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The 16 most dangerous national parks in the U.S.

A family vacation to a national park can quickly turn into an emergency situation, as many of the parks are known for unpredictable weather, difficult terrain, and dangerous wildlife. They may also attract tourists who are new to hiking and underestimate the risks of exploring the wilderness. To see where visitors are most likely to get into trouble, check out this list of the most dangerous national parks in the U.S.

Outforia obtained data from the National Parks Authority to compile this list of the national park properties with the most search and rescue incidents between 2018 and 2020. Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona tops the list, with 785 incidents reported at the end of the last decade. The Grand Canyon is the second-most-visited park in the system behind the Great Smoky Mountains. It also features difficult hikes in and around the canyon that can lead to disaster for amateur hikers. Of the hundreds of cases included in the report, only four remain open.

Coming in at a close second is Yosemite National Park in California, which recorded 732 search and rescue incidents from 2018 to 2020. California’s Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks had 503 incidents, and Yellowstone in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho saw 371.

Though the large majority of these cases have been solved, many of the people who go missing in National Parks are never found. This is more of a testament to how easy it is to get lost in the wilderness than it is to any supernatural conspiracies, as some urban legends suggest.

Regardless of your experience level, the list below is a good reminder to stick to the trail on your next national park visit. Here are more facts about the most popular national parks in the country.

  1. Grand Canyon National Park // Arizona
  2. Yosemite National Park // California
  3. Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks // California
  4. Yellowstone National Park // Wyoming, Montana, Idaho
  5. Rocky Mountain National Park // Colorado
  6. Zion National Park // Utah
  7. Glen Canyon National Recreation Area // Utah
  8. Grand Teton National Park // Wyoming
  9. Olympic National Park // Washington
  10. Arches National Park // Utah
  11. Great Smoky Mountains National Park // Tennessee, North Carolina
  12. Glacier National Park // Montana
  13. Mount Rainer National Park // Washington
  14. Jewel Cave National Monument // South Dakota
  15. Buffalo National River // Arkansas
  16. Shenandoah National Park // Virginia

Bring the iconic flavors of cacio e pepe to breakfast with this new under-30 minute dish

The influence of cacio e pepe — the Italian pasta dish that roughly translates to “cheese and pepper” — has spread to all corners of the supermarket. There are cacio e pepe potato chips, flavored with parmesan cheese dust and ground black pepper; butter-heavy cacio e pepe doughnuts; and new recipes to shop for like Mary Elizabeth Williams’ cacio e pepe pie. 

What is it about this dish that has so enamored eaters? I think, like much good Italian cooking, the answer is found in its simplicity. Most recipes call for only a few ingredients: pasta (and pasta water), cheese, cracked pepper and perhaps a few pats of butter. From that short list, you get heat, salt, spice, umami, a little funk and a lot of creaminess. 

RELATED: I tried to make cacio e pepe for dinner and it was a disaster — here’s how to avoid the same mistake

Though this breakfast strata slightly expands the ingredient list, it remains simply delicious.

For this recipe, I tend to use whatever almost-stale bread I have on hand, but breads that have buttery layers (day-old brioche or croissants) or are a little sour (sourdough or French and Italian loaves) make solid choices. Try to avoid anything too dense or seedy.

Feel free to add additional ingredients. Cooked and chopped bacon would be delicious, as would a springy mixture of buttery leeks and mushrooms. However, simplicity is the key to this recipe, so try not overload it so those base flavors can really shine.

***

Recipe: Cacio e Pepe Strata

Yields
4 servings
Prep Time
15 minutes
Cook Time
12-15 minutes

 

Ingredients

  • 5 ounces (approximately 2/3 cup) hand-torn bread
  • 3 eggs
  • 1/8 cup heavy cream 
  • 1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese, plus more for garnish
  • 2 to 3 teaspoons freshly cracked pepper, plus more for garnish
  • Salt to taste 
  • Butter (for greasing ramekins or baking dish) 
  • Optional: Chives or parsley for garnish 
     

 

Directions

  1. In a large bowl, whisk the eggs and heavy cream until completely combined. Add the parmesan, black pepper and salt to taste and whisk until a very loose, liquidy “paste” is formed. 
  2. Add the torn bread to the bowl and gently stir until all of the pieces are coated. Set the bowl aside and allow the bread to soak for about 5 minutes, so it can absorb the egg mixture. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 350 degrees. 
  3. Coat four individual ramekins or one baking dish with butter, then fill them equally with the bread mixture.
  4. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes. The top of the strata should be a crisp golden brown, and there should be no liquid egg visible in the ramekins or dish. Remove the ramekins from the oven and allow them to rest on the countertop for 5 minutes. 
  5. It’s time to garnish! Sprinkle a little extra grated parmesan cheese and black pepper on top of the strata. Finely chopped chives or parsley would also add a nice pop of color. 

Cook’s Notes

I like baking the strata in four individual ramekins, but feel free to put it all in one 8×5″ baking dish instead. 

 

More of our favorite Italian-inspired recipes:

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11 best air fryer recipes that we’re obsessed with

I’m a gadget geek, so it’s no surprise that I was fascinated by the air fryer when it first came on the scene. Especially since I’m also a busy cook; if a gadget doesn’t make my life easier, then I’ve got no time for it. (Too few hours in the day to mess with one that messes with me!)

I am all about ruthless efficiency, in other words.

Mostly, I loved the concept of frying without oil. And so began a period of intensive experimentation. (Thereby putting my doctorate in experimental psychology to the only use it has seen lately.) Fast forward to about a year ago, when I wrote my first air fryer cookbook — and then, because I will totally overdo anything good, I wrote a second one: “Air Fryer Revolution.”

Because let me tell you something: It’s not about frying per se, nor is it about reproducing fried textures in breaded foods. It’s about using an air fryer for what it does really, really well.

And what is that, you ask?

  1. It cooks fast. Air fryers take two to three minutes to preheat versus the 30 minutes most ovens take. In fact, it’s so fast, that I’ve written all my recipes without an unnecessary preheat step. I just throw everything into an air fryer and walk away. I increase the overall cook time, and that keeps me from having to fiddle with the preheat-then-cook mumbo jumbo. Note: Most of my meat recipes only take 10 minutes to cook, because I have you cut up the meat smaller.
  2. It does indeed lightly “crisp” the outside of the meat. Not only does cutting up the meat into smaller chunks help it to cook faster, it also increases the exposed surface area that gets crisp. And more crisp equals better, as we all know!
  3. It doesn’t heat up your house. A super powerful air fryer might heat up the area around it, but there’s no way it’s actually heating up your kitchen, like an oven does. If you’ve ever had to bake a cake in the middle of a Texas summer, you’ll know what I mean.
  4. It combines baking and grilling. You know how you sometimes bake things and then broil or grill them to crisp up the top? An air fryer will do both of those tasks simultaneously. Another example of #ruthlessefficiency at play.
  5. It can indeed make breaded things taste better than just baking. If a food has natural fat in it, then it will “fry” up beautifully in an air fryer. Check out my breaded chicken wings or my air-fryer chicken fried steak.

Disclaimer: Unless you have zero taste buds left, you will not confuse air-fried potatoes with deep-fried potatoes. But that won’t keep you from enjoying the air-fried ones, and in fact, enjoying them more than you might baked homemade fries with zero oil.

Don’t think of an air fryer as a way to avoid frying — think of it as a way to make delicious food, fast. Think of it as a way to get a home-cooked dinner on the table in under 30 minutes. Think of it as a way to have dinner practically cook itself with very little babysitting. And then think of how much you’ll enjoy that glass of wine or that video game you could be playing instead of babysitting your stove.

What to cook in an air fryer

On first glance, you’re probably thinking, “Why do I need another $100 kitchen appliance that will take up a ton of countertop space?” And normally I’d tell you that you don’t. But this time, you kind of do. The air fryer can cook so many things well: chicken wings, mozzarella sticks, artichokes, Brussels sprouts, fried chicken, green beans, pigs in a blanket, and sweet potato fries. Anything that you’d normally put in a deep-fryer is fair game. But there are so many things that you wouldn’t think to deep fry, like shrimp scampi, toast, tacos, and turkey sandwiches, that you can cook in the air fryer.

Shopping for an air fryer

The marketplace is pretty crowded with air fryers at various price points, so how do you find the best one? Let me start with my favorites: The Instant Vortex is sold by the Instant Pot brand of appliances. It rings it at under $100 and has a six-quart capacity, which is ideal for large families and big-batch recipes. This one does take up a lot of space, so I’d only invest in it if you know you’re going to use it frequently and need to cook large portions. For something a bit smaller, I’d recommend the Ninja 4-Quart Air Fryer. It’s a bit more expensive than the Instant Vortex (it’s about $80), but it takes up less space, which is ideal for smaller families and cramped kitchens. It offers more customization options than other air fryers, which is nice if you like to manually control the cooking time and temperature.

Best air fryer recipes

1. Pasta with Mascarpone Mushrooms

No, you’re not cooking the pasta in the air fryer. But you are making the creamy mushroom sauce from start to finish in it. Winner, winner!

2. Shrimp Scampi

Lemony, garlicky shrimp cooks up extra quick in the air fryer — perfect over a bed of noodles.

3. Gochujang Chicken Wings

Sweet, spicy, and sticky, these wings star my favorite Korean chile paste, gochujang.

4. Indonesian-Style Chicken Wings

Chicken wings crisp up beautifully in the air fryer, and taste even better once tossed in kecap manis and sambal.

5. Korean-Style Beef Tacos

I like to use thinly sliced beef here, but you could also go for fatty pork shoulder. In any case, meat loves this marinade, which is punchy and umami-packed, perfect for taco night.

6. Chile-Cheese Toast

I grew up eating this toast as an afternoon snack. (It’s an Indian thing.) And yes, the air fryer is great at toasting bread.

7. Crispy Brussels Sprouts with Garlic-Chile Butter

Who doesn’t love crispy-crunchy Brussels sprouts?! (Crickets) Thought so. Pop them in the air fryer for an irresistibly snackable side. The garlic chile butter is a great touch (and the garlic can be roasted in a regular oven, FWIW), but you can eat these sprouts with just about any dipping sauce of your choosing.

8. Cheesy Potato and Broccoli Croquettes with Ranch Dipping Sauce

This recipe was made with a multi-cooker in mind, but there’s no reason you can’t steam the broccoli the old-fashioned way, then form the croquettes and stick them in the air fryer for maximum crispiness. While they’re working, don’t sleep on the zingy, herby ranch-inspired sauce.

9. Air Fryer Buffalo Cauliflower Tacos

Community member Foodlover 12 says of this recipe: “When I tried these, I could not beleive they were cauliflower. The air fryer gives them the most delightful light, crispy consistency that’s better than any fried chicken.”

Need we say any more? We think not.

10. Air Fryer Smoky Tempeh Sandwich

Tempeh can eat a little bitter if it’s not prepared with care — luckily, this recipe is chock-full of the stuff (both tempeh and care). Pile smoky, crispy slices of the air-fried fermented soybean cakes onto your favorite grainy, seedy bread and dig in.

11. Air Fryer Goat Cheese Fritters

Goat cheese fritters, without any of the messy oozing! Just bread them lightly and stick them in the air fryer for a crispy, melt-in-your-mouth result.

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A “buried” poll result reveals a trend in the GOP that looks bad for Trump

A year after former President Donald Trump left the White House and Joe Biden was sworn in as president of the United States, Trump continues to have considerable influence in the Republican Party. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a former Trump critic turned Trump sycophant, recently told Fox News that having a “working relationship” with Trump must be a litmus test for anyone in a GOP leadership role in Congress. But an NBC News poll, conducted in January 14-18, 2022, finds that many Republican voters identify as Republicans first and Trump supporters second.

Analyzing that poll in the New York Times on January 21, reporters Leah Askarinam and Blake Hounshell, explain, “Buried in a new survey published today is a fascinating nugget that suggests the Republican Party may not be as devoted to Trump as we’ve long assumed. Roughly every month for the last several years, pollsters for NBC News have asked: ‘Do you consider yourself to be more of a supporter of Donald Trump or more of a supporter of the Republican Party?’ Over most of that time, Republicans have replied that they saw themselves as Trump supporters first.”

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Askarinam and Hounshell continue, “But the lines crossed beginning in January of last year — and as of this month, 56% of GOP voters said that they considered themselves more as Republicans, while only 36% said they identified more as Trump supporters…. Whatever the reasons behind the shift among GOP voters, it’s safe to say that Trump’s potential primary rivals are watching these numbers closely.”

Hounshell, on January 21, tweeted:

Adam Jentleson, however, responded:

Read more stories like this:

The Supreme Court supported compulsory vaccinations in 1905. What changed in 2022?

When reports first trickled out that Justice Neil Gorsuch refused to wear a mask in the courtroom, and that as a result his fellow Supreme Court judge Sonia Sotomayor needed to work through Zoom as a result, the backlash was swift and unsurprising. No doubt with an eye toward protecting its reputation as an august body above petty partisan bickering, the court and its representatives quickly moved to squash the rumors. While it is still unclear what exactly has happened, the justices would like you to think everyone remains respectful to each other, while skeptics and leaks insist tensions are at a historic high. 

Ultimately, such reports reveal a deeper problem of partisanship within the nation’s highest court. It is the same problem revealed, with far more serious and obvious consequences, in the bench’s recent decision about President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates. We live in an era when major decisions about public health are motivated by a partisanship so intense that even educated men and women on America’s most powerful court will display willful scientific illiteracy in order to sustain their positions. This was seen in the decision to overturn the vaccine mandates — and is perhaps most effectively illustrated through a contrast with how the Supreme Court handled a similar case more than a century earlier.

The story begins in 1902, when the Cambridge, Mass. Board of Health ordered its citizens to get either vaccinated or revaccinated to stop a smallpox outbreak. Henning Jacobson, a pastor who had suffered severe side effects when being forcibly vaccinated against the disease in his native Sweden, refused to be inoculated on this occasion and was fined $5. Believing that his rights had been violated, Jacobson fought the case as a matter of principle and took it all the way to the Supreme Court. The result was their famous 1905 ruling in Jacobson v. Massachusetts.

“There is, of course, a sphere within which the individual may assert the supremacy of his own will, and rightfully dispute the authority of any human government, especially of any free government existing under a written constitution, to interfere with the exercise of that will,” Justice John Marshall Harlan explained in the 7-2 decision. “But it is equally true that in every well-ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand.”

He added that the preservation of freedom does not merely involve protecting what a person can do, but making sure that their actions do not constrain the rights of others. True freedom cannot exist “under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own [liberty], whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.”

RELATED: Like COVID-19, the Black Death had its own “truther” movement, too

A couple of details stand out from this case. First, this ruling was rendered at a time when authorities took it for granted that states rather than the federal government were responsible for these kinds of public health decisions — an attitude that was reflected as far back as George Washington’s day (he also supported mandatory vaccinations in various contexts). This means that the court did not have the option of ruling on federal power to address pandemics; its thinking, therefore, can best be gleaned by analogous cases such as this one. 

