Jared Kushner raising Saudi cash after cozying up to crown prince while working for Trump: report

On Friday, The New York Times reported that former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is trying to raise money for his new investment firm in the Middle East.

“So far, he is having only mixed success,” reported Kate Kelly, David D. Kirkpatrick, and Alan Rappeport. “Qatar, whose leaders saw Mr. Kushner as an opponent in the administration, declined to invest in his firm, a person familiar with those conversations said. So did the main Emirati sovereign wealth funds; Emirati rulers saw Mr. Kushner as an ally but questioned his track record in business, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions.”

There is one government in the region that is coming to Kushner’s aid, however.

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“The Saudis are more interested, according to four people briefed on their continuing negotiations,” continued the report. “The kingdom’s $450 billion Public Investment Fund is negotiating with Mr. Kushner over what could prove to be a sizable investment in his new firm, two of those people said.”

In the Trump administration, Kushner was known as the former president’s point man for helping to cut diplomatic deals in the Middle East, playing an outsized role in a series of agreements to make several Arab and North African states recognize the Israeli government — often at the cost of the United States legitimizing human rights violations by those countries. He has since founded an institute to promote the ongoing survival of these agreements.

Kushner has presided over some high-profile investment failures in the business world, most notably his failure to turn a profit on a large office tower on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Among social scientists, a vigorous debate over loss aversion

While most people have likely never heard of loss aversion, the concept — arising in the social sciences some four decades ago — is among the most influential in the behavioral sciences. In a nutshell, it holds that when people make decisions, the impact of losing something carries greater weight than the impact of gaining something of similar value — or that, in the often-quoted words of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “losses loom larger than gains.”

The idea has come to inform empirical efforts to understand everything from investor behavior to insurance markets. Some analysts have even tried to quantify the ratio between the pain of loss and the pleasure of gains. Loss aversion, as one decision-research firm describes it, “is a cognitive bias that describes why, for individuals, the pain of losing is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining.”

And yet, in recent years, many behavioral scientists have begun to question whether loss aversion is quite so ironclad a principle of the human mind. Recent experiments, for example, have suggested that other factors — quite aside from a particular orientation toward losses and gains — might play key roles in quirks of human decision-making once chalked up to loss aversion. A blog post published earlier this year by the behavioral science consultant Jason Hreha went so far as to proclaim the death of the field of behavioral economics, largely because, he wrote, the “core finding of behavioral economics, loss aversion, is on ever more shaky ground.”

Few researchers are ready to make such extreme pronouncements, but if there are indeed cracks in the loss aversion firmament, it might well be because the concept was never meant to be a grand, unifying theory of human behavior. According to Kahneman, one of the two researchers most closely associated with the birth of the idea, the concept was originally not much of an experimental finding at all, but rather an intuition. It was something that he and his longtime collaborator Tversky — who passed away in 1996 — thought was so obvious as to be almost trivial: Losing something has a bigger impact on us than winning something.

“What our grandmothers knew, which I think is an intuition that everybody has,” Kahneman said in a recent call with Undark, “is that somehow ‘bad’ is stronger than ‘good’ in some ways.”

***

It was some 30 years ago that researchers first handed out university-branded coffee mugs to half the members of an undergraduate law and economics class at Cornell University. What happened next would become an iconic moment in the field of behavioral science: The researchers asked the mug-owners to select a sale price for their new mugs, and the mug-free students to identify the amount they were willing to spend to buy one off a classmate. The mug-owning students wanted, on average, more than $5 for their mugs. The un-mugged undergrads were only willing to pay about half that. (At the university bookstore, the mugs retailed for $6.)

The researchers next tried the same setup, but with ballpoint pens. Same finding: The people who owned the objects valued them much more highly than the people who did not.

This divide between the haves and the have-nots, dubbed the endowment effect, has been replicated many times since. And after studying those 44 Cornell students and another group at Simon Fraser University, the mug researchers — Kahneman alongside economists Jack Knetsch and Richard Thaler — proposed an explanation for the phenomenon. It was, they wrote in a widely-cited 1990 paper, a manifestation of loss aversion, a concept they defined as “the generalization that losses are weighted substantially more than objectively commensurate gains in the evaluation of prospects and trades.”

Kahneman and Tversky had first outlined a version of the concept in a 1979 paper. They highlighted a longstanding finding about gambles: that many people seem to shy away from bets that, for example, offer a 50 percent chance of winning some sum and an equal chance of losing it. (Indeed, even a bet that tweaks those odds to, say, a 50 percent chance of winning $20, and a 50 percent chance of losing $15, often feels unfavorable.)

Fueled by research like the Cornell mug study, loss aversion grew to be axiomatic in the emerging field of behavioral sciences. “The concept of loss aversion was, I believe, our most useful contribution to the study of decision making,” Kahneman wrote in a 2002 autobiography after winning the a Nobel Prize in economics.

Not everyone, though, was convinced the concept was so robust. In 2003, a Stanford graduate student named David Gal ran a version of the classic mug experiment. He found the typical result, he said: People who owned the mugs valued them more than people who didn’t. But, Gal recalled, something bothered him: His subjects mostly just seemed indifferent to the whole thing. “You have this vision — like, you’re picturing people in the study, that they’re really invested in these mugs,” he told Undark. “But for the most part, people just didn’t really care very much.”

Instead, Gal began to wonder if subjects were hesitant to part with their mugs — or to offer money to buy one — mostly from inertia, rather than any strong feeling about losing or gaining a mug.

Other researchers have also raised questions about loss aversion. “Losses appear to loom larger than gains in some settings, but not in others,” wrote a pair of Israeli behavioral scientists, Eyal Ert and Ido Erev, in one 2013 paper. In a series of six experiments, they showed how tweaking certain parameters — such as changing the stakes of a decision, or changing which option allowed the subject to maintain a status quo — could affect how research subjects weighed losses and gains.

Other researchers, including Eldad Yechiam at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, were raising similar concerns. (“I’m somehow obsessed by it,” Yechiam told Undark of his years-long work on the topic. Loss aversion “means that we are wired to sort of give the negative things in the world this huge weight. And it doesn’t seem to agree with how I view the world, with how I view people.”)

In a 2018 paper, Gal, now a professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, returned to the mug experiment, along with a colleague, the Northwestern University social psychologist Derek Rucker. This time, though, they tweaked one variable. Instead of asking people how much money they would accept to sell a mug, they indicated that they would take the mug away — and then asked how much subjects would pay to keep it. They also asked people who didn’t have a mug how much they would pay to buy one.

In theory, they argue, if the prospect of losses loomed larger than gains, people would pay more to keep a mug they already had than to buy one they did not. But that didn’t happen: Whether they had the mug or not, people largely assigned it a similar value.

Another set of researchers set up a similar study, and, in results published earlier this year, reported a similar result: By asking people how much they’d pay to keep something they had been given, signs of loss aversion disappeared. While she doesn’t argue against the existence of loss aversion, Wendy Liu, an associate professor of marketing at the University of California San Diego and an author on the paper, said it’s not applicable in every circumstance. “Based on our own evidence, it’s not a universal thing,” she said. The research, she said, suggests that loss aversion may not be a good explanation for the endowment effect, and that researchers should stop equating the two.

Gal, Yechiam, and some other researchers now argue that many phenomena chalked up to loss aversion could, at least in theory, be explained by other causes, such as a bias toward inaction over action.

Gal describes the definition of loss aversion as “fuzzy and loose” — sometimes used to describe an underlying feature of human cognition, and other times used to describe a phenomenon (like the endowment effect) without necessarily making a claim about some deeper cause.

Many of his colleagues, he said, have soured on the principle. After the 2018 paper, Gal said, he received emails from colleagues saying they had come to believe that, in their past work, they had wrongly chalked up specific phenomena to loss aversion. Other researchers, he said, told him, “‘I’ve been trying to find this stuff for years, and couldn’t find any evidence for loss aversion” — but that peer reviewers were often hostile to such findings, and unwilling to publish the results.

Gal has sometimes taken a strong stand — he described loss aversion as a “essentially a fallacy” in a 2018 essay for Scientific American — but not everyone is convinced.

“There are a lot of phenomena that are explained by loss aversion,” said Eric Johnson, a decision science expert at Columbia University. Johnson points to a recent metanalysis, published as a working paper, which analyzed 150 articles and found, on average, strong empirical evidence of people weighting losses more strongly than gains in their decision-making. While critics of loss aversion, he acknowledged, may be able to come up with alternate explanations for any specific application — such as the endowment effect — loss aversion offers the simplest explanation for all those diverse cases. Otherwise, he said, you “end up with this sort of zoo of partial explanations.”

Giving serious credence to loss aversion skeptics, he suggested in a follow-up email, was drawing a false equivalency — similar to giving credence to climate change deniers.

For his part, though, Gal said he was unimpressed with the meta-analysis. “A meta-analysis can calculate an effect size, but in most cases doesn’t tell us much about what causes the effect,” he wrote in an email. “In this case, they are aggregating different effects likely caused by different processes and claiming to have found some general loss aversion coefficient.”

***

Now 87 and an emeritus professor of psychology at Princeton University, Kahneman has not responded publicly to Gal, Rucker, or other recent challengers of the loss aversion consensus. But during a recent Zoom conversation from his apartment in Manhattan, he made it clear he had been following the controversy closely.

He agreed with Gal and others, he said, that evidence of loss aversion only appears in certain situations. “It’s not a law of human nature that you have to find it in every context,” Kahneman said.

“There are experiments where people don’t find loss aversion,” he added later. “And, again, there’s an explanation for every one of them. That doesn’t violate loss aversion, because there are exceptions to loss aversion.”

What, then, could ever disprove the idea? Is loss aversion falsifiable? Probably not, said Kahneman. “I don’t know, maybe it’s falsifiable, it’s hard to imagine. There are alternative explanations for just about any experiment,” he said. But, he suggested, that didn’t matter: In the science of decision making, the theory had established its place.

“Having a principle that helps understand a wide body of phenomena — that’s considered useful,” Kahneman said. “That doesn’t mean that loss aversion’s true. It means that it’s useful.”

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

Why I’m (still) straight edge

During my junior year of college, I spent a semester in London, where I met a guy—I’m going to call him Jimmy—who became my boyfriend for the four months that I was in England. We would sometimes take the train a few hours north to his hometown and stay with his sister, who let a heroin dealer work out of her council flat in exchange for cash, which helped her support herself and her baby while her husband was in jail for thieving. (The baby was well cared for—you can jettison that scene in “Trainspotting” from your mind.) The flat was something of a hangout, and I would watch as everyone but Jimmy (including his sister) snorted dope and then nodded out, typically on the living room couch. I could tell when Jimmy was high, but he knew that I didn’t want him to be, so he never let me see him with the little tube in his nose.

This was my thinking: I was in another country, which may as well have been another galaxy, where, like the rules of physics, the rules of Nell didn’t apply, plus I really liked Jimmy, so I could handle a stoner boyfriend for four months. But anyone who knew me back in the States would have thought I had caved, given that I was straight edge at the time, as I’ve pretty much always been.

I was already like this when I saw the phrase in an issue of Maximum Rocknroll when I was a teenager and understood, in a eureka flash, that I wasn’t the only person alive who thought that getting drunk and stoned was wimpy. When I finally read the lyrics to “Straight Edge” by Minor Threat, the DC punk band whose 1980 song shellacked the straight edge ethos into receptive young brains, I was reassured, and even a little comforted, that my reasoning aligned with theirs:

I’m a person just like you
But I’ve got better things to do
Than sit around and fuck my head
Hang out with the living dead
Snort white shit up my nose
Pass out at the shows
I don’t even think about speed
That’s something I just don’t need

I’ve got the straight edge

I’m a person just like you
But I’ve got better things to do
Than sit around and smoke dope

Cause I know I can cope
Laugh at the thought of eating ludes
Laugh at the thought of sniffing glue
Always gonna keep in touch
Never want to use a crutch

I’ve got the straight edge

The nifty thing about Minor Threat’s case against drinking and drugging was that they didn’t recycle the reasons that boring politicians were pushing, namely the health and safety risks (which, it must be said, are good reasons). Instead, Minor Threat was making a principled argument (“Never want to use a crutch”) and that was incredibly sexy to a self-important teenager who was maybe a bit too caught up in the idea of being taken seriously. But after I met Jimmy, I had to admit that the Minor Threat logic wouldn’t work on everybody.

I knew Jimmy in the late 1980s, when jobs were hard to come by in England. Jimmy, who was in his early twenties, was on the dole and, like his sister, had been given a council flat, although I don’t think he ever set foot in it. Without jobs or much in the way of prospects, the people at Jimmy’s sister’s place — who, with maybe one exception, didn’t have parents who could swing a college tuition for their kid, as mine could — arguably didn’t have, as Minor Threat put it, better things to do than drugs. And maybe they didn’t know that they could cope without them. If I had a husband in jail and a baby to care for on my own, I might reach for the heroin too.

Meanwhile, the same-age people I knew who did drugs and got shit-faced back in the States were middle-class (like me) and up; these were the people that Minor Threat, and Black Flag and the Descendents, among other spectacular punk bands with anti-drink or -drug songs to their names, were singing for and about. A recurring theme was the way that being drunk or stoned gave people unearned courage, and I agreed that this was cheating. I remember once describing something goofy that I’d done—this was during the period when I might sing a self-parodying song while a friend filmed it—and getting the reply, “Wow, you must have been really drunk.” Managing to do something funny/stupid that other people wouldn’t or couldn’t do without booze or drugs was a source of pride for me. Hey, I can achieve dork liftoff without any help!

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Some of what I found myself disliking about drinking and drugging didn’t make it into any punk rock lyrics that I’d heard. I disliked drunk/stoner braggadocio (“I was so wasted last night…”). I disliked the too-easy woots generated whenever a talk show host made a joke about tying one on or getting buzzed. Having said that, I do understand that the risk of irritating me is not a good reason for you to skip doing drugs; you’ll do better with old standbys like the expense, the shrunken attention span, and dope’s libido-killing potential. (Long before I was reading the lyrics of Minor Threat, I read my generation’s debauchery bible, Tony Sanchez’s “Up and Down with the Rolling Stones,” and learned a ton.)

But the key reason that I don’t drink or take drugs is probably this, and it’s a little embarrassing: I’ve always pictured a little scrim coming down over people’s faces when they get drunk or stoned, after which point I’ve lost my unfettered access to them. Whenever Jimmy was off his knob, it felt as though he’d been taken away from me, like a Stepford wife in a shell suit. And was there any other way to interpret his decision to get stoned in my presence than that I was less fun than heroin was? The line “I’d rather drink than fuck” in Gang Green’s “Alcohol” always made me nervous: Might I one day have a boyfriend who would prefer to get drunk than sleep with me? More to the point: If I’m sufficiently interesting, shouldn’t another person be unmotivated to get bombed in my company? And could it be that my decades-long full-bore commitment to straight edge is as much tied to my ego as to some larger principle?

I’ve been on the other side of the scrim just once. The first few times I tried to get high, there was no effect. I learned a new line in the Lothario playbook: whenever I told a guy about my latest botched attempt with pot, he’d say, “I’ll get you high.” And it was a guy — a couple-years-older high school classmate I didn’t know very well — who finally got me stoned. He took me to an outbuilding of some sort behind his suburban Boston home, and once he had gotten me, and presumably himself, high, I couldn’t stop crying. Even though I was the one bawling, he told me that he wanted to be held, and I obliged, and yes, I, too, am surprised that this encounter didn’t conclude with my molestation. What it concluded with was my understanding that the prospect of losing access to my good, clear mind was mortally terrifying. I’ve never wanted to escape myself—never nodded along with the refrain “I’m too much with myself / I wanna be someone else” from Evan Dando’s plangently beautiful Lemonheads song “My Drug Buddy.” The problem I had with being stoned was the opposite: not being able to find myself once that scrim came down.

Maybe it’s partly in the wiring. When I was in high school, I had a friend who paid a lot of attention to the clinical terms that her psychologist mother tossed around, and one day this friend informed me that I was hypomanic—essentially, someone who’s neurotically cheerful all the time. I didn’t believe this was a real, operational term until I stumbled on it a few years ago. But even if the term doesn’t apply to me, maybe having an involuntarily chipper disposition and what seems like an inexplicably large supply of self-confidence is like having parents who could afford to send me to college: a leg up that makes choosing to be straight edge a luxury. (This, combined with the usual do-gooder liberal reasons, is why I voted for legalization when Massachusetts put pot on the ballot a few years back, incidentally.)

