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A revolutionary, crunchy bean pie for a small planet

Meat is optional. Human beings shouldn’t go hungry, anywhere. Climate change is real. Our consumer choices have consequences. And food is political as hell. These are all modern ideals of conscientious eaters. But they’re also nothing new. Frances Moore Lappé, for example, has talking about this stuff for more than five decades now.

When it published in 1971, her “Diet for a Small Planet” was revelatory. It offered a persuasive argument for a different relationship with our food, for the good of all. It also provided a clear blueprint for getting started, with recipes and meal suggestions that at the time would have been considered extremely crunchy-granola, because a lot of people had no idea what crunchy granola actually was.

Since then, the book that began its life as a one-page handout has become a culinary classic. Its ideals have gained widespread acceptance, and its globally inspired recipes have gone from “hippie food” to mainstream American cuisine. This small planet of ours may be in ever more dire shape, but we still cook with hope, and gather at the table with love.

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For its 50th birthday, the “Diet for a Small Planet” has been revised yet again, with a new introduction and updated information and recipes. It’s a reflection of the changing state of the world, our evolving understanding of nutrition — and the pleasures of bringing new tastes into the kitchen, thanks to contributors like Padma Lakshmi and Bryant Terry.

“When we started dreaming of what a 50th anniversary edition would look like, one of the things that my mother and I were really clear about is we wanted this to feel like a celebration of a way of cooking and eating that is embraced by so many people,” says author and advocate Anna Lappé. “We wanted it to feel like a party.”

What I’ve always loved about “Diet for a Small Planet” is that playful party spirit, and its understanding that revolutionary cooking can be still cheap and simple. The inequities and injustices of our food system are legion and no one of us alone can solve them. But bending in the direction of a more thoughtful relationship with how we cook and what we eat can be a joyful thing. For my family this week, that takes the form of an early autumn bean pie, inspired by “Small Planet” and made just a little fancy with puff pastry. The other evening, I put it on the table with a buttery green salad, while my high schooler talked about what she’d learned in school that day about voting rights. That’s nourishment for you.

“We can send ripples out through our choices,” says Frances Lappé, “Something I do every day, multiple times a day, is connecting me   with the world I want,   and with people helping to make life better for others too. It’s not saying this is going to solve the problem, but it makes us stronger. I call it an act of rebel sanity. If this system is insane, I can have a rebel act and I can do it in the kitchen, and then from there have more confidence of what’s possible.” I’ll eat to that.

***

Recipe: Fall bean pie

Inspired by Diet for a Small Planet

Serves 4 – 6

Ingredients:

  • 1 small onion, thinly sliced
  • 1 carrot, sliced
  • 1 stalk of celery, sliced 
  • 1/2 cup of fresh or frozen corn kernels
  • 2 15-ounce cans of kidney beans, drained and rinsed (or whatever beans you prefer)
  • 1 teaspoon, more or less, of cumin
  • 1 tablespoon of tamari (or soy sauce)
  • 1/2 cup of grated cheddar cheese
  • 1 sheet of thawed puff pastry
  • Neutral oil for the pan

Directions:

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°.
  2. On a sheet of parchment, and roll out the puff pastry to about 1/4-inch thick. Just eyeball it. Prick the pastry all over with a fork.
  3. Heat the oil in a skillet over medium flame.
  4. Put the pastry and parchment on a medium sheet pan. Bake the pastry about 15 minutes, until it looks golden.
  5. Meanwhile, sauté the onion, carrot, and celery until they start to soften.
  6. Stir in the corn, beans, spices and tamari and continue to cook gently.
  7. When the pastry looks right, remove from the oven, then sprinkle with grated cheese. Add bean mixture on top. Serve immediately. The leftovers make a fine lunch the next day.

Note: The pastry is a nice touch, but there’s nothing stopping you from omitting it altogether and  making an even easier dish of beans and vegetables. Serve with warm bread.

 

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The best Gruyère cheese substitutes for nutty, salty goodness

Gruyère is a cheese staple because of its creamy, nutty flavor and sturdy, semihard texture. It’s the perfect addition to a cheese or charcuterie board, plus one of its strengths is that it melts easily for recipes like French onion soup or a croque monsieur.

It also happens to be one of the most expensive cheeses in the grocery store, averaging about $15 to $20 a pound if you’re going for the AOC label. And no, we’re not referring to Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez — we assume she is too busy to be stamping cheeses. AOC stands for appellation d’origine contrôlée, which in French cheese-speak is the label that protects a product’s ingredients and methods, tying them to a particular location.

What is gruyère, anyway? 

Gruyère originates in the town of Gruyères, in Switzerland. Genuine Gruyère has a rough (and inedible) outside layer, and it gets its tasty flavor from cows who graze on the verdant foothills of the Swiss Alps. It’s produced in exactly the same way it has been for 900 years, in big copper vats that turn out impressive wheels. These wheels clock in at close to 100 pounds each — the stuff cheesy dreams are made of.

So while it may feel sacrilegious to swap out such a storied cheese, we give you permission. Yes, Gruyère is decadent and delicious, but sometimes a Friday night grilled cheese just doesn’t warrant a trip to Whole Foods. (Though if you are committed to Gruyère Grilled Cheese Fridays, by all means, go off.)

What are the best gruyère substitutes? 

There are plenty of other premier cheeses that can serve as good substitutes for Gruyère cheese. Depending on whether you’re melting cheese or adding more variety to your charcuterie board, you might consider Beaufort, Comté, Jarlsberg, Emmental, or Fontina.

If you just can’t find Gruyère, but budget is no problem, there are other Swiss cheese options that tend to be pricier but just as delicious: L’Etivaz, Sbrinz, Engelberg cheddar, and Tête de Moine or “Monk’s Head” cheese. Scharfe Maxx is another Swiss substitute that was invented in 2004 after the Swiss Cheese Union disbanded (yes, there was once a Swiss Cheese Union, and we encourage anyone who is up for it to please reinstate it). It has a creamy texture with hints of onion, and even bacon. You can imagine how much it would level up your fondue (and Grilled Cheese Fridays).

Almost any of the above would be a welcome complement to a cheese board or melted cheese recipe. Even Parmesan can work as a good melting cheese when combined with Fontina. Plus, you’re more likely to have it on hand than, say, Comté.

What should I even do with gruyère (or a gruyère substitute)? 

Speaking of melting cheese, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention the virtues of fondue here! Fondue is a classic Swiss recipe of melted cheese (often a combination) served with fruit, meat, and/or bread on the side for dipping. To make fondue, you will first need a good pot that melts cheese. We recommend the stainless-steel Cuisinart CFO-3SS Electric Fondue Maker, which covers a wide range of fondue and even soup and stew recipes, but any sturdy Dutch oven or stockpot will do. Be sure to check out our perfect autumnal fondue recipe for some melty-cheese inspo.

Gruyère is the cheese most commonly found in fondue, but really any Swiss cheese will do, especially in combination. No Swiss cheese on hand? You can expand your palette to cheese that’s native to Norway, like Jarlsberg cheese, which has a much lower price point and similar melting texture to Gruyère. Gouda, a cheese from the Netherlands, is one of the most popular cheeses in the world, accounting for 50 to 60% of global cheese consumption, so it is sure to be a crowd-pleaser.

Gruyère may be king, but there’s plenty of other good cheeses in the court. Try any one of these in a recipe or on its own and you may just find your new favorite.

Why is Biden failing? His tightly controlled relationship to the media might be worse than Trump’s

The mood has changed at the White House.

The White House press corps, thrilled to have fewer death threats, happy to have a return to daily briefings that don’t include unending rancor and drama, and set at ease by a new president who doesn’t routinely refer to reporters as “fake news” or the “enemy of the people,” was at first very happy with Joe Biden.

He had a very low bar to crawl over to ease tensions with the free press — and his administration did just that. Now, after nine months, it has become painfully clear the Biden administration will do little more than just that — crawl over a very low bar.

Briefings are helpful. But covering the press secretary is not the same as covering the president. The president needs to answer questions before the press. A full press corps needs to be present on a regular basis to see if the president can handle the rigors of his job. Biden has conducted just one press conference in the White House since taking office — and because of COVID restrictions that was before a small number of pool reporters.

Meanwhile, the Brady briefing room has reopened and there are often more than 60 people in a room that only seats 49. The East Room, the site of many previous presidential press conferences and the largest room in the White House, has not totally reopened. We are routinely told that pandemic restrictions limit the number of reporters allowed there (fewer than allowed in the Brady Briefing Room), and thus the White House continues to conduct lotteries for access to the East Room, with no transparency about who they choose to be there when the president speaks.

Last Friday, Biden spoke twice to the press, taking no questions. The first time was in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building’s auditorium — which can easily seat a hundred reporters, even with social distancing. The second time, Biden spoke from the North Lawn in front of the East Room — outside.  Later that day, Biden opened another outside event to any reporter on campus, but the speech in the North Lawn was again limited because of “COVID restrictions.”

That was just a lie. 

If you ask any reporter or technician who’s covered more than a couple of administrations, you’ll find that the Biden administration is routinely described as “very strange” and “controlling.” This administration clearly does not want us to observe or interact with the president in a regular and robust fashion.

One of the things we notice is the president’s health. During his two meetings in front of cameras on Friday, I noticed Biden coughing and sniffing. I didn’t suspect anything nefarious, but he’s a man in his late 70s, and the people he represents have a right to know whether he is healthy. I can make no independent observation because I rarely get to see him. But noticing his behavior Friday, I asked press secretary Jen Psaki if she could address any concerns before someone blew it out of proportion. She informed me he had allergies.

Then late Friday afternoon the open press gathered for Biden’s departure. A wrangler brought us through the Palm Room doors. We walked adjacent to the Rose Garden in time-honored fashion, approaching the rope line behind which we would stand and watch Biden take off in the presidential helicopter.

As I walked down the sidewalk toward the rope line, I glanced to my right, as did a few other photographers. We saw the president with service members, spouses and their children in the Rose Garden. This was quite by happenstance. It was unplanned. I know this because the Secret Service was telling us to stay put where we were, while Biden’s wranglers were trying to move us behind the rope line, out of sight of the president.

I listened to the guys who carry the guns and I stayed put. That’s when Biden walked toward me and presented me with a unique opportunity to get a photograph of him speaking with children. I tweeted out the photo a few minutes later:

More than two million people have seen this tweet, and more than 380,000 have interacted  with it. This is exactly why the president should want more interaction with the press and not less, as his inner circle preaches. 

It isn’t always about the questions or the answers. Sometimes it’s about seeing the president as a human being, and being able to relate to him. People want and need that. For some people, that feeling means more than the president’s policy decisions. More importantly, sometimes it will get voters to accept policy decisions they otherwise would oppose. People want to connect with their president and see him as human — as a part of their family or a friend. 

If the White House doesn’t humanize the president he’s seen as cold, aloof and uncaring. He’s going to get criticized either way; both Trump and Biden were praised and criticized for their interaction with children at the White House. But I guarantee you the American people have a strong need to identify with their president.

The Biden administration says he interacts too much with the press. Media critics denounce us for asking stupid, uninformed or meaningless questions — so why should we have access?

I don’t believe there are any bad questions. The story of the young reporter who asked a “stupid question” to former First Lady Betty Ford stands out. He asked her if her children had ever smoked pot. Most of the veteran reporters thought that was a stupid question until she answered: “Yes.” You never know what someone will say in answer to your question, so as the late, legendary Helen Thomas often reminded me, just ask the question. That way they cannot deny they’ve ever been asked it.

I may not like everything others ask, but it’s not my job to judge. My job is to find out what the president of the United States is doing. He wants to put his best foot forward and I want to see if he’s really doing what he claims he is. There is a natural tension there.

Trump responded by trying to kick out the press; he pulled my press pass, as well as Jim Acosta’s, and made it as uncomfortable as possible to be at the White House. Biden embraces the press, but is far more limited in his interactions with us — making him every bit as frustrating professionally as Donald Trump, although so far he’s been far less personally annoying.

But the honeymoon is indeed over. Press pundits and analysts are all talking about how badly Biden is doing. This is in large part because he doesn’t connect with people — because the White House staff doesn’t let him. His communications team strictly limits his appearances, and therefore the administration comes off as arrogant, elitist and controlling. The photo I tweeted and the responses to it show, without a doubt, that a lot of people want to respond to Joe Biden favorably.

A wrangler told me they don’t want me near the president. I responded that he always answers my questions when I am — and was told that’s exactly why they don’t want me there. The staff is afraid of what some of us will ask him, and what his responses will be. One byproduct of this that’s invisible from the outside is that by making the press pool and a few others feel special by their proximity and access, the Biden administration has been far more successful in stifling free speech than Trump ever was with his bullying.

Bullying is easy to fight back against. A smile, a warm embrace and a stiletto in the back is a little more difficult to counter.

Only 10 percent of voters, according to a recent CBS poll, can tell you what’s in the president’s Build Back Better agenda. Paid family leave? Child tax credits for the working class? Lower prescription drug prices? Few seem to know. That is also the byproduct of limited interaction with the public. While many Trumplicans would probably support a lot of Biden’s agenda, the president’s decline in popularity polls and the fact that many Americans don’t even know what he is actually proposing are contributing to a renewed interest in Donald Trump and what’s left of the Republican Party as we head into a crucial midterm election cycle.

