mRNA vaccines changed the course of the pandemic. Now, they could cure all kinds of other diseases

The COVID-19 pandemic is what historians refer to as an “inflection point,” or a single event that has a dramatic and sweeping effect on the human story. In the case of this particular event, it changed the way we work, raised awareness about public health policy, contributed to the toppling of a president — and, in the field of medicine, resulted in a leap forward for vaccine technology. Indeed, one of the great unsung achievements amid the pandemic was how scientists from around the world worked together to create multiple effective vaccines in less than a year.

Yet what may prove most historic is the biotechnology that emerged from the pandemic. Specifically, the vision of an mRNA vaccine went from dream to reality. And the successful creation of a viable mRNA vaccine could have repercussions for the way diseases are treated for centuries.

That technology, whose development was quickened by the pandemic, is already being studied to treat other diseases. Earlier this month, scientists at Yale University created a prototype mRNA vaccine that protected guinea pigs from tick-borne diseases by training their immune systems to recognize and fight proteins found in tick saliva. They hope that, with some further development, this could be used to help humans avoid developing Lyme disease if a tick bites them.

Yet this is merely one example of mRNA vaccines’ potential, revealing how they have far more utility than merely fighting COVID-19. Indeed, mRNA vaccines are something of a holy grail of medical innovation — and researchers believe that mRNA vaccines and their underlying biotechnology could be used to fight diseases like HIV, cancer, and influenza.

The promise of mRNA vaccines

As their name suggests, mRNA vaccines depend on the nucleic acid known as RNA. RNA is a molecule similar to DNA, but it is single-stranded (DNA is double-stranded) and plays a large number of roles in keeping your cells alive and healthy. But don’t think they are unique to humans: They are found in all living things. There are also certain types of viruses — like SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19 — that could be characterized as little more than RNA strands surrounded by protein shells. Like all viruses, they take over cells and force them to churn out other copies of themselves, the worst kind of mooch you can imagine.

Yet RNA and mRNA are not precisely the same thing. mRNA refers to “messenger RNA,” a specific type of RNA that (as indicated by its name) transmits information from genetic codes in the nucleus to the cytoplasm where proteins are manufactured.

This hints at how mRNA vaccines work, which is essentially by giving your cells a blueprint of a part of a virus, and then having them manufacture what they need on their own. Previously, vaccines contained either a dead or weakened version of a pathogen, which the immune system would then learn to recognize. But mRNA vaccines don’t actually contain any of a live or dead virus; instead, they contain a set of instructions (in mRNA) that infects some of the host’s cells and makes them spit out a piece of protein associated with a pathogen. One’s cells never manufacture the actual virus; only a piece of its “shell,” say. Those pieces are then detected by the immune system and identified and destroyed. It would be a bit like learning the presence of a criminal by identifying the look of their clothing, rather than the criminal themselves.

In the case of the mRNA vaccines manufactured by Pfizer and Moderna, the mRNA contains instructions for one’s cells on how to create the spike protein. The spike proteins are the little points that emerge out of the coronavirus, like spines jutting from a sea urchin, and they are what the SARS-CoV-2 virus uses to enter your cells and get you sick with COVID-19. The mRNA vaccines have been extraordinarily successful in protecting the vaccinated; even though they have not entirely thwarted breakthrough cases, they significantly reduce the likelihood of getting sick, and the people who do develop infections with evasive mutant variants rarely become seriously ill. Most notably, mRNA vaccines were the first ones to be released on the market, with Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna winning the vaccine race exactly one year ago this month.

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The next mRNA vaccines

In terms of their world-changing potential, mRNA vaccines have two key characteristics: They are quick to make, as demonstrated by the speed with which Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna came out with their products, and by their very nature they are versatile.

As the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) wrote in March, mRNA vaccine technology has the potential to treat diseases like malaria and cystic fibrosis, tuberculosis and hepatitis B. All scientists will have to do is modify RNA strands as needed to account for the different antigens (foreign substances recognized by the immune system as threats) produced by each pathogen. Instead of making do with the materials immediately available to them, mRNA vaccines make it possible for scientists to create more specialized weapons based on detailed knowledge of their enemies’ specific characteristics.

Take the influenza epidemic. One so-called “holy grail” of immunology is a universal influenza vaccine. Right now there are four influenza viruses in circulation, all of which evolve so quickly that vaccines which were effective in one year may be obsolete by the next. This puts manufacturers in a crunch, as it takes at least six months to create the conventional vaccinations with attenuated viruses grown inside chicken eggs. The final product, though almost always safe, has a very hit-and-miss rate of effectiveness. An mRNA vaccine, by contrast, could in theory be designed to effectively fight all four strains and be quickly modified as necessary when they evolve. In addition, while conventional vaccine platforms have to hit a precise target in order to destroy a given intruder, an mRNA vaccine could target multiple parts of an influenza virus at once, overwhelming it with a full-body assault that can’t be easily shaken off.

In fact, we already know that the early stages of mRNA flu vaccines were effective because scientists used that research to help develop their COVID-19 vaccines. This speaks to how malleable the platform is: While conventional vaccine platforms require patients to hope that the pathogen injected into their body is similar enough to a possible flu infection to be effective, mRNA vaccines could be precisely designed to meet the specific characteristics of each new strain as it emerges.

There will be challenges to pulling this off, of course. Anna Blakney, an RNA bioengineer at the University of British Columbia, told the journal Nature that there is no guarantee mRNA will be an effective vehicle for transporting haemagglutinin glycoproteins, the protein that flu vaccines use to fight the different bugs. As Blakney put it, “Did we just get really incredibly lucky with COVID vaccines because of the antigen design and the immunodominancy of that protein? Or have we stumbled on something that’s functional for other viral glycoproteins as well?”

In addition to aiding in the war against influenza, mRNA vaccines could also be a game-changer in the fight against cancer. In the pre-mRNA vaccine world, the mere notion of a “cancer vaccine” would have seemed ludicrous; vaccines work by protecting your body against a foreign invader, and cancers (as far as we know) are caused by your own body producing mutated cells. Yet just as an mRNA vaccine can help your immune system recognize and destroy proteins associated with dangerous pathogens, they could in theory be developed to identify and eliminate proteins associated with cancer cells — and, of course, the cancer cells themselves.

“A successful therapeutic cancer vaccine should induce strong T cell responses, particularly with CD8+ T cells, which have a known capacity to kill malignant cells,” Dr. Norbert Pardi, whose research led to the develop of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, explained to the University of Pennsylvania. “Therapeutic cancer vaccines would be given to cancer patients with the hope that those vaccine-induced cytotoxic T cells would clear tumor cells.”

HIV mRNA vaccines are theorized to be possible, though there are massive hurdles to be overcome. The challenge so far has been that none of the vaccine candidates developed up to this point have produced broadly neutralizing antibodies, which are vital to blocking HIV in target cells. Scientists hope that an mRNA vaccine would create an immunogen (an antigen that induces an immune response) that resembles the HIV virus and can help the body develop those broadly neutralizing antibodies against it. Unfortunately, researchers are still very early in working through this, and it seems like a HIV vaccine using this technology is not in the near future.

“We certainly think that an HIV vaccine will be far and away the most complicated vaccine that we’ve ever had to put into the population,” Derek Cain of Duke University’s Human Vaccine Institute told The Guardian. “We don’t expect it to work 100% or 90% like the Covid vaccines, but even if we can get to 50-60% that would be a success; 70% would be amazing.”

What comes next

The future for mRNA technology is not one of unbounded promise. As the AAMC noted, each virus poses its own individual puzzle, which makes it unlikely that other ailments can be treated with the rapid success that occurred when fighting COVID-19. Similarly, although the COVID-19 vaccines have so far not caused widespread serious side effects, this may not be true for other mRNA vaccines; more research will definitely be needed. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic was such an overwhelming and serious crisis that the international community collaborated in fruitful ways that may not repeat themselves if a future outbreak seems less urgent.

There are also logistical factors to take into consideration. The supply chain breakdowns prompted by the pandemic are poised to get worse due to climate change, and experts are already concerned that mRNA vaccines will get destroyed as they are transported because they must be kept in very clean and ultra-cold conditions. It is hard to imagine that the impending supply chain deteriorations won’t exacerbate that problem, as will the ongoing disease of misinformation. Since anti-vaccine advocates can alter their baseless beliefs as easily as viruses change their genetic composition, some of this misinformation specifically targets mRNA platforms. One particularly prevalent myth right now is that mRNA vaccines change your DNA, even though (as the above explanation makes clear) this betrays a deep ignorance about how vaccines, viruses, cellular biology and the immune system actually work.

Finally, as with all biotechnology, governments and businesses will have to adequately invest.

“Despite the promise of mRNA vaccines, we caution that they are far from a silver bullet for future pandemics,” Michael J. Hogan and Norbert Pardi write in an Annual Review of Medicine article. “Comprehensive pandemic preparedness requires significant new investments in viral surveillance, proactive clinical testing of vaccines for pandemic-potential viruses, new diagnostic technologies, broad-spectrum antiviral treatments, and stockpiling of materials.”

From gifts to seasonal cocktails, here’s how a whiskey pro preps for the holidays

Felicia Corbett is one of the most exciting faces working in whiskey and cocktails today. She is an Angel’s Envy Whiskey Guardian and the “master of potions” at Trouble Bar, a female-owned and run Louisville whiskey bar, which was recently featured on Esquire Magazine’s 2021 Best Bars in America list.

The cocktails she helps create at Trouble indicate a masterful understanding of flavor, as well as a penchant for fun. Take, for instance, their fall menu, with drinks like the Practical Magic (gin, pistachio and cardamom-infused honey, lemon juice) and the Hey Mister, We Are the Weirdos (tequila, prickly pear syrup, lemon juice, lime juice, orange liqueur).

In advance of the holiday season, Corbett spoke with Salon about her tips for creating better cocktails at home for beginners, her picks for accessible whiskeys for sipping and gifting and what she makes at home for groups of guests.

Her philosophy behind creating seasonal cocktails:

I look at a lot of trends and see what people appreciate in flavor profiles. Then, I try to develop some weird twist on it. For example, you can take the very traditional fall spices and flavors like cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, pumpkin into account — but then find a way to put a funky twist on it. I also really like uplifting other local businesses.

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For example:

The past few menus, we’ve been partnering with FOKO (a Mexican-inspired breakfast and lunch stall at the nearby Logan Street Market food hall) where Chef Paco Garcia and co-owner Josh Gonzalez will make us horchata, which I use in my play on a pumpkin spice latte. It starts by infusing 100-proof whiskey with vanilla bean, cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg. Then, I made cold brew and pumpkin puree syrup.

You know, when you taste “pumpkin spice” in drinks, it can be overly sweet — and I’m not a fan of sweet drinks. So, you have the bitterness of the cold brew and then infusing the whiskey takes the sweetness out of it, then we top it with horchata.

Corbett’s big tip for amateur home bartenders:

I taught my mom how to do this, so if I can teach her, anybody can do it. I told her to work on perfecting a simple syrup. There’s room for experimentation — finding your ratio of sugar and water for a thicker or thinner syrup. Once you’ve mastered that, you have the fun of adding herbs and different things to it. A lot of it is just playing around, and you can even do maple syrup or honey if you don’t want to do sugar.

Once you’ve worked out your ratios, your thickness and your sweetness, you’ve also mastered the start of making the start of the cocktail. Then at that point, you can sound and look very fancy by saying, “Oh, I grew my own lavender and I used that to make a lavender simple syrup.”

While Corbett is personally a fan of rye-forward whiskeys — which can be a little intimidating for those who are new to the spirit — there are a bunch of accessible whiskeys she’s excited about right now:

I worked for them for a number of years, so I’m a little partial, but Angel’s Envy is a great, accessible whiskey that’s easy to sip on and good for gifting. If you want to stick to finished whiskey, but try something a little different, I’m a really big fan of Barrell bourbons. They source all of the liquid and then finish it in different iterations and it feels like there are a million of them. I haven’t come across one that I haven’t enjoyed. The Seagrass and the Armida are two that I think are kind of constant.

Then Willett did a line where the wheated bourbon was finished in Chardonnay barrels, the high rye is like in a Cab and the rye is finished in port; those are really fun if you’re looking for something that’s not quite popular yet, but will be.

Here’s how she makes cocktails for groups at home:

For the most part, I’ll have people over and experiment on them. That’s only if I’m feeling up to it because I’m a cancer patient and I have chemo, so when my taste buds are completely shot, I’ll do that because it gives me joy to see people’s faces when I make something and they’re like, “How did you do that?” When I’m entertaining a bigger group, though, that’s when I’ll usually do something like a cider with my own twist or toddies with a twist!

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How to brine meat — and why you should bother

Have you ever suffered the travesty that is a dry, tasteless chicken breast? Or tried to cut into a pork chop, only to be rewarded with a bicep workout and a rumbling stomach? Or chewed your way through a turkey that tastes like it might’ve been made out of sand? We have, too. It was unpleasant. Thankfully, it never has to happen again — just harness the power of science, and you can brine your way to consistently better meat. Brining meat should happen at least 12 hours in advance of when you want to cook the meat and can be done with water, salt, and sugar or a dry brine using a variety of herbs and spices. Here’s why it works, and how to use our brine recipes for everything from a Thanksgiving turkey to everyday cuts of meat.

Why do you brine before cooking?

Brining was originally used for food preservation in the pre-refrigeration era. However, there are two solid reasons why you should brine your meat in the 21st-century: flavor and texture. Brining infuses the meat with savory, finger-lickin’ flavors, all while tenderizing it to butter-soft texture. So how does it work?

Let us turn back the clock to seventh grade science class for a moment. Does the word “osmosis” ring a bell? That’s how brining works: When you place meat in a bath of salty, flavorful liquid, the solution will travel into the meat in order to equalize the salt levels. This means that, before even hitting the heat, your meat has a higher liquid content — so when you cook it, your meat will lose the same amount of moisture, but will still end up juicier. As culinary expert and general food science nerd Harold McGee puts it: “This is one time when we find our old nemesis ‘water retention’ actually playing a beneficial role!”

While you brine, your meat is not only gaining liquid; it’s also gaining salt, and the higher salt concentration will begin to break down its proteins. Think of the proteins in meat as tight, stubborn coils — then salt comes along, gives them a deep tissue massage, and they begin to relax. This yields a meat with a more tender mouthfeel and reduced chewiness. Kenji Alt-Lopez of Serious Eats sums it up perfectly: less tightening = less moisture loss = juicier meat.

What meat should be brined?

Some cuts of meats benefit from brining more than others. Drier, leaner meats are at the top of the list as cuts that could use a good ole brine, as they don’t have as much fat to contribute moisture and flavor. Poultry breasts, pork chops, shrimp, and that infamous Thanksgiving turkey are all good candidates for brining. As barbecue season draws near, racks of ribs are also begging for a briny dip, which will help them retain moisture through a long smoke. Before purchasing a piece of meat to brine, check the label to make sure it hasn’t already been injected with a salty solution. On the other hand, tender, smaller cuts of meat like a juicy filet mignon, fatty chicken thighs, and moist, flaky fish don’t really need a wet or dry brine.

How long does it take to brine meat?

A general rule of thumb is to leave your meat in its brine for roughly one hour per pound — never brine your meat more than the prescribed amount, lest the proteins break down too far, turning it into unappetizing mush. So for a 12 to 14 pound Thanksgiving turkey, an overnight brine in salt and water or with a flavorful dry rub will do the trick.

How to wet brine meat

The basic ratio for any wet brine is one cup of kosher salt to one gallon of water. Make sure to fully dissolve the salt in the water. If you’re feeling fancy, throw in some smashed garlic cloves, peppercorns, citrus (also smashed), or even a sweetener like honey or brown sugar. Or instead of water, feel free to use apple juice, which will give the poultry a sweet, autumnal flavor. Pro tip: If your meat has skin on it (hi, turkey), drain it, then pat dry a few hours before cooking time, and leave in the fridge, uncovered. It will end up juicy and tender, with shatteringly crisp skin that becomes beautifully golden brown when you cook the meat.

What is dry brining?

Dry brining is technically a misnomer. The term “brining” implies a liquid, and dry brining could more accurately be categorized as a rub, or a “cure,” for your meat. However, the end result is quite similar. By coating your meat in a salty dry brine, it both re-distributes moisture and pulls the seasoning deep into the meat. Dry brining is also a clean, simple seasoning option if you don’t want to fill your fridge with large containers of submerged meats, for some reason. Like say if you’re my in-laws who once spilled gallons of wet brine all over their newly renovated kitchen on the morning of Thanksgiving, approximately an hour before guests started to arrive at their house. (Oh yeah, true story.)

