savings accounts, making gold a relatively more attractive business investment.

Now, with inflation rising and renewed economic uncertainty over the omicron variant of the coronavirus, demand for gold remains high, even despite some recent dips. In 2020, roughly 43 percent of gold consumed globally went towards exchange-traded funds and central banks. As prices have risen and mining technology has become more sophisticated, mines are opening and reopening in places where mining was once thought economically unfeasible.

Still, mining isn’t as simple as it used to be. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that of the world’s known gold, roughly 63,000 tons are still in the ground, compared with roughly 206,000 tons that have already been mined. And the world’s unmined gold is generally only unmined because it’s deeper underground and thus less accessible. To obtain it, companies have to figure out what to do with huge amounts of mining waste, some of which contains heavy metals and other toxic substances.

Rise Gold has pledged to mitigate the environmental impact of its new mining operation in part by employing a technique called paste backfilling, which involves injecting a mixture of water, mine waste, and a binder (often cement) into mining tunnels. The practice helps provide structural support and reduce the amount of aboveground mine waste. There is some science to support the benefits of this approach, but it’s only a partial solution, and there are lingering uncertainties about its long-term impact. While Rise Gold reports that there is strong support for the project throughout Nevada County, where Grass Valley is located, some local residents remain skeptical. Among other things, they are concerned that the new mining operation will not be able to adequately contain its waste.

Given these challenges, some economists are asking whether it makes sense to mine gold when the precious mineral is merely destined for a bank vault. “The cost of mining is high,” says financial economist Dirk Baur. Much of the value of gold is tied up in the cost of just digging it out of the ground, he says. “There’s some profit for the mining company, but a big, big chunk is just an expense.”

Over the past couple of decades, proposals to develop or expand gold mining facilities have popped up across Europe and North America. In Northern Ireland, Dalradian Gold plans to open a mine in the Sperrin Mountains. In Newfoundland, Marathon Gold is slated to open an open-pit mine that the company says will be the largest gold mining operation in Atlantic Canada. In the United States, which, as of 2020, had the fourth-largest gold mine reserves in the world, mining operations have expanded in northwestern Arizona in recent years, and there are plans to reopen a mine in central Idaho. Many companies seeking to find new riches in old places face community pushback similar to what is happening in Grass Valley.

Gold mine opponents have good reason to be wary. Mining creates a lot of waste, including the rock that doesn’t contain enough gold to extract (called “waste rock”) and also the slurry left over after gold has been extracted from ore (called “tailings”). Both waste rock and tailings can contain toxic substances that threaten to pollute groundwater and surface waters if not properly mitigated.

Grass Valley has been dealing with the fallout of Gold Rush-era mining for decades. Arsenic, which occurs naturally in the gold deposits of the Sierra Nevada foothills, remains an ongoing problem in the area. Old tailings can still leach heavy metals decades after mining operations have ceased. In Grass Valley, the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board documented high concentrations of arsenic in a pile of tailings nicknamed “the Red Dirt Pile.” In 2020, high concentrations of lead, mercury, and arsenic were found in samples taken from a former mine waste disposal area that now supports approximately 4.5 acres of wetland habitat. That disposal area, known as the Centennial site, is owned by a subsidiary of Rise Gold called Rise Grass Valley.

The Centennial site was polluted enough to warrant consideration for listing as a federal Superfund site, but Rise Gold avoided federal regulation by agreeing to undertake its own cleanup. Ralph Silberstein, president of the Community Environmental Advocates Foundation, a local environmental organization, says his group welcomes Rise Gold’s plan to address the hazardous substances that currently mar the area. But, he says, the group is troubled by what might come next. According to Rise Grass Valley’s Remedial Action Plan, the company may take the freshly cleaned-up site and use it for dumping waste from “future mining operations,” though they’ll first have to get permission from the state.

Rise Gold’s plans to minimize the mine’s impact are outlined in a draft environmental report, which Nevada County released this month, and which the company describes as “favorable.” In an interview with Undark, Rise Gold’s CEO, Ben Mossman, defended his company’s plan to use the Centennial site for some of the waste produced in conjunction with the reopening of Grass Valley’s Idaho-Maryland Mine. This particular mine is unique, said Mossman, because the company found “very little metal content” in the areas where it plans to dig. Because the waste will largely consist of non-toxic materials such as sand and rock, he says, “there’s no geochemical concerns to the environment or human health” — a claim that activists question.

Even when rock has little or no heavy metals, disposing of it can be a significant challenge. According to Rise Gold’s website, the Idaho-Maryland mining operation historically had to remove a ton of rock for every half ounce of gold it recovered. “These mining companies come along and they want us to not notice that they’re going to have a huge amount of mine waste rock,” says Elizabeth Martin, who recently retired as CEO of the Sierra Fund, a local conservation group based in nearby Nevada City. Rise Gold’s draft environmental impact report says the plan will result in approximately 182,500 tons of material produced per year that will need to be transported then used as engineered fill. By comparison, a large dump truck can carry about 14 tons. Multiply that by more than 10,000, and the visual is “beyond most people’s imagination,” says Martin.

