Marjorie Taylor Greene tweets panicked message to supporters following poll of GOP voters

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., the first-term congresswoman who has repeatedly spread Donald Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, was apparently dismayed to learn that 4% of her state’s electorate said they “won’t even vote” in future elections due to that very “fraud.”

“I recently conducted a poll on Georgia’s elections and if my constituents felt their votes would count during a teletown hall,” she tweeted on Monday. “Sadly, 4% said they won’t even vote due to voter fraud. This is WRONG. Legal votes by Rs are just as important as stopping illegal ones.”

Greene, who is up for re-election in 2022, has extensively supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. Back in September, she declared – without evidence – that the former president “won Georgia,” later calling for an official audit. In May, Greene also threw her support behind the GOP-backed election recount of Maricopa County, Arizona, which just weeks ago found that President Biden beat Trump by a wider margin than originally reported.

In a series of tweets, Greene also noted that Republican Gov. Brian Kemp would have lost the gubernatorial election against progressive voting rights activist Stacey Abrams if just 4% of the Georgia GOP electorate opted out of voting.

“Combine that with mass absentee ballot harvesting and Rs never win again in Georgia,” the conservative lawmaker added, taking issue with the practice of ballot harvesting. Ballot harvesting is the process by which third parties, like volunteers or election workers, gather ballots for voters instead of having voters submit the ballots themselves.

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Last week, Trump appeared to lend credence to Greene’s concerns around non-voting within the GOP base.

“If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented),” he said in a statement, “Republicans will not be voting in ’22 or ’24. It is the single most important thing for Republicans to do.”

Trump’s remarks came just hours after a state judge dismissed a Trump-backed lawsuit alleging fraud in the Peach State, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The decision dashed Republican hopes of the state conducting an official audit any time soon.

“This lawsuit was the result of the Big Lie, which is nothing more than a meritless conspiracy theory being spread by people who simply cannot accept that their side lost,” Robb Pitts,, chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, said in a statement. “Its defeat here today should echo throughout the nation.”

Greene defeated her opponent by an approximate 50% margin in the 2020 House races, so it remains unlikely she will be ousted next year, even if she loses 4% of her voting bloc.

How your emotional response to the COVID-19 pandemic changed your behavior and your sense of time

The COVID-19 pandemic, now in its 19th month, has meant different things to different people. For some, it’s meant stress over new school and work regimes, or anxiety over the prospect of catching COVID-19 and dealing with the after-effects of an infection. But for others, it’s created space and freedom to pursue new passions or make decisions that had been put off.

Our upended lives — for better or for worse — also likely influenced our perception of time.

In June 2020, we were part of a team of researchers who presented initial evidence that an individual’s sense of time during the pandemic was closely related to their emotions.

People who reported feeling high levels of stress and nervousness in March and April 2020 also tended to feel that time was passing more slowly, but people who reported feeling high levels of happiness felt that time was passing more quickly. (Yes, believe it or not, there was a good chunk of people who enjoyed their time spent in lockdown.)

It turns out that even during a pandemic, time flies when you’re having fun.

With a year’s worth of data, we were able to see how people’s views on the progress of the pandemic were related to their sense of time, their emotional states and whether they behaved in ways intended to slow the spread of COVID-19.

Where does the time go?

Time is a funny thing. On the one hand, it’s incredibly precise and consistent — an objective measure. Each day on Earth lasts exactly 23.934 hours, the length of time it takes the Earth to rotate once along its axis.

On the other hand, how we feel or perceive time passing is neither consistent nor precise. Many people will probably agree that 23.934 hours seem to pass much faster on a Saturday than on a Monday.

Dr. Gable has spent the past decade exploring how two highly related concepts — emotion and motivation — play a large role.

Motivation is a part of emotion and can either be described as “approach motivation” or “avoidance motivation.” The former is characterized by the tendency to engage with others or pursue goals when we experience positive emotions, such as excitement and joy. The latter refers to the tendency to pull away from others when we experience negative emotions, such as sadness or fear.

Approach motivation is associated with time passing more rapidly, which ultimately results in spending more time engaged with something that makes us feel good.

Avoidance motivation is associated with time passing more slowly, which motivates us to escape from potentially harmful situations.

Under normal circumstances, these relationships help us effectively pursue our goals and maintain our safety. Consider how long you’ll spend absorbed in a good book and how quickly you try to escape from a threatening situation.

But what happens in extreme circumstances? Thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation, we were able to investigate for the first year of the pandemic how people’s motivations and emotions altered their sense of time.

Initial results

In April 2020, Dr. Gable and his team asked 1,000 Americans about their sense of time and emotional experiences over the previous month.

Almost 50% of these individuals reported that time seemed to be dragging by, which was strongly related to higher levels of stress and nervousness. These respondents also reported practicing social distancing more often. Roughly 25% of participants said time seemed to be flying by, which was associated with feeling happy and glad. The remaining 25% of participants felt no change in their sense of time.

The COVID-19 pandemic was an event that touched just about everyone – making it an ideal period to study the relationship between emotion and time.
Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images

A month later, we contacted the same people and asked the same questions. About 10% of those who had previously reported time passing slowly said it was moving more quickly. And more of them said they felt relaxed and calm.

The rest of the year

With a full year’s worth of data, we were able to analyze the results across 12 months of the pandemic. (The analysis is still under peer review.) We found that individuals who reported being relaxed, happy and confident felt that time was passing more quickly.

In contrast, participants who reported strong feelings of fear, anxiety or anger — or who felt that their lives were out of control — perceived time passing slowly. This sensation of time moving sluggishly was also associated with greater worry about personally getting COVID-19, anxiety about whether a family member would become infected and concern about how the virus would affect personal finances.

We also found an interesting pattern of results related to participants’ beliefs about the dangers of COVID-19 and the ability to address the spread of the virus. Specifically, participants who felt the government could effectively control the pandemic and that there were effective treatments for COVID-19 felt time was passing more quickly. Participants who felt there was an insufficient amount of medical equipment to treat COVID-19 and felt the virus was highly lethal reported time passing more slowly.

Then there’s the way time perception was connected to behavior.

Over the course of the pandemic, we found that when people were feeling time was moving by more quickly, they were more likely to wear a mask. Meanwhile, when people perceived time passing more slowly, they tended to avoid large gatherings.

Both limit the spread of the virus. So what might explain the likelihood of one behavior over the other?

Individuals wearing a mask are engaging in more approach-motivated behavior, as wearing a mask doesn’t protect the wearer as much as it protects those in their vicinity. The more positive people felt, the more likely they were to wear a mask to protect others around them.

Those who avoid large gatherings are engaging in more self-protective, or avoidance-motivated behavior. It prevents you from getting the virus from other people, with fear and avoidance influencing the behavior.

In other words, if you see a light at the end of the tunnel — through treatments and faith in the government’s responses — you’re more likely to have an upbeat attitude and be more motivated to engage in behaviors that help others. If you feel utterly hopeless or sense foreboding doom, time creeps by. This seems to motivate the impulse to hunker down and protect yourself.

As our understanding and awareness of COVID-19 variants increases, so does our understanding of ourselves and how we behave. These findings may highlight the importance of maintaining good habits and finding hobbies that foster positive emotions. That way you won’t be trapped in a cycle of despair, which is only compounded by the sense that time is creeping by.

Philip Gable, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Delaware and Chris Wendel, PhD Student in Psychology, University of Alabama

A mysterious and powerful radio signal from space is repeating itself

Outer space is chirping, and no one quite knows why.

Known as fast radio bursts, or FRBs for short, these very brief yet incredibly powerful bursts of radio wave energy appear to be coming from all corners of the universe. And while astronomers can pick up such signals, they are, because of their brief duration, very difficult to study. Very few of them ever repeat; and since they only last a millisecond, telescopes can rarely focus on them in time to get a good look. Moreover, astronomers do not quite know exactly where they are coming from, or where the next one might land.

All of this uncertainty around fast radio bursts has only heightened their mystery.

But astronomers may have found some answers in a fast radio burst that, unusually, repeats — which has given them more opportunities to study the strange signals.

Dubbed FRB 121102, the first repeating FRB has revealed new insights about this mysterious phenomenon. According to a study published in Nature last week, an international group of scientists found 1,652 independent radio bursts from the same source over the course of 47 days between August 29 and October 29, 2019. The analysis is significant for being the largest set of FRBs ever recorded from a single source. At one point during observation, 122 radio bursts occurred in the span of one hour from the source.

“This was the first time that one FRB source was studied in such great detail,” said astrophysicist Bing Zhang, an astrophysicist at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas and one of the study’s corresponding authors. “The large burst set helped our team hone in like never before on the characteristic energy and energy distribution of FRBs, which sheds new light on the engine that powers these mysterious phenomena.”

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Part of the mystery around FRBs is that they are relatively new to science. Scientists discovered the first FRBs in 2007, and have since turned to powerful radio telescopes to track down the bursts and search for clues on where they originate and how they are produced. One prominent theory on their origins is that they spawn from a type of incredibly dense neutron star called a magnetar, which have some of the strongest magnetic fields in the universe. Another theory posits that FRBs emerge from shock waves traveling at near light-speed outside a magnetosphere.

In a news release, Zhang said the latest observations “pose great challenges to the latter model.”

“The bursts are too frequent and — given that this episode alone amounts to 3.8% of the energy available from a magnetar — it adds up to too much energy for the second model to work,” Zhang said.

Pei Wang, one of the article’s lead authors from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), agreed.

“During its most active phase, FRB 121102 included 122 bursts measured within a one-hour period, the highest repeat rate ever observed for any FRB,” Wang said.

Indeed, in a separate study published in Nature in June 2020 suggested that some fast radio bursts could be coming from a magnetar in our galaxy nearly 10,000 parsecs away.

“Because magnetars are spinning quickly and have powerful magnetic fields, they have huge reservoirs of energy that can produce outbursts,” Alexandra Witze wrote in Nature. “One idea about the source of these outbursts is that something happening inside the magnetar — such as a ‘starquake,’ analogous to an earthquake — could crack its surface and release energy.”

While their precise causes remain a mystery, astrophysicists have mostly ruled out the possibility that these mysterious radio waves are coming from an alien civilization, as Salon has previously reported.

“It is unlikely that all FRBs are from alien civilizations due to the power requirements at cosmological distances, but possible,” Avi Loeb, the former chair of Harvard’s astronomy department previously told Salon.

Planting a life — and a future — after prison at Benevolence Farm

In February 2017, when Keia Blount was preparing to be released after serving a five-year prison term at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women, she had no idea where to go.

“Family was not an option to go back to,” she says. “There was nowhere for me to go except for a shelter.”

At the last minute, she found Benevolence Farm in Graham, North Carolina, a transitional residential and employment program on an organic farm. She applied, a few members of the staff came to visit her in prison, and within in a week, she was admitted — just in time for her release.

“Women will be released from state prisons, but they are not guaranteed safe and secure housing,” says Kristen Powers, the executive director of Benevolence Farm.

Due to the war on drugs, which began in the early 1970s, the number of women in U.S. federal and state prisons grew by nearly 800% between 1978 and 2014. But a corresponding increase in services for those women never arrived, says Powers.

As a result, in North Carolina alone, more than 2,000 women are released from state prisons each year without the infrastructure in place to adequately support them. This dearth of services prompted Tanya Jisa, a social worker who had worked at a juvenile detention center, to launch Benevolence Farm in 2008 based on her own love of farming and desire to help women break free of the prison cycle. Benevolence was created as a place where the principles of horticultural therapy could be applied to help women readjust to life outside of prison.

After acquiring the land through a donation in 2014 and preparing and cultivating it, Jisa took on their first resident, Melissie Davis, in December 2016. Blount was the second. Now, nearly five years later, the farm has hosted a total of 30 women, including the four currently residing there. By the end of the year, the house should be full with six residents. Benevolence residents stay an average one to one-and-a-half years, with a maximum stay of two years.

“Prison is such an anti-natural place,” Powers says. “So what could be the benefit of nature, healing, and exposure to dirt and hands in the soil?” That’s the question they started with.

A connection to the earth

For the first two weeks after Eden Gustavsen arrived at Benevolence in May 2018, she was able to relax and decompress after the 19 months she had spent in prison.

“I was really glad they gave me that time to hang out and get acclimated,” says Gustavsen. Growing up, her father had a small farm, and before being incarcerated, she had lived in the mountains, where she spent time outside. “I was excited to have a connection with the earth again.”

Benevolence Farm sits on 13 acres. The main residential house is a small brick structure with three bedrooms where the women live, two to a room.

A few yards from the house is a greenhouse where bundles of herbs hang to dry, and beyond that is a shelter for tractors and farm equipment. Rows of flowers and lavender, rosemary, and other herbs grow in one plot, and behind the house site sits a field of blueberries and an area where they are planning to build small homes to accommodate more women. There is also a chicken coop, and underneath the house is a large workshop where the residents turn the herbs and flowers into lotion, soap, and candles.