How to dry brine meat

General dry brining technique calls for 1/2 teaspoon of kosher salt per pound of meat, plus whatever other (dried) herbs and spices you so choose. It’s important to use kosher salt as it’s significantly less salty than table salt. Pummel everything into a sandy texture with a mortar and pestle, then rub it onto your meaty canvas. Unlike a wet brine, dry brining a piece of meat takes a little longer.

Place the meat in a very sturdy Ziploc bag and refrigerate for one to 2 days (though if you’re in a rush, just leave it in for as long as possible). Pro tip: Adding a pinch or two of sugar to your dry brine will help the meat caramelize as it cooks.

General tips for brining meat

For a basic brine, it’s important to follow a few very important food safety tips. To avoid scary bacteria like salmonella, always brine a piece of meat in the fridge. For the same reason, make sure none of your meat is exposed to the air, as this can increase the likelihood of contracting a foodborne illness. Always let your meat come to room temperature before cooking, as this will ensure that it stays tender and cooks evenly. And finally, if you are brining a turkey in a wet brine, pat it dry with paper towels before placing it in the oven to remove any excess moisture from the skin of the bird and ensure that it crisps up beautifully on the exterior. If you’ve got a brine? It’ll all be fine.

The injustice done to Janet Jackson isn’t only in the past – new film “Malfunction” also falls short

“Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson” comes before us shouldering the burden of unreasonable expectations. Black women can relate. Audiences of every stripe may be primed for it to match the quality and precision of previous “New York Times Presents” entries “Framing Britney Spears” and its follow-up “Controlling Britney Spears,” which it does not.

Fans may be hoping it rekindles conversations surrounding the disproportionate level of disparagement Jackson faced in the wake of the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show debacle compared to Justin Timberlake, the man who committed a fumble with his co-star’s breast on national TV.

Perhaps it does, but in a narrower capacity than what “Framed” inspired in its audience.

It probably doesn’t need to be said that Timberlake’s image won’t be substantially impacted by it either, although he capitalized on the publicity the incident generated by joking it away at first, only to throw Jackson under the bus as the politics heated up.

But enough with guessing of what level of business “Malfunction” might not do. What it shows us, what it leaves out and which important opportunities it misses are more concerning, all of which are why this hour disappoints more than it enlightens or activate the viewer.

If the purpose of “Malfunction” were to remind us that the 2004 Super Bowl Halftime Show, which was produced by MTV, was a terrible thing that happened to Jackson, we’d have few notes – mainly because we wouldn’t care. That’s how most people remember the incident almost 17 years later, as an event that generated an extreme overreaction and fueled thousands of cable news and tabloid takes that eventually died down.

At the time it felt like an areola bomb went off, showering the FCC with a record-making 540,000 complaints. CBS would be slapped with a whopping $550,000 indecency fine that was tossed out by a federal appeals court four years later. Sales of Jackson’s 2004 release “Damita Jo” tanked.

The world moved on, and Timberlake moved up. Only recently have people begun to listen to those who have pointed out that the white pop singer did so at the expense of Jackson . . . and Spears.

But the title purports to do much more than simply memorialize that Halftime debacle, and plants its thesis in establishing the headline-generating “wardrobe malfunction” as the opportunity that conservatives were looking for to enact tighter censorship regulations on broadcast. Jackson, a Black superstar and member of a musical family dynasty led by her brother Michael, made a brilliant scapegoat.

She grew up in front of TV viewers on “Good Times” and “Fame,” cemented as a wholesome figure before breaking free of her father Joe’s management and publicly embracing her sexuality. Her 1986 album “Control” and its 1989 follow-up “Rhythm Nation 1814” blasted her profile into the stratosphere, making her one of America’s biggest stars.

Jackson began starring in films and became MTV video royalty in the ’90s and into the early Aughts, and she likely would have sustained some measure of her momentum if Timberlake hadn’t exposed her breast for all of nine-sixteenths of a second.

“Malfunction” producer Jodi Gomes, who previously produced the 2009 miniseries “The Jacksons: A Family Dynasty,” spends nearly half of the documentary’s hour-plus runtime on her career as the walk-up to the moment colloquially known as “Nipplegate,” presuming that viewers may not know Jackson biography as much as they should.

But all of that is widely available, along with her impressive music catalogue. What’s missing, and what we should be hearing in this examination, is the subject’s voice.

Jackson and Timberlake both declined to be interviewed (and happen to share the same publicist), which is typical for a project like this. Spears didn’t appear in the FX/New York Times documentaries about her either. Nevertheless, there was a sense that someone was representing Spears’ point of view, other than the journalists called upon to analyze the significance of the incident.

Jackson has no such champion, but plenty of parties ready to heap the blame upon her yet again, including several network executives in charge of producing the halftime show or, heaven help us, Parents Television and Media Council President Tim Winter, who hyperbolically opens the hour with “If the culture wars could have a 9/11, it’s February 1st, 2004.”

No casualties were suffered in unintentional baring of Jackson’s nipple. Thinking back on it, most people really had to rewind their VCRs and freeze the moment to catch a blurry sight of it. Even with that effort, the detail was obscured by the jewelry she had on.

Nevertheless, former MTV senior vice president Salli Frattini weighs in about her hurt feelings at length, while the person whose career endured the more grievous harm is absent.

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And it’s simply amazing that Frattini airs her instincts that “there was a private conversation between wardrobe, stylist and artist where someone thought this would be a good idea, and it backfired,” without any comment from Jackson’s stylist to refute or shed light on this.

Wayne Scot Lukas, the former “What Not to Wear” host who styled Jackson’s Super Bowl fashions, isn’t particularly difficult to find. He has weighed in on the event quite recently on Page Six, although his account of who was responsible for the stunt was subsequently contradicted by Timberlake’s team.

Even if Gomes and the NYT production team didn’t use his allegation, certainly Lukas or anyone else who was close to Jackson could have offered some insight on what happened or respond to the multiple insinuations that she didn’t apologize quickly enough or, simply, enough.

Ultimately “Malfunction” swings around to pointing out the misogynistic and racial implications of Timberlake’s rise at Jackson’s expense, while also pointing the finger at former CBS top exec Les Moonves’ vindictiveness to explain Jackson’s blacklisting.

But that doesn’t tell us much we don’t already know. Moonves’ reputation as a predator who ruined women’s careers is established, but by the time he was ousted from CBS he’d still amassed a multimillion dollar fortune. Timberlake went on to become a movie star and hit-maker who was even invited back to the Super Bowl in 2018 as its headliner.

One white man helped crush this Black woman’s reputation and another launched off of her pain. If you take issue with that observation, remember that a third, Kid Rock, desecrated the American flag in that same Super Bowl performance. He went on to receive an invitation to the White House.

“Malfunction” incorporates analysis of the bigotry and misogynoir at play here, mainly relying on journalists Jenna Wortham and Toure to cover that angle using the broadest of references to the history dehumanization of Black bodies. They’re right about that, but this also speaks to an aspect of Jackson’s story that remains frustratingly unconsidered here and evokes what is presently playing out in our political landscape.

Black women tend to be the canaries in the coal mine of liberty and its rollbacks, and the punishments the right persuades the mainstream to inflict on Black women boomerang back on everyone, white people included.

We see this with the right-wing smear campaign against Nikole Hannah-Jones and the efforts to ban her Pulitzer Prize-winning work “The 1619 Project.” We’re watching it happen with the retcon of Toni Morrison’s legacy, especially her novel “Beloved.”

“Malfunction” only mentions in passing that after all the jokes died down, the first major casualty of the decency squads was none other than Howard Stern. What happened to Jackson is terrible, meaningful to her fans and familiar to Black women. But the broader audience doesn’t have a history of caring about one Black woman’s problems until the forces that destroy her splash back on a white person they like.

This doesn’t apply to Timberlake, mind you, who apologized to Jackson and Spears in February after “Framing Britney Spears” took off and his past behavior came back to haunt him. ” . . . I care for and respect these women and I know I failed,” he states in an Instagram post. “I also feel compelled to respond, in part, because everyone involved deserves better and most importantly, because this is a larger conversation that I wholeheartedly want to be part of and grow from.”

He will get that opportunity because that’s how America works. All he has to do is retreat from the spotlight and wait for our recurring bout of amnesia to kick in.

But Jackson’s absence from the spotlight is finally ending, as it should have years ago. We’ve long since embraced her inheritors, among the foremost being Lizzo, Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion and Beyoncé.

Since her 2019 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame she’s been building the process of reclaiming her rightful place in the pop firmament. People haven’t forgot Jackson, after all. But they may share Wortham’s bewilderment. “I still don’t understand how hard they came for Janet,” she says.

Watching “Malfunction” doesn’t change that, but maybe the two-part, four-hour documentary Jackson is making for A&E and Lifetime will. That debuts in January 2022.

The New York Times Presents “Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson” is now streaming on FX on Hulu.

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How vermin helped shape the modern world

Before the dawn of modernity, mutual de-lousing was a common social activity. The late- medieval denizens of Europe would sit around picking lice off of one another, and according to Lisa T. Sarasohn in her latest book, “Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of Vermin,” nobody seemed to mind. An illustration from a 16th-century health manual shows an upper-class woman using a brush to delouse a man — and “both seem pretty happy about it,” Sarasohn writes. This behavior was perfectly in step with cultural attitudes of this era; a century later, the famed diarist Samuel Pepys wrote an amused and delighted entry about waking up next to a friend who was covered in bed bug bites.

But a few decades after Pepys’ writing, both jolly bed bug jokes and sanguine communal lice-picking were practices of the past. As the pre-modern era gave way to the modern era, Sarasohn writes vermin and pests that had previously been considered everyday nuisances took on fraught social, political, and cultural significance. Part history of public health and natural science and part sociological study, “Getting Under Our Skin” argues that once Europeans separated themselves from insects and rodents and coded these beings as existential threats, they truly ushered in the modern world — with all its attendant hygienic and medical advantages, and its racist and classist horrors.

Sarasohn, an emeritus professor at Oregon State University who specializes in the history of science and early modern intellectual history, is no stranger to writing about this era; she’s published two previous books about early modern British naturalist and metaphysical thinker Margaret Cavendish. Here she covers the history of four different animals and the role they played in modernizing the Anglophone world: bed bugs, lice, fleas, and rats.

In each section, she shows how shifting public health standards shaped discourse and attitudes around these creatures — and in turn shaped commerce and society. For example, in the decades leading up to the French Revolution, Sarasohn writes, the bourgeoisie started combating lice by shaving their heads, turning wig-making into a brisk business. (Other historians suggest their popularity was also sparked by a desire to hide hair loss from diseases like syphilis.) Meanwhile, entrepreneurial exterminators in London collected bed bug specimens, published pamphlets featuring illustrations of these creatures, and hawked their trade to the itchy and desperate. Ratcatchers prowled the English countryside, shadowy figures who lived on the outskirts of society. And naturalists and scientists used newly invented microscopes to scrutinize these tiny beings and place them in the schema of their developing knowledge about the world.

Not only did the creatures intersect with human health, business, and science but they came to shape social and political commentary. Sometimes satirists evoked them in covert critiques of the ruling class; for example, rats featured prominently in criticisms of the Hanoverian dynasty, which took power in England in the early 18th century. In other cases, early modern Englishmen used vermin to talk about sex: Researcher Robert Hooke, encountering lice under a microscope referred to them as “saucy” creatures, likely due to an already established association between lice and prostitution. Meanwhile, a popular contemporary entertainment was misogynistic “flea porn,” a written genre that was, well, exactly what it sounds like. (John Donne’s 17th-century poem “The Flea” was, according to Sarasohn, the most famous example.)

Sarasohn also confronts a darker aspect of our cultural relationship with vermin: the pervasive tendency to conflate these creatures with the other. This pattern was repeated over and over again throughout the early modern and industrial ages. The British thought that bed bugs had invaded London by embedding in foreign wood imported after the Great Fire of 1666. In the 18th and 19th centuries, commentators debated whether darker skin could even sustain bites from bed bugs and both anti- and pro-abolitionists in America linked slaves to fleas. And in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the plague arrived in Hawaii and California, panicked residents refused to believe that the fleas were the bearers of the disease and instead burned down much of the Chinese section of Honolulu.

It’s a small leap from associating outsiders with vermin and disease to actually conflating foreigners with vermin and disease. Oliver Cromwell famously allegedly said “nits make lice” to justify his massacre of Irish troops in the 1640s. Most contemporary readers are aware that the Nazis called Jews lice and other vermin. In addition, the science surrounding vermin intersected with racist pseudoscience. Scientists in the 19th century used studies of rat behavior to promote so-called clean living and upright morality, ideas tinged with eugenicist thought. And other commentators of the era believed that lice evolved through polygenesis, a pseudoscientific theory that posited that species originated from many different stocks — and that, when extended to humans, implies that people of different races did too. That theory was often used to justify beliefs in racial inferiority. Of course, rhetoric that conflates outsiders or foreigners with disease, dirt, and vermin is still alive and well today.

Sarasohn’s chapters about bed bugs most clearly illustrate our pervasive, outsized propensity to panic about vermin. Unlike rats, fleas, and lice, which actually do spread deadly diseases like typhus and the plague, bed bugs don’t typically hurt you beyond delivering annoying, itchy bites. But the recent resurgence of bed bugs in American cities shows how bed bugs affect us psychologically. Sarasohn chronicles how many of those afflicted by bed bugs say their overwhelming feeling is one of shame; she describes accounts from the 21st century of discreet exterminators sneaking into the penthouses of the wealthy and fumigating their designer clothes surreptitiously to spare them social ostracization.

As Sarasohn writes, “human vulnerability makes us paranoid.” Overreaction also tinges modern responses to the other creatures in Sarasohn’s book: Although lice-borne diseases are easily curable now, and head lice do not transmit disease, lice outbreaks at elementary schools are often met by panic and shame and, tellingly, blamed on lower-income kids. Sarasohn quotes a column from The New York Times in which the writer states that the worst thing about bed bugs is “the way others react when you give them the news.” She also peruses a forum for bed bug sufferers, some of whom felt they had “PTSD that is bed-bug-related” and who went “days without sleeping.”

Humanity’s relationship with animals is a hot topic these days in books by authors ranging from Helen Macdonald to Simon Barnes. By focusing on the stories we tell about vermin, Sarasohn maintains that we can probe a spectrum of interconnected issues, including racism, classism, sexism, hygiene standards, and modernity. Although a few pieces of her evidence rely on tenuous or unsupportable leaps of logic, overall her book represents a worthy addition to this canon.

“Getting Under Our Skin” is a reminder that our perception of vermin, and our ever-burgeoning horror of them, has shaped our language, our attitude towards the poor, our prejudices toward out-groups, our obsession with hygiene, and our perspective on our environment and ourselves. It wasn’t always this way — according to Sarasohn, in medieval times, vermin were just a fact of life. But ever since, as she astutely writes, “vermin always signified something bigger than a bite.”

Emily Cataneo is a writer and journalist from New England whose work has appeared in Slate, NPR, the Baffler, and Atlas Obscura, among other publications.

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

Why blaming vaccine hesitancy on conspiracy theorists is harmful to democracy

American politics appears to be in a crisis of rationality, one driven by duplicitous political actors. Philosopher Lee McIntyre insisted during a recent PBS interview that belief in COVID misinformation was driven by clandestine propaganda efforts by Russian agents, echoing earlier claims about Trump’s 2016 election. Journalist Eric Boehlert argues that Fox News is “deliberately getting people killed” by “brainwashing” millions of Americans. In documentaries like “The Social Dilemma” and elsewhere, it has become cliché to depict social media as a maze of digital rabbit holes ready to swallow up unsuspecting users and turn them into conspiracy theorists.

This viewpoint on conspiracy theorists and vaccine skeptics isn’t just dismissive of those who find themselves on the wrong side of “rationality.” It’s just as unreasonable as the beliefs it is attacking. And this viewpoint is also incompatible with doing democracy. If we’re going to dig ourselves out of the deep hole of pathological political polarization that we’re in, we’re going to have to dispense with simplistic thinking about the people who believe things that we find to be outrageous.

