Mike Lindell says a bank is closing his accounts over fear of “reputational damage”

Money problems continue to plague MyPillow CEO-turned-election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, with the staunch Trump ally revealing Friday on Steve Bannon’s podcast that he had recently been asked by his bank to close his accounts over fear of the institution’s “reputational damage” if it continued to be associated with the controversial figure.

The pillow maven played a recorded call he said came from the bank, Heartland Financial, giving him 30 days to take his business elsewhere. The alleged representative said the institution is afraid his bank records may soon be subpoenaed by federal authorities, presenting a risk to the bank’s image.

But the request apparently fell on deaf ears — with Lindell telling Bannon that he refuses to pull his money from the bank.

“I said, ‘I am not being part of this. I’m not leaving. So you’re going to have to throw me out of your bank,'” Lindell said.

Representatives for Lindell did not immediately return a request for comment for this story.

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Lindell is already facing a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit from election security company Dominion Voting Systems, which presents a very real financial threat to the bedding magnate. As Salon previously reported, Lindell was forced to sell his private jet to finance his legal defense for the case, a 10-seat Dassault-Breguet Falcon 50 that he used to travel the country spreading former President Donald Trump’s election lies.

Asked directly whether he had sold an airplane to raise money, Lindell called one Salon reporter “flying pond scum” and “slime” before hanging up.

Lindell is apparently carrying over that confrontational approach to his dealings with Heartland Financial, at one point displaying phone numbers and contact information for the bank on the video feed of Bannon’s podcast in a bid to flood their lines with complaints from MAGA supporters and remaining election dead-enders.

“Where does it end everybody?” Lindell complained. “Where does it end?”

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Everything you need to bake bread, according to an expert

There’s not much that compares to fresh-baked bread. Well, except for a loaf that you baked yourself. If you’ve never baked bread before, I heartily suggest that you give it a shot. It’s easy, you don’t need that much equipment, and you wind up with something delicious.

But a word of caution? You may enjoy it so much that you end up quitting your day job and bake bread all the time . . . which is what happened to me — and I’m certainly not complaining.

Here’s What You’ll Need To Bake Bread:

1. Fresh whole-grain flour

First things first: You can’t make good bread without good flour. You can use white flour, but to make the most delicious and nutritious loaf, you gotta go whole. And whole-wheat flour is just the tip of the iceberg. Flours made of rye, spelt, einkorn, emmer — the possibilities are endless. Regardless of which whole-grain flour you choose, the more recently the flour was milled the better, as flavor and nutritional value decrease with time. Do keep in mind that whole-grain flour will need more water and will ferment faster than white flour.

2. Sourdough starter

A combination of wild yeast and bacteria, sourdough starter can create the most scrumptious breads around. Wild yeast (like the commercial kind) makes the bread rise, and the bacteria produces various acids that help the bread taste wonderful and stay fresh longer. Also, a starter is extremely easy to cultivate — just mix together some flour and water, and just leave it alone. Sounds too good to be true, right? It’s not, but it is needy. You need to give your starter some love and maintain it every day for the first two weeks. Otherwise, it may not grow to be strong and good for making bread. I like to use whole-grain rye flour for making starters because I’ve had good luck with keeping them alive.

More: On maintaining a sourdough starter.

3. A glass mixing bowl

In the olden days, bakers would mix their dough in wooden troughs. These days, many bakers use glass bowls so you can monitor the dough’s rising activity and really hone in on your perfect loaf over time.

4. A dough scraper

Just like a chef is helpless in the kitchen without a chef’s knife, a baker is helpless in the bakery without a bench knife or a dough scraper. OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but it’s still a super useful tool when it comes to making bread. You can use it to divide dough after bulk fermentation, to pre-shape your loaves, and any time you need to scrape dough off the table. It’ll soon become an extension of your hand. I’ve also been known to use mine to cut up apples during our daily apple break.

More: Take inspo from Josey and make some apple butter for your fresh bread.

5. A thermometer

Fermentation is greatly affected by temperature, so keeping close track of the temperature of your room, the water you mix into your dough, and the dough itself is very helpful. Instead of eyeballing when you think your loaf is done in the oven, try a good food thermometer instead. We love the Thermapen from ThermoWorks for its accuracy, speed, and durability — everyone’s fave Internet grandmother has had hers for a decade!

6. A food scale

Unlike cooking, baking is more of a science with exact measurements and measuring by weight gives you the most accuracy. When you measure dry ingredients like flour by volume, you can actually end up with drastically different amounts of ingredients. Depending on your technique, 1 cup of flour can weigh as little as 100 grams or as much as 175 grams whereas 100 grams of flour is 100 grams of flour no matter how you scoop it.

More: How to check the accuracy of your kitchen scale.

7. Proofing basket

After you’ve shaped your dough into its final shape, you have to give it a nice, cozy spot to relax and mature so that it’s ready to be baked. Some proofing baskets are lined with linen, others are not — what you go with is really a personal preference.

8. Loaf pan

While not what most people think of when they think of “artisan bread,” loaf pans are a very useful form for your bread — not to mention that using a pan gives support to grains that form a weaker dough, such as einkorn and rye.

More: Use your loaf pan to make a versatile, chewy, nutty whole-wheat loaf.

9. Razor blade or paring knife

Right before you load your loaf into the oven, you need to score the top so it can puff to its full potential. The slash will make for a beautifully finished loaf, while also providing a variety of textures that wouldn’t otherwise come to be without your handiwork. A double-edged razors works well but be careful with the edges and make sure it’s out of reach for young ones. If you’re clumsy, attach it to a wooden coffee stirrer. Otherwise, any knife you have like a paring knife works just as well.

10. A bread knife

I don’t mean to stop you from tearing into that hot loaf with your bare hands, but having a good bread knife is probably a better idea.

More: Go forth and bake bread. Here are 12 yeasted breads you can conquer.

This post contains products independently chosen (and loved) by Food52 editors and writers. Food52 earns an affiliate commission on qualifying purchases of the products we link to.

How the states have become “Laboratories of Autocracy” — and why it’s worse than you think

There’s a booming literature on the erosion of democracy in America, as well as around the world, but David Pepper’s book “Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call From Behind the Lines” stands out as arguably the most important for three reasons: It brings the subject down to earth, connects democratic erosion to corruption and the decline in America’s quality of life, and provides a wealth of ideas about how to fight back to protect democracy.

The book’s subtitle is well-earned. Pepper is a former city councilman, mayor, county commissioner and head of the Democratic Party of Ohio, as well as a lawyer who has won important battles defending democracy in court. This is no armchair account — it reads more like a well-organized set of field notes from battles seen first-hand.

Perhaps most significantly, those battles have surprisingly little to do with Donald Trump. In an essay in “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” therapist Elizabeth Mika described tyrannies as “three-legged beasts,” supported by the tyrant, his supporters and the society as a whole. In my review of that book, I quoted her on the last of the legs:

Tyrants do not arise in a vacuum. … It takes years of cultivation of special conditions in a society for a tyranny to take over. Those conditions invariably include a growing and unbearably oppressive economic and social inequality ignored by the elites who benefit from it, at least for a time; fear, moral confusion, and chaos that come from that deepening inequality; a breakdown of social norms; and growing disregard for the humanity of a large portion of the population and for higher values.

Pepper’s book provides a detailed, nitty-gritty explanation of how the general conditions Mika describes have been created in Ohio and many other states across America. And when Pepper writes about how to fight back, it’s about fighting back against the conditions that made Trump possible, if not inevitable. Of course Trump himself remains a danger, but Pepper’s book provides a roadmap for action that addresses the roots of the problem. This conversation with David Pepper has been edited for clarity and length.

Let’s start with your title. What’s the story?

It was funny — it was when I thought of the term that the book came to me. I was going to tweet the words out, “You know, these states are no longer acting like laboratories of democracy, but laboratories of autocracy.” I didn’t send the tweet, because the minute I wrote it I thought, “Boy, there’s a lot more to say than this tweet.” And everything flowed from that.

Obviously it comes out of this age-old term that Justice Louis Brandeis made famous but that many have used, a very idealized notion of states doing good things that then become models for the country. Clearly that’s been the case sometimes. But as I argue in the book, in our history sometime it’s been the exact opposite. That’s how we got Jim Crow. States have enough power that in the wrong hands they can do great damage, and the point of the title was to say that’s what’s happening now in very stark ways.

But both words matter. “Autocracy” matters, as these states are hacking away at pillars of democracy that could lead to autocracy. But the “laboratories” part matters too, because they’re always learning, they’re always improving. So they are functioning as laboratories. Until you start adding some accountability and pushing back, they’ll just keep going. So my hope is that “autocracy” wakes people up, but “laboratories” is a really important part of that title because it explains how they operate.

The first story you tell in your book is about a horrendous traffic jam caused by an Ohio secretary of state who tried to make voting more difficult in 2020 by limiting ballot drop-boxes to one per county. Why begin there?

I’ve been fighting the voting rights battle in Ohio for a number of years. The worst is still the purging of voters, but to have a secretary of state intentionally cause long traffic jams for the form of voting that he knew minorities and Biden voters were using, and lying over and over again about what the law actually, was such a troubling thing. And this was not your right-wing, Trump-type secretary of state. He had held himself out as more moderate.

So I tell the story because you look at the traffic jams that his one-drop-box-per-county policy created, and anyone with a commonsense response would say, “Don’t ever do that again.” But in a world of “laboratories of autocracy,” as I tell in the story, the state legislature of Ohio, seeing those jams, began pushing for bills to have traffic jams forever by making that not just a policy decision, but state law. And what do we see at the same time? States around the country looked at those traffic jams and saw the effect on — let’s be clear — Black voters waiting in long lines. So now we have the same effort in other states to minimize drop boxes and to do what happened here: Put the drop boxes where people are already voting early in person, which creates the maximum congestion possible. So it’s a great example of how they behave as laboratories against democracy.

As you lay it out, the heart of the problem is the relative invisibility of state representatives, combined with their great power, which the public may not be aware of. Two questions: Why are state legislatures so powerful? And why is there so little awareness?

It’s a the toxic combination: great power and total anonymity, at least for the average citizen. The power comes all the way back, from the founding. State legislatures were given a lot of power over our day-to-day lives — economic policy, energy policy, criminal justice, education, the things that we care about. Statehouses have a huge effect on those.

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But in our system the Constitution and our overall balance of powers also give statehouses enormous power over not just state elections but federal elections. They draw the district lines, as we’re seeing right now. They set the rules of elections. They have control, to some degree, over how the Electoral College is calculated. It’s a huge amount of power. It’s something James Madison worried about: My gosh, we’re giving statehouses a huge amount of power. If they’re in the wrong hands, undemocratic hands, they can threaten our entire nation’s democracy.

What about the lack of awareness?

Most people can’t name their state representative. They don’t know what’s happening in their capital city. Very few of the things that are happening are covered. You only have so much bandwidth as a citizen, so you know the president, the governor, maybe your congressman and your mayor. These people get lost anyway: the capital city is normally some distance away, these elections don’t get nearly the attention. It just isn’t on the radar.

And journalism is eroding too. You used to have more robust statehouse bureaus that would cover the ins and outs. You had local papers in the small towns and big cities. It all adds up to very low information about these places that are a source of great power. For those wanting to do damage, it’s exactly what they want.

You write, “If the average voter doesn’t know or care what state representatives can do, insiders and interests know exactly what they can do. That’s dangerous.” So what are some examples?

In Ohio, you see everything from massive subsidies given to the right players, and people getting in line for “state business,” putting that in quotes — I talk about for-profit charter school scams in Ohio — who have figured out that they can get into the revenue stream, pull out hundreds of millions or more. You see individual legislators able to provide preferential tax treatment: The payday lenders got a sweetheart policy when they were helping certain legislators. I walk through all the ways that that these legislators can just give huge favors.

The general theme of these places, outside of extremism and anti-democracy, is a massive transfer of public assets and resources to private insiders. Public school dollars go to the private school donors who are starting scam for-profit schools. In other states, It’s the privatization of the energy grid, so in Texas they couldn’t even keep things going in the wintertime. Small towns not getting any infrastructure, because public dollars have been raided by the state to give out as tax cuts at the very high end.

If you add it all up, there’s a massive movement of public resources and dollars to private insiders. That’s why one thing that comes with broken government is a rapid decline in public outcomes. In Ohio, we’re living it. A great state is finding itself ranked last or close to last in everything from higher education attainment to health care. It’s because their M.O. with the statehouse is keep the private people happy and use public resources to do it, year after year.

I’d meant to ask you about how the decline in the quality of life is tied to the erosion of democracy. That’s something that’s completely disconnected in the national discourse. We’ve been hearing that Democrats’ focus on voting rights takes away attention from kitchen-table issues, for example. But that’s not the case on the ground, is it?

My book is trying to say that everyone suffers from this. It may in the short term feel good, if you have a majority. But as I explain later in the book, towns are dying because of the privatization of everything. There no winners from this, long-term. Everyone loses when you lose your democracy. When you go to small towns in Ohio that are largely Republican, they are suffering as much from lack of democracy as larger cities. Because they’re not getting the health care, the infrastructure, anything else they need. And so ending gerrymandering actually would lift long-term outcomes in all these places, because these people would all of a sudden have to compete as well. They couldn’t just give everything to the private players without any accountability, which right now is what they’re doing.

Another category you discuss is overturning local governance. That’s where the anti-democracy aspect blatantly comes to the fore, preventing people locally from passing laws. Could you expand on that?

Statehouses are the Achilles’ heel of national governance. When local governments who are more attentive to public concerns pass laws about gun violence, for example, the statehouses have the ability to stop those local governments from being responsive. What they’ve done in Ohio on issue after issue — whether it’s raising the minimum wage or gun reform — is that if the city of Cincinnati or the city of Cleveland or someone else tries to do something on those issues, they then pass a law that — by a misreading of Ohio law, I would say —allows them to stop any efforts to deal with that issue at a local level. So it’s undemocratic in another way: Don’t reflect your citizens’ views at the state level and also don’t allow local governments to represent their citizens either.

Just to be clear, on almost every issue I’m talking about they are doing the opposite of what their states actually want. Don’t be fooled by the fact that Ohio voted for Trump by eight points. This is a state that supports common sense gun reform. This is a state that supports Roe v. Wade. It’s a state that supports doing something on climate change. I can show you the polling on that. But the statehouses are basically places that, by protecting themselves through election rigging, can put in place deeply unpopular policies and never worry about being held accountable.

It’s not just a problem with the special interests inside the state with help from the national GOP. There’s also national organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council, the NRA and others.

These national players, the Koch Brothers, ALEC and others have weaponized the weakness of statehouses to serve their national agenda. They started out doing that with social issues, but then figured out it can be done, with even greater effect, on their economic interests. I go through how they’ve been crushing rural broadband for years: They don’t want local governments to do it because they want someday to do it. The way I describe it is that they’ve privatized the legislative process.

So many of the laws that are being passed — attacking voters, gerrymandering, the abortion laws like in Texas — are being cooked up in ways that are shared all across the country. And every time one doesn’t succeed, they learn from it and correct for it, and then other states will do the corrected form. And every time one of their approaches does succeed, other states will then model from it. So they’ve turned this into a national effort that people should find very worrisome.

One thing you talk about is how how people can go through a whole legislative career and never really have a competitive election, beyond maybe winning their first primary. What do people need to know about that?

It’s so much worse than people realize. In Ohio we have a 99-person statehouse, and Republicans have rigged it so that they’ll have somewhere in the low to mid 60s of seats, no matter what. In 2018, it was 50% Republican, 49% Democrat statewide and they still had a supermajority of seats, and 60 of those seats have averaged a double-digit win, most of those by 20 points or more. So a strong majority of these people have never been in an election that you and I would say was a real election. Maybe they won a primary at one point, but many were appointed, and never even had the primary.

People just don’t understand how bad it is. We’re talking about, for the first time since back before the civil rights era, people whose entire existence in power has been devoid of democracy. They haven’t talked to swing voters, they’ve never worried about the next election. You literally have an entire generation of people in charge of statehouses who have never experienced democracy the way I did when I ran and won my races.

Everything they’ve done in this world absent democracy is the opposite of what you do in a robust democracy to succeed. They help private interests, get close to the line in terms of corruption, if not over it. They get more and more extreme to avoid a primary. There are the terrible public outcomes that we talked about. Every one of those things works just fine in their world, whereas in a world of real democracy it would guarantee you lose your election.

That Texas law on abortion is extreme, it’s deeply unpopular. If you were in a fair district, you would lose. That happens on guns and everything else. The point is these people in a non-democratic world are acting a certain way, and if they were in a real democracy they’d lose for sure. So what are they gonna do, forevermore? Keep that real democracy from arising, because that would mean they’d lose their power. It’s gotten so much more warped than I think even Karl Rove would have imagined 12 years ago, when he rigged these districts. We’re talking about a completely different mindset than most people think about with democracy.

This leads into something else I wanted to ask about, how they have increased power in part by taking it away from governors, secretaries of state, from the independent judiciary. What’s happening here that don’t people realize?

This gets back to how much power they have that’s hidden. They have levers both political and budgetary, and many can override vetoes, That’s allowed them to run over the likely moderating influences of statewide officials. To win as governor in Ohio in the past you had to be more moderate, more like George Voinovich or Bob Taft. You weren’t a right-wing nut. People who run for those offices try to be more moderate, and they get run over by the statehouse.

Our current governor tried to be reasonable on COVID for a few months, but they stopped everything he tried. They almost impeached him. Now he’s as irresponsible as any of the others because the statehouse basically has too much control over the key functions of government. So statehouses end up being able to to run roughshod over governors, over the people the public actually knows. They don’t realize that the unknown statehouse member, in the end, is trumping the governor again and again.

Recently, Democrats have done a very good job and won three of the last four Supreme Court races in Ohio. I’m proud of this. What did the legislature do? A few months ago they changed the rules of how you elect justices, to add party ID to the ballot, on the thinking that if Trump’s on the ballot and every judge’s party is on the ballot, then they can’t lose.

So they change the rules to undermine other statewide officials. After Democrats won North Carolina in ’16 and they won Michigan and other states in ’18, and even after this Raffensperger guy in Georgia stood up to Trump, what happens? The legislature immediately starts attacking the powers of those other officials, obviously if they’re Democrats, but even if they’re a Republican that doesn’t agree with them. We saw that again in Georgia where they stripped the secretary of state’s power away.

They’re not only gerrymandering and being extreme for themselves, they’re literally going after any threat to their power that arises, be it state courts, governors of either party, or other officials like secretaries of state. It’s truly disturbing behavior.

As you make clear, in Ohio there was the Tea Party wave of 2010, in reaction to the Obama coalition, where they took action to undermine that coalition’s electoral power, and similar things are happening now in response to the 2020 election.

It’s why I resist when people say, “The Big Lie is making statehouses act crazy.” No — they’ve been doing this long before the Big Lie. When there’s an election they don’t succeed in, they learn from their failure and then do everything they can to change the thing that cost them that election. It’s not just about the presidency, it’s about their own self-preservation.