Although the farm receives external funding from individuals and grants, it still needs to bring in revenue. It used to grow and sell more fruits and vegetables, but it wasn’t fiscally sustainable. So, two years ago, they pivoted to focus primarily on value-added body-care products, which they sell in local businesses and online.

The benefits of gardening and farming have been shown in many populations. “When you’re in prison, it’s pretty sedentary,” Gustavsen says. “When you come out and have that physical push, that really helps. You have that confidence and feel stronger physically.”

“Just being out in nature and being outside, pulling weeds, it’s super therapeutic,” says Megan Holmes, a transition coordinator at a juvenile detention facility in Texas and lead author of a 2019 study showing that horticultural and similar outdoor community service programs were more successful at reducing recidivism than other kinds of programs. Benevolence Farm’s recidivism rate is around 5%, lower than the national average of roughly 40%.

There are a number of reasons for this, according to Joel Flagler, a registered horticultural therapist who works as a professor and agricultural extension agent at Rutgers University. Horticulture, while not necessarily easy, doesn’t require a specific degree or certification to participate. For that reason, it can provide an accessible path toward consistent employment for those with little or no other options.

“Plants are non-judgmental,” Flagler says. “Plants will respond to any caregiver.”

In addition, horticulture offers people the chance to see the literal fruits of their labor. They plant a seed, and in a few weeks, there is something tangible. And the principles of growing can be applied to life outside of farming as well, according to Powers. In 2020, Benevolence started a program using permaculture, an approach to manage land that mimics natural ecosystems.

“We talk about permaculture principles, and the first principle is to stop and observe: How are the plants doing? Are there bugs over here? Where does weeding need to happen? And then make a plan,” Powers says. “That parallels a lot to people’s re-entry. Things can be [moving at] 100 miles per hour, but first let’s stop and assess the situation.”

There’s also an important physiological aspect to working with plants. Flagler says that people are calmer around plants and tend to be more able to focus on tasks such as planting, weeding, watering, and harvesting than other kinds of work. This difference is especially important for those who have experienced trauma and have PTSD. The sensory stimulation in the garden helps — the smell of the herbs, the feeling of smooth leaves and thorny stems, the beautiful colors of flowers, the sound of grass in the wind, and of course, the taste of the food once it’s harvested. There’s also the gratification of knowing that your hard work is feeding you and others in your community.

Learning a vocation

On top of the mental health benefits, both Holmes and Flagler emphasized the vocational component that comes with living and working on a farm. “People need to see this is not just fun horticulture,” Flagler adds. “These are real skills to get real, well-paying jobs.”

This is especially important to people coming out of prison, who often struggle with a great deal of stigma. Blount, for example, has worked as a salesperson in a number of car dealerships since leaving Benevolence, but she said all of her employers since then have used her criminal record against her, in spite of her high sales numbers.

At Benevolence, the work is organized so that each woman gets experience working in different areas, such as the greenhouse, the pack house, a particular field, or the body-care area.

The women work three days a week cutting herbs, clearing fields, and planting flowers, among other activities. They make $11 an hour, although Powers says she’d like to be able to build up to a $15 wage. Each woman works between 24 and 29 hours per week, and they pay a program fee of $250 a month that covers rent and other living expenses.

During her time there, Gustavsen learned about horticultural science, plant propagation, and even how to drive a tractor. After she left in 2019, her knowledge of seasonal produce landed her a job as the front of house lead and produce buyer at the Saxapahaw General Store, a small grocery and restaurant in Saxapahaw, North Carolina, known for selling and using local ingredients. She celebrated two years in the position in August.

Rural resourcing

Benevolence is located in a rural area, about an hour’s drive northwest of Raleigh. It’s not an easy place to live; there’s a lack of public transportation and the region is politically conservative. And, as in other rural counties, re-entry support and resources tend to range from sparse to non-existent.

Powers says she and the rest of the Benevolence team spend time advocating for more resources for re-entry in their county — things like public transportation, classes, housing, and employment, which also would help the community at large. “So many of those have ripple effects to the rest of the community,” she adds.

Currently, the residents of Benevolence farm are reliant on the staff, volunteers, or their own friends and family for rides if they want to do anything off the farm, like make it to probation appointments, shop, or meet friends.

Blount, who is African American, found the remote area especially challenging. She says she often saw Confederate flags and heard racial slurs while walking to and from the farm. And when the program staff recommended she stopped walking by herself for her safety, it made her feel isolated and trapped.

“I was in prison outside of prison,” she says. Blount also had to use her own money to go and get her hair done, since the donations Benevolence received did not include hair products for Black women. “They had not prepared for an African American woman to be there,” she says.

These issues made the experience especially difficult, and she left after six months. However, she says that even despite those difficulties, the program changed her life and saved her.

“They were able to learn from my experiences so that other women of color don’t have to go through the same thing. They never let me feel alone.” She even sat on the Benevolence Farm board for a short time after leaving the program.

And there are some benefits to the location as well. It’s far enough from daycares, schools, and parks that Benevolence can provide space for residents whose sentences — for sex work, for instance, or for connections to abusive partnerships — resulted in their being placed on the sex offender registry.

Bigger than re-entry

The staff at Benevolence also advocate for changes to the larger criminal justice system. Early in the pandemic, they mailed surveys to people in state prisons to gather data that would help them better understand the conditions and guide their advocacy. They work on campaigns to end the practice of charging incarcerated people fines and fees, and they hope to raise awareness among policymakers about how today’s prisons impact people’s lives for the worse. And they started providing the soap made on the farm to incarcerated people when the pandemic began.

This kind of work is important, says Alycia Welch, the associate director of the COVID, Corrections, and Oversight Project at The LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Incarcerated people are often seen as being somehow “outside” of society, and it’s important that the re-entry begins while people are still incarcerated, she adds.

“From the moment they walk into any jail across this country, we should be thinking . . . ‘What do we need to provide inside correctional facilities that can support women when they get outside?'” says Welch.

For its part, the staff at Benevolence are working to help the women who come to its fields — and advocating for more fairness in the system and more resources for underserved communities.

“Ultimately,” Powers says, “we want to build a community where prisons don’t have to exist.”

Meanwhile, Blount quit her job selling cars in August and is working to grow her platform on social media, where she posts videos about life as a formerly incarcerated woman. She is also planning to write a book soon about her experiences.

Ted Cruz humiliated by Australian leader after trying to lecture him on COVID-19

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was on the receiving end of an international smackdown after he tweeted about Australia’s COVID-19 rates, only to have Australia’s Northern Territory Chief Minister Michael Gunner fire back, telling the Texas Republican, “You know nothing about us.”

On Sunday, Cruz shared a clip of Gunner talking about COVID-19 rates and how citizens would be fined for not following newly implemented vaccine rules. Cruz commented, “I love the Aussies. Their history of rugged independence is legendary; I’ve always said Australia is the Texas of the Pacific,” before adding, “The Covid tyranny of their current government is disgraceful and sad. Individual liberty matters. I stand with the people of Australia.”

Gunner responded on Twitter:

“Hey Ted Cruz, g’day from the Northern Territory in Australia. Here are some facts. Nearly 70,000 Texans have tragically died from COVID. There have been zero deaths in the Territory. Did you know that?” he wrote before adding, “Vaccination is so important here because we have vulnerable communities and the oldest continuous living culture on the planet to protect. Did you know that?”

He then added, “We don’t need your lectures, thanks mate. You know nothing about us. And if you stand against a lifesaving vaccine, then you sure as hell don’t stand with Australia. I love Texas (go Longhorns), but when it comes to COVID, I’m glad we are nothing like you.”

You can see the tweets below:

G’day from Down Under @tedcruz. Thanks for your interest in the Territory. I’m the Chief Minister. Below are a few facts about COVID down here. https://t.co/cGFwBP7Nqx pic.twitter.com/mGNyOxlN41

— Michael Gunner (@fanniebay) October 18, 2021

We’ve had 50 blessed years of cooking with Crockpot

Crockpots have been a staple of American home cooking for decades. They’ve been there through the high school graduations, the Super Bowl victories and losses, the first day of school, Saturday mornings and Sunday nights. This beloved family-friendly slow cooker has been there with us through life’s biggest moments and now it’s our turn to celebrate it. The original slow-cooker brand is celebrating its 50th anniversary in a big way — with the launch of an all-new Design Series line featuring four new Crockpots in an array of modern hues.

“With the new Design Series — and our 50th anniversary — we wanted to celebrate our history and highlight Crockpot’s evolution, but not get too nostalgic. To do that, we focused on synthesis, bringing together past, present, and future. It’s about bringing the next generation of at-home cooks an iconic appliance but with a modern look they’ll love to cook meals in and make memories,” says Christine Robins, CEO of Home Appliances at Newell Brands, today’s manufacturer of Crockpot.

Ahead, we’re taking a look back on Crockpot’s decades-long history and the way it’s changed American cooking for the better.

How it all started

The slow cooker was invented by Irving Naxon and was patented in 1940, and was actually born out of necessity for Jewish families on the Sabbath. Naxon invented the first slow cooker so that Jewish families could create a traditional bean stew (cholent) without the use of the oven. Historically, families would make the stew on a Friday night and leave it in the oven at a local bakery to slowly cook. With the slow cooker, it was easier than ever to prepare the bean stew while still adhering to the Sabbath rules.

Hitting the market

Thirty years after its creation, Naxon sold his slow cooker to Rival Manufacturing, which was rebranded as Crockpot and debuted at the 1971 National Housewares Show in Chicago.

The original Crockpot Slow Cooker featured a red exterior, removable glass lid, ceramic crock, and a cookbook. We know that Crockpot has become a beloved kitchen appliance for hands-off cooking, but was it always popular? Honestly, yes! At the 1971 National Housewares Show, Crockpot was an instant hit among millions of women who were joining the workforce for the first time and looking for a convenient way to cook for their families. The idea that you could “set it and forget it” was welcome in the kitchen.

Three years after the initial launch and rebrand, Crockpot introduced a removable stoneware insert, which allowed home cooks to more easily wash the cooking vessel after use. Pro tip: Wash it while the stoneware is still a little warm (it’s super durable so you can soak it in water right away) so that any cooked-on bits of food come off easily. Or better yet, place it in the dishwasher (yes you can!) for low-maintenance clean-up.

Getting into shape

Twenty-something years later, the brand launched the now iconic oval-shaped Crockpot, allowing consumers to conveniently cook recipes on a larger scale than ever before. Without it, recipes like our BBQ Ribs, Whole Slow Cooker-Poached Chicken, and Spiced Dulce de Leche Banana Icebox Cake wouldn’t exist. OK, they probably would because our recipe developers are determined geniuses who would have found a way, but would they taste or look as good? Probably not!

Innovations to the original

In the new millennium, Crockpot introduced a few newer features for the modern consumer: programmable controllers; multi-functionality allowing cooks to roast, bake, brown, sauté, and slow cook anything and everything; entertainment pieces like the Crockpot Hook Up Connectable Entertaining System; and the Cook & Carry locking lid, so that you can bring a hot, home-cooked meal on the road.

The popularity of the brand’s beloved slow-cooker certainly didn’t slow down in the aughts, but in 2017 Crockpot expanded their line of appliances again with the Crockpot Express, an even more versatile multi-cooker that featured a pressure cooker setting, a first for the brand. It followed the popularity of everyone’s favorite Christmas and Hannukah present Instant Pot.

Modern-day cooking

This year, half a century after the first slow-cooker was first introduced to the market, Crockpot released four new slow-cookers in a range of colors that feel just right for the 21st century. “Crockpot offers the same time-saving functionality, versatility, and space for creativity that it has always provided but with new looks and colors that fit right in any kitchen,” says Robbins. While Crockpots are known for being a little retro, these new hues are so chic and stylish that you’ll want to proudly display this appliance on your countertop, even if it means tucking away a blender or finally consolidating your toaster, toaster oven, and microwave.

Old meets new

3-Quart Manual Slow Cooker, $20.47

Available at Walmart, this petite slow-cooker is perfect for beginner cooks or single people who are cooking smaller quantities of food. The 3-quart model is available only at Walmart and comes in two modern-vintage colors: Metallic Copper and Woodgrain, the latter of which is a matte whitewash. Like all other Crockpots, the interior stoneware pot and glass lid are removable and dishwasher-safe for easy clean-up.

4.5-Quart Manual Slow Cooker, $24.99

This under-$20 model is sold exclusively at Target in a metallic Café Mocha. It’s ideal for medium-sized gatherings as it can accommodate up to five servings of pot roast, pulled pork, and sticky buns. Just like the original model, this Crockpot features three manual heat settings — warm, low, and high — and has a removable stoneware insert that is both dishwasher-safe and oven-safe up to 400°F.

