“Foundation”: An introduction to five major themes in the work of sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov

Based on the award-winning novels by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, the new Apple TV series “Foundation” follows a band of exiles on a mission to rebuild civilization after the fall of a galactic empire.

Asimov, for the uninitiated, is one of the most important figures in science fiction and is often regarded as one of the “big three” authors, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. Together they helped bring about the so-called “golden age” of science fiction in the mid-20th century.

As a writer, Asimov was remarkably prolific over his 50-year career. In that time he wrote 40 novels, 383 short stories and 280 non-fiction books. Once you finish watching “Foundation” you might want to delve into some of these. With such a vast body of work, it’s hard to capture it all in a single short article. So instead, here are some of the most important themes in his work to look out for when “Foundation” has given you the itch to discover more of his stories.

Sometimes, the rules don’t work

Asimov is perhaps most famous for his book “I, Robot” (1950), a collection of short stories that introduce us to Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics.” These are a set of rules designed to protect humans from harm and ensure peaceful coexistence between humans and machines:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Plus the zeroth law: “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.”

These laws have become so ubiquitous in science fiction over the years, you may have heard of them without realizing where they came from.

However, as the “I, Robot” stories go to show us, the Three Laws of Robotics don’t actually work. This is because any rule, when applied fully and to the letter, cannot ever work as intended in all cases.

A blurring of genres

One of the things that makes science fiction so compelling for its fans is the way that it can so seamlessly shift between genres, and incorporate many different ideas in a single form. Asimov was one of the first great proponents of this blurring of genres. This can be seen in early works such as “The Caves of Steel” (1953), which blends science fiction with the detective story.

Many of our most loved science fiction TV series owe a great deal to Asimov and his pioneering work blending genres. It’s thanks to him that we can now enjoy such madcap concepts as wild-west-in-space (“Firefly“) and the isolating madness of being trapped three million years in the future with only a robot, a hologram and a creature descended from a domestic cat for company (“Red Dwarf“).

Science is important

It may seem a strange thing to say about a science fiction writer, but Isaac Asimov did place great weight on the importance of science in his work. When he wasn’t writing award-winning short stories and novels, he published widely in the non-fiction scene, including the likes of Isaac Asimov’s “Guide to Earth and Space” (1991).

Of course, all this work in the realm of science fed into his fiction work too. His books abound with talk of quasars and quarks, and ponderings on the nature of the strong nuclear force. You’re also likely to find thinking about how such developments might impact upon society and what effect new technologies might have on the way we live our lives.

Sustainability, the environment and other problems

Asimov is perhaps underrated for his work in this area, but his 1974 Nebula Prize-winning novel “The Gods Themselves” gives a fascinating insight into a world of over-consumption, where the solution to the energy “problem” is to simply pump it in from elsewhere using a device known as an Electron Pump.

Unfortunately, the “elsewhere” in this case happens to be another dimension where a race of intelligent beings starts to suffer the consequences of a cooling universe. Meanwhile, it transpires that the device used to pump in the so-called “free” energy is also altering the laws of physics in our world as well – with the inevitable consequence that it will soon cause the sun to explode – and destroy Earth with it.

This is but one example of many in Asimov’s work where he warns against the dangers of hubris, and extrapolates real-world problems – and their perceived solutions – and takes them to their absurd and often terrifying conclusion.

Where next for humanity?

Of course, no discussion of Asimov would be complete without mention of his famous “Foundation” series, which features some of his most ambitious and important novels.

The series follows mathematician Hari Seldon and his followers as a galaxy-spanning empire goes into decline. Seldon has developed a theory of psychohistory, a mixture of history, sociology, and mathematical statistics, which he uses to make general predictions about the fate of future populations. While the decline of civilization is impossible to stop, Seldon devises a plan to deflect the onrushing events with incremental changes in the present which have big effects in the future, lessening the impact of the worse parts of his prediction.

What makes “Foundation” so compelling is just how familiar some of the themes feel even today, some 70 years after the first novel’s publication. Partly, this is due to Asimov’s deep understanding of science and the potential consequences of where certain technologies, and certain ideas, might lead. And, as you’ll discover as you delve into his vast back catalogue, in an age of climate crisis, global pandemics and sinister corporations, his warnings about the future of humanity are as pertinent as ever.

Mike Ryder, Teaching Fellow in Marketing, Lancaster University

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

Road to nowhere: Oklahoma’s Donald J. Trump Highway runs through the Dust Bowl

Chris Polansky got out of his van at the Love’s truck stop in Boise City, Oklahoma, to gas up. He’d been hiking and camping with his dog, Trout Fishing in America (“Trout, colloquially,” Polansky said). Polansky and Trout found themselves in the most remote corner of the Oklahoma Panhandle, a place where literal tumbleweeds roll down Main Street past the headquarters of No Man’s Land Beef Jerky.

Polansky heard a cop tell him to get back in the van. The officer had been following him without sirens or lights, and Polansky searched for his license. Polansky dutifully sported a facemask, even though Oklahoma’s laissez-faire attitude towards masking often devolves into outright hostility.

As Polansky watched the officer in his cruiser, he noticed something strange: the cop put his driver’s license in his lips as he wrote out a speeding ticket. The officer held Polansky’s license in his mouth for almost the entire duration of the traffic stop. He was aghast. The pandemic had just torn through a nearby meatpacking plant, but then again, this was rural Oklahoma.

“Of course,” Polansky thought to himself as the officer scribbled out a ticket.

One year after Polansky’s ticket, Boise City and surrounding Cimarron County made news around the world. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a ride-or-die Republican, signed legislation dedicating one nearby stretch of road as the President Donald J. Trump Highway, starting this Nov. 1.

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For State Sen. Nathan Dahm, the Panhandle is the perfect location for the Trump Highway. “Calls from the Panhandle were some of the loudest,” he told me in an email. “This was no surprise as Cimarron County had the highest percentage of votes for President Trump in Oklahoma and one of the highest in the nation. The woke left kicked and screamed and put up trigger warnings, but we’re thrilled the new highway signs will soon be raised.”