For me, the only downside of being straight edge is that it can be a little lonely; none of my friends are, and my husband isn’t. But it’s a desperation-free loneliness—not at all like what I felt whenever Jimmy was out of his brains: I would look directly at him and not be able to find him anywhere.

More stories on sobriety from Salon:

A celebratory and seasonal Hanukkah menu, featuring sweet potato latkes and blood orange sufganiyot

Planning a Hanukkah dinner with family and friends? In addition to breaking out standby recipes, consider a few culinary departures. From crispy latkes with a sweet twist to a fool-proof, but still festive, dessert, these recipes from the Salon archives really shine for the Festival of Lights.

Sweet potato and apple latkes with hot honey mascarpone

This sweetened up version of traditional latkes leans on crispy sweet potatoes with pops of bright, shaved apple and some jammy red onions. Instead of the go-to sour cream as an accompaniment, we’ve substituted rich, tangy mascarpone spiked with just a little hot honey. Quick note: Sweet potatoes have a fair amount of moisture. This becomes really apparent when you shave them down for the latkes. Be sure to really wring all extra water from the fruit and vegetable mixture before frying.

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Oxtail ragù with orzo

Swap out brisket for this slow-simmered oxtail ragù, which is flavored with finely chopped rosemary and oaky red wine. What I like about this dish for entertaining is that it is the poster child for “set it and forget it” cooking, allowing you to focus on other things (like making dessert?). Typically the accompanying orzo is tossed with butter, but feel free to substitute good-quality olive oil if you’re avoiding dairy.

Simple shaved vegetable salad

Last month, Maggie Hennessy wrote a gorgeous guide to getting out of one’s next salad rut, because it’s honestly inevitable. I won’t spoil the tips, which you can read in full here, but she did suggest a salad that I think would be a perfect addition to your holiday table. It’s blessedly simple — built from shaved crunchy vegetables like carrots, fennel, radishes and red onions, dressed with a simple mustard vinaigrette — but the freshness and acidity will cut through some of the more decadent (i.e. fried) dishes beautifully.

Sufganiyot with blood orange jam

Is it actually a Hanukkah party without olive oil-fried doughnuts? We think not. Check out this detailed walkthrough from Food 52 for making sufganiyot, but instead of the called-for apricot jam, consider a variation that uses blood orange marmalade. In an interview with Salon, Institute of Culinary Education chef-instructor Adrienne Cheatham recommended the seasonal fruit: “They are so nice to use in marmalade, because you get a little bit more of those kind of juicy fruity-berry flavors.”

Spiced chocolate cloud cake

While dinner parties and holidays are a fun time to stretch your culinary muscles — I mean, why not break out an entirely new menu for a group of ten?! — I like to have at least one fool-proof dish on the table. For me, that’s this spiced gingerbread cloud cake. It takes its inspiration from Richard Sax’s famous flourless chocolate cake.

“The cake emerges from the oven with a craggy crust and a fallen, basin-like center that gets filled with cool whipped cream,” I wrote. “For me, it’s a casual dinner party go-to, because it’s simple, decadent, naturally gluten-free and that pile of whipped cream can hide a multitude of sins.”

This version packs a little more seasonal warmth; the batter is packed with molasses, dark chocolate, cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger. The end result of an achievable, easy-to-make dessert remains the same.

More Salon stories about Hanukkah:

26 Hanukkah recipes to celebrate the festival of lights

Hanukkah, the Jewish celebration of light, is just around the corner and you can bet we’re breaking out the frying pans, potato graters, and tons of oil. But a whole lotta latkes (although delicious) aren’t the only way to observe the Festival of Lights. There are so many crispy, crunchy dishes that commemorate the miracle of oil. From traditional roasted chicken and braised brisket to unexpected crowd-pleasers like asparagus latkes, here are 26 of our favorite fried foods.

Traditional Hanukkah foods

1. Slow-Roasted Chicken with Extra-Crisp Skin

Celebrate the Festival of Lights with this foolproof roast chicken that’s perfect for a crowd, and especially great for beginner cooks hosting their first dinner for the Jewish holiday.

2. Sweet and Smoky Brisket

It wouldn’t be a proper Hanukkah celebration — or frankly any family gathering — without brisket. This version has a rich, tangy sauce made with tomato sauce, red wine vinegar, and beef stock.

3. Jessica Fechtor’s Five-Fold Challah

Braiding challah bread takes skill and a practiced hand, but this recipe is a little bit more lenient when it comes to technique. The result is just as beautiful.

4. Noodle Kugel with Caramelized Onions and Brown Butter

Accompany a main course of brisket or roast chicken with, what else, but noodle kugel as a side dish. Dress up egg noodles with both fresh sage and thyme, plus caramelized onions in a nutty brown butter sauce.

Latkes

5. Potato Latkes

Fried potato pancakes are a staple for the Hanukkah menu. The use of baking powder is a surprise addition, but one that will help the latkes to maintain their crispiness, even after they’ve sat at room temperature for a bit.

6. Cheese Latkes

These aren’t exactly like latkes. They’re fluffier, pillowier, and cheesier, thanks to a combination of cream cheese and ricotta.

7. Giant Skillet Latke

Instead of frying dozens of individual latkes, save time (and reduce the chance of hot oil burns) by making one giant latke in a cast-iron skillet. A little bit of matzo meal provides body, and sour cream and applesauce are the necessary accoutrements.

8. Shockingly Crisp Baked Latkes

Traditionally, latkes are deep-fried to ensure that they’re super crispy and evenly golden brown on the outside. (Of course, the deep-fry is also a way to commemorate the oil that burned for eight whole nights). But Assigning Editor Rebecca Firkser achieved the same result just by baking them on a sheet tray in the oven, with plenty of oil of course. Less splatter, same delicious flavor.

9. Asparagus Latkes

“Not my grandma’s latkes or my mom’s. Because instead of starchy potatoes, we’re turning to juicy, sweet asparagus,” writes Food Editor Emma Laperruque. Somehow, we don’t think Emma’s family will be disappointed by this easy green recipe for Hanukkah.

Hanukkah sweets

10. Sufganiyot (Israeli Jelly Doughnuts)

The most traditional, most coveted, most spectacular, and most likely to disappear from the table in the blink of an eye are homemade jelly doughnuts, also known as Sufganiyot, which are a must-have Hanukkah dessert.

11. Chocolate-Walnut Rugelach

Three (count ’em three!) types of chocolate — dark, milk, and semi-sweet — are used in the nutty spiced filling for these soft cookies.

12. Mini Black and White Cookies

“Black and white cookies are the perfect marriage of chocolate and vanilla, cookie and cake. They are a classic deli treat, usually about 5 inches in diameter, but here I’ve made them mini which I find is a much more reasonable amount of cookie,” writes recipe developer Yossy Arefi. The perk of the mini size is that you will still have plenty of room for, say, half a dozen Sufganiyot.

13. The Famous Chocolate Babka

This is the babka recipe that started it all. Or rather, started the trend of swirly twirly chocolate babka that captivated the attention of bakers in New York City and beyond. Is that not reason enough to bake a loaf for Hanukkah this year?

14. Guava Cream Cheese Rugelach

In the middle of December, when the temperature drops, the snow starts to fall, and you can’t leave the house without multiple layers of clothing, these fruity rugelach cookies will give you a taste of the tropics.

15. Cranberry-Ginger Jam Donuts

For a delicious fall twist on the classic jelly donuts, fill ’em with homemade cranberry jam instead! Fresh ginger, vanilla bean, and the zest and juice of lemon and oranges bring brightness to every bite.

16. Very Easy Apple Cake

“This apple cake is as light, puffy, and fluffy as it is easy, easy, and easy. It comes together with only four ingredients (not counting salt, an honorary Big Little ingredient) and takes 20-something minutes to get in the oven,” writes Food Editor Emma Laperruque. It’s a delicious dessert to serve on Hanukkah.

For a twist

17. Fried Mushrooms with Smoked Paprika Remoulade

In addition to the usual latkes, there are so many other things you can fry for Hanukkah for a side dish or just something snackable as you mingle. Recipe developer EmilyC fried button mushroom in a panko breading and the result is an irresistible meaty treat that’s totally vegetarian.

18. Hanukkah Churros

Although churros are traditionally a Mexican sweet street food, frankly there’s no reason not to serve them as a Hanukkah dessert. For starters, they’re fried. But they also masterfully balance spicy and sweet flavors and can be served with fruit jam, chocolate sauce, or Nutella.

19. Golden Chicken Broth with Real Egg Noodles

For a light lunch during Hanukkah, or a simple starter to the meal, whip up this simple chicken noodle soup made with egg noodles. And we’re not talking about the dried kind of pasta you buy from the grocery store. These noodles are thin slices cut from a creamy omelet.

20. Zengoula with Lemon Syrup (Iraqi Funnel Cakes)

“Zengoula with Lemon Syrup is a great example of a traditional dish with a little twist that makes a big difference, says recipe developer Alice Medrich. “Instead of plain sugar syrup, the pastries are soaked in fresh lemon syrup. The results are easy to imagine: more fragrant and wonderful and, I have to say it, “zingier” zengoula.

21. Fried Pickles with Herb Breadcrumbs

Pickle lovers will rejoice over these crispy fried bites that have the perfect amount of breading on the outside and delicious dill flavor on the inside.

22. Bert Greene’s Potato Scallion Cakes (Fritterra)

This year, Hanukkah falls just days after Thanksgiving, so these potato pancakes are a genius way to use up leftover mashed potatoes from your Turkey Day feast.

23. French Toast Sticks

These are a far cry from traditional Hanukkah food, but they’re potentially the greatest (or should I say sweetest) addition to this year’s festivities.

24. Samsa (Algerian Almond-Orange Triangle Cookies)

After you light the menorah, serve a platter of these not-too-sweet, subtly floral pastries. They’re a bit of work to make, but you can prepare them a few days in advance so they’re ready to go as soon as the match strikes.

25. Smoky Fried Chickpeas

While you’re having drinks, put out a bowl of these fried chickpeas. They’re easy to stuff into your mouth to avoid answering why you haven’t found a nice Jewish boy or girl to marry yet.

26. Crispy Fried Pumpkin with Salted Egg Yolk

Instead of the usual pumpkin pie, spiced lattes, or quick breads, make use of sugar pumpkins for this extra-special seasonal spice dish.

“Great British Baking Show” was a showstopper, redeemed this season by fantastic contestants

Often the dividing line between the great and the sublime is the quality of the ingredients. We’re reminded of that as Season 12 of “The Great British Baking Show” zips up its tent, leaving us more satisfied than ever – especially compared with the previous batch.

No offense is meant to the 11th season’s contestants, people who performed as well as they could under the circumstances. They were the first folks to enter a pandemic bubble and sacrifice daily contact with loved ones in to bring us carb-loaded comfort when we most needed it. That season’s winner, Peter Sawkins, deserves his accolades. All the runners-up are lovely people.

The same is true of the current season’s champion, plainly the favorite from the earliest episodes of the competition. (To keep this story spoiler free we’re refraining from naming the winner.) But what makes their victory a cut above is that when judges Paul Hollywood or Prue Leith marveled during deliberation that they were working with the best of the best, they weren’t kidding.

A dozen seasons into its run, “The Great British Baking Show” rose with the leavening of overall excellence. Embraceable personalities combined with decadent, formidable challenges to yield a season where from week to week the outcome was never entirely predictable, especially in the season’s back half. Certain aspects of “GBBO” (an acronym of its U.K. title “Great British Bake Off”) play out as they always have, with the most skilled bakers pulling ahead early on, but the season’s middle was as hard to call as a sponge batter’s perfect baking time.

Once we filtered down to this season’s group of semifinalists, the outcome was anyone’s guess. Crystelle Pereira, Chigs Parmar, Giuseppe Dell’Anno and Jürgen Krauss are evenly matched. Although Giuseppe and Jurgen were more consistently solid, Crystelle and Chigs learned from early mistakes and improved week to week until they were among the stars. The ever-demanding Paul Hollywood even made Crystelle cry a few times by calling her work flawless.

Not only are they good, though, they’re actually good people. The producers can’t have planned this but they somehow landed upon a quartet built for the ideal fantasy quarantine house.

Remember that fixation from earlier in the pandemic? You can picture it: Crystelle, the endlessly animated sister or favorite aunt to hang out with, experimenting with adventurous flavor combinations like adding miso to caramel or using yuzu to elevate a citrus dish above the basic.

Some viewers ‘shipped her and Chigs, who began baking last year, although we’re uncomfortable playing that game with real people. Nevertheless, Chigs deserves applause for pulling off the nearly impossible each week, and by that we’re referring to each time he put on his glasses and reversed the whole Superman/Clark Kent ruse by becoming more attractive.

Giuseppe and Jürgen, an engineer and a physicist who apply their science knowledge to their baking skills and yield genius, are the uncles everyone wishes they could invite to holiday dinner. They’re passionate about balance and quality control, and confident yet humble.

Jürgen won our hearts with his serene manner and subtle jokes, effortlessly tossing off brilliant one-liners every so often as he did with Noel Fielding’s riff about a baby-shaped loaf constructed during Bread Week by replying with a deadpan, “I have a bun in the oven as well.”

Any of them would have made a satisfying victor, which is what made this round’s semifinal particularly exciting: you really couldn’t tell who would pull it out in the end. All of them won Star Baker at least twice; Jürgen pulled it out three times.

Each earned a handshake from the hard-to-please Paul during their run . . . except, painfully, for Jürgen during the highly competitive patisserie week. When he was the only contender who didn’t receive that unofficial honor during the signature challenge, U.K. Twitter users revolted.

That outcry likely had less to do with the injustice of Paul’s move than what it portended. If last year’s pandemic game revolved fantasy roommate squads, the semifinal’s outcome reflects the social media game “one must go.”

Jürgen’s exit didn’t bring any joy and it certainly wasn’t easy. Instead it felt like a reasonable decision, made with the knowledge that any cut was going to be painful. Such is the tyranny of too many incredible choices.

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If there’s one fly in the dough of this season, it’s the overt loony presence of its co-hosts. Matt Lucas, more than Noel, threw off the balance and in some instances harshed the contestants’ calm along with the audience. He has never been the favorite of the hosts, but his performance this time begs to be reined in.

Season 12 confirms that we’ll take that any day over the mediocrity that defined the 11th season finale that left the fandom dissatisfied, the baker’s least desired taste test verdict. As for the how and why of the show’s landing on such brilliant success, we can only theorize it was a matter of circumstance and maybe a bit of growth on the part of Paul and his fellow judge Prue Leith.

Paul and Prue would probably argue that they’re as exacting as they’ve always been (which is a guess, since we only know their TV personas), but everyone evolves under the influence of experience and with the benefit of better ingredients. Last year’s “GBBO” was a mix of middling bakers with one or two superbly skilled competitors. When the semifinal gave us two marvels and a pair of middling folks, and one of the better ones whiffed it, her season-long consistency didn’t save her.

This time, with so many greats folded into the tent, the judges were more cognizant of past efforts. That meant sixth place contender George Aristidou and fifth runner-up Lizzie Acker could pull out incredible showstoppers in the same week they were sent home, but their improvements weeks prior also saved them more than once.

And it also softens the letdown of Jürgen’s gentle dismissal despite his consistency in weeks prior. His competition had slipped up more than he had over the weeks, but the others kept rising. In the week where everyone needed to nail it, Crystelle, Chigs and Giuseppe hammered harder.

Such a surge of emotion didn’t merely set up for a satisfying finale showstopper challenge. It presents the possibility, however distant, that this season of winners and a ultimate champion might lead to us seeing more of these telegenic kitchen hobbyists appearing in other corners of the culinary TV ecosystem.

Regardless of what happens next for the winner and the other finalists, “GBBO” gloriously returned in 2021 just when we needed relief from the anxiety of a pandemic that’s dragged on too long and leaves us with a sugary dusting of appreciation for kindness and impeccability. As this trying year crawls to its finish the finale presented the audience the gift we can always use: a good bake.

All episodes of “The Great British Baking Show” are streaming on Netflix.

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The ancient history of adding insult to injury

At one point in the latest James Bond installment, “No Time To Die,” the henchman Primo has the upper hand on 007. But Bond has a wristwatch that can trigger an electromegnetic pulse keyed to local circuitry. Primo, conveniently, has a biomechanical eye, so when Bond activates his watch next to Primo’s head, it explodes.