7-Quart Cook & Carry Slow Cooker, $69.99

This full-sized Crockpot is what you bring out for birthday parties and game day. It can hold at least nine servings of short ribs, queso, butternut squash shakshuka, and even chocolate chip cookies (yes, really!). You can find it at three different retailers (Kohl’s, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Best Buy) in the matte mushroom color.

This larger size Crockpot has a few unique features that make it easier than ever to entertain. A mess-free, travel-proof locking lid prevents leaks and spills so that you can bring your Bourbon BBQ Chicken Drumsticks or a Low Country Shrimp Boil on-the-go to your friend’s beach house (feel free to extend an invite to the F52 team). This model also includes an additional 16-ounce “Little Dipper warmer” perfect for ranch dressing, buffalo sauce, or drawn butter to serve alongside your favorite slow cooker dish.

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

Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan and the Proud Boys: How the fragility of the male ego fuels the far-right

The Proud Boys had another rally in California over the weekend, and a telling moment was clipped and shared by Ron Filipkowski, a lawyer turned chronicler of the far-right. One speaker, armed with a bullhorn, pointed to a group of Proud Boys and declared, they “got some single real men over here looking for some housewives.” The men in the clip then joined together for a photo, flashing the “OK” symbol that has been appropriated as a way for white supremacists to signal each other while also — always — trolling the left.

At the Proud Boys’ ‘Fall Love Fest’ rally in LA yesterday, speaker announces that many of them are single and “looking for house wives.” pic.twitter.com/uNVFGolTVi

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 17, 2021

In the space of a minute, it was a perfect illustration of the two-step process that the far-right has used for years now to recruit new followers: First, bait insecure men with fantasies of female submission. Once they’re in, recruit them to white supremacy.

The misogyny-to-white-supremacy pipeline has long been well-documented, but in the past year and a half — with the rise of QAnon and the anti-vaccine movement, both perceived as more female-friendly than groups like the Proud Boys — the centrality of misogyny to authoritarian recruitment has faded somewhat from the discourse. Recent events, however, have been a strong reminder of how crucial gender anxiety is to far-right recruitment.

Authoritarians prey on insecure men, feeding them a story of how all their gnawing self-doubts can be silenced by embracing an unapologetically male chauvinist attitude. They recruit such men with a fairy tale about how the modern world is scary and confusing. The solution, they say, is to return to rigid, unforgiving gender roles that just so happen to value straight, cis men above all other people.

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Last week, Fox News host Tucker Carlson — who has perfected the art of trolling as a far-right recruitment strategy — managed to get some juicy bait out there, by sneering at Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for taking paternity leave. Buttigieg, who is the first out gay man to be a Cabinet secretary, recently adopted a pair of twins with his husband. Carlson didn’t hesitate from being a real pig about it, wondering if Buttigieg was “trying to figure out how to breastfeed.”

As feminist writer Jessica Valenti noted in her newsletter, in the past, Carlson has done segments of his show denouncing “fatherless” homes and claiming children brought up in them are “poor, uneducated and have disciplinary problems.” But now he, a father of four, is making fun of men who actually want to be present in their children’s lives. “Are fathers necessary for stable families and children, or is spending time with your kid a sign of weakness and something to be laughed at?” Valenti asks.

What this dissonance reveals, of course, is all the hand-wringing about “fatherlessness” is just a feint. After all, many divorced or separated fathers are deeply involved with their children’s lives. No, as the Proud Boys rally this weekend showed, what’s really at stake is anger at women for rejecting subservience. Single mothers, same-sex marriages, and egalitarian marriages all show that there’s nothing inevitable about male-dominated marriage. That threatens men who are attracted to the dominance fantasy of traditional marriage to silence their own nagging sense of inadequacy.

It’s not just Carlson and the Proud Boys who have figured out how to monetize male mediocrity and fragility.

Podcaster Joe Rogan has made a mint off of appealing to the sea of men who want an easy boost to their self-esteem through chauvinistic chest-thumping, rather than developing real skills and a personality. Rogan can be a little more subtle than Carlson about it, but ultimately, they’re playing on the same set of anxieties and insecurities in American men, and prescribing the same toxic masculinity as a supposed cure.

In Rogan, it’s easy to see, for instance, how refusal to get the COVID-19 vaccine got encoded for the fragile masculinity set as a way to “prove” their manly bona fides. He falsely claimed that “healthy” men who are “exercising all the time” don’t need the vaccine. He repeatedly suggested that vaccine mandates were somehow an assault on freedom, rather than what they are: a common sense health measure that helps free everyone from far more miserable pandemic restrictions. Taken together, it paints a picture of vaccination as the behavior of supposedly weak men. Unsurprisingly, then, Rogan ended up with COVID-19 and had to admit that he had kept finding excuses to put off getting a vaccine he had routinely insinuated was emasculating.

Carlson went after a gay man with a breastfeeding joke. Rogan’s preferred target for exercising his gender anxieties is all too often trans people.

Rogan has repeatedly used his show to make fun of trans people, paint being trans as a perversity, and elevate anti-trans bigots as somehow experts on the subject. Now that comedian Dave Chappelle has joined in making being transphobic a point of pride, unsurprisingly, he and Rogan are going on tour together. The obsession with trans people isn’t just gross, it’s a little confusing. Why do these cis men care so much about the lives of trans people who have nothing to do with them?

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The ugly truth is that trans people, because they’re a small and misunderstood minority, just feel like an easy punching bag for these insecure men to take their gender anxieties out on. The very existence of trans people is a reminder that gender — and therefore gender hierarchy — is a social construct, and therefore can be analyzed, criticized, and even changed. Or, as in that famous 2019 rant from a One America News Network host, transgender penguins are a threat to the “family unit” and everything conservatives hold dear.

Host for pro-Trump network melts down: “Don’t let transgender penguins fool you!” https://t.co/KMp6DO626w pic.twitter.com/DSaKn9YR6E

— Media Matters (@mmfa) September 13, 2019

For men who rely heavily on their belief in male superiority to bolster their self-esteem, the realization that gender is socially constructed is a distressing thought, and they take their rage about that out on trans people.

The irony is that no one proves the truth of gender’s social construction more than the men who flock to Carlson and Rogan’s show or join groups like the Proud Boys. None of them clearly feels confident that manhood is much of a biological, irrefutable fact that they claim it is. Instead, they are constantly trying to “prove” it, from demanding female submission to bashing trans people to refusing a vaccine. If masculinity isn’t a social construct, then one wouldn’t need to put so much work into socially constructing it.

It’s funny to laugh at the deep-set insecurities that drive this kind of behavior. However, it’s a problem for the entire country and one that’s getting worse, not better. The people marshaling all this silly male angst aren’t just making money from it. They’re building an authoritarian political movement, one that is backing Donald Trump, the perfect avatar for inadequate men who think being a sexist bully somehow makes you a “real” man.

Trump to go under oath for first time as ex-president

Donald Trump is expected to answer questions under oath about a 2015 assault that allegedly occurred during a demonstration just outside of Trump Tower, marking the first public deposition that the former president has agreed to since leaving office.

The deposition – ordered by New York state Supreme Court Judge Doris Gonzalez and set to be conducted via video conference – centers on a civil lawsuit filed by a group self-described as “human rights activists of Mexican origin,” according to CNN. The group, which was protesting against Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric in the leadup to the 2016 election, alleges that one of its members, Efrain Galicia, was struck on the head by Keith Schiller, Trump’s then-head of security, when Schiller attempted to confiscate Galicia’s protest sign. When Galicia resisted, Schiller apparently ripped the sign into pieces.

“This is a case about Donald Trump’s security guards assaulting peaceful demonstrators on a public sidewalk,” Benjamin Dictor, a lawyer representing Galicia, told AP News. “We will be taking the trial testimony of Donald Trump, under oath, on Monday after years of the defendants’ dilatory attempts to shield him from this examination. We look forward to presenting the video of Mr. Trump’s testimony to a jury at his trial.”

Traditionally, Gonzalez said, “exceptional circumstances” must be established in order to warrant the deposition of a high-ranking public official. However, the judge noted that the condition doesn’t apply in the case of the lawsuit because it concerns Trump’s conduct outside of his official duties in office.

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The former president is currently facing a spate of ten additional civil lawsuits, according to NBC News, and has reportedly struggled to delay them since leaving office.

Among these suits includes a claim filed by former “Apprentice” contestant Summer Zervos, who back in 2016 alleged that Trump sexually assaulted her when she was seeking professional advice roughly a decade earlier. In response, Trump tarred Zervos as a liar, prompting the former contestant to file a defamation suit.

“The defendant is now a private citizen, and he just cannot delay this litigation any longer,” Zervos attorney Moira Penza said, according to AP News. Trump’s attorneys have expressed an intent to file a countersuit.

On top of Zervos’ sexual assault allegations, Trump continues to battle those of E. Jean. Carroll, a former journalist who similarly accused Trump of slander after the former president accused Carroll of fabricating claims of rape dating back to the 1990s. Following Carrol’s accusations, Trump responded that it the incident “never happened,” adding that Carroll was “not my type.”

Carroll reportedly still possesses the same dress she wore during the encounter and is willing to submit it for DNA analysis.

Trump’s legal team has argued that his official duties as the former president should immunize him from Carroll’s suit – a position President Biden’s Justice Department has formally backed. However, back in September, a federal judge shot down Trump’s claims of immunity.

Colin Powell, former top general and secretary of state, dies at 84 from COVID complications

Colin Powell, the former secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, died Monday from complications caused by COVID-19, his family said.

Powell, who was 84, was fully vaccinated and treated at the Walter Reed National Medical Center, his family said in a statement. “We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father, grandfather and a great American,” they said. Powell suffered from multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that affects the body’s ability to fight infections, according to NBC News.

Powell, whose 2003 speech to the United Nations helped plunge the United States into a years-long war in Iraq, served at the top levels of the military and federal government for four decades. He was the first Black person to fill multiple high-level national security positions, including secretary of state, chairman of the Joint Chiefs and national security adviser.

The son of Jamaican immigrants, Powell began life in modest circumstances. He was born in Harlem in 1937 and mostly raised in the South Bronx. He attended City College of New York, receiving a U.S. Army commission after graduating in 1958. He served 35 years as an Army officer, including two combat tours in Vietnam. Powell was appointed as national security adviser by Ronald Reagan in 1987, serving through the end of Reagan’s presidency, and then served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs under George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, leading military efforts in Panama and in the Gulf War. He ultimately retired as a four-star general in 1993.

A two-time Medal of Freedom recipient, was among America’s most respected public figures and was long seen as a potential presidential contender before he was appointed as George W. Bush’s secretary of state in 2001. Powell, who often clashed with neoconservative war hawks in the Bush administration, ultimately became Bush’s point man in building a case for war in Iraq. In 2003, he gave a speech to the United Nations pushing faulty intelligence claims that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, which were later revealed to be false.

“There can be no doubt,” Powell told the UN, “that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more.”

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Powell remained in the administration until he was asked to resign following Bush’s re-election in 2004. He later said that he had been misled about the intelligence he presented to the UN, calling it “painful” and lamenting that it would be a permanent “blot” on his record.

“I regret it now because the information was wrong — of course I do,” he told CNN in 2010. “But I will always be seen as the one who made the case before the international community.”

He later wrote in his 2012 memoir that he was “mad” for allowing administration officials to mislead him.

“My instincts failed me. It was by no means my first, but it was one of my most momentous failures, the one with the widest-ranging impact,” he wrote, adding that the “event will earn a prominent paragraph in my obituary.”

Powell grew increasingly disillusioned with the Republican Party after his departure. He endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, and then endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, calling then-candidate Donald Trump a “national disgrace” with “no sense of shame” in leaked private emails. Powell was critical of Trump’s presidency and supported Joe Biden in 2020. He announced after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot that he no longer considered himself a Republican, blasting GOP lawmakers for failing to stand up to Trump.

“I can no longer call myself a fellow Republican. I’m not a fellow of anything right now,” he told CNN. “I’m just a citizen who has voted Republican, voted Democrat throughout my entire career. And right now, I’m just watching my country and not concerned with parties.”

Powell leaves behind a storied and complicated legacy but one that, as he clearly understood, has been damaged by his role in leading the U.S. to war in Iraq.

“Whatever else Colin Powell achieved in life, and it was a lot, he was the only man who could have stopped the Iraq War and instead he chose to swallow his doubts about the disaster he knew it would be and sell the invasion,” wrote Spencer Ackerman, author of “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized American and Produced Trump.”

George W. Bush and former first lady Laura Bush said Monday they were “deeply saddened” by Powell’s death.

“He was a great public servant, starting with his time as a soldier during Vietnam,” they said in a statement. “He was such a favorite of Presidents that he earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom — twice. He was highly respected at home and abroad.”

A lunch for when there’s no time for lunch

Big Little Recipe has the smallest-possible ingredient list and big everything else: flavor, creativity, wow factor. That means five ingredients or fewer — not including water, salt, black pepper, and certain fats (like oil and butter), since we’re guessing you have those covered. For the next few weeks, we’re sharing sneak peeks from the Big Little Recipes cookbook, all revving up to its release (blasts airhorn, throws confetti in the air).