In 2008, after the Obama coalition in Ohio won the election for Obama, it also won Democrats the statehouse. That really peeved them. They had gerrymandered the statehouse and Obama comes in with this huge coalition of urban young voters, electing Obama and elects a Democratic statehouse. The minute they have a chance in 2011 to tear apart that coalition — not by a good campaign, but through changing the laws — they do it. They’re purging voters left and right, and despite huge errors in the purging process, they never stop. They attack early voting again and again. For years they targeted the key constituency groups that made up the coalition that had defeated them, and by 2016 it was clear just how well that worked.

I go through it in the book. The margins of victory in the large counties that made sure that Obama won — particularly the ones around Cleveland — were dramatically reduced because of how many fewer voters were actually registered by the time they were done with their purging through 2016, and curbing early voting in what was called Gold Week, where you could register and vote at the same time. Tens of thousands of voters were impacted there. Hillary Clinton may have lost Ohio for a lot of reasons, but it made her journey in Ohio far more difficult that they had taken the legs out of that Obama coalition.

So they learned their lesson for 2020, same thing. Many people voted early, using drop boxes. Drop-box voters were largely voters of color, largely Biden voters. What do they do? Same as 2011, they immediately target the way that those who vote against them vote. Get rid of drop boxes or add the kind of requirements that led to the traffic jams here. They will do everything they can to isolate what cost them an election and change the laws so it won’t hurt them the next time.

That’s exactly what they’re doing with Jan. 6. That was another failure. What are they gonna do? Figure out why they failed. They have three years to fix it. They’re going to go about fixing it through statehouses.

Right. That’s already well under way. How would you describe what it looks like?

I think it’s a combination of things. The bottom line is, here’s what it won’t look like: people storming the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2025. What did they learn about Jan. 6? It was too chaotic. It was too late. It looked too illegitimate. The key to all this is that it has to look legitimate for them to really win. Storming a building does not look legitimate.

But what were they right about? That state legislators play a big role when it comes to the Electoral College. Not just through through traditional voter suppression, in rigging these districts through gerrymandering. They can also try different ways to maximize their chance of winning the electoral college long before you get to Jan. 6 so it looks legitimate, unlike Jan. 6 did last year.

One thing that happened after 2012 is that they proposed — of course, only in the states where it would benefit them — that you calculate the Electoral College based on congressional district, not the overall popular vote. That would flip Michigan, in a world of gerrymandered districts, at least, basically superimposing gerrymandering onto the Electoral College count. Wisconsin would also be a great example. It’s a very gerrymandered congressional map that would take a state where a Democrat wins overall but if you go to the congressional districts, Republicans win the electoral vote majority. There is some precedent for that right now, because you get votes in Maine and Nebraska out of congressional districts. There’s also a potential legal challenge going back to the one person, one vote principle. But that’s something they’ve already talked about and there have been bills proposed in some states to do that.

That’s something we’ve seen floated in the past. I actually wrote about it in 2014. But there are new and even wilder ideas you talk about.

This was fringe only a couple years ago, the idea that legislators can basically do whatever they want when it comes to the Electoral College. If there was a close election, and they claimed, like Trump tried to do, that it was illegitimate, the legislature could simply say, “We think that’s the wrong result, we’re going to change the outcome.” If you read some of these new Supreme Court justices’ thinking, going back to Clarence Thomas in Bush v. Gore, that was sort of what this John Eastman memo was about: A state legislature can step in and determine the Electoral College vote, and no one can challenge it. I guarantee you, that sort of legal thinking is currently being circulated around the states, and some are pushing it forward as law itself, and potential secretaries of state are running on it.

So they’re going to do the traditional stuff. But they’re also going to do everything they can to figure out this Electoral College stuff again before you have a vice president counting the votes on Jan. 6. That’s why we need to be ready for the next battle. I’m glad we honored and thought seriously about the anniversary of Jan. 6, but the best way to think about it is to stop the next version, which will be far more sophisticated than what we saw one year ago.

That’s a good lead-in to talking about the third part of your book, which is about ways of fighting back. And you start with talking about the Guarantee Clause, which not enough people know about.

It’s the only part where I risk being academic. My goal was to make sure this is very readable, but every single thing I just talked about was of great concern to the founders. I know some people will say, “Well, the founders did terrible things,” and yes, they did. But they also wrote the Constitution. They thought “rich interests” or monarchical interests would take the very powers I described in statehouses and use them to take over the country. They were so worried that they put in the Constitution something called the Guarantee Clause, which literally says, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican form of Government.” It’s in the same area as protecting against foreign invasion. Meaning the federal government must step up and protect that every state in this country has essentially what we call today a small-d democratic government.

To me, that should shape what happens in Congress. This is not just some other policy debate. When you take an oath to the Constitution of the United States as a U.S. senator or House member or president, you are taking an oath to guarantee that every state in this country has democratic governance, just like you’d stop a foreign invader. That’s why when I watch this debate over the filibuster, it shapes the debate. “Shall” is the strongest word in law, “guarantee” is about as strong as it gets.

So when I watch these people fuss about, “Well we we can’t do it unless a bunch of Republicans do it,” no! Your oath is your oath. You took an oath to uphold the Guarantee Clause, which means if there are states in this country who are falling away from democracy — and many of them are, like mine — you have to do something about it, or you’re violating your oath to the Constitution. There is no better grounding to carve out the filibuster for voting rights and democracy than the Guarantee Clause. It’s telling you that, as a senator, you have a duty to protect democracy.

So you have like 30 steps in terms of things that can be done, and that’s too many for us to go into here. Pick one or two themes, because there are some echo in different steps in different ways.

I read a lot of books. and I normally put them down and they might have been interesting but I don’t do anything. So I really wanted to say, “If you put this book down and don’t do anything different, I’ve failed.” I try to break this down into not just the big stuff but something people can do every single day in their corner of the world to lift up democracy, because that’s what it’s going to take.

I start with the federal stuff and it’s essential, but not enough, that the federal government protect voting rights. The Freedom to Vote Act in the Senate right now does so much. I also say the federal government has to do some other things that I won’t go into here, but there’s no protection against corruption in states are locked in by one party, so we need a lot more corruption enforcement from the feds in states like Ohio. A lot of the way democracy is being attacked is actually through substance, like that crazy law in Texas. I think we need to federalize rights that are getting caught up in these antidemocratic efforts, be they labor rights, be they Roe v. Wade.

But then then I’m going to the next level down, which is not through law, but politics. I believe we have to really rethink politics right now, and those for democracy — and I don’t think that’s only Democrats, although Democrats are the big part of it — have to reorient our thinking. This is a long battle for democracy, the way that John Lewis and the suffragists thought about it way back when. It’s a long battle.

What does that entail?

It should dramatically change how we fight that battle. We will lose that battle if all we do on our side is fight in swing states every couple of years for certain Senate seats and Electoral College votes, while they’re fighting democracy in 50 states every year. We have to rethink our approach, to do what they’re doing. Democracy must be protected in every state, every year, in every office that has some lever over democracy. We have to make that adjustment.

That sounds hard, and one thing we must do is decide what resources must follow that adjustment. If you took a rounding error of the billion dollars spent to win a presidential election, for example, and divided that up among 50 states over four years, you would actually have serious investment in those statehouse races and other races. Now my guess is some of those big donors would say “This is crazy. We can’t do that and not give to the presidential race.” And my answer would be, “That’s what the Koch brothers did, and it worked.” Not only will you protect democracy much more effectively, you’ll do better in the presidential race down the road as you built up some support.

That’s already been proven in Georgia, hasn’t it?

Stacey Abrams lost in 2018, but remember her speech where she didn’t concede, but she acknowledged she had lost? She said “We made progress,” and people probably looked at her and went, “What? You didn’t win!” Well, she knew she had registered more voters and inspired more voters — every door-knock was a new voter excited. She was right, and two years later Georgia was blue. Stacey Abrams has thought about democracy as a long game in Georgia her entire life, and that’s why she succeeded. She didn’t give up on everything after one bad cycle. She knew it was a long game.

A long game also means that individual candidates at the statehouse level, for example, even if they lose are contributing, and they need to be rewarded and praised for that. Too often we let a candidate run in a bad district and when they lose we walk away. If it’s a long game and they’re on the side of democracy, they need to be celebrated. Their run could in the long run be the difference in lifting other candidates. I go through many examples of how that happens.

In a big-picture frame, there’s a lot of disagreements to be had on a lot of issues, but don’t let disagreements on those issues lead to civil wars among those who all support democracy. One of the things I go through in the book is that so much of what I’m talking about are lessons learned from what led to Jim Crow. Going into Jim Crow, a lot of people who agreed on stopping things in the South — stopping the KKK and the resurgence of white supremacy — let all their disagreements on other issues get in the way of that, and they ultimately lost.

My point here is, if there are Republicans we disagree with that support democracy, welcome aboard. We’ll figure the other stuff out later. But if you’re for democracy, we need to work together. That’s why I’ve actually really enjoyed — for all the criticism, the Lincoln Project has been very good at spreading the word about what I’m trying to say. That also means that progressives and moderate Democrats, yeah, we disagree on the issues. But if we’re on the same page on democracy, to unify there is much harder than any disagreement you allow to get between you.

I worry that we’re going to get into 2022 and we know the Senate seats and House seats are important, but if we don’t do everything else we’re not getting to the root cause, which is the statehouses, the most undemocratic institutions that eating away at everything else.

There’s new talk of, “Well, we won’t pass a voting rights act, but we’ll do the Electoral College Act.” If we fall for that, it’s because we’re not thinking about the long game. If we say, “Yeah, we’ll correct for the presidential election, but we’ll let you get away with all the attacks on voting rights at the state level again,” that would again be a perfect example where the other side is protecting their long game, but we fall for the thing that deals with what we’ve always cared about, almost blindly and solely, which is the presidency. Not seeing the long game gives them another massive victory.

You conclude with a chapter on what individuals can do. As you describe it, there’s quite a lot.

Each person and organization, I believe, needs to figure out how they can add to their own personal mission statement or their organizational mission statement how, in everything they do every day, they try to lift democracy. Add that to your New Year’s resolution. If there are companies that are helping democracy, not hurting it, spend your resources there. Don’t go around the paywall if there’s a state paper that’s covering the statehouse well. Thank God! You’re lucky they’re there. Subscribe! Keep them going! Reward those who are lifting democracy!

If you’re in Georgia or Ohio, get involved in registering voters. If you run a homeless shelter, are you registering everybody who comes to your shelter every time they come through there? If you’re the mayor of the city and you run rec centers and health clinics, are you registering people? They’re attacking your voters through purging. You have an obligation to lift those voters up. Everyone can play a role. We know that there are people attacking democracy every single day. We love that we have people like Stacey Abrams out there protecting it. But we can’t we can’t leave it all to her.

It also means figuring out who your state representative is and never letting a state rep going unchallenged, especially if they’re attacking democracy. There’s a whole array of things everyone can do to push back for democracy. They may just think it’s bigger than them, but there’s steps that everyone can do, and if we all did them together it would make a massive difference.

I like to end by asking, what’s the most important question I didn’t ask? But in this case I’m aware of so many. I’d rather ask if there’s one more thing you’d like to emphasize.

Well, the other thing we all can do is wake other people up to it. I’ve gotten so many responses to my book like, “Oh my God, it’s a lot worse than I realized!” The more you can educate everyone you know — in your family, on your bandwidth — please do it. Because I’m worried sick that people just aren’t seeing this for what it is. If you think it’s bad, the truth is, it’s worse than you can actually see.

Have we forgotten how to read critically?

Not every piece of short nonfiction writing is an opinion piece, crafted to advance a particular argument. This is the first thing we all need to understand. What you’re reading now, for instance, is an essay — not an op-ed, a chapter, or a blog post. I’ll spare you the customary French translation here and simply note that I love the essay form because it’s an opportunity to watch someone — including yourself, if you write them — think deeply, out loud. To me, the signal pleasure of reading is finding partial answers to the question I have about everyone I encounter: What is it like inside your brain? I am incorrigibly nosy, and reading essays is a socially acceptable outlet for it.

Essays worthy of the name — i.e., distinct from diaries, journals, op-eds, and other forms with lower expectations for depth — have a certain quality that Virginia Woolf identified as belonging “to life and to life alone. You have not finished with it because you have read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and alters and adds.” In the opening essay of “The Gutenberg Elegies,” Sven Birkerts describes a similar quality in Woolf: The ideas in “A Room of One’s Own,” he writes, “are, in fact, few and fairly obvious — at least from our historical vantage. Yet the thinking, the presence of animate thought on the page, is striking.”

I like the phrase “the presence of animate thought on the page” enough that I’m going to pretend I didn’t just see him call Virginia Woolf basic.

“Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered,” writes Woolf. I’ve spent much of the last week reading Joan Didion precisely because she’s no longer alive, and yet, there she is on the page, vibrant and much altered since last we met. Woolf too. Every writer I’ve ever loved is immortal in this way, especially since most were never alive to me in any real sense to begin with — either dead before I was born or existing in a context utterly remote from mine. Because I never met Joan Didion, she remains as alive to me as she’s always been. There are people entitled to mourn her, to whom I offer my sincere condolences, but I am one of the fortunate millions whose long-term relationship with Didion remains essentially unchanged.

We used to understand this, I think. (“Who’s we?” the careful reader should always ask, following a sentence like that. But like most questions, it is one you could always ask yourself, quietly, while looking for answers elsewhere in the text. Reading!) But social media has tilted things so that books by contemporary authors — let alone essays — are no longer portable worlds that awaken when a reader enters and slumber when one leaves. Today, the author is not dead until the author is actually dead. In the meantime, every published piece of writing is treated as the beginning of a conversation — or worse, a workshop piece — by some readers, each of whom feels entitled to a bespoke response. What did you mean by that? Is this supposed to be funny? Did you even consider X? Why didn’t you do this thing the way I would have done it, instead? I’m writing an essay on your book for my high school class — do you have 15 minutes for an interview about the key themes?

They tweet these things, they email them, they reply in comments, they blog about them and snitch-tag the author. There is no apparent awareness that, in writing a piece and publishing it, the author has said what they meant to say and turned the project of thinking about it over to the reader. Today’s reader will simply not accept the baton being passed. If something is unclear, the author must expand; if something offends, the author must account and atone. Simple disagreement triggers some cousin of cognitive dissonance, where the reader’s brain scrambles to forcibly reconcile beliefs that don’t actually contradict each other.

A thought like, “Joan Didion was a master prose stylist and brilliant thinker who said some real bullshit about feminism” cannot stand. Was she great, or was she sometimes wrong? Do I love her writing, or do I occasionally not care for it? Which is it, dammit? Authorial worthiness is zero-sum.

* * *

I am an old woman yelling at a cloud. I know this. You want a head trip, try being in your 40s, writing an essay about how nobody knows how to read anymore, and picking up “The Gutenberg Elegies,” written by a man in his 40s about how people don’t know how to read anymore — only to realize the college students who inspired his lament were (presumably, still are) exactly your age.

“What emerged was this,” writes Birkerts of my cohort, following a disastrous class in which they decline to engage seriously with a Henry James short story:

“That they were not, with a few exceptions, readers — never had been; that they had always occupied themselves with music, TV, and videos; that they had difficulty slowing down enough to concentrate on prose of any density; that they had problems with what they thought of as archaic diction, with allusions, with vocabulary that seemed ‘pretentious’; that they were especially uncomfortable with indirect or interior passages, indeed with any deviations from straight plot; and that they were put off by ironic tone because it flaunted superiority and made them feel that they were missing something. The list is partial.”

Well, shit.

On the other hand, it’s possible assigning a Henry James story in which an older, upper-class, 19th-century man reflects on the fate of his dead friend’s butler was not the best move to engage a bunch of middle-class American teenagers 100 years later.

I just read the story in question, “Brooksmith,” for the first time, and I certainly can see its appeal as a teaching text. The narrator believes he’s telling us the tragic story of a butler “spoiled” by frequent interactions with visitors of a higher class, while unwittingly telling a different story about himself: a man who congratulates himself for befriending a mere servant, but at no point lifts a finger to help his increasingly desperate “friend.” The satire of a privileged twit is dry and delicious.

But I say that as someone who’s nearly 47 and has read a lot more 19th-century fiction than I had 30 years ago. As a college freshman in 1992, I would have been just like Birkerts’s students, complaining, “I couldn’t get into it” and therefore didn’t get it. So many little things I didn’t know yet — what a “salon” for fancy 1890s English people would even look like; the meaning of “parterre” and “casaque”; why it might be perceived as humiliating for a former butler to run a shop or wait tables in a restaurant — would have been stumbling blocks that made the reading far more difficult. And in this case, the payoff (“Ho ho, this guy is awful and doesn’t even know it! Dang, now I’m really sad for Brooksmith”) wouldn’t have seemed worth the struggle.

By contrast, I loved reading even earlier works like “The Scarlet Letter” and “The Mill on the Floss” my freshman year, because characters closer to my age, going through big, dramatic events, provided a cleaner entry into unfamiliar diction and syntax, carried over pages of baggy Victorian digressions. I wasn’t “uncomfortable with any deviations from straight plot,” but I did appreciate a little plot here and there, as a sort of handrail.

When I adopted my first puppy after a series of older rescue dogs, I understood that he was extremely new to Planet Earth, yet I was somehow still surprised by how much he had to learn. Wait, dogs aren’t born knowing that patting your leg means “Come here” and patting the couch means “Join me”? Stairs are a thing that needs to be explained? When you’ve done graduate work in literature, and then aged a couple decades, it’s easy to forget that college freshmen approaching new texts are basically the human version of that.

I entered college as a lifelong avid reader, encouraged by excellent teachers and librarians, and I still didn’t really know anything, because I’d only existed for 17 years. A lot of that time was spent just learning how to manage my body in space and behave in a culturally appropriate manner (saying “please” and “thank you,” starting with the outside fork, being a good sport about casual misogyny, etc.). So even now, in the middle of my own essay about how people don’t know how to read anymore, I find myself crying back across three decades of further rapid changes to the written word: Throw ’em a fuckin’ bone, Sven! They’re just babies!

Birkerts is hardly insensible to this point; in the very next essay, he reflects on his youth, acknowledging both that he was “an interested, eager, but not terribly precocious reader . . . no Sontag knocking back nutritive classics while still in grade school” (hard same) and that he’s only “gradually become interested in lives that are utterly different from [his] own.” Later, in “The Shadow Life of Reading,” he writes of “a kind of sedimentary layer of insights and impressions” each reader accrues over time, adding context and detail to each subsequent reading experience. Reading is, after all, a matter of decoding symbols in a way that makes them meaningful to the reader, which ideally approximates — but can never identically reproduce — the way they were meaningful to the writer who coded them. Someone just stepping into adulthood in 1992, like a puppy sussing out whether it’s safe to cross from rug to hardwood, could not be expected to decipher all the code Henry James laid down a century earlier.

This is why we humans have a long tradition of teaching literature — in other words, how to read closely and think deeply — instead of just turning our young loose in a library and hoping for the best. Those of us who love books learn as much as we can and pass that accumulated wisdom along to students who mostly do not give a shit. ‘Twas ever thus. But along the way, we create a chain of language lovers and nosy parkers that links us — you, me, Birkerts, Didion, Woolf, James, all of us — through time all the way back to Gutenberg; before him to handwritten letters, stone tablets, and the oral tradition; before that to the best crafted series of grunts; all of which makes death seem a little less terrifying, a little less final.