Questioning the cognitive fitness of certain segments of the citizenry has a long history in America. In his classic 1964 essay, Historian Richard Hofstadter subsumed Cold War fear of communist infiltrators, the 19th century Populist Party, and anti-masons under the titular neologism “The Paranoid Style of American Politics.” More recently, labeling someone as conspiratorial or paranoid has become the new political weapon of choice. Indeed, Hofstadter’s essay has made a return, ostensibly explaining vaccine hesitancy and a reported explosion in conspiratorial thinking.

Historian Ted Steinberg called the reliance on accusations of paranoia or conspiratorial thinking the “diagnostic-style” of politics, wherein “clinical diagnosis [is offered] in place of empathic understanding.” In his book, “Acts of God,” Steinberg explains how mid-20th century farmers who were worried about harm to their crops from cloud-seeding experiments were dismissed as crackpots suffering from a “persecution complex.” Yet they were no less deluded than the US government scientists and large commercial growers who not only believed they could control the weather, but also unilaterally decided that they should be allowed to try. Turning farmers’ opposition “into a form of mental illness” just served to obscure the situation’s underlying politics.

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Paranoia is sometime legitimate. Despite Hofstadter’s dismissal of the 19th century Populists, their tales of bribery driving the decision by Congress to no longer allow silver-backed currency proved to be correct. Some of the reasons for vaccine skeptics’ mistrust of mainstream medicine and the FDA echo criticism that were uncontroversial among leftists not too long ago: worries about financial conflicts of interest in industry-funded studies, perceived lack of transparency, and the history of medical racism and malpractice.

Worst of all, blaming problems like COVID vaccine hesitancy writ large on foreign social media meddling or profit-seeking media outlets is itself a form of conspiracism. Although there’s a kernel of truth to claims of Russian influence and social media’s tendency towards producing echo chambers, explaining complex sociopolitical situations solely in terms of the machinations of unaccountable distant organizations is only a few shades less paranoid than QAnon.

It’s also simplistic thinking. As Zeynep Tufekci points out, Americans over 65, the heavily Republican and primary demographic for Fox News, are nearly all vaccinated. One of the foremost experts on conspiracy theories, Joseph Uscinski, argues against the idea that social media algorithms dupe people into believing misinformation. Rather, the Internet provides citizens with anti-establishment leanings greater access to what they already believe and makes that belief more visible. And recently studies cast doubt on the idea that Russian social media activity has had significant impact on people’s beliefs.

The diagnostic style of politics is attractive not because it is correct but because it’s actually oddly comforting to have such an unsettling view of our fellow Americans. It lets us deny that our opponents could have any legitimate reasons for disagreeing with us. Inconvenient political complexities are replaced with a Manichean fairy tale: the enlightened, science-respecting and rational good guys versus the social-media-addled dupes. It’s no wonder debates about COVID are only getting more polarized.

Far better would be to follow the lessons of psychologist Peter Coleman’s research: Embrace complexity. Difficult conversations are harder when portrayed in black and white terms, and only more so when cast into good vs. evil. Reframing our political challenges as complicated layered sets of trade-offs and dilemmas fosters conversations between ideological opponents with more listening, more openness to learning, and greater agreement on collaborative policy statements.

In his defense of liberal democracy, political philosopher Karl Popper argued “that the only attitude which I can consider to be morally right is one which recognizes that we owe it to other men to treat them and ourselves as rational.” This attitude doesn’t mean accepting our opponents’ beliefs as correct, only that we admit that they may have good reasons to believe what they do. These reasons may not be factual, but rather stem from their experiences or from their deeply held values.

Richard Hofstadter rooted mid-20th century conspiracism in the feeling of being dispossessed, a feeling seemly confirmed by the outcome of public decisions upon which the “paranoid” could exert little to no influence. Even if we take vaccine skeptics to be conspiratorially motivated, it only further undermines the prospects for democratic conversations when we play armchair psychologist. We end up providing more evidence to skeptics that we really do want to repudiate them as unfit for and unworthy of democratic politics. Diagnosing the supposed cognitive deficiencies of our opponents won’t get America out of an era of pernicious political polarization. Only dialogue will.

How — and when — to defrost your turkey

We don’t need to tell you that Thanksgiving involves a little prep . . . OK a lot of prep. Peeling potatoes, cubing stale bread for stuffing, rolling out pie dough, folding buttery biscuit dough over itself once, twice, three times for pillowy rolls. But defrosting the turkey is one of those things that seems like it should just happen without much effort. While you’re busy filling the fridge with casseroles and potatoes and pies — there’s not a lot of room (physical or mental) to add a raw, frozen bird. But (surprisingly!) the turkey won’t magically thaw the morning of. In fact, depending on how big the bird is, you might even need to take it out now. (If you’re reading this in September, it’s probably too early . . . but if it’s the week of Thanksgiving, it’s definitely time to take the turkey out of the fridge to thaw it).

How to defrost a turkey

The easiest and safest way to defrost your turkey is in the refrigerator (kept at 40°F). The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) recommends one day of thawing in the refrigerator for every 5 pounds. So if you have a 15-pound bird, you’ll need to start defrosting at least three days in advance. If you’re planning to brine your turkey, you may want to allocate for an extra day, as brining is best done over the course of at least 24 hours. Make sure to place the wrapped turkey breast-side up on a roasting rack near the back of the refrigerator, where it will remain consistently cold. You might also want to keep it on a bottom shelf to prevent cross-contamination from any possible leakage. Once your bird has thawed, cook it within the next 4 days.

Pro tip: Leave the turkey resting in the refrigerator unwrapped and uncovered at least overnight, as this will help to dry out the skin so it gets super crispy and golden-brown as it bakes in the oven. Sure, butter and olive oil will help seal the deal too, but dry skin is the key to crispy (but not burnt!) turkey skin.

How to quickly defrost a turkey

If you don’t have room for turkey in the refrigerator (or you’re reading this on Wednesday afternoon — hey, it happens!), the second way to quickly defrost a turkey is in cold water. Simply cover the turkey breast-side down in cold water, then change the water every 30 minutes. In this method, budget 30 minutes of thawing per pound. So, plan 7 hours for the same 15-pound turkey as above, then cook immediately. This may mean that you have to wake up really early on Thanksgiving morning in order to adequately thaw and cook the turkey . . . but you were probably going to set the alarm for 3 a.m. anyway, right? Or maybe this is the year you decide to host a Thanksgiving dinner rather than a luncheon.

In cold water-thawing, it’s very important that the entire turkey remains submerged in 40°F water. Chances are that your tap water won’t be cold enough, so add some ice cubes. If you don’t have a large enough container, try using your sink, ice chest, or even a bathtub (just be sure to thoroughly sanitize these vessels afterward to remove any bacteria that spread from the raw bird). Another way to keep the turkey covered is to hold it underwater with a heavy plate. Make sure to stir the water occasionally to break up the cold envelope surrounding the bird.

How to defrost a turkey in the microwave

First of all, we’d be super impressed if you have a microwave large enough to accommodate a 15 to 20 lb turkey (and we’d have some questions, too . . . like where did you buy it? How do you store it?). But if you’re one of the lucky ones that is able to thaw a turkey in the microwave, start by removing the outer wrappings and any plastic inserts (including the packaged giblets) from the turkey. Next, set the microwave to the defrost setting. According to the USDA, the rule of thumb is 6 minutes per pound when thawing a turkey in the microwave. Rotate and flip the bird several times as it thaws in the microwave.

How to not defrost a turkey

We’ve spent a few minutes here chatting about the best ways to thaw a turkey for Thanksgiving. But there are plenty of hacks for defrosting Thanksgiving that are not so safe. First, do not leave your turkey on the counter. Even if the air is room temperature and could theoretically cause your turkey to defrost more quickly, it’s dangerous to eat any meat that has been sitting out for more than three to four hours. Plus, you’re more likely to spread bacteria and cause cross-contamination this way.

Can the real lessons of Virginia rescue the Democrats in 2022? It’s definitely worth trying

The day after Terry McAuliffe’s defeat in the Virginia governor’s race, the lead segments on two MSNBC shows should have put Democratic panic to rest. If MSNBC really were “the Fox News of the left,” maybe that would have happened. But there is no such symmetry in American politics, and the lack of message discipline and infrastructure among the left-liberal coalition is always a factor.

There’s certainly good reason for Democrats to be concerned: Midterm losses are historically almost guaranteed, even without aggressive partisan gerrymandering. But Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell’s initial segments should have gotten Democrats out of circular-firing-squad mode and refocused them on “OK, here’s what we need to do now.”

President Biden himself downplayed the momentarily popular idea that simply passing his infrastructure bill would have saved McAuliffe — the disconnect between his broadly popular agenda and support for Democrats was visible at least a month beforehand. The question isn’t what to do about Biden’s agenda, but what to do about the disconnect. There are answers.

Maddow started off by pointing out that losing the Virginia governor’s race a year after electing a new president was predictable: It nearly always happens. In fact, the party in power usually loses the New Jersey governorship as well, so Democrat Phil Murphy’s narrow re-election in the Garden State was actually promising news.

O’Donnell followed up with communication guru Anat Shenker-Osorio, host of the “Words to Win By” podcast, who deftly explained how major flubs by both McAuliffe and Murphy in New Jersey could easily have been avoided, simply by articulating common-sense shared values. McAuliffe was facing bad-faith attacks on “critical race theory,” and Shenker-Osorio said there was a clear response:

What you say is simply, most of us, no matter where we come from, what our zip code, and what our color, want our kids to be told the honest truth of our history, to reckon with the mistakes of our past, to understand the present to build a better future. But today a handful of politicians and my opponent here, Youngkin, they want to divide us. They want to spin lies about what our teachers are teaching, while they endanger our kids by refusing masks and spreading stories about vaccines.

They hope we’ll look the other way while they vote to defund the schools that every single one of our kids need. By standing together and demanding that our kids deserve the truth of our history so that they can acknowledge where we’ve been and all they can become, we can make this a place where every single kid has the freedom to learn.

As Shenker-Osorio told Salon in an interview, McAuliffe “needed to first and foremost call people up to their ‘better angels,’ and not speak not so much to what he believed, but what Americans believe, what parents believe.”

That wouldn’t solve all the Democrats’ problems, and it certainly is no remedy for GOP gerrymandering. But it does show that a crucial and supposedly difficult problem has a solution that isn’t just theoretical.

“We’ve tested language like that a few times now and it’s not really that controversial,” Shenker-Osorio said. “That is in fact what huge portions of parents want.” (One recent poll found that 84% favored teaching “American history that includes both our best achievements and our worst mistakes.”) It’s also important to “parry the dog whistle,” she added. “You talk about what the other side is doing, but you ascribe motivation. You explain why they’re doing it.” She continued:

Democrats should be prepared for this. None of this is shocking, none of this is new. It’s been going on over and over again and Democrats need to establish themselves on firm footing that what the majority of people actually want is an equitable cross-racial democracy. And then say that the other side is engaging in this strategy to distract from their failures, so they can get us to look the other way while they continue to endanger our children’s lives by lying about vaccines and opposing masks.

And really, that’s the connection to make, between “Hey, look — this is what they’re doing,” and “This is the reason why.” They’ve never given a damn about public education and they’ve done everything under their power to weaken it and harm our kids in every possible dimension, right down to their actual physical health. So because they cannot run on their record, and they cannot run on having actually helped improve our schools and helped our families, they need to sow this distraction. That’s the way to deal with this.

This approach draws on Shenker-Osorio’s work on “race-class narratives,” developed in partnership with Ian Haney López, which I’ve written about previously. It’s a way of responding to dog-whistle politics, the subject of López’s book by the same name. “Dog-whistling at its core is about undermining the notion of the collective, i.e., the principle of government,” Shenker Osorio said.

Democrats have struggled with this for decades, López added, realizing it was a problem as early as the 1970s, but failing to come up with a viable solution. “They even, to their discredit, emulated dog whistling as a tactic to get elected,” he said. “I have in mind here Bill Clinton.”

So perhaps it’s no surprise that Clinton’s infamous campaign guru, James Carville, echoed old-school dog-whistle attacks on the left in a post-Virginia discussion on “PBS NewsHour“:

This defund the police lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools, that — people see that. And it’s just — really have a suppressive effect all across the country to Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a woke detox center or something. They’re expressing language that people just don’t use. And there’s a backlash and a frustration at that.

Backward thinking, backward analysis

As usual, Carville has everything exactly backwards. No Democrats anywhere were running on the caricature of “wokeness” he unhelpfully echoed. In fact, the voters who didn’t show were exactly younger people and people of color, who feel neglected if not outright attacked by the “mainstream” politics Carville represents and its failure to address their needs and desires, from police reform to gun safety, student debt relief, climate action and so on. Young voters declined as a percentage of the electorate in Virginia, and would likely decline even more if Democrats listened to Carville’s advice.

In short, wokeness isn’t the problem. James Carville and the backward-looking political establishment is, with its tired, misguided takes that accept the right-wing framing of the issue landscape, rather than challenging it and proactively advancing both broadly popular issues and a holistic social and political vision, as the race-class narrative does. But you don’t even have to embrace a “progressive” viewpoint, as the race-class narrative clearly does, to advocate a broad and proactive approach. which comes from a progressive perspective.

Political analyst Rachel Bitecofer, founder of STRIKE PAC, a self-described centrist close to the former Republicans of the Lincoln Project, suggests that the 2022 midterm campaign “should be devised, as a centralized strategy, as a referendum on this question and this question only: Is it safe for you to give Republicans power?”:

And you can define that broadly — safe for you economically, safe for you physically, safe for you mentally, safe for democracy. Whatever it might be, but, like, micro-targeted. You have to convince this electorate —our side, the 50% that can caucus with us — that if they do not vote in ’22 and vote for Democrats, their world is going to end. Because the message the other side is getting is exactly that.

That’s clearly different from the race-class narrative, but both are proactive efforts to reframe the issues, and both offer Democrats choices on how to get out of their defensive crouch. Next year’s elections will be “a referendum on us, if we let the GOP bait us into engaging on their issue spaces,” Bitecofer warned.

“We may be right about race, and we may have all the merits on our side — of morals, ethics, facts — but if we take time to point that out, we have already lost the election,” she said. “We have to go after them on issues they do not want to engage in, because the politics are bad for them, and ultimately we will bring racial equality through amassing political power.”

There are other promising ideas that are not being embraced, especially those about identifying and tackling local problems that grassroots movements and organizers have been developing for years. More on that below — but first, let’s understand what actually happened in Virginia. Gaby Goldstein’s post-election analysis at the Sister District Project blog added another layer about the race’s lack of obvious significance: Heading into three out of the last four midterms, Virginia had been an important bellwether, but in those elections the victory margins had been more than five points; the exception was McAuliffe’s victory in 2013, when the margin was just 2.6 points.

Goldstein’s main focus is on legislative races, and she notes that “Democrats lost the majority [in the Virginia House of Delegates] by less than 800 collective votes,” a razor-thin margin, much smaller than McAuliffe’s margin of defeat. Two key factors she cites fall under the headings “Finding the Right Messages for the Right Voters” and “Support Year-Round Organizing.”

She notes that Republicans in Virginia “used a very tight, disciplined set of messages…. After extensive early research, they chose three messages over the summer and stuck to them, across all targeted districts, for the entirety of the cycle,” while McAuliffe “focused on tying Youngkin to Trump.” Citing Shenker-Osorio, Goldstein observes that “we have to be FOR something desirable, not just against deplorable things.”

On that same topic, Shenker-Osorio shared her perception that “People didn’t want something that was tied to the old,” such as incessant attacks on Trump. “If I had to summarize the mood of voters, and of our coalition,” she continued, “they’re fatigued, they’re exhausted, they’re disengaged, they’re feeling disempowered, disenchanted and lots of other ‘dis’ words. They’re basically just sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

On the need for year-round organizing, Goldstein stressed “the often unheralded and unsexy work of connecting the dots between issues people care about and building political power.” When that’s done right, the next time “a campaign comes by to ask someone to vote, the voter already feels connected to civic life and understands that they have a role in building political power, so that it can be wielded in ways that benefit their lives.”

That kind of ground-level analysis differs markedly from Beltway conventional wisdom, but resonates strongly the view from many state parties, as expressed by Nebraska Democratic Party chair Jane Kleeb in her book “Harvest the Vote: How Democrats Can Win Again in Rural America,” (Salon interviews here and here) and again in our recent exchanges.

“Just like with young people, just like with Black and Latino voters, you have to have peer-to-peer messaging and constant organizing, year-round organizing,” she told me. While a D.C.-centric view sees tensions between different elements of the Democratic coalition, organizers on the ground are more likely to see commonalities, which messaging experts and outsider analysts like Ian Haney López see as well.