Bond’s gadgeteer, Q, radios in, and Bond delivers the rhetorical goods: “I showed him your watch. It blew his mind.”

This sort of witty quip after killing someone isn’t unique to the Bond franchise. From “Dirty Harry” to “Django Unchained,” they’ve become staples of the action film genre.

Audiences might assume action films invented these one-liners. But as I’ve demonstrated in my work researching ancient Greco-Roman epic poetry, the origin of this sort of rhetorical violence goes back thousands of years.

A perverse eulogy

The one-liner is in many ways the calling card of action films. The motif took off in the 1960s and peaked in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. Today you’ll see occasional nods to the tradition in films like “No Time To Die.”

Earlier James Bonds also delivered post-kill zingers. In “Thunderball,” Sean Connery’s Bond spears a foe with a harpoon gun, then jokes: “I think he got the point.” After “Live and Let Die” villain Dr. Kananga balloons and explodes from ingesting a gas pellet, Roger Moore’s Bond gloats, “He always did have an inflated opinion of himself.”

These one-liners had become de rigueur by the 1990s. In “Universal Soldier,” Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Luc Deveraux kills Andrew Scott by feeding him through a woodchipper that hurls bits and pieces of his corpse through the air. Deveraux’s companion asks where Scott is, to which Deveraux laconically replies, “Around.” And after killing Screwface in “Marked for Death,” John Hatcher, played by Steven Seagal, discovers there’s another Screwface — or, rather, that twins have been running the criminal organization he’s fighting. Hatcher then executes the second Screwface in one of the most violent, prolonged death scenes in film history.

Hatcher catches his breath, before muttering, “I hope they weren’t triplets.”

But Arnold Schwarzenegger, who rose to fame during the golden era of action films in the 1980s, was the king of one-liners.

“Commando” ends with John Matrix, played by Schwarzenegger, impaling the villainous Bennett with a massive metal pipe that travels through Bennett and, inexplicably, into a boiler. The blast of steam travels back through Bennett and out the end of the pipe. Surveying the carnage, Matrix quips: “Let off some steam, Bennett.” In “Predator,” Schwarzenegger’s character pins an enemy to a wall with a knife, inviting him to “stick around.” And in “The Running Man,” he chainsaws his adversary Buzzsaw vertically, crotch up.

When asked what happened to Buzzsaw, he reports: “He had to split.”

The quips literally add insult to injury, defaming the victim immediately after their demise, emblazoning the death with a caption, like a perverse eulogy. Film heroes deliver the best taunts because their rhetorical skill is linked to their physical prowess.

This might seem incongruous. But the link between martial and rhetorical skill goes back to Western literature’s beginning.

The “vaunts” of the ancient epics

Ancient epic poems are, in many ways, the antecedents to today’s action flicks; they were the violent, thrilling blockbusters of their era.

Homer’s heroes in the “Iliad,” written sometime between 750 and 700 B.C., are not just deft fighters but also adroit talkers. Achilles, for example, is lauded as both the best fighter and the best speaker among the Greeks at Troy.

The parameters of ancient epic duels mirror action film fights. When two warriors square off, they taunt each other. When one warrior wins, typically the victory is punctuated by a witty defamatory “vaunt” that signals the champion’s prowess and the loser’s now-verified inadequacy.

In Virgil’s “Aeneid,” Turnus avoids damage from a spear cast by the young warrior Pallas thanks to his thick shield. After hurling a spear of his own that pierces Pallas, Turnus boasts of the performance of his weapon by comparison. The taunt is soaked in sexual innuendo: “See whether my weapon can penetrate better.”

Turnus later sneers over the slain Eumedes, whose throat he’s severed: “Hey, Trojan, the Western land you hoped to conquer, measure it with your corpse.” Since Eumedes sought to colonize parts of modern-day Italy, he would have surveyed the land for settlements; Turnus sardonically suggests using his dead body as a measuring stick.

In the “Iliad,” Polydamas spears Prothoenor in the shoulder. He falls and dies, whereupon Polydamas jokes that the spear will be useful to lean on “like a staff when he descends to the underworld.”

At another point in the “Iliad,” Patroclus kills the Trojan charioteer Cebriones by smashing his face with a stone. The force of the strike ejects Cebriones’ eyes from their sockets; they hit the ground, and Cebriones follows them headfirst onto the battlefield. The bizarre situation elicits Patroclus’ zesty bon mot: “What a spring the man has! Nice dive! Think of the oysters he could come up with if he were out at sea …”

In this vaunt-cum-metaphor, Cebriones’ eyes, which he “chases” into the sand, have become precious pearls in the oysters he’s imagined to be hunting.

Breaking the fourth wall

What value does wit hold in genres defined by brute strength?

Never mind the fact that a corpse is hardly a suitable target for clever punchlines. The jokes are for the audience, and it’s as close as the genre gets to breaking the fourth wall. Viewers are attuned to these witticisms not simply because they are funny, but because they’re self-consciously ridiculous. They help distance the audience from the often horrific levels of violence on display.

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Epic poetry has traditionally held a highbrow status in literary criticism, while action films are regarded as puerile and brutish. These designations collapse at the level of rhetorical violence. In truth, epics like the “Iliad” skew more “action film” than most literati would like to admit, and vice versa.

The larger-than-life heroes from John Matrix to James Bond are ultimately the silver screen progeny of warrior-poets from antiquity.

Andrew M. McClellan, Lecturer in Classics and Humanities, San Diego State University

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

More women are giving birth after uterus transplants — and experts say they could even be put in men

When Chelsea Jovanovich was 15, she learned that she didn’t have a uterus.

That was a result of her having Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) Syndrome, a rare congenital disorder that is estimated to occur in 1 in every 4,500 females. Such a diagnosis meant she’d never be able to carry a pregnancy on her own; her only options would be adoption or surrogacy. Jovanovich said it wasn’t until she got married and started thinking about having a family of her own that really came to terms with the reality of not having a uterus and started to investigate other options. Jovanovich and her husband, Jake, considered a gestational carriers. They even approached a close friend about it, but ultimately realized the arrangement likely wouldn’t work.

“It was a lot harder on me emotionally as I got into my child-bearing years,” Jovanovich said. “Your friends are having babies, and you can’t. It was pretty hard and I went through some rough patches.”

Nearly out of options, Jovanovich learned about the possibility of a uterus transplant, which is when a person receives a uterus transplant from a living or deceased donor. The surgery of a transplant from a living person remains rare and is still in early clinical trial stages; to date, only 20 have been performed in the United States as of April 2021. Fifty had been performed around the world through April 2019.

Unphased by the experimental nature of the surgery, Jovanovich decided to try her luck, and applied to Penn Medicine’s Uterus Donation program which began in 2017. To her surprise, she was accepted and matched with a donor. In February 2020, she successfully received a uterus from a woman named Cheryl Cichonski-Urban, who had already given birth to two healthy babies. After a successful transplant, Jovanovich underwent in vitro fertilization. In a uterus transplant, the fallopian tubes of the donor are part of transplantation— and it all paid off. On May 18, 2021, Jovanovich gave birth via a C-section to a healthy baby boy thanks to Urban’s uterus.

Her son, Telden, was the first baby to be born from a live donor at the Penn State program. Of the 70 uterus transplants that have ever occurred globally, only a handful of babies have been born from both living and deceased donors. Despite the rarity of the procedure now, it could be a process that becomes more common in the future for women who have Uterine Factor Infertility (UFI), which is a form of female infertility that affects as many as 5 percent of reproductive-aged women worldwide. Those with UFI cannot get pregnant because, like Jovanovich, they either lack uteri or their uterus doesn’t function properly.

“[A] uterus transplant is the only option that allows women with UFI the opportunity to carry and deliver their own babies,” said Kathleen E. O’Neill, MD, MTR, co-principal investigator of Penn Medicine’s Uterus Transplantation for Uterine Factor Infertility (UNTIL) trial. “Women with UFI have limited pathways to parenthood.”

Dr. Aimee Eyvazzadeh, a reproductive endocrinologist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, told Salon despite recent successes, the world is likely still “far away” from a uterus transplant to be offered as an option at a fertility clinic.

“It’s cost-prohibitive and most people won’t have the funds to pay out of pocket for a uterine transplant,” Eyvazzadeh said. “Given the risks associated with transplants, I don’t see fertility clinics adopting this as a new procedure they will offer; it’s a high risk procedure with a lower rate of live birth compared to IVF with a gestational carrier with a much higher cost.”

Indeed, uterus transplants are costly because they are long and invasive processes that can require around 100 medical professionals (as happened with Jovanovich’s transplant). If a transplant is successful and the recipient gives birth, the uterus is removed after child-bearing is complete. Doctors estimate a uterus transplant would cost up to $200,000, and are not apt to be covered by insurance — and then there are the risks to consider. As with many organ transplants, the recipient must take immunosuppressive medications to help the body accept the new organ, which can cause diabetes or renal damage in the long-term. There is also no guarantee that such a transplant will lead to a successful pregnancy.

“Graft failure is also a complication of uterine transplants,” Eyvazzadeh said. “A little less than one-third experience graft failure; the transplant doesn’t ‘take’ in a little less than a third of transplant recipients.”

Eyvazzadeh said she was basing this number on a study published in February, 2021, in the peer-reviewed journal Obstetrics & Gynecology. In 2019, the Washington Post reported on one woman’s journey to getting a uterus transplant who nearly died from a life-threatening Candida infection. It turned out that the uterus implanted in her body came from a Candida infection in her donor’s bladder.

Eyvazzadeh added that the risks and cost do not mean the transplant won’t become a more common operation in the future. Surprisingly, she thinks uterus transplants could become an option for an unexpected population: men.

“I predict with our aging population, and the rise of infertility, we will need men to share the burden of growing our population,” Eyvazzadeh said. “While some people may think this is far-fetched, it is not for the near future; I predict in maybe 200 years from now, it will be a reality.”

Transgender female patients will also be another group of people to benefit from the research into uterus transplants.

“Transgender females are also good candidates,” Eyvazzadeh said. “I am not aware of a transgender female having a uterine transplant yet.”

Indeed, many doctors believe a uterus transplant could work for a transgender woman.

However, as with most surgeries and procedures that involve a uterus, Eyvazzadeh said to “absolutely” expect many future debates.

“Anytime a treatment involves a woman’s uterus, there will definitely be a debate especially when it involves IVF,” Eyvazzadeh said. “As with all new technology, they will get safer and more effective and ultimately more cost effective.”

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The best ways to use up leftover sweet potato

Got leftover sweet potatoes in your fridge? Say you meal-prepped a few sweet potatoes and don’t know what to do with the extras, or you’re in the days after the Thanksgiving rush and are living in Leftover Land. You’re in luck — sweet potatoes are an excellent, flavor-packed base for dishes like pancakes, waffles, salads, soups, and of course, pie. That’s right, they’re more than welcome at any meal of the day, and we’re here to help you navigate the sweet, orange road ahead.

We’ve compiled a stacked and loaded compendium of exciting ways to repurpose these delicious, satisfying, beloved root veggies. From the classic to the unexpected, and whether your sweet potatoes are mashed or baked or boiled or steamed, these leftover sweet potato recipes are sure to satisfy everyone at your table.

Erinrae was left with some extra sweet potatoes the other night and took to the Hotline to ask for your best ideas for repurposing them. As always, you came through with a bunch of brilliant ideas, inspiring all of us to step up our “bestover” game:

For breakfast:

LE BEC FIN suggests a riff on baked eggs, instructing: “In ramekins or muffins tins, put a layer of mashed sweet potatoes, top with cooked bacon, then grated sharp cheddar, and, finally, an egg. Bake as you would baked eggs.”
Drbabs votes for making sweet potato bread or muffins.
Carlito suggests adding the mashed potato into a bowl of oatmeal.
Lindsay-Jean Hard offers a recipe for using them in scones.
Our editors love sweet potato in a smoothie.
Emma’s Big Little sweet potato yogurt is a slam-dunk.

For lunch or dinner:

Nancy suggests using the leftover sweet potatoes on a salad. Anne7hall agrees and thinks that a soft-boiled egg would be a great addition.
Mblossom uses them in quesadillas: “I mash the baked sweet potato with some cumin, coriander, and salt, then spread it on the tortilla, add black beans, plenty of Monterey Jack cheese, some cilantro, and maybe some jalapeños.”
Fritters and croquettes are popular solutions — Pegeen, dinner at ten, and ADM are all fans.
Peter says these mashed sweet potatoes are one of his favorite Food52 recipes of all time.

For dessert:

Deborah Madison’s flan is an inventive, delicious recipe.
These Genius-grade sweet potato cookies are perfect for leftover steamed sweet potatoes.
Got leftover sweet potato pureé? Meet your favorite new brownies.
A baked sweet potato is the secret to this beautiful rolled cake.

More leftover sweet potato recipes:

20 memorable moments from talk show history

As television gained popularity in the mid-20th century, so too did the talk show: a holdover from the radio era that offered the masses access to celebrities, thought-provoking discussions on social issues, and more.

Over the last seven decades or so, charismatic hosts have weathered (or initiated) their fair share of high-shock-value moments — and they’ve done it with an audience that sometimes numbers in the millions. From Oprah’s meme-able car giveaway to Geraldo Rivera’s broken nose, here are 20 unforgettable incidents from the annals of American talk show history.

1. When Oprah gave everyone a car

On September 13, 2004, “Oprah” kicked off season 19 of her show by staging what might have been the most benevolent fake-out of all time. After surprising a handful of audience members with free Pontiac G6s, the remaining spectators were each given a wrapped box and told that one contained keys to yet another free Pontiac G6. The room then devolved into one happy mass meltdown as everyone — all of whom had been chosen to attend that day because they each needed a new car—realized every box contained keys. Though the 276 vehicles were donated by Pontiac, the fact that the new owners ended up owing some several thousand dollars in income tax did retroactively rain on the parade. But what people more often remember is Oprah’s repeated shouts of “You get a car!”— a refrain which has been memed into immortality.

2. When Larry King and Marlon Brando crooned a duet (and kissed)

Marlon Brando had become something of a recluse by the 1990s, so the fact that he’d agreed to an interview on “Larry King Live” in October 1994 was news enough. So was the interview itself, which King conducted from Brando’s home. “The Godfather” star was promoting his new book, “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” and he and King got so chummy by the end of the 90-minute segment that they closed it out with a duet: “Got a Date With an Angel.” And then they kissed — still very much a pearl-clutching move at the time, and one for which producer Wendy Walker took some heat. When CNN’s then-president Tom Johnson called to ask why she let it happen, she said, “I guess I forgot … to tell them that if they were having a really good time that they shouldn’t kiss at the end of the show.”

3. Kristen Bell’s sloth-induced breakdown on “Ellen”

Sloths have occupied a prominent place in American culture for years now, in part because the “Ice Age” franchise refuses to die and also because the slow-moving mammals are the mascot for everyone’s favorite cardinal sin. But if you had to pinpoint a single moment that pushed the sloth craze to its peak, it would probably be Kristen Bell‘s January 2012 interview on “Ellen.” Bell recounted the story of how partner Dax Shepard surprised her with a sloth for her birthday, inciting a tear-filled panic attack of excitement. Not only did viewers get to see footage of the incident, but they were also treated to an encore performance: Bell again began to cry when Ellen jokingly implied that a sloth was on set.

4. Tyra Banks’ fake case of rabies

If 2000 was the biggest year for Tyra Banks’s acting career — “Love & Basketball,” “Life-Size,” and “Coyote Ugly” all premiered then — 2010 was the second biggest, for that was the year she pretended to have rabies on her talk show. After monologue-ing about contracting the disease from a dog bite earlier that day, Banks began to foam at the mouth and bark belligerently; she even went so far as to lunge toward a nearby guest, who smiled through what looked like terror. Banks wasn’t trying to raise awareness for rabies, which — need we say it? — does not cause people to act like Cujo. She was just indulging in some good, clean “Tyra Pranks.”