The internet has made the entire world a library with no exits and no supervisors.

* * *

Heather Havrilesky loves her husband, you numbskulls.

Last week, the humor writer and longtime advice columnist at The Cut published an essay, “Marriage Requires Amnesia” — an excerpt from her forthcoming book, “Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage—” in the New York Times. This led to an inexplicably angry Twitter fight among readers about whether she should leave her marriage. (Or whether her husband, wronged by this shocking display of dirty laundry, should leave her.) The argument for dissolving Havrilesky’s marriage is that she said, in so many words, she hates her husband. In The New York Times! Can you imagine? Surely, there could be no clearer signal that a relationship is over.

The argument against: Oh my god. Irony exists. Hyperbole exists. Please get better at reading.

Havrilesky loves her husband, Joe Biden won the election, COVID-19 is not just a cold, the omicron variant is bananas contagious, vaccines are safe and effective, climate change is real, the fascist threat we face is not coming from the left, Aristotle was not Belgian, the central message of Buddhism is not “Every man for himself,” etc. Not everything the internet treats as ambiguous actually is. Texts generally do contain evidence that certain interpretations are more valid than others. .

Not that the whole text of Havrilesky’s essay has much to do with the outrage it generated. As far as I can tell, the majority of people complaining didn’t make it past the line “Do I hate my husband? Oh for sure, yes, definitely,” which serves as the piece’s subhead.

Disclosure, before I go on: I’ve internet-known Heather since we both wrote for Salon, which I started doing in 2008. More relevant to this discussion, though, is that I was a fan of hers for years before that, going back to Suck.com and Rabbit Blog. The sedimentary layer of reading deposits in my head includes 20-plus years’ worth of Heather Havrilesky, which means I have certain expectations when I see her name.

The piece will be long. It will meander but never lose me. I will find it hilarious, while knowing not everyone would, because it will contain outrageously hyperbolic “confessions” about what a “terrible” person she is. But the exaggerated self-incrimination is mostly there to skim some embarrassing earnestness off the top of what she’s actually come to say, which is usually something tender, wise, and kind. A soft, anxiously beating heart will always be nestled inside the confident bluster of her voice. A piece that begins with the author “hating” her husband, for example, will end with, “In spite of everything, he’s still my favorite person.”

And then the internet will scream in response, “If you hate your husband, just get a fucking divorce!” because the internet is really bad at reading.

At Defector, Albert Burneko went long on how upsetting he found “this terrible, ridiculous piece of writing” (which he characterizes as a “blog,” despite its clearly being labeled as a book excerpt). The basis of his rant, as far as I can tell, is his presumption that Havrilesky’s husband, Bill, must feel humiliated by “Marriage Requires Amnesia.”

I’m not grasping at subtext here. “He would have to be an absolute nightmare of a husband to deserve the humiliation of being aired out in personal terms in the New York Times by the very person he vowed to honor and cherish forever,” Burneko writes. Elsewhere, he wonders “how profoundly my wife would have to have wronged me, how galactically and intractably miserable in my marriage I would have to be, before I could even consider doing this to her — taking to the pages of the New York Times to savage everything about her . . . “

Back in 2008-2010, when Havrilesky and I were both writing for Salon’s feminist blog, “Broadsheet,” the lightly moderated comment section was just what you’d expect from that time and place: a bunch of misogynists taking a break from MRA/PUA Subreddits to harass some professional lady writers. (We called ourselves “ladies” back then, at first ironically and then just habitually, until younger people started identifying it as an old-person thing, and we stopped but got old anyway.) I no longer recall what I wrote about my spouse, Al, that occasioned it, but one day an angry man hissed at one of my posts: “Your husband must be so embarrassed.”

“Honey,” I called out to said husband after I read it. “Come look! The boys are talking about you!”

He read the comment, laughed, and asked my permission to respond — not because we have the kind of relationship where he needs my permission to do a damned thing, but because he knew and supported my policy of not responding to trolls. This guy had come into my workplace to stir shit, not his. He would respect how I wanted to handle it.

“Go nuts,” I said.

“The only thing I like better than my wife having strong opinions,” Al wrote back, “is that she gets paid for them.”

So my first thought reading Burneko’s screed was, “Oh my god, this is 2,500 words of ‘Your husband must be so embarrassed.'” My second thought was, the meat of his post — about how no marriage or person is perfect, sure, but he loves his wife very much and doesn’t actually find it hard to stay married — is strikingly similar to Havrilesky’s actual thesis in “Marriage Requires Amnesia.”

If you ignore all her artistic and rhetorical choices in favor of an arbitrarily literal reading, then sure, it’s a piece about a woman who hates her husband and hates being married (at least until the end, when she says the exact opposite). But if you trust the author to do her job, and you do yours as a reader, you’ll find a love letter to Bill — and to marriage itself — within all the irony and exaggeration.

I’m pretty sure you don’t need to be a 20-year fan with a Ph.D. to see that. You just need to operate on the premise that the author knows what she’s doing. So often, that seems to be the problem when women write.

When married, straight women write, do people really not understand that our husbands have met us? That they are aware when we publish things and have often even read those things in advance? That their being the men we chose to marry suggests they have personalities, senses of humor, egos, and privacy needs compatible with ours?

In “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Didion tells the story of publishing her first column for Life magazine, which included the line, “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.”

It was a joke, of course. But when they returned to New York from Hawaii, people started asking in hushed tones if John had been aware that bombshell was coming. How did he feel? Did he know?

“Did he know I was writing it?” she writes, decades later, grieving her beloved husband of 39 years:

“He edited it.
He took Quintana to the Honolulu Zoo so I could rewrite it.
He drove me to the Western Union office in downtown Honolulu so I could file it.
At the Western Union office he wrote REGARDS, DIDION at the end of it.”

To presume a writer’s spouse would be humiliated by a piece like Havrilesky’s requires a whole other series of ungenerous assumptions about both people involved:

That the piece was written in secret;
That its primary purpose is to advance a controversial argument;
That the narrator of a personal essay is identical to the author, as opposed to a funhouse reflection of certain aspects of her;
That a line like, “I have evolved, unlike my spouse. I am so good, so thoughtful, so generous” is genuine delusional narcissism, as opposed to the comedic set-up for a scene where she blows her stack in a distinctly unevolved way;
That no amount of signposting irony is ever enough; if one person takes it literally, then the writer has failed.
That the writer is not an expert in her craft, making considered decisions about language and tone, but a novice out of her depth — even when she’s a middle-aged professional with a long publication history, and you’re reading an excerpt from her next book in the Times.

That’s what makes all the “get divorced” and “get therapy” responses a matter of bad reading, not just subjective interpretation of an ambiguous text. If you think about it for one second, if you ask yourself the most fundamental question of textual analysis — “Does this interpretation make any fucking sense at all?” — you immediately see that this cannot actually be an essay by a woman who despises her partner. For one thing, a woman who wants to publish a straightforwardly narcissistic hit piece on her own husband is going to end up somewhere like the Daily Mail, not the Times. (And I say that as someone who yells about the Times’ crumbling standards at least three times a week.)

* * *

“Do I hate my husband? Oh, for sure, yes, definitely.”

Look at those words and ask yourself whether they sound like they’re meant to be taken literally. If it helps, compare them to the following:

“Do I hate my husband? God help me, I do.”
“Do I hate my husband? How honest do you want me to be?”
“Do I hate my husband? I don’t want to talk about it.”

You can see it, can’t you, the difference? The way one of those alternatives smacks of guilty confession, one of resentment ready to boil over, one of anger too large to own — while “Oh, for sure, yes, definitely” smacks more of that Jennifer Lawrence thumbs-up GIF? How saying it three different ways doesn’t really suggest emphasis so much as playfully protesting too much? How each affirmative in the series offers a new opportunity to pick up on the irony? Hell, if you’re over a certain age, you’ll also recall that a sarcastic “For sure” was one of the most devastating retorts an ’80s teen could deliver.

In other words, if you read for anything, anything at all besides social-media yelling fodder, you can see Havrilesky did everything short of hyperlink that line to a static page that says, “I’M FUCKING JOKING I LOVE HIM SO MUCH” in blinking neon.

“I remember why I chose him. In spite of everything, he’s still my favorite person,” she concludes, in the same piece that prompted half the internet to ask if Bill needs a good divorce lawyer. That’s no Shiv Roy–style “I may not love you, but I do love you.” It is, quite literally, a declaration that she thinks there’s no one better on Earth. It’s just deliberately understated, in direct contrast to the hyperbolic way she discussed his flaws (and, it bears repeating, her own).

And that’s not a function of withholding bitchiness; it’s a function of craft. It’s a point and counterpoint. The drastic shift in tone tells you that now — not before, when I was rambling and exaggerating and affecting a heightened comedic voice, but now — you need to pay attention: He’s my favorite person.

“For it is only by knowing how to write that you can make use in literature of your self; that self which, while it is essential to literature, is also its most dangerous antagonist,” writes Woolf. “Never to be yourself and yet always — that is the problem.”

In the age of social media, it’s everybody’s problem.

Heather Havrilesky, who very much knows how to write, confronts it with dark humor and hyperbole. I juxtapose five-dollar words with “fuck” and “shit,” so everybody knows I’m smart but also hate myself for caring if anybody knows I’m smart. We all have our thing.

For those of us who feel things deeply but find earnestness mortifying, noisy humor is often the only way into our most vulnerable selves. HA HA, LOOK OVER HERE, EVERYBODY! (the weight of loving mortal beings is simply too much to bear) TAKE MY HUSBAND, PLEASE! I don’t know if that’s exactly Havrilesky’s deal, but it’s definitely mine, which is why I identified her essay persona as a kindred spirit, years before she learned my name.

Reading can make you feel close to someone without actually knowing them, a precious gift in a lonely world. But if the pleasure of reading is feeling connected to a distant stranger, then the pain of watching people read badly is its opposite: a severing of shared humanity. A cold, demoralizing reminder that we never can look inside each other’s minds, no matter how we try.

* * *

Books once kept the boundaries between writer and reader distinct. Unless you met an author under the controlled circumstances of a public event, you’d never get a chance to say hello, much less insult their intelligence and demand they go to therapy. Now, you and 300 other furious strangers can tell an author to kill herself before she’s finished her first coffee. Technology is a miracle.

In all seriousness, though, it is. (I may not love you, but I do love you, internet.) Having lived on both sides of the digital divide, I would never trade the opportunities we have now to create connection and mutual understanding — to say nothing of the information access. In writing this essay, I pulled up the New York Times, a Virginia Woolf essay, a Henry James short story, an encyclopedia entry on Roland Barthes, multiple Joan Didion books, a clip from a 1988 movie, a picture of an actor making a specific face, the exact wording of a line from “Succession” that aired a few weeks ago, and a link that enables immediate purchase of a book I mentioned, all within seconds, on the device I was already working on. (Fittingly, the only physical book I quoted from was an old copy of “The Gutenberg Elegies.”) The Brother word processor I went to college with in 1992 couldn’t do that. A hot-shit librarian couldn’t do that in 1992 without 24 hours’ notice. I harbor no doubts about whether this lifestyle is spiritually or intellectually preferable to some woodsy hermitage full of paper books and my own stupid thoughts. I love it here.

But what we love is never free of flaws. Every day of the last two years, we’ve seen the devastating consequences of combining a torrential flow of information with lousy reading and thinking. We have to do better, and that’s not just some vague call to arms I’m plunking in here at the end because I’ve used up my brain for the day and want to go to bed. Reading better, thinking better, is quite literally a matter of survival in the time of COVID and climate change, in these days when we’re reflecting on the first anniversary of disinformation-powered insurrectionists breaching the U.S. Capitol. It’s no longer enough to see a headline, feel a feeling, and go off. We have to ask more questions, of ourselves and our sources, starting with that fundamental one: Does this make any fucking sense at all?

The antiquated homophobia of “And Just Like That”

A big part of the episode “Diwali” in “And Just Like That,” the HBO Max show that reanimates “Sex and the City,” reminded me of a different, much earlier series.

Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) has confessed to her friends that she had sex outside of her long, monogamous marriage, sex with a mutual friend who is nonbinary. Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) already knew, having been not-really asleep after hip surgery and in the very next room at the time the indiscretion occurred, overhearing much of it. But when Cynthia gets up the courage to tell Charlotte (Kristin Davis), her longtime friend, Charlotte’s reaction is extreme, outdated outrage directed at the wrong part of the experience.

Her mouth falls open. She recoils from the picnic table where the women are seated, having an otherwise lovely sunset meal. A gasp escapes her, a what?! loud enough to make Carrie physically flinch. Charlotte is reacting to the fact that her friend had sex with a queer person — not that the sex happened in Carrie’s kitchen, or even that it happened while Miranda is currently married to someone else.

Carrie doesn’t help things. She avoids eye contact. She looks disgusted. “Are you not fine with it?” Miranda asks her. “I don’t even know what it is yet,” Carrie says.

The reaction of Miranda’s friends to her queer experience called back my deeply problematic, childhood favorite “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” when the character of Willow (Alyson Hannigan) comes out to her best friend and roommate, Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar).

“Oh,” Buffy says. “Oh.” She quickly stands up from Willow’s bed where she had been perched. “Tara’s a really great . . . girl.” She keeps saying Wil’s name and moving awkwardly, restlessly, around their shared room. “Are you freaked?” Willow asks.

Buffy at least recovers somewhat quickly, turning supportive, unlike Willow’s ex-boyfriend (Seth Green) who physically assaults Willow’s girlfriend, Tara (Amber Benson) once he gets a whiff of their relationship. “STOP! Is she in love with you?” He shakes Tara violently. “Tell me.” Then he transforms, as one does in the Buffy-verse, into a vicious werewolf, and tries to murder the woman with whom his ex has found love. The show always was heavy-handed with its metaphors.

Here’s the thing. That episode of “Buffy” aired in 2000. “And Just Like That” is airing in 2021. That Miranda’s grown adult friends — in their 50s, but acting, in most regards, like much older people — might have the same disgusted reaction to a friend coming out to them as teenagers would decades ago is an issue.

They’re not disgusted at the right thing. Miranda is cheating on Steve (David Eigenberg), with whom she has had an apparently now-sexless marriage for years, and who is the father of her child. The fact that it’s marital infidelity merits barely a mention, nor does the fact that Miranda feels happy — alive, as she says — for the first time in a very long time.

It’s the queerness that her friends object to. Charlotte seems not to understand how a woman would have sex with someone who is not a man, leading to an offensive and tasteless exchange about “a finger.” It’s immature. And it’s othering.

The object of Miranda’s new affection is Che (Sara Ramirez), Carrie’s podcast boss, a standup comic and as Kevin Fallon writes in The Daily Beast: “one of the new characters added to the series in a woke panic.” In a desperate attempt to address the utter lack of diverse characters in the first go-round of “Sex and the City,” the HBO Max show throws characters and issues at the wall like spaghetti, hoping something is done and will stick. One of Charlotte’s tween children is experimenting with a new name and new way of dressing, for example, and contributes to the nonbinary anxiety that rises up in Charlotte. So many plotlines, each barely touched-upon, including the ones about gender, reduce what could be relevant, contemporary stories to after school specials.

Che is, according to Fallon, “the worst character on TV.” As often happens with bisexual characters, the series stereotypes the queer character as hypersexual (which they have also done with the character of Anthony, who is gay, polyamorous, and promiscuous, getting a handjob from a cater-waiter in a bathroom in one scene at a school function). Even Charlotte admits to dreaming about Che because they’re “so cool and charismatic.” And while bisexuals are often lumped together as promiscuous, dangerous and tricksy, “And Just Like That” presents the nonbinary character as . . . an age-inappropriate fraternity member?

In a weird reversal of how the main trio of woman speak and behave much older than their characters are supposed to be, Che is a person in their 40s who acts like a terribly behaved teen, giving Miranda’s underage son marijuana at a party, shotgunning Miranda from a vape pen, and of course, having casual, tequila-fueled daytime sex with her while Carrie is just a few feet away.

Che’s only appeal to Miranda is, so far, sexually. They certainly aren’t a good friend, supportive or trustworthy. After the two have sex — Miranda’s first-ever queer experience — Che forgets to message Miranda back for months because . . . Che has apparently smoked too much pot to remember her? How does this person hold down a steady job?

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Steve, Miranda’s husband, barely enters into the conversation in part because the show has done a good job of suddenly making him a foil. He has had few scenes so far, and his only character development is that he now wears hearing aids due to age-related hearing issues. His first four lines (yes, I counted) are all some variant of “what?” “And Just Like That” is a stunning example of how not to write a disabled character. Like the women, Steve seems doddering, confused, and older than his age: forgetting his wallet, unable to find Miranda in a public place.

Miranda’s (and Steve’s) storyline is a huge missed opportunity for the show. A middle-aged woman struggling with new and different sexual feelings, struggling to define herself as a long marriage evolves (or maybe dissolves), and she herself changes is turned instead into caricature. The show plays both disability and complex human sexuality for cheap and cruel laughs, and takes what could have been an important moment — a not-young character possibly coming out to her friends — into antiquated moral panic.

“You are not progressive enough for this,” Charlotte tells Miranda, calling her sex with Che “a midlife crisis,” and further insulting Miranda’s looks: “You should have just dyed your hair.” But even Carrie does not show empathy for her friend. When a visibly upset Miranda tries to remove herself from the situation, Carrie tells her: “You can disagree, but you can’t leave,” calling to mind for me hate the sin, not the sinner, and the cloying bromides of let’s disagree to disagree — wishy-washiness that doesn’t work when someone’s humanity has just been called into question.

With every episode, “And Just Like That” chips away nostalgia for the original show with grating storylines and widely drawn stereotypes. “Sex and the City” may have provided a sort of fantasy getaway in the wild lives and wilder clothes of the original women, but anyone looking for a comfort watch here will be disappointed. This isn’t an escape. It’s a trap.

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5 Popes who formed a holy bond with their animal companions, from cats and dogs to even an elephant

Pope Francis has really strong opinions about pets and children, of which he has neither. But that didn’t stop him from weighing in on their unimportance and the character of their caretakers.

In early January, the supposedly progressive pontiff proclaimed that pet ownership (over parenthood) is selfish and “takes away our humanity,” according to the New York Times.

“And in this way civilization becomes aged and without humanity, because it loses the richness of fatherhood and motherhood,” he continued. “And our homeland suffers, as it does not have children.”

His Holiness doesn’t have any pets of his own, staying true to his preachings. But his stance is not one shared by many of his predecessors, ranging from the Renaissance to the modern era, who adopted animals. Even the fictional Pope Pius XIII, played by Jude Law on HBO’s “The Young Pope,” had a bond with his kangaroo, presented to him by the Australian foreign minister. Whether the animals were exotic gifts or chosen domestic companions, a veritable menagerie has been wholeheartedly embraced by their rightful Holy Fathers over the centuries.

Not only that, but caring for animals is considered a power move where popes are concerned. According to the New York Times, Italian historian and author Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, author of the 1994 novel “Il corpo del papa” (“The Pope’s Body”), animals were used “to create and confirm the authority and sovereignty” of the papacy. In short, pets were symbols of great power and dominance.