“The best hope for the rational remnants of the GOP is for us to form an alliance with Democrats to defend American institutions,” write Miles Taylor and Christine Todd Whitman, both Republicans, in a guest essay for the New York Times. 

As it turns out, Republicans are better at messaging than Democrats — even when they support the Democrats.

The threat of fascism in this country has grown since Donald Trump’s loss last November. He has solidified a movement that sees itself as both victor and victim. 

And every single day, Joe Biden and the Democrats show they still have a long way to go in countering this slow-moving coup.

The “mystery” illnesses informed by culture

In late 2017, media reports began to appear about a real-life 9-year-old Sleeping Beauty. Sophie, an asylum seeker who lived in a small Swedish town, had slipped into something resembling a coma for more than a year. Though medical tests suggested she was healthy, she scarcely ever stirred beneath her pink blanket. A clear feeding tube snaked from her nose since she never awakened even to eat.

While her condition wasn’t novel — others refugees had reported similar symptoms prior — Sophie’s mysterious stasis helped launch neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan on a book-length reporting journey. She had already spent years seeing patients with symptoms and disabilities, from convulsions to leaden limbs, for which no clear biological cause could be found.

O’Sullivan had thought of such illnesses primarily as products of the mind’s effects on the body. Yet the Swedish outbreak of what doctors called “uppgivenhetssyndrom,” or “resignation syndrome” in English, prompted her to consider how profoundly social and community influences guided the disease process — which explained why uppgivenhetssyndrom primarily exists in Sweden’s refugee community. “That single extreme example,” O’Sullivan writes, “was the reminder I needed of just how much society and culture matter in the shaping of illness.”

In “The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness,” O’Sullivan invites readers to move beyond the Western concept of disease as a failure of individual biology. She crisscrosses the globe to investigate “culture-bound” syndromes that occur mostly within specific communities. Besides uppgivenhetssyndrom, O’Sullivan delves into poorly understood conditions like “grisi siknis” — hallucinations and convulsions that occur among the Miskito people of coastal Honduras and Nicaragua — and Havana syndrome, a pattern of dizziness and hearing impairment that first appeared five years ago among foreign diplomats stationed in Cuba. But “The Sleeping Beauties” is about something more fundamental: how humans unconsciously express their struggles in physical ways those around them will understand.

Despite the phrase “mystery illness” in her book’s title, O’Sullivan believes few such illnesses are as cryptic as they seem, so long as they’re assessed in the right cultural context. Swedish refugees like Sophie often have traumatic histories that instill what’s sometimes called learned helplessness — a sense they can do nothing about terrible events that befall them. Before escaping her home country in the former Soviet Union, Sophie saw her father taken by police and her mother beaten by men with connections to the mafia. When Sophie and other asylum seekers slipped into long stretches of unresponsiveness, O’Sullivan theorizes, they were embodying the hopelessness they felt in a way other refugee children also had, “unconsciously playing out a sick role that has entered the folklore of their small community.” Culturally influenced reactions like Sophie’s, O’Sullivan stresses, have nothing to do with fakery, but are very real, physical manifestations of distress.

Through the case studies she explores, O’Sullivan unpacks the complex process by which culturally influenced thought patterns and assumptions can alter behavior and even brain function itself, and how those changes, in turn, can further entrench symptoms. One of her patients, who struggled with a heavy college workload, had local doctors attribute her dizzy spells to blood pressure drops when she stood up — a verdict her family endorsed as clear evidence her illness was real. But when O’Sullivan tested the woman in her office, her blood pressure remained stable, even as she complained that her head was spinning.

She “believed that standing when she felt dizzy would inevitably lead to collapse,” O’Sullivan writes. “So, when she tried to stand, her expectations overwhelmed her nervous system and fulfilled her prophecy.” Likewise, among the Miskito people of Central America, the community narrative that grisi siknis causes convulsions can foster seizure-like activity in those with the condition — though with none of the brain activity associated with epileptic seizures.

Telling patients that community-driven expectations play into disease symptoms tends not to go over well, however. They feel as if doctors are telling them they’re making themselves sick, so they often go to great lengths to deny their symptoms have social origins. When O’Sullivan visited Sweden, a doctor there hoped she would supply a biological explanation for uppgivenhetssyndrom, just as some of her patients clamored to be told they had a “real” disease like epilepsy. Finding “an objective change on a blood test or scan,” O’Sullivan writes, “allows others to believe in the suffering.” But a search for such evidence might not be necessary, she thinks, if most doctors took cultural and social drivers of illness more seriously.

“The Sleeping Beauties” makes a major contribution in highlighting the mismatch between existing medical norms — which prize discrete evidence of physical disease — and the reality that illness is a complex entity with braided social, mental, and biological components. In exploring the many cultural lenses through which sickness can be viewed, O’Sullivan prompts readers to consider not just the origins of mystery illnesses, but the way social expectations shape everyone’s experiences of disease.

Someone in the United States or Europe, for instance, might believe depression arises from a serotonin imbalance that should be medicated, an assumption that’s normal in the culture they inhabit. But someone in another culture might see depression as a result of life events that they can confront and alter. O’Sullivan argues that this take can be just as helpful — if not more so in some cases — because it prompts people to define themselves not as victims, but as architects of their own growth and healing. She sometimes goes too far in bemoaning the perils of Westernized diagnosis, contending that “we make sick people” with our zeal for medicalized labels. Yet there is something refreshing, almost Jungian, in her recognition that other cultures may be better at understanding struggle or pain as possible routes to broadening human potential.

Though O’Sullivan is not a reporter by training, her storytelling chops shine throughout. In each location she visits, from Sweden and Texas to a former mining town in Kazakhstan, she patiently builds trust with families to understand what caused specific social contagions. She channels communities’ desperation as they grasp for answers, however unlikely. After a surge of Tourette-like tics among teens in Le Roy, New York, she writes, “somebody told reporters that, when the Jell-O factory was open, the creek that ran through the town used to change color according to the flavor being manufactured on any given day. Who knew what toxins had been left behind?”

She relays tense exchanges with a cinematic eye, as when she pushes back against the patient who’s convinced that her frequent blank spells mean she has epilepsy. And her descriptions of a young Swedish patient in prolonged sleep are both lyrical and chilling: “She looked serene, like the princess who had eaten the poisoned apple.”

To this day, some Swedish refugee children remain victims of uppgivenhetssyndrom — living reminders that we have a long way to go in untangling the complex snarl of factors that create illness. Yet as their families settle into new, safe surroundings, many of the children recover, emerging from their slumber months later to re-engage with their families and communities. “The Sleeping Beauties” makes the passionate case that embracing more inclusive definitions of disease — addressing its psychological and social causes with as much rigor as its physical ones — can help mystery illness sufferers reconnect with the world.

* * *

Elizabeth Svoboda is a science writer based in San Jose, California. Her most recent book for children is “The Life Heroic.”

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

The most powerful space telescope ever built will look back in time to the Dark Ages of the universe

Some have called NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope the “telescope that ate astronomy.” It is the most powerful space telescope ever built and a complex piece of mechanical origami that has pushed the limits of human engineering. On Dec. 18, 2021, after years of delays and billions of dollars in cost overruns, the telescope is scheduled to launch into orbit and usher in the next era of astronomy.

I’m an astronomer with a specialty in observational cosmology — I’ve been studying distant galaxies for 30 years. Some of the biggest unanswered questions about the universe relate to its early years just after the Big Bang. When did the first stars and galaxies form? Which came first, and why? I am incredibly excited that astronomers may soon uncover the story of how galaxies started because James Webb was built specifically to answer these very questions.

The ‘Dark Ages’ of the universe

Excellent evidence shows that the universe started with an event called the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, which left it in an ultra-hot, ultra-dense state. The universe immediately began expanding after the Big Bang, cooling as it did so. One second after the Big Bang, the universe was a hundred trillion miles across with an average temperature of an incredible 18 billion F (10 billion C). Around 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was 10 million light years across and the temperature had cooled to 5,500 F (3,000 C). If anyone had been there to see it at this point, the universe would have been glowing dull red like a giant heat lamp.

Throughout this time, space was filled with a smooth soup of high energy particles, radiation, hydrogen and helium. There was no structure. As the expanding universe became bigger and colder, the soup thinned out and everything faded to black. This was the start of what astronomers call the Dark Ages of the universe.

The soup of the Dark Ages was not perfectly uniform and due to gravity, tiny areas of gas began to clump together and become more dense. The smooth universe became lumpy and these small clumps of denser gas were seeds for the eventual formation of stars, galaxies and everything else in the universe.

Although there was nothing to see, the Dark Ages were an important phase in the evolution of the universe.

A diagram showing different wavelengths of light compared to size of normal objects.

Light from the early universe is in the infrared wavelength – meaning longer than red light – when it reaches Earth. Inductiveload/NASA via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Looking for the first light

The Dark Ages ended when gravity formed the first stars and galaxies that eventually began to emit the first light. Although astronomers don’t know when first light happened, the best guess is that it was several hundred million years after the Big Bang. Astronomers also don’t know whether stars or galaxies formed first.

Current theories based on how gravity forms structure in a universe dominated by dark matter suggest that small objects — like stars and star clusters — likely formed first and then later grew into dwarf galaxies and then larger galaxies like the Milky Way. These first stars in the universe were extreme objects compared to stars of today. They were a million times brighter but they lived very short lives. They burned hot and bright and when they died, they left behind black holes up to a hundred times the Sun’s mass, which might have acted as the seeds for galaxy formation.

Astronomers would love to study this fascinating and important era of the universe, but detecting first light is incredibly challenging. Compared to massive, bright galaxies of today, the first objects were very small and due to the constant expansion of the universe, they’re now tens of billions of light years away from Earth. Also, the earliest stars were surrounded by gas left over from their formation and this gas acted like fog that absorbed most of the light. It took several hundred million years for radiation to blast away the fog. This early light is very faint by the time it gets to Earth.

But this is not the only challenge.

As the universe expands, it continuously stretches the wavelength of light traveling through it. This is called redshift because it shifts light of shorter wavelengths — like blue or white light — to longer wavelengths like red or infrared light. Though not a perfect analogy, it is similar to how when a car drives past you, the pitch of any sounds it is making drops noticeably.

Similar to how a pitch of a sound drops if the source is moving away from you, the wavelength of light stretches due to the expansion of the universe.

By the time light emitted by an early star or galaxy 13 billion years ago reaches any telescope on Earth, it has been stretched by a factor of 10 by the expansion of the universe. It arrives as infrared light, meaning it has a wavelength longer than that of red light. To see first light, you have to be looking for infrared light.

Telescope as a time machine

Enter the James Webb Space Telescope.

Telescopes are like time machines. If an object is 10,000 light-years away, that means the light takes 10,000 years to reach Earth. So the further out in space astronomers look, the further back in time we are looking.

A large golden colored disc with a sensor in the middle and scientists standing below.

The James Webb Space Telescope was specifically designed to detect the oldest galaxies in the universe. NASA/JPL-Caltech, CC BY-SA

Engineers optimized James Webb for specifically detecting the faint infrared light of the earliest stars or galaxies. Compared to the Hubble Space Telescope, James Webb has a 15 times wider field of view on its camera, collects six times more light and its sensors are tuned to be most sensitive to infrared light.

The strategy will be to stare deeply at one patch of sky for a long time, collecting as much light and information from the most distant and oldest galaxies as possible. With this data, it may be possible to answer when and how the Dark Ages ended, but there are many other important discoveries to be made. For example, unraveling this story may also help explain the nature of dark matter, the mysterious form of matter that makes up about 80% of the mass of the universe.

James Webb is the most technically difficult mission NASA has ever attempted. But I think the scientific questions it may help answer will be worth every ounce of effort. I and other astronomers are waiting excitedly for the data to start coming back sometime in 2022.

A 4-ingredient marinade for always-tender flank steak

As the days get shorter and the evenings become distinctively crisp, my desire to cook outdoors on the grill tends to dwindle. Autumn, for me, spells the beginning of baking and braising season. A delicious steak, however, never goes out of season.

Broiling a well-marinated steak in a cast-iron skillet yields a pleasantly charred and surprisingly tender cut of beef, especially if you really lean into some of the cozier, more nuanced flavors of fall. My current go-to marinade for flank steak requires only four simple ingredients: chipotle chili powder, molasses, orange zest and a bottle of Guinness Draught Beer. 

Any dark stout would work here, but Guinness is an excellent choice because of its strong coffee, maltiness and cacao notes. The beer doesn’t just provide a flavor boost—it also helps tenderize what is typically a tougher, less expensive (aka the perfect weeknight) cut of steak. 

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The profile is brightened by the zest of an entire orange, which plays off the robust sweetness of the molasses and the deep, smoky spice of the ground chipotle chili powder. The end result is a subtle nod to the layered flavors of Mexican moles. 

Don’t forget to save the leftover orange to make a quick citrus vinaigrette. The finished steak pairs very nicely with a simple salad of avocado, bitter greens, pickled red onions and pumpkin seeds.

***

Recipe: 4-Ingredient Flank Steak Marinade

Serves 3-4 

Ingredients:

  • 1 bottle (11.2 ounces) of Guinness Draught Beer
  • Zest of one orange
  • 3 teaspoons of chipotle chili powder 
  • 2 tablespoons of molasses 
  • 1 1-pound flank steak, generously salted 

Directions:

1. In a large bowl, combine the Guinness, orange zest, chipotle chili powder and molasses. Mix until combined.  

2. Pour the marinade in a bowl with a cover or a large sealable plastic bag, followed by the flank steak. Make sure the steak is completely covered in the marinade, then place it in the refrigerator. Allow the steak to marinate for at least 30 minutes (though overnight is preferable). 