I half-expected parade preparations to be in full swing when I visited this summer. Not so. Mike Patel, staffing the night desk at the Townsman Motel, had never heard of the Trump Highway, but had a grim take on his adopted hometown. “The kids here, they leave for college, and they don’t come back,” he said. Boise City has been losing population since 1970.

Braving a storm that brought both hail and tumbleweeds, I walked from the Townsman down Main Street to find Tangee Cayton, a counselor at Boise City High School, who was selling fireworks out of the shell of a brick building. Cayton, like many folks in town, shrugged off questions about the highway. “It could bring tourists,” Cayton said. “But it could also bring haters.”

Many of the folks coming in and out of the store neither knew nor cared about the Trump Highway. Locals wanted to talk about anything other than the former president: How Amazon Prime was killing local business, how this hail might knock out the GPS system on a tractor, whether the new Mexican place in town was any good.

This surprised me. Cimarron County could very well be the most conservative county in the entire nation. In a statistic that resembles an election return from Russia, Trump captured 92% of the vote here. Joe Biden got a total of 70 votes in the entire county. Boise City’s High Plains conservatism makes for a colorful subject on cable television. CNN stopped in the Bluebonnet Cafe and reporter Gary Tuchman asked a packed restaurant to raise their hands if they thought it was a “good idea to take the vaccine,” to which he received blank stares. “What if President Trump was very robust and said ‘take the vaccine?'” Tuchman insisted.

A roomful of glares shot back at Tuchman, who then sat down and tried to press the issue with a group of men in hunter orange. “Trump’s a liberal New Yorker,” one said. “Why would we trust him?”

That comment touched on a streak of anti-urban bias that runs even deeper than Trumpism in this area of the country. Yes, you could shorthand it to libertarianism, but that implies a set of policy beliefs. What urban folks do not understand about a place like the Oklahoma Panhandle is that pessimism about social progress is rooted deeper than the prairie shortgrass.

There are historical reasons for this pessimism, as the Panhandle has seen its share of tragedy and farce. Those historical forces, however, have stemmed not from government intervention or liberal elites, but rather from a sort of wildcat capitalism that once brought the region to the brink of famine.

* * *

Boise City, which is closer to Denver than to the state capital in Oklahoma City, was founded in a swindle. In 1908, the Southwestern Immigration and Development Company published a brochure advertising 3,000 lots for sale in a town of paved roads, tree-lined streets and handsome buildings, supplied with water from an artesian well. The brochure claimed that “King Corn and King Cotton grow side by side, yielding in excess of forty-five bushels of corn and a bale of cotton per acre.”

By the force of American knowhow and bootstrapping, this Great American Desert would, the developers claimed, become the latest stage of Manifest Destiny. Only 30 years later, this area became the epicenter for what the environmental historian Donald Wooster has called “one of the three worst ecological blunders in history.”

Even before the coming of the Dust Bowl, however, there was trouble on the frontier. For starters, the folks at the Southwestern Immigration and Development Company did not have title to the thousands of lots they sold. Midwesterners who knew little of life in an arid land in the former Comanchería arrived to find they’d been scammed. There were no trees, no buildings, no paved roads and a dry riverbed. Contrary to the advertisement’s claims about King Cotton growing next to King Corn, no cotton could be grown in the Panhandle. Despite it all, the settlers took up the difficult task of breaking the land, making the thin soil produce wheat.

The region’s anti-government sentiments are rooted in the lawless origins of the place. The Oklahoma Panhandle had been ceded to the United States by Texas so that the Lone Star State could remain a slave state (the Missouri Compromise of 1820 prohibited slavery above 36.30 degrees north latitude). But the place was neither part of Kansas nor the Cherokee Nation. It was a place without a government, a Public Strip open to all sorts of bootleggers, swindlers, and outlaws.

Federal agents eventually arrested the leadership of the Southwestern Immigration and Development Company. Three men were charged with “grossly misrepresent[ing] the natural resources of Boise City and Cimarron County,” and sent to the federal penitentiary in Fort Leavenworth, although they were later pardoned by President William Howard Taft.

After its dubious beginnings, a brief period of prosperity ensued. In the 1910s and 1920s, the Panhandle became a wheat producer during “the Great Plow-Up” of the Plains. World War I caused the price of American wheat to double, and the government proclaimed that the key to winning the war was to plant more wheat. Little did the government know that it was planting the seeds for the region’s destruction.

On April 14, 1935, a darkness appeared on the horizon. Fluttering birds landed dead in yards. A “norther” picked up strength, turning dust particles into projectiles that felt like shards of glass on exposed skin. As cattle breathed in, their lungs filled with dust. At first, they lost their bearings and circled around, looking for water. Then they fell over, dead.

Swirling dust stripped cars of paint, felled trees and filled the intestines of livestock. Static turned people into electric livewires. Children died of dust pneumonia. By 1940, 43 percent of Cimarron County’s residents had fled. The capitalistic urge to break the land and squeeze profits from wheat farms with little precipitation had destroyed the natural vegetation that kept the thin topsoil in place. Once a drought hit, northern winds turned cold fronts into black blizzards.

Survivors’ stories are the thing of disaster movies. A child playing in the yard, lost in the blackness, wandered into a ditch and was suffocated by the dust. A woman whose car died in the static electricity of a dust storm pulled off the highway to seek help, only to become lost in dust so thick she could not see her hand in front of her face. In 1937, a reporter from Collier’s toured the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles to find, “famine, violent death, private and public futility, insanity and lost generations.”

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Today, the Dust Bowl is remembered as a terrible aberration that paired the dire economic conditions of the Depression with a rare drought. According to most environmental historians, however, it was a manmade ecological disaster that reflected an American desire to take risks, consume natural resources and ignore the advice of experts. An object lesson for our times of coronavirus and climate change if there ever was one.

I talked to a lot of Panhandlers about the Dust Bowl, and no one seemed to be drawing the same conclusions as the environmental historians who study it. Rather, people talked about the grit and resilience of their grandparents and great-grandparents, who stayed on while weak-kneed cowards fled to California. If there was a lesson to be learned about the Dust Bowl for them, it was this: Everyone lies, take what you can while you can and never, ever trust the government.