Let’s take a look at some of the most famous pet-loving popes and their companions.

Pope Benedict XVI and his cats

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI (2005 – 2013), who is widely known for his fondness of cats, is the proud owner of several. There’s Chico — a black-and-white domestic short hair — Contessina and the many other stray felines that used to meander around the Pope’s former Vatican residence. In 2008, Chico was even featured in the children’s “autobiography” titled, “Joseph and Chico: The Life of Pope Benedict XVI as Told by a Cat,” which was authorized by Pope Benedict and the Vatican Press.

“Every time he met a cat, he would talk to it, sometimes for a long time . . . The cat would follow him,” said Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone in a 2005 Daily Telegraph article. “Once about 10 cats followed him into the Vatican,and one of the Swiss Guards intervened, saying ‘Look, your eminence, the cats are invading the Holy See.'”

Pope Pius XII and his goldfinch

Pope Pius XII (1939–1958) and his beloved goldfinch, Gretel, became an inseparable duo after the Pope rescued her from the Vatican Gardens. The miniscule bird, who suffered from a wing injury, joined the Pope for dinners following her recovery and provided him company while he worked late into the evening. She was oftentimes seen resting on the tip of Pope Pius’ finger or on his shoulders — her two favorite spots.

The Pope also housed a flock of canary companions, and was known to even treat the insects of the Vatican Gardens with nothing but care and compassion.

Pope Leo XIII and his collection of creatures

During his papacy, Pope Leo XIII (1878 – 1903) kept ostriches, deer, goats and African gazelles in the Vatican Gardens. He allowed the gazelles to roam freely, which was a risky decision considering that one gazelle managed to leap onto the Pope. Even in the face of danger, Pope Leo maintained his cool and joked, “Did you really think that a gazelle could defeat a lion?”

Sadly, the pope’s successor, Pope Pius X, did not share his love for animals or the gardens and put an end to the papal menagerie traditions.

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Pope Leo X’s elephant

Pope Leo’s elephant, Hanno, could perform an assortment of tricks and dances on command. Although elephants are an unconventional choice for a pet in today’s day and age, Hanno was revered as a spectacle and became a symbol of grandeur. The elephant, who was gifted to Pope Leo X (1513–1521) by King Manuel I of Portugal, was featured in paintings, sculptures, poems, fountains, ceramics and other works of art.

Pope Pius II and his dog

During his stay in Siena, Tuscany, the Renaissance pope (1458 – 1464) wrote about the beautiful countryside landscapes and natural spectacles of his hometown. He also wrote stories about his pooch, Musetta.

More stories about the Catholic Church:

From speed viewing to watching the end first: How streaming has changed the way we consume TV

In 2010, there were around 200 television programs in the United States and only 4% of them aired on streaming networks such as Netflix. By 2020, this number had more than doubled.

Thanks to streaming platforms such as Netflix and Hulu, viewers can now access more narrative content than ever before. We conducted a study to understand how this digital disruption has affected how we watch TV.

Our findings show that streaming services have changed the way we watch television series, and that fans are much more active than expected when tuning in.

We conducted an extensive program of research combining several methods from the traditional (interviews with viewers, diaries, analysis of fan forums) to the more creative (recording people watching TV series in their own homes). We studied 30 viewers and analyzed online forums for seven TV shows (35 threads with 16,528 messages).

Skipping, speeding and spoiling

In contrast with traditional notions of passive viewing, we find that series fans want to be in control. While some watch episodes from start to finish, many re-watch scenes or skip unwanted content (including nudity, violence, or scenes with a specific character they dislike).

Some fans report watching all or part of their series in fast forward (or “speed-watching”) to consume as much content as possible in a short amount of time.

As one “House of Cards” fan posted on an online forum:

“It’s game on when the season drops . . . in the mad dash I power through the episodes on ff [fast forward]. It distorts the voices a bit and the scenes are a little more cartoon-like but I can see a whole episode in under 30 minutes.”

Others choose to watch the ending of the series first to ensure they will enjoy it, and therefore make sure that the show is worth investing time in.

Amy* told us in an interview:

“I watch happy stuff because it’s not always happy in life. In life, you don’t know the ending. This one, you have control over the ending and choose if you want to experience it, I guess. It’s the worst thing to put all the effort in and not get the reward at the end.”

And while many go to great length to avoid spoilers, they are actually appreciated by some fans, who read detailed online plot summaries before watching a show to manage their emotions.

Often, the weight of suspense proves too much for some viewers. Spoilers help reduce the anxiety they experience when they don’t know what will happen next.

Many dedicated fans look for additional information about the series or the actors on Wikipedia or read online forums and fan theories to enhance their understanding of the author’s intentions and the characters’ motivations.

As Nora* put it in an interview:

“Maybe it’s my bit to sort of understand from a writer’s point of view where the story is going and what the immediate end is going to be.”

By taking charge of how they watch TV series, fans can maximize their enjoyment in times in which many things are beyond their control.

Choose your own adventure

Our findings have implications for series producers and streaming platforms. Producers can cater to those who want deeper engagement by offering additional content that adds value to the narrative (for example in episode after parties like “The Walking Dead’s” “Talking Dead“).

They can also facilitate fan engagement and discussions with people at different points in the narrative: those who watched the show as it was originally aired, those who come to it long after production has ended and everything in between. This requires hosting fan discussions based on content units (seasons, arcs, episodes) and signposting spoilers so viewers can opt in or out of content reveals.

Because we find some TV series fans like to skip specific scenes, streaming services could offer filters to enable consumers to easily select the content of narratives. Storylines with adult content (nudity, drug use, violence) could explicitly locate important plot or character points outside the adult content for people who don’t want to watch these scenes.

Beyond adult content, our finding that viewers consistently skipped scenes with specific characters or subplots suggests other potential filters or technologies to accommodate viewer habits. Allowing viewers to customize the episodes around favourite characters, producers could package content based on character development and character-specific plot components.

Our participants’ desire to be in control also suggests that, like in the world of gaming, TV series viewers could run the story themselves. Producers may choose to write and film multiple narrative options, like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, a format already seen in the “Bandersnatch” episode of “Black Mirror,” which garnered critical and popular acclaim.

The future of storytelling will be found in this multiverse of participatory media in which viewers are empowered to skip forward and backward, to slow down and speed up, to edit the plot and make their own adventures.

* Participants’ names have been changed.

Stephanie Feiereisen, Associate Professor of Marketing, Montpellier Business School – UGEI; Cristel Antonia Russell, Professor of Marketing, Pepperdine University; Dina Rasolofoarison, Maitresse de Conférences en Marketing et Communication, Université Paris Dauphine – PSL, and Hope Schau, Eller Professor of Marketing, University of Arizona

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

Can any animal learn to speak with buttons like Bunny the “talking” dog does?

It’s no secret that the internet has been captivated by Bunny the Talking Dog.

In case you’ve been on a digital detox over the last couple of years, Bunny is TikTok’s beloved “talking” Sheepadoodle who uses an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) device to communicate with her human parent. As Salon has reported, Bunny has stunned her followers by seemingly asking existential questions, recalling her dreams, and wondering about Uni, the cat she lived with who went missing. Indeed, it’s not just Bunny anymore. There’s also Billi, a 13-year-old domestic cat in Florida, who’s captured the internet’s attention by pressing buttons to communicate.

Both animals are enrolled in a project called TheyCanTalk, which is seeking to better understand if animals can use AAC systems to communicate with humans. The project consists of dogs, cats, a small cohort of horses, and one peahen. In the study, participants receive instructions on how to set up their AAC buttons. They usually start with easy words like “outside” and “play” linked to their buttons. Pet parents set up cameras to constantly monitor the animals when they’re in front of their boards, data which is sent to the lab where researchers examine what they say.

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As popularity continues to rise by way of social media and these talking animals, some might be wondering: can any animal species learn how to talk using an AAC device?

“Certainly when we got started on this, my expectation was that we would see that dogs would do surprisingly well, but I didn’t expect we would see that much in the way of a great performance from non-dogs,” said Leo Trottier, cognitive scientist and founder of How.TheyCanTalk Research and developer of the FluentPet’s system that Bunny and Billi use. “Dogs have famously evolved with us for thousands of years. We’ve engaged in aggressive selective breeding with them. Their behaviors are obvious; they are very interested in us, they look into our eyes routinely when we’re talking to them, they can famously recognize pointing gestures that’s been shown last, so I was surprised to see how cats ended up performing.

Indeed, as Salon has previously reported, Billi speaks up to 50 words. And while there are some anecdotal differences between how cats and dogs use the buttons, the fact that a non-dog species is succeeding with them gives Trottier confidence that perhaps any animal can use them.

“We have birds which are using them. The evidence for the birds is pretty limited, but I’m not gonna write them off, but I think the evidence for cats using the buttons inherently or in a way that’s contextually appropriate is stronger than for birds,” Trottier said. “But it does seem like it’s surprisingly the case that many non-dog species seem to be able to do this better than expected.”

While Trottier admits he’s not very “optimistic about reptiles,” the surprising fact that a non-dog species appears to be doing better with the buttons than expected raises new questions around animals, language and communication. The reason why animals don’t speak like humans is in part an issue of vocal anatomy: they might lack the tongue flexibility to speak, vocal cords or mouth musculature. According to a 2018 study published Frontiers in Neuroscience brain power puts humans at an advantage to being able to speak, too. But that doesn’t mean animals don’t communicate in their own ways, or have the ability to mimic human speech. A study published in 2018 found that orca whales can mimic the words such as”hello” and “bye.” A 2016 showed an orangutan was able to copy the pitch and tone of sounds made by researchers.

AAC devices were created to help people who faced difficulties in expressing natural speech. If animals face difficulties, could it be possible that animals could use an AAC to express themselves, too? Indeed, this is precisely what inspired Christina Hunger, a speech-language pathologist, who famously taught her dog Stella how to use an AAC device. There have been some clues that non-canines and felines would succeed at using an AAC — like a bottleneck nose dolphin pressing a paddle to singal “yes.”

Trottier said seeing cats succeed using an AAC device has “refined” the questions: “What has the impact been of co-evolution? And what are the things that get in the way of language use by non-human animals?”

The buttons, Trottier said, being similar to each other yet slightly different could be a means of being something that is “language friendly.”

“Because that’s kind of the way words are, words are these things that we share with each other that are both very similar, they’re all just sounds, made by our lips, at each other, but they’re also slightly different, right?” Trottier said. “And so it might be the case that the major impediment to language use in non-human animals is – well, obviously, there’s going to be general intelligence – but it could be the case that the language ability is somewhat independent, and depends on some kind of unique set of kind of cognitive capabilities that maybe buttons enable.”

Read more about how pets communicate:

Evangelicals do battle with “critical race theory” in new online video course

In the right’s all-hands-on-deck crusade against “critical race theory,” there’s a job for everyone: movement intellectuals and keyboard warriors, school board brawlers and politicians — from Congress to the governors’ mansions down to the new class of local right-wing bureaucrats eager to link student test scores to faculty demographics. So it’s no surprise that there’s a role for church folks as well.

This week, Focus on the Family — the behemoth Christian-right ministry founded by James Dobson, with some 650 employees, its own zip code and an estimated worldwide audience of 200 million — did its part, asking followers to sign up for its free online course teaching parents how to “empower” their families to “face CRT.”

The course consists of five videos, hosted by FOF vice president of parenting and youth Danny Huerta, speaking with a handful of evangelical leaders: the Hoover Institution’s Shelby Steele; John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview; and Carol Swain, co-author of the 2021 book “Black Eye for America: How Critical Race Theory Is Burning Down the House.”

After each video, viewers are directed, school workbook-style, to a series of additional tasks. First, to meditate on selected Bible verses (“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free…”) Second, to consider a series of deceptively neutral discussion prompts: “How do you think Critical Race Theory creates confusion, especially among children?” “What is dangerous about people viewing themselves as victims or using shame and moral manipulation to get what they want?” Or, most blatantly, “After viewing this video course, do you have a better understanding of Critical Race Theory and how it is contrary to the truth of God’s Word?”

On the whole, it’s a gentler approach than most of the discourse around CRT this past year — framed more like a public service announcement than the threats to unseat the local school board, perhaps with violence, that proliferated last summer and fall. But the message is largely the same, as Huerta and his guests cover a number of religiously-inflected but familiar critiques: CRT “places what it means to be human only in the context of race”; “God only created one race: the human race”; any white child who balks at being called an oppressor is “plac[ing] a target on themselves” (a charge illustrated in the videos by a picture of a white boy getting roughed up by two Black boys); and the promise that “America’s victorious struggle with its imperfections” regarding racial equality mirrors the gospel’s message of redemption.

But some bigger themes from the videos shed light on how conservative evangelical institutions are grappling with debates about race today. First, there is the foundational presumption that racism is real, but a matter of individual sin. Second, the idea that critical race theory isn’t just incorrect, but constitutes an alternative, “destructive” and “twisted” worldview, contrary to the one Christians should follow.

“The idea of racism as individual sin is a hallmark of evangelicalism,” said Anthea Butler, chair of the University of Pennsylvania’s religion department and author of the 2021 book “White Evangelical Racism.” In the book, she elaborates: “Sin for evangelicals is always personal, not corporate, and God is always available to forgive deserving individuals, particularly if they’re white men. The sin of racism, too, can be swept away with an event or a confession. Rarely do evangelicals admit to a need for restitution.”

In November, Swain made just that case, when she spoke at the highbrow National Conservatism conference in Florida that drew together several hundred right-wing intellectuals. As one of a small handful of nonwhite speakers, Swain called CRT not just “anti-American” but “anti-Christian” as well, lamenting that a number of “churches that consider themselves woke” had embraced it. Among them, she said, was her own denomination, the 16 million member Southern Baptist Convention, which last June was wracked by a bitter, potentially schismatic debate over whether to pass a resolution condemning CRT.

“We have so many woke members of [the SBC]. And when I think of Southern Baptists, the main thing I remember is apology after apology after apology — for slavery, for even existing,” said Swain, referencing steps that the denomination, originally founded to defend the right to own slaves, has taken in recent decades to acknowledge its checkered history. “And what that tells me is that Southern Baptist Convention leadership doesn’t understand the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus died on the cross once for our past, present and future sins. Racism is a sin. And you don’t have to continually apologize.”

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As pastor and professor Andre E. Johnson wrote last spring, evangelical attacks on CRT predate the current fight, which is widely credited to Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo alone. Evangelical heavyweights like John MacArthur condemned the idea that “the postmodern ideologies derived from intersectionality, radical feminism, and critical race theory are consistent with biblical teaching.”

“[B]y the time Rufo began learning how to manipulate CRT for political gain, white evangelicals in churches across the country were already setting the stage,” Johnson wrote. “[I]n the hands of white evangelicals CRT isn’t just an academic theory, it’s a worldly ideology of evil that people of faith should oppose. Thus, for better or for worse, those of us who teach CRT and Intersectionality will now have to contend with those who would bring their faith presuppositions to class.”

One of the chief complaints among the Southern Baptists’ anti-CRT faction, said Daniel Eppley, a religious studies professor at Thiel College who has followed this debate, is that CRT “redefines” racism as something other than “personal animosity towards another based on race.”

“In their view, racism is only thinking badly of another person because of their race,” Eppley said. “If you can look in your heart and honestly affirm, ‘I don’t think badly of people because of their race,’ then you’re not part of the problem of racism. Which is to say that structural racism either doesn’t exist, doesn’t matter or isn’t something you can do anything about. That’s very similar to the way that an earlier fundamentalist evangelical leader, Bob Jones Sr., presented his opposition to desegregation in the 1960s. He denied seeing one race as inferior to another, but he believed the races had to be kept separate. So his solution to racism was basically, ‘Love your Black neighbor,’ even as he’s convinced, based on his reading of this particular passage from the Bible, that segregation is God’s will.”

Ultimately, the Southern Baptists voted for a resolution that didn’t specifically call out CRT but disavowed “any theory or worldview that finds the ultimate identity of human beings in ethnicity or in any other group dynamic.”

The term “worldview” was also invoked repeatedly in FOF’s anti-CRT lessons, as in one post-video discussion prompt: “Why is Critical Race Theory really a worldview issue?”

That language is ubiquitous in modern conservative American Christianity, as journalist and historian of American religion Molly Worthen has observed. Within the evangelical realm, Christian media outlets promise to instill or reinforce a “biblical worldview.” Christian universities emblazon the term on the side of campus buildings. Young people within the evangelical movement attend sleep-away “Worldview Weekend” conferences.

In its most basic and good-faith definition, according to Jacob Alan Cook, a professor at Wake Forest University’s divinity school and author of the 2021 book “Worldview Theory, Whiteness and the Future of Evangelical Faith,” the concept of a biblical worldview goes like this: “If the Bible is what we say it is, then we should be able to logically extend its truths to encompass most important things, and most moral matters should have a logical connection with the core of this thing we believe in.” In reality, he continued, “worldview theory” carries with it a lot of “extra-biblical” baggage that’s been fused onto conservative evangelical doctrine, making things like capitalism, Christian nationalism or, in decades past, segregation, seem like matters of faith.

What this amounts to, Cook said, is an evangelical way of saying, “Everyone else has ideology, but we have the truth.” In that context, it becomes “really hard to challenge this stuff from within” the faith, he observes, where a biblical worldview can function like “alternative facts” or a closed epistemological door.

That’s exactly the message Focus on the Family’s Huerta expresses, telling viewers, “Let’s not enter this discussion on CRT out of fear, but with boldness: that we’ve got God’s word and that’s the answer to this.”

Read more on the political battle over “critical race theory”:

How to protect your precious plants from a harsh frost

When winter sets in, frost can be the hour of reckoning for gardeners. It’s that moment when the plants that have adapted to your local climate are going to be fine (even if a bit unsightly because they are shutting down until spring), while others will suffer, even die, without protection because they are not cold-hardy in your zone.

Shrubs wrapped in burlap are a common sight in winter across yards, but the question is: Do you really want to go through that effort year after year? For anything that you permanently plant — all the perennials, that is — you should only pick plants adapted to your USDA Plant Hardiness Zone. But that’s probably not what you want to hear when you are worrying whether the beautiful crape myrtle you planted in your front yard last spring will make it through the New England winter.

Plants that fit your hardiness zone are not usually harmed by frost and chilly winter weather. There are, however, exceptions. In a warm spell during the winter, which isn’t as much of a rarity with climate change, fruit trees such as apples, or ornamental flowering trees and shrubs that are normally perfectly adapted to cooler climates might be tricked into budding way too early. When the weather reverts back to more normal winter temperatures, the buds get zapped, and the flowering fruit buds are lost for the year. Because it’s impractical to wrap an entire tree or large shrub in burlap, there is sometimes nothing you can do to prevent this from happening.

The first step in protecting your plants from frost is to find out which plants you really need to give extra attention to when temperatures fall below freezing — and then figure out what you can do to protect them.

How to cover plants against frost

If you live in a cool climate, all frost-sensitive container plants should be brought inside for overwintering before the first strong fall frost. If you live in a warm climate with only occasional night frosts, keep watching the weather forecast and line up everything you need to protect your plants from frost (see below).