3. When you’re ready to cook the steak, remove it from the marinade and place it in a greased cast-iron skillet. Set your oven broiler to “high,” then place the skillet in the oven. Cook for 4 to 6 minutes; flip the steak and broil for another 4 to 6 minutes. 

5. The steak is done when the edges are charred and a little crispy. Cut against the grain and serve immediately. 

More easy marinades for easy weeknight dinners:

Justice Alito complains, but the evidence is clear: This Supreme Court was built by dark money

Justice Samuel Alito wants desperately for us to believe that everything is just fine at the Supreme Court. Indeed, in his view the court is a victim. 

Before an audience at Notre Dame on Sept. 30, Alito denounced “unprecedented efforts to intimidate the court.” He aimed his outrage at the media, at leading legal academics, and at people like me who are concerned about, as he put it, the Supreme Court “deciding important issues in a novel, secretive, improper way in the middle of the night, hidden from public view.”   

The problem for Justice Alito’s sense of grievance is that the evidence supports our concerns. Alito has participated in a pattern of decisions — like the court’s recent “shadow docket” ruling suspending abortion rights in our second-biggest state — that deliver wins for big Republican donors. Americans’ perception that the court lacks independence, and the court’s related drop in approval, doesn’t flow from some left-wing conspiracy. It’s a recognition that the evidence shows a pattern whenever certain interests come before the court. 

How strong a pattern? During Chief Justice John Roberts’ tenure, the Court has issued more than 80 partisan decisions, by either a 5-4 or 6-3 vote, involving big interests important to Republican Party major donors. Republican-appointed justices have handed wins to the donor interests in every single case. The decisions greenlit rampant voter suppression and bulk gerrymandering (Shelby County v. Holder and Husted v. Randolph Institute); closed courthouse doors to workers wronged by their employers (Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis); unleashed floods of dark money to corrupt our politics and foul our democracy (Citizens United v. FEC and Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta); and more. Eighty to zero is a pattern so strong that it could serve as compelling evidence in a trial alleging bias and discrimination.

This pattern did not just happen. It is the fruit of a half-century-long operation by right-wing donors to win through the Supreme Court what they can’t win through elected branches of government. In 1971, a corporate attorney from Virginia named Lewis Powell wrote a memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce laying out a game plan for corporations and right-wing ideologues to use “an activist-minded Supreme Court” as an “instrument for social, economic, and political change.” (Within months, Powell himself would be appointed by Richard Nixon to the court to advance the plan from within. His memo was never disclosed to the Senate.)

Powerful interests have a long, sordid history of “regulatory capture.” Volumes have been written on that history. For big donors, turning the techniques of regulatory capture to the Supreme Court was a short leap. Of course it can’t be obvious, so the court-capture operation would obscure its influence using front groups and anonymous secret funding. 

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The Federalist Society emerged as gatekeeper, monitoring Republican-appointed judges for allegiance to right-wing donor interests, while accepting gobs of anonymous donations. The Judicial Crisis Network and its offshoots sprang up as political attack dogs in the confirmation fights for Federalist Society-approved judges, funded by anonymous donations as big as $17 million. Other front groups groomed convenient plaintiffs to manufacture controversies to give the selected justices cases that would generate precedent favorable to donor interests. Secretly-funded groups also began to lobby the court in orchestrated flotillas — through so-called “friend of the court” briefs — signaling which cases are important to donor interests and advising judges which way the donors want them to rule. They have a perfect winning record.

All of this required boatloads of anonymous money; what people who study this clandestine activity call “dark money.” The Washington Post has exposed how the right-wing donor network spent upwards of $250 million in dark money on its judicial influence operation; testimony before my Senate Judiciary Courts Subcommittee has since upped that dark money figure to $400 million. Because the funding is covert, we do not know exactly who contributed that money or what interests they have before the court. But rarely do people spend $400 million for no reward.

The success of this operation is undeniable. And it is not legal conservatism at work. To reach the desired results, Republican justices often abandon the principles and doctrines of legal conservatism, like textualism and originalism. Take last term’s Americans for Prosperity Foundation decision, which created sweeping First Amendment protections for the funders behind dark-money political groups, like the Koch-backed plaintiff in the case. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in her dissent, the “decision discards decades of First Amendment jurisprudence” to produce a novel, activist creation in the law: constitutional protection for dark money. Good luck finding support for massive dark-money, special-interest spending in the debates at the Constitutional Convention.

Perhaps Justice Alito is so touchy because his fingerprints are all over this pattern of Republican judicial activism. Consider his decades-long judicial campaign against public sector unions, a prime political target of major Federalist Society donors like the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. In a series of cases over a few short years (Knox v. SEIU Local 100, Harris v. Quinn, and Janus v. AFSCME), Alito invited successive challenges to a bedrock 40-year-old precedent protecting unions. Anti-labor front groups with financial ties to the Federalist Society and Bradley Foundation eagerly rushed cases to the court tailored to that invitation, and Alito delivered new First Amendment rights to strike the precedent and gut the unions.  Textualist or originalist principles were nowhere to be found in his opinion.

If Alito and the Republican majority on the Supreme Court want the public to believe the court is not a secretive political “cabal” (his word) doing the bidding of big donors who helped put them there, they should deal with the evidence. Explain the 80-0 donor win record. Disclose who’s behind the dark-money briefs. Stop the special-interest fast lane around the “case or controversy” requirement. Report gifts and hospitality — not worse than the other branches of government do, but better. Take precedent seriously when it doesn’t suit you, not just when it does. Ditto recusal. Put yourself under a code of ethics, like every other federal judge. And understand that you have fouled your nest, not us, and that the Supreme Court must now at least match every other political institution with a renaissance of transparency. Democracy demands it. And the Court That Dark Money Built has squandered the benefit of the doubt.

CPAC set to stage far-right conference in Hungary, as federal prosecutors zero in

The American Conservative Union, the conservative grassroots organization that puts on the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, better known as CPAC, is taking its tested model for hosting right-wing gatherings to the authoritarian nation of Hungary. 

CPAC events have been held in various foreign countries over the years, but there is an unmistakable significance to staging one in the country ruled by right-wing despot Viktor Orbán, who has many fans among American conservatives and Trump supporters.

In a statement to Salon, CPAC’s acting communications director, Regina Bratton, acknowledged that the event is scheduled for late March of 2022 in Hungary, saying the organization hopes it will be a “huge success.”

“International CPAC in Tokyo” launched five years ago, Bratton said. “Since then, annual conferences have been added in Australia, Brazil and South Korea. There are plans for a CPAC Israel, and now organizers in Hungary who are passionate about protecting freedom have announced plans to host a future event,” she continued. “The battle for freedom is the same in America as it is around the world. It is a battle against socialism.” 

Yet CPAC organizers also appear to be distancing themselves somewhat from the Hungarian event, which Bratton later said in a phone interview was not “an official CPAC conference” and was not being “put on by our organization here in the Washington, D.C., metro area.” She described the sponsors of the Hungary conference as “an outside organization” comprised of “freedom-loving people” in that country. CPAC “was very happy the [Hungarian] government is allowing this to happen in their country,” Bratton said.

Asked about the relationship between the CPAC sponsors in Hungary and the American Conservative Union, Bratton was not specific, saying only, “I don’t believe they are a subsidiary of CPAC.”

Although the relationship between ACU and the Hungarian CPAC event remains unclear, a former ACU employee told Salon the attempt to draw a distinction was largely cosmetic, and that the Hungary gathering had been on the table since before the COVID pandemic. Another individual familiar with planning for the Hungary event told Salon that the ACU has been closely involved from the beginning. An ACU spokesperson declined to comment on these claims. 

News of the CPAC event in Hungary was first reported by a Hungarian news site called “24.hu,” which quoted ACU executive director Dan Schneider saying, “Hungary is an excellent place to host the CPAC. The essence of conservative ideology is to preserve the best old values ​​for everyone,” he said, but “liberals are destroying everything traditional with their ‘strange ideas.'”

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One former ACU chairman, Al Cardenas, told Salon he has no idea why the group is holding an event in Hungary, saying he hasn’t “heard of any reason” for the venture. 

Michael Edison Hayden, a spokesperson for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said he clearly saw a purpose behind the event. 

“It’s a threat,” he explained, adding that Orbán’s party, Fidesz, has “all but eliminated the free press, and have weakened democracy in that country to the point that it can’t even be considered a democracy anymore. There is no reason to bring [CPAC] to Hungary unless that is a clear statement that that’s what you want to do to the United States.” 

News of the Hungarian venture comes as ACU and its chairman, Matt Schlapp, reportedly find themselves targets of a federal probe. “Federal investigators are currently looking into possible criminal campaign-finance misdeeds at ACU during Schlapp’s tenure,” The Dispatch reported last week. “As part of the investigation, the FBI has interviewed former and current ACU employees about the financial dealings of the organization and its leaders.” 

When asked to comment on the reported investigation, Schlapp said he would respond with a statement. He did not do so before publication of this article. 

Timothy Snyder warned us fascism was coming — now he says we can survive it

One reason historians study the past is to better understand the present.

In his books, essays and public scholarship, historian Timothy Snyder has been conducting a master class on authoritarianism, neofascism, and the existential threat that Donald Trump and his movement represent to America’s multiracial democracy. Snyder, a professor at Yale, is the author of the bestselling books “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” “The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America” and “Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary.” His new book is “On Tyranny Graphic Edition,” an adaptation of his 2017 bestseller illustrated by Nora Krug. 

In a series of conversations at Salon, Snyder has repeatedly warned and predicted how Donald Trump’s regime, the Republican Party and their ascendant neofascist movement would threaten the foundations and future of American democracy. In May of 2017, he speculated on how quickly American democracy could begin to crumble in the face of this assault:

Nobody can be sure how long this particular regime change with Trump will take, but there is a clock, and the clock really is ticking. It’s three years on the outside, but in more likelihood something like a year. In January 2018 we will probably have a pretty good idea which way this thing is going. It’s going to depend more on us than on them in the meantime. Once you get past a certain threshold, it starts to depend more on them than on us, and then things are much, much worse. It makes me sad to think how Americans would behave at that point.

Several months later, Snyder said this about the precarious state of the rule of law under Trump:

I think the most predictable thing, because it does not have to do with legislation, was the moral effect that his presence would have.

This works three ways. It works by what Trump does and says. For example, the outrageous things he says about the press and his obsession with violence. It also works by the things he doesn’t say and the things he doesn’t condemn. “On the one hand and on the other hand” is a way to destroy values and virtues, because if the leader of the country does not have a firm opinion about good and evil then it becomes very hard for other people to have firm opinions about good and evil.

People who have opinions which are in fact absolutely evil are supported by this kind of relativism. With the attempted terrorist attacks, defacing the Holocaust Memorials, and defacing the Lincoln Memorial — which just happened, by the way — you are looking at the demoralization of a society.

The second big trend is that we are hanging by our teeth to the rule of law. That was my judgment at the beginning of his presidency and it is still my judgment now. The rule of law is what gives us a chance to rebuild the system after this is all done.

Snyder offered this warning several months before the Capitol assault on Jan. 6 of this year:

Obviously, we are in a slow-motion Reichstag Fire right now. That is what is happening. Donald Trump is not as skilled as Hitler. He doesn’t work as hard as Hitler. He doesn’t have the same level of confidence as Hitler, but he’s clearly looking for that Reichstag Fire emergency. Trump tried to make Black Lives Matter into that emergency. “Antifascists” and “thugs” and “law and order” and so on is part of that effort. Donald Trump keeps trying to make the Reichstag Fire work.

If Trump is not successful, then that is a credit to the people who are resisting. Donald Trump is not involved in a political campaign; it is emergency politics in the constant search of an emergency. Whether Trump and his allies can line up the emergency politics with the emergency, I do not know. But that is all that Trump and his allies have got on their side — and it is all they are going to have through to Election Day.

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party, the so-called resistance and other pro-democracy forces for the most part did not listen to Snyder and other experts’ warnings. Matters are even more dire now than they were on Jan. 6 when Trump and his followers attempted a coup. Democrats and pro-democracy forces are not acting with the urgency required to defeat the Republican-fascist movement, and continue to behave as though compromise and “bipartisanship” can somehow save American democracy and society.

In this new conversation, Snyder reflects on how and why America’s democracy crisis is getting worse, the seductive power of normalization and denial, and how Trump and the Republican-fascist movement have tried to capture and debase the concept of “freedom.”

Snyder also offers advice for how to resist the rising tide of fascism: Americans must create lighthouses of truth and democracy — which should include more local news media and other civil society institutions — that can help our fellow citizens become better informed and more responsible. Toward the end of this conversation, Snyder observes that America is in a moment of interregnum, a turning point in history where there are hopeful possibilities for the future, but also nightmarish potential outcomes as well.

This conversation has been edited, as usual, for clarity and length.

How are feeling now? How do you make sense of America’s escalating democracy crisis? You predicted more or less what would happen with Trump’s regime and the country’s path to autocracy. 