World War II brought one more indignity to Boise City. A B-17 Flying Fortress taking off from Texas mistook Boise City for a practice bombing range. The B-17 passed over the town several times, dropping a single bomb each time. Bombs nicked a Baptist church, crushed a garage and sent truckers fleeing out of town. A 1993 commemorative plaque proclaimed that, all those years later, the town was “still booming.”

Almost every conversation about Boise City’s precarious existence eventually turns, not to Trump’s highway, but to the neighboring town of Guymon, which is growing at the fastest clip since the pre-Dust Bowl days. Guymon’s revival began when Seaboard Foods built a pork processing plant there in 1996. (More recently, half the plant’s workers contracted COVID.)

Tangee Cayton recalled teaching students of dozens of nationalities, from Ethiopian to Guatemalan, in Guymon’s public schools. With a population of about 13,000, Guymon now has loft apartments and Latin-fusion restaurants; Boise City, with less than one-tenth that many residents, has No Man’s Land Beef Jerky and Cimmy, a life-size Apatosaurus of rusted iron. Cimmy, along with the World War II bombing plaque, make for eccentric roadside Americana, but there’s little hope for the long-term viability of the town.

Parker Furniture, across the street from Cayton’s fireworks stand, has been in business since the Panhandle’s halcyon days of the 1950s. Hank Hankla’s family ran the store, and young Hankla drove all over the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles delivering furniture or laying carpet for the family business. Hankla remembers Boise City as an all-American town with four baseball teams and a Juilliard-trained music teacher. The postwar years were full of promise, but the perils of life on the High Plains were inescapable.

“We had dust storms into the 1950s,” Hankla remembered. “That’s the first time I saw a person in a face mask.” Hankla recollected raising stakes on barbed-wire fences. If the tumbleweeds caught in the barbed-wire, dust piled up, burying houses. “You had to respect the dust,” he said.

In fact, Guymon’s resurgence worries many people in Boise City. Melissa McGaughy, a history teacher in the public schools, said there’s a segment of the population that would rather watch the town die than become a multicultural, multilingual community. She’d seen it happen before. One Panhandle school district recently closed, and there’s talk of another shutting down as well. With Oklahoma spending less per student and less on teacher pay than surrounding states, it’s hard to see how the pattern of decline can be reversed.

Boise City has much to recommend it: cheap real estate, virtually zero crime and a population willing to drop off a pot roast on the porch if someone catches COVID-19, which Melissa McGaughy did, twice. The first time felt like the flu, but the second bout landed her in the hospital. The town pharmacist delivered drugs to McGaughy’s door, and a stranger brought over a watermelon. McGaughy may not always see eye-to-eye with her neighbors, but she says many of them have been “wonderful” through the hard times. She also suspects that a lot more people have been vaccinated than Gary Tuchman’s video at the cafe, or even state health data, might suggest. “We don’t have a county health department, and that’s caused lots of issues,” she said.

None of those issues, safe to say, will be addressed by the coming of President Donald J. Trump Highway. “Boise City might be dying,” McGaughy said, “but we’re a couple good turns away from thriving. We need to start by accepting that things aren’t what they used to be.”

In the final analysis, “Ted Lasso” is all about a man, a team and their daddy issues

“Ted Lasso” is apolitical by design. Jokes about the prime minister or America’s president are out of bounds for the same reason the script doesn’t acknowledge the pandemic: like its title character, the show is a people pleaser. Fulfilling its role as a place of pure uplift in a downer of a time, it does all it can to levitate above the morass of negativity that is 2021, reality edition.

And yet, one cannot ignore the fact that it is also the product of a time crushed into a jagged crystal by a petulant authoritarian whose sociopathy is attributed to a distant, aggressively prejudiced father he could never satisfy.

Jason Sudeikis may not have been thinking about that specific goon when he wrote the second season finale, “Inverting the Pyramid of Success,” or mapped out the stories leading up to it. But if he and the show’s writers had bullies on the brain when they sat down to break the season, that may be because we’ve been living with one for half a decade.

In any case, now we know what members of the cast meant when they hinted that this season was inspired by “Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.” They weren’t talking about the rebels suffering a setback; since AFC Richmond was already relegated and lost their team mascot in the premiere, the only way to go was up. Which, in the final episode they did, rising from relegation to promotion.

Besides, people don’t remember “Empire Strikes Back” as the story of which team was ahead. “No Luke – I am your father” – that’s what we remember. “Empire” may start as the tale of the Rebels on the run, but ultimately it’s about an abandoned son whose father finds him. Unfortunately for that son, his dad happens to be one of galaxy’s evilest men. And with those words, Luke Skywalker is given the choice to inherit that sinister mantle or leap into the unknown.

Anyway, it’s a better reference than calling the latest episodes the Daddy Issues season, even if examining the relationship between fathers and their children is a natural extension of the show’s mission to be a rebuttal to toxic masculinity.

Other more obvious parallels to “Star Wars” came to the fore in the relationship between Ted (Sudeikis) and Nate (Nick Mohammed), the former kit man that Ted elevated to assistant coach in recognition of his natural talent as a strategist. But Ted isn’t Darth to Nate’s Luke – he’s the Obi Wan to the younger man’s Anakin. A mentor, not a father.

And Anakin never had an emotionally distant dad like the one we meet Nate’s in “Rainbow” and “Headspace,” who never affirmed his son’s accomplishments and only amplifies his insecurities.

Ted’s endless positivity and willingness to choose understanding over punishment is Sudeikis and his co-creator’s main antidote to macho aggression – but, as we saw with Nate’s heel turn and the backlash against the show’s unapologetic kindness in Season 2, light and joy can only achieve so much.

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We needed Ted’s vision in 2020, to ride with a guy who had been knocked not down but all the way out across the ocean. There was something noble and magnificent in Ted’s insistence upon healing everyone before himself, in assuring that everything is possible if people simply believe.

That was always a palliative, not a fix – and “Ted Lasso” acknowledges this, I believe. In the first season a few keen-eyed viewers noticed, while the rest of us were floating on rosy clouds, that maybe Ted isn’t perfect. If he’s so wonderful, why did his wife want a divorce? His “Empire Strikes Back” arc, as it were, was to head into the darkest place in the swamp and face the part of him that hates.