For larger plants, cardboard boxes such as those used to package furniture or large appliances are ideal (and worth storing for this purpose if you have the room). The cardboard box should be large enough so the entire plant fits inside without breakage.

If you have a bunch of smaller pots, you can gather them under your patio table and create a “plant cave” by covering the table with old blankets and bed sheets on all sides. For just a couple of small plants, a patio chair or bench turned upside down and covered with a blanket or a sheet provides similar frost protection.

The material you use to cover your plants should be a breathable fabric or burlap, and it must be removed the next morning, so the plants aren’t deprived of light. Plastic is not recommended because it prevents air circulation and traps moisture, which is a breeding ground for plant diseases. Also, if you don’t get around to removing the cover promptly the next morning, and the sun hits the plastic, it can overheat the plant and scorch its leaves.

Covering plants against frost can only be a temporary remedy, though. If daytime temperatures consistently drop below freezing, bring all your potted frost-sensitive plants inside.

The last hurrah for tomatoes

If you still have tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, or other frost-tender crops growing in your garden, you can protect them with a circular fence made of bubble wrap and held in place by four stakes around the plant. Make sure to remove the plastic promptly the next morning.

While this little trick will extend your gardening season a little, the truth is these frost-tender annual plants are at the end of their lifecycle anyway — and it’s time to let them go (don’t forget to do a good cleanup and remove the all the dead plant material to prevent disease from spreading in your garden next year). If there are still a lot of unripe tomatoes or peppers on your plants, you are usually better off ripening them indoors.

Remember that some garden crops, such as broccoli and kale, are actually frost-hardy, so you don’t have to worry about them.

Tuck in your strawberries for the winter

A winter wonderland of snow is surprisingly the best thing that can happen to your yard because when cold-hardy plants are buried under a thick snow cover, they are actually insulated against the cold. It’s when plants are exposed to chilling winter winds that the most damage occurs, even to plants that are otherwise fully winter-hardy.

Strawberries are the most notorious for suffering winter damage in the absence of snow. That’s why I covered my strawberry patch on our wind-beaten hilltop in northeast Pennsylvania with a thick layer of straw a few days ago. I’ll leave the straw on until early spring when the strawberries start growing again.

Time to get digging

If you’ve already had frost in your area, your gladiolas, dahlias, and cannas will likely have died back. That’s nothing to worry about as they only die off above ground; the roots and tubers in the ground are still alive. Still, they should be dug out and stored inside in a cool location for overwintering before a deep frost, and well before the ground freezes.

Tucker Carlson has history of promoting Oath Keepers member who faces Capitol riot sedition charges

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson has repeatedly hosted a man said to be a member of the Oath Keepers and who is now facing sedition conspiracy charges for his participation in the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.

According to Media Matters, Carlson interviewed Thomas Caldwell, of Berryville, Virginia, on his Fox News primetime show and his Fox Nation podcast given him and his wife a platform to depict themselves as “victims of overzealous prosecution for the events of January 6.”

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During their multiple discussions, Carlson described Caldwell as simply being a “disabled veteran” and seemed to downplay the potential that he had serious criminal exposure.

the chyron description of this guy lol pic.twitter.com/PNB2vHl9QF

— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) January 14, 2022

However, the indictment offers details that paint a relatively different picture of Caldwell’s involvement. Caldwell, who reportedly goes by the name “Commander Tom,” was charged along with nine others for involvement in the far-right extremist, anti-government organization. The indictment alleges Caldwell marched to the Capitol and was “stationed” outside of the federal building on Jan. 6.

Per Media Matters:

“As noted in the indictment, Caldwell was stationed outside Washington, D.C., on January 5, standing ready to distribute weapons to his fellow militia members at the direction of Rhodes. He allegedly helped coordinate the Oath Keepers’ so-called “quick reaction force.” The indictment states that the militia had “amassed firearms on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., distributed them among ‘quick reaction force’ (‘QRF’) teams, and planned to use the firearms in support of their plot to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power.”

The indictment continued with more allegations against Caldwell and members of the organization. “The government’s case claims Caldwell sought boats to assist the QRF, saying he wrote in a message that they could have “heavy weapons standing by, quickly load them and ferry them across the river to our waiting arms,'” Media Matters reports. “It also alleges that ‘on January 5, 2021, Caldwell and others drove into Washington, D.C., around the Capitol, and back to their hotel in Virginia’ where the Oath Keepers had stockpiled weapons. The indictment says that ‘Caldwell described the trip as ‘recce,’ or a reconnaissance mission.'”

The indictment also contends, “The QRF teams were prepared to rapidly transport firearms and other weapons into Washington, D.C., in support of operations aimed at using force to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power. The QRF teams were coordinated, in part, by Thomas Caldwell and Edward Vallejo.”

The latest report comes amid charges filed against Caldwell on Thursday, January 13. If convicted on sedition charges, which are common in cases involving Caldwell could face a maximum of 20 years behind bars.

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Biden administration fires former Trump aide after he pushed Jan. 6 “false flag” conspiracy

On Friday, The Washington Post reported that the Biden administration has forced the resignation of a Trump administration appointee to an advisory commission, after he promoted conspiracy theories on his blog that the FBI helped to instigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

“Darren Beattie was named by former president Donald Trump to the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad in November 2020. In a letter Friday, Gautam Raghavan, deputy director of the White House office of presidential personnel, told Beattie that he must turn in his resignation by the end of business Friday and if he did not, his position would be terminated,” reported Mariana Alfaro. “Beattie confirmed the White House’s letter in a Friday afternoon tweet, saying the request for his resignation was ‘better than a Pulitzer [Prize].'”

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“On Sunday, the former president issued a statement praising Beattie for pushing his baseless claims about Jan. 6, when the pro-Trump mob invaded the Capitol to stop the affirmation of Joe Biden’s electoral college win, an attack that left five dead and 140 members of law enforcement injured,” said the report. “‘Because of Darren’s work, and others, Americans aren’t buying into the Unselect Committee’s attempts to smear 75 million (plus!) Americans,’ Trump said, in an apparent reference to his 2020 voters. He received about 74 million votes; Biden got about 81 million.”

The main purpose of the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad is to memorialize victims of the Holocaust.

Before Trump appointed him to the commission, Beattie worked as a presidential speechwriter, but was removed from that role after it emerged that he appeared at a conference with Peter Brimelow, the infamous founder of the white supremacist website VDare.com.

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COVID walkouts: Why Omicron is pushing teachers and students to leave the classroom

Thousands of U.S. students and teachers are organizing walkouts and work stoppages over their schools’ lack of COVID-19 precautions – a development that comes amid an unprecedented upsurge in coronavirus cases as the the Omicron variant tears through the nation.

On Tuesday afternoon, hundreds of New York City school students flooded out of class midday in protest of their school’s choice to continue in-person learning despite the uptick in COVID-19 cases over the past month, according to The New York Post. The demonstration, which saw especially high rates of participation from Brooklyn Tech High School, Stuyvesant High, and Bronx Science, called for an immediate transition to remote learning until the pandemic subsides. Student activists are also demanding that their schools redouble routine testing, health-screening, and social distancing requirements to protect both themselves and staff.

Hundreds of kids walked out of Brooklyn Tech today to protest the continuation of in person school during the Omicron wave and to call for a remote option pic.twitter.com/0HMVAFM2YC

— Jillian Jorgensen (@Jill_Jorgensen) January 11, 2022

The demonstrations come at a time of uniquely low student attendance throughout the city. According to the New York Department of Education, just 45% students showed up to class last Friday – roughly half the typical turnout. Several student demonstrators told AMNY that they refused to attend classes because they were wary of bringing the virus home to their family members, many of whom are immunocompromised.

On Tuesday, the city reported over 7,000 student cases of coronavirus, along with roughly 1,200 amongst staff. Since many New York City schools operate in close quarters, students and teachers have warned of the high potential for outbreaks. Despite these fears, Mayor Eric Adams, who assumed office at the start of January, has refused to impose school closures, stressing that the city “must learn to live with COVID.”

Theo Demel, a 14-year-old eight-grader who helped organize the demonstrations, told Salon Adam’s stance is wrong-headed, suggesting that the mayor is downplaying the virus for political reasons.

“I’ve spoken to Mr. Adams. He’s a politician,” Demel said in an interview. “His approval ratings will go down, probably. And on a national level, it might look like he doesn’t have it under control – which frankly, he doesn’t.”

In Columbia, Missouri, over 120 Hickman High School students coordinated a similar effort, staging a walkout in protest of the Columbia Public Schools’ decision to suspend its mask mandate, according to The Columbia Tribune.

The board’s decision, handed down on January 4, reportedly came amid a significant uptick in cases throughout the state’s school system. According to district data, the 14-day rate per 10,000 people in district boundaries jumped up last week from 123 to 139 in one day. This week, KOMU reported that roughly 187 students are currently out sick due to COVID.

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An online petition signed by thousands of students is asking the board to “reevaluate and discuss [its] COVID safety measures.”

“Our community has reached record high active cases for four days in a row,” petition organizers wrote to the board. “You are not following the guidance of the health department as you state in your mass communications.”

In Boston, a similar petition was launched by William Hu, a senior at Boston Latin School, amid an “extremely concerning” outbreak first identified at the school three weeks ago, according to The Boston Globe. The petition, backed by over 7,200 signatories, encourages Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker to permit students the option of remote learning until the spread of Omicron peters out.

“The oppressive adamance of Governor Charlie Baker’s words ‘We count in-person school as school’ is a horrifying example of a dazed and confused education system. Schools aren’t even given the option of turning remote,” Hu wrote in his petition. “What is Governor Baker actively condoning here? Are school districts so engrossed in maintaining ‘normalcy’ that they are unwilling to make a change for the health and safety of our communities?”

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu likewise told an NBC affiliate that Baker’s policy is too rigid and that she supports a remote option, given that 200 staff are already out sick due to COVID. “Many of these schools are already preparing to offer remote learning whether or not it gets counted by the state,” Wu said.

The rash of student demonstrations comes at a time of intense tug-of-war between teachers and districts throughout the country, who remain sharply divided on whether to keep schools open as COVID-19 cases soar.

This conflict first came into the national spotlight last week, when the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) shut down classes after the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) overwhelmingly voted to suspend in-person instruction, opting for remote teaching in light of COVID health concerns. The vote, supported by 73% of the union’s 25,000 members, continues to affect roughly 360,000 students and staffers throughout the city. The union is arguing that CPS has failed to provide adequate masks, testing, and health screening measures to both teachers and students, creating a breeding ground for an outbreak in the city’s schools.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who on Tuesday tested positive for COVID-19, has argued against remote learning, saying that it comes at too high a cost for parents.

On Wednesday, Lightfoot and the CTU reportedly reached an agreement ensuring certain slightly higher closure thresholds and improved testing requirements, but the mayor did not allow the union to make remote learning an option, which was the union’s chief demand. The union, for its part, called the deal “more than nothing, but less than what we wanted.”

Though Chicago has made the majority of headlines this past week, it’s not the only city where teachers have led demonstrations.

Last month, at least 40 teachers at Olney Charter High School in Philadelphia called out sick after a 17-year-old senior, Alayna Thach, died due to COVID, arguing that the school had not taken enough precautions to safeguard its students and staff from contracting the virus.

Sarah Kenney, a 10th grade African American History teacher at Olney, told The Philadelphia Inquirer that “Alayna’s death should have been a wake-up call for Olney Charter’s corporate managers.

“We need a more robust COVID mitigation strategy, which should include testing, more nursing staff, a plan for physical distancing in the lunchroom, more stringent mask compliance, and a vaccine clinic on premises,” Kenney said.

Aspira, Inc., the corporation that manages Olney, responded that teachers were “demanding additional safety protocols without citing any relevant detailed claim – and, despite the fact that the school administration has taken thorough open measures to protect the health and safety of students and staff.”

Olney shortly transitioned to remote learning following Thach’s passing, stating that it would remain remote until the week after Christmas break.

Meanwhile, in Oakland, California, students and parents are currently expecting their second teacher sick-out after a coalition of 503 teachers spanning twelve schools called out sick last Friday in solidarity with students aggrieved by their school’s lack of COVID safety.

According to The San Francisco Chronicle, classrooms have thinned out dramatically in recent weeks, with high rates of absenteeism amongst both students and teachers. Students in the district have also signaled that they are prepared to go on strike until their safety demands are met, writing in a petition backed by over 1,200 signatories that schools should transition to remote learning unless they provide students with KN95 masks, more outdoor spaces, and administer semi-weekly PCR and rapid tests.

Though a large swath of the press has indicated that parents are averse to school closures, a recent Axios poll found that 56% support remote learning to prevent the spread of COVID.

Why omicron stalled the effort to vaccinate young children

Two months after Pfizer’s covid vaccine was authorized for children ages 5 to 11, just 27% have received at least one shot, according to Jan. 12 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Only 18%, or 5 million kids, have both doses.

The national effort to vaccinate children has stalled even as the omicron variant upends schooling for millions of children and their families amid staffing shortages, shutdowns and heated battles over how to safely operate. Vaccination rates vary substantially across the country, a KHN analysis of the federal data shows. Nearly half of Vermont’s 5- to 11-year-olds are fully vaccinated, while fewer than 10% have gotten both shots in nine mostly Southern states.

Pediatricians say the slow pace and geographic disparities are alarming, especially against the backdrop of record numbers of cases and pediatric hospitalizations. School-based vaccine mandates for students, which some pediatricians say are needed to boost rates substantially, remain virtually nonexistent.

“You have these large swaths of vulnerable children who are going to school,” said Dr. Samir Shah, a director at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Compounding the problem is that states with low vaccination rates “are less likely to require masking or distancing or other nonpartisan public health precautions,” he said.

In Louisiana, where 5% of kids ages 5 to 11 have been fully vaccinated, Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, added the shot to the list of required school immunizations for the fall, over the objections of state legislators, who are mostly Republicans. The District of Columbia and California, where about 1 in 5 elementary school kids are fully vaccinated, have added similar requirements. But those places are exceptions — 15 states have banned covid vaccine mandates in K-12 schools, according to the National Academy for State Health Policy.

Mandates are one of multiple “scientifically valid public health strategies,” Shah said. “I do think that what would be ideal; I don’t think that we as a society have a will to do that.”

Vaccine demand surged in November, with an initial wave of enthusiasm after the shot was approved for younger children. But parents have vaccinated younger kids at a slower pace than 12- to 15-year-olds, who became eligible in May. It took nearly six weeks for 1 in 5 younger kids to get their first shot, while adolescents reached that milestone in two weeks.

Experts cite several factors slowing the effort: Because kids are less likely than adults to be hospitalized or die from the virus, some parents are less inclined to vaccinate their children. Misinformation campaigns have fueled concerns about immediate and long-term health risks of the vaccine. And finding appointments at pharmacies or with pediatricians has been a bear.

“One of the problems we’ve had is this perception that kids aren’t at risk for serious illness from this virus,” said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases. “That’s obviously not true.”

Parents are left to weigh which is more of a threat to their children: the covid virus or the vaccine to prevent the virus. Overwhelmingly, research shows, the virus itself presents a greater danger.

Kids can develop debilitating long-covid symptoms or a potentially fatal post-covid inflammatory condition. And new research from the CDC found that children are at significantly higher risk of developing diabetes in the months after a covid infection. Other respiratory infections, like the flu, don’t carry similar risks.

Katharine Lehmann said she had concerns about myocarditis — a rare but serious side effect that causes inflammation of the heart muscle and is more likely to occur in boys than girls — and considered not vaccinating her two sons because of that risk. But after reading up on the side effects, she realized the condition is more likely to occur from the virus than the vaccine. “I felt safe giving it to my kids,” said Lehmann, a physical therapist in Missouri, where 20% of younger kids have gotten at least one dose.

Recent data from scientific advisers to the CDC found that myocarditis was extremely rare among vaccinated 5- to 11-year-olds, identifying 12 reported cases as of Dec. 19 out of 8.7 million administered doses.

The huge variations in where children are getting vaccinated reflect what has occurred with other age groups: Children have been much less likely to get shots in the Deep South, where hesitancy, political views and misinformation have blunted adult vaccination rates as well. Alabama has the lowest vaccination rate for 5- to 11-year-olds, with 5% fully vaccinated. States with high adult vaccine rates such as Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Maine have inoculated the greatest shares of their children.

Even within states, rates vary dramatically by county based on political leanings, density and access to the shot. More than a quarter of kids in Illinois’ populous counties around Chicago and Urbana are fully vaccinated, with rates as high as 38% in DuPage County. But rates are still below 10% in many of the state’s rural and Republican-leaning counties. In Maryland, where 1 in 4 kids are fully vaccinated, rates range from more than 40% in Howard and Montgomery counties, wealthy suburban counties, to fewer than 10% along parts of the more rural Eastern Shore.

Nationally, a November KFF poll found that 29% of parents of 5- to 11-year-olds definitely won’t vaccinate their children and that an additional 7% would do so only if required. Though rates were similar for Black, white and Hispanic parents, political differences and location divided families. Only 22% of urban parents wouldn’t vaccinate their kids, while 49% of rural parents were opposed. Half of Republican parents said they definitely wouldn’t vaccinate their kids, compared with just 7% of Democrats.

The White House said officials continue to work with trusted groups to build vaccine confidence and ensure access to shots. “As we’ve seen with adult vaccinations, we expect confidence to grow and more and more kids to be vaccinated across time,” spokesperson Kevin Munoz said in a statement.

The Hunt for Shots

Just before her younger son’s 5th birthday, Lehmann was eager to book covid vaccine appointments for her two boys. But their pediatrician wasn’t offering them. Attempts to book time slots at CVS and Walgreens before her son turned 5 were unsuccessful, even if the appointment occurred after his late-November birthday.

“It was not easy,” she said. Wanting to avoid separate trips for her 10-year-old and 5-year-old, she nabbed appointments at a hospital a half-hour away.

“Both of my kids have gotten all their vaccines at the pediatrician, so I was kind of shocked. That would have certainly been easier,” Lehmann said. “And the kids know those nurses and doctors, so I think it would have helped to not have a stranger doing it.”

The Biden administration has pointed parents to retail pharmacies and 122 children’s hospitals with vaccine clinics. Nationwide, more than 35,000 sites, including pediatricians, federally qualified health centers and children’s hospitals have been set up to vaccinate young kids, according to the administration. Yet administering the covid vaccine to children presents obstacles that haven’t been as prominent for other inoculations.

Enrolling pediatricians in the covid-19 vaccine program is a challenge because of the application process, reporting requirements for administered doses, and staffing, said Claire Hannan, executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers.

“Many of them are short-staffed right now and don’t necessarily have huge capacity to serve,” she said. Plus, “it’s not as easy to engage the schools in school-based clinics in certain areas just due to the political environment.” Health centers, government officials and other groups have set up more than 9,000 school vaccination sites for 5- to 11-year-olds nationwide.

The CDC’s long-standing program, Vaccines for Children, provides free shots for influenza, measles, chickenpox and polio, among others. Roughly 44,000 doctors are enrolled in the program, which is designed to immunize children who are eligible for Medicaid, are uninsured or underinsured, or are from Native or Indigenous communities. More than half of the program’s providers offer covid shots, although the rates vary by state.