* * *

What do you make when you don’t have time to make lunch?

When I asked people this question — on text, on Slack, on Instagram — the answers were endless. Pita and hummus. Ravioli and butter. A can of soup. Instant oatmeal. Instant ramen. Instant soba. Quesadillas. More quesadillas. Sandwiches. Ice cream sandwiches!

Frozen chicken nuggets. Frozen veggie burgers. Tomato, cucumber, and avocado. Tomato, cucumber, and cottage cheese. Chickpeas with tahini and hot sauce. Chickpeas with olive oil and balsamic. Chickpeas on toast. Sardines on toast. Avocados on toast. Eggs on toast. Eggs on rice. Eggs on udon.

I could keep going. You could keep going. All of which makes me think: Huh, none of us have time to make lunch, do we?

And yet, we still have to eat lunch. And we want it to taste, at the very least, not bad. Or even, dare I say it, actually good. All in the nine and a half minutes before that next meeting.

Working from the office means planning ahead and packing something — or, in lieu of that, heading to the nearest sandwich slash salad slash soup spot. Working from home means forgetting about it until, oh no, what am I going to do for lunch?

This week’s Big Little Recipe is actually two recipes, both plucked from our upcoming cookbook, and both dreamed up with WFH lunch — but make it fast — in mind. For each, all you need is a can of tuna, some sliced bread, and a couple other ingredients.

Ready, set, go.

Tuna Artichoke Melt

Melty, gooey, and overeager to be paired with a lemon seltzer. Marinated artichokes do all the work, even the dressing and seasoning.

Tuna Avocado Toast

Is it your new favorite avocado toast or your new favorite tuna salad? Trick question. It’s both. This would also be great as a closed sandwich if that’s your thing.

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

Biden’s agenda may end up falling apart — but the GOP is eating itself alive

As anyone could have predicted, much of the media is once again obsessed with the “Democrats are in disarray” storyline, a perennial favorite that makes it easy to preserve the preferred conventional wisdom that says the right may be authoritarian bigots but at least they aren’t the dizzy dingbats of the left. Republicans don’t even have to make the trains run on time anymore.

Right now, the Democrats are doing the most tedious of all political tasks: trying to pass complicated legislation with a coalition that includes a handful of officials who look in the mirror every morning and see a superstar looking back at them. There is no politician on Earth who does not have a healthy ego, but these are people who live for headlines like this one: Manchin Lays Down Demands for Child Tax Credit.

This is hardly a unique characteristic of the Democratic Party. We only have to look back at the famous moment back in 2017 when GOP Senator John McCain of Arizona, dying of cancer and filled with loathing for President Donald Trump, dramatically gestured thumbs down and defeated the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Still, it is true that Democrats are particularly prone to exceedingly tiresome haggling over legislation, but that’s because they actually want to do things. The Republican agenda is pretty much confined to confirming judges and cutting taxes so they tend to get those things done quite efficiently, no negotiating required.

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So the Biden Agenda may end up falling apart. It was always going to be a heavy lift to do big things with such a narrow majority. But they still might pull it off and if the process is messy and exhausting it’s just how progress happens. If one wants an example of a political party that’s in a state of full-blown internal chaos, just look to the right and check out what’s going on in the GOP. Sure, Republicans are in lock-step obstruction mode in Congress, fighting anything and everything the Democrats are trying to do. But the party is actually eating itself alive, so energetically in fact that the media is beginning to take notice. What seems to have precipitated this new interest was this startling statement by Donald Trump last week:

NEW!

“If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented), Republicans will not be voting in ‘22 or ‘24. It is the single most important thing for Republicans to do.” – President Donald J. Trump pic.twitter.com/eZAPCPIUu1

— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) October 13, 2021

There was no way to interpret that as anything but a threat. Trump was just making it clear that anyone who isn’t in line with the Big Lie will be put on his “don’t vote” list. And, not that he cares, but the statement also has the effect of telling GOP voters that unless the election fraud is “solved” (whatever he means by that) that they might as well not bother to vote.

There are plenty of people, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who believe that his caterwauling about voter fraud cost the Republicans two Senate seats last year. He wasn’t the only one. Right wing personality Erick Erickson said at the time:

“Telling everyone that the race was stolen when it wasn’t cost the Republicans two Senate seats. The going all-in on the cult of personality around President Trump hurt them as a result. They had to play up this, ‘There’s no way Donald Trump could have lost. It had to be stolen from him.’ “

This is not just an assumption. In this Sunday New York Times piece, Jeremy Peters notes that even a vociferous supporter like Marjorie Taylor Greene was surprised to find in an internal survey that 10% of Republican voters in her Georgia district would not vote in 2022 if there was no “forensic audit” of the 2020 vote. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district will no doubt return her to Congress, unfortunately, even if 10% of her voters did lay out. But in districts and states with more competitive races, that rate of GOP apathy could be a serious problem.

There are a few rare dissenters left in the party and not just the usual suspects., Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Il, or Wyoming GOP congresswoman Liz Cheney. Senator Bill Cassidy, R-La, has shown some independence in the past and this week told Axios that he wouldn’t vote for Trump in 2024 and hoped he wouldn’t run because he lost the House, the Senate and the Presidency in four years and politics is about winning. I don’t know if Cassidy had attended the National Republican Senatorial Committee retreat in Palm Beach, Fla. last week, but according to the Washington Post, if he did he heard Trump say that he had actually saved the party, telling the gathered GOP senators that “it was a dying party, I’ll be honest. Now we have a very lively party.” That’s one way of putting it.

Trump went on to insult various “RINOS” in the party whom he felt betrayed him, naming Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse among others. It’s a good bet Cassidy will also be name-checked soon, as will Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson who told Meet the Press on Sunday that “re-litigating” the 2020 election would be a “recipe for disaster.”

Cassidy and Hutchinson are outliers in the party for openly embracing reality. Most elected Republican officials are falling all over themselves trying to prove their loyalty and the ensuing primary battles are already head spinning. Everyone is no doubt aware by now of Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley’s humiliating descent into Trump cultism. Fred Hiatt in the Washington Post tells the tale of first term Tennessee Republican Senator Bill Hagerty, former Ambassador to Japan, a man once considered to be a man of integrity and independence who has instead become an energetic Trump sycophant for no real apparent reason other than a desire to please the man.

Nowhere is the tension more marked than the Virginia gubernatorial race, where the the Big Lie is the last thing GOP candidate Glenn Youngkin wants to talk about but it’s the only thing his voters seem to care about. He is a man desperate to escape the clutches of Donald Trump but cannot risk offending his followers and it’s tying him up in knots.

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Still, the GOP primary races are where the real action is.

Amy Davidson Sorkin in the New Yorker reports on an astonishing Republican race in Alabama to fill retiring Richard Shelby’s seat between an establishment candidate Katie Britt and Insurrectionist Congressman Mo Brooks. Brooks attacked Britt for saying that she feels it’s important to stand with women and her reply was that Brooks was insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump because he had once supported Ted Cruz in the 2016 primaries while she was a Trump supporter from the get-go. It’s getting very ugly, very quickly.

Democratic wrangling over their agenda is difficult and frustrating but at least they are trying to get something done for the people. The Republican Party is making the Democrats look like rank amateurs when it comes to being in “disarray” and it’s all in service of keeping Donald Trump happy. It’s not hard to see which process is actually serving the public interest and which one isn’t.

Fascism or freedom? America is stuck in an ugly and dangerous in-between

America’s democracy crisis is rapidly getting worse. Collapse may be imminent, and coming far faster than many experts predicted. In a new conversation with Dean Obeidallah for Salon Talks, Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky, co-author of “How Democracies Die,” says that when the book was published three years ago, he and co-author Daniel Ziblatt still believed “that the bulk of the Republican Party was minimally committed to small-D democracy.”

“We believed there was a faction in the Republican Party, particularly in the Senate, that would be able and willing to draw a line that they wouldn’t let Trump cross,” he said. “And we were wrong about that. The speed and the extent to which the Republican Party has been Trumpified is way beyond anything that we expected.”

We can only conclude that the country’s democratic institutions were not as strong as many people believed them to be, and that the American people’s faith in democracy was exaggerated. Furthermore, the Republican Party’s move towards fascism was far deeper and more sincere than the country’s political elites and mainstream media wanted to admit. Many other societal problems also helped bring America to this crisis.

This sort of slippage is often seen in a society during an interregnum, the sort of in-between historical period famously described by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

In a featured essay for the Society of Cultural Anthropology’s online journal, Andrea Muehlebach offers this context:

Interregnum was the term used in ancient Rome to refer to the moment of legal and political in-betweenness that followed the death of the sovereign and preceded the enthronement of his successor. The declaration of interregnum was accompanied by the proclamation of justitium, for it was not only sovereignty but also legality that was suspended. Gramsci brilliantly played with these terms, extending them as he grappled with the generalized crisis of authority in his own time. Old hegemonies were crumbling. The ruling order had lost its capacity to lead through consent. The masses had drifted away from traditional ideologies and toward a structure of feeling that awaited full articulation. The horizon was open.

The rest, as we know, is history.

Such moments of crisis pose a fundamental challenge to the way individuals think about their role in society.

When a society’s landmarks are erased and its lodestars or guiding lights are plucked from the sky, a collective confusion and disorientation — even madness — can take hold. Fundamental questions of personal identity come to the fore: Who am I in this moment? How do I make sense of it all? Will I even survive? Am I obsolete? Does my life have meaning?

To varying degrees and in different ways these kinds of questions are being asked by both America’s elites and everyday people. There are no easy answers but the stakes are very high: America’s choice between fascism and freedom.

In seeking these answers it will be tempting to default to obsolete habits and assumptions, which will often bring neither salvation nor safety. In a recent column for the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin — a somewhat repentant anti-Trump conservative — offers one such example:

Republicans’ embrace of conspiracy theories, election denial, vaccine mandate opposition and, frankly, nihilism pose real threats to our democracy and to the health of Americans. But just because Republicans delight in “owning the libs” does not mean their behavior helps them politically. To the contrary, Democrats may well make hay out of Republican trail of chaos.

Rubin argues that the failed recall campaign against California Gov. Gavin Newsom offers an electoral strategy: “spotlighting Republicans’ extremism is a winner for Democrats. … There is nothing like the specter of misogynistic antiabortion policy or Republicans’ willful refusal to fight a deadly pandemic to engage the Democratic base. Moreover, in stressing these issues, Democrats do nothing to alienate independents or sane Republicans.” She concludes this way:

Even Democrats — who are often loath to sound “too negative” or to use blunt language instead of complex policy arguments — should be able to figure out a campaign message for 2022. Republicans are neither conservative in economic outlook (look at the business community’s reaction to the debt ceiling standoff) nor pro-life (consider the innocent life they put at risk in their management of the pandemic). They fail to put the country’s national security above partisan politics. Theirs is a radical, reckless and revanchist party — one far too dangerous to trust with power. Call it the “Chaos Party,” a term that will remind suburban voters and college-educated voters why they fled the GOP in 2020.

Rubin is well-intentioned. Unfortunately, her hopeful vision withers in the harsh light of facts, and she is not alone — many people in the political and media classes share such dangerously naïve views.

Today’s Republican Party and the larger right-wing movement no longer feel any commitment to “normal politics,” with its traditional mores of compromise, consensus building and other forms of horse trading, and where each side strives to win as much as possible while maintaining some semblance of a functioning democracy.

Victory is all that matters for today’s Republican Party. Destruction, not creation, is the Republican modus operandi. When they gain control of the levers of government, “democracy” becomes an instrument used to undermine the system itself on the road to creating an autocratic one-party state, if not an all-out authoritarian regime.

Republican leaders and their foot soldiers are using gerrymandering, voter suppression laws and voter exclusion, as well as political violence — as seen on Jan. 6 — and other forms of intimidation to limit the franchise to their own supporters. If the Republican-fascist movement achieves its goals, America will become an apartheid theocratic pseudo democracy similar to Russia or Hungary, where the Republican Party and its followers can effectively do whatever they want, without facing consequences or any significant accountability. One of the darkest indications of the way the Republican Party has abandoned democracy and “normal” or “responsible” politics, is its willingness to let its own voters die in the pandemic.

If anything, followers of Donald Trump and his Republican-fascist movement have become even more loyal to the cause than they were previously. This is true even when confronted by the mass death caused by the coronavirus and how Republican-fascist leaders made the pandemic much worse.

Jennifer Rubin’s essay reflects the widespread hope that somehow, someday, Republicans will be punished for their assaults on democracy and other crimes. But this hopeful sentiment avoids the inconvenient fact that Rubin and her fellow “traditional” or “mainstream” conservatives themselves helped to create the conditions that gave rise to the Trumpist monstrosity she now hopes can be brought to heel. (Spoiler: It cannot be.)