Still, there’s healing to be done – on Ted’s side, and on nearly everyone else’s part too. AFC Richmond is a crew of beloved sons and daughters alongside father survivors, some whose dads were simply flawed and others who were raised by very selfish, abusive, worthless jerks – like the lowlife who beat Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster) into a champion and an emotionally stunted prick.

Team owner and devoted den mother Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham) is only starting to heal from the psychological wounds inflicted on her by a philandering father who cared nothing for her feelings or her mother’s.

All we know about the man who fathered Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein), according to Roy, is that he’s racist. But Roy pours so much passion into being a solid father figure to his niece, and a perfect mate to Keeley Jones (Juno Temple), that he’s presumably compensating for some kind of parentally inflicted damage. And his inability to allow Keeley to enjoy her power is a sign of that even great men must be works in progress.

Tellingly Sam Obisanya (Toheeb Jimoh) has a loving relationship with his father. Bearing witness to his bond with Sam is what moves Ted to welcome Jamie back from exile; he explains to Beard that Jamie’s problem is that he never had a decent father figure. (What nobody expects is for Roy to fill that role.)

Then there’s Ted, a man who offers nothing but kindness and good humor to the world and is ready to insert himself into his friends’ problems, but nearly explodes when Dr. Sharon Fieldstone (Sarah Niles) correctly deduces that his eagerness to ingratiate himself to others is a shield preventing people from seeing his weakness. But that emerges in the form of panic attacks, one during a pivotal game.

So when Nate betrays Ted’s confidence and leaks a story about Ted having such an episode to The Independent, hoping to shatter the upbeat, forgiving nature that is central to The Lasso Way, he’s stupefied when it backfires. Coach Beard (co-creator Brendan Hunt) and the team’s fellow assistant coach Roy know Nate turned on Ted and almost expect Ted to, well, strike back.

Ted’s refusal to do so is an even graver insult to Nate than Roy not caring that he kissed Roy’s girlfriend Keeley (Juno Temple). So midway through a game Richmond seems about to lose, Nate unleashes on Ted.

“You made me feel like I was the most important person in the whole world, and then you abandoned me. Like you switch out a light, just like that,” Nate spits at Ted, tears in his eye. “And I worked my ass off, trying to get your attention back. To prove myself to you, to make you like me again. But the more I did, the less you cared. It’s like I was f**king invisible.”

Ted didn’t do any of those things, of course – and we see that Nate isn’t yelling at his boss, or his friend. He’s screaming at the father who refuses to see him.

Ted’s father, the one who took him to play darts and inspired him to be curious, also died by suicide. Ted’s panic attacks come from a place of failing to reconcile himself with the notion that the same man who taught him how to be gracious and good could also have been in so much pain that chose to end his life and left his son to find his body.

The overt message of these episodes is one of promoting mental health and wellness, along with endorsing the value and virtue of being in touch with one’s emotions. As ever, though, this season of “Ted Lasso” speaks to us on a level beyond simply making us feel good or asking us to get in touch with our vulnerability. It reminds us that in the same way that good fathers and men make us #Believe and desire to be our best, villainy is a choice.

This was Luke Skywalker’s epiphany after surviving the events of “Empire,” and it’s one Nate is playing out, only on the team dark side as a fully silver-haired Sith, working under Rebecca’s ex Rupert (Anthony Head).

It’s also a truth we’re wrestling with on a national and global scale. The split widens between people who see compromising and collaborating for the common good as the only winning strategy against loss and decline, and those who resent being asked to contribute instead of being applauded for standing apart.

Then again, Sudeikis would probably shrug as he did with this previous season and simply claim he was telling a story – and not one that concerns a former world leader who had a crooked father and shows no signs of breaking that cycle.

“Ted Lasso” comforted us in its first season. That much is beyond debate. But perhaps its second is meant to wake us from that respite and remind us that everything isn’t OK while assuring us that, with effort, we can be OK.

And if this is in fact “Episode V,” that’s good news for Ted and AFC Richmond. In the next movie, the enlightened good guys win. . . but not before coaxing one lost soul back from the dark side.

All episodes of “Ted Lasso” are now streaming on Apple TV+.

How a team of musicologists and computer scientists completed Beethoven’s unfinished 10th Symphony

When Ludwig von Beethoven died in 1827, he was three years removed from the completion of his Ninth Symphony, a work heralded by many as his magnum opus. He had started work on his 10th Symphony but, due to deteriorating health, wasn’t able to make much headway: All he left behind were some musical sketches.

Ever since then, Beethoven fans and musicologists have puzzled and lamented over what could have been. His notes teased at some magnificent reward, albeit one that seemed forever out of reach.

Now, thanks to the work of a team of music historians, musicologists, composers and computer scientists, Beethoven’s vision will come to life.

I presided over the artificial intelligence side of the project, leading a group of scientists at the creative AI startup Playform AI that taught a machine both Beethoven’s entire body of work and his creative process.

A full recording of Beethoven’s 10th Symphony is set to be released on October 9, 2021, the same day as the world premiere performance scheduled to take place in Bonn, Germany — the culmination of a two-year-plus effort.

Past attempts hit a wall

Around 1817, the Royal Philharmonic Society in London commissioned Beethoven to write his Ninth and 10th symphonies. Written for an orchestra, symphonies often contain four movements: the first is performed at a fast tempo, the second at a slower one, the third at a medium or fast tempo, and the last at a fast tempo.

Beethoven completed his Ninth Symphony in 1824, which concludes with the timeless “Ode to Joy.”

But when it came to the 10th Symphony, Beethoven didn’t leave much behind, other than some musical notes and a handful of ideas he had jotted down.

There have been some past attempts to reconstruct parts of Beethoven’s 10th Symphony. Most famously, in 1988, musicologist Barry Cooper ventured to complete the first and second movements. He wove together 250 bars of music from the sketches to create what was, in his view, a production of the first movement that was faithful to Beethoven’s vision.

Yet the sparseness of Beethoven’s sketches made it impossible for symphony experts to go beyond that first movement.

Assembling the team

In early 2019, Dr. Matthias Röder, the director of the Karajan Institute, an organization in Salzburg, Austria, that promotes music technology, contacted me. He explained that he was putting together a team to complete Beethoven’s 10th Symphony in celebration of the composer’s 250th birthday. Aware of my work on AI-generated art, he wanted to know if AI would be able to help fill in the blanks left by Beethoven.