Rise Gold plans to reduce its aboveground footprint at the Grass Valley mine with cemented paste backfill, which was first used in the 1970s as a way to recycle mine materials and help stabilize the underground workings. In essence, the mine becomes safer and the waste goes back to where it came from.

Paste backfilling is widely regarded as a more environmentally friendly way to dispose of mine waste. There is evidence that locking tailings up in cement decreases their permeability and stabilizes any heavy metals within them. There are still questions, though, about whether or not arsenic and heavy metals will stay put in the paste backfill material over the long term. The leaching behavior of arsenic depends on a lot of different factors, including the binder used in the backfill and the chemical content of the tailings. The biggest unknown is what happens in the future, when the mine closes and the pumps shut down, which will let groundwater flow into the backfilled tunnels. Some studies have noted that even low levels of leaching could continue for years, potentially contaminating drinking water or nearby rivers and streams.

Heavy metal leaching is high on the list of concerns in Grass Valley. Rise Gold promises their operations will be clean, but even so, the company’s hydrology report does note arsenic leaching from some test samples. The leaching tests, meant to simulate what might happen to a waste rock pile when it rains, found that arsenic leached at concentrations 17 times greater than the water quality standards from samples of the mineral type serpentinite. Rise says that’s not a concern since there will be very little serpentinite in the waste rock. Its report also notes that tests on tailings indicated arsenic leaching, but only at concentrations that would not exceed regulatory limits.

Underground mining operations also intersect with the water table, which means the existing tunnels have to be dewatered, and the water that’s pumped out of the tunnels has to be treated before it’s released aboveground. “The water coming from these mines that they’re dewatering is full of arsenic, manganese, iron, and other heavy metals,” says biologist Josie Crawford, executive director of the Wolf Creek Community Alliance, another local group that opposes the mine. “It will be treated, but it needs to be treated forever.”

The water also has to go somewhere after it’s been treated. Rise Gold plans to flush it down nearby South Fork Wolf Creek, a move that Crawford fears could cause damage to the riparian habitat. “It’s a trout stream, so it’s sensitive,” she says. “If the dewatering starts scouring the creek, they could lose a lot of those invertebrates and ruin the trout habitat.”

Conservationists and community opposition groups often see gold mining as a battle between nature and greed, and question whether the pursuit of gold is really worth so much environmental destruction. So does Baur, the financial economist, who says it makes sense from both an environmental and economic perspective to just not mine for gold at all. Much of the gold that already exists above ground, he says, is held by banks and investment companies. Investors can buy shares of gold they’ve never even seen. Baur says they might as well just buy shares of gold that companies promise to leave in the ground. “You buy something that doesn’t disrupt the land as much,” he says, “and you don’t have all the negative effects of the actual gold mining.”

Baur recently explored this idea with a couple of his colleagues at the University of Western Australia Business School. In a 2021 paper, they proposed leaving unmined gold in the ground and letting “nature act as a natural vault and custodian legally protected by gold firms and the government.” In this scenario, investors could buy stock in gold exploration companies that have identified underground gold but have no plans to mine it. This would give investors an alternative to purchasing shares of the aboveground gold that currently sits in bank vaults around the globe.

Would the unmined gold, which the paper calls “green gold,” actually earn money for its investors? Baur and his coauthors considered the costs of gold exploration and gold mining, and the uncertainty of the quality and amount of gold that might exist in any given underground location. They then ran an empirical analysis, and concluded that unmined gold can still be a valuable investment.

Baur says his paper has, unsurprisingly, received negative feedback from the gold industry. “They hate the idea, of course,” he says. “It’s the end of their business, essentially.” He thinks investors, though, may be more willing to entertain the idea, especially those who are looking for green investments. “But there’s also a lot of greenwashing,” he says, adding that investors may say they want to invest green, but may not be as willing to try new ideas when the time comes.

These questions will take time to sort out. In the meantime, the Grass Valley mining project still needs to overcome public opposition and significant financial hurdles. Opening a mine is expensive. Before Rise Gold bought the mineral rights in 2017, EmGold Mining Corporation had plans to reopen the mine. They spent $1 million just on consultants, according to one estimate, and the project never got past the preliminary stages. Locals like Silberstein hope Rise Gold’s plans will meet a similar fate.

“They’re talking about bringing gold up from 3,000 feet below the surface,” he says, “which means restoring a badly damaged, probably collapsed-in gold mine to get less than an ounce per ton of gold out.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” he adds. “It’s not a smart thing to do if we want to have a sustainable, livable world.”

Becki Robins lives in California’s gold country and writes about science and nature, history, and travel. Her work has appeared in Earth Island Journal, Lonely Planet, and on the YouTube series SciShow.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

Suspending Whoopi Goldberg doesn’t help anyone fight against bigotry

The last few weeks have seen a significant amount of antisemitism. People were taken hostage at a synagogue. There was a neo-nazi rally in Florida wth blood libel chants. And an important work about the Holocaust, Maus, was banned in a Tennessee school district.

