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“A Cop Movie” director: “Being a cop involves performance. You put on a costume and play a part”

“A Cop Movie” is a documentary about police officers Teresa and Montoya — and it is not. In addition to talking with the real cops, director Alfonso Ruizpalacios (“Museo“), who cowrote the film with David Gaitán, also has two actors, Mónica Del Carmen and Raúl Briones, study Teresa and Montoya to play them. If the film sounds meta, it is, but Ruizpalacios’ involving film examines what prompts folks in Mexico to become cops. 

It is not the pay. Police officers make peanuts, and some take bribes to supplement their meager income. It is not for the respect. Officers get harassed and spit on by criminals and citizens. And it is not for the safety given how much violence permeates their world. A single incident can end their career — or their life. 

“A Cop Movie,” however, shows what officers like Teresa and Montoya grapple with on and off the job, from delivering a baby to chasing criminals. The film also shows the actors’ efforts to give authentic performances as people they would never be in real life. 

RELATED: In Netflix’s “The Guilty,” cop Jake Gyllenhaal mesmerizes during one fateful night on the job

Ruizpalacios spoke with Salon via Zoom about his remarkable hybrid documentary/narrative film. 

Before you made this film, what was your attitude towards or experiences with the Mexican police force? 

It was pretty much what most Mexicans’ attitudes and experiences are — we encounter them in the city in many circumstances on a daily basis; when you run a red light or there’s an accident. There is always this huge mistrust. Raúl says it at one point in the movie — and it sums up most people’s attitudes towards the police — that when you see police coming, you don’t feel safe, and say, “Thank God, the police are here,” you feel the opposite, which is worrying. “S**t, I’m in trouble. These guys are going to try to get money out of me,” You don’t know what will happen. That was my view of the police before I made this movie as well.

How did you find your subjects Teresa and Montoya and get them to trust you to tell their story? 

Once we decided to make this film about the police, we found them through a process. We were looking for the right characters and interviewed a lot of policemen and academics that had worked with the police. The film had a few key advisors who helped us through the whole process that worked in law enforcement and also in public policy. It was through one of them that we arrived at Teresa. Someone had interviewed her for a pilot program for police reform and said, “She has some amazing stories you have to hear.” I met her for coffee. She didn’t know what the interview was for, and as soon as she started telling me her life — she is one of these people who have a need to tell her story — it was love at first sight. She was so charming and funny and clever and self-deprecating, which I always respond to. More importantly, she wanted to tell the story, and, the fact that there was this love story in the middle of this very hostile environment, was so attractive and cinematographic. 

Likewise, how did you cast the actors to play these parts as well? Did Teresa and Montoya meet Mónica and Raúl?

Raúl and Mónica didn’t meet Teresa and Montoya until the very end [of the shoot]. I wanted to keep Teresa and Montoya’s real voices for the whole movie because I don’t think you can equal the way they tell their stories. We needed actors to put bodies to these voices. The actors had both worked in theater doing these very brave acting processes where they immersed themselves in the world in the characters. I knew they both had what it took. I knew I needed [actors] who were both brave but also very skilled. 

Did you, like the actors, take any police classes to learn more about the experience that officers undergo in their six months of training? And do you think that’s enough time for someone to learn how to police?

No [laughs] I’m not that brave. I’m actually unfit for it. I’m too old, they wouldn’t let me in.  And I’m probably not fit enough [laughs]. I absolutely think six months isn’t enough time to learn how to police. But that’s how it is in Mexico. It really is like that and it is very worrying. After six months, you get a badge and gun and out you go, into the real world. It’s a huge problem. The actors’ training was half of the term, three months. It was a demanding process. They went to a third academy that didn’t make the final cut. They had to sleep there, and it was the toughest academy for them.

“A Cop Movie” is evenhanded in your discussion of the police. Teresa acknowledges that there are crooked cops, and that the police are sometimes at fault. There are scenes suggesting cops take bribes to supplement their meager income. But there is also the concern that cops have difficult jobs, are underpaid, and have to spend money to get a clean vest or decent squad car. Moreover, they are so disrespected that, as someone says in the film, “no one cares if they die.” Can you talk about being critical and celebratory of the police in your film? 

I think you cannot generate empathy within yourself if you don’t look at the whole picture and acknowledge the faults as well as the aciertos, [positives]. That’s the main thing. What we tried to do in the film, and we realized it as we progressed, that we were dealing with the actor’s main tool, which is empathy. We needed that. It’s interesting to think of empathy as a tool — something useful and powerful, we don’t tend to think of it like that — but it was our tool to get inside their minds and under their skins and see the people behind the uniform. I wasn’t interested in making a movie that was making an apology, or pro-police, or “adopt a policeman” kind of movie, that would be preposterous and ridiculous. But likewise, there would be no point to say what we can read in the newspapers about how corrupt they are. Looking at the human beings was more interesting and trying to portray them in all their complexity. They are contradictory. Some days they do the right thing, and other days they don’t. That was one of the things we realized in the research. The hardest thing to understand is that a Mexican cop can do the right thing and the wrong thing on the same day. It’s crazy to wrap your head around that.

Given the high risk/reward aspect to this work, why do you think people become cops in Mexico? 

I think most of them come into it out of necessity. It’s a job. And then they realize it’s not enough to make a living, so they turn to corruption to fulfill their needs. Most people we talked to — and Raúl said — that most people are there because it is a job. They could drive a bus, or whatever. A small minority is there because they have a passion for law enforcement and learning that law, and another small amount do it because it’s a family tradition. Most people do it because there are no other opportunities. Some are fortunate enough that their parents lead them down a straight-ish path and they turn to that rather than to the cartels. I love that story Montoya tells about one of his friends from when he was a kid and they used to play cops and robbers — when the met again after many years, he had just gotten out of jail. It’s such a remarkable story that happens. It’s not literature, it’s Montoya’s life. 

You immerse viewers in this world, starting from your opening sequence (shot largely through the windshield of a police cruiser) to a gorgeous slow motion scene of a different kind of bravery. In between you feature a chase scene, a sex scene, as well as some reveals, some repetitions, and reenactments, and some narrative surprises. Can you talk about your stylistic approach to telling this story?

I wanted to go against the typical verité documentary where it is a handheld following the characters around. There are great beautiful important documentaries made that have been made that way where it is more about just the subject than the form. I wasn’t interested in that for this movie. I wanted to create a tension between what you are hearing, and what you are seeing, and for that, there is a sort of dissociation. The audio is completely documentary, it’s the voices of Teresa and Montoya all the time narrating their own story. But what we are seeing is very deliberately staged and shot and that tension I found so interesting to watch. There’s something jarring about hearing somebody talk like that but seeing another body performing it in a very stylized way. 

This is a film about work. Not just the work of a cop but also the work done by actors. What parallels do you see in their jobs? And what connections did you make between the Teresa and Montoya meet Mónica and Raúl?

The link came because the key was that when I interviewed Teresa and Montoya, they talked about how the concept of performance was a part of their lives. Being a cop involves a great deal of performance. You put on a costume and play a part. Monica says that they are playing the part of someone strong and are the most vulnerable people. Are they equipped to play that part? Do they have the necessary skills? I think that’s the question that the movie asks. This idea of performance I find endlessly fascinating.

“A Cop Movie” streams on Netflix beginning Friday, Nov. 5. Watch the trailer below, via YouTube.

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Doctors across the world are feeling depressed and traumatized. That’s bad news for patients

Reports abound of blue-collar workers, particularly in the service industry, experiencing burnout and depression as a result of the pandemic. Yet America’s doctors, upon whom so many Americans rely for their lives, are experiencing their own miseries amid an unrelenting pandemic and mass disillusionment with the health care industry. The collective impending mental health crisis among America’s doctors may have a trickledown effect on patients, and in some cases it already has. 

In recent years, healthcare workers in the U.S. have indeed experienced increased drug misuse and suicide rates. In 2019, an estimated 29% to 54% of U.S. healthcare workers experienced burnout in 2019; a percentage that rose to 71% of physicians in September 2020, after the pandemic began. Those statistics suggest that these issues predated the pandemic, which merely exacerbated the crisis. 

But it’s just not doctors in the U.S. who are suffering. The pandemic has caused a mental health crisis in healthcare workers all across the world.

Now, a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE suggests that this crisis is actually international in nature: doctors in Catalonia (Spain), Italy and the United Kingdom are experiencing high levels of anxiety and depression. The cross-country study assessed the mental well-being of doctors — including consultants, specialty doctors and associate specialists, specialty registrars, junior doctors and general practitioners — in the three countries at two points during the pandemic; June 2020, and November/December 2020. Collectively, researchers gathered over 5,000 survey responses at each point. The researchers found that in Italy, 1 in 4 doctors had experienced symptoms of anxiety in both June of 2020 and in the winter of 2020. One in five reported symptoms of depression over the same period of time.

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In Spain, 16% of doctors surveyed reported anxiety, and around 17% reported experiencing symptoms of depression during the same timeframe. In the United Kingdom, around 12% of doctors reported anxiety, and 14% depression symptoms during the two periods surveyed.

In all three countries, women doctors were more likely to experience symptoms of anxiety and depression. In fact, in Italy, there was a 60% increase in likelihood of female doctors experiencing anxiety. In the UK, there was a 54% greater prevalence of female doctors experiencing symptoms of depression. As a whole, younger doctors under the age of 60 were more likely to experience anxiety and depression in all three countries surveyed.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has been classified as a traumatic event, with healthcare workers arguably having the most direct and longest exposure to this disease,” said co-author of the study, and principal investigator Climent Quintana-Domeque, professor of economics at the University of Exeter. “Our study identified a high prevalence of anxiety and depression symptoms among medical doctors in both the first and second waves of the pandemic, and the similar patterns across countries suggest that our findings may be applicable to other European settings.”

Notably, there appeared to be a correlation between workplace safety and mental health. Nearly half of the Italian doctors disagreed with the statement “my workplace is providing me with the necessary PPE” [personal protective equipment] in June 2020. Doctors who worked 40 hours or more in the previous week also had a higher likelihood of experiencing anxiety and depression.

The authors of the study hope this data can inform ways the healthcare industry can better protect and support their workers.

“The results of this study suggest that institutional support for healthcare workers, and in particular doctors, is important in protecting and promoting their mental health in the current and in future pandemics,” Quintana-Domeque said.

Recent well-publicized incidents in which doctors struggled at work, seemingly due to stress or overwork, attest to these findings. A story about a Massachusetts surgeon falling asleep in his car before he was scheduled to operate went viral after news outlets reported that he was facing a $5,000 fine and a reprimand from the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine. 

The consequences of overworked healthcare professionals could bring the healthcare industry to the brink of collapse, as Salon has previously reported. In a recent survey from the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN), 66% of 6,000 critical care nurses surveyed said they had considered leaving their jobs because of the pandemic.

“The thing is, if nurses decide to leave the profession in the numbers that say they might, it would bring our healthcare system to its knees,” Amanda Bettencourt, AACN president-elect, previously told Salon. “You wouldn’t be able to get care for lots of things that you need, whether it’s your health emergency or your loved ones’ health emergency, and critical care nurses are not easy to replace because it takes at least a year past their academic training for a nurse to have the skills and knowledge to take care of critically ill patients.”

Climate change is muting fall colors, but it’s just the latest way humans have altered US forests

Fall foliage season is a calendar highlight in states from Maine south to Georgia and west to the Rocky Mountains. It’s especially important in the Northeast, where fall colors attract an estimated US $8 billion in tourism revenues to New England every year.

As a forestry scientist, I’m often asked how climate change is affecting fall foliage displays. What’s clearest so far is that color changes are occurring later in the season. And the persistence of very warm, wet weather in 2021 is reducing color displays in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic. But climate change isn’t the only factor at work, and in some areas, human decisions about forest management are the biggest influences.

Longer growing seasons

Climate change is clearly making the Northeast warmer and wetter. Since 1980, average temperatures in the Northeast have increased by 0.66 degrees Fahrenheit (0.37 Celsius), and average annual precipitation has increased by 3.4 inches (8.6 centimeters) — about 8%. This increase in precipitation fuels tree growth and tends to offset stress on the trees from rising temperatures. In the West, which is becoming both warmer and drier, climate change is having greater physiological effects on trees.

My research in tree physiology and dendrochronology – dating and interpreting past events based on trees’ growth rings — shows that in general, trees in the eastern U.S. have fared quite well in a changing climate. That’s not surprising given the subtle variations in climate across much of the eastern U.S. Temperature often limits trees’ growth in cool and cold regions, so the trees usually benefit from slight warming.

In addition, carbon dioxide — the dominant greenhouse gas warming Earth’s climate — is also the molecule that fuels photosynthesis in plants. As carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere increase, plants carry out more photosynthesis and grow more.

More carbon dioxide is not automatically good for the planet — an idea often referred to as “global greening.” There are natural limits to how much photosynthesis plants can carry out. Plants need water and nutrients to grow, and supplies of these inputs are limited. And as carbon dioxide concentrations rise, plants’ ability to use it decreases — an effect known as carbon dioxide saturation.

For now, however, climate change has extended the growing season for trees in the Northeast by about 10-14 days. In my tree ring research, we routinely see trees putting on much more diameter growth now than in the past.

This effect is particularly evident in young trees, but we see it in old trees as well. That’s remarkable because old trees’ growth should be slowing down, not speeding up. Scientists in western states have even noted this acceleration in bristlecone pines that are over 4,000 years old — the oldest trees in the world.

Fall colors emerge when the growing season ends and trees stop photosynthesizing. The trees stop producing chlorophyll, the green pigment in their leaves, which absorbs energy from sunlight. This allows carotenoid (orange) and xanthophyll (yellow) pigments in the leaves to emerge. The leaves also produce a third pigment, anthocyanin, which creates red colors. A longer growing season may mean that fall colors emerge later — and it can also make those colors duller.

A changing mix of trees

Climate isn’t the only thing that affects fall colors. The types of tree species in a forest are an even bigger factor, and forest composition in the eastern U.S. has changed dramatically over the past century.

Notably, eastern forests today have more species such as red maple, black birch, tulip poplar and blackgum than they did in the early 20th century. These trees are shade-tolerant and typically grow in conditions that are neither extremely wet nor extremely dry. They also produce intense red and yellow displays in the fall.

This shift began in the 1930s, when federal agencies adopted policies that called for suppressing all wildfires quickly rather than letting some burn. At that time, much of the eastern U.S. was dominated by fire-adapted oak, pine and hickory. Without fires recurring once or twice a decade, these species fail to regenerate and ultimately decline, allowing more shade-tolerant, fire-sensitive trees like red maple to invade.

There is evidence that some tree species in the eastern U.S. are migrating to the north and west because of warming, increasing precipitation and fire suppression. This trend could affect fall colors as regions gain or lose particular species. In particular, studies indicate that the range of sugar maples — one of the best color-producing trees — is shifting northward into Canada.

Intensive logging and forest clearance across the eastern U.S. through the mid-1800s altered forests’ mix of tree species.

Forests under pressure

So far it’s clear that warming has caused a delay in peak colors for much of the East, ranging from a few days in Pennsylvania to as much as two weeks in New England. It’s not yet known whether this delay is making fall colors less intense or shorter-lasting.

But I’ve observed over the past 35 years that when very warm and wet weather extends into mid- and late October, leaves typically go from green to either dull colors or directly to brown, particularly if there is a sudden frost. This year there are few intense red leaves, which suggests that warmth has interfered with anthocyanin production. Some classic red producers, such as red maple and scarlet oak, are producing yellow leaves.

Other factors could also stress eastern forests. Climate scientists project that global warming will make tropical storms and hurricanes more intense and destructive, with higher rainfall rates. These storms could knock down trees, blow leaves off those left standing and reduce fall coloration.

Scientists also expect climate change to expand the ranges of insects that prey on trees, such as the emerald ash borer. And this year’s very wet fall has also increased problems with leaf-spotting fungi, which are hitting sugar maples particularly hard.

Forests shade the earth and absorb carbon dioxide. I am proud to see an increasing number of foresters getting involved in ecological forestry, an approach that focuses on ecosystem services that forests provide, such as storing carbon, filtering water and sheltering wildlife.

Foresters can help to slow climate change by revegetating open land, increasing forests’ biodiversity and using highly adaptable tree species that are long-lived, produce many seeds and migrate over time. Shaping eastern forests to thrive in a changing climate can help preserve their benefits — including fall color displays — well into the future.

Marc Abrams, Professor of Forest Ecology and Physiology, Penn State

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

Virginia election: Democrats left listless without Donald Trump

Tuesday’s Virginia race is the fertile soil from which a thousand hot takes will bloom, but in the end, it really did come down to voter enthusiasm. People who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 were fired up and ready to vote for Glenn Youngkin. It’s not because they are infatuated with the milquetoast mini-Trump in a sweater vest. It’s because they were drunk on racist hysterics and eager to stick it to the Democrats. A lot of people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 — 33% — however, stayed home. Meanwhile, Republicans only saw a 15% drop-off in turnout. 

In the end, Youngkin got 85% of the vote share Trump got the year before, and Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe only 66% of Biden’s 2020 share. Swing voters exist, but they are a small percentage of voters. This election came down — as they often do — to turnout. Republicans turned out and Democrats, about a third of them, did not. 

This was all entirely predictable.

Republicans are reliably easy to rile up with two main weapons: bigotry and resentment of liberals. The performative freakout over trans rights and “critical race theory” in public schools was built on easily debunked lies, and will be dropped the second it’s no longer electorally useful. But none of that matters, because Republicans live in a cloistered media ecosystem where kids reading “Beloved” in high school and imaginary rapists-in-dresses jumping strangers in the bathroom are treated like far more pressing threats to society than climate change or wealth inequality.  

RELATED: Don’t be fooled by parents’ “critical race theory” tantrums — they’re a part of the GOP’s strategy

One thing the Virginia race does end is the debate over whether there can be a Trumpism without Trump. The answer is a very definitive “yes.”

As I’ve long argued, despite Trump’s ability to get attention, he personally is not all that important to the movement that’s grown up around him. His voters see the same thing liberals do, which is a long-winded narcissist whose incuriosity is only equaled by his sadism. They just don’t care, because they see him as a useful vehicle for their agenda, which can be boiled down to being very racist while triggering the liberals. Since Trump is very good at both of those things, his voters can overlook what they don’t like about him. 

But clearly, Republicans don’t need Trump in order to rile up their voters. All they need is to give the base opportunities to be racist jerks.

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Youngkin and his surrogates offered up such opportunities on a platter, from the drama queen antics at school board meetings to the lame “let’s go Brandon” meme that Republican voters clearly think is just hee-larious. Meanwhile, Democratic leaders can’t say they weren’t warned about the enthusiasm problem.

As I’ve been writing about both at Salon and in my Standing Room Only newsletter, the signs that Democratic voters were checking out have been as obvious as a billboard in Times Square. A Morning Consult poll last month showed a whopping 92% of Republican voters said they’re fired up for future elections, while only 70% of Democrats said the same. That hypothetical 22 point gap in enthusiasm in a poll translated to a real-life 19 point gap at the Virginia ballot box on Tuesday. As Karen Tumulty in the Washington Post pointed out in mid-October, the female voters “whose engagement and activism fueled the gains that Democrats made during Donald Trump’s presidency, are increasingly tuning out politics.” I’d argue that the huge tip in the polls of female voters away from Democrats and towards Republicans reflects this mass tune-out, by Democratic women, more than a sudden switch in party affiliation. 