Normalization has no bottom. People can normalize just about anything. Many people who supported Trump back in 2016 would, back then, have pronounced themselves appalled by things that did in fact happen. But if you don’t make an active break, you will go along, right down through a coup attempt.

On the other side, for people who oppose Trump, the temptation is to think that problems can be solved in one stroke. They tell themselves, “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe some things did happen that were bad, but surely now we’ve taken some kind of turn.” Those who like Trump are still thinking about him all the time. And those who don’t have sometimes lost their focus since he left the White House.

And that is what is particularly frightening: there are structural changes underway that are more important than Trump. What’s most frightening about this moment is that unlike in 2016 — where there were America’s historic problems plus one person, Donald Trump — now there are those historical problems plus a coordinated, multi-layered effort to sabotage future elections.

America is in danger of drowning under a fascist tide. Should the American people try to float right now? Or do they need to learn to swim?

I believe we need to build a lighthouse. The very term “fascism” is also a kind of lighthouse, because it’s a concept. As soon as you say “fascism,” putting aside the question of how applicable it is, you’re saying this situation is something which has historical precedent. We have seen fascism all over the world. It is not a concept or situation that just emerged from nowhere. Ultimately, America needs more such lighthouses.

The lighthouse allows us to then say, “OK, there’s a rising tide. But look, there are rising tides everywhere. And come to think of it, when I look at my lighthouse records, we’ve seen rising tides in the past and here’s what they look like. Here’s how people have navigated them.” We also need to make the noise being caused by the rising tide into something comprehensible.

For example, the level of discourse is getting lower and lower on the side of those who support authoritarian politics. They are abandoning concepts in favor of noise and personal attacks. Some of those values are worth picking up. One of the most important values and concepts right now is freedom. The other side’s idea of freedom is so impoverished that it does not exist anymore: it is a cliché with no real content. Freedom for them just means being rolled by the waves. Freedom for them just means their impulses or whatever they’re feeling right now in the moment. On the left, people are shy of the word, but we need the word, and we need the value. We can’t do without the value.

Donald Trump represents a certain type of freedom. When I think of Trump and freedom, I see a man who is now an idea. What Trump represents is much bigger than one person. Trump is permission for his followers to engage in a perverse and vile type of “freedom” that represents the worst sort of human behavior. I see permission for freedom without responsibility. I see permission for violence. I see permission for destruction.

I always try to give credit where it’s due. Donald Trump is a very talented entertainer. Entertainment is a form of education. He’s setting an example, because he’s simultaneously an entertainer whose life seems to suggest that you can behave like him and then rise all the way to the top. It can all be shtick all the way down, nothing beyond the shtick.

But Trump’s behavior and life are not a useful lesson for people. Even if his behavior was not unethical and authoritarian, it’s also just not good life advice for most people to follow. Most people are not going to have Trump’s talent. They are also not going to have a fabulously wealthy father to save them from their bad choices. And just mathematically speaking, you can’t have a society where everyone survives by conning everyone else. 

What is the importance of corporeal politics as a form of resistance during this moment of crisis?

In my writing I have defined corporeal politics in a narrow way. This involves getting off the internet and doing something in the three-dimensional world. Make sure you take action with people who agree with you on some things but not on everything. Make sure that some of this action takes place outside. Make sure that you spend some time in places you hadn’t known with people you hadn’t known. A lot of this is about mood, about feeling better, about feeling more free.

I was also defining corporeal politics in terms of the mood change that you experience when you protest for something, or when you march for something. 

We feel like we are on the defensive all the time — because we in fact are. But when we take action with other people around, we not only feel better, we start to see the problems in different ways, more imaginatively. I am also really concerned about how freedom, as being enacted by and through our bodies, is being taken away.

I am not just thinking about women’s reproductive rights but also in the sense that when we are separated from one another by the internet or by the coronavirus or whatever it might be, it is harder for us to recognize one another as fellow citizens or fellow human beings. As a result, it is easier to fall into these traps caused by extreme political and other forms of polarization.

To my eyes, Joe Biden, the other leaders of the Democratic Party and too many other political and social elites are not acting with the “urgency of now.” They are literally saying that America is experiencing the greatest political crisis since the years before the Civil War — but where is the urgent action? What can history teach us here?

One of the things we can learn from history is that if a leader has a large parliamentary majority, like FDR did, then they can pass many more laws. If the Democrats had more votes in the Senate, very important legislation having to do with protecting elections and democracy would have already passed.

The elections are close to being a meta-issue here. The American people are much better than their electoral system. Our electoral system makes real policy very difficult.

Where I see Biden and the Democrats failing is that they are not using enough positive language about the future. In terms of fighting the rising tide you alluded to earlier, positive language about how America could be much better is essential.

The culture war is a way of keeping everyone stuck in the present, or in the past. The voter suppression and the memory laws and the obsession with “critical race theory” is, among other things, about fomenting culture war in time for 2022. You can’t win a culture war without a vision of a much better future. If the Democrats or other pro-democracy forces are trying to defend against the right wing and its culture-war tactics, then they are going to lose without such a vision.

One of the other problems I see with the Democrats and other pro-democracy forces also has to do with information and knowledge. We are in the middle of the largest Facebook scandal yet. All well and good. But how do we turn that around? The companies should be broken up. That is what antitrust is for. The algorithms should be opened up. You should be able to see your car’s engine and you should be able to see your kid’s school’s curriculum. You should also be able to see the software that is designed to run your emotions. 

The profits that social media make from polarizing us and making us stupid should be turned towards a project to recreate local news in United States. We need local news, news about people’s lives, to provide a cushion between everyday life and the global.  

We can do all the corporeal politics we want; we can get everything else right. But if people have no idea what’s actually happening in their daily lives, then their politics immediately jumps to the national or the international or the conspiratorial, and perhaps even the entirely fictional. That is where we are in America right now.

We’ve just raised a whole generation of Americans who lack local newspapers. Most of America is now a news desert. You cannot deny people factuality and then blame them for how they act and vote. We need to resuscitate factuality, as a value but also as part of daily life.

Texas has now empowered vigilantes to prevent women from exercising their reproductive rights. These plans are going to be copied nationwide in GOP-controlled areas. What is the role of legal vigilantism, and the rule of law more generally, in a failing democracy?

For me this is not so much vigilantism, although it is that, as a kind of planned anarchy. Rather than the state taking responsibility for the law, the state is marking out a policy line and inviting citizens to enforce it. This is how one party-states operate. It is characteristic of both fascist and communist regimes. The law exists, but power is not defined by the law. Instead, the party courts a certain kind of chaos. The leader sends a signal, and then sees how people respond. The result is that people take part in their own oppression.

If you oppress someone else because you believe the state has given you license to do so, you are saying that you too can be oppressed by another private citizen.

I receive many emails from people asking me about leaving the country because of Trump and his movement and everything that is happening. They are concerned about what to do, and when it might be too late to make that decision. What would you tell them?

I would tell them to have a valid passport and an actual plan. If you have a plan, then you can think sensibly about the moment. Beyond that answer I would have to know them personally.

Where are we in the story of America’s democracy crisis? Are we in the beginning of the story, the middle or something else? Finally, can this all be turned off or is the road ahead a function of path dependency?

History tells us that there are always more roads, for good or ill, than we can see at a given moment. We are close to a kind of managed democracy, brought either by “legal” changes at the state level, a dramatic repeated coup attempt in 2025 or likely a mixture of both. The scenario is right out there in the open, it is underway. But it is far from inevitable.

Defense is now played at a higher level than in 2016. There is more awareness of the need for structural changes. But above all, we need a sense of the future which is something better than an averted disaster. Without visions of a better future, it is hard to shake the sense that there is some kind of path dependency. Personally, I think there are much brighter versions of the future out there, alongside the much darker ones.

‘I hate blacks’: Federal judge silent about racist message from clerk who worked at right-wing group

Crystal Clanton had worked for the far-right student group Turning Point USA when, in late 2017, The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported that she had sent an overtly racist text to her co-workers. And now, according to Law.com, she is being hired as a clerk by a federal judge for the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals: William H. Pryor, Jr. , who hasn’t responded to inquiries about the controversial hire.

In 2017, Mayer reported that Clanton sent a text telling others in Turning Point USA, “I hate Black people. Like fuck them all.… I hate blacks. End of story.” Clanton served as Turning Point’s national field director.

Law.com’s Katheryn Hayes Tucker reports, “Pryor did not have an immediate response to messages October 8 seeking comment about the clerk and the vetting process used to choose clerks. Circuit Executive James Gerstenlauer also did not respond to messages October 8. Nor did the office that monitors the press e-mail account for the Eleventh Circuit. The clerk, Crystal Clanton, also could not be reached for comment.”

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On October 5, Above the Law published an article with the headline, “Law School Student Famous For Saying ‘I HATE BLACK PEOPLE’ Now Has Prestigious Federal Clerkship.”

“It’s not only the would-be law clerk herself that’s driving the controversy,” Tucker writes. “It’s the life-changing nature of federal clerkships for young lawyers, who typically go on to big law or the bench. That, plus whatever level of assistance clerks provide their bosses in writing opinions that make law and affect litigants.”

Capitol rioter tries to defend himself in court — and talks himself into two more felonies

When one Capitol rioter decided to self-represent in court, he was forewarned by the judge that testifying on his own behalf could result in additional charges and him being sent back to jail. Unfortunately for the defendant, the judge was correct.

According to WUSA-9, Brandon Fellows was sent back to jail after further incriminating himself when he testified before U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden.

Prior to Fellows’ testimony, McFadden made it clear that perjury —and possibly obstruction of justice— could lead to more problems than he was already facing. But despite the warning, Fellows was allowed to proceed. “Most people do not do this,” U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden told Fellows. “Obviously your attorney has discouraged this. I do not think this is a good idea… but I’m going to allow you to take the stand if you wish.”

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At his bond hearing on Tuesday, October 12, Fellows requested to call Cara Halverson, his former public defender, to the stand as a witness so he could explain a so-called legal loophole they discussed to have McFadden disqualified from overseeing the case. When that request was denied by the judge, Fellows rambled on as he detailed the legal advice he requested from Halverson about having McFadden removed; an action Halverson told him was illegal.

“Fellows said he asked Halverson if he should contact McFadden’s family as a means of disqualifying him from presiding over his case. He also said he had told Halverson – to her horror – about a previous occasion in which he’d intentionally put the phone number of another judge’s wife as his emergency contact in order to get a new judge. In that case, the judge was replaced with another.”

For nearly two hours, Fellows reportedly continued rambling as he shared his endless grievances about life behind bars. However, the turning point came when Assistant U.S. Attorney Mona Furst cross-examined Fellows.

WUSA-9 reports that Furst managed to get Fellows to admit – under oath – “that he had climbed into the Capitol through a broken window without police permission, that he had used the previous judge’s wife’s contact information to try to get him removed from the case and that he had missed court-ordered mental health and drug testing appointments.”

“Dopesick” is an ineffective prescription for telling the story of the opioid crisis

Perhaps the most effective props in “Dopesick” are the laminated illustrations of the Wong-Baker FACES Pain Rating Scale, friendly smiley faces that were originally created for use in pediatric medical settings. Reducing pain to a cartoon scale — with ratings falling between a green, grinning “No Pain” circle and a red, weeping “Worst Pain Possible” drawing — were a crucial part of Purdue Pharma’s plan to put a friendly face on its highly addictive painkiller OxyContin. When a doctor pulls one out to show a patient, that’s a warning flag that life for that person is about to get a whole lot worse. 

The pain rating scale’s frequent appearances also provide regular reminders of the moderate discomfort created by this viewing experience, but only in its most affecting scenes. In the main, watching the eight-episode limited series is numbing. That’s not a feeling a show like this should engender in viewers.

Anyone committed to watch “Dopesick” should expect a tough viewing experience, since it endeavors to show us how our opioid crisis came to be. But while Danny Strong’s adaptation of Beth Macy’s New York Times bestseller “Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America” provides an adequate explainer of the epidemic’s nascency, its hyperactive leapfrogging between 1986 and the early-to-mid aughts is needlessly baffling.

“Dopesick” debuts months after a U.S. bankruptcy judge approved Purdue’s plan to resolve thousands of opioid lawsuits by the Sackler family contributing about $4.5 billion of their own cash, selling their pharmaceutical holdings, and forfeiting their equity in Purdue.

In exchange, members of the family will receive lifetime immunity from civil lawsuits over their role in promoting and encouraging the accelerated usage of OxyContin.

Knowing this, this show should enrage you. But it never earns that mood spike, robbing the story of its potency and undercutting the excellent performances from a strong ensemble fronted by Michael Keaton and Rosario Dawson, Michael Stuhlbarg and Peter Sarsgaard, who co-starred in Hulu’s other star-studded and very important piece, the fictionalized 9/11 drama “The Looming Tower.”

The recent court decision conflicts with the vision of Strong and director Barry Levinson in “Dopesick,” in which the narrative places blame primarily on Richard Sackler (Stuhlbarg). Through the script and Stuhlbarg’s portrayal of Sackler as a cold, unfeeling, small man determined to leave a giant’s footprints in history, the series indicts Richard’s ravenous ego and insatiable need to eclipse his uncle Arthur’s legacy.

Stuhlbarg, a frequent player in prestige dramas like this one, plays the part well. He makes Richard’s perma-frown the first trait we notice, as he rehearses a speech in a dim room that begins, “The time has come to redefine the nature of pain.”