Second, unlike anti-vaccine advocates today, Jacobson lived in an era when inoculations were more dangerous, and his concerns therefore had more scientific legitimacy. Nevertheless, technology had advanced to the point where the benefits to the public as a whole of mandatory vaccinations outweighed the risk incurred by each individual in obtaining them.

Finally, and most significantly, the judges took it for granted that they needed to listen to the scientific consensus. They recognized that their expertise was in legal theory, not science, and felt it was their responsibility to align their reasoning with legal precedent rather than partisan demands.

It helped immensely, of course, that the case in question was not politically charged.

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“There was no obvious division between Democrats and Republicans on the question of how deeply government regulation can affect the workplace or one’s bodily integrity,” Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School, told Salon. “Those were things that cut across party lines. Now what we have is a lot of political ideology with partisan affiliation, and we have the court moving in the direction of that ideological and partisan leaning when it pushes back against OSHA’s regulation.”

Tribe’s reference to OSHA, or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, addresses the underlying issue in the vaccine mandates case. In the case of National Federation of Independent Business v. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Supreme Court had to consider whether OSHA has the authority to force private companies to require their employees to be vaccinated. They argued that the COVID-19 pandemic is a broad public hazard rather than one which is specific to the workplace, and that the agency therefore does not have the authority to enforce vaccine mandates. (They established one exception, ruling in Biden v. Missouri that the mandate can reasonably apply to healthcare workers.) To do so, the conservative judges — particular Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — underplayed the threat posed by COVID-19 and the effectiveness of vaccines and masks in curtailing it. Otherwise, it would be self-evidently absurd to argue that it was not a workplace safety issue.

“Supreme Court justices from any era have very little understanding of science and public health,” Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown Law who specializes in public health law and has written about the case, told Salon by email. “But the Court in Jacobson understood it had little scientific expertise and therefore deferred to the decision of public health agencies. The modern Supreme Court suffers from arrogance that wasn’t evident in 1905. They brazenly substituted their judgment for that of experienced public health agencies. The Court in its oral arguments made egregious errors about COVID transmission and vaccinations.”

While it is tempting to characterize this as a “war on science,” the target here is not the discipline of science or even necessarily the medical ideas that are currently controversial. The judges are acting not out of hostility toward science, but out of affinity for the idea that are most trendy within conservative political circles. The science behind stopping infectious diseases is not the target; it’s a bystander.

“I think the Supreme Court’s belief in states rights and federalism was at the core of its decision,” Gostin explained, arguing that the “one good reason” for the court’s decision was that “public health powers have historically been exercised at the state and local level.” As Gostin pointed out, though, “COVID-19 has taught us that states acting alone cannot curtail a pandemic. We need strong national rules. By striking down the OSHA mandate, it was devastating to the US COVID-19 response.”

“The court in the current vaccine case was tone deaf to the science,” Tribe added, pointing out that they did not deny that COVID-19 is highly infectious but instead chose not to pay much attention to that fact. “The court did not take an anti-vaxx position. On the contrary, it has upheld a number of state mandates just in recent months, so that it is not at all that the court today would come out differently in a case like Jacobson.” At the same time, while the court in 1905 was able to buck the anti-regulatory trends of its time in order to save lives from a deadly disease, the court in 2022 was hostage to its own political biases.

“In the current case, the court was simply swimming with the ideology,” Tribe told Salon. “It’s the ideological current that it had itself churned up that has been pushing away from government regulation now. It struck down this regulation consistent with that tendency, even though it would’ve upheld a regulation at the state level.”

This is not to say that politics alone explain the judges’ decision. Like all people, they are influenced by their environment and backgrounds, and therefore are prone to viewing the world in a way that is distorted by those factors.

“I believe that many of the justices are arrogant and out of touch because they have lived such privileged lives, Gostin wrote to Salon when asked about what has changed on the court between 1905 and 2022. “Many have also been judges or have held other positions where others give them great deference. These justices may also feel a sense of superiority. Overall, many justices do not come from backgrounds that are conducive to compassion and understanding of the lives of others who have had to struggle and have so often experienced injustice and dignity violations.”

Read more on the history of plagues and pandemics: 

An A-to-Z guide to every single type of pasta

The only dictionary I want to read is the A-to-Z guide of pasta. There are so many different shapes, ranging from long, thin strands to tube-shaped pasta, that the category really needs its own dictionary. This list is not nearly exhaustive, as there are, as I said, so many different shapes of pasta. But these 30 types of pasta are the most popular. These are the ones you’re likely to find in your regular grocery store or served as part of a pasta dish at an Italian restaurant, the ones that will make you think, “I’ve heard of that, but I don’t know what it is.” Well, now you’ll know!

A guide to popular types of pasta

Angel Hair

Angel hair is a quick-cooking, super thin noodle that is sometimes sold under the name “capellini.” Capellini literally translates to “thin hair,” but angel hair has a nicer ring to it, don’t you think?

Recipe: Sue Kreitzman’s Lemon Butter Angel Hair Pasta

Bucatini

Beautiful bucatini looks similar to spaghetti, albeit slightly thicker. What makes this noodle special is that each one has a small hole that runs through the center of it, which is like a secret tunnel for vodka sauce or amatriciana sauce.

Recipe: Bucatini all’Amatriciana 

Calamarata

This pasta shape not only sounds like calamari, but it actually resembles it, too. Originally from Naples, these wide, thick rings are often served with seafood pasta dishes because of their squid-like appearance.

Recipe: Calamarata with Squid in Its Own Ink

Capellini

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Obviously Shakespeare was referring to angel hair and capellini when he wrote Romeo and Juliet. Two kindred spirits, destined for eternity. That is me and capellini. Or me and angel hair. They’re actually the same type of pasta, just sold under two different names.

Cascatelli

Cascatelli is one of the newest, trendiest types of pasta to capture the hearts of gluttonous gluten lovers everywhere. It was designed by Dan Pashman, host of The Sporkful podcast, who was determined to create a pasta shape that had the ultimate “sauceability, forkability, and toothsinkability.” Safe to say he absolutely nailed it, since cascatelli has consistently been sold out (or required a super long waitlist) since it launched in early 2021.

Cavatappi

This perfect corkscrew-shaped pasta is my personal favorite for baked macaroni and cheese (so much cheese sauce in every twist and turn!) or this summery Cavatappi with Sun-Dried Tomatoes, Brie, and Arugula.

Recipe: Cavatappi with Sun-Dried Tomatoes, Brie, and Arugula

Cavatelli

Cavatelli is way underrated. You’ll generally only find it as fresh pasta served in a restaurant. Like orecchiette (which you’ll meet a little later), cavatelli is usually served with broccoli rabe and sausage. Think of it as a cross between orecchiette and gnocchi, as it’s slightly doughier than many other rolled pastas.

Recipe: Homemade Cavatelli Recipe

Chitarra

I can’t help but pronounce chitarra with a thick Italian accent that sounds like I have lived in southern Italy for decades (or rather, makes it sound like I wish I’d lived in southern Italy for decades). Chitarra actually refers to the tool used to cut spaghetti by hand, which resembles guitar strings. When you see “spaghetti alla chitarra” on a menu, just know that it’s spaghetti made with a little extra love.

Recipe: Spaghetti alla Chitarra with Classic Abruzzese Ragu

Elbow Macaroni

I was introduced to elbow pasta around the age of three, when I first started eating boxed macaroni and cheese. Eventually, Kraft came out with other fun shapes like farm animals, SpongeBob SquarePants, and rocket ships, but when all else failed (or when the store was sold out of SpongeBob because it was every kids’ favorite), there was always a box of elbow macaroni and cheese to fall back on. Elbow macaroni generally comes in two sizes (small and large), and I love them both.

Recipe: Martha Stewart’s Macaroni and Cheese

Farfalle (aka Bow Ties)

Oh, why hello there, Mr. Farfelle. I didn’t know this dinner was a black-tie affair. This bow-tie-shaped pasta comes from northern Italy and is a popular choice for kid-friendly pasta dishes and pasta salad.

Recipe: Homemade Farfalle — How to make bowtie pasta yourself!

Fettuccine

You know and love fettuccine. It’s generally the widest long noodle option available in the average U.S. grocery store (if they don’t carry pappardelle), and it is the key player in everyone’s favorite Italian-American dinner: fettuccine alfredo.

Recipe: Best Fettuccine Alfredo

Fusilli

Fusilli looks like my bedhead if I haven’t slept on a silk pillowcase, which is to say a short, tight, corkscrew shape. It’s a popular choice for pasta salads, mainly because it has so many nooks and crannies that are perfect for cradling sauce, herbs, grated cheese, and other add-ins.

Recipe: Pasta Salad with Crispy Salami and Cherry Tomato Vinaigrette

Garganelli

The first time I met garganelli was the first time I ever felt true love. It was that perfect feeling of “Where have you been all my life?” It’s kind of like penne, but it’s not. It’s kind of like cavatelli, but it’s not. Garganelli are handmade using egg pasta dough, which is formed and cut into small squares and then rolled like a baby’s swaddle. It hails from Emilia-Romagna in Italy, and while you can certainly find it stateside these days, it’s not always readily available in the average supermarket.

Recipe: L’Artusi’s Famous Mushroom Ragu with Fresh Garganelli

Gnocchi

Some people would argue that gnocchi is not pasta, but rather a pasta-dumpling hybrid. But I, a gnocchi lover, feel that it deserves to be included in this generous roundup of pasta shapes. Gnocchi is made by combining mashed potatoes with all-purpose flour and eggs to form a dough. The dough is portioned, rolled into thin logs, and sliced into bite-size pillows that are quickly cooked and served any which way. (My personal favorite is when they’re tossed with marinara sauce, a little ricotta, fresh basil, and lots of fresh mozzarella, then transferred to individual gratin dishes and baked until bubbling…just in case you were wondering.)

Recipe: Classic Potato Gnocchi

Linguine

In terms of thickness, linguine is in between spaghetti and fettuccine. You might know it by its award-winning performance in box-office hits like Linguine with Clams, Parsley, and Lemon. It’s wider and flatter than spaghetti but not quite as wide as fettuccine. Make sense?

Recipe: Linguine with Breadcrumbs and Kale

Mafaldine

Think of mafaldine as half-width lasagna noodles. Also known as reginette (which is Italian for “little queens”), this ribbon-shaped pasta is flat and wide with ruffled edges. For some reason, it’s often served with lobster, blistered cherry tomatoes, and a cream sauce. I don’t question it. I just eat it.

Orecchiette

Translating to “little ears,” orecchiette are most likely to be found hanging out with sausage and broccoli rabe in a shallow bowl. This shape actually has roots in southern Italy and, like its other southern Italian pasta cousins, is usually made with semolina flour.

Recipe: Orecchiette Pasta with Roasted Butternut Squash, Kale, and Caramelized Red Onion

Paccheri

If you like rigatoni, you will love paccheri. They’re essentially shorter, stubbier, and wider pasta noodles, compared to rigatoni. You’re more likely to find smooth paccheri, but some versions are ribbed, which we prefer for chunky meat sauces like bolognese.

Pappardelle

If fettuccine or linguine are boxed hair dye, pappardelle is balayage. Which is to say, they’re kinda the same, but one is obviously much better. Pappardelle are some of the widest egg noodles you’ll find on menus and in the grocery store. It’s more difficult to score than fettuccine or linguine, but it is totally worth the scavenger hunt and a little extra money. Bigger isn’t always better, but in this case, it absolutely is.

Recipe: Ottolenghi’s Pappardelle with Rose Harissa, Black Olives, and Capers

Penne

If I could lay on a bed of five-cheese baked penne, I would. If I could drive a car made out of five-cheese baked penne, I would. And if either of those fantasies are out of reach (something makes me think they are), then I’ll settle for single-handedly eating a 9×13-inch baking dish of five-cheese baked penne. You have absolutely met penne before, but let’s recap: Penne is a cylinder-shaped hollow pasta with angled ends and ridges. You may also come across mezze penne, which is a slightly smaller, shorter version of regular penne.

Recipe: Penne alla Vodka

Pici

Pici are underrated for a number of reasons. For starters, they’re entirely hand-rolled, which is not only an art form of sorts but one that requires no special equipment. They’re also usually made with an egg-free dough, which means it’s a great choice for anyone who is vegan. And also, they’re delicious! Pici is essentially a thicker, rounder, hand-rolled version of spaghetti (you can absolutely use it in place of its more popular relative in any pasta recipe).

Recipe: Pici Cacio e Pepe with Garlic and Marjoram

Ravioli

Ravioli can describe a shape and type of pasta, as well as a dish. Ravioli are either square or round pieces of stuffed pasta filled with anything and everything from meat sauce to spinach and ricotta to lobster to mushrooms. They’re always made by hand using a stamp (essentially a ravioli cookie cutter) or a mold that looks like an ice tray, but instead of ice, it makes ravioli.

Recipe: Ravioli alla Sorrentina

Rigatoni

Rigatoni is the quarterback of the pasta world. It rarely breaks under pressure (unless it’s way overworked). It’s dependable, loyal, and guides other important players to the field, er, bowl, like chunky sauces, lots of Parmesan cheese, roasted squash, or crushed tomatoes. (But take this with a grain of salt. I’m a food writer, not a sportscaster.)

Recipe: Rendang Rigatoni

Rotini

Rotini and fusilli are very similar, but the former has slightly tighter screws. They’re absolutely interchangeable in a recipe, and no one would ever be able to tell the difference.

Recipe: Rotini with Andouille, Pine Nuts, Raisins, and Spinach 

Shells

Shells provide the ultimate shopping experience because they are sold in every size from extra small to extra-large. Small shells are ideal for soups or homemade macaroni and cheese, whereas the biggest ones are just waiting in the wings to be stuffed with spinach and ricotta.

Recipe: Cheesy Stuffed Shells with Kale Pesto

Spaghetti

Is it the most exciting type of pasta on this list? No. Is it the tastiest? No. But what it lacks in mystery, it makes up for as a key figure in classics like spaghetti pomodoro or spaghetti and meatballs. It’s a long, thinnish strand of pasta, but then you already knew that, because who doesn’t know what spaghetti looks like?

Recipe: Spaghetti all’Ubriaco (Drunken Spaghetti)

Tagliatelle

Oh, these are good. Everytime I look at tagliatelle, I get amped to make pasta. This long strand of pasta is ever so slightly wider than fettuccine, but you’d probably have to get out your tape measure to tell the difference between the two. It hails from the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, and I’m booking a ticket there as I write this so I can tour its homeland.

Recipe: Tagliatelle with Corn, Tomatoes, “Onion-Bacon,” and Basil

Tagliolini

This is another long noodle that is very similar to spaghetti. It’s been described as being in between capellini and tagliatelle, which, to me, sounds like spaghetti. However, it’s often only presented in the form of eggy fresh pasta, so it has a more vibrant yellow hue and more complex flavor compared to dried spaghetti.