Dog-whistle politics, in perspective

Given how central dog-whistling has long been to Republicans, it warrants a deeper look, including the question how it worked in Virginia, which was quite different from how it worked for Donald Trump. In his 2019 book “Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America” (Salon interview here), López described the evolution of dog-whistling over time, up through Trump, who still uses coded language but with much hotter code-words like “shithole countries'”or “send them back,” while stopping short of racial epithets, insisting, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body” and accusing those who call him out of being the “real racists” by falsely accusing him and his supporters of bigotry.

Since then, López told me, dog-whistling has evolved in two directions: propaganda content and delivery. On the delivery side, it’s bifurcated. “Precisely because there’s so much synergy between the Republican Party and right-wing media, Fox News but also Facebook and Instagram,” he said, Republican Glenn Youngkin could present a “public face of moderation yet still directly communicate extreme vestiges of racial antagonism to the most amped-up Republican base.”

For example, Youngkin could express support for “parental rights,” without quite explaining that. “It’s quite bland. It’s hard to know what that means. It’s certainly hard to object to,” López said. “At the same time, he and his surrogates are on Fox News saying that critical race theory is teaching that white children are monsters.”

On the content side, there’s a bigger change. There are two traditional stories told through dog-whistling, López said: “Stories of welfare and scarcity on the one hand, like we’re all in competition for the scarce resources, and they’re being wasted on undeserving people” and on the other, “the story of physical threats from supposedly psychotic and violent people of color,” conceived as thugs, gang-bangers, rapacious immigrants, drug dealers, and so on. Now there’s a new story: “Those people agitating for racial justice are in fact motivated by racial revenge. So critical race theory, the 1619 Project, Black Lives Matter — they may say they care about racial justice, but in fact they hate white people and want racial revenge.”

This new dog-whistle “is much more racially explicit because it’s talking about racial justice folks who are centering race,” López said. “It’s not drugs or welfare queens, who rhetorically are distant from race. This is a flat-out conversation about race. But what they’re saying is, ‘We on the right are the people genuinely committed to racial justice and to bringing people together by race, whereas the left divides us by race and is motivated by race hatred. They are the real racists.’

“This is a classic reactionary strategy of accusing the other side of your your own rhetorical strategy,” López continued. “So if the left wants to say, as we do, that the right is intentionally dividing us by race, the right immediately seizes on that and says the left is dividing us by race. It helps muddy the water, and in that muddy water, people tend to retreat to whatever identity they most identify with.”

All of this, López said, “ties into a cultural fear among white people that goes back to the era of slavery, which is that demands for the end of slavery, demands for the end of racial oppression, will not create equality between groups but rather will flip the hierarchy…. What they’re really demanding is the right to do to whites what’s been done to them, the right to force white men into labor or to kill them, the right to rape white women,” which remains a powerful driver of racist fear to this day, although it’s a vanishingly rare occurrence in reality, compared to the ugly history of sexual violence under slavery.

Shenker-Osorio told me she sometimes observes, “with a significant amount of irony, that the way I know the race-class narrative works is that Republicans have started trying to adopt it. Because, of course, being untruthful is not a problem for them. They’re perfectly comfortable talking about things that have nothing to do with their actual aim as long as they can gain power.”

We can see this reflected on the world stage, where the Guardian reports that people in “particularly polarized countries” are “divided more deeply by identity than by issues,” according to a YouGov-Cambridge Globalism survey of more than 27,000 people in 27 countries. People on the right overwhelmingly reject the “feminist” label, for example, but don’t have especially negative attitudes toward a woman being a politician in most countries. Drawing on specific evidence from the U.S. and U.K., the Guardian reported that clear majorities of Biden supporters and British Labour Party supporters viewed Black Lives Matter favorably, while only 5% of Trump supporters and 17% of British Conservative Party supporters shared that opinion.

But when asked how important “combating racisms of all kinds” should be for their country, clear majorities of Conservative (80%), Labour (94%) and Biden (92%) voters said it should be a high or medium priority, along with 47% of Trump voters.

That split is striking. There’s an almost even divide, among Republicans, between outright white nationalists and their allies and those with more pluralistic and tolerant values. Calling out the former group as “deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton did, is counterproductive because dog-whistle politics bridges that divide, as López describes, by putting Democrats and progressives on the defensive. The race-class narrative he favors shows how to draw at least some of that 47% into a genuine conversation, one in which they can still have their say, contrary to what Fox News keeps telling them.

Education in Virginia: Two Things at Once

The education issue was extremely complicated in Virginia, as political scientist Angie Maxwell told Salon. Her book co-authored with Todd G. Shields, “The Long Southern Strategy” (Salon interview here) explained the “Southern strategy” as an evolving long-term phenomenon that involved gender and religion as well as race and revolved around shaping defensive identities defined by threat.

In Virginia, Maxwell said, there were “two things happening simultaneously.” On one hand, there were legitimate concerns about educational disruption during the pandemic, while on the other side was the “racially motivated anti-CRT effort,” underway for at least 18 months, which is “nationally-driven, not grassroots,” and seeks “to activate particularly moms and women who don’t always tune in elections by getting them where they are active, which is at schools.”

This campaign goes well beyond the so-called issue of “critical race theory,” she noted. “It is very conflated with anti-masking, anti-vaccination and anti-CRT.” When people speak at school board meetings, Maxwell said, “It’s usually not one or the other, it’s usually a combined speech about both,” a fact reflected in exit polls showing a landslide vote for Youngkin among unvaccinated. “Now, the reason that makes sense is that if you do not believe COVID is even a threat, or you believe the threat is overblown, then you’re going to have even more animosity toward schools being closed. It’s going to seem absolutely ridiculous, and you’re going to be irate.”

All of this was complicated by teachers’ legitimate concerns for their health, and the fact that they’d only recently been unionized, still a rarity in Southern states. “When teachers really pushed back about the safety of in-person teaching and demanded to be on the vaccine priority list, after health care workers, that was met with a little bit of ‘Who do these people think they are?'” Maxwell said. “Because usually the public does not see what’s happening in negotiations between teachers’ unions and state government.” In addition, some of the anti-teacher animus “is loaded with modern sexism. A majority of teachers are women. They haven’t been always empowered to push back, to protect their own safety in a way that affects everyday households pretty significantly.”

So you had one set of outside manufactured issues (mask mandates, vaccines and CRT), another set of issues arising from real-world concerns and “some overlap” between the two, she said. Amid all that, McAuliffe’s muddled messaging about parents and education “really rubbed those folks the wrong way,” while Youngkin “was able to separate himself a bit from Trump” and could “afford to be polite, to use the bigger umbrella term about ‘parents’ involvement in education’ and hold onto those anti-CRT folks while also pulling some of the voters who … are frustrated with the lack of in-person education, frustrated with teachers, worried about learning loss.”

Maxwell sees “the anti-CRT stuff being promoted everywhere” in the 2022 midterm campaigns, while legitimate educational concerns will be more varied. Parents have new concerns about education that need to be taken seriously. “It’s an opportunity for feedback and parent engagement,” she said, which Democrats should welcome.

“In terms of the anti-CRT stuff. I feel like the best strategy with that is to go very, very local,” she said. “When I’ve watched the anti-CRT speakers, it’s never something specific. It’s never, ‘I’m very concerned about this lesson plan, this specifically was worded this way, and I had this conversation with my child.’ It isn’t that. It is very generic, it is very top-down.” So the answer to that is “focusing on the local,” she said. “Every Democratic candidate should be knowledgeable about the school systems within their district, what they teach, what the standards are and how they have changed, what do we not teach — just to try to keep the conversation local, local, local.”

Local, local, local

That coincides perfectly with Nebraska Democratic chair Jane Kleeb’s perspective. “This whole model of ‘National folks know best’ needs to be flipped on its head,” she said. “We need to start saying that actually state and county people know best, because they’re closest to the ground.”

National Democrats have good intentions, she adds. “There are people who are trying to reach rural voters, including the president, who’s including a major rural initiative” in the Build Back Better plan, Kleeb said. But the reality is, “For folks on the ground in these rural communities — whether you’re a grassroots organizer outside the party working on issues, or you’re a county party person or state party person — we don’t have money to do the organizing we know we need to do.

“You have to have peer-to-peer messaging and constant organizing, year-round organizing. That means rural folks talking to rural folks, not parachuting in somebody from a different state, who’s 20 years old and it’s their first job, which has been the DNC model in presidential campaigns.

“It starts with the DNC recognizing that we do have a rural problem.Second, it’s absolutely about funding state parties so we can do the organizing we know we need to do, and we know how to do. Third, and this is a big problem the constant bickering between DNC people, who I love and respect, and state party and grassroots organizers has to end.”

Kleeb said she wasn’t referring to current DNC chair Jaime Harrison — himself a proclaimed “dirt-road” Democrat from rural South Carolina. “But senior staff leadership at the DNC totally disrespects state parties on so many levels,” she said. “They treat us like we’re babysitters for local candidates and local county parties. They pat us on the head, saying, ‘Good job. But the big stuff, leave it to us. We got that. The Senate races, the presidential races, the congressional races, you don’t really know what you’re doing, so we’re going to run campaigns from outside, because we know how to win elections.'”

Kleeb draws an analogy to the climate issue a decade ago, when Democrats avoided talking about it because they feared they didn’t understand the issues and it might turn politically toxic, leaving all discussion to scientists. “So the way to solve that is, sure, listening to us more. It’s about getting a rural leader who lives in a rural community inside the room at the DCCC, the DSCC and the DNC when they are making funding, messaging and strategic decisions. But that’s not happening right now, and I know from personal experience that unless that voice is in the room, that voice is not being heard and it’s totally being misrepresented.”

There are two contrasting but important lessons in the aftermath of Virginia: Democrats need a proactive, agenda-setting narrative in order to counter the GOP’s ongoing and highly effective dog-whistle, and they need to empower, listen to and take direction from ground-level activists and organizers. Both are necessary, and both require loosening the stranglehold of conventional powerholders and conventional wisdom, which was never all that wise in the first place.

Nobody should claim this approaches will solve all the Democrats’ immediate problems. Without filibuster reform and new national voting-rights legislation, House Democrats are nearly certain to lose their majority in 2022, thanks to gerrymandering alone, along with the cyclical nature of midterm voting. But the underlying theme — Democrats and liberals need to think outside the box, and to speak up boldly and clearly for what most Americans believe — surely applies there as well.

Trump is “complicating” Mitch McConnell’s efforts to recruit Republican Senate candidates: report

According to a report from the New York Times, a Republican governors’ meet-up this past week found lawmakers looking expectantly at the 2022 midterms while also worried about what Donald Trump will do in the next year that could damage the party.

As the NYT’s Jonathan Martin and Shane Goldmacher report, Republicans were putting on a happy face about their prospects when the press is around — and privately worrying, “What could be done about Donald J. Trump?”

During the conference, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) was upfront about the next year, telling his colleagues that Trump’s attacks on incumbents are “outrageous, unacceptable and bad for the party,” before calling the former president’s comments “Trump cancel culture.”

“One year after his defeat, Mr. Trump is not only still looming over the G.O.P., but also — along with his imitators — posing the biggest threat to what is shaping up to be a fruitful year for Republican candidates. With President Biden’s approval ratings mired below 50 percent — in some surveys, below 40 percent — and voters in a sour mood, Republicans are well positioned to make gains in Congress and statehouses across the country,” Martin and Goldmacher report.

However, they report, “But there is Mr. Trump, threatening primary challenges to some House Republicans in key swing districts, endorsing Senate candidates who make party leaders uneasy and recruiting loyalists to take out Republican governors from Idaho to Georgia.”

Case in point, they note, has been Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s efforts to recruit strong candidates for seats that are either held by retiring Republicans or open seats that could be a GOP pick-up.

“Trump is now threatening to unseat lawmakers who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill. He taunts Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell as an ‘old crow’ on a near-daily basis, while demanding that Mr. McConnell be removed from his leadership post. And, most alarming to the clubby cadre of Republican governors, Mr. Trump has already endorsed two challengers against incumbent governors and is threatening to unseat others,” the Times is reporting.

“More broadly, Mr. Trump is complicating Mr. McConnell’s recruitment campaign by making clear his contempt for the sort of center-right Republicans who refuse to echo his lies about last year’s election,” the report states. “Two New England governors, Chris Sununu of New Hampshire and Phil Scott of Vermont, indicated this month that they would not run for the Senate, Mr. Hogan appears more intent on pursuing a long-shot presidential campaign, and Mr. [Doug] Ducey [of Arizona] continues to insist that he will not challenge first-term Senator Mark Kelly.”

You can read more here.

Chris Christie “proud” Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted: “Justice was done, and the jury system works”

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) on Sunday said that he was “so proud” of the U.S. justice system after admitted killer Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted by a jury.

Christie made the remarks during an interview on Fox News Sunday with guest host Bret Baier.

“Justice was done,” the former governor opined. “And the jury system works. You know, I was a prosecutor for seven years and those charges should never have been brought. And prosecutors are not supposed to give in to the whims of the public. They’re not supposed to give in to public opinion.”

“I hope that everyone will leave this young man alone now and let him go to living his life,” he continued. “He should not become a political symbol for anybody. He’s 18 years old. He should be allowed to now go on and live his life after what has been an extraordinarily difficult time for both Kyle Rittenhouse and his family.”

Christie went on to criticize media coverage of the trial.

“I think those people on the left are just attempting to continue to tear our country apart for political gain,” he insisted. “Anybody who looked at the videos of this could tell it was an act of self-defense. Anyone who knows the law would know that.”

“That’s why I’m so proud of our justice system,” Christie added. “Because you know what? It’s not perfect, Bret, but it’s the best system anyone has ever come up with in terms of trying to determine guilt or innocence in our society and that’s why I’m so proud of the jury and the jury system because it gave Kyle Rittenhouse a chance that all of these other talking heads on television didn’t give him.”

You can watch the video below via Fox News:

Mike Lindell announces plans for a protest outside of Fox News headquarters: report

According to a report from The Daily Beast’s Zachary Petrizzo, on Friday night MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell announced plans for a protest outside the New York City headquarters of Fox News, claiming the conservative network is “a big part of our country being taken from us.”

Lindell has been at war with Fox after they banned him as a guest for pushing 2020 presidential election conspiracies, including one accusing Dominion Voting Systems of allowing their voting machines to be hacked which then led to a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit filed against him in February.

After pulling his ubiquitous ads from the network for a brief period, they have since returned, but Lindell’s war with the network is still ongoing.

The Beast reports that Lindell told his followers, “We are going to do something out in front of Fox News, I think we should have — you know, if people want to go down there, maybe we should give out Frank Speech signs,” referring to his “Frank” social media platform.

Petrizzo adds Lindell labeled Fox the “controlled opposition” stating, “They [Fox News] are a big part of our country being taken from us.”

The Beast also adds that Lindell’s sidekick Douglas Frank launched an attack on the network on Saturday night on Telegram, saying Fox News is “not a credible source of news” and that some of their hosts are “traitors to our country.”

You can read the complete report here.

NASA is pulling a “Deep Impact”: New spacecraft will test asteroid deflection methods

Among existential threats to humanity, asteroid impacts rank high — in part because they’ve caused extinction-level events on Earth so many times before. Indeed, the dinosaurs perished 66 million years ago as a result of an impact from an asteroid or comet; and it’s a matter of when, not if, another strikes.

Fortunately, real-life NASA engineers are acutely concerned about the threat of space rocks ending life as we know it. To that end, NASA is launching a spacecraft to test means of neutralizing such a threat, using methods similar to (but not exactly like) those seen in the 1998 big-budget asteroid disaster movies “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact.”

The spacecraft is known as the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), and is scheduled to launch from California on Nov. 24. If the launch is successful, DART will collide with a pair of asteroids named Didymos (nearly 800 meters wide) and Dimorphos (roughly 160 meters wide). The goal will be for the spacecraft to collide with Dimorphos as it orbits Didymos, and thereby shrink its orbit. If DART succeeds in doing so, it will reinforce the idea that a spacecraft directed at a devastatingly large asteroid could deflect it away from Earth’s orbit like a billiard ball being bounced away from a corner pocket.

And if it fails? While that would be disappointing, neither of these asteroids pose a menace to Earth. The stakes in this hypothetical world-saving scenario are low because right now it is just that — a proof-of-concept in a spacecraft.