Pharmacies have been heavily used in Illinois, where 25% of 5- to 11-year-olds are fully vaccinated.

Dr. Ngozi Ezike, a pediatrician and the director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, said 53% of shots administered to younger children as of Jan. 5 were done at pharmacies. Twenty percent occurred at private clinics, 7% at local health departments, 6% at federally qualified health centers and 5% at hospitals.

“You need all pieces of the pie” to get more kids vaccinated, Ezike said.

Kids Respond to ‘the Greater Good’

The Levite Jewish Community Center in Birmingham, Alabama, tried to boost vaccinations with a party, offering games and treats, even a photo booth and a DJ, along with shots given by a well-known local pharmacy. Brooke Bowles, the center’s director of marketing and fund development, estimated that about half a dozen of the 42 people who got a dose that mid-December day were kids.

Bowles was struck that children were more likely to roll up their sleeves when their parents emphasized the greater good in getting vaccinated. “Those children were just fantastic,” she said. In parts of the Deep South like this one, pro-vaccine groups face a tough climb — as of Jan. 12, only 7% of Jefferson County’s children had gotten both shots.

The greater good is what pediatricians have emphasized to parents who are on the fence.

“Children are vectors for infectious disease,” said Dr. Eileen Costello, chief of ambulatory pediatrics at Boston Medical Center. “They’re extremely generous with their microbes,” spreading infections to vulnerable relatives and community members who may be more likely to end up in the hospital.

Seventy-eight percent of the hospital’s adult patients have received at least one dose. For children 5 and up, the figure is 39%, with younger children having lower rates than adolescents, Costello said. Particularly amid an onslaught of misinformation, “it has been exhausting to have these long conversations with families who are so hesitant and reluctant,” she said.

Still, she can point to successes: A mother who lost a grandparent to covid was nonetheless reluctant to vaccinate her son with obesity and asthma whom Costello was seeing for a physical. The mother ultimately vaccinated all four of her children after Costello told her that her son’s weight put him at higher risk for severe illness.

“That felt like a triumph to me,” Costello said. “I think her thinking was, ‘Well, he’s a kid — he’s going to be fine.’ And I said, ‘Well, he might be fine, but he might not.'”

Methodology

Vaccination numbers are from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as of Jan. 12.

National vaccination rates are calculated by the CDC and include vaccinations provided by federal programs such as the Indian Health Service and the Department of Defense, as well as U.S. territories. To compare the vaccination rollout for kids and adolescents, we counted day 0 as the day the CDC approved the vaccine for each age group: May 12, 2021, for 12- to 15-year-olds and Nov. 2, 2021, for 5- to 11-year-olds.

The CDC provides vaccination numbers at the state and county level. These numbers do not include the small fraction of children who were vaccinated by federal programs. To calculate rates for 5- to 11-year-olds, we divided by the total number of kids ages 5 to 11 in each state or county.

To calculate the number of children ages 5 to 11 in each state, we used the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 Population Estimates Program “single year of age” dataset, the latest release available. For county-level data, we used the National Center for Health Statistics’ Bridged Race Population Estimates, which contain single-year-of-age county-level estimates. We selected the 2019 estimates from the 2020 vintage release so the data would reflect the same year as the state-level estimates.

Vaccination data by age is unavailable for Idaho, counties in Hawaii and several California counties. For county-level vaccination data, we excluded states in which the county was unknown for at least 10% of the kids vaccinated in that state.

Visit the Github repository to read more about and download the data.

“Don’t Look Up” is a Netflix hit. Is that also a win for the climate?

Netflix announced on Wednesday that Don’t Look Up, the satirical film about our apathetic approach to dealing with global disasters, has become its second-biggest hit of all time.

The film, co-created by director Adam McKay and journalist David Sirota, continues to dominate (or at least feature in) the cultural conversation a full month after its release. Many activists consider this a victory for climate awareness – including some climate scientists and, perhaps most vocally, the makers of the film itself.

McKay told journalist Eric Holthaus that he “literally made Don’t Look Up for the climate community.” Granted, when you make a movie for a niche group of people — be they journalists or scientists or activists — who have spent years deeply invested in the nuances and frustrations of climate communication, you’re sure not to please everyone.

On Wednesday, an article in The New York Times described a saga in which the makers of the film came under some criticism for a climate action website they created to go along with the film. The points of contention will be familiar to anyone in the aforementioned niche group: too much emphasis on individual lifestyle choices like diet and home energy use, not enough on government action and social transformation. Prominent climate activist Peter Kalmus announced on Twitter that he is collaborating with McKay to refine the suggested points of action.

The thing is — as I noted in my review when the film first came out — that this dilemma kind of exemplifies the pitfalls of trying to make a social movement campaign out of an artistic work and vice versa. If Don’t Look Up is meant to be a rousing call to action, the fact that (spoiler alert!) everyone dies in a fiery explosion at the end is a confusing choice. It’s an effective and logical conclusion for the fictional storyline of the film, but makes for a rather defeatist message in the context of climate mobilization.

We can agree on one thing: The fact that a movie “made for the climate community” became a mainstream commercial success is certainly remarkable. Even Julia Fox liked it!

DirecTV is dropping OANN, the conspiratorial far-right network favored by TrumpWorld

One America News Network, the far-right cable channel that continues to boost former President Donald Trump’s election lies, has been removed from DirecTV, one of the largest American TV providers, following pushback over its increasingly conspiratorial coverage, reports said.

OAN will cease to broadcast on DirecTV when the network’s contract expires in April, Bloomberg reported. The provider informed OAN’s parent company, Herring Networks Inc., of its decision this week, announcing that it will also cut off service for one of Herring’s other channels, called “A Wealth of Entertainment” or AWE.

“We informed Herring Networks that, following a routine internal review, we do not plan to enter into a new contract when our current agreement expires,” DirecTV said in a statement to Bloomberg News.

DirecTV is by far the right-wing network’s largest distributor. It will still be carried on smaller pay-TV providers like Verizon FiOS — as well as a relatively obscure streaming service called KlowdTV — but the abrupt cessation of OAN’s DirecTV contract is sure to deal a major blow to the network. It’s never been carried by any of the three other major American TV providers: Comcast Corp., Charter Communications Inc. or Dish Network Corp.

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OAN is largely bankrolled by AT&T, an unusual arrangement that came under heavy scrutiny after a bombshell Reuters report last year revealing AT&T’s involvement. AT&T also owns a majority stake in DirecTV, which provides the vast majority of OAN’s revenue. At one point, Reuters reported, an accountant for the network testified under oath that the network’s value “would be zero” without its deal with DirecTV.

AT&T continues to deny any financial affiliation with OANN, saying in a statement to Salon: “AT&T has never had a financial interest in OAN’s success and does not ‘fund’ OAN.”

In recent months, calls from critics for AT&T and DirecTV to sever their arrangements with OAN reached a fever pitch.

“OANN has the right to air whatever content it chooses,” a letter led by the nonprofit Free Press and signed by 16 other groups reads. “However, AT&T’s support for OANN runs contrary to its public commitment to equality given OANN’s role in funding and promoting anti-democratic policies as well as its track record of providing a platform for disinformation and calls for acts of violence that undermine trust in our institutions.”

“OANN is a major supporter of the Stop the Steal movement and is currently being sued by Dominion for spreading election fraud lies that claimed the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump,” the letter continues. “OANN has provided ongoing coverage of ‘fraudulent’ results and played a role in fomenting the Jan. 6 deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. OANN is continuing to run content that spreads election disinformation and seeks to cast doubt over the results of the 2020 presidential election.”

OAN is certainly not the only network to be dropped by its provider recently — DirecTV and other pay-TV companies have been dropping channels from their offerings for years to lower costs as they battle competition from streaming services and other online content providers.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story erroneously stated that OAN was directly owned by AT&T. This story has been updated to include comment from AT&T.

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‘Complete sociopath’: Stewart Rhodes’ estranged wife warns Oath Keepers leader a “dangerous man”

The estranged wife of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes said he is a “complete sociopath” during a Friday interview on CNN.

CNN’s John Berman interviewed Tasha Adams one day after her husband was arrested on charges of seditious conspiracy for his alleged role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Adams described fearing for her family and that she was happy he was arrested.

“So much relief,” Adams said.

“I knew I lived in fear he might show up here. But the — just setting that weight down and knowing we were safe and my kids were safe and my kids’ school doesn’t have to worry, that was a relief I didn’t know existed,” she explained.

“So I understand you’re telling us you feel personally at risk from Stewart, but I wonder what danger you feel, what threat you feel he poses to the country,” Berman said.

“He’s a dangerous man,” Adams replied.

“He is very dangerous. He lives very much in his own head,” she explained. “He sees himself as a great leader, he almost has his own mythology of himself and I think he almost made it come true as seeing himself as some sort of figure in history and it sort of happened. He’s a complete sociopath, he does not feel empathy for anyone around him at all.”

Watch below via CNN:

“[It] was a kind of relief I didn’t know existed … he is a dangerous man,” says Tasha Adams, ex-wife of Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers who was indicted by the DOJ on charges of seditious conspiracy for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. pic.twitter.com/34QnabYsvJ

— CNN This Morning with Audie Cornish (@CNNThisMorning) January 14, 2022

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From logos to gender fluidity, what “Station Eleven” costumes reveal in the aftermath of apocalypse

The main hook of “Station Eleven” is simply feeling. It is the proverbial “you’ll laugh, you’ll cry” kind of show, which isn’t a phrase we typically associate with a story about a world that emerges from an annihilating pandemic.

But in the way of all successful, meticulously realized works, Patrick Somerville’s adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel speaks to us in ways that aren’t overtly written into the script. Helen Huang’s costumes, for one, speak a dialogue all their own.

The Emmy Award-winning costume designer told Salon in a recent interview, “When I costume, I costume from emotion.” And it shows. Huang’s costumes become the fabric that joins civilization’s past to a culturally rich future built around community, expressing the limitless possibility and creativity that can rise out of massive loss.

Through her fabrications, she and Somerville, along with fellow executive producer Hiro Murai, made it their mission to turn common expectations of post-apocalyptic narratives and aesthetics on its head. Their version is lush, wild place where survivors prioritize culture, evinced by a band called The Traveling Symphony whose purpose is to bring Shakespeare to makeshift Michigan communities.

This colorful nomadic family of choice eventually crosses paths with charismatic zealot introduced as The Prophet (Daniel Zovatto) and an enclosed community that arose out of a few dozen airline travelers stranded during a layover at Severn City Airport which, blessedly, remained virus free as illness felled most of humanity.

A costume designer’s work adds layers to a character’s profile, but in “Station Eleven,” Huang was free to use clothing to describe the hope of an age. Along with that, she and her team also had the opportunity to create magnificent costumes for the Symphony’s stagings of “Hamlet,” using items thrifted from a world full of garbage from before.

Through each faction and Traveling Symphony performance, we experience Huang’s way of answering existential hypotheticals most wouldn’t think to ask. What would the world look like if there weren’t any arbiters of taste? Do brand logos contain a deeper meaning? How would our clothing choices change if all gendered rules about fashion crashed and burned with the rest of civilization? And if a group of people casually decide in 2021 to form a Museum of Civilization and share leadership as “a triumvirate,” how would that inform what they wore 20 years afterward?

Our recent conversation with Huang traveled through all of this territory.

The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Station Eleven (Ian Watson/HBO Max)

You emphasize the importance of the visual and costuming language of “Station Eleven” being different from other interpretations of a post-apocalyptic world. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that?

A lot of post-apocalyptic work – not all of it, but a lot of it – is very much about barren lands, lack of resources, and people trying to sort of kill each other. A lot of the fabrication, a lot of the color palette is very brown and very gray. People are dressed more for the aesthetic of the show.

After reading Patrick’s second script, the land was just so lush and overgrown, and sort of this beautiful sort of description of what the post-pandemic work is in the Year 20. And so I wanted lots of color.

Another thing is that post-apocalyptic works almost always operate as if there is no existence of the previous world. I didn’t want that. I wanted the clothes have a lot of memory of the world that we currently know…I wanted a lot of logo. I just wanted a lot of connection to our past.

I also really wanted to make it very gender fluid . . . The regular gender norm constructs have faded, and people gravitated towards the practical and what they like. Even in times of uncertainty, people still want to create and still want to dress creatively, and the need for dress, and the need to communicate through dress is very apparent in Year 20 for “Station Eleven.”

Going through our own pandemic made me realize that, you know, that in dire times, people still want to create. If you really look at what people gravitated towards when they were on lockdown – like baking bread, or going back to crafts, all these things involving working with your hands – art is sort of intrinsic within us and that doesn’t really go away in times of trauma.

Can you expand upon that emphasis on logo? My understanding is that getting permission to use a logo in a show can be challenging. And I’m wondering if you encountered any of that here, or if some of the brands you feature absolutely wanted to be part of this show. Why was using logos important here?

I did want to use a lot of the bigger sort of store logos, like Target. Things that are very, very recognizable to this day and age. And they just wouldn’t let us do that. They were okay with sports logos if they were small. And so if you saw Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) in the beginning of Episode 2, she’s wearing a Speedo [swimsuit] with the word Speedo on it. We actually sourced that vintage, but she needed multiples, and it was not in her size. So we actually made the whole costume. Someone hand painted the Speedo logo on the swimsuit costume, because I wanted it that much.

I really do feel like part of the story is sorting through memories. There are a lot of timelines and [themes] about holding on to things. And I felt like that was very important to express.

I’m a big graphics person, because I feel like graphics express a time and age. There’s a lot of emotion in graphics and text in general. And so I try to recreate a lot of that as much as I can.

Station Eleven (Ian Watson/HBO Max)

It sounds like it wasn’t about what the logo implies to us status-wise or anything, but more about the form of it.

The form of it, the time of it, it’s more like a feeling of a time rather than, “Oh, this is a sports brand.” They’re scavenging and so even if they were wearing a logo, it doesn’t have the connotations that it does now.

Because, you know, if you think of the way our society is structured, brands and clothing have a certain identity onto itself. Then there are consumers to that identity, right? But if you think about the way “Station Eleven” the world gets wiped out, that type of identity doesn’t exist anymore. And so when they wear logos, it doesn’t have that attachment to an identity, but it does have an attachment to a specific sort of time in general.

One aspect about the costuming that stands out is the specific expressiveness, and I would even call it exuberance, of The Traveling Symphony’s clothing, particularly in terms of what you would see August (Prince Amponsah) wearing and Kirsten’s and Alex’s clothing choices. I imagine some of them were choices that you made for the characters based on the script. But did anybody in the cast express opinions about the way they wanted their character to dress?

Actually with Alex (Philippine Velge), it was kind of special because she [grew up] post-pandemic. I thought, what would it be like if we had this girl, and she’s just so attracted to everything frilly and trashy and costumey? We chose her clothes from that sort of perspective, because she doesn’t know what’s good taste and what’s bad taste. There is not that construct for her.

To her, and a lot of The Traveling Symphony, it’s about the pure experience of this object and not what the connotation is.

And so we created a lot of things for Alex as well, as, you know, thrifted a lot for her to find the specific pieces to show that sort of exuberance and sort of detachment she has to sort of other types of clothing that might be seen now.

. . . So instead of being like, “we want this person to dress at this socioeconomic status” it was very much about getting the clothes on the actor and seeing what the things read on them, which is very different than regular shows. It was much more experimental.

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I imagine that must have been very freeing.

Yeah, it’s so fun. You know, I study a lot of costume history. And it was really good to see how clothing from different time periods, clothing meant for different types of people – older, younger, male, female – read so differently on a person when the world is sort of freed up to where they could wear anything that they want.

Station Eleven (Ian Watson/HBO Max)

I wanted to go back to what you said about dressing to delineate socioeconomic status. There’s a stark difference between the clothing The Traveling Symphony wears and the clothing worn by the society that’s lives in the airport. And part of that tells a story of what’s accessible. But you can see a class demarcation within that airport society based on what they’re wearing.

There was a lot of talk about the people in the airport being very sort of communal. So we looked at a lot of sort of communal forums and kibbutzes. This is where a weird idea comes in: I just went to Patrick and I was like, most of the people in this world need to feel like a) that they’re farmers, and b) that they’re a part of a Gap ad. And so we went with that construct.

I purposely made them a lot paler, in terms of the saturation in their clothing compared to The Traveling Symphony. And so the contrast for the Museum of Civilization was they’re much more, you know, male and female. There’s no sort of gender fluidity. The color palette is very pared back, there’s a practicalness to what they wear.

And the things that they wear are much more recognizable to the audience, because they actually hold on to the past a lot more than The Traveling Symphony. There are also other elements, like they are not nomadic. That means they have a lot of more access to washing, and just in general keeping their clothes clean.

But when I thought about the hierarchy, it was just Elizabeth (Caitlin FitzGerald), Clark (David Wilmot) and Miles (Milton Barnes), and I just wanted them to seem like they’re above everyone.

The direction was to make them a little bit more costumed, that their outfits are put together more carefully. They wear jewelry when nobody else in the whole world wears jewelry, to signify the hierarchy that they are in.

And then in my mind, they were sort of like Roman senators in the Republic.

Yes, they are elegantly draped and wearing ornamentation.

We had to just order in clothing for that. But a lot of the textiles were found textiles that we took apart and put back together for that section. Clark wore this gigantic ornamentation when you first meet him at the airport. That was constructed out of several different sort of vintage necklaces that we found, and put back together. And Elizabeth – I know you can’t tell a lot of the details on shows – Elizabeth’s necklace was handmade by our tailoring team. I think they twisted all the fabric and made all her necklaces for her.

Station Eleven (Ian Watson/HBO Max)

And of course, the main event is the costumes for the stage performances. You have this interesting combination of textiles, but also it looks like garbage or found things. There’s one scene where Kirsten wears a capelet made of golf gloves sewn together. And there’s the crown Elizabeth wears in the 10th episode, which is amazing. Also, what are those small tubes?

They’re actually spools. The whole thing is made out of cardboard and foam core, and painted. The lace coming out of that crown is 1930s lace. All of that fabric was sourced and found from old blankets. Everything that you see in the Symphony, that was made for those costumes, was found.

When it comes to that Gertrude costume, we asked, “What makes someone feminine?” And if we want to put bows and ruffles on something because that’s the traditional construct of feminine, let’s just put it all over the place.

Can you explain a little bit about what went into the various incarnations of the “Hamlet” costumes? Mackenzie and Daniel have different body types, so there’s that, but they also look very different in very specific ways. For instance, was Daniel wearing seat cushions?

I think it was rubber mats. Patrick had a very specific thing where he wanted it to be made it out of things from the airport. And they wanted his costume to be simpler, much simpler than Mackenzie’s costumes. The thought is that August is sort of in charge of creating and thinking about these costumes, and he’s evolved into making a different type of costume at the end of the show. So we started to simplify it with the golf elements. Then we get to that version of “Hamlet” at the very end, when it becomes a very, very simple bare bones sort of costume that still keeps in mind the character that is Hamlet.

We’re all going through this pandemic together, even as you were making “Station Eleven.” So what is it like to see people react so passionately to it?