Tonnarelli

Pretty much the only time you’ll come across this long thin noodle is in cacio e pepe, aka adult mac and cheese, aka the ultimate comfort food. Think of it as squared-off, ever-so-slightly thicker spaghetti. But does it really matter? You know you’re going to order the cacio e pepe no matter what pasta shape it’s served with.

Recipe: Cacio e Pepe

Tortellini

Another stuffed pasta! The literal Italian translation is “small little pies,” so yes please to this meat-and-cheese-filled pasta. Tortellini are served two ways — sometimes you’ll find them just tossed with tomato sauce and baked or with olive oil and roasted veggies. But the more traditional, and I think more special, presentation is in the form of tortellini soup, where these little pockets float in a warm, savory broth.

Recipe: Smoky Minestrone with Tortellini and Parsley or Basil Pesto

Women are finding new ways to influence male-led faiths

In some religions, women are barred from serving as clergy or excluded from top leadership roles. Nonetheless, women have broken into influential roles in these male-led faiths. How are these women forging new pathways in these traditionally patriarchal religions?

The Associated Press, Religion News Service and The Conversation held a webinar with academics, journalists and religious leaders to discuss the future of women in faith leadership on December 9, 2021.

The panel featured Ingrid Mattson, chair of Islamic Studies at Huron University College at Western University; Emilie M. Townes, dean and distinguished professor of Womanist Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt Divinity School; Carolyn Woo, distinguished president’s fellow for global development at Purdue University; and Jue Liang, visiting assistant professor of religion at Denison University. Roxanne Stone, managing editor of Religion News Service, acted as moderator.

Below are some highlights from the discussion. Please note that answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Some of the women [faith leaders I’ve spoken] with [talk] about how leadership isn’t just in titled positions, but in influence. What is your definition of leadership? In the male-led faiths that you’re paying attention to, are you seeing any examples of women taking on nontraditional, unofficial leadership roles?

Carolyn Woo: I think leadership is the ability to have a vision that really advances that particular organization and serves that organization, and the capacity to translate that vision into action. I think influence is very important. I think informal influence for women comes from the fact that perhaps [they] are very invested with [their] work and have expertise and have good relationships with people and credibility. Those are informal sources of influence, but it is not fair. Women shouldn’t only operate with informal power — not because it is not useful, but because they also deserve formal recognition of their position. Formal positions allow you to have a vote. You don’t have to whisper it to somebody else.

Jue Liang: The Buddhist way of thinking about leadership is more in the identity or the role of a teacher or a role model. Everyone has the potential to become enlightened, just like the Buddha. [In Buddhism] leadership is considered, at least in theory, open to all. [Historically, it has not been] the case. But through education and ordination, we’re [seeing] more [role] models that are inhabiting the body of women. [Leading] more women to think, “Maybe I can do that too.”

Are women who have informal or non-clergy roles of influence — say in publishing, social media or academia — able to maintain that informal influence long term?

Emilie M. Townes: I think our ability to lead and influence is going to be tenuous [in any circumstances]. Influence is always going to be dependent on whether or not people are listening. I think it becomes even more tenuous if you are in a more conservative setting that has a hierarchy of roles where the thought of challenging is just not a part of everyday life.

Ingrid Mattson: I see a lot of self-censorship. When I speak to women religious leaders about issues that impact women, there’s a lot of caution that the majority exercise. They feel like their authority is very tentative and that all it takes is a few guys calling them a radical feminist [to lose their influence]. The women who are ready to step out have other sources of support. They are at universities or women’s organizations, so that even if they are dismissed in this way, they still have a basis for support.

When we talk about these issues [that women in male-led major religions face], there is almost an assumption that change is inevitable, that younger generations are just not going to stand for this. And that if women do not start to have more top leadership posts in some of these traditions, that they’re not going to survive. What are your thoughts on that, and where do you think we’re headed?

Carolyn Woo: Changes are inevitable, but the direction and the sources of those changes are not homogeneous. You have young people who walk away from the church and become disaffiliated. On the other hand, I also see women who have started ministries for women athletes. Within the Catholic Church, [women have started ministries] to try to understand our own menstrual cycles so that they could appreciate the female body.

Emilie M. Townes: Change is happening, but I always look at the structures of the change happening. [We may have more women seminary students than men], but if the basic structure of the church remains the same, the roles perpetuate the structure. I like to think more in terms of transformation. I think it pushes us further along.

Watch the full webinar to hear more detailed answers to these questions and to hear the panelists discuss stereotypes women leaders face, the future of women’s leadership in the Catholic Church, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Muslim women leaders and more.

[The most interesting religion stories from three major news organizations. Get This Week in Religion.]

Emily Costello, Managing Editor, The Conversation and Thalia Plata, Editor, The Conversation

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

Would dogs be better off without us?

Would dogs be better off without us?

This may be a difficult question to consider if you live with a dog, love dogs, and find beauty in the enduring loyalty of the human-dog partnership. If you are reading this book with a dog curled up next to you on the couch or on her fluffy dog bed, happily licking peanut butter out of a Kong, this question might even be too painful to contemplate: How would my dog survive, naked and afraid, set adrift in a frightening new reality, without me to keep her safe? Yet try to imagine for a few moments not only what your dog might lose, but also what she might gain. Better yet, think about the whole range of individual dogs who currently share the planet with humans and consider the potential losses and the potential gains of having the world to themselves. And think about dogs who might come after the transition, who have never known life with humans. Maybe dogs as a species would have a better go of things on a planet that they didn’t have to share with people, if the 20,000-year-long domestication experiment—which, arguably, has had its problems—were called off once and for all.

Dogs would be challenged by living on their own in a posthuman world. But a posthuman world is also full of what you might call “dog possibilities”—the various ways in which dogs would adapt, innovate, and expand their experiential worlds. We’ve seen that there is far more to the lives of dogs than being a house pet, spending the day chasing balls, barking at the postal delivery person, or waiting anxiously for their person to come home from work. A dogs’ world is a bustling place, with dogs working on their own and with others to solve the puzzle of survival and to reap the rewards of life. Trying to catalog what dogs might stand to gain and lose if humans disappeared can help bring into focus some of the ways in which humans make life hard for dogs. More pertinent for those of us who live with companion dogs are the potential insights about how we might, without even realizing it, be asking our dogs to live in ways that constrain who they are and who they might become, the many ways in which we compromise the “dogness” of dogs. Having a sense of the whole experiential range of dog possibilities may help us become better companions to our dogs.

To explore whether the dog sitting next to us on the couch is fantasizing about a humanless world, we’ve tried to identify the potential gains and losses for dogs in a world without us. As you might expect, the question, “Would dogs be better off?” does not yield a simple “yes” or “no” answer, and the further you dive into the question the murkier the waters become.

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Variables at Play in the Gains and Losses Game

We’ve constructed a comprehensive list of what dogs stand to gain or lose if humans go extinct in our book. Here are a few thoughts on why judgments about gains and losses are complicated.

What dogs may gain or lose as a species is distinct from what an individual dog stands to gain or lose. The sudden disappearance of humans will result in broadscale losses at the individual level. Many dogs will be ill-equipped to survive, not having had any lived experiences of obtaining their own food, finding shelter, or forming a workable pair bond. Depending on how humans disappear, individual dogs in captivity—for example, inside homes with no way to get out, or locked inside shelters or laboratory cages—will perish. Overcrowding of dogs in some areas may lead to intense competition for scarce food resources. Moreover, large numbers of individual dogs will be unable to reproduce because they have been desexed, and so even if individuals manage to survive, they will be at a genetic dead end. Nevertheless, enough dogs may survive this first wave so that viable populations will be able to take hold in habitable ecosystems. Dogs as a species may very well go on to flourish.

The gains and losses for dogs in a world without humans will be unique and will depend a great deal on where a dog begins this unprecedented journey into a posthuman future. The unique characteristics of where and how each dog is living when humans disappear will greatly influence what challenges they face and what is experienced as a loss or gain. How well they cope will depend on an individual dog’s personality, past experiences, learning, social and emotional intelligence, and physical attributes.

Dogs currently live in wildly diverse relationships with humans, and while some dogs may keenly miss humans, others will be glad to see us go. A pet dog with a well-informed, motivated, and empathic human caregiver has more to lose than a dog caged at a research laboratory or in a puppy mill. Feral dogs will miss the enormous piles of garbage that humans produce but may not experience any loss of human companionship. Although the challenges for pet, free-ranging, and feral dogs will be different, the loss of humans and the transition from human selection to natural selection will be abrupt, and it won’t be pretty for many of the dogs on the planet.

RELATED: Dogs have the potential to be bilingual, a recent study finds

There will be far fewer posthuman dogs inhabiting the planet. A reduction in total numbers should not necessarily be viewed as a complete loss because arguably there are too many dogs, their population having been bloated by intensive human breeding and careless pet-keeping practices. The size of dog populations, especially in dog-dense areas, will need to be much smaller to be sustainable, with sustainability depending on the carrying capacity—the maximum population size of a species that can be sustained within a given environment—of different habitats in which dogs are trying to survive.

Posthuman dogs may form short- or long-term groups. What might be a gain for a group isn’t necessarily a gain for all individuals within the group, and much will depend on who else is in the group and the ecological conditions with which the group must contend. Groups of animals tend to be most robust when they contain a broad range of behavioral phenotypes. It may be good for a group to have a combination of high-ranking and low-ranking individuals, but life might be difficult for those individuals who are of lower rank.

If humans disappeared, some gains and losses would be felt immediately, such as loss of human food subsidies and the gain of freedom from physical constraint, but the effects of human disappearance will reverberate and shift over generations.

For more about the book, see “Science and Speculation Say Dogs Would Do Well Without Us” (Psychology Today, October 21, 2021) by co-author Marc Bekoff. For a deeper dive into many of the topics addressed in the book, please visit Dr. Bekoff’s blog, Animal Emotions.

Jan. 6 committee obtains executive order draft that called for voting machines to be seized

The House Select Committee has uncovered a draft of an executive order written sometime in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election. According to Business Insider, the order would have called for the U.S. Secretary of Defense to “seize” voting machines and select a special counsel to conduct an election investigation.

The document, reportedly dated December 16, 2020, “outlines a plan for the Pentagon to take the machines and for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to conduct an assessment of the machines within 60 days of their seizure.”

“Effective immediately, the Secretary of Defense shall seize, collect, retain and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information, and material records required for retention,” the draft order said.

In addition to suggesting a government seizure of voting machines, the order also echoes multiple election conspiracy theories largely circulated by former U.S. National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Trump’s controversial campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, both of whom are known Trump allies.

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“The appointment of a Special Counsel to oversee this operation and institute all criminal and civil proceedings as appropriate based on the evidence collected and provided all resources necessary to carry out her duties consistent with federal laws and the Constitution,” the draft order also said.

While it remains unclear who actually wrote the draft, it does appear to align with the ideology of former President Donald Trump’s allies and many right-wing figures who circulated his claims of widespread voter fraud. The Jan. 6 investigative committee was able to obtain the draft earlier this week after the U.S. Supreme Court denied Trump’s request to block the panel from obtaining a substantial amount of executive-branch documents.

Although Trump’s campaign legal team filed countless lawsuits contesting the election results in multiple states, election audits cybersecurity experts have confirmed there was no evidence of voter fraud.

More on the continuing aftermath of Jan. 6, 2021:

GOP’s new voter suppression tactic is also an old one: “Election police”

Republicans have been committing election fraud right out in the open since 1964 and covering it up by yelling about “voter fraud.” 

Remember the hours-long lines to vote we’ve seen on TV ever since the ’60s in minority neighborhoods? Those are no accident: They’re part of a larger election fraud program the GOP has used to suppress the vote for 60 years now.

This election year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is raising the stakes: He’s planning to put together a force of “election police” under his personal command to travel the state intimidating voters while pretending to look for “voter fraud.”

RELATED: Voter suppression in action: Mail-in ballot rejections many times higher under new Texas law

As The Washington Post reports:

DeSantis is asking the GOP-controlled legislature to allocate nearly $6 million to hire 52 people to ‘investigate, detect, apprehend, and arrest anyone for an alleged violation’ of election laws. They would be stationed at unspecified “field offices throughout the state” and act on tips from “government officials or any other person.”

Meanwhile, the GOP in Texas is quietly recruiting 10,000 white volunteers “courageous” enough to go into Black and Hispanic polling places and confront people trying to vote. As Jessica Corbett reported for Common Dreams:

“Common Cause Texas on Thursday shared a leaked video of a Harris County GOP official discussing plans to ‘build an army’ of 10,000 election workers and poll watchers, including some who ‘will have the confidence and courage’ to go into Black and Brown communities to address alleged voter fraud that analyses show does not actually exist.”

These efforts to intimidate voters are part of a much larger Republican campaign of widespread and systemic election fraud that the party has been running since the days of Barry Goldwater. Democrats need to start calling it that.

Individual “voter fraud” doesn’t affect elections in modern America. Every election year we hear about a handful of people busted for trying to vote twice or in the name of a deceased relative, but it’s so rare it has absolutely no impact on elections and hasn’t at any point in my 70 years on this planet.

Voter fraud, in other words, isn’t real. But election fraud is very much real and alive, and that’s exactly what DeSantis and the Texas GOP are proposing, right out in the open.  

This has a long history, stretching back to the era when the Republican Party first began trying to cater to the white racist vote.

In 1964, Sen. Barry Goldwater — who was running for president on the Republican ticket — openly opposed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts that President Lyndon Johnson was then pushing through Congress. 

At the time:

  • 35.5% of the citizens of Mississippi were Black but only 4.3% were able to register to vote. 
  • South Carolina was nearly one-third Black (29.2%) but only 9% of that state’s African Americans could successfully register to vote. 
  • Alabama was 26% Black but the white power structure made sure only 7% could vote.

These were not accidents: From poll taxes to jellybean counting to constitution-interpreting requirements, most Southern states had erected massive barriers to Black people voting.

These elections where only white people were allowed to vote in large numbers were fraudulent elections.  

After all, isn’t it a fraud to say that a “free and fair” election was held when, in fact, large numbers of people who were legally qualified and wanted to vote weren’t allowed their voice? 

How can that not be a fraudulent election? 

And back in 1964, Goldwater and the Republicans wanted to keep it that way. 

But as the issue of voting rights was showing up on the nightly news and people were marching across the country for their right to vote, Republicans on Goldwater’s team realized they needed a justification for the status quo.

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So they came up with a story that they started selling in the 1964 election through op-eds, in speeches and on the news. This story was simple:

There was massive “voter fraud” going on, where mostly Black people are voting more than once in different polling places and doing so under different names, often, as Donald Trump recently said, “by the busload” after Sunday church services. In addition, the Republican story went, “illegal aliens” living in the United States were voting in the millions.

None of it was true, but it became the foundation of a nationwide voter suppression campaign that the GOP continues to promote to this day.  

A campaign of actual “election fraud” based on the lie of “voter fraud.”

William Rehnquist, for example, was a 40-year-old Arizona lawyer and Republican activist in 1964, when his idol, Goldwater, ran against Johnson for president. 