5. When Jerry Springer interviewed a man who married his horse

Of “The Jerry Springer Show”‘s near 5,000 episodes, its eponymous host remembers one as the wildest: A 1998 installment titled “I Married a Horse.” In it, a man named Mark Matthews calmly explained that he did, in fact, marry his horse — or more accurately, his Shetland pony. The pony, Pixel, then clip-clopped out onto the stage, leaving the audience aghast. Springer was equally shocked, as he didn’t know that the wife in question wasn’t human. As Springer told Meredith Vieira years later, he was never allowed to know what the show was about. “All my card has on there are the names of the guests … And then I’m supposed to ask questions that you would ask sitting at home watching, and then make jokes.” So Springer’s surprise was genuine. And if you think Matthews’s relationship was all for show, take his book, “The Horseman: Obsessions of a Zoophile,” as evidence to the contrary.

6. When Magic Johnson talked HIV/AIDS with Arsenio Hall

The day after Earvin “Magic” Johnson announced his HIV diagnosis in 1991, he appeared on “The Arsenio Hall Show” to discuss it further. Hall hadn’t wanted to do the interview. “I remember telling him, ‘I’ll go with you, let’s do it elsewhere. Go to Larry King,'” Hall later said, explaining that his close friendship with Johnson made him feel too emotional to be the right interviewer. Johnson convinced him that it was precisely their friendship that made “The Arsenio Hall Show” the ideal outlet for him to share his story. During the segment, the two tackled misconceptions and misinformation about HIV/AIDS, kickstarting Johnson’s decades-long crusade to raise awareness for and dismantle the stigma around the virus and its disease.

7. When Johnny Carson helped cause a national toilet paper shortage

In late 1973, Wisconsin congressman Harold V. Froehlich sounded the alarm about an impending toilet paper shortage, mostly based on news that pulp paper was growing scarce and that fewer toilet paper suppliers than normal had bid on a certain federal government contract for TP. Media began to report on the claims, but the general public wasn’t really affected until December 19, when Johnny Carson mentioned it on his show. Though Carson’s tone was joking, phrases like “acute shortage” and “it is serious” made the situation seem, well, serious. People flocked to stores to stock up on toilet paper while they could, and Carson’s mention of a possible nationwide shortage became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Things died down in early 1974 as people learned that TP manufacturers weren’t actually struggling with production quotas; and Carson helped put the country at ease by explaining that he’d exaggerated the story. “For all my life in entertainment, I don’t want to be remembered as the man who created a false toilet paper scare,” he said.

8. David Letterman’s blackmail scandal

In 2009, when a blackmailer (Robert “Joe” Halderman) threatened to expose David Letterman’s misdeeds unless he forked over $2 million, the talk show host took the case to authorities. And then he preempted the publicity by confessing said misdeeds on air — sort of. Of the 10 minutes Letterman spent telling the tale, nearly eight focused on the process of finding the blackmail package, figuring out what it meant, and neutralizing the threat with legal help. Finally, near the end, Letterman admitted that “the creepy stuff was that I have had sex with women who work for me on this show.”

His self-deprecating jokes kept the audience laughing and clapping, and he offered nothing in the way of an apology for his behavior. That came the following week, when Letterman apologized for an unintended consequence of his earlier admission, saying:

“It did not occur to me last week when I was discussing having had sex with women who worked on this show, that then what would happen is reporters and newspaper people and radio and TV would start hounding the staff and saying, ‘What do you say?,’ ‘Are you?,’ and this and that. It was very, very unpleasant and I would just like to set the record straight: No, I’m not having sex with these women, those episodes are in the past. So my apologies to subjecting them to that vulnerability.”

Though that apology was met with some skepticism, as not everyone believed that Letterman wouldn’t have anticipated the media frenzy that would follow his earlier statement, it’s a notable incident in which a conduit for news became the news.

9. When “Mr. Organic” died on “The Dick Cavett show”

What might be the most morbidly ironic incident in TV history occurred during a June 1971 taping of “The Dick Cavett Show.” Jerome Rodale, a septuagenarian health guru nicknamed “Mr. Organic,” appeared on the show touting unorthodox health hacks — like urine-soaked asparagus, which he actually had in tow — and confidently asserting that he’d reach the age of 100. Then, as Cavett was interviewing the next guest (journalist Pete Hamill), Rodale seemed to fall asleep right beside him. It soon became clear that he wasn’t just sleeping, and Cavett called for help. Rodale left on a stretcher, and it was later confirmed that he had died of a heart attack. The episode never aired, but Cavett later wrote about the experience at length for “The New York Times.”

10. The fainting hoax on “The Phil Donahue Show”

On January 22, 1985, an audience member fainted at Phil Donahue’s feet while trying to share her views on “gay senior citizens,” according to the Associated Press. Six other guests soon passed out, too, prompting Donahue to empty the seating area and finish the show sans crowd. The odd occurrence was chalked up to some combination of how hot the room was, how little the fainters had eaten beforehand, and how nervous they may have been about being on TV. But within a couple of weeks, one fainter confessed that they had all been hired by known hoaxer Alan Abel, who confirmed that the stunt was staged in support of an organization called Fight Against Idiotic Neurotic Television (yes, FAINT). Abel thought the state of TV was deplorable, and he wanted to “raise the consciousness of the public by going unconscious.”

11. When Dakota Johnson challenged Ellen

When Ellen DeGeneres tried to tease Dakota Johnson for not inviting her to Johnson’s 30th birthday party on a November 2019 episode of “Ellen,” Johnson wasn’t having it. “Actually, no, that’s not the truth, Ellen, you were invited,” she said, before asking producers to confirm the invitation. “You were out of town,” one producer called out. The relatively good-natured exchange could have easily disappeared into oblivion had not the internet seized upon it as feud fodder. The racket intensified when people realized that DeGeneres’s widely criticized outing to an NFL game with George W. Bush had taken place the very day after Johnson’s party — suggesting that DeGeneres had, if unintentionally, chosen to hobnob with a former president over partying with Johnson and company.

12. When Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah’s couch

In May 2005, Tom Cruise appeared on “Oprah” to promote his latest movie, “War of the Worlds,” and instead approximated a toddler fresh off a six-course meal of candy. The ostensible cause of Cruise’s alarming level of energy — which he let off by hopping on and off the couch, kneeling on the floor, and even manhandling Oprah — was his love for then-girlfriend Katie Holmes. The interview occurred just shortly after the launch of YouTube, and it helped define what “going viral” meant in the internet era. But the most chaotic clips got the widest circulation, and critics would later point out that Cruise’s behavior seemed considerably less eccentric with proper context. Oprah had, after all, pressed him for details about his relationship, and the audience members had been screaming their heads off since the moment he arrived. Oprah herself even called the context-less distribution and public fixation on the episode “really, really, really unfair.”

13. When Danielle Bregoli said “cash me outside” on “Dr. Phil”

When the world first met Danielle Bregoli, she was a combative 13-year-old colloquially known as the “Cash me outside girl,” a nickname earned after her 2016 appearance on “Dr. Phil.” Bregoli was there to work through her strained relationship with her mother, but that fact — and basically the entire interview — got lost in the noise of Bregoli’s unforgettable suggestion that the audience catch her outside (as in: She will fight you). She leveraged her fame into a surprisingly successful rap career as Bhad Bhabie, even earning a 2018 Billboard Music Award nomination for top female rap artist, alongside Cardi B and Nicki Minaj (Cardi B won).

14. Normal Mailer and Gore Vidal’s epic verbal joust

Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer had acted as foils to each other in the literary world since the 1950s, but their biggest — and most public — clash didn’t come until 1971. Vidal took Mailer to task for misogyny in a piece for “The New York Review of Books,” going so far as to lump him in with Charles Manson (and Henry Miller). Mailer was incensed, and when both writers were invited to duke it out on “The Dick Cavett Show,” they rose to the occasion spectacularly. Or rather, Mailer — affecting a puzzling Irish brogue, as he was known to do — shot barb after barb at a somewhat amused Vidal, who responded levelly.

15. When Geraldo Rivera’s nose was broken in a brawl

In November 1988, Geraldo Rivera and his producers invited a number of white supremacists on Rivera’s tabloid talk show “Geraldo” to help people grasp that such radical racism still exists in the country. Roy Innis, the national chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, appeared on the panel as the voice of reason. The discussion escalated until one of the white supremacists directly insulted Innis, at which point the guests launched into a brawl that audience members joined, too. Nobody was seriously harmed except for Rivera, who took a chair to the shoulder and a blow to the face that broke his nose.

16. Chelsea Handler’s star-studded “We are the World” parody

In 2014, Chelsea Handler closed out seven years of “Chelsea Lately” by proving, once and for all, that she really does have a ton of celebrity best friends. Virtually every famous face you’ve ever seen — Sandra Bullock, Jennifer Aniston, Gerard Butler, 50 Cent, Miley Cyrus, Dave Grohl, Tim Gunn, and so on — joined the final episode and sang her off with a parody of “We Are the World” called “Goodbye to E!”, which featured lyrics like “She can’t go on faking every day that Chelsea cares about Kim and Kanye.” A real “Don’t cry that it’s over — try to name as many celebrities as you can during wide shots” moment.

17. When Wendy Williams said “Dula Peep”

We see your Adele Dazeem and we raise you one Dula Peep, courtesy of Wendy Williams. The talk show host first mispronounced Dua Lipa’s name in May 2018, and the pop star’s fans immediately embraced the moniker. Williams again struggled to say “Dua Lipa” during a segment a couple years later, eventually deciding — much to everyone’s pleasure — just to stick with “Dula Peep.” Dua Lipa herself laughingly described the sobriquet as “kind of cute” on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” essentially giving the world license to call her that for all eternity. Even close friends like Bella Hadid have adopted it.

18. When Jimmy Kimmel stuck it to Jay Leno…on Jay Leno’s show

The 2010 controversy over late-night talk show spots was difficult to follow even for those involved. What basically happened is that NBC promised that Conan O’Brien could take the reins from Jay Leno, let him do just that, and then reneged on the deal seemingly because O’Brien’s ratings failed to impress. The main 11:35 p.m. slot was returned to Leno and O’Brien was offered a show at 12:05 p.m., which he refused. Hosts outside the conflict had strong opinions about it, and Jimmy Kimmel made his feelings clear in no uncertain terms during an interview with Leno himself: Leno asked Kimmel a series of questions, which Kimmel answered with unsubtle references to how unfairly O’Brien was treated. The Kimmel-Leno feud continued for years. Moreover, the incident serves as a reminder that the pre-streaming era — when people cared a lot about (or at least knew) when and where shows aired — wasn’t that long ago.

19. When Barack Obama plugged Obamacare on “Between two Ferns”

On March 11, 2014, then-president Barack Obama appeared on Zach Galifianakis’s Funny or Die talk show “Between Two Ferns.” He responded to Galifianakis’s ribbing with his own amiable jibes (mostly about “The Hangover” movies) and eventually steered the conversation toward the Affordable Care Act, tacitly answering the question that hung heavy over the room: Why is the president on a goofy internet talk show? The idea had come from the show’s co-creator Scott Aukerman during a brainstorming session that presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett had convened in order to come up with ways to promote Obamacare to the nation’s new adults. It may have seemed like a shot in the dark, but it actually worked; HealthCare.gov enjoyed a 40 percent increase in traffic that day.

20. When Ziwe asked Andrew Yang to list his favorite billionaires

Comedian Ziwe made a name for herself in the early days of the pandemic by inviting buzzy and somewhat controversial internet figures like influencer Caroline Calloway and chef Alison Roman to participate in Instagram Live videos. Her deadpan questions on racism and other hot-button issues often left her so-called “iconic guests” squirming (or just oblivious), and the series proved so popular that Showtime gave her an actual talk show.

Even with the new, and bigger, format, the so-awkward-you-have-to-laugh nature of the interviews didn’t change. Ziwe’s most memorable moment to date is arguably the time she asked Andrew Yang, then running for mayor of New York City, to list his top four favorite billionaires. Instead of taking the opportunity to address the wealth gap and maybe earn a few Millennial votes, Yang just went ahead and listed his favorite billionaires, starting with … Michael Bloomberg. (To be fair, he did redeem himself slightly by naming a couple universall high-earners: Oprah and Michael Jordan.)

QAnon congressional candidate sets up Bitcoin fundraising operation that may be illegal

Ron Watkins, the longtime QAnon influencer who is now running for Congress in Arizona, has set up a fundraising operation that relies on cryptocurrency — but one reporter thinks that Watkins may be running afoul of the law.

The Informant’s Nick Martin writes on Twitter that Watkins this week started soliciting “no more than $2,000 worth of Bitcoin” in donations from his supporters.

As Martin writes, this is a legally dicey proposition.

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“What he doesn’t say is that the FEC prohibits anyone from donating more than $100 to a campaign when using Bitcoin,” he explains, while adding that $2,000 in Bitcoin donations would be “20 times the FEC limit.”

Watkins announced his campaign back in October with a bizarre video in which he invoked God in his decision to run while also doubling down on bogus conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.

“I also want to emphasize that we must stay vigilant and keep up the pressure — both here in Arizona and throughout the country — to indict any and all criminals who have facilitated election fraud,” Watkins said. “President Trump had his election stolen, not just in Arizona, but in other states, too.”

Did the FBI order Malcolm X’s murder? New revelations raise an old question

Just a few days before the City of New York removed the oversized statue of Thomas Jefferson from the City Council chamber, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance asked a state court judge to vacate the convictions of two men who were wrongfully convicted for the murder of civil rights visionary Malcolm X in 1965 at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.

While moving the statue may seem heavy lifting, it’s nothing compared to the inner fortitude required to revisit the ongoing race-based injustices that victimize people of color, who are living now and continue to feel the lash of punitive, racist and often corrupt law enforcement.

Exonerations of wrongfully convicted Black men now come with such frequency that they show up at the end of the newscast, just before the weather and the stock quotes. There can be no greater validation of “critical race theory” than regularly tracking these cases in all their gory detail.

Vance, who is in his final days in his office, told the court that Muhammad Abdul Aziz (who is still living, at age 83) and Khalil Islam (who died in 2009), had been the victims of “unacceptable violations of the law and the public trust” on a massive scale that easily crossed over the line into something far more sinister than your run-of-the-mill racial profiling.

“But what we have obtained now in this reinvestigation, are numerous materials that my office tragically did not have in 1965 and thus did not turn over to the defense,” Vance told the court. “Most critically, we have obtained dozens and dozens of reports, from the FBI and the NYPD’s Bureau of Special Services and Investigations. … And, significantly, we now have reports revealing that, on orders from Director J. Edgar Hoover himself, the FBI ordered multiple witnesses not to tell police or prosecutors that they were, in fact, FBI informants.”

Vance continued: “Many of those documents were exculpatory. None of them were disclosed to the defense. Without these files, it is clear these men did not receive a fair trial, and their convictions must be vacated. Moreover, under the unique circumstances presented by a 55-year-old case, there can be no retrial on any of the charges contained in the indictment. Therefore, the People believe the indictment against Mr. Aziz and Mr. Islam should be dismissed.”

Both men had maintained their innocence throughout their trial and incarceration. They ended up serving 20 years in prison and were paroled in the 1980s.

Vance went on to apologize to Aziz and his family, to the family of Islam and to the family of Malcolm X “on behalf of our nation’s law enforcement for this decades-long injustice, which has eroded public faith in institutions that are designed to guarantee the equal protection of the law. We can’t restore what was taken from these men and their families, but by correcting the record, perhaps we can begin to restore that faith.”

There was no physical evidence to connect Aziz and Islam to the murder scene, and both insisted they were home at the time of the murder, which occurred in broad daylight, beginning with a shotgun blast from one shooter and then additional rounds from two other perpetrators with handguns.

By contrast, there was considerable physical evidence to implicate Mujahid Abdul Halim (known at the time as Talmadge Hayer), the third man originally convicted along with Aziz and Islam. Halim, who was shot in the leg by a member of Malcom X’s security detail, was apprehended by the crowd outside the Audubon Ballroom.

Halim originally denied at trial that he was involved in Malcolm X’s murder, but had a change of heart after speaking to Aziz and Islam while they were in lockup together. He testified that he was one of the shooters, but that Aziz and Islam had nothing to do with the murder, saying that three or four other men had been involved in the shooting and that he knew who they were, but refusing to identify them.

Thanks to a Greek chorus of a dozen eyewitnesses — some or all of them FBI informants — who testified they saw Aziz and Islam on the scene, they were convicted. What we have here is an obvious frame-up that implicates the NYPD and the FBI.