This urgent crisis of democracy has forced a type of paradigm shift onto (white) American society and culture. It is a great personal and existential challenge for the fourth estate and the political class to acknowledge the unsettling new reality. What happens when they do not have the answers, and like the American people en masse, they feel disoriented and lost?

As the American people and their leaders navigate this dangerous period of crisis, interregnum and paradigm shift, they will need to resist seductive illusions and refuse easy answers offered by hucksters who assure them there is an easy way out. To defeat and survive the rising fascist tide, there is only one solution: Accept that the old world is gone, and fight to create a better one.

In my recent conversation with the Rev. William J. Barber II for Salon, he described the necessity of harnessing the strange and powerful energies of this moment:

Now the question is, where’s the energy going to go? Because it’s going somewhere. And it is always when a nation is about to burst that moral movements are birthed. If you do not have the moral movements, then that energy can go in directions that are utterly destructive. But that bursting can also be a birthing. As has been explained to me, when a woman has a baby, it is the most critical time between life and death, and the most creative time.

Is this moment in America going to be a tomb or a womb? Is it going to be the burying of democracy, or is it going to be the birthing of a new freedom?

In the weeks since that conversation — weeks that feel like years — it has become ever more clear that the American people will have to accept significant pain in order to survive this dangerous moment of interregnum. But on the other side of pain and struggle and sacrifice, a healthier civic life, and a genuine multiracial democracy may await them.

New Jersey hit hard by COVID and climate change — so why is the governor’s race about nothing?

To this point, the governor’s race in New Jersey — while not drawing even one-tenth of the media attention as the race a few hundred miles south in Virginia — has been about everything other than the real-world circumstances of the Garden State’s millions of residents.

The debased multi-billion-dollar slugfest between Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy and former Republican Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli has been all about what’s wrong with these two privileged candidates, and not at all about the huge percentage of the electorate both parties have failed for generations.

Between the millions in taxpayer money and the millions from outside national groups, this high-priced non-therapeutic mud bath is mired in a fixation on the past of two white guys. There’s been very little discussion of the future of this state, which for the past year and a half has suffered through a mass death event that has inordinately affected poor people of color. They are most often the “essential workers” in one of the richest states in the nation, where many white residents had the luxury of “sheltering in place” in sprawling suburban homes.

We’ve known about these brutal race-based inequities for decades. After the 1967 civil disturbance in Newark, the Lilley Report, commissioned by then Gov. Richard J. Hughes, noted the connections between poverty and race-based health care disparities and outcomes in the state’s largest city.

Among the statistics the report laid out to describe Newark’s endemic poverty: The city had the highest maternal and infant mortality rate in the nation and the highest rate of tuberculosis infection, and ranked ninth out of 302 American cities in severity of air pollution.

A half-century after that report, the COVID pandemic has driven home the enduring nature of those same race-based economic and health care disparities, which continue to define Newark, our state and the entire nation.

In the decades since, we have systematically undercounted the number of New Jersey residents struggling in the margins of poverty, in a state with one of the highest costs of living. According to a report released in July by the Legal Services of New Jersey’s Poverty Research Institute, the federal measure we use to determine the number of people in poverty undercounted that population by more than two million.

Under that official measure, informed by an outdated one-size-fits-all federal formula, a family of four is only poor if they make less than $21,000 a year, which means that just 800,000 New Jersey residents are poor.

Researchers at the Poverty Research Institute found that in 2019 a two-bedroom apartment in New Jersey averaged $17,316 a year — about $1,450 a month — which would claim nearly 85% of that poverty-level family’s $21,000 in wages.

“They would be left with $3,275 annually, or $273 a month, to meet other essential needs like food, transportation, health care and taxes, according to the researchers,” the Asbury Park Press reported when the report was released.

Calculating the actual cost of living in New Jersey, the advocacy group calculated the poverty-level survival wage for a family of three would be $70,372 a year. Under that more realistic calculation, at least three million New Jersey residents struggle financially week to week to make ends meet amid the pandemic.

If democracy is supposed to be an effective exercise in self-determination, it needs to be one of honest self-reflection about the socioeconomic conditions of people who live in a state currently mulling its leadership options.

But there has been nowhere near enough attention to how our state’s long standing racial disparities in health care and wealth inequality have helped drive its per-capita COVID death count to the highest in the world — until we were recently eclipsed by Mississippi.

As the pandemic appears to ease, we need to discuss how best to support the families of the 27,000 people who have died in New Jersey, many of them health care professionals, first responders, civil servants, transit workers and retail personnel who were exposed to the virus as a direct consequence of their commitment to serve our communities.

There are well over one million people in our state who have survived an infection with this virus, which we still know relatively little about. A substantial portion of these people are either essential workers or their family members. Based on preliminary health studies, we have reason to believe that as many as one in four of these people will suffer long-term consequences of varying severity — the long-lasting aftereffects of a virus that has now killed more Americans than the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918-1921.

Many of these families who are the arms and legs of our essential workforce are undocumented immigrants, and even now have to look over their shoulders in fear — not just of the virus, but of our cruel and dysfunctional immigration system.

We know that this pandemic was particularly hard on women, who have lost perhaps a generation of economic progress because two million of them were pushed out of the workforce to help educate their children at home, too often while caring for a loved one afflicted with the virus.

Under our current system, their families will be economically deprived in the short term, and they themselves will also feel it later, when they reach retirement age and their lost earnings will be reflected in anemic Social Security payments.

Even as we dealt with the pandemic, New Jersey and New York were hit with the unprecedented drenching rains brought by Tropical Storm Ida, itself an artifact of climate change. Many of those who died in our region were living in substandard basement apartments in urban immigrant neighborhoods.

As we look forward to the holidays, the financial press is filled with reporting on how our inadequate transportation infrastructure is driving price inflation: Consumer demand is returning, but we don’t have the capacity to move the goods they’re ordering. By every measure, we remain a “Stuck Nation.”

President Biden’s $3.5 trillion Build Back Better agenda seeks to offer a 21st-century version of the New Deal advanced by Franklin D. Roosevelt advanced. It includes a long overdue realignment of our system of taxation, which has promoted global wealth accumulation by a tiny handful of billionaires.

Thanks to the ongoing obstructionism of Republican insurrectionists and Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, who remain captive to big donors, this lifeline — which aims to address so much of what’s upside down in America — is in big trouble.

Most of the news media coverage of this issue has focused on entirely on Democratic infighting and on whether Biden can deliver on their ambitious agenda, and not why it’s about our collective survival.

One stellar exception was the interview that WNBC’s Brian Thompson conducted with Vice President Kamala Harris during her recent visit to New Jersey, partly as a boost to Gov. Murphy’s campaign.

“Let’s be clear, the Build Back Better agenda is about helping families and helping working people in America,” Harris said, describing those people as those “who for too long have been trying to get through the end of the month without really the kind of help they need.” The vice president also made clear that the child care issue isn’t just about greater convenience and flexibility for working mothers and families, as crucial as that is: “It’s about saying, let’s bring down the cost of child care but also pay child care workers their value and pay what they deserve when it comes to their profession.”

Harris’ language suggests that the Biden team understands where we are, a year and a half into this once-in-a-century health crisis. “If this pandemic did nothing,” Harris told Thompson, “it certainly highlighted the importance of all working people being able to stay home and take care of sick family members and not compromise their ability to pay their rent to do it.”

It would have been useful if such questions had ever come up in last week’s gubernatorial debate between Murphy and Ciattarelli — for example, if they’d been asked about addressing climate change, perhaps the most important element of the Build Back Better package.

“The climate crisis is real,” Harris said. “It is something that has been highlighted every day when you look at the hurricanes, you look at floods, you look at California wildfires. New Jersey has been extraordinarily damaged by these extreme climate conditions and we need to invest in a number of things that will not only mitigate the harm but allow for adaptation and allow us to reduce the damage to our atmosphere that is contributing to these extreme weather conditions. That includes investing in the jobs that are about creating a clean energy economy.”

“That’s a very big part of our Build Back Better approach—understanding we have to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels,” the vice president continued. “There’s no question about it. It is the thing that will allow our planet to live longer and we as a species to live longer. It’s that basic.”

Former DOJ official faces disbarment, criminal referral over “election subversion scheme”: report

According to a report from the Guardian’s Peter Stone, former assistant attorney general and high-ranking Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark is facing the very real threat he will be disbarred and face criminal charges for assisting Donald Trump in his attempts to subvert the 2020 presidential election.

Clark is accused of working hand in hand with the former president in his efforts to compel former acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen to pressure Georgia election officials to change the vote totals in the state and hand its Electoral College votes to Trump.

Following an eight-month inquiry by congressional investigators, the Senate judiciary committee churned out a damning 394-page report that led committee chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) to refer it to the DC bar’s disciplinary counsel to investigate Clark and discipline him appropriately — including career-killing disbarment.

That same Senate report has also been submitted to the House select committee investigating the Jan 6th Capitol riot as evidence against Trump.

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According to one former DOJ inspector general, the evidence against Clark is both damning and presents a compelling case for criminal charges.

“It’s no mystery why Clark is playing hard to get with Congress,” Michael Bromwich explained to the Guardian’s Stone. “He faces a meaningful threat of criminal liability based on the facts contained in the Senate report.”

“The Senate report provides overwhelming evidence that Jeffrey Clark became a witting pawn of Trump’s in trying to launch a coup in the justice department, which would then serve as the launching pad for the broader coup whose aim was to overturn the results of the election,” he added.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) concurred, telling the Guardian, “Either Jeffrey Clark was an enterprising sycophant looking to score points with a transactional president, or he was a cog in a much larger election-theft scheme. Clark’s testimony under oath will be very important to arrive at the full truth, which is why it’s very hard to imagine he avoids testifying – either before Congress or a grand jury.”

Stone writes, “The Senate report provided new details about the secretive pressure tactics deployed by Trump and Clark to persuade Rosen to accede to their schemes to help nullify Biden’s win, even after Trump staunch ally, attorney general William Barr, publicly stated on 1 December that the election results were not marred by fraud that ‘could have effected a different outcome in the election’.”

You can read more here.

This tomahawk-wielding QAnon sympathizer is terrorizing school board meetings: report

QAnon conspiracy theorists are rallying behind an eccentric individual as school boards are bombarded by opponents of pandemic safety measures.

The Daily Beast on Saturday reported on the mask debate at one Iowa school board meeting where a parent threatened to “stalk” members.

“But the Ankeny school board has become a larger flashpoint in the fight over mask mandates in schools, thanks in large part to a leather-clad, tomahawk-toting QAnon personality named Scott McKay,” The Beast reported. “McKay, a middle-aged former bodybuilder whose followers call him ‘Patriot Streetfighter,’ has used his sizable online platform and frequent use of violent rhetoric to turn the Ankeny mask debate into a national event among followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory, urging his followers to bombard specific school board members with complaints.”

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Although YouTube suspended his channel, McKay is successful at spreading his message.

“Despite his bizarre demeanor and online presence, McKay has marshaled his fan base to engage in sometimes hostile activism at school board meetings against mask mandates—despite his own recent experience with a COVID outbreak at one of his rallies,” The Beast reported.

There is a tie-in with the QAnon conspiracy theory that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping cannibalistic pedophiles.

“McKay’s ability to direct his audience to harass the school-board members demonstrates hyper-partisan anger now targeted at school board officials across the country. And it reveals how the right’s focus on school boards this year has allowed fringe figures who openly advocate for violence to grab the spotlight,” The Beast reported. “McKay styles himself as a sort of QAnon biker, frequently wearing leather chaps and a leather Harley-Davidson in his public appearances.”

How cute is this lady? pic.twitter.com/ng8UskkW7I

— Scott A McKay (@SAMcKay3) May 29, 2021

McKay frequently poses with his tomahawk.

“McKay poses for pictures with his fans with the tomahawk, uses it as a prop onstage, and incorporates it into the Patriot Streetfighter logo,” The Beast reported. “At a rally in Nebraska, McKay explained the tomahawk’s significance. If the Democratic officials McKay claims make up the ‘cabal’ will resign peacefully, he’ll share the peace pipe with them. But if officials refuse his demands, they’ll face the tomahawk.

Eleven common words you’re probably mispronouncing

Ever feel embarrassed when you don’t know how to say a word? Don’t be. Even the most fluent English speakers stumble. Besides, pronunciations change over time. See if you’ve been mispronouncing these common words.

1. Seuss

Pen names don’t always make things easier. Theodore Geisel‘s college buddy Alexander Liang made a rhyme to teach you the right way to pronounce Dr. Seuss’s name:

“You’re wrong as the deuce/And you shouldn’t rejoice/
If you’re calling him Seuss/He pronounces it Soice” (or Zoice).

2. Kibosh

Let’s put the kibosh, pronounced “KY-bosh,” on saying this word like “kuh-BOSH.”