Rehnquist helped organize a program called Operation Eagle Eye in his state to challenge the vote of every Hispanic and Black voter and to dramatically slow down the voting lines in communities of color to discourage people who had to get back to work from waiting hours in line to vote.

As Democratic poll watcher Lito Pena observed at the time, Rehnquist showed up at a southern Phoenix polling place to do his part in Operation Eagle Eye:

“He knew the law and applied it with the precision of a swordsman,” Pena told a reporter. “He sat at the table at the Bethune School, a polling place brimming with black citizens, and quizzed voters ad nauseam about where they were from, how long they’d lived there — every question in the book. A passage of the Constitution was read and people … were ordered to interpret it to prove they had the language skills to vote.”

Rehnquist was richly rewarded for his activism; he quickly rose through the GOP ranks to being appointed by President Nixon, in 1972, to the U.S. Supreme Court. He was elevated in 1986 by President Reagan to chief justice, a position he used to stop the Florida State Supreme Court-mandated vote recount in 2000, handing the White House to George W. Bush.

(Interestingly, two then-little-known lawyers who worked with the Bush legal team to argue before Rehnquist that the Florida recount should be stopped were John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh. Bush rewarded Roberts by putting him on the court as chief justice when Rehnquist died. Roberts was also the tie-breaking vote to allow Ohio to continue its voter purges in 2017, and wrote the 5–4 decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013.)

Rehnquist’s Arizona arm of Operation Eagle Eye was one of hundreds of such formal and informal Republican voter suppression operations that exploded across the United States that year. As The New York Times noted on Oct. 30, 1964:

Republican officials have begun a massive campaign to prevent vote fraud in the election next Tuesday, a move that has caused Democrats to cry “fraud.”

The Republican plan, Operation Eagle Eye, is designed, according to party officials, to prevent Democrats from “stealing” the 1964 election. Republicans charge that the election was stolen in 1960.

The Democratic National Chairman, John M. Bailey, has criticized the Republican plan as “a program of voter intimidation.'”He has sent a protest to all 50 state Governors and has alerted Democratic party officials throughout the country to be on their guard.

“There is no doubt in my mind,” Mr. Bailey wrote the state chairmen yesterday, “that this program is a serious threat to democracy as well as to a Democratic victory on Nov. 3rd.”

Republican positions both then and now are not generally popular. Who’d vote, after all, for more tax cuts for billionaires, more pollution, banking deregulation, gutting Medicare, privatizing Social Security, shipping jobs overseas, keeping drug prices high and preventing workers from forming unions? 

The GOP’s sweet spot, however, is scaring white people about “crime” by minorities, particularly African Americans and Hispanics. Which is why Donald Trump told Congress that “3 to 5 million fraudulent” votes were cast in the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton.

And when they can’t clamp down enough on ID laws or close enough polling places in Black neighborhoods, they fall back on “election police,” the 2022 version of Operation Eagle Eye.

As the conservative Town Hall site notes about the election just held in Virginia that saw that state’s governor’s office flip to a Republican:

Not only did the RNC indeed have “a robust poll watching operation,” involving 50 election integrity trainings with over 3,200 attendees, but such an operation produced results. In the 37 [many minority] target Virginia counties, poll watchers covered 100 percent of polling locations, the November memo confirmed.

This is one dimension of a much larger nationwide campaign of Republican voter suppression election fraud, using the phony excuse of trying to stop “voter fraud.” 

They’ve already started, in numerous states, seizing control of election systems in minority neighborhoods, aggressively purging voter lists, outlawing mail-in voting or making it far more difficult, and closing polling places by the hundreds.

This year, and particularly in 2024, they’re reviving Operation Eagle Eye to have armed militia volunteers and “election police” confront people in their own neighborhoods on Election Day, all in a craven attempt to discourage minority voting.

Now that neither the Supreme Court nor Congress is willing to stop them, we must, like Paul Revere, awaken the American people to this long-term strategy that’s worked so well for the GOP since 1964, usually producing widespread disenfranchisement and hours-long lines to vote in minority neighborhoods. 

The struggle for democracy in our republic is far from over, and the next battlefield will be the election this November. Republicans are doubling down on every tool they’ve ever used to suppress the vote.

Spread the word.

More on the Republican campaign to suppress the vote:

Bill Maher reveals how Democrats can fight fire with fire and give Barack Obama a third term

Comedian Bill Maher facetiously suggested Friday night that Democrats should grant former president Barack Obama a third term by having him “gay-marry” President Joe Biden.

Pointing to Biden’s record-low approval ratings, Maher said during the season premiere of HBO’s “Real Time” that it’s time to “move him into a more ceremonial role.”

According to Maher, the problem is that even when Biden does something good, he gets no credit.

“This is what happens when you lack passionate defenders, as opposed to Trump, who every day sh*t the bed, and 90 percent of Republicans blamed the bed,” Maher said. “And Biden may well have even further to fall, because there’s no die-hard Biden base. His is a coalition of the un-enthused. No one ever fainted during one of his speeches, or claimed Biden was appointed by God, or asked him to sign their tits.”

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Quipping that the Democratic Party lacks any “big-d*ck energy,” Maher said the “bench is so thin” that “they’re even talking about running Hillary (Clinton) again.” He added that Vice President Kamala Harris’ approval rating is even lower than Biden’s, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is “too old,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is “too young,” and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo “didn’t work out.”

“But there is one guy all Democrats could rally behind and would love to see back in the White House,” Maher said, referring to Obama. “Of course, you’re saying Obama can’t be president again — he’s had two terms, and that’s the rule. You know, politics, often called the art of the possible, really is now the art of whatever you can get away with, something only Republicans seem to realize, like when they just made up that presidents can’t appoint a Supreme Court justice in an election year, or when they changed their mind and said, ‘Oh wait, they can when our side is in power.'”

“To them, hypocrisy is not a bug, it’s a feature,” Maher said. “They’re all about grinning in the mirror as they shove it up your ass, like Jesus would do. That’s the essence of Trumpism.”

RELATED: Bill Maher explains how he thinks America can stop Trump’s “slow-moving coup”

He compared the GOP’s tactics to the 1970s Disney movie “Gus,” about a mule who gets signed to kick field goals for a football team because there’s no specific rule that prohibits it.

“Trump pulled a ‘Gus’ every day when he was in the White House,” Maher said. “What the Democrats have to do now is their version of a ‘Gus.’ And it goes like this: Biden and Obama must divorce their wives — not leave them, just officially legally divorce them. Then, Biden will gay-marry Obama, thereby putting him back in the White House. The law says Obama can’t be president again, but there’s nothing that says he can’t be first lady.”

Noting that all first ladies have pet projects, Maher said Obama’s would be “running the federal government.”

Watch below:

Meat Loaf taught me it’s OK to have big dreams

Meat Loaf, the singer and actor, died Thursday at age 74, his manager Michael Greene confirmed, as reported by the New York Times. No cause of death has been officially released, but Meat Loaf was with his friends and family when he died, including his wife of 15 years, Deborah Gillespie, and his two daughters, singer Pearl Aday and actor Amanda Lee Aday. Meat Loaf was previously married to Leslie (Edmonds) Aday.

Meat Loaf had a career that spanned decades and mediums. He trained to be a Broadway singer and met his longtime collaborator and devoted friend, songwriter Jim Steinman, at an audition for the Steinman co-written musical “More Than You Deserve” at the Public Theatre in New York in 1973. Steinman would go on to compose all the songs for Meat Loaf’s first album “Bat Out of Hell” in 1977, which the New York Times called “one of the most successful records of all time.” The album was born out of a futuristic “Peter Pan” musical that Steinman had written and was trying to stage more widely, with several of the songs from the musical reinterpreted for the album.

The Todd Rundgren-produced “Bat Out of Hell” showcased the musical theatre prowess of Meat Loaf, his dramatic flair. His extraordinary voice soars in songs that became big hits, like the title song, “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.” 

But Meat Loaf, Steinman and the band initially struggled to get a record company to sign them. The musician who would go on to sell 100 million albums worldwide was rejected for two and a half years straight, and even Epic Records, the parent company of Cleveland International Records, which eventually released “Bat Out of Hell,” wasn’t thrilled with it. Underpromoted, the album found its audience first in the UK and in Canada, where in 1978, Meat Loaf brought the house down at El Mocambo in Toronto. The same year, he performed for America on “Saturday Night Live,” where host Christopher Lee jokingly introduced him as “Loaf.”

With power rock chords, crescendoing piano, and operatic heights, “Bat Out of Hell” wasn’t like anything anyone had heard before. It still isn’t. It was like Meat Loaf had flung, fully formed, from hell himself. The album art, conceptualized by Steinman, added to the mythology with its image of a shirtless, long-haired motorcyclist blasting out of a grave, orange fire and a winged demon in the background.

But after “Bat Out of Hell,” which has sold over 40 million copies worldwide, Meat Loaf struggled. He lost his voice, perhaps unsurprising given the rugged everything he devoted to his live performances (he broke his leg during a concert in 1978). He struggled with addiction and depression, the quick and fickle rise to fame, and was entangled in lawsuits, including being sued by Steinman (and vice versa). In the 1980s, Meat Loaf filed for bankruptcy.

In 1993, he was back and — surprisingly, given their public fights — back with Steinman for the album “Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell.” His sixth studio album reached No. 1 in multiple countries. It reached me in Ohio. 

RELATED: 25 famous songs with misunderstood meanings

My first introduction to Meat Loaf was “Bat Out of Hell II,” which I bought in cassette form. I’m certain I bought it at the mall, where I spent hours with my friend, waiting for her older brother, who had a license, to pick us up.

So much of my childhood was waiting, longing for more and other. We would leave this town, my friends and I swore. Leave the cornfields stretching on endlessly in the distance. Leave far behind the high school where on the last day, a classmate drove his John Deere tractor; where, when we performed show choir songs for other schools, the audiences would moo at us. 

Meat Loaf struck a nerve with me — with millions of others, it turned out — because here was teenage angst given serious attention and empathy, given powerful anthems, given belief. He was bombastic, but achingly sincere. The joke about his 1994 Grammy Award-winning hit “I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That),” penned by Steinman and featuring Lorraine Crosby, was . . . well, what’s that?  What won’t he do?

That’s a joke from people who weren’t paying attention. He won’t cheat. That’s what the narrator of the song — a Phantom of the Opera-type character, on the run from the law, in the popular music video — won’t do to the person he loves. He’s going to get her “right out of this Godforsaken town” but he’ll be faithful. He won’t be “screwing around.”

Meat Loaf was an unlikely sex symbol. His stage name was a childhood nickname (maybe; like multiple details of his life, he spun myths about it). He was born Marvin Lee Aday in Dallas in 1947, and later legally changed his first name to Michael. Critics mocked his weight throughout his career. As Steinman said, “He looks like every kid who thinks he’s a misfit.”

Meat Loaf looked different from me, but my physical disability kept me firmly in the outcasts corner too. And here was a large man confident enough, when asked by a duet partner if he will love her forever, to sing “let me sleep on it.” He somehow managed, despite songs like “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad,” when he sings about sleeping with someone but not loving them, to seem nontoxic, supportive and faithful with the earnest heart of a child.  

His stage persona was shameless, prone to drama, big promises and bigger dreams. Passionate, intense, with a vocal range worthy of opera, he wore ruffled poet blouses, tuxedo pants he sometimes split on stage. He kept his hair long. Off stage, he proposed to his first wife Leslie by giving her a salmon. He adopted her daughter. Despite never registering for either major political party, he supported Mitt Romney‘s 2012 failed presidential run and sang at an Ohio rally for him in a performance many called “bizarre.”

And then there was Steinman, the beating heart behind his songs. Steinman wrote all of Meat Loaf’s hits, and the two had a lifelong, contentious friendship, as intense and sprawling as any of the pair’s ballads. Steinman, who died last year at age 73, was the definition of an artist, but as the Washington Post wrote, “It was Meat Loaf who was the vehicle for the music, delivering energetic, emotionally earnest performances with an almost heroic sincerity.” Meat Loaf was more than a muse, but the art made flesh.

In an emotional interview Meat Loaf gave to Rolling Stone after Steinman’s death (where Meat Loaf also contradicts the stories of the pair suing each other, saying simply it was their managers suing), he said, “I became the song and he saw the ability for me to become the song.” Sometimes, artistic pairings work, work with the devotion of a marriage forged in hell and tested by fire. “We belonged heart and soul to each other,” Meat Loaf said.

Meat Loaf was the son of a former police officer and an English teacher, and grew up in Texas. He spent a good deal of his childhood with his grandmother, possibly due, as he theorized in his 1999 memoir “To Hell and Back,” to the drinking of his father. He released 12 studio albums; 2016’s “Braver Than We Are” was the last. At the time of his death, he had been in the studio recording seven new songs.

As an actor, Meat Loaf’s big break came with the 1975 cult classic “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” where he appeared as bad boy delivery boy Eddy, roaring onscreen in a motorcycle, like an alternate version of his first album cover. Modern audiences may recognize him best from his sensitive turn as Robert Paulson in “Fight Club” (1999). He also appeared in movies like “Wayne’s World” (1992) and in TV shows like “The Outer Limits” (2000).

In recent years, Meat Loaf had dealt with health problems. In 2013, he was diagnosed with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome; he had collapsed while performing several times in the 2000s. He also had asthma, and had undergone back surgeries which made it difficult for him to move and, he feared in 2018, sing. 

In the Rolling Stone interview after Steinman’s 2021 death, Meat Loaf related how Steinman’s nurse had reached out to him: “She left me a message saying how much [Steinman] loved me. She said I was the one person he needed more than anyone else in his life. I don’t want to die, but I may die this year because of Jim. I’m always with him and he’s right here with me now.”

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When I’m drunk on one and a half beers on Friday nights in this unending pandemic, it’s Steinman and Meat Loaf’s songs I sing alone in the kitchen. Meat Loaf’s operatic voice was the one that first allowed me to dream of other places, another life I might make for myself with the kind of love that lasts beyond death, the kind of dreams that are rock and roll dreams, and as such, they live forever. 

In a statement posted on Facebook, Meat Loaf’s family wrote: “From his heart to your souls . . . don’t ever stop rocking.” And as the title screen of the “I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” video says, for the unabashed king of earnestness: “Sometimes going all the way is just a start . . .”

More stories to read:

The Expanse producers “would love” to continue the show

This past weekend saw the debut of the season 6 finale of “The Expanse,” and seemingly the end of the show. After nearly seven years on the air, the science fiction epic which began on the Syfy Channel before being cancelled and subsequently saved by Amazon has reached its conclusion. Or has it?

While “Babylon’s Ashes” wrapped up many of the plotlines of “The Expanse,” including the solar system-wide war sparked by the Free Navy, it also left a few big threads dangling. This is because “The Expanse” book series by James S.A. Corey (a pseudonym for authors Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham) spans nine books, with book six, “Babylon’s Ashes,” serving as a major turning point and internal ending within the series. The final three books, which the show hasn’t reached, occur 30 years later, and bring many of the story’s largest lingering plotlines, like the Laconian Empire and the “sleeping entities” by the Ring, to the forefront.