RELATED: Democrats hit the panic button. Is it too little too late for Joe Biden?

To be certain, getting voters fired up in an off-year election is always an uphill battle for the party that controls the White House, as Derek Thompson of the Atlantic pointed out. 

But this doesn’t let the Democrats off the hook as much as Thompson is insinuating. On the contrary, it’s a reminder that it was entirely predictable that there would be an enthusiasm drop-off as the result of time-tested partisan complacency. That’s doubly true without Trump on the ballot. For what are very good “drink bleach” reasons, mind you, Trump was an excellent get-out-the-vote motivator the Democrats. But without Trump to vote against, Democrats needed something to fire up their base. And what they offered was a whole lot of nothing. 

The biggest thing is the pandemic, and there’s no use in denying it.

Biden dragged his feet on vaccine mandates for months, and even after his big announcement rolling out new ones in September, the actual deadlines for most people to comply are non-existent. And so the virus is still spreading, albeit at a slowly dropping rate. People, especially in blue areas where taking the pandemic seriously is a matter of partisan identity, are still masking up and curtailing their social activities, even (and frankly especially) in low transmission areas where such measures are less necessary. No wonder Democratic voters are depressed and demoralized. 

RELATED: Why Joe Biden remains hostage to the GOP’s death cult

Having failed at curtailing the pandemic through the only tool that was ever going to work — vaccine mandates — Democrats then reinforced their reputation as do-nothing politicians by failing to pass any of Biden’s ambitious agenda items.

There’s been no movement on voting rights or reproductive rights or climate change. Biden’s even failing on his biggest issue, major economic reforms to make life easier and fairer for workers. The Build Back Better plan languishes in a state of purgatory, kept there by centrist Democratic senators who clearly plan to keep coming up with excuses to put off the vote until it’s killed off forever. And what those centrists are killing off is really popular stuff! 

Democrats even failed to utilize their best weapon, hatred of Trump, for turnout purposes.

Despite the long public record of evidence pointing to a conspiracy between Trump and his allies to steal the 2020 election, he and his compadres continue to walk around free men. The Justice Department won’t even arrest Steve Bannon, despite the fact that he’s in contempt of Congress. Justice after the coup attempt may not be the top issues voters cite in polls, but this failure to do anything just adds to the overall sense of Democratic impotence. 

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Plugged-in voters understand that the solution to this problem is to elect more Democrats, to create majorities strong enough that the Joe Manchins and Kyrsten Sinemas of the world can’t derail the agenda. But low information voters, the kind who are most likely to tune out during an off-year, only see that Democrats can’t get squat done and so they see no reason to vote. As one Democratic pollster told the Washington Post, voters are saying, “It doesn’t matter who we elect, it’s all the same.”

Also predictable: That Republicans would fire up some nutty culture war lies and start a racist panic (to be dropped the second it is no longer useful). They do this every time, as those of us who remember long-forgotten issues like “the caravan” and the “Ground Zero mosque,” which were once treated by Republicans as the most pressing issues of our time. Republicans signaled for months ahead of time that they were going to make transphobic urban legends and this bullshit about “critical race theory” the center of the campaign. But instead of hitting back hard and fast, Democrats let the situation fester. It was only at the last minute that McAuliffe’s campaign started pointing out that “critical race theory” is a pretext for what is outright government censorship, no different in its origins than the Nazi book burnings. By then, however, it was a matter of too little, too late — the Republican spin already dominated the narrative. 

There’s a tendency in both the mainstream media and the hot take industry of social media to reduce the complex math of elections to simplistic narratives about voters “switching” sides. But that’s really not how these things work. A bunch of Biden voters didn’t see a few school board tantrums on the local news and suddenly become Tucker Carlson fans. The people who have always been bigots were hella fired up. A huge chunk of the “everyone else” category that constitutes the Democratic base is demoralized and checked out.

Getting racists to stop being fired up by race-baiting is probably a lost cause. So Democrats have to figure out how to outnumber them — and that requires getting their own people energized. The first step is to give would-be Democratic voters something to vote for, especially when there’s no cartoon villains like Trump for people to vote against. 

The absolute best way to make chewy cookies, according to so many tests

In Absolute Best Tests, our writer Ella Quittner destroys the sanctity of her home kitchen in the name of the truth. She’s mashed dozens of potatoes, seared more porterhouse steaks than she cares to recall, and tasted enough types of bacon to concern a cardiologist. Today, she tackles cookies.

* * *

It recently came to my attention that there is no consensus on the definition of “chewy” among the people I count on for taste-testing. Unfortunately, this happened to coincide with the afternoon I asked those exact people to rank that exact characteristic across 24 batches of cookies.

“Chewy!” said my mom, biting into a sugar cookie a few Saturdays ago. “Just like a scone.”

No, that wasn’t right.

“Oh, I think this one is the chewiest,” said my dad, waving around a chocolate chip. “It’s like Tate’s.”

Also no.

“Chewy?” asked my boyfriend Nate, biting into a peanut butter cookie. “You mean like a piece of cake?”

I did not.

Accordingly, I had to take on all of the tasting for this installment of Absolute Best Tests, which was both an overwhelming task and a total dream. I have eaten so many cookies in the past few weeks that I am now one giant cookie. I can’t imagine going back to normal life. I am so high on sugar! Ha ha ha! Here, touch my chips!

Now feels like as good a time as any to offer my understanding of chewy: requiring a bit of force to bite through. Like rigatoni cooked al dente. Or mochi. Or gummies. Or udon. Or boba. A little something to keep my teeth occupied. Octopus is chewier than chicken. A bagel is chewier than white bread. A scone is not chewy, unless something has gone horribly wrong.

A perfect chocolate chip cookie, however, should be chewy. As should a peanut butter cookie, and a sugar cookie. In an ideal world, each would have tender, crisp, buttery edges, and a dense, slightly underbaked, fudgy center. The “Saturn’s ring” region — that’s what we Cookies call the space in between our edges and our centers — should be distinctly chewy, a clenched tightness that elicits some mastication.

What follows is my mad attempt to produce precisely that.

Controls

As a jumping-off point for my foray into chew-enhancement, I used three popular recipes on Food52:

My Classic Best Chocolate Chip Cookies 

Peanut Butter Cookies

Chewy Sugar Cookies #2

Since I was mainly making tweaks to increase moisture, I popped each of the doughs into the freezer for 20 minutes before baking, to help the cookies retain their shape. I also used the same standard supermarket brands of ingredients for each recipe, and a kitchen scale.

Results

Classic (No Tweaks)

It should be noted that each master recipe produced at least a slightly chewy specimen to begin with. The chocolate chip cookie was more Toll House than Entenmann’s. The peanut butter cookie was the crumbliest of the three with just a bit of bend, very “Grandma’s house” (if my grandma had ever learned to bake instead of parking me in front of Jaws reruns while she played bridge and ate cabbage soup). And the sugar cookie was plump and didn’t spread much, a little dome of dense dough.

Slam

Variation: Halfway through the bake time, remove the sheet pan from the oven and slam it on the counter. Return to the oven and keep baking according to the instructions.

Pan-banging mostly entered the recipe-world lexicon around 2017, when Sarah Keiffer’s big crinkly boys went viral on Instagram. It’s a technique I’ve been employing — albeit in a much lazier fashion — since I first learned to make cookies, as my father has long been appalled by any amount of cakiness or puff in a CCC. I applied my lazy version of the technique to each recipe: a one-time double slam of the cookie tray atop a counter midway through baking to deflate them.

Across each type of cookie (chocolate chip, peanut butter, and sugar), this tweak produced materially chewier cookies. It worked even better when, in some trials, I remembered to slam the pan against the counter at the end of the bake as well. Lacy-crisp edges were an added benefit.

Rest 24 Hours

Variation: Before baking the dough, cover and let rest in the refrigerator for 24 hours.

For this trial, I simply used the master dough recipes (chocolate chip, peanut butter, and sugar) and let each one sit covered in the refrigerator for 24 hours. According to Bon Appétit: “The primary reason for a brief resting period is to redistribute the liquid in the dough… With less ‘free moisture’ hanging around, the dough has a higher concentration of sugar, and the higher this percentage, the more likely it is that you’ll get cookies with chewy centers and crispy edges.”

While resting my doughs did not make any cookie chewier — in fact, it resulted in a softer, plusher texture across the board — the tweak did result in markedly better-tasting cookies. Even my sorta useless but very lovely taste-testers agreed with that. The cookies spread less, and they did have more even browning and texture as well.

Bread Flour

Variation: Swap half of the all-purpose flour for bread flour.

Bread flour contains more protein than all-purpose flour, and, as King Arthur explains, “The higher the protein content in a flour, the more gluten there is to develop when water is added. The more that gluten develops, the stronger the dough.” So I had hoped that swapping out half of the all-purpose flour in each recipe for bread flour would yield substantially chewier cookies.

That was the case only for the chocolate chip cookies. The bread flour batches were consistently thicker across all types (chocolate chip, peanut butter, and sugar), but for the peanut butter and sugar cookies, the thickness was softer than the master recipes. My little sister Clem also claimed that this tweak made each batch of cookies taste “just like bread” and screamed in disgust each time she took a bite, but no one else commented on flavor.

More Yolk

Variation: Halve the amount of egg white called for, and double the amount of egg yolk.

In his guide to the Food Lab‘s perfect CCC, J. Kenji López-Alt writes, “Egg yolks also provide some moisture and protein, but more importantly they provide a well-emulsified source of fat. When cooked, egg yolk forms a tender protein coagulum that can keep cookies tender and fudge-like. A high proportion of egg yolk leads to a more brownie-like texture in a finished cookie.”

For the yolk-centric trials, I took the total amount of egg in each recipe and cut the amount of egg white called for in half. Then, I doubled the amount of yolk in the recipe. And holy hell, did things get crazy!!!! Each of the doughs (chocolate chip, peanut butter, and sugar) were dry and crumbly, due to the reduction in overall egg — an egg white weighs 35 grams, while a yolk weighs just 14. But the baked cookies were (puzzlingly) more like macarons than anything else, with dry shells and extremely wet, tender insides. I cannot stress enough that these cookies looked unappealing fresh from the oven, domed and craggy like something an unpopular neighbor might bring to a potluck, until we broke them in two to reveal their extremely moist interior. Unfortunately, my sister’s friend Sander took a bite of a yolk-trial chocolate chip cookie, then exclaimed, “Mmmm, I like ’em juicy.”

None of the cookies were chewier — if anything, the wet insides were a little tacky. They were soft and pliable and bonkers, with a custardy flavor. The peanut butter cookies were especially delicious. The sugar cookies were almost gooey in the centers.

Melted Butter

Variation: Start the recipe with melted (but not hot) butter, and skip the creaming step. Instead, use a whisk to combine the melted butter with the sugar, then proceed with the recipe.

When I swapped melted butter in for creamed (aerated room-temperature butter), each batch of cookies (chocolate chip, peanut butter, and sugar) was noticeably denser, with more spread and more chew. The peanut butter cookies could practically be bent end to end without breaking. The sugar cookies were simply denser, which “read” like chewiness (my mouth can read). The chocolate chip cookies were the least pliable of the three, but were a touch chewier than the classic batch, and they had a markedly richer, more velvety internal texture. All three doughs were also wetter-seeming, and needed an extra half-hour or so to chill and firm up before scooping.

Swap Oil

Variation: Swap an equal volume of vegetable oil for half of the butter called for in a recipe.

In Cookie Genius Jesse Szewczyk’s guide to the perfect chocolate chip cookie, he suggests using a 50-50 mixture of vegetable oil and butter to achieve “soft, chewy texture with beautiful cracks.”

Making this tweak actually worked best for the peanut butter cookies, which became almost comically elastic when cooled (or maybe not comically? I spend so much time alone). The flavor didn’t suffer in the peanut butter batch.

I couldn’t discern much extra chew in the chocolate chip cookies or in the sugar cookies, though I did notice a muted flavor in both. For some reason, the reduced butter led to the vanilla and salt coming through less.

Brown Sugar

Variation: By weight, swap half the amount of white sugar for additional light brown sugar.

Per the Bob’s Red Mill blog (!! hi Bob), “Cookies that are dense and chewy incorporate more moisture into the batter. This can be achieved by making substitutions with ingredients, or even just changing the way you incorporate certain ingredients. Plus, your particular baking technique and your method of storing cookies can also play a role.”

Brown sugar has more moisture than granulated sugar, so I swapped half the granulated white sugar in each recipe with additional brown sugar. The results differed: The sugar cookies were much chewier with a higher proportion of brown sugar — especially a full day after baking — but they spread to a point of near unreliability, so for future batches, I will tweak the proportion to be a bit less. The chocolate chip cookies were thinner but a bit chewier after cooling, though they were paler and looked softer when they came out of the oven. But the peanut butter cookies were actually pillowy, and less chewy. All three batches were so delicious, though, that I would recommend you make this tweak no matter what.

***

The Chewiest Cookie Recipes

Here are the three master recipes, tweaked to include the tricks that worked best in my tests.

Recipe: The Chewiest Chocolate Chip Cookies

  • 1 1/4 cups (150 grams) all-purpose flour
  • 3/4 cup (90 grams) bread flour
  • 1 teaspoon Diamond Crystal kosher salt
  • 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 cup (226 grams/2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled
  • 2/3 cup (132 grams) granulated sugar
  • 1 cup (213 grams) packed light brown sugar
  • 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
  • 2 large eggs (100 grams)
  • 12 ounces (340 grams) bittersweet chocolate, chopped, or 2 cups chocolate chips
  1. Heat the oven to 375°F. Line two sheet pans with parchment or silicone mats.
  2. Whisk together the flour, salt, and baking soda.
  3. Whisk together the melted butter and the sugars vigorously until the mixture is smooth and thick, about 1 minute. Whisk in the vanilla. Add the eggs one at a time, whisking for 1 minute after each egg goes in. Add the dry ingredients in 3 portions, mixing only until each addition is incorporated. On low speed, or by hand with a rubber spatula, mix in the chocolate.
  4. Chill in the freezer for 45 minutes.
  5. Scoop the dough into heaping 2-tablespoon balls on the lined sheet pans.
  6. Bake the cookies one sheet pan at a time for 12 minutes total. After 8 minutes, remove the pan from the oven and slam it twice against a heatproof counter to deflate the cookies, then put them back in the oven to finish baking. They’re done when they’re browned at the edges and golden and soft in the middle. Once they’re out of the oven, allow the cookies to rest for 1 minute, then carefully, using a wide metal spatula, transfer them to wire racks to cool to room temperature.
  7. Repeat with the remainder of the dough, cooling the baking sheets between batches. These will keep in an airtight container for several days, but they are best fresh.

Recipe: The Chewiest Peanut Butter Cookies

  • 1/4 cup (2 ounces) melted (but not hot) unsalted butter
  • 1/2 cup (135 grams) creamy peanut butter (not the unsweetened kind)
  • 1/2 cup (99 grams) granulated sugar
  • 1/2 cup (106 grams) light brown sugar
  • 1 large egg (50 grams)
  • 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1/4 cup (49 grams) vegetable oil
  • 1/2 teaspoon Diamond Crystal kosher salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 cup plus 1 tablespoon (129 grams) all-purpose flour
  1. Heat the oven to 350°F. Line two sheet pans with parchment paper or silicone mats. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment (or use a large bowl and hand blender), beat the butter and peanut butter until fully combined (since the butter is melted, it won’t get aerated). Beat in the two sugars until thick and creamy. Beat in the egg, vanilla, and vegetable oil, scraping down the sides of the bowl once to make sure everything is evenly incorporated. Add the salt, baking soda, and flour and beat just until combined. Give the dough one last fold with a spatula. Chill the dough in the freezer for 45 minutes.
  2. Scoop the dough into heaping 1½-tablespoon balls on the lined sheet pans, spaced 2 inches apart. Use the back of a fork dipped in flour to flatten each cookie and make a crosshatch pattern.
  3. Bake the cookies for about 10 minutes, removing the sheet pan from the oven midway through, and slamming it firmly twice against a heatproof counter to deflate the cookies, before putting them back in the oven to finish baking. They’re done when they’re lightly golden and just firm around the edges.
  4. Let them cool on the baking sheets for a few minutes, then transfer to a baking rack to cool completely. These will keep in an airtight container for several days, but they are best fresh.

Recipe: The Chewiest Sugar Cookies

  • 1/2 cup (4 ounces) melted (but not hot) unsalted butter
  • 1/3 cup (33 grams) granulated sugar
  • 1/2 cup minus 1 heaping tablespoon (88 grams) light brown sugar
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  • 1 large egg (50 grams)
  • 1 1/2 cups (180 grams) all-purpose unbleached flour
  • 3/4 teaspoon Diamond Crystal kosher salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 cup (180 grams) turbinado sugar
  1. Heat oven to 375°F. Line two sheet pans with parchment paper.
  2. Whisk the butter and sugars for 1 minute, until thick and creamy. Scrape the sides of bowl. Add the vanilla. Whisk for 1 minute. Scrape sides of bowl. Add the egg. Whisk for 1 minute. Scrape the sides of the bowl. Add the flour, salt, and baking soda. Whisk for 1 minute. Scrape the sides of the bowl and whisk for another minute.
  3. Place the dough in the freezer to chill for 45 minutes. Meanwhile, place coarse sugar in a small, shallow bowl.
  4. Scoop heaping 2-tablespoon balls of the chilled dough and drop a few at a time in the turbinado sugar and gently roll around. (Do not press the balls down — this will ensure a chewy middle.) Place the balls of dough on the lined pans, leaving about 1 1/2 inches of space between each.
  5. Bake for 10 to 11 minutes, removing the sheet pans from the oven midway through, and slamming them firmly twice against a heatproof counter to deflate the cookies, before putting them back in the oven to finish baking. Resist the urge to bake your cookies longer, or they won’t be chewy. The tops don’t get much color, but the bottoms will be nicely golden.
  6. Place the pans on cooling racks. When cool, store the cookies in air-tight containers.

Trump and Giuliani sued for slander: Election official cites death threats caused by Trump’s Big Lie

The supervisor of a warehouse where voting machines are stored in Philadelphia has filed a lawsuit against former President Donald Trump, his personal attorney Rudy Guiliani, Jenna Ellis, local Republican officials and other political advisors in his county.

According to Politico, an attorney has filed a lawsuit on behalf of James Savage, who works as a voting machine warehouse custodian in Delaware County, Penn.

As the voting warehouse supervisor, Savage reportedly “managed the storage, security, programming, testing, and delivery of all voting equipment in Delaware County.”

Savage’s “position did not vest the Plaintiff with any ability to conduct vote tabulation whatsoever,” according to his attorney.

However, the 60-page lawsuit attributes Savage’s failing health to the outrage he faced after the presidential election. Savage noted that he “suffered two heart attacks and has regularly received threats.”

“Simply put, Mr. Savage’s physical safety, and his reputation, were acceptable collateral damage for the wicked intentions of the Defendants herein, executed during their lubricious attempt to question the legitimacy of President Joseph Biden’s win in Pennsylvania,” said Savage’s attorney, J. Conor Corcoran.

Although Savage’s attorney acknowledges Trump did not personally name his client in connection with possible election misconduct, the lawsuit explains:

“Although the Defendants mostly referred to Mr. Savage by his job title, the Voting Machine Warehouse Supervisor, anyone who heard or saw these defamatory statements or insinuations would have known that they were referring to Mr. Savage, because he was the only Chief Custodian/Voting Machine Warehouse Supervisor position in Delaware County.”