3. Celtic

An initial hard K sound is the standard these days, according to Merriam-Webster, the S sound came first. Still, you’ll sound ridiculous (but correct!) if you bring that hard K to a Boston Celtics basketball game.

4. Comptroller

This word sounds just like controller. If you’re tempted to pronounce that silent pt, please comptroll yourself!

5. Cache

Maybe it’s because it’s one letter short of cachet. Maybe it’s just more fun to mispronounce. This words sounds just like cash.

6. Chicanery

This word, meaning “deception by trickery,” is aptly tricky to pronounce. The beginning ch sound is “sh,” as in Chicago. The French pronounce the word “shih-connery,” which makes it easy to remember the definition. However, Americans love a long A and tend to pronounce it “shih-cane-a-ree.” Choose your own adventure.

7. Banal

According to Merriam-Webster, there’s more than one way to pronounce this word. The three most commonly used pronunciations are “BAY-nul,” “buh-NAHL,” and “buh-NAL.”

8. Affluent

If pronouncing it “a-FLU-ent” is wrong, some people don’t want to be right. The stress on this word is supposed to be on the first syllable—”AFF-lu-ent.” But stressing the second syllable became so mainstream that dictionaries eventually validated the pronunciation.

9. Forbade

The past tense of forbid was originally supposed to be spelled and pronounced “for-bad,” but then people started spelling it as forbade and rhyming it with made. These days, the word sounds archaic any way you say it: Most people use forbid as a past or present-tense verb.

10. Boatswain

OK, so maybe this word—which Merriam-Webster defines as “a petty officer on a merchant ship having charge of hull maintenance and related work”—is not that commonly used (unless you’re a fan of Below Deck). But now that you know it’s pronounced “bo-sun,” you might find more reasons to work it into conversation.

11. Niche

When this word was borrowed from French in the 17th century, it was quickly Anglicized to rhyme with itch. But in the 20th century, more people embraced a true French pronunciation and decided to pronounce it “neesh.” Both are correct.

A version of this piece ran in 2013; it has been updated for 2021

David Chase might hate HBO Max’s “The Many Saints of Newark” — but it’s the wave of the future

The trailer for “The Many Saints of Newark” features the song “Money” by The Flying Lizards.

One lyric poignantly captures the thematic heart of the prequel to the sprawling television series about mob boss Tony Soprano: “Money don’t get everything / It’s true / What it don’t get / I can’t use.”

It also reflects the milieu of a movie industry embroiled in a battle over release dates and release formats.

“The Sopranos” creator David Chase has expressed anger over HBO’s decision to simultaneously release “The Many Saints of Newark” in movie theaters and on HBO Max. In order for the new film to shed its “television image,” Chase thought it needed to do a traditional theater run before moving over to a streaming service.

Hollywood executives see things differently. To them, lines that once separated movies, TV movies and TV series are starting to fade — to the point where you have to squint to see them. They’ve embraced analytics and are increasingly interested in measuring movies using data that only streaming services can offer — numbers that can help them learn more about viewers, cut waste and boost profits.

The old model falls apart

As recently as a decade ago, the dominant movie distribution strategy involved what was called “exclusive window distribution.”

A big-budget movie usually debuted in theaters, which was often the first exclusive window. Then, between three and six months after its theatrical debut, the film became exclusively available as a DVD or home video. This was followed by pay-per-view distribution or cable TV distribution.

The rise of streaming services caused this model to crack.

Netflix could instantly disseminate movies and series to consumers online, removing the need to create physical DVDs and sell them at a steep discount to retailers like Best Buy.

Furthermore, what were once important distinctions between television shows and movies started to blur. On streaming services, you could easily watch movies and TV shows without periodic interruptions from ads. Television cinematography started to imitate movie cinematography. You could even argue that bingeing a series with connected episodes was no different from watching a long movie.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. With theaters closed, studios started experimenting with digital movie distribution in new ways.

Unlike movie theater pricing models — which charge the same for all tickets regardless of demand — studios premiered films on streaming services at different price points. A study I’m conducting with media management scholar Ronen Shay details how movie studios actually shifted movie price points week by week, attempting to capitalize and exploit the hype and demand tied to each distributed movie.

For instance, Disney+’s “Mulan” maintained a price point of US$29.99 during the first three months of its release. But starting in December 2020, Disney+ subscribers were able to view it for free, while on other platforms, it was made available for rent at $19.99.

A data portal

Streaming content isn’t just used to attract audiences. It’s used as an analytics tool to better understand audiences in ways you simply can’t by showing a film in a theater.

When people stream “The Many Saints of Newark,” HBO Max can capture audience information like demographics, lifestyles and viewing preferences. Using these consumer profiles, it’s possible to predict and understand what type of movie or genre customers will be drawn to in the future. These algorithms are fluid enough to adjust and refine themselves depending on what a subscriber watches.

Data can also be used to predict how many people will view a program and whether a certain movie or series will boost subscriptions. It can also help digital content distributors stifle subscription cancellations by strategically staggering the addition of new movies or series to keep subscribers on board.

For instance, if Warner Bros. — which owns HBO Max — determines that “The Batman,” set to be released in 2022, will boost subscription rates for HBO Max, it may elect to place the film in its content library alongside the film’s theater release. HBO Max will also be able to refine its algorithms for subscribers who watch “The Batman.”

Meanwhile, hardly any audience information will be collected on people who see “The Batman” in movie theaters. Aside from movie theater loyalty card programs and customer information gleaned by vendors like Fandango, it’s difficult for movie theater executives to capture audience data.

Swimming against the stream

Purists such as directors Christopher Nolan and Patty Jenkins have criticized movies debuting on streaming services, which they believe undermines the romantic and immersive experience of seeing a film on an 80-foot silver screen.

But they’re swimming against the stream. TVs are bigger and cheaper than ever before, while the prices of movie theater tickets and concessions continue to go up. It isn’t even clear whether bigger is better. Does it really matter if a rom-com appears on a jumbo screen? Moreover, younger viewers – a major consumer segment for movie theaters – are increasingly comfortable viewing movies from smartphones and other devices.

Studios, meanwhile, are already chasing the data. Traditional movie theater debuts simply “don’t get everything / it’s true / What they don’t get / the studio can’t use.”

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Anthony Palomba, Visiting Assitant Professor of Business Administration, University of Virginia

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

Even “low-level” noise is unhealthy: A neuroscientist explains how sound and health are connected

Stop for a moment and open your ears. What do you hear?

There’s the hum of my building’s ancient elevator. The creak of neighbors walking upstairs. A rustle of leaves in the trees outside. A car coming down the street and then continuing on its journey. A toddler crying.

I pay almost no attention to any of it, this rattle of urban life. Yet every aspect, every biological and anatomical particularity that brings this auditory experience to my ears is, for lack of a better word, amazing.

“Every time I hear the story about sound, I’m like a little kid,” says neuroscientist Nina Kraus. “I love to hear the story again and again.”

After reading her book, “Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World,” I get it. The ways in which our hearing — the sense that, as Kraus observes, is “always on” — actually works are remarkable. And the power of sound to help us make connection and make sense of the world are almost limitless.

Drawing on hard science and exuberant appreciation, “Of Sound Mind” examines why we love music, how we make words, and what we mean when we say, “It’s good to hear your voice.” It also, significantly, advocates for creating our own healthy sonic environments, to “allow sound to change us for the better.”

Salon spoke to Kraus recently about noise, sound and the things we choose to listen to. As always, this conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

There is a sense that we can’t live in silence in general in our world, that now silence is almost intrusive. We don’t, as a culture, want that silence. Talk to me about what might be good about having sounds around us, but also what can be really detrimental when we don’t have any silences.

First of all, each one of us is different. The case that I’d make in my book is how our [lives] really are rooted in sound, and in how we have assimilated our nervous system and our brain to respond to sound. This is something that happens throughout our lives. It is something that we also are in a position to change if we want. I think a lot of responsibility of curating our sonic world is ours, for ourselves and for our children and in our society. We live in a world where we are constantly stimulated. We’re checking our phones, and we keep getting prompts and information about things that we didn’t even know were out there. Some of this stimulation robs us our solitude and our personal thought. It robs us of our ability to think, and kind of take stock of who we are and where we are.

The beauty there is the fact that we are all different and there is no recipe. [Some] people will feel more and less comfortable, for example, studying with music or not. We need to know ourselves, and we need to know what are good values from a biological perspective. We know that there is a lot to listen to. I don’t really think that we need quiet as much as an absence of noise. Noise is defined usually as a manmade cacophony that we might not even know is there. We’ve all experienced when the refrigerator turns off in the kitchen or you turn off the overhead light — suddenly it’s quieter. You hadn’t even realized that the sound was there till you take the sigh of relief.

So much of my message about sound is that sound is under-recognized because it’s invisible. We don’t often realize how much of an impact it has on our health and who we are. Often, even with respect to this low-level noise that is around us all the time, we are kind of in this constant state of alarm, if you will. Hearing evolved to alert us to danger, to mates, to food. Hearing is absolutely essential to our survival.

Without even being consciously aware of it, the sounds that are going on around us are influencing our brain or influencing our nervous system. I would want to ask everyone, because I ask this of myself all the time, is this necessary? Is it necessary for me to wake up my neighbor when I come home at night and lock my car? Is it necessary when you’re at an airport — do we need, every time a boarding pass is scanned — to hear “beep, beep,” 235 times?

And also, as a lover of music, music is so intrusive when you’re not choosing it — when it’s foisted upon you. There are times when having background music is exactly what you want. There are times when it isn’t. I think we, every day, need to think about our sonic environment and to realize that we really can honor the sonic environment we think is important so that we can hear the marvels that there are to listen to.

So many people have commented during the pandemic how they have heard sounds of birds and animals and wind in a way that we haven’t before. That’s the silver lining. That’s the beauty of it. What is really interesting from a biological perspective is the fact that the birds are actually singing more quietly. They’re singing more intricate songs because they don’t have to shout above the din. How cool is that?

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I want to talk about what music does for our learning, how we learn things as children but also how we learn as adults. Most of my family is not musical, so that was interesting to read.

I’m going to push back and say, there’s hardly anybody who is not musical. Everyone is musical. We respond to music as babies before we learn words. Before we learn to talk and understand the meaning of words, we hear the music of speech, the rhythms. Any baby will be so delighted if you sit them on your lap and take their little feet and clap them together and move them in rhythm. Think about when your baby’s crying — what do you do? You rock him, you bounce him. My view is that music should be a part of every child’s education and everyone’s education throughout their lives. We’re not talking about the goal of becoming a professional musician in any way, but everybody loves to sing.

People who are exceptional at music and people who really don’t engage with it at all are at the tail ends, are just a few percent of people. In fact, everyone else is musical. Why is this? It’s because sound is so important. One of the reasons it’s important is that it connects us. The hearing brain is vast and the hearing brain engages how we think.

How we feel, how we move, how sound is incorporated with our other senses, all of the many invisible ingredients of sound, all of these things come together in the hearing brain — and music is the jackpot. Music engages all of these things so strongly to the extent that beyond learning to make music, one is learning and strengthening one’s communication skills.

Making music also strengthens our sense of timing on multiple time scales, from microseconds to seconds. We need those same ingredients for language. We find that kids with language impairments have weaknesses in the brain’s ability to process this information. We know this because we can measure sound processing in the brain with scalp electrodes.

As I’m talking to you now, the neurons in your brain that respond to sound are producing electricity. We can measure that electricity, and we can see how good a job your brain is doing at processing the different ingredients of sound. We can see, where are your strengths? Where are your bottlenecks? What we can see resoundingly is that the ingredients that are important and that are strengthened with making music are the ones that we need for processing language.

To that point, you also mentioned auditory learning in the book. So what does that look like when we are sound of mind and sound learners?

There is this differentiation about being auditory or visual learner. If you think about the biology, these things are not compartmentalized. They’re not separate.

Probably the best example is Beethoven, who lost his hearing. He used his sound mind to instruct and to create some of the most beautiful music that we can ever experience, because sound engages so much of our brain. That’s why you can see that if you strengthen your sound mind, you are strengthening so many different parts of you. We are experiencing the world with how we think and feel and move and interact with our other senses.

You talk about the limbic reward system. A lot of us have been longing for and missing just touching each other, smelling each other. I have a kid who’s away at college and I feel that dopamine rush when she calls. The sound of each other’s voices is such a powerful thing.

It’s so powerful. It’s powerful because we have learned over time. Your child’s voice has a home in your brain, so that when we hear the sound of something that we have learned and is familiar to us, it engages again. It engages the sound mind, but engages so much of us and who we are. We all know the sound of home. When your daughter calls you, depending on how you answered the phone and your first few words, she can tell, “Mom, what’s the matter?” Our voices tell us so much more than the words that we’re speaking.

All of those cues create this very emotional and physical response that sound. I think that’s what the book is for, all of the incredible magic that goes into having that experience, all of the biology, the science, the evolution that brings you to that moment.