The challenge seemed daunting. To pull it off, AI would need to do something it had never done before. But I said I would give it a shot.

Röder then compiled a team that included Austrian composer Walter Werzowa. Famous for writing Intel’s signature bong jingle, Werzowa was tasked with putting together a new kind of composition that would integrate what Beethoven left behind with what the AI would generate. Mark Gotham, a computational music expert, led the effort to transcribe Beethoven’s sketches and process his entire body of work so the AI could be properly trained.

The team also included Robert Levin, a musicologist at Harvard University who also happens to be an incredible pianist. Levin had previously finished a number of incomplete 18th-century works by Mozart and Johann Sebastian Bach.

The project takes shape

In June 2019, the group gathered for a two-day workshop at Harvard’s music library. In a large room with a piano, a blackboard and a stack of Beethoven’s sketchbooks spanning most of his known works, we talked about how fragments could be turned into a complete piece of music and how AI could help solve this puzzle, while still remaining faithful to Beethoven’s process and vision.

The music experts in the room were eager to learn more about the sort of music AI had created in the past. I told them how AI had successfully generated music in the style of Bach. However, this was only a harmonization of an inputted melody that sounded like Bach. It didn’t come close to what we needed to do: construct an entire symphony from a handful of phrases.

Meanwhile, the scientists in the room — myself included — wanted to learn about what sort of materials were available, and how the experts envisioned using them to complete the symphony.

The task at hand eventually crystallized. We would need to use notes and completed compositions from Beethoven’s entire body of work — along with the available sketches from the 10th Symphony — to create something that Beethoven himself might have written.

This was a tremendous challenge. We didn’t have a machine that we could feed sketches to, push a button and have it spit out a symphony. Most AI available at the time couldn’t continue an uncompleted piece of music beyond a few additional seconds.

We would need to push the boundaries of what creative AI could do by teaching the machine Beethoven’s creative process — how he would take a few bars of music and painstakingly develop them into stirring symphonies, quartets and sonatas.

Piecing together Beethoven’s creative process

As the project progressed, the human side and the machine side of the collaboration evolved. Werzowa, Gotham, Levin, and Röder deciphered and transcribed the sketches from the 10th Symphony, trying to understand Beethoven’s intentions. Using his completed symphonies as a template, they attempted to piece together the puzzle of where the fragments of sketches should go — which movement, which part of the movement.

They had to make decisions, like determining whether a sketch indicated the starting point of a scherzo, which is a very lively part of the symphony, typically in the third movement. Or they might determine that a line of music was likely the basis of a fugue, which is a melody created by interweaving parts that all echo a central theme.

The AI side of the project — my side — found itself grappling with a range of challenging tasks.

First, and most fundamentally, we needed to figure out how to take a short phrase, or even just a motif, and use it to develop a longer, more complicated musical structure, just as Beethoven would have done. For example, the machine had to learn how Beethoven constructed the Fifth Symphony out of a basic four-note motif.

Next, because the continuation of a phrase also needs to follow a certain musical form, whether it’s a scherzo, trio or fugue, the AI needed to learn Beethoven’s process for developing these forms.

The to-do list grew: We had to teach the AI how to take a melodic line and harmonize it. The AI needed to learn how to bridge two sections of music together. And we realized the AI had to be able to compose a coda, which is a segment that brings a section of a piece of music to its conclusion.

Finally, once we had a full composition, the AI was going to have to figure out how to orchestrate it, which involves assigning different instruments for different parts.

And it had to pull off these tasks in the way Beethoven might do so.

Passing the first big test

In November 2019, the team met in person again — this time, in Bonn, at the Beethoven House Museum, where the composer was born and raised.

This meeting was the litmus test for determining whether AI could complete this project. We printed musical scores that had been developed by AI and built off the sketches from Beethoven’s 10th. A pianist performed in a small concert hall in the museum before a group of journalists, music scholars and Beethoven experts.

We challenged the audience to determine where Beethoven’s phrases ended and where the AI extrapolation began. They couldn’t.

A few days later, one of these AI-generated scores was played by a string quartet in a news conference. Only those who intimately knew Beethoven’s sketches for the 10th Symphony could determine when the AI-generated parts came in.

The success of these tests told us we were on the right track. But these were just a couple of minutes of music. There was still much more work to do.

Ready for the world

At every point, Beethoven’s genius loomed, challenging us to do better. As the project evolved, the AI did as well. Over the ensuing 18 months, we constructed and orchestrated two entire movements of more than 20 minutes apiece.

We anticipate some pushback to this work — those who will say that the arts should be off-limits from AI, and that AI has no business trying to replicate the human creative process. Yet when it comes to the arts, I see AI not as a replacement, but as a tool — one that opens doors for artists to express themselves in new ways.

This project would not have been possible without the expertise of human historians and musicians. It took an immense amount of work — and, yes, creative thinking — to accomplish this goal.

At one point, one of the music experts on the team said that the AI reminded him of an eager music student who practices every day, learns, and becomes better and better.

Now that student, having taken the baton from Beethoven, is ready to present the 10th Symphony to the world.

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Ahmed Elgammal, Professor, Director of the Art & AI Lab, Rutgers University

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

Capitol police whistleblower claims leaders lied to Congress about Jan. 6 and mishandled evidence

A whistleblower who is a former high-ranking Capitol Police official has accused two of its senior leaders of mishandling evidence and failing to respond properly to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Politico reports.

The whistleblower, who has asked to remain anonymous, left the force months after the riot. In his letter, he makes explosive allegations against Sean Gallagher, the Capitol Police’s acting chief of uniformed operations, and Yogananda Pittman, its assistant chief of police for protective and intelligence operations.

“The whistleblower accuses Gallagher and Pittman of deliberately choosing not to help officers under attack on Jan. 6 and alleges that Pittman lied to Congress about an intelligence report Capitol Police received before that day’s riot. After a lengthy career in the department, the whistleblower was a senior official on duty on Jan. 6,” POLITICO reports. “The whistleblower’s criticism went beyond Capitol Police leaders to Congress. Without naming specific lawmakers, his letter accuses congressional leaders of having ‘purposefully failed’ to tell the truth about the department’s failures.”