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Consider the role of one of the of the enthusiastic “eyewitnesses” who, according to Vance’s motion, picked up the .45 caliber semiautomatic pistol used by Halim after he dropped it, “brought it back to his home in Brooklyn, and disassembled it” and then, hours later, “contacted the New York Office of the FBI and arranged to give them the gun. The FBI turned over the gun to the NYPD.”

The New York Times reports that Vance’s review was undertaken after “an explosive documentary” on Netflix about the assassination “and a new biography renewed interest in the case, [but] did not identify who prosecutors now believe really killed Malcolm X. Those who were previously implicated but never arrested are dead.”

The Times article continues: “Nor did it uncover a police or government conspiracy to murder him. It also left unanswered questions about how and why the police and the federal government failed to prevent the assassination by at least one member of a New Jersey chapter of the Nation of Islam.”

What’s missing from both Vance’s filings and the subsequent news coverage is any effort to put these latest developments into the historical context of COINTELPRO, the evil brainchild of J. Edgar Hoover that was aimed at discrediting and neutralizing important civil rights activists and change agents, including Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., leading figures in the Black Panthers and so many others.

Earlier this year, the family of Malcolm X and attorney Ben Crump released a letter written by a former New York police officer, which they claimed showed that “the NYPD and the FBI were behind the 1965 assassination of the famed Black leader,” according to the Washington Post.

“The 2011 letter by the now-dead officer, Raymond A. Wood, stated that Wood had been compelled by his supervisors at the New York Police Department to coax two members of Malcolm X’s security team into committing crimes, leading to their arrests just a few days before the assassination,” reported the newspaper. “They were then unable to secure the entry to New York’s Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X had been speaking when he was killed.”

According to the FBI’s account on the agency’s own website, COINTELPRO, “short for Counterintelligence Program,” was launched in 1956 “to disrupt the activities of the Communist Party of the United States” and was expanded in the 1960s to “include a number of other domestic groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Black Panther Party.”

All this ended, the Bureau assures us, in 1971. The FBI’s rather anodyne description goes on to say it was “limited in scope (about two-tenths of one percent of the FBI’s workload over a 15-year period),” and “was later rightfully criticized by Congress and the American people for abridging first amendment rights and for other reasons.”

That is a partial accounting, at best. Context and timeline are immensely important here.

Consider that in the summer of 1964, when Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party came to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City to protest the seating of the white supremacists who controlled the state party apparatus, President Lyndon Johnson directed Hoover to conduct covert surveillance of Hamer and her fellow activists.

Hamer’s televised first-hand account before the Credentials Committee at that convention, describing how local and state police in Mississippi had beat her savagely for trying to register to vote, riveted the nation.

Hamer was born in 1917 and was one of 20 children in a family of Mississippi sharecroppers who worked corn and cotton. At age 44, with just a grade-school education, she started attending meetings of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was organizing voter registration drives.

The FBI was already conducting illegal wiretaps on Dr. King. After Atlantic City, Hamer was a featured speaker at engagements with Malcolm X in the months that followed. What likely caught Hoover’s attention was the fact that Hamer and Malcolm X’s joint appearances represented a powerful convergence of forces within Black activism.

In an interview on my program on WBAI, New York civil rights and criminal defense attorney Ron Kuby recalled that his former mentor and friend Bill Kunstler attempted in the 1970s to “do exactly the same thing” that Vance did, relying on an affidavit from the confessed killer of Malcolm X.

“That motion went to court and was vigorously opposed by District Attorney Robert Morgenthau,” Kuby recalled. Ultimately Judge Harold Rothwax, whom Kuby described as one of the worst on the New York bench, “denied the motion and these men stayed in prison for another decade or so, until they were paroled.”

Kuby agreed it was a good thing that justice had finally been done in this case — but had more to say. “I have to say, this business of exonerating dead innocent Black people is a good thing,” he said, “but a little more time should be spent a) exonerating living innocent Black people who are behind bars and b) trying to prevent more people from going to jail for crimes they either didn’t commit or they were so over-criminalized there’s no explanation for their incarceration except structural racism.”

Statues are indeed easier to lift. This lost history behind the Malcolm X killing is much heavier.

More on history, racial justice and the surveillance state:

Far-right Michigan Republican known for anti-vaxxer views hospitalized with COVID-19

Time and time again, far-right MAGA Republicans have railed against COVID-19 vaccines, mask mandates and social distancing measures and downplayed the pandemic’s severity — only to be hospitalized with the potentially deadly coronavirus. A recent example is William Hartmann, former vice-chairman of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers in Michigan. The Detroit Metro Times is reporting that Hartmann, known for his anti-vaxxer views, is in intensive care after being infected with COVID-19.

The Metro Times’ Steve Neavling, on November 24, reported, “William Hartmann, former vice-chairman of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, has been on a ventilator since about November 6, according to his sister Elizabeth Hartmann. Two sources confirmed to Metro Times that Hartmann has been in intensive care since early November. The status of his health is unclear.”

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William Hartmann has repeatedly attacked Democratic vaccination campaigns from Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and President Joe Biden. Whitmer held a lottery to encourage vaccinations in her state, and on July 30, Hartmann visited Facebook and wrote, “If the ouchie is so great, why do they have to offer bribes?”

Unvaccinated former GOP Vice Chair of the Wayne Co (MI) Bd of Supervisors William Hartman is on a ventilator this Thanksgiving with covid. He refused to verify the 2020 election, said covid was “hullabaloo,” and compared mandates to Nazi Germany. https://t.co/64YfdUsKNi

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) November 25, 2021

The MAGA Republican was engaging in coronavirus denial as far back as February 2020. In a Facebook February 27, 2020 Facebook post, William Hartmann wrote, “I was at the Doctor’s the other day, yes again, and we were talking about the CoronaVirus. I asked if I should be concerned. He said it’s just a virus like any other virus, nothing to be concerned about. So why all the hullabaloo in the media about it. He thinks it’s all about the money. Follow the money. Lots of corporations and people are making a ton of money off this thing. Like always wash your hands if you go out. Just be health conscious.”

The virus that William Hartmann described as “nothing to be concerned about” has, according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, killed more than 5.1 million people worldwide and over 775,000 people in the United States.

In addition to his anti-vaxxer and anti-masker views, William Hartmann has been a promoter of the Big Lie — the false, totally debunked conspiracy theory that Donald Trump really won the 2020 presidential election but was robbed of a victory because of widespread voter fraud. Hartmann, in November 2020, initially voted against certifying the presidential election results in Wayne County, but later agreed to certify them.

At this point, the majority of people being hospitalized with COVID-19 in Michigan are unvaccinated. Neavling noted that Hartmann has “criticized the vaccine and compared government COVID-19 efforts to Nazi Germany.”

The Metro Times reporter wrote, “Hartmann’s hospitalization is just the latest cautionary tale in a country where the virus and vaccine have become politicized and scientific research is often dismissed.”

Everything we know about the Omicron COVID-19 variant

There’s a new COVID-19 variant on the scene, and the heavily mutated strain has experts worried about the potential for another devastating spike in cases this winter.

The variant, originally named B.1.1.529, was first identified in South Africa Wednesday, and has since been discovered across three continents.

The World Health Organization named it “Omicron” Friday, calling it a “variant of concern” — the agency’s most serious designation — just as a number of countries around the world enacted a new round of travel restrictions to combat its spread. The last variant to earn the category was Delta, which was responsible for a deadly resurgence of the virus earlier this year.

“Omicron, B.1.1.529, is named as a variant of concern because it has some concerning properties,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on Covid-19, said on Twitter. “This variant has a large number of mutations, and some of these mutations have some worrying characteristics.”

The Technical Advisory Group on SARS-CoV-2 Virus Evolution met today to review what is known about the #COVID19 variant B.1.1.529.
They advised WHO that it should be designated a Variant of Concern.
WHO has named it Omicron, in line with naming protocols https://t.co/bSbVas9yds pic.twitter.com/Gev1zIt1Ek

— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) November 26, 2021

But scientists have also spent the last few days cautioning the public about jumping ahead of still-limited research on the subject — there’s a lot that remains unknown about the new variant and its severity, ability to bypass immunity and contagiousness, among other things.

In an interview on CNN Friday, White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci called the news a “red flag,” but insisted that there is “no indication” that the new variant has made its way to the United States yet.

“Right now you’re talking about sort of like a red flag that this might be an issue — but we don’t know,” Dr. Fauci said.

Here’s everything we do know so far about the newly discovered Omicron variant:

Where has the Omicron variant been identified?

The newest COVID-19 strain was first identified in South Africa on Wednesday from a sample that was collected earlier in the month, according to the WHO. It has since been located in four other countries: Belgium, Botswana, Hong Kong and Israel. Just a few dozen cases have been confirmed across these countries, which experts were quick to point out may not necessarily be the origin point for the variant.

South Africa appears to have the most confirmed cases of Omicron so far, according to The New York Times. 58 were reportedly concentrated in the bustling province of Gauteng, which is home to the country’s capital of Johannesburg, while the WHO said the number of Omicron cases “appears to be increasing” in all of the country’s provinces.

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South African health minister Dr. Joe Phaahla said Friday that the cases that have been identified so far have largely affected young people, the cohort with the lowest vaccination rate in the country — just over 25%.

Six people tested positive for Omicron in Botswana, as well as two in Hong Kong and one unvaccinated person in Belgium who had traveled recently from Egypt.

In response to this news, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control estimated Friday that there was a “high to very high” risk that it would spread across the continent.

How is this strain different from previously identified COVID-19 variants?

Scientists identified more than 30 mutations on the Omicron COVID-19 variant cell’s spike protein, which the virus uses to breach host cells. This structure is also the main way antibodies fight against the virus, which is why experts have begun to sound the alarm: the large number of mutations may make the Omicron variant more likely to evade the body’s defenses built up by either a previous infection or a vaccine — though more research is still needed to determine whether this is the case.

It is common for viruses to mutate — though these mutations do not necessarily mean that the new strain will spread more easily or prove more deadly. A number of other variants whose emergences were greeted with concern did not live up to the hype, though some, like Delta, have proved to be cause for concern.

The WHO did note in a statement that it anticipates an increased rate of reinfection due to Omicron, though it remains unclear whether it will prove more transmissible or more deadly.

“Preliminary evidence suggests an increased risk of reinfection with this variant, as compared to other VOCs [variants of concern],” the organization said.

The New York Times also reports that researchers studying the variant believe it may have first evolved in someone with the autoimmune disease H.I.V., whose antibodies could not properly fight the virus. Instead, the Omicron variant likely spent months mutating within this person, virologist Theodora Hatziioannou of Rockefeller University told the newspaper.

“This virus has seen a lot of antibodies,” Dr. Hatziioannou said.

How effective are vaccines against Omicron?

The short story, experts say, is that it remains unclear how effective the available vaccines will prove against Omicron.

“Epidemiologists are trying to say, ‘Easy, tiger,'” William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told the New York Times Friday. “This could be bad. This could be very bad. But we don’t know enough to roll that tape forward.”

The good news is that it seems unlikely that Omicron will make vaccines irrelevant entirely.

When asked about the likelihood of the new variant bypassing vaccines, Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told CNN that he thought that situation was “exceedingly unlikely.”

“The question is, is there a tiny hit to vaccine efficacy, or is there a large hit?” he said. “I think we’ll get some preliminary data probably in the next few days.”

What are vaccine makers doing in response to the situation?

Vaccine makers, for their part, say they’re remaining vigilant and have begun making contingency plans for the chance Omicron proves more resistant to vaccine protection.

Pfizer and BioNTech, the first vaccine manufacturers to receive full approval from the Food and Drug Administration, told FOX Business Network Friday that it would be able to produce a new vaccine within 100 days should the Omicron variant escape the protection of its initial inoculation.

“As always, we will continue to follow the science as we examine the best approaches to protecting people against COVID-19,” Pfizer wrote in a statement. “In the event that vaccine-escape variant emerges, Pfizer and BioNTech expect to be able to develop and produce a tailor-made vaccine against that variant in approximately 100 days, subject to regulatory approval.”

Likewise, Johnson & Johnson told the network it was testing the effectiveness of its vaccine against the newly identified variant.

CNN also reports that Moderna plans to test both an Omicron-specific booster and whether a larger dose of its original vaccine will prove more effective, saying it expects to have preliminary data within a few weeks.

“The combination of mutations represents a significant potential risk to accelerate the waning of natural and vaccine-induced immunity,” the company wrote in a statement, saying Omicron’s contained mutations “seen in the Delta variant that are believed to increase transmissibility and mutations seen in the Beta and Delta variants that are believed to promote immune escape.”

What policy measures are American officials and world leaders taking?

President Joe Biden responded to Friday’s news by banning travel to South Africa and seven other countries: Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Namibia, Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe. The travel ban is set to begin Monday.

The European Union also set a temporary travel ban from most of Southern Africa, the bloc announced Friday.

Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Singapore, Iran, Dubai, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Jordan also instituted restrictions on travel from South Africa, reports said.

In response to the flurry of announcements, South African officials expressed disappointment with those nations — including health minister Dr. Joe Phaahla, who told the BBC that the bans were “unjustified.”

“The reaction of some of the countries, in terms of imposing travel bans, and such measures, are completely against the norms and standards as guided by the World Health Organization,” he said.

But South Africa wasn’t the only nation adversely impacted by this week’s news — global stocks suffered a steep nosedive Friday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling more than 1,000 points.

The trend affected nearly all industries, with oil, travel and banks suffering the steepest declines.

“Lyric writing is not easy”: Michael Stipe looks back on creating REM’s “New Adventures of Hi-Fi”

When R.E.M. was still an ongoing concern, the division of musical labor looked something like this: The instrumentalists— bassist Mike Mills, guitarist Peter Buck and, prior to 1997, drummer Bill Berry — worked up music. Then they’d hand these demos over to vocalist Michael Stipe, who would then respond to what he heard and write lyrics.

On 1996’s “New Adventures in Hi-Fi” (which was recently reissued as a deluxe package) Stipe looked outward. His lyrics drew on varied inspirations — the American west, mean-spirited talk shows, grief, gender, and people prone to self-destruction — and capture the whiplash of trying to process big feelings and big emotions while your life is a nonstop whirlwind. However, it’s also a deeply empathetic album, and the themes and ideas he explores feel very contemporary and forward-thinking.

Calling from Athens, Georgia, in October 2021, Stipe is busier than ever. He recently released a book of photographs, “Michael Stipe: Portraits Still Life,” and contributed the foreword to “Familiar” by his long-time friend, the artist and photographer Christy Bush. Stipe is also currently working on solo music with musician Andy LeMaster, who fronted the band Now It’s Overhead. (The group opened for R.E.M. in 2004.) In fact, he says he was up until 7 a.m. the morning of our conversation.

“Andy and I are working diligently on new material, solo material of mine, and it’s great to be able to work with him and compose with him and work on music,” he says. “I’ve worked with R.E.M. as an arranger a lot, but I didn’t actually write or have much to do with the writing of the music, so that’s really a new way to approach music for me. And one that I needed, I think, as a solo artist. It was necessary for me to approach it from a very different perspective than what I was accustomed to.”

I’ve been reading many of the recent interviews you’ve done about your photo book, and I find it fitting that we’re talking about “New Adventures in Hi-Fi.” To me, that album has always felt so informed by photography, starting with your album cover photo and then just how the songs themselves are like snapshots.

It was Peter Buck [who] wanted me to use my photographs for all the imagery for “New Adventures.” I think he just saw what I was doing on the road the year before and thought that it was fitting [for] some of the themes and some of the musical nuances and landscapes that those guys were creating in 1995 when we were on tour and recording. And so, yeah, I was very flattered by that and thrilled to come up with something that works for the project.

At the time, we were really exploring the idea of doing… [Back in 1982] Springsteen had put out “Nebraska,” and it was this very, very different type of sidestep for him as an artist several years into a career and legacy. And so with “New Adventures,” that was a bit of where it looked like we could push the project in that direction. And so we did. With the use of black and white photography, it was a pretty direct lift. But it worked.

I’m very, very proud of the visuals that go along with [the album], from the music videos to packaging itself. And when we go back and re-explore [with] these 25th anniversary re-releases, I’m able to go in and find contact sheets with images of us. I was 36 at the time. We were hot. And [we] took pictures that no one’s ever seen before and [can] present those to, not only our old fans, but possibly to another generation of listeners, so that’s thrilling for me.

R.E.M.’s “New Adventures in Hi-Fi” cover art (Craft Recordings)

When you went back and looked and re-listened to the music, what were your thoughts 25 years later? What came to your mind?