So it’s pretty natural that a lot of people are asking if this is really the end for “The Expanse.” And according to showrunner Naren Shankar, that question is on the mind of the creatives behind the show as well.

“The Expanse“ showrunner teases that the series could return

“This has been such a delightful experience. We love the show and we love making the show,” Shankar told Entertainment Weekly. “Right now, the future really lies with Alcon Television, which is the studio that makes the show, and Amazon, if there is in some form, an appetite for more.”

I think from the standpoint of just the pure creative, I think what we tried to do at least was come to a satisfying conclusion of a huge chunk of the story while leaving the door open for more if the appetite and the desire is there. I’m certainly not betraying any confidence to say that Ty, Daniel and I — speaking for ourselves — would love to do it. It would be a remarkable thing to complete the whole book series that way. And I certainly hope we get to do it.

According to Shankar, the idea of ending the show while leaving things open enough for a potential return added an extra layer of complexity to this season. One place that really manifested is in the Laconia plotline, which largely never tied back into the main plot but is very important for future books.

“Well, yeah. I mean, we are,” Shankar said, when asked if Laconia was laying the groundwork for future installments. “It’s pretty clear. And it’s tricky. There’s a lot of juggling that goes into these things, and this is kind of a fine line to walk because you don’t want to feel like the whole thing is a setup. You don’t want to feel like we’re just leaving stuff out there and have no intention of resolving it, but it also gave you a little bit of insight into the why of what is Laconia.”

“The Expanse“ season 6 finale is a “natural ending” that “leaves the door open” for more

Nonetheless, this is at least the end of “The Expanse” for now. And even though the show is ending in the middle of the books series, it’s a finale that has long been planned for. “Well, this is actually something that Ty and Daniel and I have been talking about for quite some time is how might we end the show if we had to end the show before the end of the full run of books?” Shankar said. “And there is this kind of an off-ramp at the end of book six. And if you think about the show in terms of where it started, Ty recently pointed out how episode 1 of season 1 starts with that text call talking about Earth, Mars and the Belt on the brink of war with each other. And all it would take is a spark. We then provide the spark in terms of the protomolecule.”

And season 6 is the culmination of that and it’s the resolution of that. Where it ends is essentially in a new political order for the solar system that resolves the situation that we started with in the very, very beginning. And, of course, it leaves the door open because there are things going on in Laconia that are going to change the order in the solar system. But the time gap between book six and book seven is almost 30 years. So it’s a natural place and a natural ending in many ways.

Yet just like the show itself, Shankar couldn’t help but give one last tease about the foreshadowing laced into the finale’s final moments. “The ending that we had in the last scene of episode 6, that’s a natural place to bring the narrative to a close. And if you watch the end credits really closely, we even put a little something in there. If you notice, the Ring entities are sort of coming to life at the very end.”

Seasons 1-6 of “The Expanse“​​​​​​​ are now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Check out our review of the finale, explainer for every one of this season’s bonus X-Ray episodes, and break down of that amazing finale easter egg.

The kids are not alright: Data suggests 10% of children with COVID-19 become “long-haulers”

Eleven-year-old Noah Symons feels like “someone started a fire and then threw my hands into it.” He has felt this way for three months, he says, and his feet feel like they are on fire too. Symons been trying to go to school and stay active, but any extra effort results in fatigue and painful flare-ups.

Meanwhile, over the past five months, 16-year-old Lane Perkins has experienced debilitating headaches, severe fatigue, and difficulty concentrating and retaining information. She lost her spot on the traveling softball team and dropped a chemistry class. 

For the past 22 months, 14-year-old Anastasia Athienites has had “Covid toes” — a painful blistering rash on her feet. Not long after the rash appeared, she began having heart palpitations, migraines, and cognitive issues. 

In the past 23 months, 16-year-old Kitty Mcfarland has battled intense fatigue, an increased heart rate, tightness in her chest, the ability to be in an upright position, severe abdominal pain, headaches, and major cognitive and memory struggles. She couldn’t talk properly and could barely get out of bed for the first 8 months of her ordeal, and had to crawl from her bedroom to the bathroom.

The four kids from Colorado, Tennessee, Massachusetts and the United Kingdom have a few things in common: namely, they all contracted a mild case of COVID-19 weeks before the onset of their symptoms, and have all now accepted a diagnosis of “long COVID.” Their situations are a testament to COVID-19’s indiscriminate nature — and a rebuke to the myth that COVID-19 is always mild in children.

“We are definitely seeing long COVID in children,” said Dr. Amanda Morrow, Co-Director of the Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Pediatric Post-COVID-19 Clinic in Maryland. “It does exist. And it is impacting day-to-day lives significantly.”

RELATED: Months after recovering from COVID-19, millions may suffer from “brain or psychiatric disorders”

Because the data is preliminary, estimates thus far vary wildly on the prevalence of what is now known as “long Covid” in children and adolescents. 

Available studies have reported wildly varying numbers on the proportion of children who suffer long Covid, ranging from 0.8% to 66% of total pediatric COVID-19 cases.

“We don’t really know a whole lot,” said Dr. Sindhu Mohandas, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. “We are just starting to learn over the past few months what long Covid in kids is.”

Recognizing its existence, Mohandas said, has been a big advance.

While there is no official definition of pediatric long Covid at this time, the parameters typically include the persistence (or return) of symptoms 12 weeks following the initial infection. Some criteria look for new or persistent symptoms 30 days out from the acute infection. Another key is ruling out of alternative medical explanations — making the process of diagnosis lengthy and requiring a multi-disciplinary team. 

However, there is now growing consensus that somewhere around 10 percent of COVID-19 cases in kids turn into long Covid — at least according to the data collected for primarily pre-omicron and pre-vaccine cases.

At this time, most of the studies come from other countries. 

In September 2021, the Israeli Health Ministry announced the results of a survey showing that 11.2% of kids reported symptoms of long Covid. 

“No one is certain exactly how many people who’ve had COVID-19 end up being long haulers,” wrote Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Professor of Pediatrics Dr. Peter Rowe on the American Academy of Pediatrics’ “Healthy Children” website.

He continued: “One study showed that as many as 52% of teens and young adults between ages 16 and 30 may experience lingering symptoms 6 months after having COVID. The U.K. Office for National Statistics estimated that 12.9% of children 2 to 11 years of age, and 14.5% of children 12 to 16 years old, still experienced symptoms 5 weeks after infection.”

“It will end up being about 10% — is my guess,” said Morrow. “We do not know at this point what risk factors predispose children to developing long COIVD. It could be a possible outcome for anyone. We just don’t know.”

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Dr. Alexandra Yonts, director of the Post-COVID Program at Children’s National Hospital in Washington D.C., said based on her knowledge thus far, that yes, as many as 10% of all pediatric COVID cases turn into long Covid.

“My best guess is 10 to 20%” said Mohandas. “It depends at what time you are looking at symptoms.”  At the four week mark, it may be closer to 20%, reducing after that, she explained. “That’s a rough estimate based on limited experience.”

There are currently about 10 pediatric long Covid clinic in the United States, including those where Morrow, Yonts, and Mohandas work.

Sammie Mcfarland (Kitty’s mother) co-founded “Long Covid Kids” in 2020 – the first U.K.-based international charity for long Covid kids. It started with the stories of seven families.

From there, 300 more reached out, she described.

Today, the group has more than 5,500 families, some with multiple children with long Covid. About 100 to 120 new families are joining every week.

“I suspect, based on what I know — it’s around 12% to 15%,” Mcfarland said, adding that would be conservative. If she were not being conservative, Mcfarland would say closer to 18 to 20%.

Doctors and researchers are anticipating more long Covid cases stemming from the omicron variant, given the statistical magnitude of the spread, and the increase in pediatric infections. 

Much remains to be seen, including the impact of vaccines on long Covid in kids, and whether omicron produces different severity or types of long Covid symptoms.  

In Israel, a ward specifically for pediatric omicron patients recently opened. Dr. Moshe Ashkenazi, director of the new ward, told The Times of Israel, “From previous waves we believe seven percent to 10% developed long Covid, but with Omicron, the numbers being infected are so high that even if just 1% of infected children get long Covid, it’ll cause more pediatric long Covid cases than Delta.”

On Jan. 18, the American Academy of Pediatrics reported more than 981,000 new COVID cases confirmed in children in the United States during the week ending on Jan. 13, representing a 69% increase from the previous week, according to the Academy.

In addition to a consensus on how many kids may be affected by long Covid, other common threads are emerging in the data and in anecdotal experiences.

For one, older children and adolescents appear more at risk of long Covid than babies and young children. Yonts said she is primarily seeing long Covid in the 11 to 17 age range. Mohandas said she’s seen the highest prevalence in the 12 to 15 age group. 

However, the doctors note an important and concerning caveat: young kids don’t have the same ability to communicate what they are experiencing.

“My hypothesis,” Mohandas said, on the age range most at risk, “is that I don’t think [older children] are more at risk. I think they are more able to voice symptoms.”  

In addition, Mohandas noted it is easier to notice and track a change in an older child’s academic or athletic performance. 

Curiously, girls appear to be at higher risk, too.

The majority of children developing long Covid had only mild cases of the initial SARS-CoV2 infection, and were healthy pre-COVID with no underlying conditions. A significant portion had asymptomatic cases.

“All of the kids we’ve seen have been high-achieving,” Yonts said. “Straight-A students, prospective Division I athletes, musicians, artists. They went from super high-functioning to not being able to get out of bed.”

There have been reported as many as 200 different long Covid symptoms, with some kids by themselves experiencing 40 or 50 symptoms. 

It is now well documented that the SARS-CoV-2 virus can affect nearly every organ and system in the body — and long Covid in kids appears to do the same.

There is more research needed, the doctors say, on the important distinction between damage done directly to organs by the virus, and damage caused by a hyperactive immune system response triggered by the virus. 

In her patients ranging from age 2 to 20, Yonts said that “severe, persistent fatigue is the number one complaint.”

From various studies, surveys, and clinical experience, the following list comprises the most common symptoms of long Covid in kids:

Fatigue or decreased physical performance, difficulty thinking or concentrating and memory loss (known as brain fog), headaches, dizziness, trouble breathing, loss of taste and smell, sleep disturbance, chest tightness or pain, abdominal pain, fever, mood changes, muscle and joint pain, congested or runny nose, cough, heart palpitations, loss of appetite or weight, and rash.

“There is an extremely diverse array of symptoms,” Mohandas emphasized. “Every week we see or hear of something new. Physicians have to keep their mind open to a wide range of symptomatology.”

Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) is also part of long Covid in kids, but rarer, and not fully understood.

The process of recovery and healing can only start once the experiences of the long Covid kids are acknowledged and validated, Mohandas said. And there is much being done in the way of information sharing, collaboration, and writing guidance and accommodations for schools, businesses physicians, and families. 

It’s requiring a “holsitic and multidisciplinary approach,” Mohandas said, and they are acquiring more and more knowledge and tools to help kids minimize and cope with the physical and mental health symptoms that accompany long Covid.  

A big unknown at this time is how long — and for some, even if — kids will recover. 

The good news is, the bulk of their patients are improving or recovering, reported Yonts, Morrow, and Mohandas. Of course, they are getting a high level of care to which not many children have access.

Studies suggest most cases resolve within about six months. But there also appear to be a significant number of kids — like Anastasia and Kitty — whose symptoms began with the first wave in the spring of 2020 and persist in some form today.

While there is much more research to be done, new information on the impact of COVID-19 on kids manifests almost daily. 

On Jan. 7, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study finding children and teens are more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes a month or more after their COVID infection, compared to those who did not contract the virus.

“We are getting information in real time as the parent is living through it,” Morrow said. 

Diagnosis of long Covid is a difficult — and heart wrenching — process. 

“There’s no specific list of symptoms that lead to a diagnosis,” Mohandas said. “There is no blood test to say ‘This is long Covid.'”

And ruling out every other medical explanation takes time and evaluations from different specialists, she noted. 

Many families report being dismissed and disbelieved by the medical profession. 

Being accused of “fabricating” their illness “nearly broke us,” Mcfarland said, of herself and her daughter who both contracted COVID-19 in March of 2020 and were bedridden for 8 months once their long Covid symptoms began. They are not yet fully recovered, and she wonders what intervention or treatment might have helped had they had more help in those early months. 

“The diagnosis of long Covid in itself is very significant, Yonts said, in no small part by “giving families the space to feel heard and be validated.” 

Mohandas reported parents in tears at finally being believed about what was happening to their child.

From a doctor’s point of view, “It’s easy to be dismissive when you don’t understand what’s going on,” Yonts acknowledged.  “A lot of us had to learn very quickly how to talk about uncertainty. Some doctors have not adapted and it feels like failure.”

The mothers of all four long Covid kids described an endlessly frustrating process of going to new doctors, getting more tests, trying more treatments — only to find they still have very few — if any — answers as to why this is happening to their child, what can make them feel better, and how long it will last.

“Not being able to do anything to make him better has been the hardest thing,” said Noah’s mom, Sheila Symons. “We keep looking forward to doctors appointments feeling like we are going to find something that helps. The disappointment every time is horrible.”

For almost two years, “Kitty has not had the energy or mental capacity to do anything other than get through the day. And that’s taken a massive toll on her mental health. And that’s also because of her experience being minimized by doctors for more than 20 months,” Mcfarland said. Kitty doesn’t want to talk to doctors anymore. “She says, ‘What’s the point? They don’t believe me.”

Morrow said doctors are also seeing a lot of symptoms of anxiety and depression in kids with long Covid — at this time unclear whether is a symptom of long Covid or a symptom of the chronic pain, brain fog, reduced activity constant fatigue, isolation, and doubt and dismissal from adults.

The Symons family is now transitioning Noah’s treatment to pain management, as opposed to taking the pain away. They’ve seen dozens of doctors and tried everything prescribed.

“He wants to be normal — but now this is getting to be normal,” Sheila said. 

“He taught himself how to scream on the inside,” said Noah’s father, Aaron. “Those are his words.”

Lane’s new symptom “feels like someone is choking her when she tries to swallow,” described her mother, Angi Wilson-Perkins. They have an upcoming appointment with a neurologist, but are finding the most support, treatment ideas, and resources in the long Covid groups across social media. 

“The brain stuff is really scary. I’m not going to lie,” Angi said. “The amount she can’t focus or learn. Her memory — she can’t recall names of people she sees on a daily basis. Her sense of taste comes and goes. And this swelling thing is really scary. We get shoved from one specialist to another. And are paying for all these tests. And then everything comes back fine. And the doctors say she’s fine. Well, clearly she’s not.”

Anastasia is finding some relief for the migraines but not much for the feet issues, which have also resulted in a diagnosis of Raynaud’s disease.

Her mother, Jennifer Athienites, advises other parents to seek multiple opinions from doctors, and go to a major medical institution if possible. She’s grateful for the access to care her family has had in the Boston area. 

“I want people to know this is real,” Angi said. 