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While small asteroids and other celestial bodies collide with Earth on a regular basis, most of them are so small that they either disintegrate in our atmosphere or land on the ground as harmless meteorites. From a strictly probabilistic standpoint, it is exceptionally unlikely that an extinction-level event deriving from an asteroid will occur in our lifetimes. Even so, as any disaster movie fan will tell you, it is better to be safe than sorry. That is why engineers have come up with a number of ideas for making sure that if the possible doomsday ever comes, humanity will be ready to tell that asteroid that is not welcome near from our gravitational keyhole — that is, the tiny region of space in a planet’s gravity that sucks the passing object into its orbit in such a way that collision becomes unavoidable.

In 2007, NASA sent a report to Congress detailing options for stopping an asteroid heading toward Earth. One proposed method would be to simply lob a nuclear bomb at it. While the detonation’s force would probably blast the asteroid away from Earth, it could also cause fallout problems that would take lives (albeit far fewer than an extinction-level asteroid impact). A “kinetic impactor” like DART was listed as the next best option, although the downside there is that there are many variables about any given asteroid that scientists simply don’t know. Just as a competent pool player is familiar with the physical properties of billard balls, and as such how to apply geometry and physics to their method of play during a game, any astronomer trying to deflect a dangerous asteroid would need as much information as possible about its size, surface composition, trajectory and momentum. Scientists who prefer the kinetic impactor approach acknowledge that, quite likely, a number of “deflection campaign architectures” will be necessary to cover humanity’s bases.

In addition to possibly saving our skin from a future catastrophe, DART could also help us learn more about the asteroid itself. After making impact with the asteroid, DART may kick up a dust storm or leave a giant crater. A probe named LICIACube, which was funded by the Italian Space Agency, will separate from DART a mere 10 days before impact, which is expected to happen next autumn. It will then circle around what remains and take pictures, possibly giving scientists an unprecedented view of the interior of a busted up asteroid.

“We might be surprised by the images we collect,” Elisabetta Dotto, an astronomer at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome and leader of the group of Italian universities and institutions involved in LICIACube, told Nature.

Texas abortion law harms survivors of rape and incest, activists say

The Safe Alliance in Austin, Texas, helps survivors of child abuse, sexual assault and domestic violence. Before Texas’ new abortion law took effect, the organization counseled a 12-year-old who had been repeatedly raped by her father.

Piper Stege Nelson, chief public strategies officer for the Safe Alliance, said the girl’s father didn’t let her leave the house.

“She got pregnant,” Nelson said. “She had no idea about anything about her body. She certainly didn’t know that she was pregnant.”

The girl eventually got help, but if this had happened after Sept. 1, when the state law took effect, her options would have been severely curtailed, Nelson said.

In Texas, abortions are now banned as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. Known as SB 8, the new law represents the nation’s most restrictive ban on the procedure currently in effect. According to a recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist national poll, Texas’ law is unpopular across the political spectrum.

Notably, the law makes no exceptions for victims of rape or incest, which runs counter to public opinion. For decades, Americans consistently have favored exceptions to strict abortion bans — even in Texas. Social workers in the state said that is causing serious harm to sexual assault survivors.

While many people don’t realize they are pregnant until after six weeks, Nelson said, the time frame is a particular problem for those who are repeatedly raped or abused. To cope with the trauma of the abuse, she said, they often grow numb to what’s happening to their bodies.

“That dissociation can lead to a detachment from reality and the fact that she’s pregnant,” Nelson said. “And so, there again, she is not going to know that she is pregnant by six weeks and she’s not going to be able to resolve that pregnancy.”

Monica Faulkner, a social worker in Austin who has worked with sexual assault survivors, said not having the option of terminating a pregnancy will make recovering from an assault harder.

“The impact of finally coming forward and then being told there are no options for you is devastating,” said Faulkner, who directs the Texas Institute for Child & Family Wellbeing at the University of Texas-Austin.

Being forced to carry a pregnancy to term can be harmful financially, psychologically and, sometimes, physically. For survivors, Nelson said, that burden further strips away agency after their sense of safety and control has already been violated.

“And so, when you have something like SB 8,” Nelson said, “what it is doing is, it’s further taking control and power away from the survivor right at the moment when they need that power and control over their lives to begin healing.”

Faulkner said it’s important to give sexual assault survivors options on how to move forward in their lives. She said SB 8 “clearly is taking away any choice that they have.”

Carole Joffe, a professor and sociologist who studies abortion policy at the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California-San Francisco, said that, despite prevailing public opinion, most of the anti-abortion bills introduced across the country in recent years have not included exceptions for rape or incest.

“What we have seen over the years is a dramatic escalation,” she said. “I think what Texas shines a bright spotlight on is what disdain we have for the needs of women and girls, or people who can get pregnant even if they don’t identify as female.”

The history of abortion exceptions is complicated. Joffe noted that toward the end of the 20th century it was more common for states to include exceptions for rape and incest. She said the trend to eliminate exceptions for rape and incest started about 10 years ago, after the tea party gained power in Congress and in many statehouses. As some legislatures became more politically conservative, anti-abortion groups gained influence in the lawmaking process. Meanwhile, as some state legislatures have increased restrictions on abortion, public views have remained quite stable in the sentiment that abortion should be allowed in cases of rape and incest, Joffe said.

“The kind of restrictions we are seeing are the product of growing power in state legislatures of the anti-abortion movement,” she said.

In 2019, a coalition of anti-abortion groups sent letters to national Republican Party officials following the passage of a controversial abortion law in Alabama. In it, groups asked GOP leaders to “reconsider decades-old talking points” regarding exceptions for rape and incest.

In Texas, the growing power of hard-line conservatives in the state has helped anti-abortion advocates successfully push for more restrictive laws.

John Seago, legislative director with Texas Right to Life — an influential anti-abortion group that pushed for SB 8 — said the political shifts in the Texas legislature have made it easier to enact stricter abortion laws.

“In the last 10 years, in Texas, our Republican majority has been growing,” he said. “And kind of right around 2011 and/or 2013 we were really having enough votes to pass strong legislation.”

By “strong” Seago means not having to compromise on things like allowing abortions when severe fetal abnormalities are detected. Texas dropped those exceptions a few years ago. And now that the new law in Texas makes no exception in cases of rape or incest, Seago said, it’s more consistent with the underlying philosophy that groups like his hold.

“We are talking about innocent human life — that it is not their crime, it was not their heinous behavior that victimized this woman,” he said. “And so, why should they receive the punishment?”

The problem of pregnancies arising from sexual assault is not a small one. One study estimates that almost 3 million women in the U.S. have become pregnant following a rape.

This story is part of a partnership that includes KUT, NPR and KHN.

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I was in a cult. Britney was in a conservatorship. Our situations are crazy similar

Nov. 12 marked the historic day when after 13 years, Britney Spears finally freed herself from her father’s stranglehold, proclaiming, “I ain’t a slave 4 u!” The termination process of Britney’s conservatorship went into full effect after a court hearing, booting her father, James Spears, as her conservator.

My father converted from Judaism to Islam when I was five years old, and I grew up in a Sufi commune that turned into a cult in the Hill Country of Texas. So, unlike Britney, a legal document didn’t tether me to my cult – my childhood did, so my exit was a lot less glitzy.

A judge, attorneys, and cameras weren’t present. Nor do I have a paper or a plaque to commemorate the day of my freedom. I don’t even remember the exact month, but I do know I was 20 years old living in England, where my leader had moved. I was caring for his eight children and three wives when I finally listened to the little voice inside me that said I needed to find my own path, separate from the belief system I’d been raised in.

I flew from London back to America, escaping the treacherous life I could’ve continued indefinitely.

Hail the #FreeBritney movement, whose members followed through on their promise to free Britney, proving it takes a pink village wearing feather boas, holding bright pink signs to create change against misogyny. What I wouldn’t have done to have a #FreeTamara crusade during my childhood, battling for me to break free from all the men who controlled every aspect of my life.

I could’ve been saved years of labor trafficking and abuse.

Even though I was well past being in my teens, which were all the years I missed out on living in the cult, when Britney began dating Justin Timberlake, I was envious of her because in my cult, the girls weren’t allowed to date, something we desperately wanted to do.

When Britney hit the airwaves as the sexy Pepsi spokesperson and performed at the MTV Video Music Awards wearing a giant albino python, I was also envious. My dream was to be a dancer, but girls weren’t allowed to dance in our cult. We also couldn’t wear revealing clothes – we were asphyxiated by swooping fabrics, covering almost every inch of our bodies.

I was 27 and married with two children under five when Britney Spears’ “Hit Me Baby One More Time” debuted at No. 1. She looked like the representation of the high school girls I envied — blonde, skinny, a living plastic Barbie doll. She appeared to be carefree. I would’ve done anything to slip out of my complicated life and into her seemingly seductive life.

In 2007 when Britney began her media descent, she appeared more human and less Hollywood. She looked flabbier around the middle, her skin didn’t glisten as much, and the sparkle in her eyes dimmed. But it wasn’t until 2019, thanks to Britney’s justice warriors, that I learned Britney’s life wasn’t as perfect as I thought.

Suddenly our lives appeared more alike than ever. Secretly behind closed doors, we’d both been held hostage, our personhood and civil liberties stolen.

The point of the cult was to break the girls’ wills and to eradicate our identities so that we’d become compliant zombies and do whatever we were told. Cults are about power and control, and much is the same in a conservatorship, such as Britney’s — the purpose is to abolish the selfhood of the conservatee, turning them into a puppet of the conservator.

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In Britney’s testimony, she claimed her dad controlled what she ate and whether she drank coffee. She also couldn’t drive. In the cult, our diets were also controlled. The teenage girls were fed last, often only lentils and rice. For years, we weren’t allowed to drink caffeine of any type, and surely not coffee. Just as how Britney wasn’t allowed bodily autonomy, having lithium pills forced down her throat, we also weren’t in charge of our bodies.

Men controlled how we dressed, how long we slept and when we prayed. Britney was held prisoner in her house, and we were also unable to leave our 100+ acre compound.

Usually, conservatorships are reserved for people in comas or advanced Alzheimer’s, but in 2008 after Britney’s “erratic” behavior, Britney’s dad gained control of Britney’s estate and personhood, in essence becoming Britney. My cult leaders also essentially became Tamara. They wriggled their way into my body through mind control, snatching my thoughts and emotions.

Maybe Britney suffered from mental illness, but regardless, it’s none of our business. A person’s mental state is not up for public debate, ever. Labeling women as hysterical goes back centuries. So, of course, why not label Britney as crazy as a means to control her? Why not label the pubescent girls in our commune crazy when we disagreed with the asinine rules that governed our lives?

If this happened to Britney under the scrutiny of the media with camera lights flashing, what happens to the countless hidden girls and women, like me, who were/are controlled and manipulated by men in their families and in their communities?

When you see a woman “acting out,” don’t question her sanity. Instead, ask who and what is making her behave hysterically. Point to her social and political systems of control rather than spotlighting attention on her. Stop creating “crazy” women and then calling them cray-cray as a means to manipulate and control them into acquiescing.

Even though I officially left the cult when I was 20, I still suffer from Complex PTSD, including flashbacks, nightmares, and hypervigilance. Breaking free physically is only the first step in healing from psychological trauma. Now that Britney is free from the domination of her father, she may behave in extremes, which is typical of people who’ve previously lived under chokeholds. So, don’t be surprised if Britney acts a fool for the next several months . . . or even several years.

Leave Britney alone. Britney is traumatized, and trauma doesn’t have a timeline.

When Britney posts nudes, flaunts her stomach, her thumbs gently moving her white low-hanging shorts lower and lower or seductively sways while rolling and unrolling a pair of black stockings or shows us her yellow thong, she shouts: You don’t control me. I’m free.

Allow Britney to heal.

“Sorry, I’m not sorry,” Britney posted on her Instagram. Now that Britney is the ringleader of her circus, and she controls her fertility, her money, what will come next? How lavish will her wedding be? What will her custom Donatella Versace wedding gown look like? What juicy surprises await us? Already, on Insta, Britney wrote, “I’m thinking about having another baby!!! I wonder if this one is a girl . . . ”

Britney’s fans wait with bated breath, watching as Britney unleashes herself from shackles.

Although womanpower keeps me bound to Britney, a vast chasm still separates us. I didn’t jump out of my cult into a plane’s cockpit. I’ve spent my adulthood struggling with finances, relationships, and in finding home. Britney’s whiteness, money, and fame will afford her certain privileges I’ll never experience.

So am I still envious of Britney? Sure. But much more so, I admire her fierceness, her roar.

Twenty-one years ago in “Lucky,” Britney sang, “And the world is spinning, and she keeps on winning.” That same year in 2000, in “Stronger,” she sang, ”Stronger than yesterday. Now it’s nothing but my way. My loneliness ain’t killing me no more. I’m stronger.”

Were these prophecies that would later come true? I do believe forces greater than ourselves work their magic. Hallelujah, here, today, Britney stands stronger, a winner. May she and we all become spokespeople for the people in the world who are still bound, still gasping for air.

Britney posted on Instagram, “I suggest if you have a friend that’s been in a house that feels really small for four months . . . no car . . . no phone . . . no door for privacy and they have to work around 10 hours a day 7 days a week and give tons of blood weekly with never a day off . . . I strongly suggest you go pick up your friend and get them the hell outta there!!!!!”

If you know of a girl or a woman held against her will, don’t remain complacent. She may use code, like wearing yellow. Her voice may not be audible, but she’s screaming for help. May we all become her pink village. May we all allow her to become the pop princess of her life.

Let’s fire confetti cannons for all the women in the world who are still chained. In Britney’s words, “Hold your head high, fingers to the sky.”

And in case you didn’t know: I’m Tamara, B1*@h!!!

More stories you may want to read:

Are Democrats the “real racists”? Well, they used to be: Here’s the history

Republicans have an obvious race problem — one they prefer not to admit, even to themselves. The party’s voter base is overwhelmingly white, and Republicans are now actively trying to suppress Black voters (and other voters of color) through a range of Jim Crow tactics. They reflexively support police even in the most egregious cases of racist violence (such as the murder of George Floyd last year) and have consistently depicted Black Lives Matter as a subversive, anti-American movement. But they can’t win elections without moderate and independent voters who are uncomfortable with overt and blatant manifestations of racism, so they claim that Democrats and liberals are the “real racists.”

It seems that everyone on the right, from crackpot filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza to The Federalist, enjoys pointing out that the Democratic Party used to be the main political vehicle for white supremacy in the United States. They assume their readers will pretend not to notice that decades ago Democrats and Republicans “switched sides” (at least on the issue of race), since that would cancel out this attempted “gotcha.” In fact, the Democratic and Republican parties did not assume their current identities as “liberal” and “conservative,” respectively — and as we understand those terms today — until partway through the 20th century, and neither party stands for what it once did, especially but not exclusively on racial issues.

Three presidential elections play key roles in this story: Those of 1912, 1932 and 1964.

The modern two-party system began to take shape in the 1850s, with the demise of the Whig Party and the birth of the Republicans (from the anti-slavery faction of the Whigs, more or less). But in the decades after the Civil War, neither party much resembled its latter-day version. As the party of Abraham Lincoln, Republicans theoretically supported citizenship rights for Black people (at least up to a point), along with other vaguely “liberal” policies like a more centralized approach to economic policymaking, expanding the post-Civil War veteran pension system to create what some scholars argue was an early welfare state, and lavishing government support on America’s burgeoning industries. Democrats like Grover Cleveland — the only Democratic president of the later 19th century, and something of a libertarian by modern standards — thought those ideas were wasteful and dangerous.

But the Democrats of the time, incoherent heirs to the populist tradition of Andrew Jackson, were a chaotic mixture of ingredients: Big-city political bosses and urban white immigrants, agrarian populists like William Jennings Bryan (some of whose proposals would be “liberal” or even radical today), Jeffersonian idealists who preached bromides about limited government, business interests who favored lower tariffs and opposed protectionism, and Southern white supremacists, who often supported progressive economic policies alongside vicious Jim Crow segregation. Essentially, the Democrats were a motley crew consisting of everyone who wasn’t a Republican — a situation that is perhaps oddly echoed today, albeit without as many jarring philosophical contradictions.

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Then came the 1912 election. Republican President William Howard Taft ran for re-election but was challenged by former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, who believed the GOP had veered too far right on economic, environmental and good government issues. Roosevelt lost the nomination struggle to Taft, but ran anyway as candidate of the newly-invented Progressive Party — and won the highest percentage of the popular vote of any third-party candidate in American history. In fact, he got more votes than Taft, and carried six states — but both of them were overwhelmed by Democrat Woodrow Wilson. In the process Americans suddenly became aware of the Republican Party’s ideological schism, and over time self-described “progressives” would feel increasingly unwelcome in the GOP.