The controversy dominating the news the past few days has been an incorrect comment on the Holocaust from Whoopi Goldberg. She Goldberg said the Holocaust wasn’t about race. “This is White people doing it to White people,” she said on “The View.” (ABC, which broadcasts the program, suspended the co-host for two weeks.)

Goldberg’s comments show a clear misunderstanding of antisemitism and the Holocaust, but that isn’t surprising considering the attempts to ban teaching accurately about race and history in this country.

In reality, race makes no sense. So it’s no surprise that racism is inconsistent and nonsensical or that talking about it is confusing.

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There is a lot to unpack when trying to understand race, antisemitism, and white supremacy. Antisemitism predates modern conceptions of race and racism, and Jews as a community don’t fit neatly into contemporary categorizations of a religion or even ethnicity.

If you get three Jews in a room, you’ll get five opinions on this topic. So it’s understandable that people can make good-faith mistakes about complicated topics regarding .2 percent of the world’s population.

Additionally, the history of the Holocaust and antisemitism in general is very badly taught in the US. New laws limiting what teachers can say in class will only deepen the misunderstanding. Racism and antisemitism are embedded in Ameirca’s white supremacist culture. The only way to combat them is by confronting them head-on.

One of the reasons all of this is so hard to understand is because the entire concept of race is an arbitrary modern social construct. There is absolutely no scientific basis for racial categorizations.

Take a step back and try to define race. How would you separate people into different categories?

Would you base it on skin color? If so, how would you explain that East Asian people, often with very light skin, are a different race from “white” or caucasion people? Or that South Asian people with darker skin are actually included in the caucasian racial distinction?

Courts trying to determine objective racial characteristics for miscegenation cases fell short in providing consistent criteria. Anthropologists, biologists, medical doctors, even hairdressers were called to testify in cases that required a racial determination.

Ultimately these decisions came down to a common understanding of who was white and who was not. Such racial distinctions were just as arbitrary, as if we separated people based on height or hair color.

Even though race is a social construct, the effects from that social construct are real and acutely felt. We cannot pretend, because race doesn’t scientifically exist, that it also doesn’t socially exist.

White supremacy is built on a hierarchy of exclusion that’s often fluid depending on what serves that hierarchy best. While antisemitism predates race and racism, it has been absorbed into white supremacy which is often Christian centered even if not particularly religious.

Jews as a group, no matter their race, are a target of white supremacy.

Jewishness isn’t a race or a religion or an ethnicity. Even the term “ethnoreligion,” often applied to us, doesn’t do our community justice.

Ashkenazi usually describes an ethnic group that’s mostly white and that ended up in Eastern Europe. Sephardic is the term for the group of Jews that were in the Iberian Peninsula. Mizrahi refers to Jews from Western Asia and North Africa. Ethiopian Jews are obviously African.

While these terms do illuminate ethnic conversations around Jewishness, they are far from sufficient. When someone converts to Judaism, they become fully Jewish and part of our people.

Adoption or intermarriage can racially diversify Jewishness. Not all Ashkenazi Jews have white skin. Many Jews of color are also Ashkenazi. We consider all Jews “ethnically” Jewish and part of our people.

How we define ourselves as Jews, however, means little to white supremacists. I have very white skin and have white-skin privilege, but that doesn’t stop white supremacists from saying they want to kill me.

Also most white supremacists aren’t very smart. I’m often faced with harassment from Twitter accounts telling me Jewishness is a race because Ashkenazi shows up on DNA tests. Of course, they seem to forget that “French” would also show up on a DNA test. I don’t think they’re claiming French people are a different race.

When Hitler and the Nazi Party developed their plan to exterminate Jews and build an Aryan race, they were absolutely acting out of white supremacy and racism. Antisemitism in Europe had a long history of racializing Jews and not seeing Judaism as just a religion.

The Holocaust was not just about religion –converting to Christianity, or only being “part” Jewish, did not protect people from the Nazis. The Holocaust aimed to exterminate undesirables to build a master race.

It was focused on Jews but it also Roma, Black Germans, the disabled, and gay and gender non-conforming people. White supremacy doesn’t just want to exclude racially undesirable people, but anyone who could “pollute” the white race with disability or “deviant” sexual behavior. Jews are also often seen as contributing to such pollution through encouraging deviant sexual behavior in non Jews.

Goldberg is right that white-skinned Ashkenazi Jews are not a distinct race, but that doesn’t mean the Holocaust wasn’t about racism. So if you’re confused about race and Jews and the Holocaust, you’re not alone. This is all very confusing and none of it is consistent or logical.

Othering and bigotry aren’t logical. They exist to support hierarchical thinking and oppression. But as long as racism and antisemitism exist, we need to take them seriously and respond to the continued oppression and harm. This is why actions like banning Maus or Beloved are so harmful. They limit the tools we have to understand the harm.

Suspending Goldberg doesn’t help. All it does is punish someone for engaging a difficult conversation and misunderstanding some of it.

Goldberg did exactly what we want people to do when they make a mistake. She listened to experts. She apologized.

Please pay a little more attention to blood-libel claims and a little less to someone making an honest mistake.