Think about it evolutionarily. Mommies just needed to be able to signal to their babies that they were around. They were present even while they were busy doing other things. That’s still very much the case. Babies learn right away. Even if they’re not seeing mommy, they can hear. You’re connected to them by your voice, by your footfalls, by the way you move. Our brains have developed for a millennia, to be able to make these kinds of connections.

Christopher Steele dishes on Trump dossier in new interview: Pee tape ‘probably does’ exist

The investigator of the infamous Donald Trump dossier, Christopher Steele, sat down with ABC News reporter George Stephanopoulos where he revealed what he knew was true and what wasn’t.

“Do you think it hurts your credibility at all that you won’t accept the findings of the FBI in this particular case?” Stephanopoulos asked.

“I’m prepared to accept that not everything in the dossier is 100% accurate,” Steele said. “I have yet to be convinced that that is one of them.”

According to a release from ABC, there were parts of the dossier that he admits aren’t true, but one major point is true. According to Steele the salacious “tape” of Trump with prostitutes in a Russian hotel room urinating on a bed once used by former President Barack Obama is real.

“So how do you explain if that tape does indeed exist, why hasn’t it been released?” asked Stephanopoulos.

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“Well it hasn’t needed to be released?” said Steele.

“Why not?”

“Because I think the Russians felt they got pretty good value out of Donald Trump when he was president of the U.S.,” Steele said.

“While Steele acknowledged that no corroborating evidence has been found for many of his dossier claims, he argued that very little contradictory evidence exists either — a line of defense that his critics have found problematic,” said ABC News.

Whether or not the tape is real might be inconsequential to Trump, because he might believe that the Russians have “something” or anything on him that is compromising. That could motivate his behavior.

In interviews over the past year, former top Trump lawyer Michael Cohen has said that he doesn’t believe that the tape exists because he looked extensively for it while working for Trump. He also wrote extensively in his book Disloyal about the Steele claims that it didn’t seem impossible, which is why he worked to find it.

“But I do know that the decision to go to The Act in Vegas in 2012 was made by the Agalarovs and the Russian men certainly seemed hugely entertained in a venue that boasted golden showers and fairly bristled with the energy of sex for sale. They were the same men who hosted Trump in Moscow in 2013, so it doesn’t seem entirely impossible that the amusements of a golden shower were again part of the Boss’s festivities,” wrote Cohen.

“Trump’s hatred for Obama was on a level that might provoke some sort of perverse and perverted ritualistic humiliation in a hotel suite,” the book continued. “Like the Faux-Bama he hired to express his hatred and contempt for Obama in symbolic ways, I can attest that he was entirely capable of being entertained by such an act, even if he is a germaphobe, as he claims to be. However, this claim never occurred, to the best of my knowledge and investigations, and as verified to me by the Boss’s longtime head of security and attaché, Keith Schiller.”

Steele also said in the interview that it was “a fact” Cohen met with Kremlin officials in Prague ahead of the election, which he thinks was about the tape. Cohen has denied it and the FBI also found in its extensive investigation that Cohen didn’t meet with the Russians.

Steele claimed that Cohen would never admit to it because it would be “self-incriminating to a very great degree.” The FBI, however, did more than take Cohen’s word for it. It was clear that they did their own investigation into Cohen’s trip and if there was any wrongdoing, presumably he would have been charged with it.

“I’m pleased to see that my old friend Christopher Steele, also known as Austin Powers, has crawled out of the pub long enough to make up a few more stories,” Cohen told Raw Story when asked about the allegations. “I eagerly await his next secret dossier which proves the existence of Bigfoot, the Lochness Monster and that Elvis is still alive. In fact, I hear David Pecker needs a new dirt digger at the National Enquirer.”

Steele claimed that he’s now speaking out because there were problems he identified in 2016 he said have not only not gone away but have gotten worse.

See the clip of the interview below:

This tomatillo and avocado salsa is guacamole’s spicier, smokier cousin

One thing that cooking during a pandemic taught me is that time is truly a secret ingredient. I should confess that patience is not one of the fruits of the spirit that has flourished within me. However, when I had nothing but time on my hands during quarantine, it seemed like a virtue worth exploring.

Quick weeknight pasta was replaced with risotto as I stood by my stove gently stirring the grains of arborio rice until they absorbed fresh stock — then repeated the process again and again until the entire pot became sumptuous and creamy. I methodically braided challah strands and let them rise without rushing the process — a mistake that resulted in rock-hard bread.

The extra time made a difference, exactly like it makes a difference when making salsa. While I really love fresh, quick salsas like pico de gallo — a mix of tomato, onion, jalapeño and cilantro — others made with oven-roasted vegetables take on an additional depth of flavor.

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That said, you still want a little brightness, especially when pairing salsa with braised or grilled meats. That’s where this roasted tomatillo and avocado salsa comes in — it’s verdant, smooth, a little spicy and packs a tremendous amount of flavor despite so few ingredients.

The key? Oven roasting the tomatillos, jalapeño, garlic and onion until they get a little black before tossing them with fresh avocado and a handful of cilantro — sprigs and all — into a blender.

***

Recipe: Roasted Tomatillo and Avocado Salsa

Ingredients:

4 tomatillos, husked and rinsed
1 jalapeño, seeds optional
2 cloves of garlic
1/4 onion, roughly chopped
1 tablespoon of olive oil
1/4 cup of cilantro
1/2 teaspoon of salt, plus more to taste
1 avocado
Optional: Lime juice to taste

Directions:

1. On a large, prepared baking sheet, add the 4 tomatillos, jalapeno, garlic cloves and onion. Drizzle with the tablespoon of olive oil, and season with the 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Place in a 400-degree oven for 20 to 25 minutes, turning halfway through. The vegetables should be very tender and slightly blackened. Allow them to cool.

2. In a large blender or food processor, combine the avocado, the cooled and roasted vegetables, the cilantro and (if desired) lime juice to taste. Blend until very smooth and completely combined. Season with additional salt to taste.

3. If refrigerated in a covered container or squeeze bottle, this salsa will last for up to two weeks.

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How to make a flax egg (and use it as an egg replacement)

Vegan recipes have long been using ground flax seeds mixed with water as a replacement for real eggs. Even if you’re not into vegan baking, you can learn how to make a flax egg substitute for many recipes that require regular eggs for binding ingredients, especially if you’re in, well, a bind.

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What the heck is a flax egg?

A flax egg is a pretty simple mixture of flaxseed or flaxseed flour with water to create a binder in place of an egg. It’s a clever way that vegans and non-egg-eaters have been mimicking the qualities of eggs in vegan baked goods for years. Flax eggs and regular eggs are a 1:1 ratio, meaning that for every egg that a recipe calls for, you’d make one flax egg mixture. To do that, you will need:

1 tablespoon ground flaxseed. If you have whole seeds, you can grind them in a coffee grinder or a food processor.
3 tablespoons of water

To make a flax egg, all you need to do is add the ground flax seed to a bowl, then add room temperature water. Let it sit for about 15 minutes.

Alternatively, you can use boiling hot water, and the flax egg will only have to sit for about two minutes until you get the same gelatinous texture. If you need more than one egg, you can combine two or three flax eggs in the same mixing bowl.

When to use it

We love a recipe hack, but in this case, it’s wise to use a flax seed egg only in the case where the recipe you’re using requires only a small amount of eggs. Pancakes? Yes. A souffle? Would not recommend it. Unfortunately, this vegan egg substitute is no match for the structural integrity that a chicken egg provides for things like frittatas, enriched breads, or anything that require copious egg whites, like meringues.

Flax eggs do work for most baked goods that have a lot of flour, however. Chocolate chip cookies, pancakes and waffles, and quick breads like banana bread and muffins are all great candidates for experimenting with a flax egg recipe. It also works for salad dressings that need an emulsifier. When mixed correctly, the flax egg provides the same gluey-ness that is crucial for binding ingredients together.

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Are flax eggs healthier?

And of course, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention the health benefits of this vegan egg replacer: the flax seed egg has fiber, omega-3’s, protein, and has been shown to help prevent heart disease and breast cancer. If you’re cutting back on cholesterol, dealing with hormone imbalances, or just wanting to get your digestion, um, on track, the flax seed is the perfect superfood.The pantry-friendly egg recipe can also work using chia seeds, if that’s your thing. A chia seed vegan egg substitute is just as good of a substitute for real eggs in vegan cooking and baking.

And then there are those of us who have little to no interest in vegan recipes, or the virtues of healthy eating in the context of dessert. We hear you. But the time will come when you will look into the fridge in the middle of making zucchini bread and realize with horror that the omelet you made two days ago polished off the last of the carton, and you will frantically pull up this article. Welcome back.

A note about gluten-free recipes

You may want to find another substitute for eggs if you’re using a gluten-free recipe. The protein in gluten provides structure, as does the protein in regular eggs. Without either, your muffins will be sad flax pogs, and your cookies will be greasy, crumbly little saucers. Oat flour is maybe the only gluten-free alternative that is flax egg-friendly.

Storage

Flax seed is useful and healthy but you don’t want to keep it in your cabinet for too long, or else those health benefits go out the window, and actually the flaxseed will have the opposite effect than it would if it were in its prime. If you’re going by expiration dates, whole flaxseed can last months past their expiration date, but ground flaxseed can spoil just a week after.

If you buy flaxseed in bulk, a good way to tell whether it’s spoiled is to take a whiff of the bag. Does it smell kind of sour? Almost like a box of crayons? Time to toss it. It probably tastes acerbic too, and nothing like the warm, nutty notes of flavor it once had. The reason it smells and tastes funky is because the omega-3 fatty acids in the seed have become rancid. Ground flaxseed is more likely to have this smell because the seeds have been broken open and the acid has been oxidizing for longer.

So how do you prolong the shelf life of flaxseed? First thing’s first: don’t even try to store flax eggs. They don’t keep, even in the fridge, so when you’re measuring out your flax eggs, be precise to avoid having extra. Aside from that, you can store flax seed or flaxseed meal in an airtight container; putting them in the fridge isn’t necessary, so long as you have a dark, cool pantry.

Flax eggs are so simple to make that even with two dozen chicken eggs in the fridge, you might as well see what all the fuss is about. With the right texture and a little ingenuity on the part of the baker, the unassuming seed gets the job done.

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

Last weekend, I woke up with a solitary mission: to make the best possible cacio e pepe for dinner.

After falling into a well-documented pasta rut for the greater part of the pandemic, I’ve endeavored to change up my dinner routine. I’m trying to eat more mindfully and incorporate a variety of different vegetables into my meals. That includes swapping out a bowl of beige pasta for a beautifully braised eggplant or a hearty salad.

Weekends, however, are when I turn to comfort meals and project recipes. On Wednesday, I solidified a cooking plan that included homemade focaccia, honeydew melon wrapped in prosciutto, and of course, that cacio e pepe.

Cacio e pepe, which translates to “cheese and pepper,” is prized for its simplicity. As its name suggests, this Roman staple features a velvety sauce made from a combination of finely grated cheese, black pepper and pasta water.

It’s one of those dishes that kind of slowly took over the world, especially over the last few years. It appears everywhere from menus at luxury restaurants to the shelves of Trader Joe’s to Salon Food’s own “Quick and Dirty” column.

The best versions are creamy, peppery and a little funky — and the first time that I made cacio e pepe, it turned out that way. On that occasion, I loosely followed Bon Appetit’s recipe, whisking together piping hot pasta water and (don’t tell them this) the fresh, but pre-grated supermarket parmesan that’s so fine it’s basically dust. It came together beautifully.

That was obviously a fluke.

My most recent cacio e pepe excursion was a disaster, which was only made worse by the amount of thought I put into it. I woke up Saturday morning, and after pulling a new “more authentic” recipe from an Italian cooking blog, made my way to a cute little Italian market. I bought a wedge of nutty, briny Grana Padano and parmesan. I debated between a few bags of pasta before finally settling on Semolina fusilli. The last thing I grabbed on my way out of the door was a little baggie of fresh peppercorns to grind into the sauce.

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I was ready to cook. That evening, after my focaccia had risen and rested a few times, I placed the dough in the oven and pulled out my stock pot and skillet. I boiled and drained the pasta, reserving the water, and set about making the sauce.

I grated the cheese directly into the pan, followed by the pepper, folding the ingredients over the pasta. That’s when things began to go downhill. Instead of forming a cohesive, silky sauce, the cheese and pepper quickly became a rubbery white ball flecked with streaks of black. I attempted to rectify the situation by adding more (now lukewarm) pasta water, but I was left with the same rubbery cheese ball sitting in a puddle.

I tried to break up the mound of cheese, but it wasn’t until I increased the heat and added pat after pat of butter that the dish began to appear somewhat salvageable. The sauce did eventually become mostly cohesive, but instead of becoming smooth and creamy, it remained a little gritty. It was definitely a disappointment.