“New Adventures” has been historically my favorite R.E.M. album, and it hasn’t been bumped out of [my] No. 1 spot, but it’s been joined with “Reveal,” which is the album that we put out two after “New Adventures.”

I mean, it’s a bit selfish, but [with] my contribution to what we were doing, I had reached a real peak, I think, lyrically and thematically. I’m really proud of the songwriting. I’ve never once thought of myself as a poet, but there’s some actual poetry within some of the lyric writing that I did for those two albums.

I find that interesting, because both of those records are very distinctive within R.E.M.’s catalog, both for very different reasons. “Reveal” to me has always felt like this otherworldly, beautiful [album], almost like an orbiting-in-outer-space, dreamscape-type thing.

Yeah. I think of “Reveal” as kind of a fever dream about summer, about my favorite season, but yeah, it feels like it’s in this really almost quasi-somnambulant, fever dream state. Everything’s a little hazy, like Lana Del Rey [Laughs].

Absolutely — you predicted her!

[Laughs] I would love to have that honor, but I’m afraid I had nothing to do with it. Thank you for that, though.

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As a lyricist, because the songs on “New Adventures” were coming together on the road, did that have any particular different or distinctive influence on what you were coming up with?

Melodically, I was listening from my dressing room while those guys were working at these songs and the arrangements on the road and recording them. And so the melodies are really strong for that reason. I had a year of listening before I even sat down and started working on lyrics for most of the material.

For me, that created this profound difference [from] the usual techniques that I would employ to try to bring my very best contribution to the work. That amount of time was something that we never, ever had. And that I certainly never had. I was always the last one to hand in my homework, as it were, and actually completely finish the songs.

Lyric writing is not easy, and I don’t need a pat on the back for it, but it’s just a really different thing to work with words and ideas and narratives, than putting chords together and creating and arranging music. The music speaks to a very different part of our brain and our heart than other mediums. And lyric is like “The Colossus of Maroussi” over the bay of these different mediums. . . . Wow, that was quite an analogy I just [made]. Sorry about that.

It’s spanning these two great mediums. One is writing and perhaps literary-based the other is music, and they touch very different parts of our soul and our heart and our brain.

When it works, it really works. If it doesn’t work, it’s the thing you don’t ever want to be in your work, or in what you present to people outside of your immediate circle of intimates is, “His work is mediocre.” . . . As I grew more confident as an adult, I became okay with the failures, as well as the triumphs. Hopefully. R.E.M. was never a band that presented mediocre material.

As a fan, I would agree with that. Being on the road, you do get into a groove, and you are running on a different level of cylinders rather than being at home. Do you think that contributed to why everyone was at their peak?

Well, you’re in a profoundly adrenalized state. And if you’re a touring act, that continues for the better part of a year, or a year-and-a-half in our case, that adrenalized state is fight-or-flight-level hypersensitivity. And what’s coming out of you as a creative artist or as a creative person is going to be entirely heightened by that.

It more, really, resonated with the guys who were writing the music and arranging those songs. By then, with me, I was really focused during the tour on the performance that night and not on writing lyrics.

But “E-Bow the Letter” was something that happened during a soundcheck. I just remembered this letter that I had written, and I ran back to my dressing room and pulled it out of my bag and walked up on stage and just recited. And it’s a recitation, that song.

Part of its beauty is that I’m using my voice in a very different way than we’re used to hearing it. And it’s really this avalanche of ideas and thoughts that separately don’t really mean a whole lot but, in combination with each other and as a single thought, present a very, very different and a very profoundly good, beautiful image.

[Plus] I had relocated to the West Coast, and so being in Los Angeles, I had a whole other set of histories and narratives to play off of as a lyricist and to explore. And that’s certainly a very different vista than the American east and New York City.

R.E.M. New Adventures in Hi-Fi (Chris Bilheimer)

What made the west so distinctive from the south or the east, just in terms of as a writer? What riches does it give for you?

That’s such a giant question. Peter’s grandfather was the sheriff of L.A. County for a long time. And Peter would tell stories of being young and his grandfather would find headless bodies in the desert, and it was connected to water rights. This was in the 1970s.

From the gumshoe detective novels in the 1940s and ’50s to this idea of what we would now call colonization — but at the time anyway, it felt like this new world that we were exploring and a new way of thinking about who we are and how we populate the places that we decide to settle and the difficulties that come with that. It just was, topically and emotionally, a very rich place to tap.

I arrived at a place where I had my stay in Los Angeles. And now I’m just repelled by the city, as one of the most isolating places on earth. And I’m actually somewhat allergic to L.A. now. I apologize all the time to my friends who live there because they’re really good people, all of them, but I can’t spend more than three or four days there without wanting to just jump in a car and leave.

At the same time, you know, my adopted city and home, New York City, just at the time for me, felt really sad and dark, and I had to leave there and going west was a good place for me to go.

I also want to talk about “New Test Leper,” because reading the liner notes for the reissue, it was really striking to me how that was a song everyone really gravitated toward. And I really saw the song through new eyes and a new light in reading what you all said about the song.

The character in “New Test Leper” is suggesting that he/she is not a fan of Jesus, but a fan of Jesus’ idea. So, I’m not a follower, but a fan, I guess is how you would say. For me, that song was really important, because I threw away seven drafts of different lyrics. And I when I say draft, we’re talking a notebook of ideas, seven times. And I arrived at this by watching a daytime TV show where this person came on in what we would have at the time called transvestite drag and tried to present themselves and explain why their desire to dress as a woman was important to them. [This] was met with ridicule and a lot of shrugging and raised eyebrows and pearl clutching.

And so the song is about this realization on camera and in real time that this person had — and I’m referring to them as they. I’m just using the vernacular of today to do so. But it really precedes this revolution of ideas in Western culture about what gender is and what it means to us, and that it goes beyond the body that we’re born into. And identity is deeper and much more profound than this very 18th, 19th, and 20th century idea of simplistic, black-and-white division, abstracted, binary ideas.

Anyway, from the title, which of course references the New Testament to the idea of being a leper, as placed in scripture, bringing that up to the end of the 20th century and into the 21st century. This character suddenly looking back becomes quite prescient and quite lovable in their attempts to suggest that there’s more than this binary way of thinking about gender and thinking about identity.

And I love that, because you’re right. Every ’80s and ’90s talk show, that’s exactly what it was. It was, “Let’s put these people who we think are freaks on display.” And I use that term loosely; that’s what they were perceived as. It’s so mean, and mean-spirited, when you look back on it now. It’s very upsetting.

At the very beginning [season] of those [music audition] shows [like “American Idol”], those were just as brutal and mean-spirited and freak on parade as you could get. And whether it was the producers or Simon Cowell doing it, it’s shocking to me that it didn’t end in violence, the way that they would pull people up who were clearly not going to become the next Adele or the next Sia. The people were put on display on TV, really, for laughs. It was ethically brutal and horrible.

I was mortified by it, frankly. And I think he softened as the shows moved on, and they don’t do that as much now, but they certainly did play it for laughs in the early days.

I think that’s right — and it’s such a welcome change. It’s a little bit kinder and gentler.

Yeah. There’s one example. She’s a British singer, Susan Boyle. Oh my God. The most astonishing voice. And what a beautiful energy she has. But clearly, when she walked on stage, it was played for laughs. The producers knew that she had that voice and that she would knock the show sideways, and in fact, she did. Took her time, but anyway, it was done.

In the boxed set, there is a prominent image with the band and Patti Smith. Where was that photo from and why that was so important to center that in the box set imagery this time?

Well, obviously, Patti Smith means so much to us as a band. We all credit her with bringing us together as a band through our mutual love of her work. To be able to work with her side-by-side was really a huge draw. She flew to Seattle to record her vocal part for “E-Bow the Letter,” and the photograph was taken there. I think it was Chris Bilheimer who took it. He’s [R.E.M.’s] graphic designer, who I worked with very closely on all the packaging from “Monster” forward up to now, up to this package.

For me, the thrill looking back 25 years, is to be able to see with a great deal of distance. When I was 23, I wrote songs about not being able to imagine myself as a 30-year-old. I’m now twice that age plus, and looking back, it’s fascinating to see who we were as people, who we were as a unit, as a writing band and a touring band, and being able to pull those influences.

But looking at the videos, looking at the artwork that we chose, looking at the B-sides, looking at the alternative tapes, and then, as I mentioned earlier, going into the archives to pull contact sheets of images by people as profoundly talented as Anton Corbijn, and looking at these pictures that had never published before, putting that together as a package for not only our old fans, but also a new generation of potential listeners, for me, it’s thrilling. It makes me bristle with excitement that we did that well back then. We did something, really, quite extraordinary.

And as I jokingly mentioned earlier, and I’ve said this a few times, We were really hot! And it’s kind of nice to look back and be like, “Wow, we knew how to take a picture. So let’s put these pictures out into the world.”

You and Patti are still connected, and in the liner notes, you mentioned that she helped influence your writing. As a lyricist, where did you find yourself going after that, after having that experience recording with her?

I watched . . . I had no idea how she did what she did. At that point, she had just come back to touring, but I watched her in the studio. We all were just unbelievably fascinated by her process. She listened to the song. She found something that she liked, and she hung onto it and she just started riffing on it. And we were able to pull from that and put together the vocal part that she built for that song.

And it’s an odd song. It’s an actual . . . in a lifetime of writing lyrics, I am not [an] autobiographic writer at all, but from time to time, something lands, and it just connects, in a way. And so this was somewhat autobiographic. It is actually a letter that I wrote, and we found a line to repeat to create the chorus, and Patti just riffed on that and built this beautiful part out of it.

And that’s such a skill. I mean, you talked about how that can take so long to write lyrics sometimes and to riff on something. For that to come out like that almost instinctually is an amazing gift. It’s like people who can sight read music or improvise.

Well, it’s a confidence and a lack of fear of one’s abilities that I deeply admire. And you know, she’s presented it in her work over and over and over and over again. I’m doing something for another media outlet and talking about the song, “My Blakean Year.” Obviously, I’m a fan, and she’s family now and we’re great friends, but standing back from that objectively, it’s one of the best written lyrics of all time. I mean, it’s absolutely brilliant.

With the gift of retirement and hindsight, do you think that “New Adventures” was a turning point for the band or an ending of sorts, a closing of a chapter?

Well, it was a closing of a chapter for sure, of us as a four-piece, but we didn’t know it at the time. I don’t think Bill even recognized while we were making that record that he was ready to retire. And we became a three-piece shortly after that record was released. It was a real turning point.

But part of what I appreciate about it . . . you know, I’ve never really aligned myself with rock and roll. I’ve never felt like a “rock star,” and I’m putting giant parentheses around that. I am just much more like a punk rocker hippie who used pop music . . . and alternative, you know. We helped spearhead this idea of an alternative to the mainstream, but to push our very specific ideas of what we had to offer through the mainstream.

And yet “New Adventures in Hi-Fi” presents us as a four-piece working band that were really as a four-piece we were at a peak during the writing and recording of that record. And I’m very proud of the results.

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Jeremy Renner on what’s missing from Marvel movies

A couple of years ago, “Goodfellas” director Martin Scorsese famously said that Marvel movies were “not cinema,” instead likening them to attractions at amusement parks. “It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

Theaters have become amusement parks. That is all fine and good but don’t invade everything else in that sense. That is fine and good for those who enjoy that type of film and, by the way, knowing what goes into them now, I admire what they do. It’s not my kind of thing, it simply is not. It’s creating another kind of audience that thinks cinema is that.

Those comments stirred a lot of debate among fans and Hollywood insiders alike, with MCU mainstays like Samuel L. Jackson, James Gunn and Robert Downey Jr. all weighing in to gently disagree with Scorsese. Obviously, no one who’s making a living off the Marvel universe was openly going to agree that it wasn’t cinema, right?

Jeremy Renner talks Marvel movies vs “The Hurt Locker”: “That’s not cinema”

Probably not, but Jeremy Renner (Hawkeye) comes closer than anyone else in a new “Men’s Health” cover story. He remembered the reaction he got for playing Sergeant First Class William James in the 2010 war movie “The Hurt Locker,” which explored William’s stressful job defusing bombs during the Iraq War as well as his difficulty reintegrating into civilian life. If you haven’t seen it, the movie is really good, and Renner got something out of it he never got playing Hawkeye.

“So many soldiers would come up to me like, ‘This is something I cannot explain to my wife. Now she can watch and have a f**king understanding of what the f**k I’m talking about,'” Renner said, remembering one encounter in particular as his eyes welled up with tears. “It helped their marriage. They were going to get divorced. They’re done. This guy did like eight tours — f**king eight tours. Insane.”

“This is not cinema. We’re not talking about people sitting at this theater and eating popcorn and watching a movie. A different thing was happening. … It was amazing, man. I don’t get that out of a Marvel movie.

I think there’s an instinct to read something like this and retreat to either the “Marvel movies are cinema” or “Marvel movies aren’t cinema” camps. But I don’t think he’s condemning Marvel movies here, just acknowledging that they don’t serve the same purpose as a more substantive movie like “The Hurt Locker.” There’s nothing wrong with films being made just to entertain, and Marvel movies are very entertaining even if they’re not the deepest films in the world.

Renner’s new Marvel TV show, “Hawkeye,” premieres on Disney+ on November 24.

Donald Trump still livid Bob Woodward was “allowed” to write books about him

Donald Trump on Friday questioned whether Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Bob Woodward was “allowed” publish books about him.

Woodward was not granted his interview requests for his 2018 book Fear: Inside the White House. Trump then agreed to 18 interviews for his 2020 book, Rage. The final book in his trilogy, Peril, was published on Sept. 21 and co-written with Robert Costa.

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“Does anybody really believe that longtime Con Man Bob Woodward, and his lightweight lapdog assistant Robert Costa, are implying in their book of fiction that I was planning to go to war with China, but that one of the dumber generals in the military called the Chinese to tell them that he will inform them if this action proceeds further. Milley may have called, but if so, he should be tried for treason. I never had even a thought of going to war with China, other than the war I was winning, which was on TRADE,” Trump argued in a statement.

“To make up stories like this and to sell it to the public is disgraceful. I watched that craggy smug face of Woodward as he ‘bullsh*ts’ the public and said to myself, ‘I wonder if history will really believe this stuff?’ How do you get your reputation back?” Trump wondered. “I was the only President in decades to not get us into a war—I got us out of wars!”

“Our Country has been taken over by Scammers and Hoaxsters, and we have to take it back. Just like the Russia, Russia, Russia Scam has now been totally debunked and discredited as a FAKE Democrat/Crooked Hillary Plot, the ‘go to war with China’ story is even more ridiculous. It’s incredible that someone is even allowed to write this stuff,” Trump said ominously. “We no longer talk about greatness for our Country, everything is about political investigations, hoaxes, and scams.”

How one discredited 1998 study paved the way for today’s anti-vaxxers

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic and the concomitant vaccine, the anti-vaccination movement was mainly identified with one very specific myth: the idea that vaccines cause autism.

Aside from being patently offensive to neurodiverse and autistic people (including this writer), version 1.0 of the anti-vax movement was also dangerous because its adherents made it easier for infectious diseases to spread. This wasn’t just a theoretical fear: local measles outbreaks in places like Disneyland that occurred with greater frequency throughout the 2010s were tied to the increasing number of anti-vaxxers, who had collectively lowered the herd immunity numbers for diseases like measles which were once nearly eradicated in the United States.

Now that COVID-19 has changed the world, it is worth reexamining the legacy of that autism-related controversy, which may have proven to be the “original sin” that led us to this dismal moment in which anti-COVID-vaccination misinformation is rife. That means turning our eye to the inglorious career of a man named Andrew Wakefield.

Wakefield’s wake

Once a British doctor, Wakefield is infamous for being the lead author of a 1998 case series that studied links between autism and digestive conditions — and, he claimed, documented changes in behavior in children who were given the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR vaccine). Over time, this mutated into a claim that MMR vaccines could cause autism, prompting an international panic.

Because Wakefield’s study had been published in a distinguished medical journal (The Lancet), his claims quickly circulated and influenced millions of parents to not let their children get vaccinated at an age when, they believed erroneously, they could be at risk of developing autism. This trend persisted despite the fine print within the study: notably, it included no data about the MMR vaccine, its conclusions were speculative, it had been poorly designed, and the researchers had only studied a small sample of patients. Other critics observed that, because autism is usually diagnosed at the same young age when MMR vaccines are supposed to be administered, the study could dupe impressionable parents into thinking the timing of their child’s autism diagnosis was linked to the inoculation. These fears proved founded; measles outbreaks surged as more and more people followed Wakefield’s uninformed advice. By 2019, the United States was experiencing its worst measles outbreak since 1994.