With Democrats back in power after many decades in the wilderness, Wilson realized he had to deal with his own party’s progressive and reactionary wings. He pushed for antitrust legislation and labor rights, lowered tariffs, and later tried to launch the League of Nations, a precursor to the UN. The native Virginian also expanded Jim Crow policies (and turned a blind eye to racist violence in the South) and clamped down on the free speech rights of socialists and other dissident groups. Wilson identified with the progressive movement when that was politically convenient, but he was also a white Southerner deeply invested in the “Lost Cause” mythology of the Confederacy. While there are other contenders for this prize, Wilson may have been America’s most overtly racist president; his attitudes seemed extreme even to other white Americans at the time. He proved to be the practical embodiment of his own party’s deep internal tensions, and unsurprisingly closed his second term widely despised.

But the point here is that while the Democrats were certainly still racist in 1912 and thereafter, the two parties were losing the respective identities they’d had since the Civil War. The words “liberal” and “conservative,” which were used very differently before the Wilson presidency, began to take on their modern ideological associations. But there were large numbers of liberals and conservatives — in this modern sense — within both parties, and that would take several more decades to sort out.

The big sort began in earnest 20 years later, in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s landslide victory over President Herbert Hoover, a Republican who was widely blamed (fairly or otherwise) for the stock market crash of 1929 and the trauma of the Great Depression. Roosevelt set out, quite literally, to save capitalism with his famously ambitious agenda, known as the New Deal. Politically the New Deal allowed Democrats to forge a majority coalition by becoming the party that offered economic security to America’s most vulnerable citizens, and by greatly expanding government aid and assistance in many other areas of life. The basic premise of this agenda was summed up by Roosevelt himself in his 1944 State of the Union address:

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

Roosevelt’s economic and political innovations laid the foundations for several decades of American prosperity that, among other things, allowed the baby-boom generation to flourish as no other generation had before (or has since). They also greatly expanded the Democratic constituency, which now included unionized workers (a much larger fraction of the population at the time), “white ethnic” immigrants, students and intellectuals — and Black people in Northern cities (which were pretty much the only places they could vote). Southern whites continued to vote for Democrats for several more decades, partly based on tradition but also because the New Deal did a tremendous amount to improve living conditions in the South. But arguably, the die was cast: Rural white supremacists, leftist intellectuals and the rapidly growing Black populations in big cities couldn’t remain in the same party forever.

And indeed all that changed after 1964, when Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson, who took office in the traumatic aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, began pushing through historic legislation on civil rights and voting rights — partly out of genuine conviction and partly under enormous pressure from the civil rights movement and leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. As Johnson himself clearly foresaw, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 — which established full racial equality, at least as a matter of law — drove white Southerners out of the Democratic Party, apparently forever. A conservative insurrection within the Republican Party began immediately, resulting in the nomination of Barry Goldwater (essentially a segregationist, although he was not from the South) in the 1964 election. Goldwater lost to Johnson in an epic blowout, with the Democrat receiving a higher percentage of the popular vote than any candidate before or since — but, again, that’s not the important part. Black voters and other minority groups almost unanimously supported Johnson and the Democrats, who were now officially the party of civil rights. In practical terms, and allowing for ideological outliers like Clarence Thomas and Candace Owens, Republicans have effectively been an all-white party after that election.

So in fact it’s too simplistic to say that the Republicans and Democrats “switched sides.” It was clearly a bit more complicated than that. From the pre-Civil War period through Woodrow Wilson’s administration, the Democrats really were a white supremacist party — along with a whole bunch of other more or less incompatible things. But in a gradual process that began with the arch-racist Wilson and accelerated through FDR and LBJ, the Democrats assembled what we would now call a “liberal” coalition, with support for racial equality (at least in principle) as a central pillar. Even after 1964, the transformation was not complete, and some “conservative Democrats” and “liberal Republicans” hung around into the late 20th century. (George Wallace was a Democrat, for instance, while Nelson Rockefeller was a Republican; both would absolutely switch parties if they were alive today.)

You probably knew this already, but the bottom line here is that it’s either ignorant or dishonest (and likely both) to claim that Democrats are the “real racists” based on history. There is a lot of context — especially involving milestone events like the 1912, 1932 and 1964 elections — that pretty much invalidates the claim. Maybe the real answer is that neither party is very much like it used to be. Democrats used to be a nonsensical coalition that harbored lots of white supremacists (and other groups who more or less looked the other way), so in that sense the charge contains a tiny grain of truth. But then again, Republicans used to be a bland pro-business party and not a fascistic cult of personality. They should think twice about encouraging any other political party to juxtapose the present with its own history.

Wait, we don’t need to clean our Thanksgiving turkey?

Prepping for Thanksgiving is no easy feat. From battling amusement park-long lines in grocery stores to artfully arranging pumpkins on your front porch to rolling out pie crust after pie crust after pie crust, it takes weeks to get ready for the feast of the year. And at the center of it all — literally — is the turkey. Do you wet brine or dry brine? Fill the cavity with lemons and herbs or a cornbread stuffing? Will you roast the turkey the traditional way or try your hand at deep-frying? And wait, is it necessary to clean a turkey before cooking it? Just as there are thousands of recipes for roast turkey, there are many theories about whether or not you should rinse the bird.

Should you rinse a turkey?

In short, no. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), rinsing a raw turkey in the kitchen sink can lead to the spread of bacteria on countertops, nearby food, and other surfaces, which can cause cross-contamination. The contaminated water can spray as far as three feet away, making it nearly impossible to disinfect every single object within reach.

While cleaning a turkey may get rid of some of the bacteria on the bird, the best — and truly only — way to ensure that any bacteria or foodborne pathogens are killed off is by cooking it. According to the USDA, “cooking turkey to the correct internal temperature of 165ºF will kill any bacteria, making washing an unnecessary step.” Insert a meat thermometer in the thickest part of the thigh to check the temperature. For a moist, juicy bird, we recommend removing the bird from the oven when it has reached 160℉ to avoid overcooking the meat; the temperature will continue to rise as the bird rests before you carve it.

How to clean a turkey

There’s no need to clean a raw turkey with soap and hot water (in fact, that’s probably a bad idea). Some recipes may call for rinsing a salty dry brine off a turkey before roasting it. “When rinsing brine off of a turkey, be sure to remove all other food or objects from the sink, layer the area with paper towels, and allow a slow stream of water to avoid splashing,” says the USDA. However, we don’t recommend doing this step either, as it will not only dilute the flavor of the brined turkey but also prevent the skin from getting crispy and golden brown in the oven.

There are really only two things you absolutely need to do to clean a turkey. First, pat the skin dry with paper towels to remove any excess seasoning or moisture. Second, don’t forget to remove the neck, giblets, and any other turkey bits from inside the front and back cavities before stuffing and roasting the bird as directed in the recipe.

Against all odds, the Paris Agreement is — kinda, sorta — working

The Paris Agreement shouldn’t be working.

In many ways, the landmark climate accord, agreed to at a U.N. summit in 2015, is a weak treaty. Despite the fanfare that accompanied its signing, the agreement has no binding limits on emissions, relies on countries to set their own goals for slashing pollution, and rests on an assumption that they can be shamed into living up to their promises. It’s not even a real treaty: To get the U.S. on board, the architects of the accord crafted it as an “executive agreement” — no Congressional approval needed.

And yet, somehow, the Paris Agreement is working. To a point.

The most recent U.N. climate conference, which wrapped last weekend in Glasgow, Scotland, showed signs of progress that would have seemed unthinkable only a few years ago. Under the Paris Agreement, nations have to submit pledges (or promises, or wishful thinking, depending on who you ask) for how much they will reduce emissions every five years. That’s the core of the agreement: Voluntary pledges enacted and reviewed in a soup of international peer pressure that, ideally, will push countries to steadily do more and more. The goal is to use this system of “pledge and review” to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius — or, ideally, 1.5 degrees Celsius.

As of 2018, however, all 192 countries’ pledges added together — assuming they are actually met — would have only reduced warming to 3 degrees Celsius by 2100. At that temperature, almost all coral reefs would likely die, and a quarter of all species could vanish. Not to mention the disappearing coastlines and searing heat waves.

But during the Glasgow conference, known as COP26, a strange thing happened. Countries began making bigger promises, both in the short-term (by 2030) and in the long-term (by the end of the century). India, the world’s fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, vowed to zero out its emissions by 2070; 141 nations agreed to end deforestation; and the U.S., along with 129 other countries, promised to cut emissions of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas. By the end of the conference, the International Energy Agency announced that if all countries’ current promises are kept, the world will warm 1.8 degrees Celsius — seemingly on track to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping emissions “well below” 2 degrees Celsius.

“We came to Glasgow on a path to disaster (2.7°C),” Johan Rockström, an environmental scientist and the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, wrote on Twitter. “We leave Glasgow on a path to danger (just below 2°C).”

How could this be? Paradoxically, the weaknesses of the Paris Agreement — its feeble enforcement measures and non-binding nature — are also its strengths. “Formal international law is overrated, frankly,” said David Victor, a professor of public policy at the University of California, San Diego. The genius of Paris, according to Victor, is its flexibility: It lets countries choose how ambitious they want to be.

That might sound strange. For decades many economists and policymakers believed that the only way to take on climate change was through some kind of collective, binding agreement — one that would force countries to take action and punish those that don’t. That was the approach tried in the Paris Agreement’s predecessor, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which bound countries to emission reductions, with financial penalties if they didn’t comply. It was a textbook solution to the climate crisis.

But the Kyoto Protocol soon fell apart: The U.S. failed to ratify the treaty, and Canada, unable to meet its commitments, dropped out. Attempts to revive it at the U.N. summit in Copenhagen in 2009 failed miserably.

The problem with binding commitments, according to Victor, is that they tend to be unambitious. If a nation knows that it will face stiff penalties for not following through, it won’t want to promise as much. Paris ducks that problem. “What you want to do is liberate countries to make ambitious pledges,” Victor said. “Get them to do as much as possible and put as much on the table as possible.”

There are, of course, huge caveats. To meet the goal of keeping warming well below 2 degrees Celsius, countries actually have to follow through on those promises — something most have not been known to do. Many countries are not on track to hit their first round of pledges under the Paris Agreement, and those that are, including the U.S., have been helped along by emissions drops from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some researchers have tried to estimate whether this kind of “pledge and review” system will work to create actual action, and the results are … not particularly encouraging. One experiment, conducted by researchers at Columbia University and the University of Kassel in Germany, involved a game in which players acted as individual nations under the Paris Agreement. The “name and shame” system of emissions cuts, they found, was good at getting players to pledge more, but not as good at getting them to actually follow through.

“The framework seems to change what players say, and not what they do,” said Scott Barrett, a professor of economics at Columbia University and one of the authors on the study.

It’s too early to tell whether that will be the case for Paris. Despite rhetoric from climate activists (at COP26, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg complained that all the negotiations added up to nothing but “blah blah blah“) who expect these conferences to deliver clear results, U.N. climate summits aren’t supposed to make new policy. They are supposed to rustle up big, ambitious pledges and provide the impetus — through public pressure and diplomatic scolding — for countries to go home and start the hard work of slashing greenhouse gas emissions. By themselves, summits won’t deliver emissions cuts. That’s for individual countries — and individual industries — to do.

In a way, Glasgow’s result may mark the beginning of the end of the “pledge” stage of climate negotiations. As countries’ promises align more closely with the Paris Agreement’s goals, attention will shift to follow-through — and there, U.N. summits may not be as useful. Victor expects to see more bilateral agreements and agreements within industries, some of which were already on display at COP26. Over 30 countries and several major automakers agreed to stop building gas-guzzling cars, and the U.S. and China promised to work more closely together to cut emissions over the next 10 years.

There will still be tussles at future climate summits — especially fights over money, as poor countries seek promised funds to help them switch over to clean energy and put pressure on rich countries to compensate them for climate-related damages. But as an ambition-raising process, the Paris Agreement, for all its faults, is working. Now countries just have to deliver.

Rats in our house, rats in our streets: For New York rodents, so much depends on real estate

In February of 2020, my family got fancy rats. Our much-loved cat, Clifford, had died a few months earlier and my eldest, then thirteen, enlisted her younger siblings to advocate for a new pet. She made a PowerPoint, interviewed her brother and sister on camera, and knowing a creature of higher order was off the table (“I can only handle something that lives in a cage right now,” I’d told them), came up with various other options. Rabbits, sugar gilders, chinchillas, and hamsters made the list. But the animal she truly championed was a rat.

She narrated from the slide: “Rats love to show affection, to get pet and scratched. They also love to play games like, hide ‘n’ seek, tug-of-war and more! All rats are individual, they each are themselves and even the dumb ones are affectionate too. Rats are good for all ages. They only need one hour of love a day and they are good in spaces of any size. They are non-allergenic pets too! They are good with other rats! They will also eat almost anything!”

So we got two, Snowball and Dill. Soon after, my partner, a rat skeptic if ever there was one, even mused, “If I had known how cute they’d be, I would have signed off a lot sooner.” I also grew quite fond of the pair. Even when their litter smelled. Even when they gnawed through not one, but two cages, and escaped. Even when — contrary to my daughter’s PowerPoint assurance — they did indeed bite.

But at the same time as we were learning to love our pets, we were also being confronted with a new challenge. Street rats. I’d lived in my neighborhood for almost fifteen years and on my block for five. It was clear there were more rats recently. This, we were told, was the result of the newly arrived pandemic. Restaurants were closing and without their garbage, rats were starving and in search of food.

The pandemic meant that while rats were out and about, we were home. Though we had historically been subway people, we had moved into a place that actually came with both a driveway and a backyard. These were luxuries far beyond any I had before known in the various apartments I had inhabited during my two decades in the city. And so, with a driveway we got a car, a 2003 Camry hand-me-down from my in-laws. We would use it maybe once a week to grocery shop or do errands, or occasionally to get out of town.

But as we sheltered in place, those trips decreased. For months we had no need to drive. We biked and walked and just didn’t go very far. As a result, the car sat more idle than usual. In fact, it had been well over a month since we had driven it when my son fell off his bike, broke his wrist, and in one of the most dire months of the first pandemic wave, had to go to the hospital.

But when I opened the car door to transport him, I was hit by an odd smell. Then a grinding sound emerged as I tried to start the ignition. It was clear that the car was out of commission.

So we took a Lyft.

After returning from the hospital, my partner and I did some exploring and realized that rats were not only racing around our block, but they had also invaded our engine. We went on the attack. We took the car to the first of many mechanics, cleaned out the nest, and tried every home remedy — moth balls, peppermint spray, special spicy rat tape — that YouTube could offer. We called exterminators, set up traps and fortified our fence. We put in high frequency anti-rat alarms, scrubbed the driveway, and floored the gas before driving in order to give any rats inside a chance to escape.

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But this was a battle we continued to lose. Every time we thought we had conquered the situation, telltale rat droppings would appear. Or we would try to start our car and discover that rats had eaten through yet another wire. Or we would pop open the hood, only to have a rat leap out.

Worst was the day I left my house and noticed that the windows of the car were all blacked out. I walked closer and saw that the car was so infested with flies that one could not even see in. Flesh flies, the internet told me. These thrived on the dead. You could tell the breed by their red eyes. I later learned that a rat had died in an air vent and this was the grotesque result.

But it didn’t stop there. The rats were not only intent on destroying our car, they also discovered they could tunnel under the fence of our small backyard and dart across a swatch of patchy clover in a move that would startle the guests we had only slowly begun to socialize with outside.

We doubled down, got rid of the car, tried to block off the driveway, and dug a trench along the back fence into which we sank chicken wire and filled with pea gravel. We conferred with neighbors about the source of the vermin, and called the Department of Health to report an abandoned car, which we blamed, in part, for the infestation. Despite the fact that my own car seemed to be towed every time I was two minutes late returning to a meter, I was told that since the vehicle had valid license plates, and even though it had been there for well over a year accruing a mountain of tickets for failing to move during alternate side parking, it simply could not be removed. “Why don’t you just take off the plates yourself,” a helpful sanitation worker suggested to my partner while writing yet another ticket on the car. He declined. (For the record, it has now been two years. The license plates are no more. Yet the car remains.).