It adds, “It was obvious there was only one person who was being accused of election fraud by all of the Defendants herein.”

The greatest moral stain: Why a U.S. military jury is seeking clemency for a Guantanamo detainee

With all of the hoopla this past week over the off-year elections, President Biden’s foreign trip, and the ongoing drama on Capitol Hill, there was very little discussion of the latest chapter in one of the most important and horrific stories of our time.

The New York Times reported on an unprecedented sentencing hearing of a detainee held at Guantanamo Bay. It was the first time a prisoner detailed in public the torture he underwent at the hands of the U.S. government. There are no adequate words to describe the grotesque war crimes committed against this man. Times’ reporter Carol Rosenberg, who has covered the Guantanamo legal proceedings for many years now, vividly detailed the story of 41-year-old Majid Khan, a Pakistani citizen who graduated from a Baltimore high school and, as a lost young man, took a trip back to his home country in 2002 after his mother died. There he was seduced into joining a terrorist organization. As he put it, “I went willingly to Al Qaeda. I was stupid, so incredibly stupid. But they promised to relieve my pain and purify my sins. They promised to redeem me, and I believed them.”

RELATED: “Moment of reckoning” as two architects of CIA torture program testify at Guantánamo Bay

Khan was captured by American forces in 2003 and has been held in legal limbo ever since, despite the fact that he cooperated from the beginning. But according to his testimony, the more he cooperated, the more he was tortured. As with so many other victims of the brutal U.S. torture regime, Khan was compelled to make up tales in order to get the torture to stop. When his tales didn’t pan out, he was tortured some more.

The maze of national security restrictions put on Guantanamo prisoners attempting to defend themselves (an almost 20-year long process) has generally made it impossible for them to speak out about what happened to them. But apparently, (it isn’t clear from the reporting) Khan’s lawyers found a way for him to publicly detail the torture he endured without specifically accusing any individuals. So last week, in open court, he took the stand and expressed remorse for his actions and forgave his tormentors. In front of his horrified father and sister, both of whom are American citizens, he laid out for the record what happened to him.

Kahn described in detail the primitive conditions in which he was held: naked, with his hands chained above his head or shackled to the wall crouching “like a dog,” beaten and sleep-deprived to the point of hallucination. He was waterboarded repeatedly and nearly drowned. And then there was the sexual and “medical” sadism, as Rosenberg reports:

[A]fter he refused to eat, his captors “infused” a purée of his lunch through his anus. The C.I.A. called it rectal refeeding. Mr. Khan called it rape.

The C.I.A. pumped water up the rectum of prisoners who would not follow a command to drink. Mr. Khan said this was done to him with “green garden hoses.”

“They connected one end to the faucet, put the other in my rectum and they turned on the water,” he said, adding that he lost control of his bowels after those episodes and, to this day, has hemorrhoids.

He spoke about failed and sadistic responses to his hunger strikes and other acts of rebellion. Medics would roughly insert a feeding tube up his nose and down his throat. He would try to bite it off and, in at least one instance, he said, a C.I.A. officer used a plunger to force food inside his stomach, a technique that caused stomach cramps and diarrhea.

When CIA officers transferred Khan from one black site to another, they would insert an enema and then duct tape a diaper on him so he wouldn’t have to be taken to the bathroom. 

RELATED: Half of Americans are cool with CIA torture techniques

Kahn was eventually charged with four terrorism charges and pled guilty to delivering $50,000 from Pakistan to an Al Qaeda affiliate in early 2003 that was traced to the bombing of a Marriott hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia. At the time of the bombing, Kahn was already in custody. He also worked with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, in some failed plots during his brief period with al Qaeda.

At his trial, the lead prosecutor conceded that Kahn got “extremely rough” treatment but told the jury he was lucky to be alive when the victims of al Qaeda are not. Kahn’s lawyer said “Majid was raped at the hands of the U.S. government. He told them everything from the beginning.”

The jury of eight military officers was required to hand down a sentence of 25 to 40 years. They gave him 26 years beginning from his guilty plea in 2012. But in an unexpected twist, obviously moved by the testimony, seven of the eight jurors wrote a letter to the overseer of military commissions asking him to grant Kahn clemency. They did not know of a secret deal that was struck earlier this year with the Pentagon in which the sentence could actually end early next year and no later than February 2025 because Khan turned government cooperator upon pleading guilty.

Some of the details of these monstrous tactics were known already due to the “executive summary” of the classified Senate Torture Report that the Obama administration ensured would be withheld from the public. You may recall that the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA were at each other’s throats over that project with the CIA issuing criminal referrals against Senate staffers and the committee accusing the CIA of penetrating its computers. (As it turned out, the Inspector General found that the CIA was wrong on both of those issues and then CIA Director, John Brennan, was forced to apologize.) The Senate passed the McCain-Feinstein Anti-Torture Amendment, banning “enhanced interrogation techniques” the Bush administration’s Soviet-style euphemism for torture. But no one has ever been held accountable.

In 2018, Gina Haspel, who was involved in the CIA’s infamous destruction of CIA tapes that documented the practice and was personally involved in the torture of one terrorist suspect, became the head of the CIA under Donald Trump, the man who won the presidency in 2016 by declaring:

Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would — in a heartbeat, And I would approve more than that. Don’t kid yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work.

Torture doesn’t work. And the use of it, as well as the cover-up by two administrations and the crude endorsement by a man who would be president, is one of the greatest moral stains on America’s reputation in its long history of moral stains. And this one happened on our watch.   

ERs are swamped with seriously ill patients, although many don’t have COVID

Inside the emergency department at Sparrow Hospital in Lansing, Michigan, staff members are struggling to care for patients showing up much sicker than they’ve ever seen.

Tiffani Dusang, the ER’s nursing director, practically vibrates with pent-up anxiety, looking at patients lying on a long line of stretchers pushed up against the beige walls of the hospital hallways. “It’s hard to watch,” she said in a warm Texas twang.

But there’s nothing she can do. The ER’s 72 rooms are already filled.

“I always feel very, very bad when I walk down the hallway and see that people are in pain, or needing to sleep, or needing quiet. But they have to be in the hallway with, as you can see, 10 or 15 people walking by every minute,” Dusang said.

The scene is a stark contrast to where this emergency department — and thousands of others — were at the start of the pandemic. Except for initial hot spots like New York City, in spring 2020 many ERs across the country were often eerily empty. Terrified of contracting COVID-19, people who were sick with other things did their best to stay away from hospitals. Visits to emergency rooms dropped to half their typical levels, according to the Epic Health Research Network, and didn’t fully rebound until this summer.

But now, they’re too full. Even in parts of the country where COVID isn’t overwhelming the health system, patients are showing up to the ER sicker than before the pandemic, their diseases more advanced and in need of more complicated care.

Months of treatment delays have exacerbated chronic conditions and worsened symptoms. Doctors and nurses say the severity of illness ranges widely and includes abdominal pain, respiratory problems, blood clots, heart conditions and suicide attempts, among other conditions.

But they can hardly be accommodated. Emergency departments, ideally, are meant to be brief ports in a storm, with patients staying just long enough to be sent home with instructions to follow up with primary care physicians, or sufficiently stabilized to be transferred “upstairs” to inpatient or intensive care units.

Except now those long-term care floors are full too, with a mix of COVID and non-COVID patients. People coming to the ER get warehoused for hours, even days, forcing ER staffers to perform long-term care roles they weren’t trained to do.

At Sparrow, space is a valuable commodity in the ER: A separate section of the hospital was turned into an overflow unit. Stretchers stack up in halls. A row of brown reclining chairs lines a wall, intended for patients who aren’t sick enough for a stretcher but are too sick to stay in the main waiting room.

Forget privacy, Alejos Perrientoz learned when he arrived. He came to the ER because his arm had been tingling and painful for over a week. He couldn’t hold a cup of coffee. A nurse gave him a full physical exam in a brown recliner, which made him self-conscious about having his shirt lifted in front of strangers. “I felt a little uncomfortable,” he whispered. “But I have no choice, you know? I’m in the hallway. There’s no rooms.

“We could have done the physical in the parking lot,” he added, managing a laugh.

Even patients who arrive by ambulance are not guaranteed a room: One nurse runs triage, screening those who absolutely need a bed, and those who can be put in the waiting area.

“I hate that we even have to make that determination,” Dusang said. Lately, staff members have been pulling out some patients already in the ER’s rooms when others arrive who are more critically ill. “No one likes to take someone out of the privacy of their room and say, ‘We’re going to put you in a hallway because we need to get care to someone else.'”

ER Patients Have Grown Sicker

“We are hearing from members in every part of the country,” said Dr. Lisa Moreno, president of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine. “The Midwest, the South, the Northeast, the West … they are seeing this exact same phenomenon.”

Although the number of ER visits returned to pre-COVID levels this summer, admission rates, from the ER to the hospital’s inpatient floors, are still almost 20% higher. That’s according to the most recent analysis by the Epic Health Research Network, which pulls data from more than 120 million patients across the country.

“It’s an early indicator that what’s happening in the ED is that we’re seeing more acute cases than we were pre-pandemic,” said Caleb Cox, a data scientist at Epic.

Less acute cases, such as people with health issues like rashes or conjunctivitis, still aren’t going to the ER as much as they used to. Instead, they may be opting for an urgent care center or their primary care doctor, Cox explained. Meanwhile, there has been an increase in people coming to the ER with more serious conditions, like strokes and heart attacks.

So, even though the total number of patients coming to ERs is about the same as before the pandemic, “that’s absolutely going to feel like [if I’m an ER doctor or nurse] I’m seeing more patients and I’m seeing more acute patients,” Cox said.

Moreno, the AAEM president, works at an emergency department in New Orleans. She said the level of illness, and the inability to admit patients quickly and move them to beds upstairs, has created a level of chaos she described as “not even humane.”

At the beginning of a recent shift, she heard a patient crying nearby and went to investigate. It was a paraplegic man who’d recently had surgery for colon cancer. His large post-operative wound was sealed with a device called a wound vac, which pulls fluid from the wound into a drainage tube attached to a portable vacuum pump.

But the wound vac had malfunctioned, which is why he had come to the ER. Staffers were so busy, however, that by the time Moreno came in, the fluid from his wound was leaking everywhere.

“When I went in, the bed was covered,” she recalled. “I mean, he was lying in a puddle of secretions from this wound. And he was crying, because he said to me, ‘I’m paralyzed. I can’t move to get away from all these secretions, and I know I’m going to end up getting an infection. I know I’m going to end up getting an ulcer. I’ve been laying in this for, like, eight or nine hours.'”

The nurse in charge of his care told Moreno she simply hadn’t had time to help this patient yet. “She said, ‘I’ve had so many patients to take care of, and so many critical patients. I started [an IV] drip on this person. This person is on a cardiac monitor. I just didn’t have time to get in there.'”

“This is not humane care,” Moreno said. “This is horrible care.”

But it’s what can happen when emergency department staffers don’t have the resources they need to deal with the onslaught of competing demands.

“All the nurses and doctors had the highest level of intent to do the right thing for the person,” Moreno said. “But because of the high acuity of … a large number of patients, the staffing ratio of nurse to patient, even the staffing ratio of doctor to patient, this guy did not get the care that he deserved to get, just as a human being.”

The instance of unintended neglect that Moreno saw is extreme, and not the experience of most patients who arrive at ERs these days. But the problem is not new: Even before the pandemic, ER overcrowding had been a “widespread problem and a source of patient harm, according to a recent commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“ED crowding is not an issue of inconvenience,” the authors wrote. “There is incontrovertible evidence that ED crowding leads to significant patient harm, including morbidity and mortality related to consequential delays of treatment for both high- and low-acuity patients.”

And already-overwhelmed staffers are burning out.

Burnout Feeds Staffing Shortages, and Vice Versa

Every morning, Tiffani Dusang wakes up and checks her Sparrow email with one singular hope: that she will not see yet another nurse resignation letter in her inbox.

“I cannot tell you how many of them [the nurses] tell me they went home crying” after their shifts, she said.

Despite Dusang’s best efforts to support her staffers, they’re leaving too fast to be replaced, either to take higher-paying gigs as a travel nurse, to try a less-stressful type of nursing, or simply walking away from the profession entirely.

Kelly Spitz has been an emergency department nurse at Sparrow for 10 years. But, lately, she has also fantasized about leaving. “It has crossed my mind several times,” she said, and yet she continues to come back. “Because I have a team here. And I love what I do.” But then she started to cry. The issue is not the hard work, or even the stress. She struggles with not being able to give her patients the kind of care and attention she wants to give them, and that they need and deserve, she said.

She often thinks about a patient whose test results revealed terminal cancer, she said. Spitz spent all day working the phones, hustling case managers, trying to get hospice care set up in the man’s home. He was going to die, and she just didn’t want him to have to die in the hospital, where only one visitor was allowed. She wanted to get him home, and back with his family.

Finally, after many hours, they found an ambulance to take him home.

Three days later, the man’s family members called Spitz: He had died surrounded by family. They were calling to thank her.

“I felt like I did my job there, because I got him home,” she said. But that’s a rare feeling these days. “I just hope it gets better. I hope it gets better soon.”

Around 4 p.m. at Sparrow Hospital as one shift approached its end, Dusang faced a new crisis: The overnight shift was more short-staffed than usual.

“Can we get two inpatient nurses?” she asked, hoping to borrow two nurses from one of the hospital floors upstairs.

“Already tried,” replied nurse Troy Latunski.

Without more staff, it’s going to be hard to care for new patients who come in overnight — from car crashes to seizures or other emergencies.

But Latunski had a plan: He would go home, snatch a few hours of sleep and return at 11 p.m. to work the overnight shift in the ER’s overflow unit. That meant he would be largely caring for eight patients, alone. On just a few short hours of sleep. But lately that seemed to be their only, and best, option.

Dusang considered for a moment, took a deep breath and nodded. “OK,” she said.

“Go home. Get some sleep. Thank you,” she added, shooting Latunski a grateful smile. And then she pivoted, because another nurse was approaching with an urgent question. On to the next crisis.

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

Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

QAnon expert: Unhappy believers are now being lured into far-right extremist groups

America’s mainstream news media has a short attention span, which has certainly played to the advantage of the long-running Republican-fascist assault on democracy (and on reality). Of late, the media has grown bored with QAnon, the antisemitic and racist conspiracy cult which claims to believes that a secret cabal of pedophile Democrats and other members of the “deep state” run the world — and gain superpowers from kidnapping and killing children and then ingesting their vital essence. In this demented worldview, only Donald Trump and other “patriots” can save America and the world.  

It appears that QAnon followers played a significant role in the attack on the Capitol and coup attempt on Jan. 6. No leaders of that coup plot have been apprehended or punished, and most of the foot soldiers have received relatively lenient punishment to this point. President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland appear reluctant to apply the full power of the law to punish Donald Trump, along with his allies, operatives and followers.

QAnon followers are also attempting to undermine American democracy and civil society by infiltrating such “vulnerable” sites as local school boards, library committees and other ground-level institutions of local and state government. Their purported goal may be to ban the teaching of “critical race theory” (which is not taught in public schools), but the real goal is larger: to enforce punishment of “unpatriotic” thoughtcrimes, and to mainstream right-wing conspiracy theories and other lies about American history.

RELATED: What are the true goals of QAnon? It’s the 21st century’s ultimate catfish scheme

QAnon followers are also seeking to become election officials, where they are planning to use the fervor around Trump’s Big Lie and other conspiracy theories to rig election results, overthrow multiracial democracy and replace it with one-party Republican rule.

In an article posted last June, the National Education Association explored the QAnon-fueled “radicalization” of school boards in communities all over America:

In a small town in Washington State, the newly elected mayor calls QAnon, “a truth movement,” and recently fired the town’s skeptical city manager. In coastal San Luis Obispo, California, a school board trustee’s Facebook posts include a QAnon video, misinformation about COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter, and promotion of the ex-gay, conversion movement. She won, says the town’s mayor, who is calling for her resignation, because “people had no idea this was going on,” and didn’t have the “bandwidth to research the school board election,” reports the local newspaper, the Tribune.  

Meanwhile, in Florida, a newly elected county sheriff is now explaining why he posed for photos last year with a supporter in a “We are Q” t-shirt.   

Across the county, conspiracy theorists and proponents of fake news are winning local elections. And their new positions give them a powerful voice in everything from local law enforcement to libraries, trash pickup to textbook purchases.

QAnon followers are also gaining influence and power within white Christian evangelical churches and other faith communities. This is integral to the worsening radicalization of white Christianity and the threat of a right-wing “holy war” against Democrats, liberals, progressives, Black and brown people and anyone else who believes in the separation of church and state, or who holds values and beliefs deemed “un-American” or “anti-Christian.”

Public opinion polls and other research show that a large percentage of Republicans and Trump followers say they believe in at least portions of the outlandish QAnon fantasy and — not coincidentally — are also willing to support right-wing political violence to protect their “traditional way of life” and “save the country.” This includes removing President Joe Biden from office by violent means if deemed necessary.

Matthew Rozsa of Salon summarized these findings this week: 

New public opinion research from the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute, part of its 12th annual American Values Survey, has returned alarming findings. 

Close to one-third of Republicans in the survey, or 30%, agreed with the statement that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” That was more than the combined total of Democrats and independents who say the same thing (at 11% and 17%, respectively).

PRRI CEO and founder Robert Jones said the large proportion of Republicans who appear ready to endorse political violence is “a direct result of former President Trump calling into question the election.” Jones noted that according to the same survey, more than two-thirds of Republicans (68%) claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump, as opposed to only 26% of independents and 6% of Democrats.

The study also found that 39% of those who believed that Trump had won the 2020 election endorsed potential violence, compared to only 10% of those who rejected election misinformation. There were also signs of a split based on media consumption, with 40% of Republicans who trust far-right news sources agreeing that violence could be necessary, compared to 32% of those who trust Fox News and 22% among those who trust mainstream outlets. In addition, respondents who said violence may be necessary are more likely to report feeling like strangers in their country, to say American culture has mostly worsened since the 1950s and to believe that God has granted America a special role in human history.

Sophia Moskalenko is a social psychologist and expert on conspiracy theories, radicalization and extremism. She is currently a research fellow at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (NC-START) and is the author of several books, including “Friction: How Radicalization Happens to Them and Us” and “The Marvel of Martyrdom: The Power of Self-Sacrifice in the Selfish World.” Her new book, with co-author Mia Bloom, is “Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon.”

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In this conversation Moskalenko discusses the dangers QAnon poses to American democracy and national security. She explains that QAnon is a community where overwhelmingly white and often socially alienated followers find fellowship and meaning as they are radicalized into extremism and other potentially dangerous antisocial behavior. In her view, QAnon functions as a space that nurtures and satisfies white fantasies of right-wing masculinity, femininity, violence and heroism about “protecting” children and reasserting “traditional values”.

Toward the end of this conversation, Moskalenko explains what she would tell Joe Biden and other senior members of the administration about the threats posed by right-wing terrorism, as well as about the ways hostile foreign powers are using disinformation and other forms of propaganda to weaken American democracy and society.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

You are an expert on terrorism and other forms of political extremism. You are also an expert on propaganda and disinformation. How are you feeling right now, given America’s democracy crisis?

I’ve been feeling a little bit like Cassandra, the woman in Troy who was yelling as loud as he could about the city falling to ruin, and everybody was laughing at her. Then of course her warnings came true. It doesn’t feel good. There was so much attention being paid to Islamic terrorism after 9/11. Unfortunately, there was not enough attention being paid to the trends right here in the United States domestically. This was all very alarming for somebody such as me who is an expert on terrorism and radicalization. These trends pointed to how right-wing groups were attracting more people and carrying out more and more lethal attacks.