Soon, the people who merely suspected something fishy in Wakefield’s study were given more than mere clues. Other scientists were unable to reproduce Wakefield’s findings, which is crucial for scientific studies to be considered valid. Then, in 2004, Wakefield was hit with a double whammy: An investigation by Sunday Times reporter Brian Deer demonstrated that Wakefield had financial conflicts of interest he had not disclosed when publishing his report. It was revealed that Wakefield had established several autism-related medical businesses, but their success was predicated on establishing links between MMR vaccines and a likely-fabricated disease called “autistic entercolitis.” On top of that, 10 of the 12 scientists who co-authored the paper retracted it on the grounds that “no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism as the data were insufficient.”

By 2010 The Lancet fully retracted the paper, admitting that it was riddled with scientific errors and that the authors had behaved unethically, in no small part by studying children without the required clearances. Wakefield was ultimately stripped of his ability to practice medicine, although he continues to stand by his findings and insists he was mistreated.

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A direct line can be drawn between Wakefield’s assertions about MMR vaccines and the rhetoric about COVID-19 vaccines (an issue where Wakefield is also anti-science, but has not emerged as a prominent voice). Studies have repeatedly found that general vaccine skepticism increased as a direct result of Wakefield’s study; just last August, researchers writing for the scientific journal PLOS One again confirmed that vaccine hesitancy went up after Wakefield’s paper came out.

“The Wakefield et al paper arrived at an interesting time in history,” epidemiologist Dr. René Najera told Salon in June. “The internet was growing. The 24-hour news cycle was growing. People like Jenny McCarthy and others were becoming ‘influencers.’ His paper only brought to the forefront fears that many parents had: that vaccines caused developmental delays. Before 1998, you didn’t have the internet as a bullhorn, or time to interview or showcase celebrities.”

While hesitation about vaccines existed before Wakefield, the British doctor made it possible for misinformation to do something that had previously only occurred in the world of epidemics: achieving virality. Even after Wakefield himself sank into obscurity, other anti-vaccine activists emerged to take his place. By normalizing the practice of questioning vaccines without regard to reliable medical knowledge, they laid the foundations for the denial of the COVID-19 vaccines that is so prevalent today.

Wakefield may not be one of the so-called “disinformation dozen” — social media voices today who create two-thirds of all anti-vaxxer content online — but he is their forefather. Without Wakefield, it is hard to imagine that the anti-vaccination movement would have been so loud before the pandemic that it would metastasize during it, to the extent that millions of Americans now view opposing vaccines as a crucial part of their identity.

Despite the claims made by Wakefield and others, there is no evidence that vaccines are in any way linked to autism. There is also no evidence that the COVID-19 vaccines are either unsafe or ineffective — or, as some kooks claim, have microchips in them. Autism refers to a broad range of neurological conditions that many doctors argue should not even be considered “unhealthy,” and which certainly are not induced by vaccinations. Vaccines work by training your immune system to protect the body against pathogens (microorganisms that cause disease) by either introducing a weakened or dead part or whole of that pathogen into the body, or by teaching the cells to make proteins associated with a specific pathogen so that the invader can be identified and eliminated.

Why plaintiffs may have hard time collecting $26M in damages from Unite the Right organizers

On Tuesday, November 23, a jury in Virginia found that a group of White nationalists and White supremacists who organized the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017 were guilty of a conspiracy — and the plaintiffs were awarded $26 million in damages. But reporting from the Associated Press stresses that collecting the money may be challenging, as some of the Unite the Right organizers are broke.

According to AP, “Whether they will be able to collect a significant chunk of that money remains to be seen. Many of the defendants are in prison, in hiding or have dropped out of the White nationalist movement. At least three of the far-right extremist groups named as defendants have dissolved. And most of the defendants claim they will never have the money needed to pay off the judgments against them.”

One of those defendants is Matthew Heimbach, who co-founded a neo-Nazi group called the Traditionalist Worker Party with Matthew Parrott, another defendant in the case. AP reports that Heimbach “said he is a single father to two young sons, works at a factory and lives paycheck to paycheck.” And White nationalist Richard Spencer, before the trial in the case, told a judge that the lawsuit has been “financially crippling” for him.

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AP notes, “Even with the many obstacles to collecting the full $26 million judgment, there are ways to secure at least some of it. Typically, plaintiffs’ lawyers will seek court orders to seize assets, garnish wages and place liens on property owned by defendants.”

Attorney James Kolenich, who has represented three of the defendants in the lawsuit, told AP, “I don’t think any of them could afford to pay out of pocket these damages. We are going to do what we can to cut this down to size.”

But Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernadino, believes that plaintiffs may be able to collect at least some of the money because there are so many defendants in the lawsuit. In other words, payments here and there could add up.

Levin told AP, “The thing that’s different about this case is you have a wide array of defendants. Some of them are currently locked up or destitute, but they might have assets, (insurance) policies or real estate that could be recoverable.”

Famous ex-neo-Nazi shifts focus: America is becoming “the skinhead’s dream of the 1990s”

“I’ve been at war for 30 years,” Christian Picciolini says, intensity widening his eyes, “I’m ready to go home.”

His homeward journey involves leaving the work that has consumed his life for the past two decades: disengaging white extremists from neo-Nazi organizations or similar groups. Physically and emotionally exhausted, wrestling with PTSD and panic attacks, and dealing with death threats on a regular basis, Picciolini says he has no choice but to stop working one-on-one with white extremists attempting to reform their lives.

“If I don’t stop doing this, I could burn out and be no good to anybody, or I could die,” Picciolini said, explaining that it’s not just his own psyche he is trying to save, but also multiracial democracy in the United States. “There is a greater danger on the horizon, and I’m going to focus on that full time,” he said.

As former leader of Chicago Area Skinheads (CASH) and lead singer of the hate-rock band the Final Solution, Picciolini has devoted the past 21 years of his life to anti-racism advocacy and outreach young extremists. He makes no excuses for the brutal reality of his past. “I hurt many people, and the music I made as a teenager influenced people like Dylann Roof” — the young white man who murdered nine Black worshipers at a South Carolina church in 2015.

“I’ll have to live with that,” Picciolini said. What began more than two decades ago with asking for forgiveness directly from the people he had harassed or assaulted, along with their communities, eventually grew into the world’s most successful effort at disengagement or “deradicalization” — a word Picciolini avoids — effort in the world. That work has given him an up-close view of how the political and legal institutions of the United States are failing, he says, to adequately address the rising tide of white hate. Democratic politicians and most mainstream media reporters and commentators, he believes, are also frozen in denial regarding the escalation of fascist politics in the Republican Party.

Citing his experience, observations and research, Picciolini offers a devastating rebuttal to those who believe American democracy is indestructible.

I recently sat down with him for an interview in a quiet restaurant in suburban Chicago, where we both grew up. I asked how he feels about America’s future, particularly Donald Trump’s apparent consolidation of power within the increasingly autocratic Republican Party, and Trump’s likely candidacy for the presidency in 2024. He said, “I’m terrified.”

In 2017, Picciolini spoke to an audience in Hungary: “I told them, ‘Based on everything I know and everything I’ve seen throughout my life, you are in big trouble.” Three years later, the international nonprofit House of Freedom demoted Hungary from a “semi-consolidated democracy” to a “hybrid regime,” reflecting Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s autocratic assault against the nation’s remaining democratic institutions.

Picciolini recently spoke with the House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6, and sounded the same theme he has repeated to American officials and voters for decades. There is perhaps a painful irony here: In some ways, American society has gone the opposite direction from the trajectory of Picciolini’s life.

At age of 14, in the late 1980s, Picciolini met a charismatic neo-Nazi recruiter in a dark alleyway of Blue Island, Illinois, a working-class Chicago suburb. Within a few years, he would rise to the top of his recruiter’s violent, white supremacist organization, recruiting other members, committing hate crimes and even exporting “white power” propaganda on a trip to Europe. Picciolini tells the fascinating details of his redemption story, and how he renounced the white power movement, becoming both antiracist and anti-capitalist, in his memoir, “White American Youth: My Descent Into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement — and How I Got Out.”

The most heartbreaking element in Piccioini’s chronicle of transformation is the murder of his younger brother. They were 10 years apart in age, but Picciolini says when they were young, they were inseparable: “We were each other’s entire world.” he said. Then Picciolini’s world became the white hate movement, and his brother’s world fell apart. Two of his close friends became members of the Latin Kings, a criminal street gang on the South Side of Chicago. Picciolini, having left his own violent gang, tried to warn his brother what lay ahead. “I told him, ‘I’ve been on the road you’re on, and it is going to end badly,'” he recalled. But his brother’s anger over Picciolini’s earlier abandonment of the family undermined any advice he could offer.

In 2004, at the age of 20, Picciolini’s brother, riding in a car with his friends to an apparent drug transaction, was killed by members of a rival gang. “For a long time, I felt like my brother got the bullet that was meant for me,” Picciolini said. “I’ve tried to be the guy for other young men that my brother needed before he died. I’ve tried to be the guy who can help people like my brother. When everyone else sees the monster, I can still see the child, and I try bringing that child back.”

Since Picciolini’s disavowal of white supremacy, he has worked as an advocate for hate crime prevention, racial equity and progressive politics, through books, speaking tours and a three-episode documentary series for MSNBC, which shares the title of his second book, “Breaking Hate: Confronting the New Culture of Extremism.” Picciolini now describes himself as a “white nationalist translator,” saying, “I still understand their language, symbols and movements. That enables me to go to law enforcement, policymakers and journalists and explain what is happening.”

As Picciolini has transitioned from hate leader to democratic healer, he has watched significant sectors of American society, including a major political parties, defend, excuse and sometimes embrace the ideology of white supremacy.

“Everything happening right now is the skinhead’s dream of the 1990s coming true,” Picciolini told me. “Donald Trump’s ideas are not new, but he has made people in influential positions comfortable in expressing racism. In a relatively short time, we’ve gone from not talking about these things, even if they were always there, to no longer feeling shame about it. Tucker Carlson, other right-wing pundits, congressional representatives like Paul Gosar and Mo Brooks, are saying exactly what I was saying when I was a Nazi. They are using softer terms, but the message is the same.”

Picciolini says he understands how this strategy has played out. “We advised infiltration,” he said, “infiltration of law enforcement, the military and political offices with low barrier of entry, like the school board, town council, county election positions. And that’s exactly what we are seeing now: a widespread, coordinated effort for the far right to take power at the local level.”

He specifically means the use of racial paranoia and panic, through invented culture-war issues like “critical race theory” and “voter fraud,” as a pretext for far-right political victories.

What hangs in the balance is the survival of American democracy. Picciolini sees all the political momentum on the right, aided by disruptive foreign agents who manipulate social media to encourage hatred, division and extreme partisanship. Meanwhile, the combination of voter suppression and the “big lie” subversion of faith in fair elections has brought America, in his words, “to the edge of disaster.” At the more immediate level, Picciolini joins many experts, such as genocide scholar Alexander Laban Hinton and political scientist Anthony DiMaggio, in predicting the possibility of mass violence.

White supremacists, according to all the available data, are already responsible for more political violence than any faction since the 9/11 attacks. Hate crimes from lone actors or small groups have steadily increased over the past 12 years, and Picciolini warns, “With people becoming more radicalized, it isn’t a big step for these groups to coordinate larger attacks, especially with leaders like Donald Trump giving encouragement.”

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He worries that law enforcement’s tactical approach is the equivalent of “fighting the war on drugs by going after addicts, and maybe a few street-corner pushers. The traffickers are still out there, and there is an endless supply of addicts and pushers.”

But with the U.S. at a flashpoint, Picciolini stands at a crossroads. For the past 14 years, as he chronicles in “Breaking Hate,” he has counseled members of hate groups on an individual basis, pairing them with psychologists, teachers, clergy members, life coaches or anyone else who can give them the mental health assistance and treatment they desperately need to reform their lives and, even more important, stop them from hurting other people. As he told Susan Bro, the mother of Heather Heyer — the antifascist protester killed in Charlottesville in 2017 — “We need to work so other mothers don’t lose their children.” But the grueling requirements of that work, along with the “endless supply” of people who need it, have left Picciolini exhausted.

Picciolini officially shut down his disengagement services organization, Free Radicals Project, in early November. Meetings with those who have suffered at the hands of American hate, such as Bro, capture the conflict of Picciolini’s decision. “Frankly, I’m tired of helping white men,” Picciolini said before adding that when he has done so he has also insisted on measures of accountability. “I have no interest in being their laundromat,” he said, explaining that members of extremist organizations may begin as victims, but morph into victimizers. Picciolini believes American society must “spend more time discussing and helping the victims,” which mostly means people of color, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, LGBTQ people and members of other marginalized groups.

“Taking bad white men off the street and stopping them from doing bad things stops the cycle of abuse, and does help the victims,” Picciolini said, “But radicalization happens very quickly, and so-called deradicalization takes a long time, sometimes years. There is no way that it can work long-term to prevent extremism throughout the United States.”

Picciolini’s emotional turmoil was palpable as he discussed his change of direction. In his 14 years of disengagement work, he has rarely taken a personal paycheck, instead directing all the funds he receives from speaking fees, donations and book royalties into his organization. He says he is fortunate: His wife has a professional career that can support them both. More debilitating than the material cost, he says, is the pain of constantly contemplating, discussing and dealing with trauma.

Among members of hate groups, he says, a traumatic disturbance of the psyche is perhaps the single most significant commonality. “Trauma creates potholes, and those potholes take a person off the road to a healthy and happy life,” Picciolini said. “I’m a pothole fixer.” Picciolini said. He began to suffer from panic attacks for the first time two years ago, he reports. Now in therapy, and feeling spiritually depleted, he is no longer able to relive trauma on a daily basis: hearing stories of abuse and heartbreak, and revisiting experiences in the white power movement that still darken his memory with shame, guilt and regret.

He does feel gratification for his successful interventions, which number in the hundreds, and that compounds the difficulty of closing down the Free Radicals Project. Picciolini said he recently convinced a young member of Identity Evropa, a neo-Nazi organization, to repudiate white supremacy and rebuild his life. On Jan. 6 of this year, the young man sent Picciolini a text message saying, “Just want to let you know the reason I am not in D.C. now is because of the opportunities you gave me.”

“When I leave, there is going to be a void,” Picciolini says. “No one else is really doing what I do right now.”

That assertion might surprise many Americans, given the newfound focus on white supremacy after Charlottesville and Jan. 6. There are certainly other organizations ostensibly committed to “deradicalization,” but Picciolini expresses suspicion about their authenticity and efficacy. He says he has heard from some hate group members that when they reach out to recently created nonprofit organizations, they hear nothing back.

“After 9/11, there was a cottage industry of terrorism prevention and so-called deradicalization of militant Islamists,” he said. “Just a few weeks ago, the Department of Homeland Security gave $20 million in grant money to organizations claiming to fight homegrown extremism. My worry is we are going to see an ineffective but lucrative ‘deradicalization industry.'”

Some organizations he declines to name, he says, have become “grant machines” by looking for “poster boys,” whether sincere or otherwise, to herald as conversion success stories. The grift, he suggests, is transactional: The organization obtains the grant and a flashy news story, while the supposedly repentant extremist “gets his reputation laundered.”

Those who are genuinely interested in assisting extremists in leaving white-power groups can follow the “blueprint” Picciolini has established, he says. But his concern is that even for those with the best intentions, “It cannot scale to meet the need.”

“It is like I’ve been sent to a hospital emergency room, and there are hundreds of people about to flatline, because they’ve been poisoned, and I’m supposed to save them all,” he said. “In the meantime, the poison is still out there, and I know that within days, another hundred patients are going to come into the ER.”

Picciolini’s former organization, Life After Hate, received a grant during the final months of the Obama administration only to have the incoming Trump administration immediately revoke it — a devastating early harbinger of a presidency that internally passed along articles from white nationalist websites, complimented white supremacists as “very fine people,” and asked the Proud Boys, a violent hate group, to “stand by.”