Even in those first moments with Richard, his strain to sound both charitable and serious allows us to understand that he’s not trying to palliate agony but create it (alongside with profits). And Stuhlbarg’s performance is convincingly chilly, despite the fact that he and the rest of the Sacklers are written like low-rent Bond villains.

Granted, this is not expressly Richard Sackler’s story. It’s also the tale of a determined DEA agent Bridget Meyer (Dawson) screaming into the wind as she tries to warn government officials about what Purdue is unleashing in small towns.

It’s also the story of a kind, attentive country doctor, Samuel Finnix (Keaton), who becomes one of Purdue’s earliest clients by prescribing the drug to injured coal miners in his Appalachian community — including a young woman named Betsy (Kaitlyn Dever) — and the boyish sales rep (Will Poulter) who gets him on the hook.

Floating between these two stories are Sarsgaard’s U.S. Attorney Rick Mountcastle and John Hoogenakker’s Randy Ramseyer, a pair of crusaders who join Meyer’s efforts well after she’s passed the point of absolute frustration.

Crafting “Dopesick” into an intriguing fictional narrative is no simple task, which is why the job fell to Strong, the guy who gave us “Recount” and later on, “Empire.” Purdue Pharma’s deliberately misleading branding of OxyContin is a story of massive malfeasance that exemplifies the coziness between multibillions corporations and federal government agencies that are supposed to protect everyday Americans. That requires significant explanations of how the law was bent or broken; and, on top of that, how it was artfully but simply circumvented in some cases.

Some of the most consequential turns in Purdue’s favor portrayed here are the result of someone at the Food & Drug Administration either failing to properly read proposed changes; or, more often than not, turning a blind eye to new information brought to their attention. Explaining the intricacies of these developments can bog down each episode’s movement, which is why Strong emphasizes the far more relatable irritation our intrepid agents experience when they’re intentionally stonewalled.

But it’s a mistake to shove at least three made-for-TV movie plots into a single limited series.

A couple of these arcs could stand on their own, especially the one anchored by Keaton’s sensitive performance and Dever’s raw, painful portrayal of a woman in a small town who, for so many reasons, never stood a chance.

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But we don’t spend enough time with these characters together, or separately, to wholly connect with their pain. As a result, the series never convincingly establishes why her attempts to nab Purdue destroy the personal life of Dawson’s DEA agent character.    

Indeed, none of the characters’ tales feel fully realized, or even complete, at the end of the seven episodes made available for review.  Since Strong’s script leans heavily on humanizing the toll this emergency is taking on every aspect of American life — save for the people profiting off it — that lack of substance ultimately defeats the story.

With the stylistic details lurk other annoyances, including the Hollywood trope of establishing coal country with a fiddle-heavy soundtrack, made keenly grating by placing it beside the lilting, antiseptic violin concertos that accompany each resplendent Sackler family shareholder meeting. Perhaps if the overall production were better, the musical cues wouldn’t even be noticeable; but as it is, they’re a distraction on top of multiple detractions.

The opioid epidemic wreaked by OxyContin is amply and ably covered in several non-fiction treatments, whether you seek it out by way of Frontline’s ongoing coverage, via a docuseries such as Alex Gibney’s excellent “Crime of the Century,” or otherwise. “Dopesick” could have provided a moving fictionalized alternative for people who don’t watch documentaries but still want to understand how these tiny pills came to be such a destructive force in modern society. Instead, we’re given a tragedy lacking adequate conflict and drama whose miserable ending is still playing out.

The first three episodes of “Dopesick” are currently streaming on Hulu.

Vast majority of Democratic voters prefer bigger social spending bill: poll

Despite the recent Congressional battle over how to pare down a $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill that would expand the United States’ social safety net, polling shows that Americans, especially rank-and-file Democrats, favor big investments in programs that would expand the social programs and climate change initiatives championed by progressives.

According to a CNN survey conducted by the SSRS Opinion Panel, at least 75% of Democratic voters would prefer Congress pass President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, while just 20% wanted to pare down the measures currently being debated.

It’s a stark rebuke of the prevailing narrative pushed by mainstream political pundits, many of whom have insisted for months that the lawmakers fighting to scale back spending — such as Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz. — had their thumb on the average Democratic voter.

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Republicans, of course, were generally against the measure — though just 55% of people who identified with the GOP said they would prefer the bill be scrapped entirely — while independents were split fairly evenly into thirds, with a plurality of 36% wanting the bill to be larger. 

The poll also showed in stark terms the messaging problems that have vexed Democratic efforts to expand the social safety net: just one-quarter of respondents said they personally believe they’ll benefit if Biden’s agenda is passed.

Whatever happens, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is insisting it’s got to be done quickly — she and other Democratic leaders say they’re aiming to land a deal by the end of October, which is when a temporary extension of highway and transit programs expires.

My love letter to Italian-American red sauce joints

I am a proud product of my Italian-American heritage. As I have noted umpteen times, there is almost nothing that brings me as much joy as the food of my family and one of my all-time favorite pastimes is going out to eat at a traditional Italian-American restaurant — or “red sauce joint,” as they’re called in my neck of the woods. 

To be clear, I’m not talking about a pizzeria or an Olive Garden or a Carrabba’s; I’m talking about a local, often family-owned, classic Italian-American spot that probably had red and white tablecloths and fiascos (those straw bottles) of the house red on each table decades ago. Maybe they even had some of those wonderful, hand-painted murals on the walls, too. 

When I’m in one of those restaurants, I’m positively enthralled by each aspect and while I essentially have a “standing order,” I don’t ever feel monotony or redundancy when it comes to these dinners. For me, there is no “genre” of restaurant more restorative, nostalgic or filling — both from a gustatory and emotional perspective. 

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I’d venture to say that I was born, raised and reared in the land of the RSJs (red sauce joints). There are truly an inordinate amount of Italian-American restaurants — plus pizzerias, Italian cafes and specialty shops — within a 10-mile radius of my home. I have probably enjoyed more RSJ meals than any other kind of dinner. It gets me literally every single time. I am somehow always looking forward to my next RSJ foray, without fail. 

As American Heritage notes, the original Italian-American eateries began to pop up in the early 1900s, primarily on the east coast. Many of these family-owned restaurants were the conduit for many of the traditionally recognizable Italian-American foods that are now cherished. In the late 1900s, an attempt toward reconceptualizing the understanding and general grasp of the widely varied “Italian food” — and an attempt at ‘rebranding it’ to become something healthier (think greens or grains instead of cheese-laden dishes). 

Nowadays, though, I’d venture to say that the 2021 comprehension of Italian-American food essentially boils down to the infamous “Why Not Both?” meme. It’s all so good, so why minimize or stereotype the food in any way? 

From minestrone and osso bucco to manicotti and gnocchi to chicken saltimbocca, caponata, penne alla vodka, and shrimp scampi — the amount of amazing dishes within Italian-American cuisine is incredible. 

As time went on, restaurants began to incorporate “finer ingredients” and dishes, such as high-end prosciutto, risotto, veal and elevated cuts of beef. Italian food was also considered more affordable and not as high falutin as other cuisines, which also helps in its preponderance and the continued openings of so many establishments throughout the 1900s. 

Soon after, more “elevated” Italian ingredients became paramount, such as specialty cheeses, truffles, balsamic, oils, and gelato, according to La Gazzetta Italiana.

The Ravioli House in WIldwood, New Jersey is the prime example of this type of establishment. It also boasts the best stuffed pastas and braciole I’ve ever enjoyed in my nearly thirty-three years. It is truly the flavor and aroma of my childhood summers and an establishment I hold in such incredibly high regard. At the same time, though, there are legions of Italian-American restaurants that dot the eastern seaboard and I’m sure each one is just as special to some other marinara fiend way out yonder. 

The Ravioli House has been a stalwart of the “Jersey Shore” restaurant scene for 50 years. As noted by The Press of Atlantic City, the restaurant is helmed by Theresa DeSanctis and her husband, the restaurant initially opened in 1970, before adding an Italian bakery adjacent to the building in 2000. Incredibly affordable, communal, and convivial, there is no better place to wind down after a day at the beach. All of the sauces and pastas are homemade. The restaurant is seasonal, though, and is usually open between May and September.

The Ravioli House truly encapsulates that “home away from home” type feeling. It is the pinnacle of Italian-American cuisine and an unparalleled beacon of childhood and Jersey Shore nostalgia. 

I grew up eating there in the summers, feasting to grotesque ends, feverishly eating their pristine homemade pasta and the most unbelievably sublime marinara (you must try it), ordering off the early-bird menu before trekking up the block towards the beach to “walk off” or fullness. My family and I ate so much that it may have been borderline masochistic, but the food was so damn good that it didn’t matter. 

Their sauce — astonishingly thick, rich and almost velvety —  is the distillation of what a “tomato” really is. It positively bathed every inch of their exceptionally fresh stuffed pastas, epitomizing “red sauce” to the fullest: unvarnished crimson, in perfect contrast with the crystalline white ceramic of their dinner plates and bowls. Their meatballs are some of the best I’ve ever had the privilege of eating. Their colorful, “old-school” placemats were made of paper, with illustrations of Italy and fun little coloring activities for the kiddies. 

Their salad is truly the epitome of no frills and they have a dessert cart that positively towers with every sweet Italian-American delight you can conjure — and then some. 

There’s a timelessness when you eat there. When I last visited in August 2019, it could’ve been 2005, or maybe 1992 or another year that predated my birth. It is home to a reassuring, comforting familiarity like nothing else from a culinary ethos and perspective: a family restaurant, conveniently nestled on the corner a few blocks from the ocean, a staple for shore-goers, and a space to relax, reinvigorate, and refuel after a day at the pool, beach, or bay, sunkissed and slightly sandy. 

Sometimes, my family would stay in Atlantic City and take the 45 minute trek over to WIldwood to eat at The Ravioli House. There was, and is, almost no experience that causes me such joy as those evenings did. Redolent of family, nostalgia, warmth, music, books, and lots and lots of laughter, food, and chatter (with some arguing sprinkled in here and there, of course), there is truly nothing like it. The moments of my childhood, my summers, my vacations — and they are firmly ensconced in the warmest, most cherished chambers of my memory

As noted by John Mariani in Saveur, “there’s a beauty and succor to Italian-American food, and it’s for a good reason that so many chefs have been returning to those classics recently, preparing them with a newfound zeal and sense of respect.” 

And that definitely sums it all up pretty darn well.

There’s also a certain spirit, a purity and overabundance that is native to Italian-Americans, from their food to the volume of their everyday speaking voices, which stirs a familiarity and a sense of nostalgia within me … a real abbondanza, if you will. And we have the Italian-American eateries of yore to thank for introducing these wonderful dishes and ingredients to our collective cultural consciousness and to that, I say “grazie mille.”

Some of our favorite Italian-American recipes:

Trump AG questioned by Jan. 6 panel about Trump’s crusade to overturn 2020 election

Jeffrey Rosen, the former acting attorney general under Donald Trump, reportedly appeared before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot on Wednesday to answer questions about his apparent role in beating back the former president’s failed bid to overturn the 2020 election. 

Rosen, who headed the Department of Justice during the final weeks of Trump’s presidency, reportedly played a key role in thwarting Trump and his allies from weaponizing the agency to their own advantage in the aftermath of Trump’s loss. 

He is the second DOJ official, just after his own former deputy, Richard Donoghue, to be questioned by the panel. 

Back in August, The New York Times reported on a number of Trump’s plans to wrest control of the agency, either by enlisting the support of Rosen or ousting him altogether. 

Throughout December, the former president worked with Jeffrey Clark, an attorney in the department’s civil division, to legitimize the notion that the 2020 election war was marred by widespread fraud. Trump asked Clark, for instance, to pressure Rosen to send a letter to Georgia’s leadership asking that the state’s legislature look into Trump’s election conspiracies. The letter falsely alleged that the Department of Justice was taking such conspiracies seriously. 

When Rosen refused to send the missive, Trump apparently conspired to replace Rosen with Clark, thinking that the latter would be far more sympathetic to his effort to overturn the election. At one point Trump reportedly sat Rosen and Clark next to each other in the Oval Office – in an “The Apprentice”-like fashion – and asked to make a case for themselves as to why they should helm the agency. Facing the threat of mass resignations from the DOJ’s top leadership in the case of Rosen’s ouster, Trump ultimately abandoned the plan. 

Clark is expected to be subpoenaed by the select committee as early as Wednesday, according to a Politico report. 

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Rosen’s slated appearance comes amid similar revelations stemming from the Senate Judiciary Committee, which last week released a report culminating a 9-month investigation into the above schemes. 

“President Trump’s efforts to enlist DOJ and its leadership in his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election were aided by numerous allies with clear ties to the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement and the January 6 insurrection,” the Senate report stated. 

Trump and his allies in Congress, the report added, “could effectively position themselves to overturn the presidential election results with cover from DOJ, asking DOJ to ‘just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the [Republican] Congressmen.'”

Clark and Rosen are just two of a cavalcade of characters expected to sit down with federal lawmakers over their apparent role in blocking or advancing Trump’s failed election crusade. Among those formally subpoenaed include former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, ex-social media czar Dan Scavino, Defense Department official Kash Patel and Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows. 