There were people in positions of power and influence here in the United States who were beginning to pander increasingly to these groups. And of course, Trump’s presidency was a type of pinnacle for that behavior. Those appeals to right-wing extremist groups are now crystallized in congressional representatives who are outspoken supporters of QAnon conspiracy theories.

There was also Trump’s line after the riots in Charlottesville about “good people on both sides,” which implies that maybe Nazis aren’t so bad. This problem has been developing for a long time.

When you looked at the events of Jan. 6, what did you see? What jumped out at you?

I’m a psychologist, so I focused on the emotions that I observed in the faces, the screams and the actions of the Trump followers who were there that day at the Capitol.

It was just striking to me how angry and violent and ready to inflict serious damage a lot of those people were. On Jan. 6, I saw a huge crowd of people who look just like my neighbors but who were acting in a very threatening and menacing way. It was disturbing. I also, of course, saw many QAnon symbols and antisemitic symbols and other references to hate groups.

I was also struck by the composition of the people at the Capitol on Jan. 6. They were very diverse in terms of age and gender. From the Arab Spring to images from the Ukrainian revolution or Georgian revolution, we mostly see men carrying out these mass radical actions. But on Jan. 6 at the Capitol, we saw a lot of women. There were many young people and also people in their 60s and 70s. That is very unusual, in many ways, as far as radical movements go.

There were various right-wing extremist groups and other forces involved in the events of Jan. 6. What role did QAnon conspiracy believers play?

We know that between 10% and 20% of people present at the Jan. 6 insurrection were members of right-wing militia groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and Three Percenters. A sizable proportion of those groups also consisted of active-duty military or veterans. Those militia groups also include active or retired police.

As for QAnon members, after Jan. 6 when the prophecy about Trump’s return was unfulfilled, a number of QAnon followers became disenchanted. They went back online looking for answers, like they did before they found QAnon. Now they are looking for something else.

There was a concerted effort by the right-wing extremist groups to bring them in, because they were like lost sheep. The way these groups and individuals talk about the QAnon types is very dismissive. They call them idiots. They call the QAnon prophecy nonsense. But they felt this was an opportunity to recruit a bunch of disenchanted QAnoners into their ranks.

We know that both QAnon and the right-wingers I am discussing here are very antisemitic and racist. Whatever they may say about it, we know from the data we have collected from their own materials that they express clearly antisemitic and racist attitudes. In that aspect there is an overlap, at least psychologically, between QAnon and these right-wing extremists.

“I am Q.” We see that language everywhere among the QAnon believers. What is the meaning?

“Q” is a mysterious person, or likely several people. This person or persons has “Q-level” government clearance, which indicates they are supposedly quite high in America’s intelligence hierarchy. So while a given person may claim to be “Q,” another way of thinking about the meaning of “Q” is that it is an expression of a larger identity. We are in the era of identity politics. Wearing some clothing that announces that one believes in QAnon is a way of projecting that membership and identity.

Wearing that symbol is also a way to connect to other QAnon followers. Because again, especially at these mass rallies or events, people come there for many different reasons, including a shared emotional experience, whether it’s rage or hope or even fear. That is the attraction of being together with all these other people who are experiencing the same emotions – even if they are negative emotions. It’s a way of establishing your tribe. In a rapidly changing world where we often do not know who our neighbors are, it can be very isolating and very unsettling to not have a tribe.

Carrying something like a big letter “Q” on your chest or over your head is likely an attempt to feel connected with other people who believe similar things.

One key aspect of QAnon is how it is a space for white male fantasies of power, home and family, and about using violence to “protect” children, women, faith and community. QAnon is also a space for fantasies about a particular type of white womanhood and femininity.

Much of QAnon behavior and beliefs are rooted in entertainment. In fact, they borrowed many of their tropes from traditional folklore, like vampires and witches, and also from Hollywood movies. Experimental research has shown that people are compelled to conspiracy theories because they are a lot better at eliciting strong emotions. Some people seek out conspiracy theories because they offer a chance to feel fear, like a horror movie, or anger, such as in a revenge movie.

At the same time, QAnon fills a void that was created when single-earner households where the dad goes to work and the mom stays home in her white little apron were increasingly not viable for most Americans. Such an idea, that a lot of white middle-class men and women grew up with, is no longer available to them. What is left behind are feelings of disillusionment, anger, grievance.

Of course, many of these grievances are then redirected by these QAnon or right-wing narratives more broadly towards immigrants who are supposedly taking the good jobs or taking money out of the economy that would have been enough to make the American dream possible for “real” Americans. Channeling that anger into a hatred toward minorities or immigrants is one way to make sense of their new reality.

QAnon is also a fantasy of action and about the ability of individuals to have agency in their own lives — albeit in delusional, dangerous and unhealthy ways. For example, this deranged belief that children are being held hostage by evil forces who drink their blood is likely to encourage people to get their weapons and go save them. How do these QAnon fantasies play out on the individual level?

QAnon really grew in power and popularity when the George Floyd protests and Black Lives Matter protests were also becoming more prominent. For a lot of women, it was an uncomfortable political conversation that they did not feel ready to have. This idea about saving children then became a safe political alternative for white suburban women to discuss. In their minds, who wouldn’t want to save the children?

These QAnon “save the children” ads often portray white children who are being held roughly or muzzled by dark hands. It’s a man of color holding this child. This is in contrast to the real Save the Children charity’s posters, which overwhelmingly depict children from African and Asian countries who are smiling and laughing in the pictures. By comparison, the QAnon pictures show horrified, abused and generally unkempt kids who elicit sympathy and distress by their appearance alone.

These QAnon “save the children” ads are just a kind of placeholder, I believe, to project their racial discomfort and political beliefs with people who feel the same way — and to do without really calling things by their actual name.

How do you assess the Republican Party and the larger right-wing movement’s use of stochastic terrorism? Are we at a tipping point where that stochastic terrorism could become direct encouragements to violence against “the enemy”?

I believe that we are past the tipping point. Hate speech has been increasing for a number of years. I published a book in 2018 where I traced trends for hate speech online, including on Facebook and Twitter. There was a very sizable increase since before the 2016 election, with hate speech becoming more and more prevalent.

For example, the rise of Nazism involved the use of dehumanizing language and other propaganda comparing Jewish people and others to vermin and cockroaches. Jews were depicted as being less than human, which makes it easier to call on people to exterminate them.

The language used by the Nazis might sound familiar in the present because it’s also what we hear from places like OAN or Fox News about immigrants, especially in the context of COVID. As seen with the increasing number of attacks against the Asian and Asian American communities, we can see how such hate speech has an impact.

The question is now whether we will see more mass events such as the Jan. 6 insurrection, which require coordination, movement across the country, money and other resources. I am really hoping that the authorities who are tasked with preventing another such event are doing their jobs.

Donald Trump and his spokespeople and other agents have created a martyrs out of his follower who was killed by law enforcement in the Capitol on Jan. 6. The Trumpists and right-wing propaganda media are now referring to members of Trump’s attack force as “political prisoners,” who are by implication innocent and heroic. How do you explain to the public the importance of this narrative and the political work it is doing?

This is a classic move. We saw it in Nazi Germany. We also saw it in the Soviet Union. Mythologized martyrdoms manufactured sometimes literally out of nothing. In Nazi Germany before World War II, they created a fake martyr out of a man named Horst Wessel. He became a huge martyr, and it was completely fabricated.

Martyrdoms in general are a hugely potent mass radicalization weapon. A martyr always inspires followers who will make self-sacrifices of their own. And it always challenges opponents to prove that their values are not morally bankrupt and that they too can pay the cost in blood to support the cause they believe in. There is always conflict in the wake of a martyrdom, including a fake martyrdom.

What Donald Trump and his spokespeople are doing is capitalizing on the potential of right-wing martyrdom. Whether or not this is going to catch on like Horst Wessel’s did depends on how ready the public is to carry the banner of fake martyrdom. Because any martyrdom is always a symphony between the individual and the public, even a true martyr will not inspire followers if they are not ready to make sacrifices in the name of the cause.

A fake martyr, on the other hand, can appeal to millions, as in Nazi Germany or in Soviet Union, if they are ready to jump on the bandwagon and express their rage in the name of the martyr.

What are you most concerned about in this crisis and going forward?

I am most concerned about mass radicalization and the related hatred and intolerance.

What advice would you give President Biden and other senior leadership?

Try not to pay attention to red herrings. Things like QAnon are a red herring. Try to not lose the forest for the trees. We have a massive right-wing radicalization problem in the United States where the followers are mobilized and armed and actively training. They have military or police training. They are also actively recruiting from those ranks. The resources should be going to confront that problem.

Do not discount the influence of malicious foreign actors, such as Russia and China. They are a lot more experienced with the weaponization of information and concocting propaganda narratives that are going to spread like wildfire and sow discord and mobilize people. The United States needs to catch up with their capabilities in that regard, and to protect ourselves in a way that we are not doing right now.

We need to do better with the social media giants about holding them accountable for what is taking place on their platforms. That means we need to demand that they become a lot more transparent, such as by sharing how they use algorithms and who they allow to dominate the discourse. At the moment, it’s a complete black box. We need to hold those huge business entities responsible. They’re like a type of public square — they need to be regulated.     

More from Salon on QAnon and its toxic consequences:

                     

Apple cider vinegar substitutes for perky, puckery goodness

As a medium-sharp vinegar, apple cider vinegar is easygoing when it comes to being substituted. It is almost always a quick 1:1 replacement. You may not find its exact fruity, acidic pitch in these substitutes, but you’ll make a vinegar chicken, or salad dressing, or cheesy chickpea omelet here that lets the show go on. Call it an understudy, dinner edition.

So: Is there a “best” apple cider vinegar substitute? It really comes down to which element of apple cider vinegar you want to replace most: the fruitiness, sweetness, or the sharpness.

Best apple cider vinegar substitutes

For fruitiness: Lemon or lime juice

To replicate ACV’s fruity acidity, look for acid that comes from… other fruits. Lemon is mildest here, and therefore more versatile. It has a similarly low pH too. Half a lemon makes about 1 tablespoon, so if your recipe calls for 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar, replace it with 1 tablespoon of lemon juice / the juice of half a lemon. Ditto for lime, though keep in mind lime does have a more distinct flavour. Not a bad thing, as the Caesar’s dressing I made with lime juice yesterday proved.

For sweetness: Rice vinegar (unseasoned is best)

The mildest of the vinegars, rice vinegar can be used as a 1:1 replacement. It’s sweeter and less sharp (think of the mild tang of sushi rice), so use it when you’re OK sacrificing a bit of sharpness, i.e. cooked dishes rather than salad dressings. I personally use rice vinegar as a fallback any time a dish asks for an acid that I don’t have, because a huge bottle of it is always on standby for when I cook Chinese or Japanese food and I know it will provide just enough bite to balance out any dish.

For sharpness: White wine (or white wine vinegar)

For folks who don’t keep alcohol in the house, apple cider vinegar comes in handy as a white wine substitute; and it works just as well vice versa. The reason white wine tends to be an even better ACV substitute than white wine vinegar is because white wine is lighter and less assertive. White wine vinegar still makes a good 1:1 substitute in a pinch though, but just expect more acidic punch than sweetness. (Did we mention you should always taste as you go?)

If you like the taste of red wine vinegar, then you can use it as an ACV substitute too; but that does change the flavor profile even more distinctly than white wine or white wine vinegar. Ditto for sherry vinegar, or even malt vinegar, which is made from barley (AKA future beer). If you don’t mind that shift, or want to get creative, go for it and report back in the comments. In the meantime, here are some recipes that include apple cider vinegar, which you can feel free to replace with the aforementioned subs.

Recipes with apple cider vinegar (or not!)

Scandal at Liberty University: How a Christian college dismisses students’ reports of sexual assault

When Elizabeth Axley first told Liberty University officials she had been raped, she was confident they’d do the right thing. After all, the evangelical Christian school invoked scripture to encourage students to report abuse.

“Speak up for those who can’t speak for themselves, for the rights of all who need an advocate. —Proverbs 31:8.” It was quoted in large type across an information sheet from the school’s office tasked with handling discrimination and abuse.

Axley was a first-year student at Liberty in the fall of 2017. She had been at the school less than three months. One Saturday night, she went to a Halloween party at an off-campus apartment and drank eight shots of vodka, along with a couple of mixed drinks. She doesn’t remember much after that, until, she recalls, waking up with a fellow student on top of her and his hand pressed over her mouth. (The student denies Axley’s allegations.)

After Axley returned to her dorm, she called the campus police department. One of the officers drove her to the local hospital, where, records show, a nurse documented 15 bruises, welts and lacerations on her arm, face and torso.

Axley wasn’t sure what to do next, but she did know that she wanted the man to “stay away from her,” as she recalled. So when Axley got back to her dorm that Sunday morning, she again told someone at Liberty, her resident adviser.

The RA, Axley said, told her not to report it, saying Axley could be found to have violated the school’s prohibition against drinking and fraternizing with the opposite sex.

Instead, the RA offered to pray with Axley.

“I was really confused,” recalled Axley. “They were making it seem like I had done something wrong.”

Axley didn’t want to pray. She wanted the school to do something about what had happened. “I didn’t want to get fined or punished, but I wasn’t going to let this keep me from reporting my assault.”

The next day, Axley went to the school’s federally mandated office for investigating sexual harassment and violence.

She had prepared. Axley saved texts from that weekend. “He was all over you,” one concerned friend had written to her. It was “pretty damn weird.”

“I fucking remember making noise and him covering my mouth oh my god,” Axley texted another friend in the early morning hours. She also took photos of the welts across her chest, multiple lacerations on her right upper arm and a bruised lip.

“When I went into that office,” Axley said, “I was ready.”

But Elysa Bucci, the official who took the complaint, didn’t seem interested, Axley recalled. Bucci was a lead investigator with Liberty University’s equity office, which is responsible for looking into potential violations of Title IX, the civil rights law that bans sexual discrimination on campuses that receive federal funding. Liberty students receive almost $800 million a year in federal aid.

Instead of considering her evidence, Axley said, Bucci started throwing questions at her: Why had Axley gone to the party? What had she had to drink? How much? “I immediately felt judged,” remembered Axley. (Bucci, who is now a Title IX investigator at Baylor University, declined to comment.)

Then Axley waited. She received email updates saying the school was still looking into her case. After five months, Axley heard from Bucci that Liberty had completed its investigation and a committee was now going to consider the case. Bucci invited Axley to first come to the office and review the file.

Axley went in and looked through the materials. The photos with her injuries, she recalled, were no longer there. Axley said that when she asked what had happened, Bucci told her the photos had been removed because they were too “explicit.”

“I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach,” Axley recalled. “I had been relying on them all these months to take my evidence into account when considering my case, and it wasn’t even in my file.”

A few days later, Axley received another email from the university. It said that as the case was moving ahead for a final decision, Axley needed to sign a document acknowledging that she could be found to have violated the university’s code of conduct. The Liberty Way covers nearly all aspects of a student’s life and includes bans on drinking and “being in any state of undress with a member of the opposite sex.”

As the document that Axley received phrased it, by moving ahead with the case, Axley was acknowledging that she herself could face “possible disciplinary actions.”

Universities across the country have long faced scrutiny for their handling, and mishandling, of sexual assault cases. But Liberty University’s responses to such cases stand out. Interviews with more than 50 former Liberty students and staffers, as well as records from more than a dozen cases, show how an ethos of sexual purity, as embodied by the Liberty Way, has led to school officials discouraging, dismissing and even blaming female students who have tried to come forward with claims of sexual assault.

Three students, including Axley, recalled being made to sign forms acknowledging possible violations of the Liberty Way after they sought to file complaints about sexual assaults. Others say they were also warned against reporting what had happened to them. Students say that even Liberty University police officers discouraged victims from pursuing charges after reporting assaults.

Some students still confided in school staff — who at times did not report the cases to the Title IX office, despite being legally required to do so. When students filed complaints themselves, they were often not given legally required notice that they had the option of going to the police.

In the fall of 2013, Diane Stargel sought the help of the university’s mental health counselors, telling the counselor she met with that she’d been raped by another student at a party off-campus. Stargel recalled that the counselor listened and then asked her to sign a “victim notice” that warned she could be found to have broken the Liberty Way if she chose to move forward. Terrified of losing her scholarship, Stargel signed the paper and did not formally report being assaulted.

“I feel like Liberty bullied me into silence after what happened to me,” said Stargel. “I’ve always regretted that I never got my day in court. But at least now I can stand up and say, ‘Yeah, that happened to me.'”

Amanda Stevens also remembers being warned she could be fined for having violated the Liberty Way. After she reported being raped to the school’s Title IX office in April 2015, Stevens recalled that a school official listed her potential infractions: drinking (though she had not been drinking at the time of the assault), having premarital sex and being alone with a man on campus.

“I remember thinking, ‘What? Are you kidding me?'” said Stevens. “‘I could get in trouble for coming forward and reporting?'” After an investigation, Stevens recalled receiving a letter saying the student she had reported for assault had been found “not responsible.”

Liberty officials did not respond to detailed questions sent weeks ago. But one person who received them did ultimately reply: Scott Lamb, who was Liberty University’s senior vice president of communications until earlier this month. Lamb worked at Liberty until Oct. 6, when, he said, he was fired for internally blowing the whistle on the university’s repeated failures to respond to concerns about sexual assault.

“The emails from ProPublica were definitely ignored,” said Lamb. He recalled himself and one colleague trying to make a case for the school to respond. “We said, ‘Listen, the optics of this are killing us. Is there anything we can message — something? A message about empathy? Or that we’re at least working to get to the bottom of this?’ And then it dawned on us: They’re not working to get to the bottom of this.”

Lamb was the point person who had fielded questions from journalists since he took up his post at Liberty in January 2018. He was one of the people to whom I sent a detailed request for comment this month.

Liberty’s lack of response was typical, Lamb explained. “Concerns about sexual assault would go up the chain and then die,” he said. It was “a conspiracy of silence.”

Lamb is filing a federal lawsuit alleging he was fired for raising concerns about Liberty’s conduct. Liberty did not respond to detailed questions about Lamb’s claims.

In the end, Stevens, Stargel and Axley were not fined. But two former students did recall being punished after they reported being sexually assaulted. One said that after she reported being raped to school authorities, she was fined $500 for drinking alcohol and told she had to attend counseling. The former student, who declined to be named, said she was told her transcript would not be released until she paid.

Another student recalled being punished after reporting the potential sexual assault of someone else: Axley.

Logan Pratt, the friend who had texted Axley saying he was concerned by what he saw, told the Title IX office he’d seen Axley being mistreated at the party. He said the university misrepresented what he told investigators, giving the false impression that his testimony undercut Axley’s recollections rather than buttressing them. Then, a few months after the incident, Pratt said Liberty kicked him out of school for drinking and other Liberty Way infractions. One other student also said Liberty misrepresented what she described seeing in Axley’s case.

Ten more former students told me they chose not to report their rapes to campus officials amid fear of being punished. “I knew I would face the blame for putting myself in that situation,” said Chelsea Andrews, a Liberty alum who said she was assaulted by a Liberty graduate student.