A big part of creating these things was sort of trusting the audience. And I think just the response of it is beyond sort of what I could expect, mostly because we spent so much time researching. People have no idea how we get months and months of research, on art and on movies. And for it to come across on screen the way it does and film so beautifully. It’s just it’s just beyond what I could say.

To me, the Symphony is about collaborative art, right? And so the costume element of it is collaborative art to me. It wouldn’t be there without everyone involved giving it their best and understanding what we’re working towards as a whole.

What are you hoping that people will take away from “Station Eleven” after they’ve seen every episode?

That people still reach for community even in their more dire emotional state. And, through all this, people could still kind of get out at the other end with eternal aspects of themselves intact, which is creativity, which is wanting to belong. Regardless of whatever society you create, those sorts of things are the fundamental building blocks.

And the fact that, you know, survival really isn’t just about finding food and being safe. Survival is about lighting this creative element of ourselves. And that’s fundamental to how humanity works.

That’s also what makes it different from other post-apocalyptic things. They don’t talk about the fact that art, theater, things like that really matter and feed the human soul. It is this other dimensional layer to functioning as a human being.

All episodes of “Station Eleven” are available to stream on HBO Max.

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Washington’s new bipartisan issue: Ban lawmakers from actively trading stocks

It’s about the only thing garnering bipartisan support these days in Washington: A ban on stock trading for active members of Congress.

Though it’s still unclear whether the idea has the majority support it needs to pass, it does have purchase on both the Republican and Democratic sides — with Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., announcing competing bills earlier this week to accomplish roughly the same goal: stopping Congresspeople in both chambers from cashing in on their powerful positions by placing their stocks in a blind trust and outlawing any future investment in individual companies.

“Members of Congress should not be playing the stock market while we make federal policy and have extraordinary access to confidential information,” Ossoff said in a press release. His bill is co-sponsored by Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., who added that the measure would “put an end to corrupt insider trading.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told Punchbowl News this week he was considering pushing the measure if Republicans were to re-take Congress in 2022, though it was unclear by what mechanism. McCarthy has previously said he’d abstain from trading individual stocks while in office.

Not one to be outdone, even Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is rumored to be considering a similar bill of his own.

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And it’s a sentiment that was also echoed Friday by one of President Joe Biden’s top economic advisers, Brian Deese, who called both Hawley and Ossoff’s proposals “sensible” and something that would “restore faith in our institutions.”

“I can tell you, the restrictions on [employees in] the executive branch are quite significant,” said Deese during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box”. “There’s no engagement on individual stock transactions.”

“I think [banning Congress from trading individual stocks] is certainly sensible. It’s a rule that we all operate by and live by in the executive branch, and [it] doesn’t put any real practical burden on our ability to do our jobs.”

The dueling bills come only after talks between the two senators’ offices broke down in recent weeks, Axios reported. Hawley previously tweeted that it was a “good idea” when news of Ossoff’s bill broke, and told POLITICO that he was open to co-sponsoring the measure. But the Missouri firebrand ultimately decided to introduce his own bill, further complicating the issue.

The difference between the two bills come in their enforcement mechanisms. Hawley’s, called the “Banning Insider Trading in Congress Act,” would give the Government Accountability Office oversight of Congressional investment, and require lawmakers (or their spouses) to repay all profits to the U.S. Treasury.

Ossoff’s bill, meanwhile, would leave oversight to the congressional ethics committee and fine violators the entirety of their salary. It also includes dependent children of congressional members, something Hawley’s bill does not.

Calls to rein in congressional stock trading have crescendoed in recent months after a slew of headlines about members who have violated the STOCK ACT, an Obama-era law requiring prompt reporting of any trades, and reports of potential insider trading from several Congresspeople.

An investigation from Insider last year revealed that at least 52 members of Congress and 182 top staffers had violated the STOCK Act, an act with a comically small fine for rule-breakers: $200.

Recent reports here in Salon — and elsewhere — have also exposed trades that appear to violate conflicts of interest.

For example, Rep. Pat Fallon, who dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars in Microsoft stock just weeks before the company’s $10 billion Pentagon contract was scrapped. Fallon sits on the House Armed Services Committee’s brand new Subcommittee on Cyber, Innovative Technologies, and Information Systems, which has oversight of the deal in question. He’s just one of 15 Congressional members in both parties with key roles in shaping defense policy who have actively invested in military contractors.

But the idea of banning Congresspeople from trading stock has at least one high-profile opponent: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She’s also one of Congress’ most prolific traders, with her husband in recent months gobbling up millions in blue-chip stocks like Google, Disney, Salesforce and Roblox.

The entire situation, critics say, has given Capitol Hill an irreconcilable image problem. Deese alluded to the problem during his CNBC interview, saying, “There’s a lot of distrust and mistrust around how politics works, around the political process.”

“One of the things that we need to do across the board is restore faith in our institutions, whether that be Congress and the legislative branch, whether that be the Fed and otherwise and so anything we can do to try to restore that faith, I think makes a lot of sense,” he added.

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GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville rails against Chinese companies — and quietly invests in their stock

Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama has been a vehement critic of companies based in Mainland China. But according to CNBC, the Republican senator has been buying stock in the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba — which is based not in Taiwan or Hong Kong, but in Hangzhou, Zhejiang in the People’s Republic of China.

CNBC’s Dan Mangan reports, “Tuberville, as recently as December, made three separate purchases with his wife, Suzanne Tuberville, of Alibaba shares valued at as much as $300,000 in total, according to a financial disclosure report filed Wednesday. In July, the Republican’s spokeswoman told CNBC that in mid-2020, he had ordered his financial advisors to sell off a small stake in Alibaba stock after becoming aware it was in his portfolio.”

The Alibaba group, founded in 1999, has been in business for 23 years and is a major player in e-commerce in the People’s Republic of China — which, after the death of dictator Mao Tse Tung in 1976, went from strict communism to having more of a Marxist/crony capitalist mixture. Many products sold in the U.S. are manufactured in Mainland China.

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“In July,” according to Mangan, “(Sen. Tuberville’s) spokeswoman told CNBC that in mid-2020, he had ordered his financial advisors to sell off a small stake in Alibaba stock after becoming aware it was in his portfolio. That previous sale of shares, then valued at less than $5000, occurred when the former Auburn University football coach was running for the Senate seat. Tuberville was revealed, in July, as having violated a federal financial transparency law, the STOCK Act, by failing to file disclosures of about 130 stock and stock options trades from January 2021 through May 2021 within a 45-day deadline.”

Sen. Tuberville’s trades, Mangan notes, “included a January 25, 2021 sale of stock put options for Alibaba Group Holding.”

“The sale of the put options — which would give their holders the right to sell Alibaba at a share price of $230 by September 19 — was valued at $15,001 to $50,000,” according to Mangan. “That sale occurred months after the divestment of Alibaba shares that his spokeswoman had described.”

Tuberville was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2020 after defeating former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a GOP primary and incumbent Democrat Doug Jones in the general election.

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“Our brain is not a slot machine,” so quit trying to hack it

Your brain is not a computer to be hacked. Considered it, instead, a planet to be explored.

That’s how science writer Emily Willingham invites us to get to know our gray matter, before we decide that we really need to optimize it. In “The Tailored Brain: From Ketamine, to Keto, to Companionship, a User’s Guide to Feeling Better and Thinking Smarter,” Willingham, the author of “Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis,” clarifies our often mistaken ideas around intellect and offers a new way of looking at self-improvement. It’s a lively, often genuinely funny deep dive into our current mania for a bespoke brain, one that investigates what current research involving diet, drugs and technology is really telling us, and considers why being a nicer person might be the best thing you can do for your headspace.

Salon talked to Willingham via Zoom about her new book, and why real life is not like a science fiction movie — yet. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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There are so many things we get wrong, like the myths of the “lizard brain” or IQ. What don’t we understand about our own brains?

There are so many things that neuroscientists disagree on, or they haven’t looked at yet. They don’t even agree on the names of things when you’re talking about brain anatomy and things like that. People still say that we use only 10% of our brains. But the whole thing is busy all the time, and doing its job, even when you feel like you maybe aren’t doing anything.

The other myth about the lizard brain, or the triune brain, is that you’ve got some sort of unevolved part of your brain that would be akin to something that a lizard might be using. The reality is that even those parts of the brain that we consider throwbacks have evolved along with the part of our brain that we think of as the smart part that makes us human.

And we don’t just know in our brains. We carry knowledge all over our bodies. But in common parlance, we talk about the brain and wanting to hack and optimize it. Why is this idea is so deeply entrenched in this moment in our culture?

That’s Silicon Valley tech speak, right? The brain has been metaphorized as being like a computer. When you start from that premise, then it’s a pretty easy slide into, if you can hack a computer, you should be able to hack this wiring in our heads. Yes, we have a network in our heads. We have cells that use electricity to communicate. But they’re only about half the cells in our brain, and the other half are not that kind of cell. We have a lot of not electrified things going on in our brains.

Our brain is not a slot machine. You can’t pop a quarter in, pull a lever, and then just hope for the best. There are so many pathways in our brains that act together. If you affect one, you’re going to be influencing the other. There’s not some direct target where you just hit the bullseye and that’s it.

You talk in the book about Elon Musk, and about this concept of BCI. What is BCI?

Those are Brain Computer Interfaces. They connect the brain to the computer and use thinking to affect what happens on a screen, to even move a mouse cursor and things like that. They have a lot of clinical utility. They’re being tested for people in the form of implants and similar things for people who have paralysis. You can imagine how that would be incredibly useful.

And then there’s some other scarier versions of these things where you and the computer are connected, maybe in a way that is intrusive and uninvited, and possibly an invasion of privacy. Looking down the road, we are going to be having to face some decisions or repercussions of things like that.

Who wants access to our brains? It’s not all benevolent physicians, is it?

You’re probably referencing the US Department of Defense, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and their interest in what’s going on inside of our heads. It’s a similar pattern to the one that I just described. Some of it is extremely useful and legitimate and necessary. They look at what happens with implants and how you can address people’s mood difficulties, or PTSD. If you’re the Department of Defense and you really want to help the people who are doing the jobs you’re sending them out to do, this is useful stuff to learn. On the other hand, you think maybe this also is almost “Minority Report,” where they’re going to predict that you’re about to do a thing they don’t want you to do, and they’re going to stop you from doing that. It starts to get into creepy territory.

There’s this sci-fi ideal when we talk about optimizing our brains, where you’re just omniscient. You walk back a step by first asking, what is our brain, really? What does it do? When we talk about optimizing or tailoring our brains, what does that even mean? I think when we talk about hacking our brains, we’re really talking about what that means to Silicon Valley dudes who want to be like Bradley Cooper in “Limitless.”

I came to this book wanting to get people to interrogate why they’re motivated to do what they think they want to do for their brains. “Where is this coming from? Did I just watch that movie with Bradley Cooper? Why do I feel like I need to do a thing to my brain that makes jacks up my intelligence in some way?” Instead, maybe examine what you might want to do that would give you a brain at peace or a brain that connects better with people you love, instead of, “I am going to be the smartest person in the room.”

I don’t recall from that movie that when he took the pill and had these limitless powers, they were related to his interpersonal relationships and making those better. That that’s something that we omit when we try to consider, how do we want to make our brains better? We don’t live in caves by ourselves, we live with other people. We interact with other people. We should consider more than just our own brain.

I want to take a moment on IQ, because when we talk about intelligence, we are talking about a concept with a very narrow and beyond racist origin. We’re not talking about good ideas from good people. Intelligence itself is not objective. It’s not like measuring in the number of rocks in a pile. So what do we mean when we say IQ?

That number that we get, if you ever learn what yours is after taking the test, is often used as a proxy just for your smarts. This number is supposed to be a reflection of how you think. It’s a modern invention that we use in ways that aren’t especially apt. There are so many different ways to be smart. And it’s contextual, just like any other trait that you might have, or population might have, that depends on your environment.

IQ, as I delineate in the book, has some strongly bigoted origins. They used to try to stratify people based on IQ score using really bigoted and ableist terms, like “moron and imbecile.”

Then there came this idea that this was somehow a fixed thing, a trait that maybe got a little worse with age, but you’re just born this way. What I found was is that it can change, and there are absolutely environmental factors. Even in real time, factors like giving people money to take the test, can result in a better score on it. So what is it really capturing? I didn’t land on that it was capturing something about us that makes us better as human beings. I didn’t find that.

I want to ask you about these things that we culturally pursue, that are not about making us better as human beings, but supposedly making us more intelligent. We think, maybe if I just do crossword puzzles I won’t be dumb. But it doesn’t mean that I’m the smartest person, it just means maybe I’ve learned how to do crossword puzzles. I can learn different skills. I can practice and improve at things.

When people look at the evidence base for it, they find that if you do crossword puzzles, you will get better at doing crossword puzzles. That applies across the board to a lot of things that we think of as being really cerebral. If we think this is a cerebral activity, then we’re going to have a global benefit from it. If you enjoy it, that’s great. That’s actually pretty helpful in general if you just do something that you find relaxing. That eases your brain burden, makes you feel better about life.

Every time I get that little genius from the New York Times spelling bee, I get a little dopamine payment, a little reward. Hugely satisfying. But it doesn’t mean that my IQ shot up or that it made my memory better, or anything else. It just means that I’ve done it long enough that now I know that no matter how common some words are to me, the spelling bee is not going to accept them as words.

Then let’s talk about the other things. What about keto? What about cannabis? What about all of these other really trendy concepts?

Some of those things do show promise, depending on what it is you want to be promised to you. There’s certainly some benefit of some psychedelics, like ketamine, for mood conditions. They are finding some benefit of some microdosing, maybe for PTSD. But this stuff is midstream. I would say that there’s still some good work yet to be done, and some randomized controlled trials yet to be done to really demonstrate it. I wanted to look at those things like ketamine and keto, to tap into the zeitgeist and see what people are wondering about, and say, here’s what we know. And honestly, right now, we’re not to the end of what we know and what we need to know.

How do we vet this information as consumers? You spend time saying, “Here’s what you need to think about when you’re looking at information.”

I have a checklist that I’ve actually used in different forms for a long time. You certainly want to look at what the study design was underlying, of there was even a study. Underlying what’s being claimed. If it doesn’t have words in it like “randomized, controlled trial” and “placebo,” then there’s probably still ways to go before you know it’s doing something.

You’ve got to look at where the money is. Who’s getting money out of this? Are they telling you that you have a problem you didn’t realize you had, and then offering this to you as a way to solve it? Are they relying on testimonials? I think it’s really interesting, because we all do have really individual responses to just about any intervention. Where somebody says, for example, that an antidepressant worked for them — I wish that these things would work for everybody who needs them — there’s somebody else out there for whom it didn’t. When you see a testimonial you have to understand, that’s just half of a story right there. It’s not data, it’s not evidence. Those are things to watch out for.

That gets to the heart of this book, the why. Why are we looking for these kinds of hacks to begin with? What are we really asking ourselves? That’s when you start talking about empathy and social cognition.

I made that the central chapter of this book. I went through all that stuff about global cognition and IQ and everything else because, my hope is that by the time you get to this social cognition chapter you’ve realize, maybe that isn’t the thing that I need to pursue. People have just been telling me I need to, that’s a social imposition on me. Can we look at what might really be helpful, not just for my brain, but the brains around me? Because none of us exist in a vacuum. How well do you think socially? I don’t mean to be an extrovert, be a people person. But you have people with whom you are connected and you want to have the best possible, healthiest relationships with them that you can.

That’s a very personal thing. I wrote this book during a pandemic, and during everything else that’s going on in the world. I think that it becomes very important for us to take a step back, to pause, to stop being so reactively judgmental, and really try to put ourselves in the shoes of other people and understand where they’re coming from. I don’t mean that in a sense of, you must forgive people who harm you, or anything like that. Just be a little less reactive and maybe shore that up a bit. I think it’s important.

This really is about recognizing, what do we as a culture of value? Do we value guys like Elon Musk or saying that our brains are like computers? We value the hardware. What we don’t necessarily value is empathy, listening, understanding. I think this book is saying there’s the intelligence of being able to understand a chart, and there’s the intelligence of being able to understand another person.

I agree that we do, as a society, at least think we value those Elon Musk type things. But when you get down to it and you read the stories of people who are losing loved ones right now, and you read the stories of people who can’t see each other and haven’t been able to for a couple of years, you ask yourself, what do you really value? If this were your last day, what would you actually value? Would you want to be Elon Musk on your last day? Or would you want to be with the people you love and connect with them? The funny thing is that even though I do believe that is a core value for most of us, nobody’s offering you that in a pill. Nobody’s offering you that in a brain hack. I’m hoping this book redirects attention to it.

Because nobody’s going to pay money for a pill that could make me a better listener.

The good news is, we don’t have to pay anything for it. Everybody just put your wallets away, because you can access most of the tools you need to make yourself feel better, and be in better positions with other people, without spending a dime. Except on this book, I mean to say.

This isn’t a “10 tips to be smarter by Tuesday” book. But you do talk about things that actually can help give our brains a little bit of a break.

Just a better feeling of balance and less overload, if you achieve that, then that global cognition everybody thinks they want, where you’ve got more space and you can think smarter and all the other stuff, you actually might get it.

The trifecta that I landed on here is, first, physical activity. I don’t mean getting on a treadmill. I just mean, to whatever extent you’re able to, moving your body around and doing something physically active. The second thing, is if you can do it with somebody else, it can be so helpful. If you walk with a friend, you’re doing the physical activity part, but you’re also having this social sharing with them. You’re sharing each other’s cognitive burdens. You’re telling each other your stories. You’re reacting with the emotions that you share. You’re reflecting emotions to people. All that’s just so helpful to release space in your brain. You can almost feel it when you’re done. And then the third thing … I just don’t come to this as somebody who meditates or spends time on mindfulness. It’s just never been my personality. I started doing it while I was writing this book during the pandemic, even just a few minutes at a time, taking a break from the anxiety spiral, the doomscrolling, the rumination that takes you to bad places. Checking back in, paying attention right now to what’s around me. Right now without judgment. And just saying, “I’m here now, I’m doing okay.”

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Florida Republican who lost special election by 59 points refuses to concede, files suit

A Florida Republican took a page out of former Donald Trump’s playbook this week, refusing to concede a congressional special election he lost by more than 59 points in one of the state’s most Democratic districts.

Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a health care executive who supports progressive policies like Medicare for All, the Green New Deal and a $1,000-per-month universal basic income, earlier this week defeated Republican Jason Mariner to succeed the late Rep. Alcee Hastings, a Democrat who served more than 14 terms in Congress before his death last April.

Mariner, however, refused to concede defeat despite losing the race by an overwhelming margin, roughly 79% to 20%.

“Now they called the race — I did not win, so they say, but that does not mean that they lost either, it does not mean that we lost,” Mariner said after the race was called, according to CBS Miami.

Mariner filed a lawsuit before polls had even closed, alleging problems with ballots in Palm Beach and Broward counties.

“And we’ll also have some stuff coming out that we’ve recently discovered,” Mariner said, not specifying what kind of “stuff” could affect the outcome of a race he lost by almost 33,000 votes (out of the 54,000 cast).