Trump has instructed all of his former aides to resist the subpoenas, casting doubt over whether any of them will be questioned. Democrats, meanwhile, have been strident in their threats to punish the group for non-compliance. 

“We are completely of one mind that if people refuse to respond to questions without justification that we will hold them in criminal contempt and refer them to the Justice Department,” Rep. Adam B. Schiff, D-Calif., a member of the Jan. 6 panel, said in a Tuesday interview with The Washington Post. 

Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., another member of the select committee, likewise called for fines and jail time for anyone that resisted the subpoenas — even threatening to deploy law enforcement if necessary. 

“We have engaged with a wide variety of law enforcement offices, including the U.S. Marshals, in order to issue the subpoenas,” Murphy said in an MSNBC interview. “We will use everything, as you said, with all due respect, we will use all of the agencies and all of the tools at our disposal to issue the subpoenas and enforce them.”

Republican Senate candidate gets booted from Ohio school board meeting

U.S. Senate candidate Josh Mandel was kicked out of a Cincinnati school board meeting after disrupting the event to “defend the moms and dads” against board members he said were “using kids as pawns in a political game.”

A video of the gauche display shows school board candidate Darbi Boddy giving Mandel a brief window to speak to parents and board members of the Lakota Local Schools District, southwest Ohio’s largest suburban school system, according to WCPO. 

In the video, Mandel opens by critiquing the district’s apparent failure to update the Ohio Checkbook, a digital financial record of each public institution in Ohio that was created during Mandel’s term as the state treasurer. 

Mandel is quickly asked by board president Kelley Casper to stop speaking, but the Ohio Republican refuses to step away from the microphone. “I’m just trying to stand up for kids,” Mandel says. 

In another video of the affair, Mandel takes aim at the district’s mask mandate, telling the school board that it’s “using kids as pawns in a political game.” He also railed against the district’s apparent effort to teach kids about gender identity, according to The Cincinnati Enquirer, later saying in an interview: “It is not the role of a school official or politician to tell moms and dads how to raise their kids.”

After a kerfuffle between board members about whether district’s bylaws allowed Mandel to speak in the first place, two deputies later approach Mandel and escort him out of the room. 

The Lakota school board’s bylaws reportedly grant their presiding officer the ability to remove “a disorderly person when that person’s conduct interferes with the orderly progress of the meeting.” However, this proviso didn’t stop Mandel from casting himself as a victim of censorship. 

“The school board was in total violation of their own rules and of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” Mandel told the Inquirer. “They should be ashamed of themselves.”

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“Josh Mandel wanted to speak at our school board meeting in support of the community and their children,” Boddy, who invited him onstage, echoed. “Unfortunately he was silenced by what I consider petty behavior by the board president and was not able to exercise his free speech.”

Douglas Horton, a Lakota Local Schools parent, however, suggested that Mandel was booted because “he knew nothing of Lakota.”

“In Lakota, we care about our schools, advocate for ourselves, and want nothing to do with the political jokes Mr. Mandel and some of our candidates for the Board are trying to play,” Horton said in a Monday statement. 

Mandel is currently running as a candidate to replace Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who in January announced that he would not be seeking re-election. Mandel previously made an unsuccessful bid to oust Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown in the 2012 U.S. Senate election. 

Throughout most recent his campaign trail, Mandel has shown a particular predilection for spouting for right-wing disinformation and fanning the flames of the culture war. 

Back in June, Mandel made headlines for posting a widely panned video of himself lighting a mask on fire and tweeting, “FREEDOM.” And in March, the Senate candidate tweeted a poll, later removed by Twitter, asking his followers which group will commit more crimes between “Muslim Terrorists” and “Mexican Gangbangers.”

The “Only Murders in the Building” stunt double gag isn’t just hilarious, it’s subversive justice

Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building” already had a killer cast going for it, pairing industry veterans Steve Martin and Martin Short with Selena Gomez playing three nosy neighbors trying to solve a murder mystery in their luxury New York City apartment building. The show even boasts big names with its guest appearances, ranging from Tina Fey and Sting as himself to Twitter sensation and “Daily Show” correspondent Jaboukie Young-White as a podcast fan.

But the series outdoes itself with its latest familiar face: Jane Lynch. 

It’s not just that Lynch is a fantastic comedian — which she is — but it’s who she plays and how she plays them that elevates her always welcome presence into comedy gold. In the episode “Double Time,” Charles Haden-Savage (Martin), who played a cop on the show “Brazzos” 30 years ago, reveals that he’s still in touch with his stunt double who is, yep, played by none other than Jane Lynch.

Enter Saz (Lynch), who just happens to be wearing what could be considered classic Charles attire, down to the pork pie hat. When the two reunite, it’s like looking into a funhouse mirror, with all the elements similar enough but just off. The series fully embraces the gag with multiple people — such as Charles’ true crime podcast partners Oliver (Short) and Mabel (Gomez) — mistaking Saz for Charles initially, until seeing the two together.

“What is this, ‘Face/Off’?!” wails Oliver after doing a double take.

The gag doesn’t end there. Saz, an electric queer woman whose charisma is undeniable, reveals that doubling for Charles wasn’t confined to stunt work. Apparently their build is so similar to each other’s (and Tilda Swinton’s!) that Saz also doubled for Charles’ hot tub scenes and sex scenes . . . because his hip motions weren’t “natural.”

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The ultimate way that Saz replaced Charles? She stole his girlfriend Cookie back in the day. Ouch.

In this episode, the tensions and anxieties that often accompany murder mysteries are relieved by Lynch’s comic relief and the joy of seeing a female stunt double for Charles. Despite the many ways that Saz has shown herself to be a better Charles than Charles himself, the two have a palpably warm and familiar chemistry.

While “Only Murders” doesn’t wade into the politics of gender and stunt doubling — beyond Mabel calling the arrangement “pretty progressive for the early ’90s” — we can’t help but celebrate Saz’s calling in the context of rampant sexism in Hollywood’s stunt work industry. The Saz-Charles dynamic subverts a widespread problem among stunt work known as “wigging”: male stuntmen donning wigs and women’s clothes to perform stunts for actresses, even though female stunt workers are more than qualified to perform these jobs.

In 2017, a stuntwoman named Deven MacNair filed a lawsuit against a production company and the Screen Actors Guild to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after a wigging incident on set at “The Domestics” in 2016. MacNair had believed that she would be performing a car stunt for actor Kate Bosworth in the movie. Instead, stunt coordinator Nick Gillard, known for his work on the “Star Wars” prequels, put on a wig and women’s clothes and did the stunt for her, citing safety reasons and how friends in the industry had told him he shouldn’t let MacNair “anywhere near” a car stunt. 

Following MacNair’s lawsuit, the Screen Actors Guild — American Federation of Television and Radio Artists launched an investigation into wigging cases, and concluded that wigging is “not acceptable and that this should not happen again.” Still, despite progress from this lawsuit, Hollywood’s four main stuntmen’s organizations have long histories of excluding women, and don’t even have female members. 

Only Murders in the BuildingJane Lynch as Saz and Martin Short as Oliver on “Only Murders in the Building” (Craig Blankenhorn/Hulu)

In “Only Murders in the Building,” Saz and Charles reflect the opposite of this problem. Instead, Charles reveals that he’d wanted to get rid of Saz after she started dating his girlfriend, but that Saz had become too indispensable and popular on the set of “Brazzos.” 

The two ultimately remained friends despite this conflict, as we see when Saz sits Charles down for a heart-to-heart. Charles’ self-loathing has sparked his irrational fear that Saz will take his new girlfriend too — mostly because he doesn’t believe he deserves to be happy.

“I know you, Charles. That’s why gender never prevented me from doubling for you — even in the hot tub and the sex scenes,” Saz says. “But one thing I could never get about you is how someone as wonderful as you could think so little of himself. I could never understand it.”

In “Only Murders,” through Saz and Charles’ relationship, we see the problem doesn’t lie in gender-bending in stunt double work. Rather, the controversy around wigging is about the prevalence of sexism and exclusion in stunt work, allowing male stunt workers to take work from equally qualified female stunt workers. Lynch as Saz has fun subverting this reality, reminding us real-life female stunt workers like Saz deserve all the opportunities in the world.

“Only Murders in the Building” releases new episodes Tuesdays on Hulu.

Merck’s new COVID-19 drug could be a pandemic “game-changer”

Imagine if an unvaccinated person with COVID-19 could go to the pharmacy and get a pill that could reduce their risk of dying from COVID-19 by 50 percent. This scenario could drastically reduce the number of needless COVID-19 mortalities, and it could become a reality as soon as 2022.

On Monday, pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. announced that it submitted its application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization of the first antiviral pill targeted to treat COVID-19. If approved, the pill — called molnupiravir — could be a major milestone in ending the pandemic as an effective at-home treatment option.

The concept behind the drug is that those with high-risk conditions could take the pill to prevent their COVID-19 case from worsening and progressing to hospitalization or death. According to an announcement by the company earlier this month, the results in its clinical trials cut hospitalization and death by 50 percent in patients who had at least one high-risk factor for COVID-19.

“More tools and treatments are urgently needed to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, which has become a leading cause of death and continues to profoundly affect patients, families, and societies and strain health care systems all around the world,” said Robert M. Davis, chief executive officer and president of Merck & Co. in a statement. “With these compelling results, we are optimistic that molnupiravir can become an important medicine as part of the global effort to fight the pandemic.”

Indeed, the pill’s clinical trial results are quite compelling, though they have yet to be peer-reviewed and published. According to the company’s news release, its late-stage clinical trial was so successful that it stopped enrolling subjects after discussions with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Based on the participants with available viral sequencing data (approximately 40% of participants), molnupiravir was consistently effective in treating the variants gamma, delta, and mu. Similarly, the side effects were comparable among patients who received the drug and those in a testing group who received a placebo pill. Merck has not publicly detailed the types of problems reported, but they will likely be an important part of the FDA’s review.

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The Phase 3 study enrolled more than 1,400 unvaccinated people who were at high risk of becoming seriously ill; risk factors included obesity, diabetes, or being over the age of 60. About half of those enrolled received an 800-milligram dose of molnupiravir twice a day for five days. The remainder of participants received a dummy pill. Treatment began within five days after the trial participant developed COVID-19. Only 28 of the 385 people who received the drug were hospitalized; 53 of the 377 subjects in the placebo group who were either hospitalized or died. Nobody who received molnupiravir within the 29 days died, while 8 people in the placebo group died.

The pill is part of a class of antiviral drugs called nucleosides, which stop a virus from replicating inside a person’s cells. This particular pill creates mutations in the part of the genetic code that is responsible for the virus replicating itself, causing the virus to eventually die out.

“That is what we term lethal mutagenesis,” Richard Plemper, a virologist at Georgia State University, recently explained to Nature. “The virus essentially mutates itself to death.”

As far as cost goes, it remains unclear how accessible such a treatment would be to the U.S. and the world. Assuming FDA authorization, the U.S. government has agreed to purchase enough of the pills to treat 1.7 million people at a price of roughly $700 for each course of treatment, according to AP News.

“We set that price before we had any data, so that’s just one contract,” said Dr. Nicholas Kartsonis, a senior vice president with Merck’s infectious disease unit, in an interview with AP News. “Obviously we’re going to be responsible about this and make this drug as accessible to as many people around the world as we can.”

The drug will likely be available as a prescription at pharmacies, and wouldn’t be prescribed for everyone at first— just those who are unvaccinated, and have at least one condition that puts them at a high risk of severe COVID-19.

The process for FDA approval for emergency use authorization will likely take weeks, but it could happen before the end of the year. Once it happens, it could be a game changer for the pandemic — particularly during the winter, as cases are expected to increase among the unvaccinated.

To date, the FDA has fully approved just one treatment for COVID-19, the antiviral remdesivir. However, unlike the pill pending authorization, remdesivir is administered via injection and has been found to shorten recovery time for hospitalized patients.

“If you can stop the virus before it makes someone very sick, then it’s a game-changer,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Program, said during a Facebook Q&A earlier this month.

Regardless, top U.S. health officials continue to advocate for vaccinations as the best way to protect against COVID-19.

“It’s much, much better to prevent yourself from getting infected than to have to treat an infection,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said last week.

However, nearly 68 million Americans are still unvaccinated. If approved, it will be key to preventing deaths and burdening hospitals with COVID-19 patients.

“The value here is that it’s a pill so you don’t have to deal with the infusion centers and all the factors around that,” Kartsonis, a senior vice president with Merck’s infectious disease unit, told AP News. “I think it’s a very powerful tool to add to the toolbox.”

Move over, Instant Pot: This kitchen gadget is the key to faster family dinner

Welcome to Kids & the Kitchen, our new landing pad for parents who love to cook. Head this way for kid-friendly recipes, helpful tips, and heartwarming stories galore — all from real-life parents and their little ones.

* * *

Halfway through 2020, that special parental year from hell, I purchased a high-speed blender after a late-night doom-scrolling session. Though I had publicly scoffed at the idea of “status” appliances — “No air fryer or Instant Pot will ever grace my kitchen,” I proclaimed — this pandemic purchase had me eating my words.

Overwhelmed and anxious, unenthused about the idea of cooking every single night, and perpetually strapped for time, I found the blender to be a dinnertime savior. Sure, it sounds obvious: Blenders are fast. But think outside the saucy, soupy box. Think: Dosas. Burgers. Potato pancakes. I’m now a blender evangelist. Here are all the ways this sucker will transform dinner for you and your kids.