“It may not affect everyone, but it’s going to affect a lot of people. It’s like Russian roulette,” Angi continued. “You don’t know who will be the next person to get long Covid. There’s no way to know. People need to understand as a community we need to try to help everyone else out — wear a mask or get vaccinated to stop the spread. It’s just going to keep mutating and we are never going to get over it.” 

“Don’t be fooled into thinking kids — your kids — are not going to be the ones affected,” Sheila Symons said. “It could happen to anyone.”

Read more on long Covid:

With new subpoenas, Jan. 6 committee closes in on its ultimate target: Donald Trump

Lawyers, investigative reporters and congressional committees have one thing in common: They like to ask questions they already know the answer to. That’s the big takeaway from the four subpoenas issued by the House committee investigating the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 of last year. On Tuesday, the committee subpoenaed former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani; former Michael Flynn lawyer and “election fraud” conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell; former Trump legal adviser and evangelical law professor Jenna Ellis; and former Trump adviser and TV commentator  Boris Epshteyn. If this committee’s investigation is being run like many others I’ve followed over the years, they already have the answers to most of the questions they plan on posing to all four of these witnesses.

I realize that everyone they just subpoenaed is a “former” of one kind or another, but that’s where the committee is now as it closes in on people close to Trump who were involved in the events leading up to the assault on the Capitol last year. The committee has already subpoenaed a long list of Trump acolytes, hangers-on, former administration officials and former White House employees, including such luminaries as Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino, the former White House director of communications.

RELATED: Jan. 6 committee to investigate Trump’s calls to allies at Willard Hotel before Capitol riot

That’s just the tip of a rather large iceberg. The committee has issued 60 subpoenas, interviewed about 400 witnesses and obtained more than 50,000 pages of documents in its six-month investigation of the Capitol insurrection. Some of the witnesses who didn’t appear voluntarily and had to be subpoenaed by the committee include:

  • Ali Alexander, an organizer of the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 5.
  • Amy Kremer, founder and chair of Women for America First, involved in planning for the Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse, where Trump, Giuliani and many others spoke.
  • Tim Unes, listed on Parks Department paperwork for the Jan. 6 rally as “stage manager.” 
  • Taylor Budowich, who organized radio and social media advertising for the Ellipse rally, and is now employed as Trump’s primary spokesman and communications director for Trump’s Save America PAC.
  • Ed Martin, an organizer of the “Stop the Steal” movement and fundraiser for the Jan. 6 rally.

And here’s where it gets interesting: There are more than 300 other people who appeared voluntarily and have testified to committee investigators under oath, including at least a dozen former White House employees, some of whom were questioned for as long as five or six hours.

Under oath. Remember those words. All of the 400 people interviewed by the committee have done so under oath. That means they were subject to federal criminal charges for perjury, which means there is real pressure on them to provide truthful answers. At least some of the witnesses who appeared voluntarily also provided at least a portion of the 50,000 documents the committee has assembled, which would give even more credence to their testimony.

It was after hearing testimony for over six months that the committee issued its subpoenas to Giuliani, Powell, Ellis and Epshteyn on Tuesday. Giuliani and Epshteyn are known to have been in the “war room” at the Willard Hotel on Jan. 5, the night before the assault on the Capitol. Committee Chair Bennie Thompson announced that the committee already knows that Epshteyn was on a phone call with Trump on the morning of Jan. 6, which means that they were informed of this by another witness. See what I mean about investigators already knowing the answers to questions they intend to ask certain witnesses?

If I were Epshteyn or Giuliani or any of the others, I would be very worried right now. Let me assure you, as a longtime observer of these kinds of investigations, including Watergate, it is never a good sign if you are among the last of the witnesses to be subpoenaed by an investigative committee or a prosecutor. That means that they have already talked to everybody under, across and around you under oath, and you can count on the fact that they have already assembled volumes of information on your activities. Which means it would be a very bad idea to give false testimony, because the investigators you will be talking to already have the truth at their fingertips in the form of testimony by previous witnesses and documents already submitted to the committee.

Because the Supreme Court denied Donald Trump’s claim of executive privilege on Wednesday, the committee will now have yet another trove of official documents, visitor lists, call logs, talking points and plans to challenge electoral ballots before they question Giuliani and his compatriots. White House documents released by the National Archives will also produce names of new witnesses the committee will want to question. One document received by the committee, and published by Politico on Friday, exposed a fantastical plan to use the military to seize voting machines and electoral records in all 50 states and have them “analyzed and assessed” by the — get this — director of national intelligence. It was, in effect, a plan for a military coup using a “national security emergency” as a pretext — the “emergency” apparently being Trump’s loss in the election.

If the whole thing with the recently subpoenaed witnesses sounds like a trap, that’s because it is. Investigators for the Jan. 6 committee are lying in wait for any lies Giuliani and the other witnesses might tell to cover up what they did in the days and weeks preceding the assault on the Capitol. In fact, it may be that the committee doesn’t really need the testimony of Giuliani and Powell and the rest of the “elite strike force team” of legal eagles who filed and lost at least 60 lawsuits challenging the results of the 2020 election in battleground states. The committee has those lawsuits, as well as the judicial decisions either dismissing them or finding in favor of the defendants. They already have access to a voluminous record of the falsehoods in those lawsuits, all the phony “affidavits” filed on behalf of Trump and his campaign, all the false charges against Dominion Voting Systems and other outfits which have now dragged Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani into court to face charges that they defamed that company and others, charges which have at least temporarily cost Giuliani his law license and clearly threaten the law licenses of Powell and others.

Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a Democrat who sits on the Jan. 6 committee and is a former prosecutor, was quoted last week saying that the upcoming hearings, likely to begin later this month or early next month, “will blow the roof off the House.” I’m beginning to believe it. The problem that Donald Trump and his aides like Mark Meadows and his “elite strike force team” of lawyers and the rest of them have is that lies are not advisable when you are testifying under oath. All the lies they have told since Nov. 3, 2020, about how Joe Biden “stole” the election from Trump won’t hold up under the weight of thousands of pages of documents and phone records and text messages and all the other stuff from the National Archives and the documents already submitted to the committee, and they won’t hold up in the face of sworn testimony by former White House aides and members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys charged with conspiracy who have already flipped and have been interviewed by prosecutors investigating the assault on the Capitol. 

I don’t have any evidence for this, but based on what I saw during Watergate and other major investigations I have followed, I would place a large bet that there is a pipeline between the Department of Justice and the Jan. 6 committee, and evidence has been flowing in both directions for months now. 

When the committee, and the Department of Justice for that matter, get to the point that they’re issuing subpoenas to people who were regularly in the room with the president during the days and weeks leading up to the assault on the Capitol, I would be very, very worried if I were the ultimate target of both investigations. The lid may be getting ready to come off the House of Representatives, but down at Mar-a-Lago, the roof is falling in on Trump’s House of Lies.

More on the long aftermath of Jan. 6, 2021:

New GMO labeling rule takes effect, but food anxieties remain

On Jan. 1, the long-running public debate about labeling genetically modified foods entered a new phase. A U.S. federal rule went into effect mandating that food companies disclose whether their products contain a detectable amount of recombinant DNA — genetic material from multiple sources combined through lab techniques to confer desired traits. The new policy requires that those foods be labeled as “bioengineered,” or carry a QR code and phone number that customers can use to find that information.

Since the law requiring the rule change was passed in 2016, it has sparked a predictable backlash. Groups like the nonprofit Center for Food Safety and a coalition of advocates known as Citizens for GMO Labeling have pushed against the regulation, arguing it doesn’t do enough to protect consumers. In a 2020 complaint filed in a California district court, CFS and co-plaintiffs maintained that, instead of “bioengineered,” the rule should have required labels to use the more widely recognizable terms “genetically engineered” or “genetically modified.” The groups also oppose many of the rule’s numerous exemptions, including for foods that are made with genetically engineered crops but don’t have detectable levels of recombinant DNA in the final product — foods like sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and meat and milk from cows raised on genetically modified feed. The critics argue that these and other provisions, including the option to use a QR code instead of a more readily accessible on-label disclosure, violate “the public’s right to know how their food is produced.”

But as a writer and activist who’s been following the controversy over genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, for the better part of a decade, I’ve come to see the debate over food labels as a red herring. Now more than ever, it’s clear that the struggle for food justice involves issues far too big and complex to fit on any label.

That’s because it was arguably never the recombinant DNA technology that most naysayers were really mad at. (After all, the science is clear that GMO foods are not inherently more harmful than their non-GMO counterparts.) Rather, the GMO debate, ever since it first heated up in the early 2010s, was a pervasive and nebulous proxy for everything food-related that people worry about. Genetic engineering became a symbol of large agribusiness and its perceived seedy practices, the stark power imbalances in the food system, and the harm the food system has long caused the planet and its most vulnerable inhabitants. Many of the crops antagonized by GMO opponents — like the tens of millions of acres of field corn grown in America that go largely to the livestock feed used to fuel the environmentally and ethically dubious meat industry, the ethanol that powers cars on ever-expanding highways, and the nutrient-sparse foods on convenience store shelves — are indeed problematic, but not by virtue of their recombinant DNA. Instead of contending with the complexity inherent in building a more equitable and sustainable food system, opponents of questionable agricultural practices took an ideological stance against genetic engineering itself — and championed labels as a solution.

For some people, the act of avoiding GMOs seemed to offer a soothing sense of having fulfilled some vague health need or social responsibility. The Non-GMO Project, a non-profit that lends its imprimatur to products it deems to be free of genetic modification, began catering to this sensibility in 2007. Thousands of products in the U.S. and Canada now bear its label.

But labels — whether they read “GMO,” “non-GMO,” “bioengineered,” or otherwise — can only carry so much information. They haven’t been able to convey much about the working conditions on the farms and in the facilities where the food was made, or the subsidies pocketed by the producers, or the chemicals and intellectual property employed along the supply chain, or the size of the companies involved. They don’t even indicate where on the natural-to-unnatural spectrum a food product falls. For instance, wheat that is widely used to make breads and pastas has been subjected to mutation breeding — the intentional exposure of seeds or plants to radiation or chemicals to induce random changes in the genome, in the hopes that some of those changes will confer desirable traits. Per strict definitions, this wheat isn’t considered genetically engineered (and can carry a Non-GMO Project label), despite having artificially altered DNA.

These days, movements to revolutionize the food system are up against something much larger than labels. These movements are grappling with the racism, sexism, classism, and ableism that’s built into the industry’s very fabric — from the ivory towers where food and agricultural research happens, to the American farmlands controlled primarily by White landowners, to the inequities in economic and physical access to nutritional and culturally relevant meals. They are dismantling injustice in the food system, along with larger systemic injustices that impact everything to do with wellbeing. They are on fire, and they are busy frying big fish.

Whether or not the new food labeling law survives the legal challenge, one thing is clear: As much as we might want to boil down the morality of our food choices into a label, making responsible decisions about what we eat isn’t that simple. I would like a label that tells me if any racism was involved in the making of my food, or whether any humans were harmed in the making of my food. But, for a slew of reasons, that’s not going to happen.

Do people have a “right to know” how their food was produced, even if it didn’t materially affect the end product? Sure, to an extent. Increased transparency from the makers of our food has historically been a good thing. Must it all be printed on a label? Impossible.

* * *

Kavin Senapathy is a freelance writer who covers science, health, parenting, and food, based in Madison, Wisconsin. She’s also co-founder and contributing editor at SciMoms.com. Find her on Twitter @ksenapathy.

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

Republicans run scared from GOP’s agenda

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, who recently bowed out of a much-anticipated U.S. Senate bid, revealed that he was “bothered” after conversations with dozens of Republican Senators, who apparently wanted him to be a “roadblock” until the GOP retakes the White House. Sununu told The Washington Examiner this month that he was initially “pretty close” to running, explaining: “I wasn’t ready to make an announcement, but I was like, ‘OK, this makes sense. I think I could be a voice nationally.'” But after chatting with “most” of the GOP Senate caucus, Sununu reportedly soured on the role once it became apparent that they wanted him to be a legislative mule. 

“They were all, for the most part, content with the speed at which they weren’t doing anything. It was very clear that we just have to hold the line for two years,” he told the Examiner. “OK, so I’m just going to be a roadblock for two years. That’s not what I do.”

“It bothered me that they were OK with that,” the governor added.

Sununu’s comments come in the wake of an intense legislative standoff between Democrats and Republicans over voting rights, an issue which became the focus of President Biden’s agenda after negotiations on the “Build Back Better Act” – the president’s $2.2 trillion social safety net plan – fell apart. 

RELATED: Joe Manchin’s revisionist history: Filibuster stands after Senate Democrat sides with Republicans

On Wednesday, Senate Republicans successfully filibustered Biden’s sweeping voting rights overhaul – known as the “Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act” – which would standardize voting laws across all 50 states and clamp down on voter suppression. Not a single Republican backed the measure, even though the bill is supported by nearly 70% of Americans, according to a Navigator poll from November. 

With Republicans having dashed Biden’s hopes of passing the party’s two signature pieces of legislation – the “Build Back Better Act” and the “Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act” – Democrats now question whether their colleagues believe in anything other than mindless obstructionism. 

During a press conference on Wednesday, Biden echoed the spirit of Sununu’s remarks, asking reporters, “What are Republicans for? What are they for? Name me one thing they’re for.”

That same day, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., sidestepped questioning when asked to lay out GOP’s official agenda. “That’s a very good question,” McConnell said. “And I’ll let you know when we take it back.” 

According to a recent Axios report, the Kentucky Republican has privately told colleagues and donors that the Republicans have no legislative agenda and are more interested in picking apart Democrats’. 

Meanwhile, the House GOP caucus appears to be adopting the opposite strategy, according to The Washington Post, with its leadership drumming up a “list of policy pledges” designed to buoy support for the party in 2022. 

Among those helming this effort are House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and House Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., both of whom ardently supported Donald Trump’s election fraud conspiracy and voted to overturn the 2020 election.

RELATED: The right “isn’t fully sold” on Kevin McCarthy’s leadership, even if Republicans win the House

Playing an advisory role to McCarthy is former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who crafted the “Contract with America,” a legislative platform widely linked to the GOP’s successful campaign to flip both chambers in 1994. 

Gingrich told the Post that McCarthy doesn’t believe an anti-Biden agenda is sufficient for 2022, saying, “We need a positive message.”

“I think that’s clearly what McCarthy wants to do and I’ve offered to look at stuff and offer advice,” Gingrich added. “There’s lots of people in the House working on it. It will be a widespread commitment.”

While the exact details of McCarthy’s agenda remain hazy, the broad contours of the plan are clear. 

So-called “parental rights” are expected to be front and center as Republican state officials continue to decry the alleged instruction of “critical race theory” – whose prevalence appears to be vastly overstated. For remedy, McCarthy has already released an informal “Parents Bill of Rights,” which includes such provisions as the “right to be heard” and the “right to know what’s being taught in schools and see reading material.”