Cherfilus-McCormick, who faced a failed lawsuit from Democratic primary foe Dave Holness after defeating him by a mere five votes, shrugged off Mariner’s refusal to accept his defeat.

“Well, this wouldn’t be my first time running against an opponent who is refusing to concede, so it’s not our first time, and at the end of the day nothing can stop the motion,” she told CBS Miami.

Supervisors of the election offices in Broward and Palm Beach told the outlet that it takes 14 days to certify the results after which Mariner has 10 days to challenge them.

Candidates do not legally have to concede defeat, as evidenced by Trump’s refusal to accept his loss for more than a year. But Trump’s campaign of election lies has emboldened Republican candidates to follow suit and baselessly stoke doubts about election results even when they get blown out.

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Following the 2020 elections, Trump-endorsed Maryland congressional candidate Kim Klacik claimed that her election was “stolen” and alleged that Republican Gov. Larry Hogan helped her opponent after she lost by more than 40 points in a race to succeed the late Rep. Elijah Cummings in an overwhelmingly Democratic Baltimore district.

Similarly, Loren Culp, the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Washington state, refused to concede defeat to Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee despite losing by more than 545,000 votes. Culp filed a baseless lawsuit alleging fraud that was outright rejected by Republican Secretary of State Kim Wyman. Culp ultimately dropped the lawsuit last January after state Attorney General Bob Ferguson threatened him with sanctions over the frivolous challenge.

A growing number of Trump-allied Republicans have been quick to embrace election denialism. Adam Laxalt, a Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Nevada, has threatened to file lawsuits to “try to tighten up the election” 14 months before any votes are cast. Failed California recall candidate Larry Elder launched a website claiming voter fraud days before the votes were even counted.

Democrats and their supporters have grown increasingly alarmed over the Republican Party’s refusal to accept the will of the voters, as Republican lawmakers continue to cite doubts about “election integrity” — doubts they themselves have stoked — as a justification for impose draconian new voting restrictions across the country. Democrats, however, have been unable to pass new national voting rights legislation, largely because Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., continue to vociferously defend the filibuster.

“Once truth vanishes,” Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe warned after Mariner’s lawsuit, “all bets are off.”

Read more on the ominous prelude to the 2022 midterms:

The Supreme Court’s golden rule: Only Republican leaders hold true power

Oh boy, remember the summer of 2021? That’s when we were deluged with spicy hot takes about how the Supreme Court isn’t nearly as bad as liberals feared it would be. Well, here we are half a year away and that supposedly reasonable Supreme Court just proved all of its critics right. They are a bunch of partisan hacks who will ignore the plain letter of the law in order to undermine Democratic governance and install Republicans into power.

Thursday’s decision to strike down President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for private employers certainly wasn’t the result of a good faith reading of the law. It wasn’t even an expression of some ideological opposition to the “administrative state,” as Steve Bannon and other authoritarian nuts sneeringly call it. No, the only jurisprudence guiding the Republican-controlled Supreme Court — which has a whopping three appointees by Donald Trump sitting on it — is a belief that the only legitimate presidents are Republicans. We know this not just because of the bad faith of the decision itself, but also by contrasting it with the warm-and-fuzzy feelings that the justices have towards expansive presidential powers when Republicans are in charge.

First of all, the decision itself is a joke. As legal expert Mark Joseph Stern at Slate wrote, the court’s “unsigned majority opinion rests on several dubious claims” and, crucially, “is utterly untethered to the plain text of the law.” The anti-mandate argument held that because COVID-19 is a general threat to public health, it cannot be considered a discrete workplace safety issue. But, as many folks pointed out, the conservative justices don’t believe their own reasoning here, as evidenced by the fact that the Supreme Court building’s pandemic precautions are justified as a workplace safety issue.

I’m not the first to have noted this bit of dissonance, but perhaps worth reiterating. pic.twitter.com/qJulFwas4G

— Tejas N. Narechania (@tnarecha) January 13, 2022

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The hackish nature of this decision — which is so bad that none of the six conservative justices who voted for it was willing to sign it — cannot be overstated.

The Republican majority’s ruling is not consistent with the explicit text, structure, or purpose of the statute. It is simply overriding the will of Congress and the duly elected president because it doesn’t like the policy chosen. That’s it. pic.twitter.com/ex8CG4TfpO

— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) January 13, 2022

As Vox’s legal expert Ian Millhiser joked on Twitter, the Supreme Court “thinks there’s a Let’s Go Brandon Clause in the Constitution.”

This is about one thing and one thing only: Republicans believe prolonging the COVID-19 pandemic helps them politically. They are willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives — mostly the lives of their own voters — to serve this strategy. The Republicans who control the Supreme Court are, feeble protestations aside, partisan hacks who shape their decisions based on what will help Republicans gain power.

To that end, the motives of the conservative justices are no different than the QAnon shaman and the other jackasses who stormed the Capitol last year in an attempt to overturn the election. They all flat-out reject that right of duly elected Democrats to govern. The justices may hide this anti-democratic sentiment behind faux-legalese and the enrobed pretenses of the Supreme Court, while the QAnoners hide it behind lurid talk of cannibalistic pedophiles and stolen elections. Underneath it all, however, is the same idea: Only Republicans have a legitimate claim to power.

As Osita Nwanevu wrote in the New York Times earlier this month, Republicans view the Constitution “as an eternal compact that keeps power in their rightful hands” and don’t care much about the actual text of it that says differently. It’s why they are fighting to keep actual history out of schools and peddle fake histories that recast the U.S. as a theocratic Christian state instead of a secular democracy. It’s why Trump’s descriptions of voters of color as “frauds” make so much sense to them — not because they think those voters are actually casting illegal votes, but because they don’t view the right to vote for nonwhites as legitimate to begin with.

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And to disagree a bit with Salon’s Heather “Digby” Parton, this ruling isn’t even about anything as lofty as ideological opposition to the “administrative state.” Somehow the Supreme Court had no real problem with Trump’s actual overreach when it came to his use of executive power. They repeatedly bent over backward to protect Trump’s decisions that violated the Constitution or the limits put on his power, even as they are eager to strike down Biden’s mundane use of power that sticks closely to the letter of the law. Mark Joseph Stern pointed this out on Twitter:

The court either blessed or at least declined to curtail a large number of Trump’s actual overreaches of executive power. In violation of the First Amendment’s freedom of religion clause, the court upheld Trump’s travel ban that was quite clearly designed to block Muslims from entering the country. Not only did they uphold Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy that runs counter to international law regarding the rights of political refugees, they, with typically sloppy reasoning, forced the Biden administration to keep following Trump’s rules. They approved Trump’s clearly illegal reappropriation of defense spending money to start construction on his border wall.

Even in cases where they knew there was no way they could legally justify Trump’s abuse of executive power, they backed him anyway by slow-walking cases asking them to overrule his illegal actions. For instance, Trump’s “gag rule” barring clinics that receive federal funds from even mentioning abortion to patients clearly violated the First Amendment. But rather than throwing it out, the court dragged their feet on issuing any ruling, forcing clinics like Planned Parenthood to drastically reduce services until Biden came in and ended the policy.

Nor is this naked partisanship just about Trump. As CNN legal contributor Steve Vladeck pointed out, Republicans were more than fine with George W. Bush’s power grab when it came to his desire to avoid constitutional limits on his presidential right to wage war.

Can’t wait to hear someone explain why the “major questions” doctrine (under which Congress isn’t allowed to delegate “really important” regulatory decisions to the executive branch) doesn’t apply to the #AUMF (which lets the President decide who we are at war against): pic.twitter.com/63LDprsRPZ

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) January 7, 2022

There’s no detectable consistency in jurisprudence or legal ideology in any of this. It’s all just about one apparent belief guiding the court’s decisions: Only Republicans are legitimate leaders.

This partisan agenda is why the Supreme Court has also thrown out perfectly good laws like the Voting Rights Act or transparency legislation regarding campaign finance. Bush v. Gore, for that matter, showed this partisan hackery pre-dates even the appointment of the current slate of Republican hacks on the highest bench in the country. It all circles back to this idea that the rights and will of the voters are illegitimate — if those voters choose Democrats instead of Republicans as their leaders. Don’t let the fancy robes fool you. When it comes to their views on law and power, the Republicans who control the Supreme Court might as well pop on some antlers and face paint while they run through the halls of the Capitol building screaming nonsense about “Stop the steal!”

5 things you should know before buying a chocolate bar

When it comes to buying a chocolate bar, things can get complicated. While you might be drawn to your favorite childhood treat, like a Kit Kat or Take 5 bar, you could change your mind when you find out more about how the chocolate was made. Chocolate production, especially mass-produced chocolate from the most prominent brands, has some unsavory practices, including environmental and human rights problems. There are some chocolate facts to take into consideration when choosing between all those bars in the candy aisle.

As Lela Nargi has reported for FoodPrint, cocoa is among a handful of commodity crops, including coffee, sugarcane and palm oil, that are “grown in the global south by impoverished smallholder farmers with no power in the supply chain. The purchase of these crops by multinational food and beverage corporations — to make your chocolate bars, cookies and more — supports lack of living wages, child/forced/forced child labor, sexual assault, and rampant deforestation.”

Despite efforts to correct the decades-long misbehaviors of the chocolate industry, most industry commitments have been largely unrealized and many of the issues have actually gotten worse in the time during which companies were supposed to have been improving them. A 2020 study found that child slavery and dangerous working conditions in West African cocoa production have increased in the two decades since large corporations like Mars, Hershey and Nestlé promised to eliminate them by signing a global cocoa-chocolate sector accord. Earlier this year, these corporations were brought to court by former child cocoa farmworkers who accused the companies of encouraging child slavery through training, fertilizer, tools and other support to the cocoa farms. The case was eventually dismissed in the Supreme Court, because the court was unwilling to find the US companies culpable for something happening in supply chains that are buried in other countries.

“Too often we see companies, on the one hand, trying to eliminate forced labor, and on other hand opposed to policies to raise wages, allow collective bargaining and unionization, price increases — things that mitigate and prevent forced labor,” Irit Tamir, director of Oxfam America’s Private Sector Department, told Nargi earlier this year in an interview about the case. “Companies have to be willing to hand over some power to stakeholders in the supply chain.”

In the first season of Fair World Project’s podcast “For a Better World,” Anna Canning, the organization’s campaigns manager, dug into these issues, focusing specifically on the recent news that Nestlé UK had to decided to stop purchasing Fairtrade International certified cocoa for their Kit Kat bar, essentially ending their commitment to pay a minimum price to their cocoa farmers in West Africa. Through discussions with Ivory Coast cocoa farmers, sugarcane growers in Fiji, and palm oil producers in Ghana, Canning and the Fair World Project team examined the problems in the chocolate industry’s supply chain and suggested alternative models that could help support and improve the lives of the people growing these primary ingredients.

Listening to this podcast, or reading Nargi’s report on the industry — which outlines the history of chocolate production, as well as the shortcomings of certifications, among other things — can be overwhelming and possibly discouraging for consumers who want to do the right thing. But there are choices you can make, especially when armed with facts and advice for how to find products made in a way that aligns with your values.

Canning advises supporting the companies with good practices, rather than looking for the right certification. “Instead of a certified bar from a company who’s also getting sued by formerly enslaved former child laborers, look to invest in the long-term — supporting companies working to build a different kind of supply chain and industry,” she recently told FoodPrint in an interview. At face value, a consumer may think buying a candy bar from a large corporation like Nestlé is a good choice, thanks to the Fairtrade or Rainforest Alliance label on their packaging. But as Canning points out, there’s true irony in purchasing that Nestlé bar in hopes of supporting a better system, when the company is being sued by formerly enslaved cocoa workers.

“Overall, as we think about what ethical labels mean, it’s time for a bit of a paradigm shift,” she says. “So much of ethical marketing has to date focused on making the person buying the product the hero. The rush of ‘guilt-free this’ or ‘slave-free that’ or the really common rhetoric of ‘with each purchase, you help lift a person out of poverty.’ I think that it’s really high time for that to change.” That change, she suggests, includes no longer letting chocolate producers off the hook for these unsavory practices.

With that in mind, here are five questions you can ask yourself to help find those companies who are paying farmers better, using more sustainable cultivation practices and avoiding enslaved labor.

Where should I be shopping for chocolate?

The first step is getting away from the big producers, like Nestlé, Mars and Hershey. It’s harder than you think, since these large corporations own many brands; along with their more obvious products, Nestlé makes chocolate candies Smarties and After Eight, while Mars Wrigley Confectionery — the largest global chocolate company — produces brands like Snickers, M&Ms, Mars bars and more.

Next, look at the other options your local grocery store offers. Read below for more suggestions, but look for organic, sustainable options; recycled packaging; and detailed information on the packaging and company’s website about the brand’s production methods, standards and commitments. Shopping at a specialty grocery store or health food store may provide a larger selection of options; also look for a local chocolate producer.

It’s likely you will notice higher prices when shopping for brands that have committed to boosting wages for farmers or eco-friendly cultivation. A Beyond Good bar, for instance, costs $4.50 for a 2.64-ounce bar, compared to $1.50 for a 3-ounce Kit Kat or $3 for a 3.5-ounce Lindt bar. In many cases, it’s the detrimental environmental practices and enslaved labor of chocolate production, along with the low prices farmers receive, that keep that cheap chocolate cheap, while also resulting in big profits for the corporations.

What labels should I look for if the environment is my biggest concern?

Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all label incorporating environmental and social concerns for chocolate. When it comes to environmental sustainability, the USDA Organic label is a good place to start. “The USDA organic [label] means that it was grown without chemical inputs that are harmful to the people who grow the ingredients and the planet we all share,” says Canning. Buying organic chocolate ensures that the cocoa, dairy, sugar and other ingredients were produced without chemical fertilizers or harmful pesticides. And because organic cocoa beans are primarily grown in Central and South America, buying organic chocolate sidesteps many of the labor issues associated with cocoa grown in West Africa.

A step beyond organic is the Regenerative Organic Certification, a relatively new label that sets the “highest standards in the world” for soil health, animal welfare, and farmworker fairness. Known primarily for their soaps, Dr. Bronner’s is a newcomer to the chocolate industry, thanks to a serendipitous relationship with the Serendipalm project in Ghana, which provided palm oil for their soaps. “When we learned that many of the 800 farmers in our Regenerative Organic Certified™ Serendipalm project in Ghana also grew cocoa, it seemed the perfect opportunity to work towards creating a Regenerative Organic Certified chocolate — a chocolate good for farmers, the planet, and you,” the company states on their website. (David Bronner, CEO of the soap company, is also a board member of the label’s establishing organization, Regenerative Organic Alliance.) While other brands have made commitments to regenerative farming and eco-friendly practices, we’re eager to see if more companies follow Dr. Bronner’s example and adopt this label.

What labels should I look for if avoiding child slavery and supporting fair pay are most important to me?

“I think that for all commodities [including chocolate] the main issue is poverty,” Nargi told us during a Facebook Live conversationabout her research on the chocolate industry earlier this year. “People don’t have enough money to live. They’re in deep poverty, and there’s no guarantee of income for them. [I]t’s one thing for consumers to not really understand the global supply chains involved in making these ingredients or chocolate. But it’s another thing for companies to say, ‘Well, we don’t understand what’s going on,’ because they’re the ones involved.”

In traditional supply chains, the cocoa pod goes from the farmers to collector, exporter, shipper and then chocolate producer, with money being exchanged each step of the way. The farmers tend to receive the smallest portion of this; a 2020 report found that farmers only earn 6.6% of the retail price of a chocolate bar. When families can’t earn enough to support themselves, they are more inclined to put their children to work, perpetuating problems including limited education access, illiteracy rates and other problems within the communities.

Looking at labels, and understanding what they really signify, is one way to decipher a chocolate brand’s commitments to price and working condition standards. While Rainforest Alliance is the most widely used certification when it comes to chocolate, Canning points out that its standards and enforcement are both lacking. Fairtrade International certification, on the other hand, supports minimum prices, as well as social and environmental standards, including the banning of exploitative child labor, dangerous pesticides and GMO seeds.

Beyond labels, Canning suggests consumers “do a little research to see who owns the chocolate brand you’re buying [in order] to support those building a different kind of supply chain and industry.” Unlike large corporations, many of the smaller brands that are committed to a fair, sustainable chocolate industry have made their supply chains public. See below for suggested brands.

Beyond buying better chocolate, what can I do?

Think a $4.50 chocolate bar doesn’t make a difference? “There’s work happening now to address the root causes of issues like child labor, corporate consolidation, or deforestation, which are all much bigger than a single choice in the supermarket,” says Canning, who suggests signing up for newsletters from Fair World Project, which has a specific take action campaign focused on ending the child labor and deforestation involved in the chocolate industry. Green America, Mighty Earth and Fairtrade America have similar campaigns. FoodPrint’s weekly email is another way to stay informed about the latest in food news, label information, changes in policy, sustainable agriculture and more.

She also points to the power of our influence in our own communities, and how we can share what we know with others, encouraging them to support better companies as well. “We’re all so much more than consumers! We’re people who live in communities, some of us are citizens or voters, some of us are parents, friends, workers. In each of those places, we have spheres of influence,” Canning says.

What does a truly fair chocolate industry look like?

It’s clear there is a large divide between chocolate that is produced with integrity and the products pushed out by the larger chocolate corporations. There is also a lot of gray area, with some companies doing some things better, while others seem to make commitments for optics alone. But what does a truly fair, sustainable chocolate industry look like?

Dana Geffner, executive director of Fair World Project and Canning’s co-host of the “For a Better World” podcast, put it this way in an episode of the show: “One of the key steps is to pay cocoa farmers a living income because even all those calculations that we discussed [in a previous episode on cocoa pricing] don’t fully cover a thriving livelihood for farm families. [In our petition to end child labor in cocoa,] we’re also calling for increased transparency and traceability to allow for real accountability. And we’re calling on the big chocolate companies to phase out the use of toxic pesticides – those pesticides are harming the health of the children at work in cocoa fields, in addition to their environmental impacts.”

Some brands are working directly with farmers to do just that. “We gave the farmers a contract that said, ‘As long as you meet our quality specifications, we will buy every cocoa bean you bring to us,'” Tim McCollum, CEO of Beyond Good told Nargi in an interviewabout how the small chocolate company has cut the middlemen from their supply chain to increase prices and improve quality of life for their farmers, while also producing a better quality chocolate bar. According to McCollum, the farmers dry and ferment the beans before selling them directly to Beyond Good, where they are further processed in a Madagascar factory not far from where they are grown. “Along with the higher price for [growing heirloom] beans, the contract gave farmers incentives to farm better and figure out how to get more yield from their land; it turns them into cocoa entrepreneurs.”

Other brands pushing for this kind of change in the chocolate industry include Dutch company Tony’s Chocolonely, Seat tle’s Theo and Switzerland’s Alter Eco. Chocolate cooperatives, such as Divine Chocolate and Equal Exchange, provide higher wages for their farmer-owners, and the model also gives the producers involved a stronger voice in the chocolate industry. For more options, Fair World Project has information on mission-driven chocolate brands they recommend and Green America’s annual Chocolate Scorecard ranks nationally available brands on both environmental and social dimensions.