Burger patties

Friday nights are for burgers and movies in my house. My daughter and I are vegetarian, which means we take our veggie burgers very seriously. Into the blender go parboiled, chopped sweet potato and canned chickpeas, or roasted, chopped beets and black beans with egg, panko, and spices, pulsed until they hold together. I shape the patties, then bake them at 425°F for 8 to 10 minutes on one side, and six on the other. I freeze the ones I don’t need, then load the ones I do on to buns with sliced veggies, aioli (also made in the blender!), and cheese. They are supremely satisfying.

Savory batters

Are you using your blender for enough savory suppers? Dosa, idli, and appam — some of my 9-year-old daughter’s Indian favorites — are on frequent rotation here. It’s a time-saver, and the rice-based batters result in A+ meals. My dosas are thin and crispy enough to rival any restaurant menu offering, and are ideal for little hands to dunk into coconut chutney or sambar. Ditto for pillowy idli and lacy appam.

Don’t forget about potato pancakes. (If Jacques Pépin says it’s OK to use a blender, it is.) I like to combine cooked Russet potatoes or sweet potatoes with salt, pepper and enough flour to pull it together, then add eggs to bind, for the fluffiest potato pancakes. (I sauté them in grapeseed oil over medium heat in a nonstick skillet) Serve with whipped butter and maple syrup for a breakfast-for-dinner situation, or top them with caramelized onions and roasted vegetables for a savory (and gluten-free) feast.

One more family favorite: socca (sort of a pizza’s chill sister). This summer, I incorporated balsamic caramelized onions into the batter and topped the flatbreads with jammy grape tomatoes, asparagus, arugula, and chive blossoms from my herb garden.

Soup in every season

High-speed blenders produce a silky texture that really can’t be beat. (I’m looking at you, slightly-less-beloved immersion blender). I lean on my trusty Vitamix when I want to make fast work of woodsy or earthy vegetables such as kale, asparagus and cauliflower. A house favorite? Parsnip soup, served with parsnip oven fries and tamarind chutney.

Condiments forever

You’re a parent. You’re going to have five bites of sausage, half a salmon fillet, a slab of fried tofu in your fridge, and you are going to need to feed yourself. So make sure you have decent condiments to slather your proteins with, so you can survive while not loathing life. I always have pesto and one or more varieties of chutney in the fridge: Mint-cilantro and tamarind-date are our favorites. All can be spooned over any protein.

And yes, sauces. Gotta have ’em. My child asks for pasta on the regular. It’s true that a good marinara sauce takes time to develop flavor, but lately we’ve been loving raw summer tomato sauce. It brightens up any bowl of noodles, and can also be used as the base for a speedy pita or naan pizza. (If your child is squicked out about the texture of certain foods, the blender can puree the heck out of carrots or eggplants or whatever typically earns a hairy eyeball.)

When I am really not turning on the stove, I look to my homemade nut butters. I’ll set out a grazing platter with crudité, fresh fruit, thick slices of sourdough, jam, pickled vegetables, and peanut butter. Nut butters like cashew and honey-roasted peanut take less than two minutes to blitz together at top speed.

It’s just a gadget with a plug, sure, but my blender eliminated my pandemic cooking burnout, radically changed how I cook, and even gave me more grace with which to parent. 2021 is as weird as 2020, but armed with my blender, I have got this.

Brett Favre owes Mississippi $828,000 for role in massive welfare fraud scheme, auditor says

NFL star Brett Favre may face a civil lawsuit if he fails to repay a $828,000 welfare provision he illegally collected from the Mississippi government, said Mississippi Auditor Shad White. 

Favre is just one of the many recipients that has over the past several years received millions of dollars as part of the state’s botched use of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a federal aid program designed to help needy families become self-sufficient. 

The state has since charged Mississippi Department of Human Services director John Davis with embezzlement for his role in allowing $77 million in TANF funds to be misspent, Mississippi Today reported. The majority of the misspending was reportedly conducted through various non-profit organizations, which are now being scrutinized by state auditors. 

Back in 2017 and 2018, Favre, a Mississippi native, reportedly received $1.1 million from two state non-profits for speaking engagements in which the former Green Bay Packers quarterback did not actually show up, according to state authorities. “Upon a cursory review of those dates, auditors were able to determine that the individual contracted did not speak nor was he present for those events,” a report by White read. 

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Favre, who has not been formally accused of any crime, has claimed that he was present for the engagements and that he was unaware of the money’s original source. 

By May of last year, White said that the football star had already returned $500,000 and agreed to pay the remainder in installments. 

“I have never received monies for obligations I didn’t meet. To reiterate Auditors White’s statement, I was unaware that the money being dispersed was paid for out of funds not intended for that purpose, and because of that I am refunding the full amount back to Mississippi,” the football star echoed in a tweet last year. 

But in a Thursday letter, White said that Favre will be subject to a lawsuit if he waits any longer than thirty days to repay the state $828,000 – a figure that represents the leftover $600,000 plus interest from earlier years.  

“After the initial media dustup, he stroked a check for $500 grand and gave a commitment, a voluntary commitment, to repay the rest in the coming months,” Logan Reeves, a spokesman for White, told AP News. “And then, that didn’t happen.”

Favre is not the only athlete who has been asked to repay money illegally allotted as part of the state’s sweeping embezzlement scheme. 

The Mississippi auditor also expects Ted DiBiase Jr., a former WWE wrestler, to recompense the state with $3.9 million in speaking fees, plus interest, according to Mississippi Today. DiBiase’s father, Ted DiBiase Sr., is likewise on the hook for $722,299 that his Christian ministry received. 

Others targeted include former football player Marcus Dupree ($789,534), John Davis’ nephew Austin Smith ($378,791), and Nancy New, a non-profit and private school operator whose son, Zach, must repay $74,261. 

Favre is the only one named in the audit who has so far repaid or at least promised to repay the state

Texas agency removes site with suicide hotline for LGBTQ youth after Abbott opponent complains

A Texas state agency removed a website that listed a suicide hotline and resources for LGBTQ youth after a far-right Republican who is challenging Gov. Greg Abbott accused his administration of spreading “transgender ideology.”

Don Huffines, a former state senator who plans to run against Abbott in the 2022 Republican primary, posted a video to Twitter in August criticizing the governor over a webpage for the Texas Youth Connection, a division of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. The page provided a number for a suicide prevention hotline and other resources to help LGBTQ kids under a section labeled “Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation.”

Huffines in the video accused Abbott appointees of publishing “very disturbing information.”

“They are promoting transgender sexual policies to Texas youth,” he claimed. “These are not Texas values, these are not Republican values,” he added. “But these are obviously Greg Abbott’s values.”

Just hours after the video was posted, the Department of Family and Protective Services removed the page and later took down the entire website for the Texas Youth Connection, according to the Houston Chronicle.

“The Texas Youth Connection website has been temporarily disabled for a comprehensive review of its content,” the page now says. “This is being done to ensure that its information, resources, and referrals are current.”

Emails obtained by the Chronicle show that department employees scrambled to take down the page in direct response to Huffines’ criticism.

“FYI. This is starting to blow up on Twitter,” Marissa Gonzales, the agency’s media relations director, said in an email to agency spokesman Patrick Crimmins just 13 minutes after Huffines’ video was posted. “Don Huffines video accusing Gov/DFPS of pushing liberal transgender agenda,” the email subject line read.

Crimmins forwarded the email to Darrell Azar, the agency’s web director, writing, “please note we may need to take that page down, or somehow revise content.”

Azar explained that the page was up to primarily support teenagers who are placed in foster care by the state and has included “content related to LGBTQ for as long as I can remember.”

The webpage was taken down shortly after that exchange. Crimmins told the Chronicle that the agency’s review is “still ongoing.”

Huffines took credit for the removal.

“We aren’t surprised that state employees who are loyal to Greg Abbott had to scramble after we called their perverse actions out,” he told the Chronicle. “I promised Texans I would get rid of that website and I kept that promise.”

Ricardo Martinez, who heads the LGBTQ advocacy group Equality Texas, told the outlet that the move put young people in danger, noting that LGBTQ youth in foster care are three times more likely to report attempting suicide than those not in the system.

“The state is responsible for these kids’ lives, yet it intentionally removed a way for them to find help when they need it the most,” he said. “This action is unconscionable, and it reminds us that political aspirations are part of every attack on LGBTQ+ kids in Texas, including the fabricated debates and dozens of anti-transgender bills targeting them this year. These precious kids deserve so much better than the way this state is treating them.”

All 13 Democratic state senators sent a letter to Abbott and other state officials on Tuesday calling for them to restore the website.

“As leaders of our state, we must do more to protect our most vulnerable populations, including ensuring life-saving resources such as crisis lines and legal help are easy to access,” the letter said.

Huffines previously pressed Abbott to support a bill to ban medication and procedures “for the purpose of gender transitioning or gender reassignment.” The bill was voted down and Abbott did not call for the legislature to take it up again, but in August he asked the Department for Family and Protective Services to determine whether gender reassignment surgery “constitutes child abuse.” LGBTQ advocates accused Abbott of targeting a “healthcare practice that doesn’t exist, in his continued attempt to incite fear around vulnerable transgender children,” arguing that surgery is rarely performed on minors.

Abbott last month also pushed the legislature to pass a bill restricting transgender children from playing on school sports teams that match their gender identity, after being pressured on the issue by from Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a far-right Republican.

The state legislature has considered more than 50 bills this year targeting LGBTQ youth, according to Equality Texas.

Democrats accused Abbott of attacking LGBTQ children and teenagers for political points.

“Texas Republicans are so scared of their right wing primary opponents that even the supposedly ‘reasonable’ ones become them anyways,” state Rep. Erin Zwiener said on Twitter.

“Greg Abbott is so scared of losing his primary, he’s sabotaging an LGBTQ youth suicide prevention hotline to kowtow his extremist base,” tweeted former HUD Secretary Julian Castro, who is also the former mayor of San Antonio. “Just disgusting.”

This company’s oat milk flour is gaining a big following — and it it helps fight food waste, too

“Dregs” is such an unappealing word. But the dregs are exactly what Renewal Mill prizes. This Oakland, California–based business is all about upcycling and repurposing food by-products from waste streams; a rescue mission, if you will, that starts with the smallest scrap of food not going into the garbage.

One and a half billion tons of food waste are generated globally annually, enough to feed more than 2 billion people each year. But when Claire Schlemme co-founded Boston’s first organic juice company, Mother Juice, in 2012, this fact wasn’t even on her radar. Schlemme, who studied environmental management at Yale, swiftly found herself face-to-face with mountains of fruit and vegetable pulp. “Nutrition was going to waste in all of that pulp — we did our best to repurpose into muffins, and even sold the scraps to different outlets, but it was outside the core of what we were building,” she says.

In the summer of 2018, the year Renewal Mill began, Schlemme met Caroline Cotto in a canoe in Minneapolis during a food conference. A nutrition and human-health worker from Washington, D.C., Cotto spent time as an intern for Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative at the White House. Paddling together in the middle of a Midwestern lake, the women knew they shared the same vision: Saving food meant feeding people. Today, they are leading the charge to repurpose ingredients like okara, aka soy pulp or tofu dregs, and oat milk pulp, turning them into climate-change-fighting, gluten-free flours. (Their first ingredient was accidentally gluten-free, and they decided to build the rest of their portfolio that way.)

The first of Renewal Mill’s products came from a meeting with Minh Tsai of Hodo Foods, a soy product producer in Oakland that makes tofu and yuba — but only 40% of the soybean mass was making it into their final products. “That meant 60% didn’t have a home,” says Schlemme, who was intent on finding a use for it. Okara is the sediment left over after puréeing soybeans to make soy milk, and it is very perishable. It’s often found in the foods of Japan, Korea, and China. In Japan, unohana, or sautéed okara, is a traditional dish that’s simmered in soy sauce and mirin with shiitake mushrooms, seasonal vegetables (like carrots and burdock root), and seaweed — and is, for lack of a better word, pulpy. It’s often served as an otoshi, a free starter that comes with your first drink in an izakaya; but outside of these cuisines and regions, okara is widely used as livestock feed, or in fertilizer and compost, for its rich nitrogen content.

In Japanese, the word mottainai implies regret over wasting any part of a piece of food — even if it’s not the part one normally eats. Okara is two-thirds fiber, and holds a hefty amount of protein. Renewal Mill dehydrates and mills these dregs to make a grain-free flour that’s shelf-stable and works well as a 1:1 substitute for coconut flour (as it’s similar in absorption and texture). The company says their okara flour can be subbed for around 15% of all-purpose or other flour in a recipe, but can differ based on each recipe.

With a very neutral flavor, the okara flour is able to step into the background, while giving an unassuming nutrient boost. And it’s easier on the environment, as per a life cycle assessment (LCA) analysis of Renewal Mill’s ingredients compared to more traditional flours like wheat and rice. “Our flour has 40% of the carbon footprint,” says Schlemme. And 50% of a soybean’s carbon footprint comes from growing it in the first place, so why waste that?

Schlemme and Cotto knew it was scientifically viable; they just needed help convincing the culinary world. For this, they enlisted famed cookbook author Alice Medrich, who had recently published her cookbook “Flavor Flours,” which highlights wheat-flour alternatives like rice, oat, corn, sorghum, teff, and more. “Upcycled flour is a whole new and exciting frontier. This is part of the future,” says Medrich.