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In the letter, the whistleblower wrote that the truth “may be valued less than politics by many members of the congressional community to include those that have made decisions about the leadership of the USCP post January 6th, but I believe the truth still matters to real people and certainly the men and women of the U.S. Capitol Police.”

Read the full report over at Politico.

Bill Maher defends Kyrsten Sinema — again — after bathroom encounter with youth activists

Bill Maher appeared stunned by an encounter last weekend between Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and a group of youth activists, who followed the Arizona moderate into a bathroom at Arizona State University.

“It’s getting chippy out there,” Maher said during a monologue on his weekly HBO show “Real Time” Friday night. “She was at ASU and a gang of Gen. Z activists followed her into the bathroom.”

“Then they went back to demanding that we make campuses a safe space,” he added, to a round of applause.

Sinema was teaching a class at ASU, where she has worked since 2003, when a group of young activists with the organization Living United for Change in Arizona confronted her outside a campus bathroom. They were angry about her efforts to block President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan — and her seeming about-face on a number of progressive issues that she had campaigned on, including, among other things, efforts to lower prescription drug prices.

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In video captured by the protesters, Sinema can be heard saying, “Actually, I am heading out,” while entering a bathroom stall as people heckle her.

“We need to hold you accountable to what you told us, what you promised us that you were going to pass when we knocked on doors for you,” one activist, who identified herself as Blanca, says. “It’s not right!”

Maher had his own take on the situation, saying, “I think that’s a little over the top.”

“The [activists] said I’m streaming live,” Maher joked of the encounter, “And she said, ‘I am too! get the f**k out of here.'”

Sinema, for her part, seems to agree with Maher’s read of the situation.

“It is unacceptable for activist organizations to instruct their members to jeopardize themselves by engaging in unlawful activities such as gaining entry to closed university buildings, disrupting learning environments, and filming students in a restroom,” she said in a statement.

Watch the full clip below via HBO:

“Lab leak” or natural spillover? Leading scientists debate COVID-19’s origins

There was a time when the COVID-19 “lab leak” theory felt too hot to touch. The idea that Chinese researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had catastrophically blundered, and allowed a highly contagious novel coronavirus to slip from their lab into the surrounding province, seemed like fodder for conspiracy theorists and fuel for xenophobes and anti-Asian racists. But earlier this year, two events gave the theory a small credibility bump.

On May 14th, Science Magazine published a letter signed by eighteen researchers titled “Investigate the origins of COVID-19.” Its authors argued that the World Health Organization’s investigation, conducted in partnership with China last year, was superficial at best: only four of the report’s 313 pages assessed the possibility of a laboratory accident. Soon after the letter was published, President Biden ordered US intelligence services to conduct their own investigation. They returned three months later, empty-handed. The President blamed Chinese government officials, who had apparently “worked to prevent international investigators and members of the global public health community from accessing [critical information].”

To flesh out the competing scenarios, four scientists — including three cosigners of the May 14th letter — engaged in a virtual debate on September 30th, sponsored by Science Magazine. The panelists spent an hour arguing the merits of the lab leak theory against the possibility of a “natural spillover” — the prevailing belief that the virus originally jumped from an animal to a human.

“We want to show that you can have a civilized discussion with people who don’t necessarily agree with each other,” said Jon Cohen, the debate’s moderator and a senior staff writer with Science Magazine, at the beginning of the broadcast.

The panelists included Michael Worobey, an evolution virologist at the University of Arizona who signed the May 14 letter. Worobey said that while he had kept an “open mind,” he now believes a lab leak is unlikely. He pointed to research finding that animal species which are susceptible to coronaviruses — namely palm civets and raccoon dogs — were sold and butchered in the Huanan market in Wuhan, China, where the first cluster of 27 COVID-19 cases were reported.

“If it started with research, why does it look like it started in one of these markets?” he said.

Worobey made his arguments alongside Linfa Wang, a bat coronavirus researcher at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. Unlikely Worobey, who seemed convinced but not certain of a natural spillover scenario, Wang argued vehemently against the possibility of a lab leak.

Wang — who works closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — said the lab’s researchers collect and study coronaviruses, but always wear PPE and take precautionary measures, making it far more probable that the virus was first contracted by a civilian. Wang also defended the WIV’s leading bat coronavirus researcher, Shi Zhengli, who has become a target of lab leak proponents.

“The Western philosophy… is you’re innocent until proven guilty,” he said, arguing that Zhengli has received the opposite treatment. “As a scientist, I feel pretty sad that just because of geophysical location, you’re guilty.”

Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and another cosigner of the March 14th letter, said that while a spillover event from an animal to a human was possible, the nature of the WIV’s research makes it a viable culprit.

“The Wuhan Institute of Virology had large scale programs to collects and study SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome] related coronaviruses that were thought to pose a high risk of being able to infect humans,” he said in his introductory statement. “It’s possible that there was an accident in the process of this that led to the emergence of the virus.”

The coincidence suggested by Bloom was pushed even harder by Alina Chan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute and co-author of a book called “Viral: Search for the Origin of Covid-19.” Chan, who spent much of the debate criticizing the Chinese government’s unwillingness to cooperate with researchers and investigators, described her position by paraphrasing a quote from the comedian Jon Stewart.

“In 2019, a novel SARS coronavirus, with a novel genetic modification, appeared in a city where there’s a lab studying novel SARS coronaviruses with novel genetic modifications,” she said.

The debate intensified during a discussion about COVID-19’s “furin cleavage site” — a section on the surface of the virus’ spike protein that can be severed with an enzyme, which some scientists take as evidence of bioengineering. While many in the scientific community have dismissed this as a conspiracy theory, a leaked 2018 research proposal, which lists Wang as a co-investigator, aimed to apply a furin cleavage site to a SARS-related bat coronavirus, which would have made the virus more contagious to humans.

While the grant was never funded, Bloom pressed Wang over his and his colleagues’ silence while the debate within the scientific community was unfolding.

“In the interest of what we’re talking about here, needing to be transparent… why did no one come forward and put this information out there?” he asked Wang. “The fact that it came to light under a leak after all this discussion, to me that’s just not transparent and honest.”