RELATED: Parental rights” started on the Christian fringe — now it’s the GOP’s winning issue

The House Speaker is also expected to assemble seven “issue-specific task forces” that will tackle a variety of other policy objectives, such as countering China’s economic prowess, combating the recent crime wave, securing the nation’s borders, regulating Big Tech, cutting corporate taxes, bulldozing environmental regulations, and curtailing inflation. 

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The soaring cost of consumer goods has proven an evergreen source of whataboutism for Republicans, even as the year-end jobs numbers indicate that Biden has steered the economy through an unprecedented economic recovery since he took office. Fox News called inflation a “top weapon” for the GOP to wield against Democrats in the upcoming midterms. 

Throughout 2021, the consumer prices index rose 6.8% – the highest increase it has seen since 1982. 

RELATED: Behind Biden’s booming economy

But when it comes to actually tackling inflation, lawmakers have historically had to walk a tightrope, said Brian Riedl, who served as an aide to Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio.

“There is nothing that messages well, significantly reduces inflation and is painless,” Riedl told the Post. “It’s easier to criticize inflation than to map out an actual solution going forward, and that’s the box Republicans are currently in.”

Black Mississippi lawmakers stage mass walkout to protest ban on critical race theory

Several Black Mississippi state senators on Friday walked out en masse as their fellow legislatures banned the teaching of critical race theory in classrooms.

Local news station WLBT reports that the Black Mississippi lawmakers decided to walk out after decrying the bill as totally unnecessary given that there is no evidence that critical race theory is being taught in any Mississippi public schools.

Sen. John Horhn (D-MS) said that the intention of the bill wasn’t merely to target critical race theory, but to put what he described as a “chilling effect” over teachers who give frank lessons about the history of racism and slavery in the United States.

“I think this bill is going to put a chilling effect on that journey,” he said. “I think it’s going to slow us down on coming together, and I think it’s going to drive a wedge between us that doesn’t need to be driven.”

Simmons led all of his Black colleagues out of the chamber as the vote for the bill came up. Without the Black Democrats present, the bill wound up passing by a margin of 32 to 2. The two “no” votes came from two white Democratic state senators who remained in the chamber.

Watch the video below.

Maybe we expected too much of “The Book of Boba Fett”

A relative silence engulfs “The Book of Boba Fett.” Not the kind of that suddenly follows a million voices crying out, which would imply that it did something worth investigating. No, this is the silence one finds inside a dead mine’s depths, the result of relatively few people digging the latest “Star Wars” TV excursion.

What is being discussed about the bounty hunter’s TV vehicle isn’t good.  

“Boba Fett is dead: how Disney+ ruined Star Wars’ coolest character” proclaims a headline in The Guardian.

Forbes agrees: “‘The Book Of Boba Fett’ Is Failing In Almost Every Way.”

They’re not wrong. Next to “The Mandalorian,” “The Book of Boba Fett” feels lifeless, saddled with a two-pronged storyline more sluggish than a drunken Bantha. As some have pointed out in its defense, it doesn’t have the benefit of an adorable Baby Yoda to distract us from its flaws. The counterpoint is it has something much better that The Child. Two things, actually.

First, it’s fronted by one of the most popular characters in the “Star Wars” franchise, played by Temuera Morrison in a continuation (of sorts) of his part in “Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones.” In that film he is Jango Fett, Boba’s father; Boba is his clone.

Second, he’s flanked by master assassin Fennec Shand, played by popular actor Ming-Na Wen. Wen came to the “Star Wars” universe by way of “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” where she portrayed the ferocious Agent Melinda May.

Despite having these heat-seeking missiles in its arsenal the story is sputtering out, a victim of creator Jon Favreau’s timidity in expanding the legend of a character mainly propped up by his reputation.

Here’s another theory, though: Maybe part of the problem is us.

RELATED: How Star Wars failed Ahsoka Tano on “The Mandalorian”

Most of whatever you think you know about Boba Fett is assumption. Whatever ferocity we assign to his personality, whatever expertise we grant to him, is mainly a product of our imaginations. That makes Boba Fett one of popular culture’s most fascinating personas, if not the greatest trick George Lucas pulled on the movie-going public.  

An auxiliary figure with four lines of dialogue, and six minutes and 32 seconds of total screen time across the original trilogy, Boba Fett somehow became the most notorious bounty hunter in that galaxy far, far away. The guy who the swashbuckling Han Solo truly fears.

And yet, only twice during his screen time does Boba Fett get shots off from his very impressive rifle, and he misses both times. (Technically he also emits two wimpy sparks from his wrist launcher before Han accidentally knocks him into that famous sarlacc pit.) But that’s it. Otherwise, he’s all confident stances and slow, wordless nods.

In truth, he’s the product of excellent design and budgetary restraints. Once you realize that, you may start to question a lot of your thoughts about him. The documentary episode “Under the Helmet: The Legacy of Boba Fett” explains that his signature suit was a proposed design intended for 100 upgraded storm troopers that would have made their debut in “Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back.” But its functionality was so intricate that Lucas decided to spend the money elsewhere.

So the prototype for an army uniform became one bounty hunter with a Teutonic knight-inspired helmet and a cape modeled off of an old bath towel. Ergo, nearly everything we believe about Boba Fett is entirely based aesthetic. Darth Vader did more for his reputation by wagging his finger in his face and intoning “No disintegrations!” than any other scene in “Empire” or “The Return of the Jedi.”  That is a man, we’re led to assume, that you shouldn’t cross.

But the Boba Fett in this “Book” is not that guy.

“The Book of Boba Fett” unspools in two timelines, one in a flashback to shortly after he escaped death by digestion and lived among the Tuskens, and the other in the series’ present, where he and Fennec Shand usurp Jabba the Hutt’s Tatooine holdings by killing his majordomo Bib Fortuna. Soon afterward Boba Fett finds out his reputation isn’t enough to make the underworld automatically fall in line. Even the mayor openly disses him.

If “The Mandalorian” obliquely operates as a study of faith versus morality, “Book of Boba Fett” seeks, less effectively, to tell a story about earning respect. Ah, but this is a family-friendly series, which means, no sending messages through blood violence. No disintegrations!

As if this Boba Fett would.

Morrison’s ex-hunter doesn’t exactly have a heart of gold, but as a crime lord his tendency to favor fairness over ruthlessness keeps reminding us that there’s no way to successfully replicate “The Sopranos” as an all-ages affair.

The time our man spent in the sarlacc’s belly tenderized him in more ways that physical – and longtime fans hate that. When a gang of “mods” are reported to be terrorizing one section of his territory, and he discovers they’re nothing more than out-of-work scooter kids, Boba hires them as his muscle. To repeat: Scooter kids are protecting Boba Effing Fett.

When a homicidal Wookiee and ex-gladiator breaks into his palace to murder him, this ruthless crime lord captures him alive and eventually sets him free . . . only to hire him as his muscle. Even Boba Fett’s top muscle Fennec Shand is more effective and interesting than he is.

But the character’s shift from presumed villain into anti-hero isn’t the real problem. It’s his complete lack of guile.

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Favreau writes Boba Fett as a figure whose reputation precedes him, and yet in recent episodes he’s been defeated by Tatooine’s equivalent of a Roomba and a plucky office administrator whose secret weapon is making people wait for an appointment that never comes. Han Solo couldn’t outrun Boba Fett in his day, but in retirement a secretary outwits him by excusing themselves and locking a door.

Again, this is a case of expecting a character to be better than that based on zero visual proof, a bit akin to seeing Harry Styles in a toreador outfit and claiming shock and dismay that he’s unable to defend himself against a crazed bull.

It isn’t entirely our fault for building an outsized mythology around dope threads, a sick lid and a tricked-out backpack. Favreau was tasked to create a story commensurate to that hype, and couldn’t quite spin a new fable that that lives up to the longstanding legend. Few could.

Besides, other aspects of the plot are simply terrible. Boba Fett’s main motivation for founding a crime family (we think?) is to gain payback for the Tusken tribes whose land was stolen and colonized by industrial gangsters from other worlds. This is a noble grey hat quest as such things go.

But it’s also one steeped in guilt and stupidity. His new Tusken family was wiped out after he stole a fleet of speed bikes from a group of thugs in order to drive off another more powerful crime syndicate that was casually murdering Tuskens in drive-by shootings. Of course, the thugs from whom he stole the bikes weren’t happy about the theft, and killed the tribe  –  which, again, didn’t ask for any of this –  as payback. (There’s an entirely separate critique to be made here about how this plays into sci-fi and fantasy habits of styling the cultural appropriation of indigenous peoples as some kind of virtuous power up, but let’s stay on target.)

All that is entirely avoidable and out of character for a man renowned for being one of the top dogs in a field that requires very basic strategizing skills like, I don’t know, tying off loose ends.

It is to Morrison’s credit, thanks to his work in “The Mandalorian” and “Book of Boba Fett,” that we know the man can mix it up in hand-to-hand combat. But that bring us to another aspect of the show that’s killing it, which is that we see and hear far too much of the man under the helmet.

Showing Morrison’s face dispels the decades-held, IP-protected mystery of Boba Fett. (Again: behold the power of assumption.) Time and again, “Book of Boba Fett” reminds us how mortal he is by showing him getting beaten up before recovering in a healing tank, which is a little like lingering on shots of Batman applying Ben-Gay to his aches and pains after a face-off. 

This was less of a problem on “The Mandalorian” with Pedro Pascal, who unmasked once in the first season and seemed ready to rely less on hiding his face by the end of the second’s finale.

The entirety of that show is dedicated to building the profile of who his character Din Djarin is, first in relationship to Grogu (aka The Child) and then to others with whom he crosses paths, including fellow Mandalorians. If Pascal shows more of his face in the third season and the audience sticks with the show, which it probably will, that’s the product of two seasons of steadily laying down the narrative train tracks to get us there.

Favreau never has that option with “The Book of Boba Fett,” who lands in his lap saddled with decades of legacy. That makes the challenge of writing these new chapters dual: the writer is expected to expand upon a screen version of a mythology that’s almost entirely atmospheric and live up to whatever version of it that’s become rootbound in our collective imagination. No wonder he’s fallen short.

In the episode that recounts how Boba Fett met Fennec Shand, he enlists her assistance in part by admitting his reputation is mainly cosmetic. “Without my armor,” he tells her, “I’m less persuasive.”

We can see that.

New episodes of “The Book of Boba Fett” debut Wednesdays on Disney+.

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Asghar Farhadi’s “A Hero” is a devastating portrait of a man damned by a good deed built on a lie

Asghar Farhadi (“The Salesman“) delivers another knotty morality tale with his superb new film, “A Hero.” Shortlisted for the Best International Film Oscar, and winner of the Grand Prize at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, this heartbreaking drama shows the ripple effect of a simple lie and how a good deed may not necessarily redeem bad behavior. 

Rahim (Amir Jadidi) has been in a debtors’ prison for three years because he owes Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh) 150,000 tomans. Given two days leave, Rahim and his girlfriend, Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust) plan to sell 17 gold coins that were discovered in a purse she found at a bus stop. The couple hope that if Rahim uses those coins to repay half of his debt to Bahram, his creditor will accept a bond for the balance, and he will be free from jail. However, when the coins are not worth as much as they hoped, Rahim makes the conscientious decision to coordinate the return of the purse and its contents to its rightful owner. (Because he is returning to prison, he cannot meet the woman directly). 

The noble act makes him a hero, and garners Rahim some media attention. While he tells the prison authorities the truth — that Farkhondeh found the purse but he cannot reveal her name or their relationship — Rahim is told to lie about that detail. His good deed shows a lack of self-interest, which helps his cause. Sure enough, Rahim becomes celebrated for his honesty. A charity association that helps the destitute awards Rahim with a certificate of merit and raises money for him to pay back his creditor. Moreover, they help coordinate a job for him to earn money to pay the outstanding balance. 

RELATED: “About Elly”: A masterful thriller – and a portrait of Iran’s conflicted middle class

However, Bahram is not convinced of Rahim’s honesty or his story, and he sulks as the charity champions his debtor and asks Bahram to cooperate with forgiving the debt. Yet this seems unfair to the creditor, who explains his reasoning and suffering clearly. Bahram is not wrong, but the film seems to be squarely on the side of Rahim, a man who ended up in debt through bad luck in a business deal. He demurs it was no fault of his own. 

But rumors start to circulate regarding the veracity of Rahim’s story, and when the charity’s council intelligence officer wants to fact-check what transpired, “A Hero” becomes more complicated — and even more absorbing. 

Farhadi lets his drama unfold slowly, but his film builds its power as each scene reveals kernels of truth. Details about Rahim’s ex-wife may inform some of his actions. Likewise, the prison authorities may be leveraging Rahim’s good deed to shift attention away from a recent suicide. In addition, Rahim is a hero to his son, Siavash (Saleh Karimai), who stutters, and the child is often exploited in public to generate sympathy for his father. Viewers will likely recalibrate what they think and believe as each new bit of information emerges, and issues of truth and responsibility become murkier. 

The filmmaker is a master of showing the complexity of how a simple situation can spiral out of control. He sucks viewers into this vortex as well, asking them to root for a man who believes in the moral ambiguity of doing right for the wrong reasons and doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. Farhadi does not let viewers off the hook; he implicates them for wanting Rahim to go free even if it means compromising justice. 

Rahim is concerned with his honor and reputation; he does not want to be disgraced. However, he often does dishonorable things, from asking people to lie on his behalf to physically attacking Bahram in an especially tense scene. Framed amid a series of glass enclosed shops, this scuffle between debtor and creditor is especially claustrophobic and effective. It is also hard to watch Rahim dig himself deeper by letting his temper take over his emotions.

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For someone praised for being selfless, Rahim is, perhaps, really quite selfish. Rahim insists he is being honest, not calculating, but is he really a fraud? Everything Rahim does, from using the prison’s phone number in the ad to searching for the owner of the purse to verify his story, comes under intense scrutiny and has unseen implications that can harm others. The filmmaker is creating an allegory about truth and the law and how far someone might go, deliberately, desperately, or guilelessly, to subvert authority for their own means. 

Rahim boxes himself into a tight corner and Jadidi is fantastic as the title character, a man who may be his own worst enemy. He benefits from his image as a role model without understanding the responsibility and ramifications his actions. As he sinks further into despair when his morality is questioned, Jadidi informs his performance with the tacit resignation that Rahim may never truly be free. 

“A Hero” succeeds because Farhadi never judges his characters. He lets their actions speak for them. As others try to help Rahim, his true colors — along with his innocence, sense of integrity, and self-worth — come to light. This film is a quietly devastating portrait of a man damned.

“A Hero” is currently in theaters and streams on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, Jan. 21. Watch a trailer for it below, via YouTube.

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Airports are delaying 5G rollouts — but that does not vindicate the conspiracy theorists

Among the more physically nonsensical conspiracy theories that have emerged from the pandemic is one that connects the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus — a physical object comprising of millions of atoms — with fifth-generation broadband cellular technology (5G) currently being implemented in the form of towers broadcasting radio waves (massless photons).