But while we just wished a swift death to our outdoor rats, our indoor rats were living the high life. Snowball and Dill had a four-tier cage, chew toys and hidey holes, treats, exercise balls, and attention. That is until we noticed that Dill looked pregnant. This was surprising since we had been assured at the pet store that both rats were female.

I found an online vet service and got a different diagnosis. A mammary tumor.

The next day I put Snowball in a hamster carrier and took the subway to an animal hospital. Due to Covid restrictions, I sat outside the office on a folding chair in a light drizzle and talked to the vet over the phone.

“I’ll give you the name of an exotic pet surgeon,” she told me. “Now, these tumors do grow back, but she can remove it temporarily.”

“Um, what if I don’t want to do that?” I asked.

“Well, you could try oral antibiotics twice a day in case it gets infected.”

“And if that seems a bit much?”

“You could do a hot compress massage on the tumor for 30 minutes three times a day.”

“And what if I just let her be?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s fine too,” said the vet. “Just bring her back if she stops eating or drinking or playing.”

Eventually, the tumor was almost larger than the rat. She could no longer climb up the ramps in her cage. And soon after, she did, in fact, stop eating and drinking and playing. It was clear Snowball was not in good shape.

I told the three kids that Snowball was too sick to have a happy life and that the vet needed to put her down. There were some tears and tender goodbyes. For my littlest, then five, I pulled out a book I had turned to in previous moments of human and animal death, 1987’s “The Tenth Good Thing About Barney.” This tells the story of a pet cat who dies and then follows the debate between two children about whether the cat was in the ground, as one believes, or in heaven as the other does. We were a blended family, and my kindergartener regularly grappled with the impact of death, wondering who she and her siblings would live with were her parents to die. So it made sense that, despite the existential questions posed by Barney, her biggest concern was not about what the afterlife would bring Snowball, but rather what would happen in the present.

“Won’t Dill be lonely now that Snowball is gone?” she asked. The other children wondered the same thing.

And that was an issue. Rats are social animals and need companionship. The kids just assumed that we would get her a replacement friend. But I imagined something different. A year and a half of battling pandemic rats had taken its toll. Rodents were still a fixture on our block, darting out as we walked by, occasionally appearing flattened in the middle of the street, and leaving repugnant evidence of their presence in the form of droppings and gnawed open trash bags. Sitting in our living room, we had also become attuned to a particular type of scream that indicated the occurrence of a pedestrian / rat encounter.

The thought of continuing to nurture indoor rats, while battling those outside, was becoming too much to consider. So I joined an online group for rat owners and found Dominic. He had eight pet rats already. They only ate organic food and would free roam in his apartment for two to three hours a day. They loved alfalfa and ear scratches. He’d be delighted to adopt Dill.

The day after Snowball’s last trip to the vet, Dominic arrived. He coaxed Dill into the new pink carrier that I had bought for the occasion, made polite small talk, and then headed back out to the train.

As we waved goodbye from our stoop, I heard a telltale scream indicating a sighting. “Oh,” I tried to chuckle, embarrassed to have Dominic note our block’s situation even as he held a rat in his hand, “I’m sure it’s nothing.” Then I hurriedly closed the door to my newly rat-free home and imagined a time when I would not have any street rats to contend with either.

More stories from Salon about rats:

Cook better chicken with these classic techniques from The New York Times

Nearly 10 years ago, former New York Times food editor Amanda Hesser published a once-in-a-generation book, “The Essential New York Times Cookbook.” In its 2010 review, Saveur extolled the work as a “tremendously appealing collection of recipes that tells the story of American cooking.” In addition to being a New York Times bestseller, it went on to win a James Beard Award.

To mark the tin anniversary of her cookbook, Hesser, who is now the CEO of Food52, updated the modern-day classic for a new contingency of home cooks living in a world impacted by a pandemic. In doing so, she had the difficult task of narrowing down 120 new recipes to add to a book that already numbered 960 pages. One of the new classics that made the cut was Samin Nosrat’s celebrated Sabzi Polo (Herbed Rice with Tahdig).

However, one of the foods that appears the most often in Hesser’s cookbook is chicken. Perhaps that’s no surprise, since current New York Times food editor Sam Sifton began his own cookbook “See You on Sunday” with an entire chapter on chicken. He writes that “a roast chicken dinner is a complete explanation of why we cook.” And he has data to back that claim up: “Chicken” tends to be the most-searched term on The New York Times website. It’s also one of the easiest meals you can cook in the comfort of your own home, no matter your skill level.

That’s likely why Hesser jokingly suggested that the “The Essential New York Times Cookbook” should instead be called simply “Chicken and Dessert.” When Hesser recently appeared on “Salon Talks,” we talked about how to cook better chicken using classic New York Times techniques, as well as the Gray Lady’s top dessert of all time. To learn more, watch our conversation here or read our Q&A below.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

One topic that our readers return to again and again at Salon Food is roast chicken. Do you have any tips for how to make a delicious roast chicken at home?

Yes, I do — and I’ve learned them really through many New York Times recipes. I feel like there’s a couple of different ways that you can go. In fact, there’s a really amazing roast chicken recipe. It’s called Green Goddess Roast Chicken, and it’s by Melissa Clark. You’re essentially brining/marinating the chicken in this green goddess dressing and then roasting it. In that marination process, it absorbs all the perfume of the herbs and the tanginess, and it also tenderizes the chicken — and it’s so delicious. That’s one way to go.

The other thing that I’ve learned from recipes is really seeing roasted chicken as very easy, but seeing it as a two-day process like you do with your turkey, where you’re heavily seasoning it and leaving it uncovered in your fridge for a day before you roast it. It just helps get a much crisper skin, and I think also you end up with a moister bird. I mean, people debate about the roasting temperature, and I think everyone’s into that with turkey. Now there’s a whole contingent of slow-roasting turkey versus high heat roasters. I feel like you want to do one or the other.

In the updated version of the cookbook, you talk about the evolution of New York Times recipes in the sense that chicken thighs now outweigh chicken breasts. What is it about chicken thighs that we love so much?

Well, yay! I’m so pleased we’ve made this shift because chicken thighs have darker meat, and darker meat generally has more flavor. I think it’s as simple as that.

One recipe that stood out to me in particular was Julia Moskin’s Flattened Chicken Thighs with Roasted Lemon Slices, which you wrote is essentially a reinvention of a classic chicken under a brick.

Oh, yes. She cooks the lemons with it, and that infuses the sauce. Chicken under a brick — that’s also just a great technique where you are essentially using weight to help compress the skin against the cooking surface. It just helps create a crisper skin all around. It condenses the heat around the chicken as it’s cooking, and it has a really nice effect on it.

The New York Times is located in New York, and New Yorkers love their cheesecake. I know you have several recipes for cheesecake in the book.

I actually included at least four, maybe five cheesecakes in there because they’re a recipe that you see iterations of through many decades of The Times archive. But also because as I tested a bunch of different ones, you just saw that there are distinct varieties of cheesecake. Some are very, very dense and creamy, and to me, it was worth including a couple of variations.

Chocolate chip cookies are another thing that you see lots of variations on over the years and even in recent years. I think I included maybe two new ones in the new edition because they were wildly different techniques that create a very different cookie. Clearly readers are fascinated by this, which is why The Times publishes chocolate chip recipes repeatedly. Butternut squash soup is another one that I have a couple of variations on and gazpacho. There are so many gazpacho recipes in The Times, and I think I ended up including about four or five in the book.

I know you are familiar with this recipe because it’s not only the most popular dessert recipe, but it’s also the most popular recipe of all time. The Original Plum Torte — what is it about this recipe?

What has made that recipe a success very much speaks to what we were talking about earlier. It’s a seemingly familiar recipe that has a little bit of a twist, and I think that its twist is that you can’t overmix the batter. You can do a simple ball. It’s mostly ingredients that are probably in your pantry. Then all you need are plums, which you cut in half. So you don’t have to do special slicing like you might for a tart or a pie. You just cut them in half, take the pits out and then drop them into the batter and stick it in the oven. It travels well. It freezes well. It takes almost no time to put together.

I’ve heard of people who will make 10 at a time and then put them in the freezer for the winter. And that, to me, embodies what readers really hope for — something that anyone who tastes it is going to love, but it’s not going to take hours to make. And it feels special — it’s a very beautiful cake that has these little embedded jewels. The plums look like embedded jewels.

Read more:

The easiest thing you’re making this Thanksgiving

Hosting Thanksgiving can certainly be stressful, especially if you’re planning to cook the bulk of the meal. There’s turkey to plan for (like, how many pounds of turkey is appropriate for each person?), sides to make, and, lest we forget, a table to set. For the Home52 team, setting the table is at least half the fun. There are lots of options for crafting a masterful centerpiece, putting out your very best in dishes and breaking out the cloth napkins, and setting the vibe for when your guests arrive.

Good news, though. The centerpieces or table settings do not need to be extravagant. On the contrary, you’ll find that once every place is set with flatware, plates, glasses and napkins, they only need the smallest touch to make them feel pulled together.

This quick, easy, customizable idea came from Yasmina Jacobs at Eat Make Celebrate, who says to make a napkin ring using a rosemary sprig. Sure, we may have thought to tuck a rosemary sprig into an existing napkin ring, but why not take it a step further and make the napkin ring itself from the herb?

The idea is so simple, and so perfect for the season, we even experimented with a host of other herbs, to great success. All you need is some fresh herbs and some flower wire (and napkins, of course). Here’s how to make them:

1. Source your herbs

Look for the longest, freshest sprigs of herbs you can find — rosemary is an obvious contender, but smaller, leafier herbs like sage, thyme, and oregano will do too. If they’re a little dry, Yasmina suggests soaking in warm water for 1 to 2 hours to make them more pliable; dry thoroughly before beginning.

2. Link herbs together with wire

Photo by Bobbi Lin.

Starting with a single spring and a length of wire, bind the herbs into a long strand by wrapping the wire around each sprig as you lay it on top of the one before it, working down. When you’ve gone a few inches, you should have enough to wrap around the napkins.

3. Wrap in a ring around napkins

Wrap the herb strand around the middle of the napkins with the wire, securing it wherever the wire ends to hold. Experiment with other herbs, and use a variety!

Looking for more DIY napkin ring ideas? We’ve got a couple more up our sleeves, thanks to arguably the best place in the world… Pinterest.

Photo by Mikyla Creates.

How cute are these wooden bead napkin rings? Mikyla Creates made these adorable tasseled rings with just some yarn, beads, and a pair of scissors. Easy!

Photo by The Merrythought.

If you’ve been wanting to try your hand with oven bake clay, these twisted napkin rings are the perfect first foray. The MerryThought made these guys by rolling out two pieces of clay, twisting them together, and pinching them into a ring. Once baked, they make the perfect addition to a handmade table.

Photo by A Box of Twine.

Got some leather scraps hanging around (a belt or shoelaces count!)? This sweet and simple DIY from Susan at A Box of Twine combines two tones and widths of leather to make a tied napkin ring.

Oh, and if you’re not interested in making any napkin rings to go along with the napkins, maybe try your hand at some fancy folding skills.

Mike Mills on R.E.M’s “New Adventures in Hi-Fi” at 25: A record “infused by being on the road”

Although R.E.M. broke up a decade ago, the Athens, Georgia, band’s music endures thanks in no small part to the deluxe 25th anniversary reissues that arrive with each passing year. In late October, that meant the emergence of 1996’s “New Adventures in Hi-Fi,” an album conceived and written while R.E.M. was on 1995’s “Monster” tour. “New Adventures in Hi-Fi” is eclectic and sonically diverse — in fact, perhaps the band’s most diverse album — and reflected the ways movement and travel impact our perception of the world around us.

Post-breakup, the members of R.E.M. are busier than ever. For example, bassist Mike Mills is gearing up to make a new record with the Baseball Project in January and is playing Big Star Third concerts. Next year, he’s also relaunching A Night of Georgia Music, a concert that features him, Chuck Leavell and composer Robert McDuffie playing songs either about Georgia or by Georgia musicians. And, in addition to that, he’s creating a show featuring his rock concerto paired with a set of songs he’s calling R.E.M. Explored.

“I’ve found two arrangers, Carl Marsh and David Mallamud, and given them five or six R.E.M. songs and said, ‘Okay, here, arrange these and have fun with them. Leave enough in the melody where the audience will know what songs you’re deconstructing, and then destroy them. Then take them places and make them as crazy as you want.’ I haven’t heard what they’re going to do with it yet, but I’m hoping it’ll be really strange and unusual.”

Mills stresses that these reimagined songs won’t be existing songs paired with orchestral arrangements. “We’re trying to create something different so that you’re not simply hearing the song repeated by a symphony arrangement. You’re hearing something completely different. I like to think of it as, how would Coltrane deconstruct this melody? And that’s what I told the arrangers. I said, ‘Look, just break it down. Just pretend you’re a jazzbo and you’re turning it into something completely other.'”

He laughs. “Who knows what that’s going to come out as, with those guys? But that’s where I’m going with it. I don’t want it to just be a symphonic rendition of a song you already know. It’s supposed to be something completely different.”

For Mills, that kind of deconstruction (and reconstruction) is creatively fulfilling. “It is always exciting to take songs that you had for many, many years and do something completely different,” he says. “And of course the other aspect of what Bobby and I are trying to do with the concerto and the R.E.M. Explored is to try to bridge the gap between classical and rock and roll. And to show that you can enjoy one and enjoy the other. There doesn’t have to be this wall between them.”

Mills checked in with Salon about not just these future works, but also the “New Adventures in Hi-Fi” reissue.

R.E.M. always previewed new songs on tours. Why did it finally take until the “Monster” era for the live recording bug to hit?

We always honestly felt that live records were kind of cheating in a way. I mean, bootlegs are one thing, but when you’re writing new songs, you want to put them out as a new record and making a live record was often just a rehash of older songs. So for us to try to do this was a totally different project. It wasn’t simply a live record. It was making a new record while on the road. So it’s not your traditional live record in any sense.

As I understand it, that recording approach was guitarist Peter Buck’s idea. Where did he get the idea from?

I think his main feeling was since we were out on the road for a year, and we were going to be writing songs anyway, and we had to do sound checks, instead of making them a perfunctory 15-minute thing we did every day, why don’t we use it this time to be creative and actually create a whole new project?

That makes a lot of sense. And that breaks up the monotony a little bit too, then it’s not sound checking the same three songs over 50 cities. How did all the traveling and different geography start to affect how you were approaching writing music, coming up with new ideas and how the music was coming out?

You know, it’s hard to say. We wanted to write a record on the road without writing about being on the road. I mean, “Running on Empty” is a cool song, but we didn’t really want to write songs about, “Here’s the road and how hard it is and how lonely it is.” You know, whatever the normal subject matter is about being on the road.

We wanted to make a record that was infused by being on the road, that was influenced and informed by being on the road, but [was] not necessarily about being on the road. With the exception of “Departure”—[and] even that song isn’t about being on the road, but it does directly reference some of the things that happen while you’re touring — it’s not a record about being on the road. It’s just a record that was made on the road and therefore, hopefully it picks up a sense of travel, a sense of the urgency, a sense of the displacement that’s involved.

Being away from home, you’re out of your element. And so it can be a very creative time. I’ve always found that if you’re somewhere different, it sparks different ideas or makes you think about and approach something in a different way.

That’s quite true. That’s why we always like to go places to make records. You know, we could have made more records in Athens. But there’s a different sort of focus when you can leave the studio and go home. When you leave the studio and go to a restaurant in a strange town and then go to a hotel room, whatever house you’re renting, it sharpens your focus, I think. When you work in a studio and then you just go home and see the same furniture and the same people, it tends to diffuse your focus a little bit.

As the songs were coming together, what was your favorite kind of detour that you ended up coming up with? I think of a song like “Leave,” which is such an interesting kind of corner of the R.E.M. catalog and sounds like nothing else.

That’s true. Possibly the act of creating these songs on stage, whatever bits you bring onto the stage already, you’re still creating and finishing them on the stage or somewhere near there. You know, it just adds a new element to it. The fact that “Zither” was at least recorded, if not written, in a giant locker room’s bathroom, in an anonymous arena somewhere, it’s just something different.

That’s why “New Adventures” is kind of a standalone record in the R.E.M. catalog. You know, some of them could be lumped in with two or three or even four or five others, as being of a piece, in the sense that the first five are the I.R.S. records, or however you wish to do that. This one doesn’t really relate directly to any other record. It is its own thing, because of the unique situation in which it was recorded and written.

In the reading the liner notes, there’s a lot of talk about the album being a snapshot of a time and place. I like that description, because I think that totally makes a lot of sense.