In response, Wang questioned why anyone should publicize information in a dead grant, adding that bringing information of that kind into the public sphere was “not [his] area.”

Given the currently available information, most panelists agreed that a definitive conclusion regarding the origins of COVID-19 is unlikely to be reached. But in her concluding statement, Alina succinctly described why she believes the search for an answer needs to continue.

“We just want to find out how it happened so we can stop it from happening again,” she said.

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A New Confederacy: Trump and the Republicans have already seceded

You know which ones they are: Nineteen states have enacted 33 laws that make it harder for people to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Fifteen states made it harder to apply for a mail-in ballot. Four states limited mail-in ballot drop boxes. Four states imposed stricter mail-in ballot signature requirements. Eight states imposed harder voter ID requirements. Seven states made it easier to purge voters from the rolls. Three states reduced the number of polling places and voting hours. Three more states reduced the number of days or hours of early voting. Five states made it harder to vote for people with disabilities and two states made it a crime to hand out water or snacks to voters waiting in long lines to vote.

Nineteen states have enacted a total of 106 new laws restricting a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Twelve states enacted outright abortion bans, and Texas enacted a law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, which is effectively a ban on abortion since most women don’t even know they are pregnant at six weeks. Twenty-five states require a waiting period, usually 24 hours, before an abortion can be performed. Twelve of those states effectively mandate that women must return to a clinic twice over a two-day period before obtaining an abortion. Eighteen states require “counseling” before abortions, including notices of a purported link between abortion and breast cancer, the alleged ability of a fetus to feel pain, and the unproven long-term mental health consequences of abortion.

Twelve states have refused to expand Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act, leaving as many as two million people without health insurance. Three of those states have Democratic governors who have attempted to get their legislatures to go along with Medicaid expansion but have been stymied by the state legislatures. Six states that recently expanded Medicaid coverage did so only after citizens forced the issue with ballot measures. All had governors and legislatures that had previously refused to extend coverage.

All of the states that refused Medicaid expansion and have passed restrictions on voting and abortion are controlled by the Republican Party. Many of those same states have also passed bans on mask and vaccine mandates, and nearly all of them have endured more cases per capita of COVID-19, more hospitalizations and more deaths from the virus. In effect, without any states (yet) seceding from the Union, we already live in two Americas.

One of those countries-within-a-country, in the words of the esteemed lawyer and Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, “has no set of constraints, no belief in the norms, no commitment to the Constitution or the rule of law, while the other side is trying to observe the rules.” He said this on Wednesday night on “All in With Chris Hayes” on MSNBC, while discussing the challenges we face going into the 2022 and 2024 elections.

Even the subject of that show seems quaint at this point, because I don’t think we are able to hold what we have always thought of as “elections” in this country anymore. If politics in the United States were a basketball game, the rules of the game along with fouls and penalties would apply to one team, the Democrats, and not to the other, the Republicans. The game, in the immortal words of Donald Trump, has been “rigged.” It’s not possible for the Democratic Party to win elections, because the Republican Party has decided it won’t recognize Democratic victories. The only “wins” that are “legitimate” are Republican wins.

That’s what these so-called audits have been about. I mean, just take the Arizona “audit.” It was conducted on the orders of the Republican-controlled state Senate, but they didn’t order that the entire election held in Arizona be audited. No, they just ordered that one election in one county be audited: the presidential contest in Maricopa County (which includes Phoenix, by far the state’s largest city). They didn’t audit the races for the state Senate, which they won. They just audited the election for president, which their candidate lost, in the largest county won by his opponent, Joe Biden.

Similar audits are planned for other states carried by Biden: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Republicans are trying to have another audit in Georgia, another state Trump lost. Are they auditing the elections won by Republicans who ran for Congress or the state legislatures? No, they aren’t, because the Republican-dominated legislatures are run by Republicans who won elections. No need for an audit!

It’s like counting all the baskets made in a game by one team and not counting those made by the other team. There is only one way to win the game: If you’re on the team whose baskets get counted, i.e., the Republican team. If you’re on the Democratic team, your points don’t go up on the board.

Which is exactly what Donald Trump did way back in 2011 when he set out on his years-long challenge to the presidency of Barack Obama. Trump’s “birther” campaign was the seed-corn of what we’re seeing on a national level with the Republican Party today. What Trump was effectively saying was that Obama couldn’t have won the game because he wasn’t on the right team. He wasn’t one of us. He wasn’t one of us in religious terms because he was Muslim, and he wasn’t one of us as an American because he wasn’t born here, he was an immigrant. Therefore, his points don’t count. He’s not really our president. He is illegitimate. (To be clear, Obama isn’t a Muslim or an immigrant.)

Tucker Carlson’s “replacement” theory, which he now pushes almost nightly, is just another birther campaign like Trump’s. Brown people and Black people and immigrants don’t count, and their votes are no good because they’re playing for the wrong team. They can’t “replace” us because they’re not “real” Americans. Hitler did the same thing in Germany in the 1930s when he declared that Jews were not real Germans. Then he passed the Nuremberg laws and formally stripped Jews of their citizenship. Then he took their wealth and businesses. Then he took their lives. Republicans have already made plans to challenge birthright citizenship. It’s past time to wonder what they plan to do next, because they’re already doing it.

The laws restricting voting that have been passed largely in Republican states apply to others, not to us. We’ve got our IDs because we own cars and have drivers’ licenses. They take the bus; they don’t. Their points don’t count. We live in neighborhoods with a lot of precincts and voting locations. They live where there are far fewer voting places and more rules. The long lines they stand in to vote mean their points don’t get on the board. They don’t count.

We don’t pass laws against vasectomies because we have dicks and we might need them. Laws restricting or outlawing abortion, on the other hand, are about women — and we’re not women, we’re Republicans! We can do whatever we like in the game out there on the floor because we’re on the correct team! We don’t get a foul called because of six weeks or 15 weeks or waiting periods, because the rules don’t apply to us, they apply to them. Our points count. Theirs don’t.