A lawsuit filed in July against Liberty recounted similar patterns. The suit, brought by a dozen unnamed former students, asserts that the school failed to help victims of sexual assault and that the school’s student honor code made assault more likely by making it “difficult or impossible” for students to report sexual violence. The suit also claims that the “public and repeated retaliation against women who did report their victimization” created a dangerous campus environment. (Liberty has declined to comment on the pending litigation.)

“Historically, and based on the cases you presented to me, I do not believe Liberty has a conception of sexual assault that is consistent with criminal law, and certainly not with federal civil rights and campus safety,” said S. Daniel Carter, who helped write a law governing how universities that receive federal funding handle sexual assault cases.

Liberty’s handling of cases has often added to the pain of the women I spoke with. As Axley waited for Liberty to decide on her case, she began missing classes. She didn’t want to risk bumping into her alleged assailant. Her grades plummeted. She skipped meals and started sleeping during the day.

“She would have panic attacks constantly — like full body shaking, laying on the floor, no matter where we were, in class or in the library,” said Shannon Gage, a friend of Axley’s and a fellow Liberty student.

Axley’s memories of that time are scattered. She was knocked even further off-balance when the student who she says attacked her filed a lawsuit alleging that Axley had defamed him by recounting her story to others. The sides reached a nonmonetary settlement a few months later. The parties agreed not to disparage each other over “doubtful and disputed claims.” Asked about Axley’s accusations, the former student told me that “I didn’t rape her” and that he also thought that Liberty didn’t investigate the case properly.

Axley has no doubts about what happened. In the months afterward, she scrolled again and again through the photos she had taken of her injuries. They gave her a small measure of calm.

“I would remind myself that I had evidence, and that I had done everything I could to document and report what happened,” she said. “I told myself, ‘How could the school not take action?’ All someone had to do was look at the photos.”

 

Founded in 1971 by the Baptist televangelist and conservative activist Jerry Falwell Sr., Liberty University remains one of the largest private evangelical institutions in the world. It has a large online operation as well as 15,000 students enrolled at its central campus east of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Liberty has faced sex and financial scandals in recent years involving former university president Jerry Falwell Jr. and his wife, Becki Falwell. But the school continues to appeal to many families and students drawn to Liberty’s strict moral code.

“The goal of The Liberty Way (Student Honor Code) is to encourage and instruct our students how to love God through a life of service to others,” the code says. “The way we treat each other in our community is a direct reflection of our love of God.”

Central to the Liberty Way is a focus on abstinence prior to marriage, what’s known in evangelical communities as purity culture. As the Liberty Way puts it, ​​”Sexual relations outside of a biblically-ordained marriage between a natural-born man and a natural-born woman are not permissible at Liberty University.”

Breaking that ban and engaging in any “inappropriate personal contact,” is punishable by a $300 fine, 30 hours of community service, or possible expulsion.

Mark Tinsley saw how that can play out. Tinsley, who was first a police officer at Liberty University and later an associate dean until he left in 2017, said the school had a tendency to dissuade students from reporting sexual assaults to law enforcement.

Tinsley, who is now a pastor, said he still remembers one case from 20 years ago. Tinsley was first told to check out an alleged rape on the northern end of the campus, but then was instructed to back off because the administration had gotten involved. “I got word that there had been an assault, but that the dean of women had convinced the girl not to press charges,” Tinsley recalled. (The dean in question died in 2015.)

“That was par for the course at Liberty,” Tinsley said.

Erin McAvoy, who worked at a local nonprofit assisting individuals who’d survived sexual assaults, said she often aided Liberty students who were afraid of reporting assaults to the school. “Most of the Liberty students I met with had a friend or a friend of a friend who had ended up in a worse situation after reporting,” she said.

McAvoy said she was also surprised that Liberty students who sought her help frequently did not have information about “their basic options for reporting to law enforcement or even seeking medical help.”

“By and large, the students I worked with from Liberty had been given little to no information about their options,” she recalled.

Former Liberty student Adrianna Rice first contacted the school’s Title IX office in October 2016 to report she’d been raped by a fellow student.

Rice said it happened when the two drove off campus together to hike a local nature trail. Within hours, Rice called her mom. “I don’t think I’m OK,” she told her mom. “I had sex with a guy and I didn’t want to.”

“I asked her, ‘Did you want that?’And she started sobbing and said, ‘No,'” her mother, Kristine Rice, recalled. “And I said, ‘Honey, that sounds like rape.'”

Kristine Rice traveled to Liberty’s campus about a week after the phone call to accompany her daughter to the campus counseling office. Adrianna Rice recalled writing on her intake form that it was an “emergency” and that she had been experiencing “suicidal ideation.” But both she and her mother recalled the counseling center turning her away because they didn’t have any appointments available.

“They referred me to other Christian counselors in the area,” Adrianna Rice recalled.

Liberty’s counseling center also referred Rice to the campus Title IX office, which she contacted. Elysa Bucci, who then worked at the office, emailed Rice a list of resources. The list included the campus spiritual guidance center, a local hospital and the student counseling center.

Law enforcement was not on the list, despite a federal law requiring that students reporting sexual violence be told about that option.

“I was never informed that filing a police report was even an option,” said Rice. Figuring Title IX was her only path to justice, Rice decided to open a formal investigation. During the investigation and appeals process, Rice recalled, Bucci repeatedly told her not to speak to anyone else about the case — including law enforcement — because it could compromise the Title IX investigation.

“I felt like a gag order had been placed on me after I had already experienced a trauma,” said Rice, who described avoiding the subject of her assault even with friends and family while the Title IX investigation was underway.

Amanda Stevens, one of the women who was told to sign a form acknowledging her potential violation of the Liberty Way, said she also was not informed of the option to file a rape report with law enforcement after she reported to the Title IX office in April 2015. “They didn’t mention anything like this to me at all,” she said.

And when Diane Stargel met with a Liberty University mental health counselor and told her she’d been sexually assaulted, the counselor not only had Stargel sign a victim notice about her own potential violation of the Liberty Way, but, Stargel recalled, also told her to initial language in the document promising she wouldn’t report the case to police.

Experts said the pattern appears to be a violation of the Clery Act, which requires schools to inform students reporting sexual assaults about the option to go to law enforcement and to assist in that reporting if necessary.

“Hearing that a university official was unlawfully and improperly advising a survivor about her rights and options strikes at the core of my ire,” said Laura Dunn, a lawyer and expert on campus sexual assault who reviewed the facts of Rice’s case.

Other aspects of Liberty’s handling of Rice’s case also stuck out. Rice said she had given the school a copy of a text her alleged assailant had sent admitting what he did. Liberty’s letter summarizing its decision on the case did not cite it. The letter concluded that the man was not responsible.

Rice appealed the decision and attended a hearing about it along with McAvoy, the advocate. They were stunned by the appeal committee’s repeated questions about “how and why I had put myself in a situation where this could have happened,” remembered Rice. In her handwritten notes from the day, Rice jotted down questions she wanted to ask the committee members: “What definition of rape are you going off of?” and “What is counted as valid evidence?”

Shortly after the appeal hearing, Rice was informed that the committee had decided to uphold the Title IX office’s original decision by a “preponderance of the evidence.”

Rice then turned to university police for help. Rice provided me with a copy of the intake form she had filled out. But Rice said that when she spoke to Liberty’s campus police chief, Col. Richard Hinkley, he discouraged her from taking the case further.

“He told me all the details I had written down in my personal statement could be turned against me, and that a jury would likely kill my case,” she said. “He essentially discouraged me from continuing.”

Hinkley and the department did not respond to requests for comment.

Title IX requires university officials to report any accusations of sexual violence to a designated Title IX coordinator. That didn’t happen after Liberty student Mary Kate McElroy told her track coaches that she had been pressured by other students to have sex during her first year at the school. McElroy said the men were several years older and much larger than she was. She said she eventually said yes out of fear of “what they might do or say if I said no,” and because she was afraid of being penalized for breaking the Liberty Way.

“I had already let a guy drive me to his apartment, and I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place,” McElroy said. “I felt like I had no way out.”

“I turned to them for help,” said McElroy about telling her coaches in the spring of 2018. “I didn’t yet understand that what had happened to me was assault, but I knew something was wrong.”

Rebekah Ricksecker, one of the two coaches McElroy spoke to about the incidents, said she regrets not “pushing Mary Kate further” for details about what had happened.

“Had I thought it was assault, I would have filed a report,” Ricksecker said. “At the time I assumed that her discomfort and embarrassment came from breaking the Liberty Way — now I think maybe there was more to it.”

The second coach did not return requests for comment.

Around the same time, McElroy told her resident adviser both about being coerced into sex and her coaches’ lack of follow-up. “I remember Mary Kate telling me she had talked to her coaches about what had happened, and they hadn’t reported it up the chain,” said the RA, Liz Howe. “That broke my heart.”

Howe reported McElroy’s case to the school’s Title IX office, which got in touch with McElroy and encouraged her to file a formal complaint. But by then McElroy had already decided to drop out of Liberty and was planning to leave campus in a few days.

She declined to pursue her case further. “I didn’t have it in me,” McElroy explained. “I was leaving Liberty, and I thought I could leave what happened to me behind.”

Like many universities, Liberty has an amnesty policy to protect students who self-report dangerous or illegal activities, such as underage drinking, in the course of reporting sexual violence or other abuse. In Liberty’s case, the policy has been expanded in recent years to protect students who self-report violations of the Liberty Way, including premarital sex.

Internal email shows how the policy can work. When Amanda Stevens told her RA that she had been raped, the adviser immediately emailed her boss and recounted what Stevens had told her.

“I then asked her if she had sex with him and she said that she had,” the RA, a graduate student named JaQuayla Hodge, wrote to her resident director, a full-time Liberty staffer. “However, she mentioned that the first time he basically forced himself on her. She would tell him over and over to stop and he wouldn’t.”

The question of whether Stevens could be penalized for potential violations of the Liberty Way immediately came up. Hodge wrote that she was worried about it.

“In the case of her self-reporting, what would be the end result?” Hodge asked her boss in a follow-up email. “At this point I am more concerned about her well-being and do believe a consequence could pose a little more harm.”

Bethany Holt, the school official who ended up handling Stevens’ case, responded that Stevens’ disclosure would be treated as a “self-report,” indicating that she would not be penalized for breaking the Liberty Way.

“At this point, it sounds like anything she confessed to that was a violation of the LU Way would be considered as a self report because we had no prior knowledge of these activities,” Holt wrote. “The allegations of assault we do want to take seriously and would take precedence over the other possible violations.”

Still, Stevens recalled, it was Holt who instructed her to sign a form acknowledging that she may have broken the Liberty Way and warned her she could face fines. Holt, who remains on staff at Liberty, did not respond to requests for comment.

Hodge, who served as an RA between 2012 and 2015 and then as a supervising resident director until 2017, described being troubled by what she saw as a pattern of the school not properly handling cases she brought to them. As a resident director, Hodge began following up with the complainants she referred to the Title IX office because, she said, she “didn’t trust my girls were fully getting what they needed.”

Hodge was shocked to learn that Stevens had been required to sign a form acknowledging that she had potentially violated the Liberty Way.

“If I had heard that, I would have said something,” said Hodge. “I made it clear that it would not be fair for her to be punished if she came forward.”

Six weeks after Elizabeth Axley told Liberty University officials she had been raped, she sat on the floor of her college dorm room with her laptop and typed out a brief note:

“He did this to me/Crushed my spirit/stole those I care about/stole something from me. … I can no longer go on like this.”

Two days later, she woke up in the hospital. She stayed for a few days, then went back to campus to resume her freshman year. (If you are considering hurting yourself, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or go to speakingofsuicide.com.)

“I tried to keep functioning but I felt so disconnected from everything going on around me,” Axley recalled. Sometimes, she would forget what she was doing midaction. Sometimes she would just stare straight ahead, unresponsive to the cues around her. She felt “so far away” from her fellow students, who continued going to class and attending social events as though nothing had changed.

In her email correspondence with the Title IX office during this time, Axley requested several notes to excuse her repeated absences from classes.

It was in March that Axley got the email from the school saying the investigation into her complaint was “completed” and that she could review it before the school came to a decision on the case. That email, from Bucci, also noted that Axley’s case had been moved over to the Office of Community Life, which handles Liberty Way infractions.

And it was when Axley went to review the report that she discovered that the photographs she had submitted as evidence had been removed from her file without her knowledge.

Axley was dumbstruck and resubmitted the photos. “At that point, it honestly felt like they were trying to sabotage my case,” she said.

Soon after Axley resubmitted her photo evidence, she received another email from the school. It said the committee reviewing her case — which Axley recalled was composed mostly of men — had reached a decision: By a “preponderance of the evidence,” her alleged assailant was found “not responsible” for rape.

In its accompanying explanation of the decision, the committee focused on the account of one student who recalled that Axley was on top of the man she said assaulted her, and that the man had told Axley to get off.

But that student, who requested anonymity, told me that the Title IX office misrepresented her testimony. Liberty quoted her saying it was “obvious” that Axley was trying to initiate sexual contact, but she said she doesn’t recall saying that.

Prior to our conversation, the witness had not seen the decision letter in which she was quoted. She was shocked that her name was used in the letter, despite her repeated requests to the Title IX investigator that she remain anonymous. “They made me sound like a casual, coldhearted individual with this statement,” she said. “I was very scared and very traumatized from this situation and it affects my life even today.”

Neither Aaron Sparkman, the university official who signed Axley’s decision letter, nor Bucci, who interviewed the two witnesses, responded to requests for comment.

The letter also did not detail the recollections of Logan Pratt, the friend of Axley’s who was so concerned about the man being overly physical that he texted Axley the morning of the incident to see if she was OK.

Instead, Liberty referenced Pratt’s observation that Axley was drunk.

“The way they wrote it down makes it seem that I went to the Title IX office not to help her but to get her in trouble,” said Pratt, who was shocked when I showed him the letter. “This reads very backwards to me. It is honestly scary that they twisted my testimony like this. It makes me wonder how many other people’s words they tweaked the way they did to my testimony.”

Pratt said that he went to the Title IX office of his own volition because he was “concerned for Lizzie’s safety” after what he saw at the party. But when he was interviewed, he said, he thought “they didn’t seem to care much about Lizzie,” and instead he felt like he was “interrogated for what I had been doing at the party.”

He said, “It all felt so backwards and strange, like they were trying to find me guilty by association.”

Pratt, who entered Liberty in the fall of 2017 on a full scholarship, said that five months after reporting Axley’s case, he was expelled from the school for violations of the Liberty Way, including drinking and partying.

“It sounds like the university was crafting their own narrative that had less to do with finding the respondent responsible or not, but rather with framing the complainant as someone who was ‘not worthy,'” said S. Daniel Carter, who helped author the Clery Act that covers how schools should handle and disclose sexual assaults.

Liberty’s letter with its decision on the investigation also did not mention the other evidence submitted by Axley — not the text messages from friends that weekend expressing concern about what had taken place, and not the photographs of her bruises and cuts.

Experts who reviewed the facts of Axley’s case and the committee’s subsequent letter explaining its decision were shocked that the Title IX office seemed to have removed evidence from Axley’s file and were confused as to why the decision made no mention of it.

“That’s outrageous,” said Rebecca Leitman Veidlinger, an attorney who specializes in Title IX. “The complainant herself offered the photos. There are ways to safeguard evidence of a sensitive nature. But to disregard key evidence? I can’t imagine the justification.”

After Axley learned that Liberty had dismissed her complaint, she thought there was still a chance the school might reconsider. “Yesterday my rapist was found not guilty. I would like to appeal this decision,” she wrote in a May 2018 email to the university.

Less than two weeks later, the appeal committee reaffirmed it had found the man not responsible for the alleged rape.

 

This past summer, Liberty University’s handling of sexual assault came under closer scrutiny. The lawsuit filed in July by 12 women was followed by an outpouring of concern, frustration and calls for action on social media. A petition demanding that Liberty change how it handles sexual assaults gained hundreds of signatures in a few days.

Scott Lamb, then Liberty’s communications chief, watched it all with increasing concern, but with little surprise. He had been warning top Liberty leadership about the growing wave of concern and frustration.

“There seems to be the notion that there are many (not few) skeletons in LU’s closet when it comes to ‘mishandling sexual assault allegations,'” Lamb wrote to top Liberty leadership in a May 7 email. “Culturally, this seems to be a pattern: 1 person makes an accusation about Bill Cosby/Harvey Weinstein/Matt Lauer etc…. And overnight there are a dozen people who say the same thing. True, LU is not Bill Cosby…But I’m talking about the Court of Public Opinion. And I fear that we are about to enter into a season of being found guilty in that court.”

Lamb said his email received no response.

As summer slipped into fall and Lamb watched tensions on campus and beyond deepen, he encouraged university higher-ups to at least acknowledge the problem.

Instead, he said Liberty decided to do what it could to silence the criticism.

A Sept. 22 email from the school’s marketing department to top Liberty officials, including the school’s president, briefed them on the “uptick” in “people commenting about the sexual assault cases at Liberty” on the school’s various social media platforms. “We have disabled comments on the main university, resident and online Instagram accounts,” the marketing executive wrote.

“Comments are disabled on Instagram and we are monitoring both Facebook and Twitter. Facebook we have the ability to hide overly negative or explosive comments. Twitter, we are unable to do anything,” the executive wrote. “If there is anything that you feel we should be doing differently, let me know,” the email concluded in bold.

The scramble over how to respond continued. Liberty’s Jerry Prevo, who replaced Jerry Falwell Jr. as president last year, planned to give a speech early this month directly addressing the concerns, and in particular the lawsuit filed by the dozen women.

“I have asked a law firm to look into the facts on all these cases,” said a draft of Prevo’s speech. “Nothing is going to be swept under the rug.”

“If our policies and procedures should be changed, I’ll change ’em,” Prevo’s proposed speech continued. “Not just because Title IX, but because we need [to honor] God in all we do at Liberty and we need to do so standing on Biblical truth. That’s The Liberty Way.”

Lamb saw the proposed language and immediately wrote to his colleagues that it “will make things far worse.” Lamb pointed out, for example, that the law firm the school brought in hadn’t been hired to investigate the allegations. It was hired to defend the school against the suit.

One of the lawyers was on the email chain and agreed with Lamb’s concerns. “We’re here to represent the University in a lawsuit,” she wrote. “It’s an important distinction.”

The speech was canceled.

Instead, president Prevo briefly discussed the issue at a school prayer meeting. “We want you to feel safe,” Prevo said. “We don’t want any sexual harassment or sexual abuse.”

Lamb said he was fired less than a week later.

“The problem isn’t the PR; the problem is the problem,” said Lamb. “And until Liberty addresses the problem — first by telling the people who got hurt here that they are seen and heard — the healing can’t begin.”

Republicans take Virginia governorship in first major election of the Biden presidency

Republican Glenn Youngkin defeated Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe in the race for Virginia governor, the first major election of the Joe Biden presidency. 

The candidates were locked into a dead heat in the final weeks leading up to Election Day in Virginia, which saw a record number of 1,137,656 early voters. The early voting count was roughly six times that of 2017, CNBC reported. Well after midnight, however, the two candidates were separated by fewer than 100,000 votes out of more than 3.1 million cast. 

Both candidates were vying to replace Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, who last year passed a series of policies that expanded access to voting, which experts note may have contributed to the sharp uptick in early voting, but also found himself at the center of controversy surrounding abortion and racism. 

“Virginia passed new laws over the past several years that made it much easier to vote by early by mail or via in person early voting,” Stephen Farnsworth, a professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington, told CNBC. “Voting reform laws changes are the main reason why early voting numbers are so much higher.”