I agree. I mean, every record is really a snapshot of a time and place. But this one, because of the unique situation, is more of a snapshot than any other record we made.

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Your piano solo on “How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us” was singled out as well. What do you remember most about recording that element of the song?

That song was one that was written in the amount of time that it takes to play it. Bill was playing that drum beat, and I heard that beat and started playing exactly the piano part that became the verse and the chorus. It just sort of came out of me.

When it came time to throw a solo on it, I said, “Okay, I’m not going to work up a solo here. I’m just going to play the first thing that comes to mind.” Since I’m not really an improvisational piano player, I knew it was going to be wacky and bizarre. Whether you would consider it good or not is entirely up to you, yourself, as a listener. For me, it was simply the immediacy and chaos of doing it without thinking about it.

I relied on the theory that there are no wrong notes as a backstop doing that. But basically, I pretended I was a guy who had been drafted off the street to come in and throw this solo on there who really didn’t necessarily know what he was doing. For the first few notes, it almost sounded like he had a plan and then the whole thing just descends into utter chaos, which I thought somehow suited the immediate nature of that song since it was written so quickly.

Because it’s the first song on the record, it really sets the tone too, for the rest of the album. It draws you in like that.

I think so. I mean, it’s to let you know that this record is perhaps less thought out than others. Certainly written with less of a safety net than some of our other records.

What I’ve always really liked about the record is that even though it is so eclectic and diverse, there’s a real internal logic to the sequencing. You can tell there’s a lot of thought put into it.

Sequencing is always one of the hardest things about doing a record. This one especially, because the songs are so all over the place, to try to figure out how to put this together to make it somehow cohesive was not easy. Since it was never going to be a bookend-y type of record, linearly flowing from one song to the next, we just said, “Well, okay, let’s just try to do this to make it sound good and not worry about the overall concept.”

As the “Monster” tour went on, it became obviously notoriously fraught and stressful for health reasons. [Editor’s note: Among other things, drummer Bill Berry had a brain aneurysm onstage.] Having this project going on, did recording bring solace? Did it end up functioning as a grounding element at all?

That’s a really good question. I can’t say that it did. Touring is [tiring] — I mean, it just is. There were some days when the idea of working twice in one day, i.e. making a record at soundcheck and then doing a show that night, it got to be a little much. There were some days when we were less enthused about getting on stage and writing songs than we were on others.

On the other hand, it does give you a sense of commitment and a reason to get up there and begin to sharpen your focus and your mind earlier in the day than you might otherwise. You know, on the whole, it was definitely very good for us. You couldn’t laze your way through the day as one often does on tour.

When you ended up going kind of into a real studio to finish off everything, was there any difficulty capturing the same vibe? Or did you even want to? How did merging those two recording processes and approaches work?

Another good question. As I recall, going into the studio, we weren’t really trying to maintain the vibe, because you can’t. You’re not on tour anymore. You’re not at home. You’re actually in a studio, the same room for days on end, which you know, compared to the rest of the record, was simply not the case. So you wouldn’t want to try to…

And since there was really no overall concept to this record other than making it on tour and having whatever aspects of being on tour infused into that record, they weren’t conscious aspects, they just sort of seeped in.

So you weren’t going to try to capture that in the studio. You were just going to try to see what elements the studio itself could lend to the record. You know, something like “How The West is Won,” the immediacy of sitting there and creating that song, Bill and I creating it together, just sitting there, was pretty special. It was something that might not have happened in any other setting.

With the gift of kind of retirement and then hindsight, do you feel like this was a turning point for the band or a bookend of sorts on a chapter?

I guess I would see it more as kind of a liaison, as it turns out. . . . I mean, you could call it a bookend in the sense that it’s Bill’s last record. But we didn’t know that at the time. So we certainly weren’t thinking of it in those terms.

At the time, it felt more like a bridge. Here we were and we had entered the ’95 tour as one of the biggest bands in the world, playing a really long huge tour to really large crowds. That was sort of a new thing. 1989 had not been quite the same kind of tour. This was very much its own thing.

So to try to capture that was also important. To try to capture some of the feeling of going out as a band that big and that popular, and trying to just grab a hold of some of that feeling and putting it on a record was important for us to do.

What it meant in the long-term scheme of things, we don’t really think about that. We were just making the record we tried to make. When you look back at it, I guess obviously, it’s the bridge, it’s the last R.EM. record with Bill. It’s certainly a bridge into the new R.E.M. without Bill, but that’s all.

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Betty Crocker turns 100 – why generations of American women connected with a fictional character

Though she celebrates her 100th birthday this year, Betty Crocker was never born. Nor does she ever really age.

When her face did change over the past century, it was because it had been reinterpreted by artists and shaped by algorithms.

Betty’s most recent official portrait – painted in 1996 to celebrate her 75th birthday – was inspired by a composite photograph, itself based on photographs of 75 real women reflecting the spirit of Betty Crocker and the changing demographics of America. In it, she doesn’t look a day over 40.

More importantly, this painting captures something that has always been true about Betty Crocker: She represents a cultural ideal rather than an actual woman.

Nevertheless, women often wrote to Betty Crocker and saved the letters they received in return. Many of them debated whether or not she was, in fact, a real person.

In my academic research on cookbooks, I focus primarily on the way cookbook authors, mostly women, have used the cookbook as a space to explore politics and aesthetics while fostering a sense of community among readers.

But what does it mean when a cookbook author isn’t a real person?

Inventing Betty

From the very beginning, Betty Crocker emerged in response to the needs of the masses.

In 1921, readers of the Saturday Evening Post were invited by the Washburn Crosby Co. – the parent company of Gold Medal Flour – to complete a jigsaw puzzle and mail it in for a prize. The advertising department got more than it expected.

In addition to contest entries, customers were sending in questions, asking for cooking advice. Betty’s name was invented as a customer service tool so that the return letters the company’s mostly male advertising department sent in response to these queries would seem more personal. It also seemed more likely that their mostly female customers would trust a woman.

“Betty” was chosen because it seemed friendly and familiar, while “Crocker” honored a former executive with that last name. Her signature came next, chosen from among an assortment submitted by female employees.

As Betty became a household name, the fictional cook and homemaker received so many letters that other employees had to be trained to reproduce that familiar signature.

The advertising department chose the signature for its distinctiveness, though its quirks and contours have been smoothed out over time, so much so that the version that appears on today’s boxes is hardly recognizable. Like Betty’s face, which was first painted in 1936, her signature has evolved with the times.

Betty eventually became a cultural juggernaut – a media personality, with a radio show and a vast library of publications to her name.

An outlier in cookbook culture

As I explain to students in my food and literature courses, cookbooks aren’t valued solely for the quality of their recipes. Cookbooks use the literary techniques of characterization and narrative to invite readers into imagined worlds.

By their very nature, recipes are forward-looking; they anticipate a future in which you’ve cooked something delicious. But, as they appear in many cookbooks – and in plenty of home recipe boxes – recipes also reflect a fondly remembered past. Notes in the margin of a recipe card or splatters on a cookbook page may remind us of the times a beloved recipe was cooked and eaten. A recipe may have the name of a family member attached, or even be in their handwriting.

When cookbooks include personal anecdotes, they invite a feeling of connection by mimicking the personal history that is collected in a recipe box.

Irma Rombauer may have perfected this style in her 1931 book “The Joy of Cooking,” but she didn’t invent it. American publishers started printing cookbooks in the middle of the 18th century, and even the genre’s earliest authors had a sense of the power of character, just as many food bloggers do today.

An American ideal

But because Betty Crocker’s cookbooks were written by committee, with recipes tested by staffers and home cooks, that personal history isn’t quite so personal.

As one ad for the “Betty Crocker Picture Cook Book” put it, “The women of America helped Betty Crocker write the Picture Cook Book,” and the resulting book “reflected the warmth and personality of the American home.” And while books like “Betty Crocker’s Cooky Book” open with a friendly note signed by the fictional homemaker herself, the recipe headnotes carefully avoid the pretense that she is a real person, giving credit instead to the women who submitted the recipes, suggesting variations or providing historical context.

Betty Crocker’s books invited American women to imagine themselves as part of a community connected by the loose bond of shared recipes. And because they don’t express the unique tastes of a particular person, Betty Crocker books instead promote taste as a shared cultural experience common to all American families, and cooking as a skill to which all women should aspire.

The “Story of Two Brides” that appears in Betty Crocker’s 1933 pamphlet “New Party Cakes for all Occasions” contrasts the good “little bride” who “has been taking radio cooking lessons from Betty Crocker” with the hapless “other bride” whose cooking and shopping habits are equally careless. The message here isn’t particularly subtle: The trick to becoming “the most wonderful little wife ever” is baking well, and buying the right flour.

Betty today

Despite its charming illustrations, the retrograde attitude of that 1933 pamphlet probably wouldn’t sell very many cookbooks today, let alone baking mixes, kitchen appliances or any of the other products that now bear the Betty Crocker brand, which General Mills now owns.

But if Betty Crocker’s branding in the supermarket is all about convenience and ease, the retro stylings of her newest cookbooks are a reminder that her brand is also a nostalgic one.

Published this year, for her 100th anniversary, the “Betty Crocker Best 100” reprints all of Betty’s portraits and tells the story of her invention. Rather than using the logo that appears on contemporary products, the front cover returns to the quirkier script of the early Betty, and the “personal” note at the opening of the book reminds readers that “it’s always been about recognizing that the kitchen is at the heart of the home.”

As Betty is continually reinvented in response to America’s evolving sense of self, perhaps this means valuing domestic labor without judging women by the quality of their cakes, and building community between all bakers – even those who won’t ever be good little brides.

Elizabeth A. Blake, Assistant Professor of English, Clark University

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

Colleges are walking away from remote education – and that’s a good thing

More than a decade ago Clayton Christiansen, a Harvard business professor who coined the idea of disruptive innovation, predicted that technology would revolutionize higher education. Many believe this time has come, with the tipping point being the pandemic — which resulted in widespread adoption of remote, technology-assisted teaching. The normalization of remote learning does seem to make sense, culturally; after all, isn’t this technology-based approach to education more consistent with how young people live and work already? And if students want it, perhaps higher education will finally replace face-to-face teaching with technology-based approaches to learning.

Yet nearly all colleges have re-adopted in-person education this fall, in spite of delta variant risks. Why is this? As it turns out, student enthusiasm for remote learning is mixed at best, and in some cases students have sued their colleges for refunds. But it is not simply student opinion that has driven this reversion to face-to-face education.

Indeed, students are far better off with in-person learning than with online approaches. Recent research indicates that the effects of remote learning have been negative. As the Brookings Institution Stephanie Riegg reports, “bachelor’s degree students in online programs perform worse on nearly all test score measures—including math, reading, writing, and English—relative to their counterparts in similar on-campus programs.”

In the 1980s, Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner expressed concern about technology-based education, asserting that higher learning requires much more than the delivery of facts. He asserts it requires the development of thinking and learning competencies that can only occur when there is an educational community surrounding a student. Indeed, in the decades since we have amassed a remarkable volume of research documenting how the ability to understand concepts fully, to critically analyze, and to seek new information effectively occurs when college experiences involve close relationships between students and faculty and where faculty care about the development of their students.

Indeed, research on human learning consistently finds that the social context of learning is critical, and the emotions involved in effective human relations play an essential role in learning. Think of a teacher who had a great impact on you – the one who made you excited, interested, intrigued, and motivated to learn. Was this teacher a calm and cool transmitter of facts, or a person who was passionate about the subject and excited to talk about it? And how did this teacher relate to you? Were you an empty container into which information was poured, or a person whose thinking and enthusiastic responses were valued and important?

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Research tells us the most effective teachers – those who are most successful in having their students learn – are those who establish an emotional relationship with their students in an environment of care and trust. As former teacher and now neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang tells us, emotion is necessary for learning to occur: “Emotion is where learning begins, or, as is often the case, where it ends. Put simply, it is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don’t care about…. Even in academic subjects that are traditionally considered unemotional, such as physics, engineering or math, deep understanding depends on making emotional connections between concepts.”

Learning does not happen in a mechanistic way. We know that higher learning – the kind that contributes to a good, fulfilling, and successful life – happens most effectively when social and affective dynamics are harnessed. Today we have the benefit of extensive research documenting the short-term and long-term importance of these social-educational practices. Research based on the widely used National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) consistently finds that having meaningful outside-of-class relationships with faculty and advisors increases not only learning but graduation from college and employment after graduation.

It is also worth noting that Gallup-Purdue University public opinion research affirms the idea that people believe these personal relationships in college matter. A study of 30,000 graduates reports that they believe “what students are doing in college and how they are experiencing it… has a profound relationship to life and career.” Specifically, “if graduates had a professor who cared about them as a person, made them excited about learning, and encouraged them to pursue their dreams, their odds of being engaged at work more than doubled, as did their odds of thriving in their well-being.”

Since empirical research documents the powerful impact of meaningful human relationships on learning while in college as well as on graduate’s adult lives, and people believe it matters, do we dare replace it with technology? There are certainly numerous ways technology can be used as an effective tool to facilitate learning, and many faculty have learned new ways to make it useful. Yet when we ultimately fully enter a post-pandemic world, educators must renew the emphasis on pedagogies based on in-person, face-to-face learning. We must bring the truly transformative power of social-affective learning even more clearly into the center of our educational enterprise.

Tell us how big your turkey is — and we’ll tell you how long to cook it

How long should you cook a turkey? 45 minutes? An hour? Two? All day?

The question is straightforward, but there are so many variables that make answering this a moot point (or, in the words of Joey Tribbiani, a “moo” point). Not only is every turkey a different size(duh), but ovens vary drastically — heck, even the cook times of turkeys that weigh the same can vastly differ due to breed, fat content, breast size, etc. Did you brine it? Truss it? Are you cooking a stuffed turkey? OK, then add a few more minutes to that!

The truth is, no matter how fancy-shmancy a turkey cooking time chart looks, you’ll only really know when your bird is cooked through if you check its internal temperature with an instant-read thermometer.

“For turkey that is moist and juicy,” writes J. Kenji López-Alt at Serious Eats, “aim for breasts that register 150°F in their deepest section and legs that register at least 165°F.” Ahead, we’re sharing even more tips about how to cook a turkey for Thanksgiving and offer our pro advice on carving a turkey, too.

How long to cook a turkey

I like to roast my unstuffed, room-temperature turkey at 350°F — and if you must know for how long, it’s about 13 minutes to 15 minutes per pound. That means, say, a 12-pound turkey should take about 2 1/2 hours to cook. Keep in mind that these times work best for, as mentioned, a thawed turkey that has been brought to room temperature. Trying to cook a partially frozen turkey for Thanksgiving is an entirely different ballgame (though if you find yourself in that unsavory pickle, we do have some tips to get you out of it).

Guess who agrees? Nigella Lawson. Her turkey cook times in the seminal classic, Nigella Christmas, line up with my numbers above (and no one’s cooked as many turkeys as she has).

“The cook times here always seem shockingly short to other people,” Lawson writes, “but the truth is we’ve all been overcooking turkeys for years, and then complaining about how dull and sawdusty they are. If your turkey starts at room temperature, and is untrussed and without stuffing, and your oven thermostat is working correctly, these cooking times hold.”

I’ve read horrifying accounts on other sites advising 20 minutes per pound of turkey (!). I can just taste the sawdust of what surely will be a memorable Thanksgiving turkey (but not in a good way).

Again, go by the internal temperature at the thickest part of the bird if you can (150°F at the breast and 165°F at the leg). I personally like to remove the turkey from the oven about 5°F earlier because it will continue to cook as it rests. Before you carve a turkey for Thanksgiving, you should let it rest for at least 15 minutes (and upwards of one hour). This will let it cool ever so slightly so it’s a little bit easier to handle when you go to carve it but more importantly, it will lock in all of the moisture and flavor, lest all the juices come rushing out onto the cutting board.

Should you cover a turkey?

And while you may be inclined to use it, ditch the aluminum foil. “But Eric, however will my turkey stay warm if it isn’t covered in aluminum foil?” Fortunately dear reader, after a bird has been roasting in the oven for upwards of two to three hours, it will continue to stay hot even after it’s been resting for half an hour. Plus, wrapping a Thanksgiving turkey in foil will cause it to continue to cook — ahem, overcook — as aluminum is a natural heat conductor. So while yes, it will keep your turkey meat warm, it will also turn it from a moist, juicy masterpiece into sawdust . . . and thus, all of your hard work will be ruined.