Picciolini says he will now focus on administering the antidote for the poison of racism, white supremacy and far-right violence” “long term prevention.” Cultivating a society that diminishes the viability of hate organizations and demolishes the ideologies they promulgate, will require a mass political movement, he believes, to reorient public policy toward community, equality and solidarity. Progressive economic policies, expressed through reliable social services, such as education, health care and vibrant public institutions, will create healthier and happier people. Picciloni told me, “Healthy and happy people do not join hate groups.” Central to the policy prevention agenda, he argues, is the demolition of systemic racism. “Institutional racism breeds racists because it creates privilege, and people will fight to keep their privilege,” he said.

Such a political program, Picciolini says, is “the only way to turn off the bigot spigot,” as opposed to dealing exclusively with the outflow on a piecemeal basis. That kind of long term solution is obviously difficult to achieve, since it demands an inversion of political priorities and cultural biases, but he thinks current efforts aimed at short-term mitigation of white extremism are even less likely to succeed.

Among Picciolini’s reasons for ending the Free Radicals Project, perhaps the most alarming is his claim that no one in government or law enforcement is really listening. He recalls giving lectures to police officers and feeling them withdraw, cross their arms and stare at the ceiling. The only questions he receives from most officers concern the supposed dangers of antifa or Black Lives Matter activists. “Police union leaders, whether they’re talking about BLM or vaccines, sound exactly like right-wing extremists,” he said.

Citing recent research by political scientist Robert Pape, Picciolini noted that at least 21 million Americans appear willing to support violence as a pathway toward political victory. “What if research found that millions of Muslim Americans were supportive of ISIS, or millions of Black Lives Matter activists were supportive of violence?” Picciolini asked, leaving the obvious answer hanging in the air.

Recent reporting that Attorney General Merrick Garland fears sentencing Jan. 6 insurrectionists to lengthy prison terms at risk of “further radicalizing them” underlines Picciolini’s condemnation of the Democratic Party: “You’ve heard the phrase, ‘Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight,'” he said. “They’re not even bringing a knife.”

Picciolini is certainly not alone in his sense of foreboding. The Brennan Center for Justice has documented that many police departments have officers with white supremacist sympathies, which clearly compromises efforts to investigate hate organizations and likely leads to more episodes of racial profiling and police brutality. The Brennan report describes internal attempts to combat white extremism within law enforcement as “strikingly insufficient.” A similar problem exists in the military, with the Military Times reporting on the high number of extremists in the armed services. As the Brookings Institution has noted, these crises became viciously manifest on Jan. 6, when law enforcement reacted with leniency, especially compared to the often-violent response to BLM protesters during the summer of 2020.

Ryan Greer, national security director for the Anti-Defamation League, applauds the FBI for allocating more resources to combating the threat of white extremism, and welcomes increased political discussion of the problem, but also warns, “We simply have failed to see the massive scale of effort that is truly needed.”

The consequences of failure are potentially catastrophic. “People always ask me about all the talk of ‘war’ and ‘civil war’ on the right,” Picciolini said. “They say, ‘Do you think there’s going to be war?’ I tell them, ‘It doesn’t matter what I think. If they believe there’s going to be war, they will make sure of it. We’re going to have a war.'”

Christian Picciolini’s description of his own work varied over the course of our conversation. He called himself a “pothole fixer,” a “white nationalist translator” and, by implication, an emergency physician. Although he didn’t use the term, perhaps this is the best way to capture how he hopes to meet this historic moment: He aims to be a peacemaker.

More on the rising danger of resurgent white supremacy:

Florida Sen. Rick Scott off base in claim that rise in Medicare premiums is due to inflation

Republicans blame President Joe Biden for this year’s historic surge in inflation, reflected in higher prices for almost everything — from cars and gas to food and housing. They see last month’s 6.2% annual inflation rate — the highest in decades and mostly driven by an increase in consumer spending and supply issues related to the covid-19 pandemic — as a ticket to taking back control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.

A key voting bloc will be older Americans, and the GOP aims to illustrate how much worse life has grown for them under the Biden administration.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) issued a press release Nov. 16 suggesting that rising general inflation was behind the large increase in next year’s standard premiums for Medicare Part B, which covers physician and some drug costs and other outpatient services.

“Sen. Rick Scott: America’s Seniors Are Paying the Price for Biden’s Inflation Crisis” was the headline. The senator’s statement within that press release said, “We need to be LOWERING health care and drug prices and strengthening this vital program for seniors and future generations, not crippling the system and leaving families to pay the cost.” The press release from Scott says he is “slamming Biden’s inaction to address the inflation crisis he and Washington Democrats have created with reckless spending and socialist policies, which is expected to cause significant price increases on [senior] citizens and Medicare recipients.” Scott’s statement in that same press release also says the administration’s “reckless spending” will leave U.S. seniors “paying HUNDREDS more for the care they need.”

We wondered whether these points were true. Was the climbing annual inflation rate over the past several months to blame for the increase in Medicare Part B premiums?

We reached out to Scott’s office for more detail but received no reply. Upon further investigation, we found there is little, if any, connection between general inflation in the past few months and the increase in Medicare Part B premiums.

What’s the Status of Medicare Premiums?

Medicare Part B premiums have been growing steadily for decades to keep up with rising health spending.

The U.S. inflation rate, for years held at bay, has been above 4% since April, hitting 6.2% in October, the highest rate in decades.

On Nov. 12, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced that the standard monthly premium for Medicare Part B would rise to $170.10 in 2022, from $148.50 this year. The 14.5% increase is the largest one-year increase in the program’s history.

CMS cited three main factors for the increase: rising health care costs, a move by Congress last year that held the premium increase to just $3 a month because of the pandemic, and the need to raise money for a possible unprecedented surge in drug costs. Inflation was not on that list.

In fact, half of the premium increase was due to making sure the program was ready in case Medicare next year decides to start covering Aduhelm, a new Alzheimer’s drug priced at $56,000 per year, per patient. It’s been estimated that total Medicare spending for the drug for one year alone would be nearly $29 billion, far more than any other drug.

How Big a Hit Will Seniors Feel?

The Part B premium is typically subtracted automatically from enrollees’ Social Security checks. Because Social Security recipients will receive a 5.9% cost-of-living increase next year — about $91 monthly for the average beneficiary — they’ll still see a net gain, though a chunk will be eaten away by the hike in Medicare premiums.

Some Medicare beneficiaries won’t face a 14.5% increase, however, because a “hold-harmless” provision in federal law protects them from a decrease in their Social Security payments. But that rule won’t apply for most enrollees in 2022 because the increase in their monthly benefit checks will cover the higher monthly premium, said Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the program on Medicare policy at KFF.

What Role Does Inflation Play?

Several Medicare experts said the spike in the general inflation rate has little or nothing to do with the Medicare premium increase. In fact, Medicare is largely immune from inflation, because the program sets prices for hospitals and doctors.

“This is so false that it is annoying,” Paul Ginsburg, a professor of health policy at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, said of Scott’s claim that general inflation is behind the premium increase. “The effect of the inflation spike so far on prices is zero because Medicare controls prices.”

Medicare Part B premiums, he said, reflect changes in the amount of health services delivered and a more expensive mix of drugs. “Premiums are tracking spending, only a portion of which reflects prices,” Ginsburg said. “I can’t see that the administration really had any discretion” in setting the premium increase due to the need to build a reserve to pay for the Alzheimer’s drug and make up for the reduced increase last year, he said.

Stephen Zuckerman, co-director of the Urban Institute’s health policy center, said a rise in wages caused by inflation could spur a small boost in Medicare spending because wages help determine how much the program pays providers. But, he said, such an increase would have to occur for more than a few months to affect premiums. Continued soaring inflation could influence 2023 Medicare premiums, not those for 2022. “The claim that premium increases are due to inflation in the last couple of months doesn’t make sense,” Zuckerman said.

CMS faced the challenge of trying to estimate costs for an expensive drug not yet covered by Medicare. “It is a very difficult projection to make, and they want to have enough contingency reserved,” said Gretchen Jacobson, a vice president of the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund.

Our Ruling

Scott said in a press release about the 2022 increase in Medicare Part B premiums that “America’s seniors are paying the price for Biden’s inflation crisis.”

Though his statement contains a sliver of truth, Scott’s assertion ignores critical facts that create a different impression.

For instance, Medicare policy experts said, current general inflation has little, if anything, to do with the increase in premiums. CMS said the increase was needed to put away money in case Medicare starts paying for an Alzheimer’s drug that could add tens of billions in costs in one year and to make up for congressional action last year that held down premiums.

We rate the claim Mostly False.

SOURCES:

Telephone interview and emails with Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the Program on Medicare Policy at KFF, Nov. 24, 2021.

Telephone interview with Stephen Zuckerman, co-director of the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute, Nov. 19, 2021.

Telephone interview with Paul Ginsburg, professor of health policy at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, Nov. 18, 2021.

Telephone interview with Gretchen Jacobson, vice president of the Medicare program at the Commonwealth Fund, Nov. 18, 2021.

Telephone interview with Joe Antos, senior fellow with American Enterprise Institute, Nov. 18, 2021.

Sen. Rick Scott’s press release, Nov. 16, 2021.

Statista, monthly inflation rates, accessed Nov. 19, 2021.

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services press release about Medicare Part B premiums, accessed Nov. 19, 2021.

Medicareresources.org’s fact sheet about the Medicare hold-harmless provision, accessed Nov. 19, 2021.

Medicareresources.org fact sheet about high earners not subject to the hold-harmless provision, accessed Nov. 19, 2021.

Social Security blog about the hold-harmless provision, accessed Nov. 19, 2021.

AARP blog about the biggest-ever increase in Medicare Part B premiums, accessed Nov. 18, 2021.

Medicare Trustees Report, 2021 (see page 90 for Medicare Part B premiums by year since program inception).

KFF brief on the impact Aduhelm could have on Medicare costs, accessed Nov. 18, 2021.

CMS’ “2022 Medicare Parts A & B Premiums and Deductibles/2022 Medicare Part D Income-Related Monthly Adjustment Amounts” report, accessed Nov. 12, 2021.

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8 leftover turkey pasta recipes (because we can’t eat another sandwich)

Picture this: It’s two days after Thanksgiving, and you’ve consumed more “Moist Maker” turkey sandwiches than any one person needs to eat. And yet, when you open the fridge, there’s still pounds upon pounds of cooked turkey leftovers staring back at you. We’ve all hit the wall of Thanksgiving leftovers: the flavors of sage, rosemary, and turkey gravy infiltrating every taste bud, the thought of cold, dry turkey haunting your dreams.

1. Turkey Pho

Vietnamese noodle soup may not be the first thing that comes to mind when staring at a fridge full of leftover turkey, but it should be. Raid your pantry for spices like coriander, cinnamon sticks, star anise, and cloves to transform leftover chicken or turkey broth (or homemade from the turkey bones if you’re feeling ambitious!). Rice noodles are traditional in pho, but cellophane noodles or any other thin non-wheat noodle you have on hand will work in a pinch.

2. Creamy, Cheesy Artichoke and Chicken Pasta Bake

Chunks of briny artichoke hearts and strands of wilted spinach are interspersed between pasta and big hunks of crusty bread, all encompassed in an absurdly creamy cheese sauce, then baked until golden brown with sprinkles of mozzarella on top. Sold yet? Erin Alexander’s decadent pasta bake is inspired by Artichoke Basille’s namesake pizza, and exactly the dish to make if you want to double down on comfort post-Thanksgiving. While this recipe calls for grilled chicken breast, you could (and should!) swap in cubed turkey breast.

3. Sesame Noodles with Swiss Chard and Chicken

If you substitute shredded leftover turkey breast for the poached chicken in this recipe, you’re minutes away from an easy, elegant dinner. Adapted from a recipe in Chrissy Teigen’s cookbook “Cravings,” this recipe is adjustable to whatever you do (or don’t) have on hand. No Swiss chard? Use any hearty greens that weren’t used up for Thanksgiving dinner.

4. Baked Penne Pasta with Butternut-Sage Sauce

Have lots of leftover roasted butternut squash or sweet potatoes? Riff on this quintessential fall baked pasta and hide some cubed turkey breast or shredded dark meat right in the casserole for some added heft and nutrition.

5. Turkey Tetrazzini

If you’re unfamiliar, tetrazzini is a retro pasta bake that’s begging to be resurrected. This version is specially designed for Turkey Day leftovers, but it still utilizes the traditional cream sauce and mushrooms. It’s creamy, quintessential comfort food—and a welcome detour from stuffing and gravy.

6. Red Curry Chicken Noodle Soup

For a total flavor palate refresh, try on this curry noodle soup for size. Utilize the dark turkey meat here, shredding into bite-size pieces for easy spoonfuls.

7. One-Pot Spicy and Creamy Chicken Pasta

Substitute leftover white or dark meat for chicken in this one-pot pasta that tastes nothing like Thanksgiving leftovers. If you have any fresh herbs that didn’t make it into the turkey cavity, put them to good use cutting through the richness in this creamy, comforting pasta.

8. Thankful for Leftover Turkey Soup

This orzo-filled, dill-flecked soup is a perfect option if you’re craving something lighter after the big feast. Lemon and herbs add a hint of Mediterranean flavor that’s fresher than your standard chicken soup. Author and community member inpatskitchen writes, “I often make this one with chicken, but those little pieces of turkey pulled off the bone work equally as well.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci expresses concerns over new variant, including “evasion of immune response”

CNN’s Brianna Keilar on Friday interviewed Dr. Anthony Fauci about the new B.1.1.529 variant of COVID-19 which has been found in South Africa, Botswana, and Hong Kong.

“A new variant of coronavirus has been discovered in South Africa and this is raising concerns,” Keilar noted. “Scientists there are warning it could show immune invasion and enhanced transmissibility.”

“This is obviously a very significant day as we try to look at what the risk factors are with this variant,” she said. “What can you tell us about this?”

“Well, certainly there is a new variant that is now in South Africa, in the Gauteng province, that has some mutations that are raising some concern, particularly with regard to possibly transmissibility increase and possibly evasion of immune response,” Fauci replied.

“We don’t know that for sure right now. This is really something that’s in motion and we just arranged right now a discussion between our scientists and the South African scientists a little bit later this morning to really get the facts, because you are hearing a lot of things back and forth, we want to find out scientist to scientist exactly what is going on,” he continued.

“But it is something that emerged in South Africa and seems to be spreading at a reasonably rapid rate in the sense of when they test positivity, they are seeing it is a bit more widespread in South Africa than was originally felt. So it is a fluid motion. it is something in realtime we are learning more and more about,” Fauci said.

He also said there is “no indication” the the variant has already reached U.S. shores, but noted “anything is possible.”

Mike Lindell held a rally to demand more Fox News coverage – and failed spectacularly

Ten months into Joe Biden’s presidency, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell continues to insist that Donald Trump was the real winner of the 2020 election and will be moving back into White House — and he is disappointed that right-wing Fox News is not giving more coverage to his bogus election fraud claims. Lindell held a rally on Wednesday morning, November 24 outside Fox News’ Manhattan headquarters in the hope of applying some pressure, but according to Daily Beast reporters Zachary Petrizzo and Roger Sollenberger, it was a total flop.

Petrizzo and Sollenberger explain, “MyPillow CEO and 2020 dead-ender-who-will-simply-never-quit Mike Lindell attempted to put pressure on Fox News to cover his non-existent election fraud case — which he’s long-promised to file with the Supreme Court — by holding a poorly attended rally outside the cable channel’s offices. On Wednesday morning, a smattering of protesters gathered in Lindell’s name in front of Fox News headquarters on 6th Avenue in Manhattan, where, the MAGA mogul told The Daily Beast, the names of the mystery plaintiffs bringing his mythical filing to the High Court would, at last, be revealed. Alas, the names were not revealed.”

Video of the rally posted with Petrizzo and Sollenberger’s article, in fact, shows how poor the attendance was. The pro-Trump protesters who can be seen chanting, “Shame on Fox, shame on Fox” in the video were, as the reporters said, a mere “smattering.”

“No media turned out to cover the poorly publicized last-minute confab, though Lindell at one point urged The Daily Beast to send these ‘evil’ D.C.-based reporters to cover it in person,” Petrizzo and Sollenberger note. “But Lindell didn’t even attend his own rally — despite past promises. Instead, he said, he was busy traversing the U.S. to allegedly persuade state attorneys general to co-sign his unhinged election-fraud complaint to the Supreme Court.”