McAuliffe, a Democratic Clinton ally who served as governor from 2014 to 2018, announced his candidacy back in December and has benefited from substantial name recognition in the race. During the campaign trail, the former governor repeatedly highlighted the achievements of a Democratic-run commonwealth and stressed the need for major voter turnout to stave off “white backlash” against the apparent overreach of various Democratic and progressive policies, according to The Guardian. Much of this backlash has expressed itself in the state’s public schools, where disgruntled parents have protested against the use of “critical race theory” in classrooms. 

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Youngkin, a Republican businessman with no political experience, announced his bid back in January, campaigning on a number of hot button issues that have in recent years come to the fore of the culture war, like transgender equlity and “critical race theory” – the latter of which he has promised to ban in public schools.

In May, Youngkin received a formal endorsement from Donald Trump – a distinction Youngkin called an “honor.” Throughout his campaign, however, Youngkin has maintained a careful distance from Trump, often seeking to separate himself from some of Trump’s most loyal backers. Youngkin consistently elided the former president’s name in speeches and declined to speak about Trump’s policies or conduct as president – a sticking point for McAuliffe, who sought to paint his opponent as an ardent Trump ally. 

RELATED: Trump to campaign for Glenn Youngkin on election eve as polls narrow and Republican gains ground

“Trump has now endorsed [Youngkin] for the tenth time today,” McAuliffe said after the former president released a new statement on Monday supporting his Republican contender. “What does that tell you? The little MAGA people, not as excited as you thought.”

“Terry’s opponent has made all his private pledges of loyalty to Donald Trump,” President Biden echoed last week. “But what’s really interesting to me, he won’t stand next to Donald Trump now that the campaign’s on. Think about it. He won’t allow Donald Trump to campaign for him in this state. And he’s willing to pledge his loyalty to Trump in private — why not in public?”

Experts speculated that Youngkin was attempting to cast a wider net than a traditionally Trump-aligned candidate, appealing to a bloc of independents who might feel alienated from the former president. With some pundits arguing that the race serves as a national bellwether, it’s possible that Youngkin’s win will establish a rubric for congressional GOP candidates in 2022.

RELATED: Virginia set to be first test of GOP’s Big Lie

QAnon supporters gather in Texas awaiting an appearance from John F. Kennedy Jr.

QAnon supporters gathered in Dallas on Tuesday in the hopes that John F. Kennedy, Jr. would make major revelations.

“QAnon supporters are gathering for an event in Texas on Tuesday at which they falsely believe JFK junior will reveal he is not dead and announce a 2024 presidential run with Donald Trump, the former president,” the Independent reports.

The son of America’s 35th president died in 1999.

Journalist Steven Monacelli posted a video of members of the crowd chanting a euphemism for “f*ck Joe Biden” while holding a Trump-Kennedy QAnon banner. Although, the banner is from 2020, showing yet another “prophecy” that did not occur.

The dark side of child influencers examined on Netflix’s “Baby-Sitters Club”

As Netflix’s “The Baby-Sitters Club” adapts the original young adult book series for a modern-day context, part of that adaptation requires thoughtful reflection on the ways today’s young people — including the girls of our favorite middle school baby-sitting agency — interact with social media today. 

In the latest season of the delightfully smart and progressive Netflix YA series, the members of the fictional Baby-Sitters Club are starting seventh and eighth grade, and are already active online. Most of the interactions are what you’d expect from that age group, mainly keeping tabs on each other and low-key stalking crushes they’re too shy to actually confront.

Case in point: checking Instagram stories is how Mary-Anne Spier (Malia Baker) determines the whereabouts of her summer camp crush, Logan Bruno (Rian McCririck), after he goes radio silent on her. Knowing he’s actually at his relative’s house doesn’t really help understanding how he feels about her, but at least she can pretend he’s too busy to get in touch or maybe has spotty wi-fi.

Meanwhile, Jessi (Anais Lee), one of the club’s new junior members, is confronted with another side to social media, the rise of the child influencer. Her new client is Derek Masters (Luke Roessler), known by his legion social media followers as the Superbrat. 

Derek, it turns out, is the “most followed TikToker under 10,” and his meteoric rise as an influencer means his father has become his overzealous manager, and much of their family’s livelihood relies on Derek’s ability to get acting jobs and grow and maintain his following. Having a job when one is barely cracking double digits is hard enough, but to be the main breadwinner in the family is a heavy burden for such small shoulders.

But Derek is responsible . . . if resigned to his fate. As Jessi spends more time with Derek, it becomes clear that he might sometimes enjoy making videos and social content, but being a viral child influencer has clearly taken a toll on him and his relationship with his father, too.

RELATED: TikTok provides influencers income during the pandemic, but a ban could ruin that

At one point, shortly after Derek loses out on a part for a movie he auditioned for, Jessi comforts him by turning the camera off and making homemade ice cream. Jessi herself has been under stress because of her struggles to stand out at a new, elite dancing studio, prompting her to consider quitting dance and embarking on a social media career like Derek’s instead. But in that moment, as the two enjoy just being kids together, unplugging from social media and living in the moment appears to be the antidote to both of their stresses.

Derek’s father is predictably shocked to learn the kids’ ice cream adventure went unrecorded, and therefore can’t be mined for social content, views and clicks. 

“We thought it would be nice to do something just for fun,” Jessi explains to him. His response? “Guys, recording doesn’t make something not fun. I’m going to have to talk to your manager about this.”

The episode ultimately has a happy ending because, well, have you seen this show? Club president Kristy Thomas (Sophie Grace) has a little talk with Mr. Masters about respecting babysitters and also letting kids live in the moment, and all of the club shows up to support Jessi at her dance recital, even though she didn’t get the lead role. 

Of course, in real life, as “The Baby-Sitters Club” alludes to with Derek’s story, social media has an unfortunate tendency to adultify kids and expose young people, and especially young women and teen girls, to struggles with mental health and body image. Just a month or so ago, a bombshell report found Facebook, the parent company of Instagram, has been sitting on damning research into how Instagram impacts teen girls’ mental health. 

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Per the company’s internal findings from 2019, which drew from surveys and focus groups, Facebook admitted in an internal report published by the Wall Street Journal: “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls. . . . Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.” Another part of the report says: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

Of course, it’s not just Instagram. Like TikTok, both platforms are driven by algorithms that often lift up content that centers thin, conventionally attractive and often white women and girls. Other content almost directly promotes eating disorders, through viral “what I eat in a day” videos from thin, female influencers, or sponsored content that promotes dangerous diet teas and other diet products. Many of the influencers behind this content are actually wealthy and have personal trainers and chefs under their employ — the bulk of their job is to remain thin and attractive enough to influence people. 

And while everyone is susceptible to the usual self-esteem struggles that emerge from comparing ourselves to celebrities and influencers who are paid to be beautiful, children and teens are especially vulnerable, as they’re still developing senses of self, and don’t have any understanding of what goes into the images they see online. Social media has added a new dimension to coming-of-age experiences, as “The Baby-Sitters Club” explores through Jessi and Derek’s story, making it harder if not impossible for kids to be able to live in the moment, carefree and unencumbered, like they used to.

RELATED: Here’s why I won’t be exploiting my kids on social media

Specific to Derek’s storyline, a surprising number of kids under 10 have become viral social media influencers, and CBS reported in 2019 that companies have been raking in millions of dollars from partnerships with child influencers. Fast Company found child influencers, who can be as young as two-years-old, can earn a paycheck of $15,000 or more per post, depending on the size of their following. 

In a shockingly short period of time, the rise of social media influencers haes transformed the economy. As “The Baby-Sitters Club” explores, many children and teens who might not be able to handle the pressures and demands of this lifestyle are becoming some of the most popular influencers on our explore feeds, and for all the privilege this lifestyle may come with, it can also cost them healthy childhoods and the surprising joys of living in the moment.

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On “Succession,” Kendall Roy is the perfect #Girlboss caricature

“F**k the patriarchy!”

When Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) triumphantly yells this rallying cry to press in this week’s episode of “Succession,” we can’t help but cringe — almost as hard as we did during Kendall’s delivery of a particular celebratory birthday rap, seemingly a lifetime ago.

This week, Kendall continues his quest to oust his father Logan (Brian Cox) from the family empire, Waystar Roy Co., by exposing his father’s complicity in widespread sexual abuse, exploitation and even death among workers on their cruise line. Of course, Kenny only committed this betrayal in protest of being the fall-guy for the cruise scandal, wheras previously, he would have thrown any of the survivors of abuse under the bus, which he more or less did with his Season 2 Senate testimony writing off the accusations against his family as a politically motivated attack. 

RELATED: “Succession”: how true to life is the TV series?

Since turning on the objectively evil family business, Kendall has been high on his own supply — or rather, his own utter lack of self-awareness — even more so than usual.  He feels that he’s “good” now, and he’s adopted the social justice-y language to prove it, cementing himself as the ultimate #GirlBoss. His levels of delusion about his own goodness and the ways it’s perceived reach new heights in Sunday’s episode, as Kendall staunchly identifies with the very progressives who mock and scorn him.

Co-opting social justice language can only take you so far

Just last week, we got evidence of just how committed Kendall is to his new-age, “woke” branding. 

In trying to get his siblings to help him overthrow their father, he speaks of the powerful old white people who run the world as if he and his siblings aren’t just like them. “The great whites, from politics to culture, they’re rolling off stage — it’s our time,” Kendall says.

“You mean us? This multi-ethnic, transgender alliance of 20-something DREAMers we got right here?”  Roman (Kieran Culkin) responds.

Kendall ignores Roman’s quip, either because he knows it’s true or because he simply doesn’t get it. What follows sounds like a page out of a Pete Buttigieg Iowa stump speech from 2020. 

“Big picture? We’re at the end of a long American century,” Kendall says. “Our company is a declining empire inside a declining Roman empire. . . . U.S. supremacy is waning. Within that context, we can become omni-national and reposition. Information is going to be more precious than water in the next hundred – Amazon is 20 years old, Gates is an old geezer, detoxify our brand and we can go supersonic.”

Um, what?

Whether or not there’s merit to Kendall’s vision for the rebranding Waystar could undergo if they remove Logan and take charge, it’s clear he doesn’t actually embody the values he’s sputtering. When Shiv (Sarah Snook) rejects his offer to team up, he snarls back, “It’s only your teats that give you any value!” (But sure, F the patriarchy!)

Whatever language he uses, he is who he is, and he is where he is because of self-interest more so than sympathy for the female victims of his family. Of course his progressive critics can see right through this, no matter how much he pitifully identifies as one of them.

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We see this again in Sunday’s episode when his entourage plays a bizarre, narcissistic game of “Good Tweet-Bad Tweet” in the back of a limo, during which Naomi Pierce (Annabelle Dexter-Jones), Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun), and Comfry (Dasha Nekrasova) alternate between reading positive and critical tweets about Kendall. 

A tweet that Naomi reads — “Allies don’t always come in the form we like, but what Kendall Roy did was important and brave” — is the perfect ego-stroker that exemplifies exactly how Kendall sees himself, and wants to be seen. Others? Not so much. Another “good” tweet comes from a user who admits to “want[ing] to f**k Kendall Roy,” but the others, read by Greg and then Comfry, hit Kendall where it hurts — or where it would hurt, if he had enough self-awareness.

“Kendall Roy is not a hero, fam,” Greg reads, “He is bootleg Ross with a daddy complex.” 

“He clearly has mental health issues and crazy guilt, coupled with addiction. That’s all this is, and it’s sad,” Comfry reads. 

Kendall seems to shrug these meaner tweets off, leading the limo riders in chanting “That one sucked! That one sucked!” We later learn that one of the main reasons he seems so unphased by nasty (and deserved) criticism and mockery is that Kendall is very much a student of the “all press is good press” school of thought. If people are talking about him, no matter what they’re saying, it’s because they love him!

Take his latest obsession, a John Oliver-esque comedian masterfully played by Ziwe whose show “The Disruption with Sophie Iwobi” consistently targets him, dubbing him an “Oedipussy.” During one segement of her show, Sophie diagnoses Kendall with Caucasian Rich Brain. 

“What happens is genetically inherited wealth and whiteness cause neural pathway in the brain to constrict and make the patient believe he’s woke when he’s just a total f**king jackass,” she explains.

Kendall is ecstatic, seeing this as a delightful roast. “This is being in the conversation. This is f**king great,” he tells his team. Later, he even insists on going on the show as a guest. 

In a world of Jeff Bezoses, Elon Musks, and Mark Zuckerbergs, who can hire top-tier comms and marketing teams to sell them as benefactors rather than soulless wealth-hoarders, co-opting social justice language as Kendall does just doesn’t hit like it used to. People who are actually committed to progressive values and actions can see through shallow progressive language like Kendall’s, and see who he really is — something Kendall is still trying to figure out himself.

Kendall’s true colors

The irony is that it’s the very women Kendall claims to be helping who are calling him out. At one point during the awkward journalism gala, he refuses to meet Shiv halfway when she asks to work to change Waystar from the inside, and she asks him point-blank, “Do you not actually give a f**k and it’s all ego?”

(For what it’s worth, Shiv isn’t exactly the “good guy” she thinks she is, either, but at the very least, she isn’t shouting “F the patriarchy” to the press.)

Later, the siblings’ inability to agree on a way forward escalates when Kendall sabotages Shiv’s official public Waystar debut. For her first speech as president at the company, Shiv promises Waystar is committed to listening to criticism and accountability – when she’s promptly interrupted by “someone” amplifying Nirvana’s song “Rape Me,” driving Shiv from the stage.

Of course, Kendall’s visit to Waystar not-so-coincidentally coincides with this stunning display of callousness and cruelty, and one that makes light of rather than helps any of the victims of Waystar, and exemplifies more than anything that Kendall — if responsible — cares more about petty revenge on the family that tried to screw him, than standing with women. Even if his stunt is meant to highlight the company’s hypocrisy, it’s done in such a public and empty way that it accomplishes nothing except for causing embarrassment.

RELATED: “Succession” ends its second season with a killer instinct

Shiv, not willing to take the humiliation Kendall subjected her to lying down, publishes a statement that ​​references Kendall’s “many attempts at rehabilitation from his multiple addictions,” his long history of misogyny, and his “grandiose and disordered thinking,” moments before he goes on stage to join “The Disruption with Sophie Iwobi” as a guest. 

The piercing statement finally takes Kendall down a peg, forcing him to reckon with the truth that — gasp! — not everyone likes him, or is laughing with him, and that this is still how many people perceive him, no matter what he tweets out. Even if he’d like to write off Shiv’s statement as a mere power play, it is out there for the world to see, and from his own sister no less, which carries weight. Kendall has something of a breakdown and ditches the show, giving Sophie free rein to demolish him.  And while she calls him a few choice names, she acknowledges nothing could be as brutal as the letter Shiv had blasted out. 

Kendall’s pathetic blindness his own hypocrisy reminds us of one of his tweets that Sophie had highlighted previously: “We must overthrow the culture of corruption that silences women.”

Sophie points out this is like a dog saying, “We have to punish whoever ate coffee grinds and s**t on the sofa #SofaJustice.” (The “social justice”/ #sofajustice wordplay is just *chef’s kiss*.)

She’s not wrong — the tragic clownery of Kendall is his inability to fathom that he is a huge part of the very systems and crises that he publicly critiques with his fine-tuned social justice language and branding. It’s unclear to what extent he knows this or is completely bereft of self-awareness.

“Succession” is rife with characters who are either aware of and proud of their own terribleness, or exemplify the privileged cluelessness of the 1% and philanthropic economic elites, who will always see themselves as the good guys, no matter how many people they screw over to maintain their opulent lifestyles. Where Kendall falls on this spectrum is ultimately to be seen. But the first episodes of this season certainly make a strong case that he skews more to the latter, and that he is the architect of his own Bad Tweets. 

New episodes of “Succession” air on HBO on Sundays at 9 p.m. ET.

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Jupiter’s Great Red Spot isn’t just wide — it’s deep, too

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot appears like a slightly stretched pancake, an ovular stain on the biggest planet in the solar system. As Jupiter’s biggest anticyclonic storm — that is, a storm in which air is forced downward through the center and toward the surface, as part of a larger high-pressure system — it is certainly the largest such storm in our solar system, as well as the most conspicuous feature on the massive gas giant. And as the principal investigator of NASA’s Juno mission told reporters on Thursday, scientists had previously imagined it as flat — you know, like a pancake.

But according to new studies, Jupiter’s oval red spot is actually more like a toppings-and-syrup covered mega-stack. In other words, it’s not just as wide as 1.25 Earths — it’s also deep. 

“We knew it lasted a long time, but we didn’t know how deep or how it really worked,” Scott Bolton, who is also director of the space science and engineering division at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, explained during the press conference. Bolton was referring to a pair of new studies that, though published recently in the journal Science, are based on data that is more than two years old. When NASA’s Juno spacecraft (which entered Jupiter’s orbit in 2016) flew over the Great Red Spot in February and July 2019, it did so to learn just how deep that 10,000-mile wide vortex plummets beneath the cloud tops that we can see.

In the process, they learned, among other things, that the Great Red Spot is roughly 40 times deeper than the Mariana Trench, the deepest location in Earth’s ocean. Indeed, scientists of the first study believe that it could extend more than 120 miles deep in total. In the second study, researchers speculated that it could reach a maximum depth of more than 300 miles.

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The main implication here is that Jupiter’s interior and deep atmospheres may be connected through processes that are not yet understood. If so, this suggests that Jupiter — which is 11 times wider than Earth — may be home to meteorological events on scales more massive than scientists had previously anticipated. In either estimate, the Great Red Spot extends well past the area of Jupiter’s atmosphere, where scientists believe water and ammonia have condensed into clouds.

“The Great Red Spot is as deep within Jupiter as the International Space Station is high above our heads,” Marzia Parisi, research scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, told reporters. Yet the Great Red Spot is still shallower than the titanic bands of wind which power it, as those extend to depths surpassing 1,800 miles.

In addition to uncovering more about the Great Red Spot, the Juno mission has also found that Jupiter has five cyclonic storms at its South Pole and eight at its North Pole. Accordingly, the latter have formed into a shape like a pentagon and the former are forming a shape like an octagon. Juno also observed the sixteen wind circulation patterns in Jupiter’s atmosphere that act similarly to Ferrel cells on Earth (of which there are only two). While Earth’s Ferrel cells extend 6 miles from the surface, Jupiter’s begin at the level of their clouds and extend down for at least 200 miles.

The Great Red Spot has been a source of fascination to humans for almost two centuries, as it was first observed in 1831. Since then, astronomers have observed this charismatic feature change size, and in recent years it appears to be shrinking. Although it was twice the size of Earth’s diameter in 1979, it has shrunk by nearly one third in the ensuing 42 years. Though a fixture of the gas giant, the Great Red Spot may eventually shrink until it disappears. For now, it still contains many mysteries.

How TikTok got me out of my pandemic cooking rut

Like many geriatric millennials, I was slow to come around to TikTok. As Joan Didion once wrote about New York, it struck me as a place for the very young. But last summer I began freelance recipe development for a French food media company, a gig that required keeping tabs on the latest cooking hacks and trends bubbling up on social media. Hand forced, I finally downloaded the app, but strictly, I told myself, on a lurking basis.

To wade through the ocean of content on TikTok, an app with more than 1 billion monthly users, I began with the hashtag pages, where you’ll find the most popular videos relevant to a particular topic. It was near the top of the #waffle page that I stumbled upon creator @peachyslime.