Medrich created a line of ready-to-bake mixes for Renewal Mill that are as simple as “just add oil and water.” She began with the classics: chocolate chip, sugar, and snickerdoodle cookies, and brownie mixes (all which happened to be vegan, too). “Baking mixes give a first step to the final product,” says Schlemme. In playing around with the products, Medrich was inspired by how the high fiber content of the flour absorbed water so quickly that it translated into a fluffier texture than other gluten-free flours, which often compact the crumb.

Okara flour isn’t just for sweet baking applications. Medrich has also played around with savory breads, crackers, naan, pancakes, and even pizza dough. She finds the flour adds a subtle umami-like richness. “The quality of gluten-free baking improved once real chefs and pastry chefs got involved with what used to be called ‘alternative’ flours. I want to see that happen with upcycled flours as well,” says Medrich.

Other bakers, such as Joanne Chang of Flour Bakery in Boston, who often experiments with gluten-free baking, have considered adding okara flour treats to their menus, as well. Chang and her executive pastry chef, Jessica Morris, have been testing the possibility of using the flour in their flourless brownies, or even their vegan chocolate cake. “The idea of adding protein and fiber is great,” says Morris, who notes that the higher absorption rate of okara flour just takes some testing and tasting to adjust for the liquid in recipes. Renewal Mill also worked with Tia Lupita, a San Francisco–based Mexican food company, to incorporate okara into their grain-free tortillas and chips.

Riding on the massive success of oat milk, Renewal Mill has also seen a big following for its oat milk flour. Though it’s similar in taste and texture to regular oat flour (which is made from ground oats), it is much thirstier in formulation — and doesn’t have a direct 1:1 substitution like okara with coconut; Medrich suggests it’s best to start by subbing in 25%, and work from there. Now, Renewal Mill says top oat milk companies are clamoring to partner with them. “The oat milk flour is really unique, to be honest,” says Cotto. “It’s around 50% protein — or 31 grams of protein per 1/2 cup — which makes it more akin to something like a pea, pumpkin seed, or sunflower seed protein than another flour in the baking aisle.”

“The alt/gluten-free segment of the flour market is growing fastest,” adds Cotto, “It’s not a second-tier choice anymore.” And while both of Renewal Mill’s flours fight climate change and global food loss by turning by-products into healthy ingredients and premium plant-based pantry staples, it’s Renewal Mill’s community that may be even more important. Schlemme and Cotto also helped start an Upcycle Food Association, which “supports research initiatives that help to understand how to leverage upcycled food to maximize food waste reduction.” It has grown from nine companies to more than 200 worldwide, and is building a more sustainable food system for the future — creating a production certification program that launched on Earth Day. Whole Foods named this movement as a top 10 trend for 2021. As Cotto adds, “when consumers see the seal, it helps fight food waste — and doesn’t waste time to let them know they’re cooking with something good for them, and the environment.”

Jon Gruden’s censorship: Why conservatives decry the consequences of free speech

As soon as it was announced that Jon Gruden was stepping down from his role as the coach of the Las Vegas Raiders, the right-wing punditry exploded in outrage over the only oppression they’ll accept as legitimate: The supposed victimhood of a bigot held accountable for the ugly things he says.

The whole thing started when a review of alleged workplace misconduct at the Washington Football Team, ordered by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, turned up an email in which Gruden, then a television analyst, made fun of the head of the players’ union, DeMaurice Smith. “Dumboriss Smith has lips the size of michellin tires,” Gruden wrote in an email to Bruce Allen, who was then the president of a team whose name was a flat-out racial slur. Soon a bevy of reports about gross stuff Gruden wrote in emails came out, including mocking female referees, snarling about the league hiring “queers,” and grousing that players who protest racist police violence should be fired.

Gruden employed what writer Jamelle Bouie has mocked as the “racist bones” defense. The sheer amount of garbage that poured out of his keyboard, however, made it quite clear that Gruden could not continue to be in a high-level management position. Being the boss means being able to plausibly project the persona of respect for the people who work under you. Gruden can never do that again. 

But, of course, in right-wing circles, Gruden’s just another noble martyr sacrificed to the supposedly draconian demands of “cancel culture.”

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Conservative pundits downplayed the content of Gruden’s writings as “off-color” or “an opinion that wasn’t PC.” Talk show host Charlie Kirk cast Gruden as the real victim of discrimination, insisting that he is targeted because he’s “a white, Catholic, conservative male.” Steven Crowder, another right-wing talker, declared, “nothing that I have read here is offensive or fireable.” Unfortunately, this gambit got a lift from the euphemism-heavy coverage offered by the New York Times, which mostly avoided direct quotes in favor of vague descriptions, allowing the whiners a bit of wiggle room to pretend that the emails weren’t so bad. 

But really, all of this supposed concern for “free speech” and consequence-free bigotry is in clear bad faith. The same conservatives who are wringing their hands because a rich coach got an early retirement also back a national movement to suppress genuine free speech and vigorous, challenging discourse in education. It’s just that the opinions, facts, and ideas they want to censor are ones that support an egalitarian ideology. In other words, the right isn’t for free speech. They just want a world where it’s safe for bigots — but not for anyone else.

 For over a year now, the right has been up in arms over what amounts to a conspiracy theory about something they call “critical race theory” being taught in public schools, though it’s hard to pin down what they seem to believe “critical race theory” even is. In reality, it’s an academic theory that is largely taught in law schools and other graduate-level courses, not in public schools or even really much at the undergraduate level. But almost no one in the right-wing paranoia class uses the term correctly, instead treating it as a catch-all scare term to fear-monger to conservative white people who don’t want their kids coming home with uncomfortable questions about the history of slavery or Jim Crow. 

This fake threat is being used for a very real campaign to eradicate educational materials or classroom lessons that might lead students to believe racism is bad. Across the country, Republican-led state legislatures started bringing up bills under the guise of banning “critical race theory” which are actually written quite broadly to make it difficult for educators to teach basic history lessons on slavery, segregation, and the civil rights movement. 

All of this has led to a national rush of book-banning and other censorship efforts in schools, largely focused on suppressing information about racism, but also spreading out towards efforts to muzzle information about sexuality or diverse sexual identities. 

“We’re seeing a real effort to stigmatize any works dealing with race in America or the experience of Black, Indigenous, or people of color,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, told Education Week. The excuse, she added, is always “critical race theory,” even though “these works have nothing to do with critical race theory.”

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The impacts are far more frightening than some wealthy white guy having to quit working a prestigious job to live a life of luxury. Amelia Nierenberg of the New York Times has a good rundown of some of the more alarming examples. For instance, Pennsylvania conservatives (temporarily) succeeded in banning books “told from the perspective of gay, Black and Latino children.” Jerry Craft, whose Newberry-winning book “New Kid” tells the story of a Black student trying to fit into a mostly-white school, was not only banned by a Texas school district but the author himself was stopped from coming to the school. And across the Midwest, conservatives are not only banning materials that educate kids about sex and sexual identity, but threatening to prosecute educators for “child porn” for having sex education materials. 

In one Missouri school district, a Black administrator was drummed out of her job by white parents who were furious that the school was teaching books that taught that racism was real, including “Ron’s Big Mission,” a story of a Black astronaut who had to overcome the racism of the 1950s to get an education. In a Georgia school district, Black students accused a group of white students of brandishing the Confederate flag while using racial slurs. But when students organized an anti-racist protest, the school punished the Black organizers.

Taken together, what becomes clear is that the right has no interest whatsoever in “free speech,” neither the legal definition of it (restrictions on government power of censorship) nor the more expansive discussion about what is and isn’t considered acceptable language in the workplace or public sphere. They just want a society where racists and other bigots can say whatever foul things they want with no pushback, while people who advocate for social justice — or just want to teach kids the truth about American history — are silenced.

The “cancel culture” crybabies are just thin-skinned bullies. They want to abuse other people freely, but lose their minds over any pushback, no matter how substantive it is — or how gentle it is. The histrionics over Jon Gruden are just more of the same, an effort to distract from the fact that the real censors in American culture are mostly on the right.  

The economic cost of Republican tantrums: GOP customers are chasing workers out of their jobs

The modern conservative movement that grew out of the Goldwater campaign in 1964 understood that the country was changing and that they could benefit from the cultural backlash that ensued. But they always knew they were playing with fire with their appeals to white nationalism and southern Lost Cause mythology as well _ they just thought they could control it. For a long time, they managed to more or less keep a lid on their crazies. 

By the time George W. Bush ran in 2000, the GOP establishment had largely outsourced their coarsest rhetoric to the hugely popular talk radio and congressional showboaters so they could run the presidential campaign as “compassionate conservatives” and pretend that their base wasn’t anything but either. They knew they were barely keeping the extremist genie in the bottle but they just stayed with the program. If all those years had taught them anything, it was that the Republican base was active and engaged when they were angry and resentful. But with the new media coming into its own and the radical right-wing feeling their power, it was only a matter of time before the base took things into their own hands.

The election of the first Black president broke it all wide open. And when that wild genie burst out of the bottle, the establishment pretty much gave up the ghost.

Backed by wealthy fanatics, the grassroots of the party grew more extreme, engaging in conspiracy theories and gobbling up radical propaganda, egged on by backbenchers in the congress who joined the movement (or cynically exploited it.) Most GOP elected officials knew the Tea Party was nonsense and that the anti-immigration militia groups were fools and that the right-wing media was becoming unhinged. But they had lost control. Donald Trump just hopped on board the crazy train as it pulled out of the station.

There’s no need to recite all the ways in which Trump made everything worse. We’ve all lived it. But it’s important to remember that it was preordained that at some point this strategy of always feeding their voters just enough red meat to keep them interested but never delivering on their implicit promise to redress their grievances would end badly. And so it has.

The right-wing is now completely running wild.

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The most obvious example is the January 6th insurrection but there is so much more going on. From the moment armed militants stormed state capitols to protest lockdowns and mask-wearing during the early months of the pandemic, members of the Republican base have been acting like a bunch of thugs, threatening politicians, non-partisan election officials, health care workers, airline employees, parents, teachers, store clerks, waiters and anyone else they come in contact with who follow the pandemic protocols. They are threatening school board members over mask-wearing, vaccine mandates, and the teaching of critical race theory (which they aren’t actually teaching.) This report from a school board official is representative of many such incidents:

Are all of these protests coming from Republican voters? No. But the Republican Party is the only institution that’s profiting from them. And it couldn’t be more cynical.

There has been some disagreement as to whether or not Republicans are consciously pushing vaccine and mask refusal among their followers. I think Crooked Media’s Brian Beutler set forth a convincing argument that they are. He asks if the anti-vax Republicans would take that position if Trump had been re-elected:

I think the answer … is self-evidently “no,” and if it’s no, then they are indeed spreading COVID to harm the incumbent, and to great effect. This is why the news that Biden would miss his July vaccination target was an applause line at CPAC, and Ron DeSantis is mum on vaccines, but loudly promotes monoclonal antibody therapy, and then blames Biden for not “end[ing] covid.” It’s why Murdoch-owned media is pro-vaccine in the United Kingdom, where the government is conservative, but is the most destructive source of vaccine disinformation here in the U.S. 

There might have been a time in the past when the GOP would take an active role in suppressing such a destructive impulse among their voters, if only for fear of electoral backlash from the majority. But they can’t control them so have decided to join them.

Over the years when Democrats promised to revive the economy after a Republican government ran it into the ground, as often happens, the GOP sets about sabotaging that recovery and then excoriates the Democrats for failing to live up to their promises. It’s a cynical trick but falls into the realm of hardball politics. What we are seeing now with the unleashing of the right-wing beast, the economic fallout is very different.

COVID has had a profound effect on the workplace, with working from home, virtual school, etc. But throughout the pandemic, frontline workers continued to go to work, often at real risk, to keep the country going. The government stepped in and helped with the big rescue package and unemployment insurance for those who couldn’t work during lockdowns and beyond. But something odd is happening now that the economy has opened back up and jobs are plentiful: a lot of people aren’t going back to work or are quitting, particularly in retail and hospitality jobs.

Many of them have probably decided to try their lot in other fields or have reassessed their place in the workforce. Plenty of parents are having so much trouble finding childcare that they simply can’t do it. But there is another big reason why people are quitting jobs that deal with the public: Their customers are treating them like dirt, Axios reported:

Aggressive and violent clashes between customers and service workers over COVID safety protocols over the past nearly two years have led to prison sentences, fines and deaths. Many workers say they’re simply not willing to put up with the abuse any longer — and their employers are often taking their side, even in industries that have long deferred to their customers. Businesses have shut down in support of their employees. Some industries have provided self defense classes and banded together on public awareness campaigns.

This is the same problem facing health care workers, election administrators, school board members, teachers and airline employees. These thuggish consumers are chasing them out of their jobs.

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And the GOP profits from this just as they profit from the anti-vax and mask protests. Creating the perception that Democrats are failing to fix the pandemic and the sluggish economy is their plan for 2022. But they might want to think about how that’s going to work out for them. These folks don’t like them any more than they like the Democrats. They’re ready to burn down both parties and I don’t think anyone’s going to like what’s going to take their place.

Republicans used to understand this. But they couldn’t help themselves and they let that genie get bigger and bigger until it just exploded out of its bottle. Now they can’t put it back in  — and I’m not sure they want to.