Despite having no basis in physics, the notion that the pandemic is somehow connected to 5G cellular networks has repeatedly gained traction on social media. Though such conspiracy theories are self-evidently absurd, any negative press about 5G implementation typically causes a resurgence in the confidence of the conspiracy theorists that there is something wicked about the cellular broadband system. Hence, such rumors swelled this week, after Verizon and AT&T announced on Tuesday that, in response to concerns that the 5G technology will interfere with the safety equipment that determines an airplane’s altitude, they would delay expanding the cellular service near specific airports.

The term 5G applies to the new generation of cellular broadband technology that began being deployed worldwide in 2019. Cellular infrastructure for wireless communications needs to be upgraded roughly every ten years, and the new generation of technology is designed to be faster than its predecessor, 4G, as well as containing better bandwidth and a superior ability to quickly transmit large amounts of information. In addition, as usually happens when there are advances in forms of radio communication, the technology for 5G had to move up the electromagnetic spectrum in frequency. This is what makes it possible for this type of wireless signal to transfer such large amounts of data, though the trade-off is that such signals are not as able to travel as far without degrading as their lower frequency predecessors.

In addition — and unfortunately for airlines — 5G also uses a section of the radio spectrum that sits very close to the one assigned for vital aircraft operations. The spectrum overlap means that 5G towers, which in practice are smaller and less bulky than their predecessors, won’t be deployed near airports for the time being.

Although more than 90 percent of the planned 5G expansion will continue as anticipated, the announcement is still a setback for telecommunications companies. It reflects continued tension between airlines companies and regulators on one hand, and cellular companies on the other.

It does not, however, have anything to do with 5G technology actively spreading COVID-19.

RELATED: Why public health experts are worried about 5G, the next generation of cell network

Indeed, there is no evidence that 5G towers are linked to COVID-19 in any way.

Writing for The Conversation, University of Amsterdam professor Marc Tuters and University of Manchester professor Peter Knight likens misinformation to viruses, explaining that there are “several different strains” of conspiracy theories. Some internet commentators insist that 5G technology was launched in Wuhan (which is not true) and is therefore somehow linked to the start of the pandemic. Others explicitly accuse 5G of directly transmitting the virus, although some say the bad guys use a more circuitous route: Releasing the virus to force people to take “vaccines” that get “activated” by 5G. There are people saying that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was created to force people to stay home while engineers installed the technology, or that both it and the pandemic are part of some larger plan to “depopulate” the planet.

There is no evidence of any conspiracy involving the telecommunications industry and the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps more importantly, diseases can not be spread through radio waves. Meanwhile the vaccines, including those using the new mRNA platform technology, are as safe as any of the other common inoculations that people take. Yet despite concerted efforts by public health authorities to disseminate this information, conspiracy theorists everywhere from The Netherlands to Bolivia have destroyed 5G towers based on these beliefs.

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The conspiracy theories are themselves a pandemic of information, which some experts have dubbed an “infodemic.”

The 5G conspiracy theories are simply mutations of longstanding fringe beliefs about technology. In the 1990s, for instance, many people claimed that the military’s High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) was being used for weather and mind control. In actuality, the program was merely conducting experiments in the ionosphere. The challenge in fighting conspiracy theories is that, even though their purveyors often say they are keeping an open mind, they are most attractive to mindsets that are closed to persuasion.

“Conspiracy theorists usually have a complete worldview, through which they interpret new information and events, to fit their existing theory,” Tuter and Knight explained in The Conversation. “Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of conspiracy thinking is that it is self-sealing, unfalsifiable and resistant to challenge. The absence of evidence is, ironically, often taken as evidence of a massive cover up.”

Tom Phillips, the editor of a British fact-checking organization called Full Fact, told Vox that this phenomenon is not linked to political ideology.

“This really crosses the spectrum — lots and lots of political leanings and different types of conspiracy theory can find something in the 5G theory,” Phillips explained, adding that similar theories circulated when 3G and wifi were first introduced. “A lot of those fears were just transplanted onto 5G when the rollout of that began.”

Writing for Media International Australia, three professors from Queensland University of Technology described how organizations that have ideological, political or financial motives to promote misinformation have benefited from platforms like Facebook. When the pandemic broke in early 2020, they managed to “swiftly retro-fit” their views and gain popularity among people disinclined to want to accept the scientific facts about COVID-19. Fact-checkers were at a disadvantage because conspiracy theorists tend to reject information that contradicts their preferred beliefs; companies could only do so much to take down misleading posts, and when they did so it was often characterized by conspiracy theorists as proving their point. The misinformation was also spread by celebrities, who through their name recognition had a natural advantage in gaining attention for their views even if their opinions proved controversial.

“It is already evident from our present analysis, however, that the COVID/5G conspiracy theory is a product of the collision of long-standing conspiracist beliefs about the supposed health dangers of 5G, as well as about vaccines, global elites, China and other well-established targets of suspicion, with the emerging coronavirus crisis,” the authors write.

Of course, as the issue with airplane radar sharing bandwidth with communications reveals, there are certainly legitimate concerns about 5G. Just not the ones that the conspiracy theorists talk about. Indeed, there are health experts who believe that the part of the electromagnetic spectrum associated with 5G could have mild effects on human health. 

“Even though the radiation associated with 5G technologies hasn’t been investigated as extensively as that associated with current cell phone technologies, there is a substantial body of literature and evidence to indicate a significant impact of exposure on human health and development,” Dr. Jerry Phillips, a professor at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Colorado, told Salon by email in 2018. “Of concern here are not just the potential effects of 5G-associated radiation, but what might result from the combined impact of 5G-radiation with other sources of non-ionizing radiation in our environment. Certainly, a more careful and thorough assessment of the risks to human and environmental health are warranted.”

And, of course, there are the pilots and airline companies who note that it interferes with important equipment — namely, their radio altimeters.

“The radio altimeters on our aircraft determine not only the height above the ground in real terms, not just pressure and altitude, but in real terms above the terrain, as we come in for a landing or we’re taking off,” Joe DePete, president of the Airline Pilots Association, told Yahoo Finance earlier this month. “But they’re tied to many other systems in our aircraft.”

More on conspiracy theories:

Texas court blocks Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal workers

A Trump-appointed federal judge blocked President Biden’s federal vaccine mandate on Friday.

Judge Jeffrey Brown of the District Court for the Southern District of Texas said his ruling was about “whether the President can, with the stroke of a pen and without the input of Congress, require millions of federal employees to undergo a medical procedure as a condition of their employment.” 

The decision comes months after Biden first applied the mandate back in September, directing 3.5 million federal workers to get vaccinated unless they qualify for medical or religious exemptions. Biden also mandated that private companies of over 100 employers require their staff to get vaccinated or undergo routine testing – a policy that was blocked by the Supreme Court last week. 

RELATED: The radical right’s takeover of the Supreme Court is complete

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The Justice Department has already filed to appeal Brown’s decision. White House Press Secretary Jenn Psaki said on Friday that “we are confident in our legal authority here,” noting that 98% of all federal workers are vaccinated.

According to the Federal News Network, Brown suggested that the overwhelmingly high rate of vaccination is a reason to lift Biden’s mandate because it would target only the remaining 2% of federal employees who have not been vaccinated, 

“While vaccines are undoubtedly the best way to avoid serious illness from COVID–19, there is no reason to believe that the public interest cannot be served via less restrictive measures than the mandate, such as masking, social distancing, or part– or full–time remote work,” Brown wrote. 

“The plaintiffs note, interestingly, that even full-time remote federal workers are not exempt from the mandate,” he added. “Stopping the spread of COVID–19 will not be achieved by overbroad policies like the federal–worker mandate.”

The decision comes as the nation continues to struggle with the rise in coronavirus cases as a result of the omicron variant. Over the last week, new daily cases have dropped by 47% from a record of 1.4 million

RELATED: How likely is it for omicron to mutate into something deadlier?

“March for Life” is a misnomer — GOP’s pro-COVID stance makes clear

Friday is the misleadingly named “March for Life,” an annual event where the anti-choice brigade descends on Washington D.C. to march, speechify and party for the cause of forcing childbirth as punishment for sex. Anti-choicers are the OGs of right-wing trolling, which is why Friday’s marchers are willing to brave the grim winter weather just to attach their misogynist march to the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. This year’s theme — “Equality Begins in the Womb” — is an even nastier troll, hijacking the language of social justice while fighting to deprive every human with a uterus of their basic human rights. 

Trolls being trolls, of course, the marchers are no doubt be especially giddy this year, as nearly every legal expert believes this will be the year that the Supreme Court, with its three Donald Trump appointees, overturns Roe. So expect lots of sanctimonious speeches praising the Republican justices for their supposedly “pro-life” ways and waxing poetic about how the GOP supposedly stands for “life.” But remember that this empty posturing was always trollish nonsense from a party that opposes universal health care. It’s especially grim in the face of the ongoing GOP war on the COVID-19 vaccine and their efforts to prolong the pandemic, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of lives are lost in the process. 

RELATED: The radical right’s takeover of the Supreme Court is complete

After all, it was just last week that these supposedly “pro-life” justices nullified President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate on private employers. The ranks of those turning out for the March for Life are flush with people who have spent the last year discouraging vaccination and fighting every effort by the Biden administration to vaccinate Americans. In turn, more Americans died of COVID-19 in 2021 than in 2020, despite the introduction of vaccines that dramatically reduce the chance of dying of the disease. This remains true even in the face of the highly contagious omicron variant, as evidence collected by New York City’s health department shows. 

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The March for Life itself appears to be taking a carefully neutral stance on the matter of vaccination, but dig even an inch deeper, and it becomes clear how central the supposed “pro-life” movement has been to the right’s anti-vaccination campaign and so many unnecessary deaths.

Lifesitenews, the pre-eminent anti-abortion website that provides live coverage of the March for Life, is absolutely blanketed with vaccine disinformation. On the front page alone is a false story claiming the vaccine is dangerous for children, another false story claiming that the vaccine causes miscarriages, and multiple stories celebrating anti-vaxxers and fear-mongering about vaccine mandates. 

Multiple speakers scheduled for this “pro-life” rally have also stood against life-saving mandates and other efforts to slow the death rate from COVID-19.

Alliance Defending Freedom lawyer Kristen Waggoner has repeatedly spoken out against vaccine mandates as “unlawful” and claimed (falsely) that they will lead to massive staffing shortages. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., pushed for a law to block Biden’s vaccine mandate, calling it “overreach of federal authority, unconstitutional, and disrespect Americans’ rights.” And while the top-billed speaker — has-been actor Kirk Cameron — has been largely silent about vaccines, he repeatedly had trolling events to protest temporary lockdowns meant to prevent the spread of the disease pre-vaccine. 

RELATED: Are women people? Why the Supreme Court just signed off on a Texas law that denies women’s humanity

The list of March for Life sponsors is a similar murder’s row of anti-vaccine groups.

The Thomas More Society has been offering legal support for people trying to evade vaccine mandates. The Heritage Foundation filed a brief with the Supreme Court demanding an end to Biden’s vaccine mandate. Concerned Women for America declared vaccines an “outright violation of Americans’ civil liberties.” 

It’s easy to call these people hypocrites. After all, to protect the “lives” of mindless embryos, they want to force women to lose jobs and educational opportunities, be trapped in abusive relationships, and give their bodies over to the lengthy and often downright dangerous process of childbearing. But when it comes to ending a pandemic that is killing over a thousand Americans — real people, with minds and desires and loved ones — a small shot and a day off work to recover is treated as a bridge too far. To call them “hypocrites,” however, is to assume that their posturing about “life” ever had any validity to it whatsoever. It never has. 

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On the contrary, there’s a dark consistency between the anti-vaccination and anti-choice worldviews. Both are hostile to preventive health care, especially in light of the anti-choice movement’s turn in recent years towards fighting contraception access. And, despite anti-vaccine conservatives trolling by stealing the “my body, my choice” language, their opposition to vaccines is very much a strike against bodily autonomy rights. Ultimately, they’re claiming a “right” to spread COVID wherever they want and to violate the basic right of others to go to work, to the store, or anywhere else without an undue threat of contagious disease.

And both are wholly intertwined with the GOP’s authoritarianism.

The deliberate stoking of the pandemic by right-wing forces has ultimately been about — and very successful at — sabotaging Biden’s presidency by eroding his ability to fight the pandemic. That’s not about “life.” If anything, there appears to be no limit to the number of lives, even Republican lives, that Republicans are happy to sacrifice to undermine Biden. As with everything on the right, it’s about power: The power to force pregnancy on others, the power to force COVID-19 on others, and ultimately, the power to force Republican control on an American population that rejects them.

The anti-choice movement has always been the vanguard of American authoritarianism, and now their sadistic and power-hungry worldview has taken over the entire Republican Party. The relationship between the anti-choice ideology and the pro-COVID one is just the latest troubling indicator of where this is all headed. 

Rudy Giuliani revealed to be mastermind behind scheme to install bogus Trump electors: report

A coterie of Trump campaign officials, all led by ex-Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, coordinated a failed scheme to install partisan and illegitimate electors in seven different states that Donald Trump lost in the 2020 election. 

Sources told CNN and The Washington Post that in December of 2020 Giuliani arranged gatherings with these electors in statehouses across Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin – all of which, Trump has baselessly claimed, were the sites of outcome-altering voter fraud. 

Giuliani reportedly oversaw the “nuts-and-bolts” aspects of the operation, which involved arranging calls between potential electors and GOP operatives; reserving rooms in statehouses for elector meetings, and distributing forged certificates that were sent to the National
Archives. At times, the Post reported, Giuliani was assisted by Christina Bobb, an anchor on the right-wing network One America News.

“It was Rudy and these misfit characters who started calling the shots,” a former Trump campaign staffer told CNN. “The campaign was throwing enough sh*t at the wall to see what would stick.”

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These slates of rival electors were key to Trump’s broader coup on Capitol Hill, not public knowledge at the time, that involved persuading former Vice President Mike Pence to throw out electoral votes he deemed illegitimate, thereby giving the final say to the then-GOP-controlled House of Representatives. Pence broke ranks in the end, citing that his role in the ballot-counting ceremony was merely symbolic. 

RELATED: Trump defends supporters’ threats to “hang Mike Pence” in new audio: “People were very angry”

According to Post, several electors selected by Trump’s inner circle bowed out of the plan before it was initiated.

“It seemed like political gamesmanship, and that’s not something I would have participated in,” John Isakson, a Trump-backed elector and former U.S. senator from Georgia, told the Post. “We have a process for certifying the election. We have a process for challenging the election. The challenges failed, so I wouldn’t have participated in something that was going against all of that.”

Additionally, some of the bogus certificates sent to the National Archives had legal caveats made at the behest of certain electors, who ensured that certificates listed that as “electors-in-waiting,” according to CNN. Other certifications unconditionally declared the electors “duly elected and qualified.”

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel told MSNBC last week that the scheme could warrant decades of jail time. “Under state law,” Nessel said in an interview. “I think clearly you have forgery of a public record, which is a 14-year offense, and election law forgery, which is a five-year offense.”

RELATED: 6 ways to overturn an election, according to Team Trump memos