I watched as the hands plated three golden-brown chocolate waffles in a stream of sunlight. The waffles looked perfect — maybe too perfect. The hands added a few pats of daffodil-yellow butter and topped it off with thick, amber syrup. They cut the first bite and then proceeded to smash it all like Play-Doh. A voiceover said the scent reminded her of Eggo chocolate chip waffles. “It has the best texture to play with.”

https://www.tiktok.com/@peachyslime/video/6973376484887006469

Spoiler alert: The video didn’t feature actual food but rather food slime, a thriving trend on TikTok — videos in which someone prepares a trompe l’œil dish that is as beautiful as it is inedible. Some users watch for the food porn — “I wanted to eat it,” commented one on the waffle video — others for the nostalgia of childhood pastimes. Commented another, “I am 30 years old. WHY DO I WANT THIS SO BAD.” The video has over 7 million plays.

The more I sifted through FoodTok, as it’s sometimes called, the more I discovered what a strange and fascinating place it is. Food slime is just one example among the multitudes of weird shit uploaded onto the app, alongside other oddities like fake food and cooking on iPads. They exist on a spectrum of food and cooking videos that run the gamut from slick and studied to seemingly impromptu. Their common thread is that they pique the appetite, even the fake ones, and might just move you to cook something.

Hashtag pages turned out to be a good introduction to who’s who in the Wild West of FoodTok. Pretty soon, I began noticing the same faces (or hands) over and over — these were the influencers, with massive, multimillion-person followings. The #ramen page, for example, led me to Ivan McCombs, also known as @ramenkingivan. His cooking videos are mostly devoted to his preferred noodle and are a joy to watch, especially when he tastes something “bussin.” His ramen lasagna (4.5 million likes) holds a spot in the top three #ramen videos, just ahead of real-world celebrities Gordon Ramsay and the rapper Saweetie.

https://www.tiktok.com/@moontellthat/video/7023509254396972293

In his video, the king layers uncooked ramen noodles with Prego tomato sauce and grated cheese. The 26-second video ends with a slurpy noodle bite and a quick review: 8/10. “This is good,” reports Ivan. As far as recipes go, a craft prone to flowery intros and soul-baring backstories, it’s not a very meaty review — but as a viewer, I don’t necessarily need more either. It has all of the ingredients of a certain type of viral cooking video: intriguing, pretty tasty, and a dash of ASMR. Above all else, it’s approachable, no culinary training required. Set to “BOO!” by Championxii, it has a good beat, too. What’s more, it left me thinking about my cupboard and what I could do with those forgotten packets of Maruchan.

Further down on the ramen page, I recognized other viral-video creators, like @nickdigiovanni, a former MasterChef contestant whose videos are polished and rigorously consistent. They kick off with his steely blue gaze and signature knife toss, and end exactly where they began, creating a hypnotic loop. I also spotted @bayashi, one of Japan’s top food TikTok creators, who appears before a midnight-black backdrop that contrasts with his megawatt smile. Like many creators, he wears black latex gloves, a trend perhaps borrowed from BBQ culture, as he prepares and devours his food.

When I first landed on @bayashi’s profile, I found myself submitting to the algorithm and clicking through video after video. Some of his recipes made my mouth literally water. Others were pure theater — and hugely successful. What, I wondered, does it really feel like to consume an entire block of deep-fried butter? Many of his 9.7 million followers seemed more concerned with food waste, though it’s unclear if they were driven by the environment or sadism. “Finish the butter,” one commented, followed by an army of angry face emojis. Bayashi polished it off between two toast halves, topped with ruby-red jam.

If the highly stylized videos represent one kind of TikTok cooking, I discovered plenty of creators who took a more informal approach, trading the studio aesthetic for intimacy and authenticity. “You guys are fake as hell because when I styled my hair like this, no one said anything,” says @newt(7.6 million followers), a non sequitur before his bang-bang shrimp recipe. “I literally look like I’m about to sell real estate.” As Taylor Lorenz has written, “It’s almost as if you’re FaceTiming a friend while they make themselves dinner.” These more casual videos, however, fare no worse in terms of metrics. When @newt paired the trending Korean cheesy hot dogs with Olivia Rodrigo, I watched his version no fewer than 30 times (and with 12.9 million views, I know I am not alone!)

The more I scrolled, the more I came to see TikTok as a neighborly place, where collaborations, in the form of stitching, duets, and cameos, are encouraged. Take one of my favorite TikTokers, @Lynja, a “regular mom with killer cooking skills.” She teamed up with DiGiovanni to prepare homemade pasta, fusing both of their styles into social media synergy and a plate of glossy fettuccine alfredo with a flurry of chopped chives (16.4 million views).

It is a place that rewards jumping on trends (which is why even the influencers are choking down frozen honey and pasta chips) and at the same time, cultivates originality. Creator @thekoreanvegan mixes thoughtful recipes with heartfelt confessionals; @menwiththepotprepares gorgeous rustic meals in the wilderness, set to the soundtrack of a babbling brook; @justine_snacks signs off her feel-good breakfast recipes with a quick bite and a sunny “good morning!” And suddenly, I’m craving a savory toast.

Eventually, my voyeurism gave way to confidence. I felt I knew the landscape well, and the stop-motion flow made everything seem so doable — all I needed was my smartphone and a recipe idea. It was time to discover my signature TikTok style; time to transition from lurking to creating.

And so, I filmed the making of a croque madame — delicious, cheesy, and with a bright, wiggly egg on top, I figured it was bound to go viral. Unfortunately, the result was far too cringy and shall remain hidden in the abyss of my phone’s video gallery. My respect for creators only deepened. Even casual-looking videos are far more work and preparation than they appear.

Influencer status may not be in the cards for a geriatric millennial like me, but one thing’s certain: My home cooking has changed since joining TikTok — a place where food and music and personalities and cooking sounds (cracks, slaps, and sizzles) coalesce into a light and, dare I say, joyful cooking community.

If pandemic cooking left me empty — dinner had been reduced to a steady rotation of white rice, fried egg, and [insert roasted veg] — TikTok has refilled my tank with inspiration. It has motivated me to be more ambitious in the kitchen, and at the same time, reminded me that sometimes all you need is one good ingredient — a bright fillet of salmon or a hunk of nutty Parmesan — to throw together an exciting meal.

I recently tackled @bayashi’s stuffed chicken breast and @the_pastaqueen’s mint-kissed mac and cheese. Next, I’ve got my eye on @jennymartinezzz’s quesabirria tacos.

Maybe I’ll try uploading another video soon. In the meantime, I’ll keep scrolling for ideas.

The best poultry seasoning substitutes

It’s almost turkey time, which means we’re looking at creative alternatives to the traditional Thanksgiving menu, starting with homemade poultry seasoning. Poultry seasoning is commonly used for roasting chicken or turkey, but you can find it called for in stuffing recipes and some soups as well. If you’re like me, your early encounters with poultry seasoning were pretty limited to McCormick. I assumed that all poultry seasoning tasted the same as the one I remember from my mother’s spice rack. While the taste profile of most poultry seasoning is savory, there’s so much variation, depending on the particular combination of herbs and spices. If you can’t find poultry seasoning and need some, or even if you just want to customize your own blend, here is the best way to proceed.

* * *

Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme (yes, really)

If you’re going by the McCormick blend, the ingredients in poultry seasoning are some combination of sage, marjoram, rosemary, black pepper, and nutmeg. Poultry seasoning based on parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme is the most common variation (we’re pretty sure the Simon and Garfunkel rendition of “Scarborough Fair” is based entirely on a chicken). This is true especially for stuffing, but another big hitter that works really well for roasting is marjoram. We like marjoram because it has a similar flavor to oregano and even mint, but with a subtly different nuance of flavor.

Most of the herbs mentioned can be found dried and bottled, which you’re probably more likely to have at the ready. But if you want the flavors to pop, and you have them around, try fresh herbs and spices. For dry ingredients, it helps to have a grinder or a mortar and pestle. A mortar and pestle will work better for fresh ingredients, and a grinder is great for dried herbs.

If you’re going the more traditional “Scarborough Fair” route, your poultry seasoning is going to need to be at least two-thirds sage. Some additional herbs and spices to consider are celery seed, basil, ground pepper, nutmeg, garlic powder, or onion powder.

If you’re short on time and the idea of making a trip to the grocery store makes you want to tear your hair out, there’s more than one ready-made substitute for poultry seasoning.

Herbes de Provence? Mais oui!

Before the 1960s, when Julia Child introduced a recipe for Poulet Sauté aux Herbes de Provence in her famed cookbook “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” most Americans wouldn’t have known about herbes de Provence, the summery blend of herbs the French love to use in fish and poultry recipes.

Now, herbes de Provence is a common spice rack staple in the U.S. as well, and it works beautifully in any poultry dish. The ingredients are essentially the same as traditional poultry seasoning, but with oregano and sometimes North African spices as well. Keep in mind that this seasoning does not include sage, so you might want to add it in if you can. You’ll also often find lavender in herbes de Provence. It’s a common perennial in the French region that lends any poultry recipe a more refined, aromatic profile.

Turkey rub works, too

Turkey rub totally works as a traditional poultry seasoning substitute, too. This blend works best on darker, gamier meat like turkey, duck, and goose. The spicier flavors of ginger, coriander, and red pepper are just the thing for the holiday season, where you want something with a little kick to warm you up, along with a complimentary red wine.

Poultry seasoning is typically salt-free, so don’t feel obligated to add it, even if you’re a sodium fanatic. Just enjoy the woodsy, fragrant profile of whatever blend you choose. There are plenty of options for creating a smashing poultry seasoning that doesn’t ask for much except a couple spice staples and some ingenuity.

From the ambitious to the everyday, cookbooks are a magical portal to our culinary futures

Thirteen wasn’t a great age for me. (That being said, I’m not exactly sure it’s a great age for anyone.) I was deep into puberty, which came with both aesthetic challenges — I had yet to discover contacts and frizz-taming curl cream — and general existential angst about where I was in life. 

The best summation of that period of my life that I’ve ever witnessed comes from the 1938 film “Love Finds Andy Hardy.” Mickey Rooney is the titular star; he’s in high school and consumed with trying to buy a car as a means to woo a girl for the upcoming Christmas Eve dance. Judy Garland co-stars as Betsy Booth, the 12-year-old daughter of a famed singer, who is staying with her grandparents for the holiday season. 

Betsy’s grandparents live right next to the Hardys, and she inevitably becomes enamored with Andy. (Andy only views her as a kid in this movie, but there are two more films in the series in which their relationship unfolds.) As Betsy sighs, pines and looks out of the window, she (of course!) sings about her lot in life.

“I’m past the stage of doll and carriage,” she bemoans. “I’m not the age to think of marriage / I’m too old for toys, and I’m too young for boys / I’m just an-in between.” 

RELATED: Good coffee has become my go-to gift: I want you to have something delicious to start your day

The song continues, “l’ll be glad when mama lets me go to dances and have romances / I’ll be glad to have a party dress that boys will adore, a dress that touches the floor.” 

Whereas Betsy looks forward to going to country club parties (which honestly felt a little antiquated to me as a suburban child of the ’90s), I wanted to host parties — dinner parties, to be specific. 

I’ve loved cooking ever since I was a kid. In large part, I think my love stems from growing up during the era of peak Food Network programming. I’m talking about “Barefoot Contessa,” “Emeril Live!” and “Good Eats.” As a result, I frequently experimented in the kitchen. Early on, I started getting cookbooks as gifts for birthdays or the holidays. 

Most of these cookbooks were kid-focused, like Rachael Ray’s “Cooking Rocks: 30 Minute Meals for Kids,” which I dog-eared and stained in no time. I vividly remember a Disney cookbook that had a smoothie section decorated with illustrations of “Jungle Book” characters and a dessert section covered in the pawprints of the “101 Dalmatians.” 

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When I was 13, my mother gave me her old copy of “Joy of Cooking,” a hefty tome with a white cover and bold red lettering. I distinctly remember thinking it was a cookbook for adults — grown women who effortlessly held brunches and dinner parties. I pored over the suggestions for table settings and studied the proposed menus. 

The appetizers and hors d’oeuvres section, in particular, captivated me because many of the (decidedly retro) dishes seemed so fancy. You know, cheese puff canapes, clams casino and salmon pâté. 

That was my first real lesson that cookbooks, in addition to being legitimate culinary tools, also have aspirational and transportive powers. That cookbook was my weird little portal to envisioning my life as a grown-up. I wanted to be this glamorous woman whose friends came around for a flawlessly thrown cocktail hour on Friday nights à la “Auntie Mame.” 

These days, I’d like to think the free-spirited Mame would get a kick out of how I’ve managed dinner parties in a cramped apartment by using my freshly scrubbed bathtub as a giant ice bucket for bottles of wine and champagne (though I’m sure 13-year-old me would be mortified). 

RELATED: From dinner parties to “thanks for helping me move” pizza, I grieve for communal food experiences

The dual nature of cookbooks — serving as both a guide and a point of ambition — is one of my favorite things about them. There are a number of beautiful ones on my shelf that I use on a weekly basis. Others contain my “someday” recipes, which are the dishes I know I want to make eventually. For one reason or another, though, I haven’t yet mustered up the courage. Either I haven’t found that one hard-to-find ingredient, or I haven’t decided with whom I want to share the final result. 

From the Salon Food archives, here’s some writing that focuses on recipes, cookbooks and ways of cooking that fall on both sides of that spectrum. If you like this collection of writing, do sign up to receive “The Bite,” Salon’s food newsletter — which is where this essay originated and subscribers receive recommendations of what to read, watch and eat every week. 

***

A pasta a decade in the making

A story that beautifully highlights the sometimes tricky dichotomy between “everyday foods” and special occasion dining is “My 10-year carbonara journey” from Salon Food contributor Maggie Hennessy. Here, Maggie reveals that her first time trying carbonara was in a high-end Italian restaurant in Chicago as a young culinary student. It was luscious, with velvety yolk-based sauce and almost toothsome pasta, though deceptively simple (since the ingredient list is so short). 

Maggie then set out on a journey to make the perfect at-home version, which spanned a decade. 

“Because my first taste of carbonara was so cheffy, my early experiments came with absurdly high price tags as I sought those same elusive ingredients, from imported guanciale to duck eggs to $9 bucatini,” she writes. “Ingredient abasement is a dangerous business for home cooks; we face enough obstacles to getting dinner on the table. And while I’ll stop short of using desiccated parmesan from a can, I’ve made plenty of tasty carbonara using convenience-store bacon and eggs.” 

Read the full story here.

***

Dissecting the “angel in the kitchen” trope

A couple of years ago, I took a deep dive into a common TV trope that exists across the broadcasting spectrum, from prestige shows to sitcoms. 

“The inept female home cook is a common trope on TV — from Lucy Ricardo to Lorelai Gilmore,” I wrote. “It’s one that has signaled both societal shifts and stagnations in how we view traditional femininity throughout the decades and recently has made it even onto reality food TV.” 

On programs like “Worst Cooks in America,” it’s apparent that the concept of becoming an adept home cook is aspirational for so many people. For the women contestants on that show, in particular, there are often additional layers of motivation for becoming a good cook steeped in long-standing societal views on domesticity and motherhood. 

One 2017 contestant named Brittany confides to the camera, “How am I going to get a husband if I don’t know how to cook? I wanna cook for my boo.” Another named Mandy shows a photo of her 19-month-old daughter, Ryland. “Everything I serve Ryland is prepackaged and pre-made,” she says, a fact that Mandy is not proud of.

It’s interesting to consider who these home cooks thought they would become once their prowess in the kitchen improved. Give the show another watch — there are full seasons streaming now on Hulu — and listen to the contestant interviews with this context in mind. 

***

Your weekend dinner plans 

It’s just starting to get cool enough here in Kentucky for me to consider flipping my oven on for prolonged periods of time — which means it’s officially braising season! This oxtail ragu with buttered orzo is a dish that I took a long time to perfect. It’s definitely a “project recipe,” as it takes a couple of hours to make, from start to finish. 

Get that oxtail in the oven, then pour yourself a glass of wine and queue up some good TV while you wait for it to become fall-off-the-bone tender. (Maybe “The Many Saints of Newark?” Or “Only Murders in the Building?”) Once completed, this recipe is a stunner.

Also from Salon Food contributor La Corte, this recipe for chicken piccata — with a rich, velvety and slightly briny sauce — is a low-stakes but thoughtful dinner dish. Pair it with a side of hearty pasta.

If dessert is on the table, make it our Mary Elizabeth Williams’ extra dark sheet pan brownies. They’re perfect for sharing — and also for making ice cream sandwiches!

 

Read more great food writing: 

Inside the black market for fake vaccination cards

It was late, the lights already off in my house, but the message lit up my bedroom like a full moon. It was the person I’d been waiting for — the “dealer.” 

“We work with a group of antivax doctors who have access to the database,” the WhatsApp message read. “Your data will be updated to the system and a QR code sent which you can verify on your country’s hub.”

The message was the culmination of an investigation into fake COVID-19 vaccination cards. I’d read many stories about these cards, some funny, some shocking. But I wondered: just how easy is it to get them? And how common are they?

The answer to that question could have dire implications for public health. If they were that easy to acquire and pass off, that was reason to be more suspicious of strangers in public places that are supposed to be vaccinated-only, compromising a crucial pandemic safety policy.

Earlier in the day, I searched Reddit and Facebook; it took mere minutes to find a purported fake card dealer, the one with whom I later contacted on WhatsApp. At noon, I expressed interest in buying a card; at 8:50 p.m. later that night, they finally got back to me.

Three hours later, I found myself waiting for answers to questions about how this illegal operation works, as I pretended to be interested in making a purchase. To my surprise, they were talkative. I even asked for a photo of what the card would look like; in response, I was sent a photo of an example from a “satisfied client.”

* * *

As vaccine mandates take hold in various states, and the implementation of a federal mandate for private-sector businesses looms, a black market for fake vaccine cards has emerged. Perhaps this comes as no surprise: as this reporter observed first hand, they’re easy to seek out, and the cards themselves are printed on simple cardstock. Perhaps more surprising is the cost: some go for hundreds of dollars — meaning that some consumers are so passionate about avoiding a free vaccination that they are willing to shell out for something they could have gotten at no charge had they been willing to be inoculated.

According to the cybersecurity firm Check Point Research, the number of sellers offering fake vaccination cards increased on social media platforms and the dark web after President Joe Biden announced a plan that would require private-sector workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or be regularly tested for the coronavirus. Prior to the announcement, Telegram groups selling forged vaccine cards had as many as 30,000 subscribers, after the announcement some groups saw an uptick to nearly 300,000 subscribers.

“The market on Telegram for fake vaccination cards has been exponentially growing, and the price for a fake card has doubled, and that kind of big exponential growth time-wise really syncs up with when the federal mandate for vaccinations was released,” Maya Levine, a cybersecurity expert at Check Point Research, told me. “And since that announcement, we estimate that the number of sellers on this black market have gone up by about 10 times.”

For the unfamiliar, Telegram is a messaging application — similar to WhatsApp — with robust privacy and secure chat and texting features, which in this case seem to attract black market vaccine card sellers.

But fake vaccine card sales aren’t just happening on privacy-forwards Telegram; they’re also happening on Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Instagram, according to a separate investigation by the Digital Citizens Alliance (Digital Citizens) and Coalition for a Safer Web (CSW).