So what happened, exactly? While snacking on a piece of focaccia — which, I would like to note, turned out beautifully — I played back through everything in my head and examined different recipes. I realized there were a few places where things went wrong. The next day, with my leftover ingredients, I went back to the drawing board and made a small batch of pasta for brunch. It was infinitely better.

Here’s what I learned about avoiding cacio e pepe disaster:

Make sure your cheese is grated finely enough

One of the reasons my very first attempt at cacio e pepe — the one made with the supermarket cheese — actually had a higher chance of success was that the cheese was so finely grated that it was basically powder. It more readily incorporated into the pasta water to form a smooth sauce. When I freshly grated cheese directly into the pasta and water, the shreds were still quite thick in comparison. If I had used a grater with smaller holes, it would have resulted in a finer end product.

Work quickly

Like carbonara, which is another one of my favorite pasta dishes, a key factor with cacio e pepe is speed. Working quickly ensures that the cheese doesn’t have time to coagulate on the bottom of the pan and the pasta water doesn’t lose its heat.

Keep an eye on the temperature

Relatedly, a silky, smooth cacio e pepe is predicated on a cook’s use of heat. In my “disaster” batch of pasta, I allowed the pasta water to become lukewarm and didn’t reheat it before combining it with my (too thick) cheese. The combination of those factors contributed to the resultant rubbery ball. Many recipes call for bringing the reserved pasta water back to a simmer before adding the cheese. Whatever you do, don’t skip this step!

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“Succession” returns after two years, and the Roy family hasn’t changed a bit

Self-styled “Succession” rebel Kendall Roy is the worst type of performer, in that he’s a combination of terrible and confident.

No other stripe of man would stand in front of his media titan father, valued family friends and colleagues at a black-tie anniversary event, bust out a tone-deaf rap and believe he’s killing it. But that’s how things go down in the second season episode “Dundee,” when Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Logan Roy’s second eldest, takes the mic to deliver a tribute to dear old dad and shocks the room by introducing DJ Squiggle before launching into “L to the OG.”

Many “Succession” aficionados think of the “boar on the floor” scene as one of the show’s defining moments. Citing that is as popular as quoting one of the Roy patriarch Logan’s (Brian Cox) many profane outbursts, or giggling at the unfiltered rudeness of men in expensive suits. But if you really want to understand why Kendall’s shocking betrayal at the end of season two constitutes yet another a remix of his behavioral theme, suffer through that rap one more time and take note of the bars.

The first lines are bearable enough, and Strong doles out Kendall’s rhyme sauce assuredly. But then we get to the refrain: “L to the OG/Dude be the OG/ A-N he playin’/Playin’ like a pro, see!” His wealthy audience isn’t so much cheering as egging on the Whitest Rapper Who Ever Whited to higher disaster peaks. His father’s allies aren’t sure how to react. The trust fund kids send up a few half-hearted, superficially enthusiastic hoots.

“You need to stop this,” says his brother Roman (Kieran Culkin), while sister Shiv (Sarah Snook) is thrilled to watch her sibling rival flame out publicly and magnificently.

Think of the Roy family’s third season journey as a drawn-out version of Kendall’s cringe, only with steeper ramifications than mere embarrassment. When Kendall stood in front of a bank of cameras and implicated Logan’s complicity in covering up sexual abuse and other crimes against humanity within Waystar Royco, he thought that for once he’d be seen not as a failson, but a whistleblower. Not as an unreliable drug addict but the lesser god undeservedly slain by his father only to rise again, ascendant.

Logan sees his son more clearly than he sees himself, patting Kendall on the back for a masterful play before laughing off his son’s assertion that he really is disgusted by his father’s crimes. “Tell him that I’m going to grind his f**king bones to make my bread,” the old man growls over the phone to Kendall’s assistant, quoting actual kid’s stuff at his adult son.

“OK, well … tell him that I’m going to run up off the … f**kin’ … bean stalk,” Kendall conveys through his go-between, which makes Logan snicker like a fairy tale villain (and rightly so).

Kendall’s failure to see the way the world works, and his place in it, is one of his largest weak spots. He sees himself as a major player, though he’s really a small animal clinging to a mighty oak that has no intention of uprooting itself any time soon. That’s how his father sees him, along with the rest of the world. On a charity gala’s red carpet, he thinks he’s gaining points by yelling “F**k the patriarchy!” as he poses for the cameras. Late night hosts make him a punchline, and he pretends the world is laughing with him instead of at him. He still thinks people enjoy his performance.

Then again, Logan isn’t the fearsome beast he used to be, but nobody wants to be the one to admit it out loud — look at Kendall, after all. It’s worrisome enough that when he answers questions about his company’s health and future with “Tell ’em to f—k off!” everyone takes it as wisdom when in at least one situation that response is the product of temporary derangement.

Comedy erupts from tragedy in this show, making Kendall the saddest clown in this stretch limo. But “Succession” spreads the dark hilarity equally among the Roys, although it takes about two episodes for the show to regain the equilibrium that makes it the most hilarious drama on TV.

Smoothing rust out of the joints is be expected after two years off the air. More awkward is the show’s reckoning with how political currents have shifted since then.

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We recognize the Roys to be fictional stand-ins for the media families such as Murdochs, but their behavior is distinctly Trumpian. Logan Roy’s cruelty and false promises are as familiar to us as the Roys’ Fox doppelganger ATN is to the show’s America.

Their only saving grace is the fact that Armstrong and his writers channel gloriously profane prose through each of them, ensuring that even the meanest, Roman, has a trickster’s charm about him while the least – that would be Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) and cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) – retain their humanity.

Still, it will be interesting to witness whether the Roy family’s verbally abusive comedy hours satisfy in the way they once did. This nine-episode third round of “Succession” takes a slightly unfamiliar path through the archipelago of humiliations and embarrassments traveled in prior seasons.

This series’ creator Jesse Armstrong reacquaints the audience with the Roys in the midst of an internecine war. Dealing with the fallout of Kendall’s press conference has left Roman, Shiv, Roman’s mommy-dom paramour Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron) and the rest scrambling, while it slowly dawns on Kendall that his media salvo could be as deadly to his reputation as that of his family and his father.

Soon, the family members thirstiest for Logan’s approval either make a play for chairs closer to the head of the table, or begin researching which prisons are nicest and learning how to make a drinkable toilet wine.

“I’m worried about prison,” Greg admits over a meal Tom tells him is a practice to stomaching jail food. “I just feel that because of my physical length, I could be a target for all kinds of misadventure!”

It’s been a while, “Succession,” but that’s OK. Now we have better knowledge of each character’s emotional map than ever.

Season one of “Succession” was an involved process as the show established the Roys’ insular world of wealth and privilege. The second season is when the show figured out how absurd the people who make that world can be.

Armstrong and his team roll out a plush carpet for guest stars such as Sanaa Lathan, Adrien Brody and Alexander Skarsgård to step aboard.

The artistry is in the fact that these known players don’t stand apart from the world. Lathan’s extraordinary lawyer slips right into the fray, and Brody wears with ease the slouchy leisure couture of a billionaire investor. Helpfully, the actor always looks a little tired, aptly fitting for a man with too much money and time and little patience for a father-son squabble that’s losing him hundreds of millions.

Strong has a way of conveying the tight, pointed superficiality of a know-nothing execu-bro who radiates enough competence to pull a room’s attention. Culkin hones a sadistic edge in Roman, one slicked with with flawless comic timing. Snook’s polished chill balances Shiv’s painful eagerness to be taken seriously by a boy’s club that never will.

Then again, the Roys’ prideful refusal to own up to their intellectual shortcomings is part of the reason for that. In one scene, Shiv upbraids a swollen-headed, far-right Republican at a swanky fundraiser she’s attending in part to support her do-nothing brother Connor (Alan Ruck) and his dim political aspirations.

Ready to spar, the man asks, “Have you read Plato?” Odds are this guy probably hasn’t save for a few lines on Wikiquote. But Shiv doesn’t have enough strategic acumen to redirect the conversation or cover for her knowledge gaps, so she haughtily replies, “Uh, yeah. Remind me what happens.”

Everyone in the world of “Succession” is some version of horrid, even the pleasant ones. Amazingly, though, the writers spin each arc in a way that makes you feel for them — even if it’s tough to actually root for them. Shiv is a ball of frustration blocked from making any progress in winning anyone’s respect, but we’d feel awful if she were the one set up to fail. Roman might be the one to go down, but if that happens we’ll lose the charmingly weird foreplay energy permeating all of his dealings with Gerri.

Cox still provides the show’s gravitational pull through Logan, but his performance is more generous than the man he’s playing. In these new episodes, the actor lights the stage to give viewers a clearer view of his castmates’ glow – and they’re delivering true excellence in these episodes.

Even so, three seasons is enough to make a person wonder how long Logan’s game of using his company’s legacy as a cudgel with which he emotionally abuses his children is sustainable. I don’t say this out of deference to the assumption that people want kinder stories to balance out a world that’s gotten harder; besides, that argument doesn’t really hold up when it come to this show.

“Succession” works because it confirms our suspicions that exorbitantly wealthy are not better or smarter than the average person, or even worthy of wielding the power they’ve inherited and hoard. Chucking at the venality of the people who hold the world and care nothing about anyone on it who isn’t them is a mild temporary antidote to what ails us.

Vicariously enjoying their ridiculously posh meals and ridiculous parties helps too, mostly because they’re distracting and fertile with possibilities for verbal and situational misadventure. Nothing could possibly top the top-shelf disaster of MC Ken in that department, but nine hours of solidly wrought satire and brutal snark is a much tastier payday. To paraphrase one of Kendall’s hip-hop victims, this show is burning my eyes, but nothing can persuade me to look away.

The third season of “Succession” premieres at 9 p.m. Sunday, October 17 on HBO.

Ousted by AOC, Joe Crowley is now lobbying against tax hikes on corporate giants

Soon after losing his 2018 primary against progressive newcomer Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in a major political upset, 10-term Congressman Joe Crowley joined one of K Street’s largest lobbying outfits, and fresh reporting reveals that the former chair of the House Democratic Caucus is now working to torpedo his party’s proposed tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy.

A recently filed document on the Senate’s disclosure website shows that Crowley and other lobbyists at Squire Patton Boggs—a massive corporate law firm whose clients include Amazon, Royal Dutch Shell, UnitedHealth, and the Saudi monarchy—were hired in July by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), “one of Wall Street’s most powerful advocacy groups,” The Intercept reported Friday.

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“SIFMA, whose members range from BlackRock and J.P. Morgan to Amazon Web Services and IBM,” The Intercept noted, “has deployed Crowley to court his old colleagues as Democrats finalize legislation to implement President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better initiative, which seeks a fairer tax system and greater revenue to pay for expanded Medicare coverage, universal pre-K, and other domestic priorities.”

According to Sara Sirota, a reporter at the news outlet:

Senior lawmakers-turned-lobbyists like Crowley typically serve their special interest clients by convincing former allies to promote industry talking points to committee chairs or party leaders. On September 24, Texas Democratic Reps. Vicente González, Henry Cuellar, and Filemón Vela sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi [D-Calif.] and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer [D-N.Y.] a letter criticizing the proposed tax increases on corporations’ foreign profits that Crowley is now targeting for SIFMA. Crowley’s former leadership PAC donated to all three congressmen’s campaigns over his time in Congress, and Vela was a vocal supporter of Crowley’s leadership ambitions.

[…]

This wasn’t the only time González, Cuellar, and Vela tried to undermine House Democrats’ Build Back Better Act. They also joined New Jersey Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer’s unsuccessful attempt to weaken the party’s unity and commitment to finish the reconciliation process, which allows the bill to pass with a simple majority.

Although Crowley opposed the GOP’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act when he was in Congress—describing it as a “tax scam” benefiting the “largest, wealthiest multinational corporations in the history of the world”—the former lawmaker is now collaborating with Wall Street to undermine Democrats’ attempts at progressive reform.

SIFMA is particularly opposed to efforts to raise the rate on global intangible low-taxed income (GILTI) from its current level of 10.5%—established four years ago by Republicans and deemed a handout to multinational corporations by Democrats—to 16.5%.

That modest increase is lower than the rate sought by Biden and a majority of congressional Democrats, who want to equalize the GILTI tax rate and the domestic corporate tax rate—now at 21%, but potentially higher if current legislative proposals succeed—in order to disincentivize offshoring.

Sirota pointed out that IBM’s “global tax policy director earlier this year said Democrats’ plan to fix that scam is ‘penalizing companies that have been operating overseas for years.'”

SIFMA has also “made its opposition to the Build Back Better Act’s tax increases on the wealthiest individuals clear,” Sirota added. “Days after the Ways and Means Committee finished marking it up, SIFMA Managing Director Tim Cameron released a statement on September 17 criticizing capital gains tax hikes, restrictions on individual retirement account contributions, and other changes intended to reduce inequality.”

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