“What’s interesting is these nefarious actors have evolved, as the fear has evolved,” said Eric Feinberg, a lead researcher for the Coalition for a Safer Web, in an interview. “And this is kind of the failure of social media to keep up with it as the fear evolves, and so has the use of these nefarious actors to use these platforms in this way.”

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In the case of the purported “dealer” with whom I had been chatting, some of their claims were alarming — particularly the one about working with “antivax doctors” who could supposedly forge vaccination records digitally as well.

Are these sellers really in cahoots with doctors? It was certainly within the realm of possibility. There have been reports of health care workers with access to blank vaccine cards who went on to sell them — like one Chicago pharmacist who was charged with stealing official COVID-19 vaccination cards and selling them on eBay.

“There are cases where the source of these fake cards are not even ‘fake,’ because they work in a pharmacy — they have access to them and they just take them,” Levine said. “Unfortunately, some people in the medical system are taking advantage of this.”

NPR reported on another similar case, where a New Jersey woman calling herself the AntiVaxMomma on Instagram sold several hundred fake COVID-19 vaccination cards at $200. For another $250, a co-conspirator would then enter a fake card buyer’s name into a New York state vaccination database. At least ten names were entered into the database via a co-conspirator who worked at a medical clinic in Patchogue, New York. The woman was charged with offering a false instrument, criminal possession of a forged instrument, and conspiracy.

Obviously, copying and selling COVID-19 vaccine cards is illegal — which is why they’re not for sale on any reputable site on the internet.

“It is a felony to impersonate an official document, which is what a vaccination card is from the CDC is,” Levine said. “It’s a crime to definitely sell it, and it’s a crime to try to use that fake card in places that are asking for it as proof of vaccination.”

According to a warning from the FBI, anyone who sells, buys, or sells a fake vaccine card could be fined or face prison time.

“The creation, purchase, or sale of vaccine cards by individuals is illegal and endangers public safety,” the warning stated. “The unauthorized use of an official government agency’s seal on such cards is a crime that may be punishable under Title 18, United States Code, Section 1017, and other federal laws. Penalties may include hefty fines and prison time.”

* * * 

As for me, my conversation stopped with the anonymous seller after I received the photo. (Of course, I didn’t intend to go through with the purchase; I’d already been vaccinated anyway, and was going through the process for the sake of journalism). The image showed a hand holding up a vaccine card that looked just as normal as my real card; the person’s hand was hovering in front of a laptop screen in what looked like an elementary school classroom. There was a blackboard and a map of the United States in the background. Personal information on the card had been obscured by the sender.

I ran the photo through a reverse image search, and couldn’t find anywhere else that it had been posted online. In checking the photo’s metadata, I noticed that all identifying information — such as the device on which the photo had been taken or the GPS location — had been scrubbed or unrecorded.

As for how this person’s operation works, much of that remains unclear. It certainly would have been revealing to see what would have happened if I’d gone through with the purchase, though that was out of the picture given its illegality.

On the forum where I found this seller, other users attested to their products’ quality. And the illicit vaccine card dealer’s narrative is similar to what others have found in investigations into fake vaccine cards: in general, the potential buyer is asked to pay money, told their information will be entered into a database, and asked for similar information about themselves.

There have been reports of the FBI and Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General cracking down on this operation. Last month, the National Hockey League (NHL) suspended San Jose Sharks forward Evander Kane for allegedly submitting a fake vaccine card. In Pennsylvania, two police officers were fired for the same offense.

But that doesn’t appear to be making a dent on the growing industry.

Notably, purchasing a card can put the buyer at a higher risk of being scammed, or having their information stolen or sold.

“Besides the fact that it’s illegal, there’s a risk when you choose to give an anonymous seller your information,” Levine said. “There’s a very high chance that whatever information you give them, whether it be credit card information to pay for it, or your personal information, like your name and your birthday and your email, they can then take that and just as easily sell it on the dark web.”

And of course, by using such a card and misrepresenting yourself, you put yourself and others at risk of contracting COVID-19.

Experts say that social media platforms also need to be held accountable, and an easy and immediate solution would be for social media platforms to share information about nefarious actors with each other. Sellers often move around from platform to platform; as I observed, a seller advertised on Facebook and then requested we move our conversation to WhatsApp.

“I think information-sharing between the platforms could be one thing that could pretty quickly make a dent in some of this kind of activity, even before Congress puts pen to paper on any legislation,” said Adam Benson, from the Digital Citizens Alliance.

Can Phil Murphy break New Jersey Democrats’ second-term losing streak?

With just hours to go before the polls close in New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy appears likely to break the one-term ceiling that’s haunted his Democratic predecessors since the early 1980s. All polls suggest Murphy will easily defeat his Republican opponent, former state Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli. That might be great news for Democrats in the Garden State, but it must be tempered by the latest NBC polling that President Biden’s presidency is underwater, with a majority of Americans now disapproving of his job performance.

“What’s more, the survey finds that 7 in 10 adults, including almost half of Democrats, believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction, as well as nearly 60 percent who view Biden’s stewardship of the economy negatively just nine months into his presidency,” NBC reported.

In the midst of a pandemic and a global climate crisis we can’t afford to be myopic about what matters politically. What good is it for Murphy to win re-election, if his national party is in a nosedive and on the way down loses control of Congress?

Much of the COVID recovery that Murphy was able to run on, after our state registered the highest per-capita COVID death rate on earth, was due to the multi-billion-dollar infusion from Washington initiated by the Biden White House and passed by a Democratic Congress.

The erosion of Biden’s support among even his own party can be easily traced back to the obstructionism of Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., who kneecapped the president’s Build Back Better agenda before its specifics could even be presented to the American people.

Biden’s potentially transformative $3.7 trillion agenda was the victim of a Beltway shiv job within the Democratic Party. While media coverage fixated on personalities and dollar amounts, few Americans really knew what exactly the Build Back Better agenda was all about, even as Big Pharma, Wall Street and energy sector lobbyists worked to derail it

Now, the details being widely reported includes the long list of what Democrats have had to cut out: paid family leave, medical leave, free community college, dental and vision coverage under Medicare and a plan to lower prescription drug prices — all to satisfy two party “moderates” who might (or might not) support a greatly reduced $1.7 trillion package.

To say the professional Democrats blew the messaging on this doesn’t fully describe the political malpractice on display. Now the storyline is about what Democrats did not deliver. No wonder the tide of popular support for Biden is ebbing.

“Democrats have to speak to people’s everyday needs,” said Larry Hamm, long time Newark community organizer and former U.S. Senate candidate. “When you hear the conversation about reconciliation and Build Back Better you hear numbers, not the programs like child care or the expanded child tax credit.”

Hamm, chair of the People’s Organization for Progress, said he sees the line between progressives and so-called moderates as being between “the people who want the working class to have more” and “those who want them to get less — that would be your moderates.”

On Oct. 27, thousands of poor and low-income Americans, along with their advocates, came from across the country to Washington as part of a national organizing effort led by the Rev. Dr. William Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign to press Congress not to shrink Biden’s initial Build Back Better agenda.

“All the focus is only on the numbers — so many trillions,” said Imam Saffet Abid Catovic, the Muslim chaplain at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, who made the trip in support of the Poor People’s Campaign. “The focus is not on the people, like the essential workers who now are disposable. It’s a sad commentary on the way our democracy is functioning to have the entire process held up by two senators. I thought it was ‘We the people,’ but we are being held hostage by these two senators.”

For Murphy and New Jersey, much remains to be done — as the pre-pandemic lead pipe crisis in Newark revealed. The loss of momentum in Washington will have real consequences here in New Jersey. Generations of neglect of our basic infrastructure has taken a toll beyond the means of any single state’s treasury to repair.

The massive death toll from the pandemic, and the disparate impact on people of color — who were often on the front lines as essential workers — has exposed major gaps in our health care and public health systems.

Consider just how many of the dozens of the residents in our region who drowned in flood waters from Tropical Storm Ida died in illegal basement apartments. When you are leading a state like New Jersey — where, according to the United Health Foundation, more than one in five families live with “severe housing problems” — you need a willing partner in Washington if you hope to address our chronic housing crisis while at the same time hardening our neighborhoods to the ravages of climate change.

According to the United Health Foundation’s Health Rankings, 21% of New Jersey housing units have one or more of the following issues: they lack a complete kitchen, lack necessary plumbing or are overcrowded and/or present a “severe” cost burden for the families who live in them. Nationally, only 17.5% of residential housing stock is similarly challenged.

Build Back Better has to be more than a slogan — it needs to be an imperative.

As evidenced by a recent visit by Sen. Bernie Sanders to Rutgers University’s New Brunswick campus to campaign for Murphy, our governor has successfully aligned himself with the progressive wing of his party.

In a glowing profile in the Nation, columnist John Nichols posited that Murphy might be the “most progressive” governor in the U.S., observing that “many who were once skeptical of the former investment banker now admit that … Murphy’s policies were compassionate and forward thinking.”

On Murphy’s campaign website he flags “affordable housing” as an issue, but frames it in terms of “strengthening New Jersey’s position as the best place in America to raise a family,” with no reference to the sorry state of so much of the state’s existing housing stock, where people are paying far too much for far too little.

“When COVID-19 made it difficult for thousands of residents to pay their rent or their mortgage, Phil acted decisively, signing a sweeping executive order preventing the removal of individuals from their homes through eviction or foreclosure proceedings,” proclaims the Murphy website.

What this narrative misses is that before the pandemic, according to the United Way’s annual ALICE (Asset Limited Income Constrained Employed) survey, close to 40% of New Jersey households were struggling to make ends meet and keep current on their rent or mortgage. In some of the state’s poorer communities, a majority of the households were in that kind of month-to-month crucible.

For years now, long before COVID, New Jersey has been one of the states with the highest foreclosure rates. More than a decade after the Great Recession, thousands of zombie homes continue to drag down local property values and pose a clear and present danger to neighborhoods in places like Camden and Newark.

In 2018, NJ Advance Media reported that according to the U.S. Census, New Jersey had 391,428 vacant housing units, with the highest concentration in Newark, the state’s largest city.

“They’re empty, they’re often in disrepair and they’re a drag on your wallet,” wrote reporter Disha Raychadhuri. “Vacant properties can be detrimental to economic growth in an area, adding blight, deterring investment and dragging down the overall feel of a neighborhood. Not to mention, they can be a real thorn in the side of your home value.”

For Fredrica Bey, a Newark-based community activist, Murphy’s administration has failed to meaningfully address the state’s prolonged foreclosure crisis, which long predated the pandemic. She says she won’t be voting for him, but she will be voting.

“The governor, who comes from Wall Street, has not held banks like Wells Fargo accountable for how they have undermined Black home ownership and decimated our historical Black wealth for our children and families in our neighborhoods,” she said. “I will write in the name of our beloved Maya Angelou, who told us, ‘When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.’ Or I will write in the name of our beloved,Fannie Lou Hamer, ‘We are Sick and Tired, of being Sick and Tired!’

“As for me and my house,” Bey continued, “we will be voting for people in Trenton who continue to show respect for our lives and property, like our Assembly member Cleopatra Tucker, who has been in the struggle with us and understands what we need from our elected leaders when it comes to standing up against the big banks and Wall Street.”

Republicans simplify their defense of Texas abortion ban: Women are too stupid to have rights

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments over SB8, a new Texas law that set up a bounty hunter system that empowers private citizens to use lawsuits to prevent abortions. Going in, most observers expected the Republican-dominated court to be eager to uphold this law. In a twist, however, multiple conservative judges — including Donald Trump appointees, Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Justice Amy Coney Barrett — seemed skeptical.

To be sure, it’s not because the conservative justices care about human rights, but because they care about their own power and look askance at a law designed to evade legal review by federal courts. Now the expectation in legal circles is that the court will throw out the Texas law and open the door to banning abortion through a Mississippi case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which is a straightforward challenge to Roe v. Wade. 

Most of Monday’s arguments were centered around impenetrable legalese about “ex parte young” and “sovereign immunity.” But through the thicket of lawyerly jargon about who has what legal power here, a picture did emerge of the actual moral and political argument Republicans are making about abortion rights. It all boils down to one very basic, insulting premise: Women are simply too stupid to be allowed rights. 

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Throughout arguments, Solicitor General of Texas Judd Stone and Justice Samuel Alito, both Federalist Society-linked far-right Republicans, casually spoke about women as if they were incapable of handling the choice to have an abortion. When asked about who could be suffering “extreme moral or otherwise psychological harm” over someone else’s abortion, for instance, Stone invoked the tragic tale of a mansplainer who is horribly abused by a woman who decides to ignore his opinion.

An individual discovers that — that someone — that a close friend of theirs who they’d spoken with about — about pro-life issues and about abortion has chosen instead to have a late-term abortion in violation of S.B. 8, and they were very invested in the — basically, in that child’s upbringing and the child’s coming into being.

Oof! Can you imagine the nerve of this hypothetical woman? After someone goes to all that effort to browbeat her about how much he hates abortion, she up and decides that she is going to abort a pregnancy anyway! One can feel Stone’s heart breaking for the mansplainer denied his god-given right to boss women around. 

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

And if that diatribe weren’t sexist enough, Stone had to slide in that little jab about “late-term” abortion. It’s been a common talking point for GOP defenders to claim that the law gives women plenty of time to get abortions. The implication is that only dum-dums can’t get it done on time, and therefore they deserve forced childbirth. But this supposed “six weeks” to decide is utter nonsense. While the media keeps calling the Texas law a “six week” ban, it is, at best, a two-week ban, as that’s the length of time since the missed period indicating pregnancy. 

Alito, on the other hand, decided to insult women’s intelligence from another angle, portraying women as mental children who are being manipulated by sinister abortion doctors and therefore need to be protected from having choices. Alito repeatedly invoked the specter of a bird-brained woman who didn’t realize until after the fact that the abortion — the one she scheduled, went through and paid for — meant she wasn’t going to have a baby. He spoke of a woman who wants to sue “the doctor who performed my abortion because it caused me physical and/or emotional harm,” conjured up a woman who “sues an out-of-state doctor” for “for physical or emotional harm suffered as a result of the abortion,” and asked of a woman who “sues a doctor who has flown in from another state to perform the abortion.”

RELATED: Republicans thought the Supreme Court could stealthily ban abortion. They were wrong

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor gently pointed out, there are already “common law torts” that cover “emotional infliction of harm, breach of contract, medical malpractice.” So if a woman was actually forced or tricked into an abortion she didn’t want, she can already sue for damages. Alito, however, wasn’t interested in the real world. He wanted to wallow in an elaborate sexist fantasy, where women routinely get abortions without understanding such a procedure means they won’t get to have the baby. Wouldn’t the mansplaining hero in Stone’s tragic tale have told them? 

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Alito was riffing on a sexist notion that has been rampant in the anti-choice world for decades. Women are naturally too dumb to make choices, the argument goes, and therefore end up awash in regret after foolishly letting the “abortion industry” take their babies away. This myth persists despite ample evidence that the opposite is true, and that a whopping 99% of patients report, five years after the fact, that their abortion was the right choice. In fact, most women who get abortions are already mothers, so they understand intimately what the other choice already looks like. 

Alito’s line of argument isn’t just misogynist. It’s also worrisome from a legal perspective.

The last time the Supreme Court chipped away at abortion rights, in the 2007 Gonzales vs. Carhart decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy justified upholding a federal ban on an abortion procedure used to end pregnancies in the late second or early third trimester. Even though most of those abortions are done for medical reasons, as Dahlia Lithwick noted in Slate at the time, “His opinion blossoms from the premise that if all women were as sensitive as he is about the fundamental awfulness of this procedure, they’d all refuse to undergo it.”

Kennedy’s argument wasn’t just false and condescending, it also set up a legal precedent for the idea that women are too dumb to understand what abortion is and therefore need to be kept from having one for their own good. No doubt Alito was thinking of that as he kept harping on this fantasy of the woman tricked by a doctor into getting an abortion. It’s looking unlikely the court will uphold the Texas law, but there’s a good reason to worry that they will use the Mississippi case to end the legal right to abortion, citing the myth that women are too stupid to be trusted with rights.

After warning of a mass exodus due to the vaccine mandate, only 34 NYC cops placed on unpaid leave

Just 34 uniformed NYPD officers were put on unpaid leave on Monday amid New York City’s new vaccination mandate for municipal workers – a far cry from the mass exodus foretold by a number of NYPD unions during the lead-up to the policy. 

Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said that most of the department’s unvaccinated officers have applied for “reasonable accommodations” (i.e., religious or medical exemptions) to the mandate. Roughly 1 in every 6 police personnel remain unvaccinated. 

“With that remaining 15% it’s very important to remember that there is a process where people can request reasonable accommodations for religious or medical reasons,” Shea said during a Monday press conference. “And that’s the vast majority of that 15%.”

Last month, de Blasio announced that New York City would begin enforcing a vaccination requirement for all public employees as of November 1. Since then, the move has been fiercely resisted by various New York police unions, with particular pushback from the Police Benevolent Association (PBA), the largest union representing NYPD officers. 

RELATED: Police unions vs. vaccine mandates: The workers drawing a line in the COVID battle

Back in August, as New York City was still weighing a mandate, PBA president Patrick Lynch told members that the union would mount a legal offensive in the case of a vaccine mandate, saying that officers would resign in droves over the requirement. 

The PBA last week followed through on their vow to sue the city, writing in its suit that “the city has provided no explanation, much less a rational one, for the need to violate the autonomy and privacy of NYPD police officers in such a severe manner, on the threat of termination.” 

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However, NYPD officers appear to have largely kowtowed to the city’s mandate. “Members of the police department responded to this [vaccine mandate], they came to work as they always do, and there is literally no effect on service at this point,” Shea said on Monday.

According to CNN, the one-shot vaccination rate within the NYPD has climbed from 70% to 84% since October 20, when the mandate was first announced. Within the New York Fire Department (FDNY), vaccination over this same period has lept from 58% to 77%. The Department of Sanitation’s has likewise risen from 62% to 83%. When it comes to all New York City municipal workers, 91% have received at least one dose of the jab.

Still, the city is ostensibly seeing resistance from the FDNY, 2,300 of whose firefighters called out sick on Monday, according to Commissioner Daniel A. Nigro. On any given day, CNN reported, this number normally hovers between 800 to 1000.

RELATED: Police reform by another name: COVID mandates causing cops to complain — and quit

“Since the mandate was issued, our medical leave spiked up and we know that,” Nigro said. “The majority of them are unvaccinated. This is completely unacceptable.”

FDNY-Fire Officers Association President Jim McCarthy said on Monday that “all we are asking for is extra time” to let members get the jab, file for an exemption, or resign.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story contained an error in the headline about the nature of the police officers’ leave. The headline has been updated. 

“Trump lost”: Republicans plaster Texas with billboards against further election audits

Former President Donald Trump has been pushing for “audits” even in states where he won, but some anti-Trump Republicans are putting their foot down in the Lone Star State.

My San Antonio reports that three billboards have sprung up in San Antonio that bluntly declare that “Trump lost,” while at the same time demanding “no more ‘audits'” of the 2020 election in their state.

According to My San Antonio, the billboards are being sponsored by an organization called Republicans for Voting Rights that is spending $250,000 to pay for billboards in Texas, Georgia, Florida Pennsylvania, Michigan, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Arizona.

A Trump-backed audit in Arizona conducted over the summer failed to prove that the former president actually won the state, and in fact gave President Joe Biden more votes in its tally of the results than the state’s official count.

Despite this, Trump has continued to push for more “audits” of the election in several states, including states where he won such as Texas and Florida.