This is what I mean when I say that Republicans have already seceded. They’re a white party and they’re forming a white country with white laws and white companies and white jobs where white votes count and others don’t. They can live in the states that comprise that country, but they can’t survive there without our money. It was the same way with the South before the Civil War. They lived in their states with slavery, but they couldn’t survive without the economy of the North, so they started a war. They never intended to “secede.” They intended to win, and run the new country, which would be the South writ large, with slave-owners in power and slavery everywhere.

That’s what Republicans and Donald Trump are doing right now. They know they can’t win legitimate elections. There aren’t enough of them. So they are engaged in a war, with the aim not of winning elections, but of taking over and exercising the power that, at least until now, came from winning elections. Republicans can’t rely on doing that, so they have transformed their party from one that participates in democracy to a fascist party engaged in a takeover of the United States of America.

Democrats may or may not “win” in 2022 and 2024, but the elections are already over. Republicans have declared that only their votes count. Unless we get together and stay together and use our numbers to protect our democracy, we will end up living in their fascist country ruled by their dictator.

Book review: The mirage of a town without cellphones

Near the town of Green Bank, a strange sign edges the two-lane road: “You Are Now Entering the West Virginia Radio Quiet Zone.” It’s not immediately apparent what those words mean, but they provide a clue to drivers whose phones have gone silent. The Quiet Zone means the law limits radio-wave broadcasts: No cell service, and theoretically a lack of conveniences like Wi-Fi, or certain wireless game controllers. And no microwaves unless they’re put in a protective casing. All these devices interfere with the science conducted by the Green Bank Observatory, home to a host of radio telescopes.

“The Quiet Zone” is also the title of a new book about the area by journalist Stephen Kurczy. Here, he thought, in the land of less technology, life might be simpler, and in line with his own desire for digital disconnection: Kurczy hasn’t owned a cellphone since 2009. Green Bank, he writes, might be “like a modern-day Walden that could free us from the exasperating demands of being always online and always reachable.” He set out to investigate what society might be like if we were all less accessible, looking to the residents of the Quiet Zone for the answer.

As the book unfolds, though, Kurczy loosens his grip on that idea: the Quiet Zone, he finds, is actually pretty loud, and plagued by problems similar to those in the outside world. And so Kurczy shifts his aim, attempting instead to understand why such an unusual set of residents — astronomers, white supremacists, dubious medical practitioners, people who say they’re allergic to radio waves, cultists, and murderers — arrived here. He shares that journey in visual prose peppered with frank dialogue and empathic descriptions of the four months he spent exploring Pocahontas County over a period of three years. “The area seemed tinged with magical realism, with an impossible menagerie of eccentrics congregating in the forest,” he writes. “How had so many random groups found their way to the same corner of West Virginia?”

A former sheriff gave perhaps the best answer. “To escape,” Kurczy summarizes. “To be left alone.” That may be true, but Kurczy’s journey forces him to reexamine the idea that disconnection is utopian, and that lack of technology means lack of complication.

The public-facing reason for the technological restrictions is the Green Bank Observatory, whose telescopes detect radio waves from space. Kurczy grounds readers with a brief but compelling history of radio astronomy: In 1931, scientist Karl Jansky accidentally discovered radio waves from space and presented his findings two years later. The field took off after World War II, and by the mid 1950s the National Science Foundation was ready to create a radio-astronomy research center — but where?

With its low population, abundance of public land, and location in a mountain valley close to the nation’s capital, Green Bank seemed ideal. Soon, both the state of West Virginia and the Federal Communications Commission instituted radio-quiet rules for the area, at different radii, to protect the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).

The rules, still extant, are strictest within 10 miles of the facility, theoretically barring connectivity like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. No one in town has cell service. Observatory visitors can’t use digital cameras once they pass a certain boundary. More-permissive guidelines limit fixed transmitters like cell towers and television broadcasters across a 13,000-square-mile area, each of which must be evaluated for its effect on the observatory before approval.

Today, the flagship instrument is the Green Bank Telescope, taller than the Statue of Liberty and wide enough to hold two football fields inside its dish. Kurczy likens it to a “washbasin for Godzilla.” The instrument monitors pulsars, left behind by supernova explosions, using them to hunt for gravitational waves. It can see the effects of black holes at the centers of other galaxies, and stars in formation. It also searches for extraterrestrials.

But that work is threatened by earthly broadcasts. Terrestrial signals can easily drown out weak celestial ones, just as it’s hard to hear someone whispering next to a choir. The rules exist to shush the choir. “The restrictions were based on a simple premise: To listen, we have to hear,” writes Kurczy. “To unlock the mysteries of the universe, we have to be quiet.”

Whenever the observatory hits existential bumps — as it has in recent years, when it parted ways with NRAO, a controversy Kurczy chronicles without boring readers with bureaucratic detail — people begin to worry about the Quiet Zone’s survival. The facility, whose operation was once fully funded by the National Science Foundation, now only receives part of its budget from that governmental source, with the rest coming from private partnerships with groups like the North American NanoHertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves and the Breakthrough Listen project, which is involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Kurczy, in investigative mode, digs into why the zone may not be in acute danger even if the observatory is: a nearby National Security Agency outpost called Sugar Grove, which appreciates radio-quiet for surveillance. “Sugar Grove was like the bigger, stronger brother protecting its kid sibling in Green Bank,” he writes, putting the situation in political context with astronomy’s other connections to the military-intelligence complex.

Despite the big stick, keeping the quiet has never been easy. Today, it’s Sisyphean. The sources of radio interference are ubiquitous and socially, economically, and educationally desirable. Helping check their influence is EMITT, the observatory’s electromagnetic interference tracking truck, whose instruments pinpoint illegal radio waves. “It reminded me of the wraith-hunting vehicle from ‘Ghostbusters,'” writes Kurczy.

But he notes that observatory officials now mostly monitor interference, rather than shut down its neighbors’ emissions. “If they find a house that’s particularly bad, then they’ll bring that to my attention and I’ll take care of it,” the observatory’s business manager, who has since retired, told Kurczy. “By that,” Kurczy explains, “he meant he might initiate a conversation with the offender and politely explain the observatory’s need for radio quiet.”

The observatory tries to get compliance through education, the then-business manager explains, but “We don’t have the staff to do any further enforcement.” This passivity becomes apparent when Kurczy rides in EMITT: “Within five miles of the telescopes, we counted more than 200 Wi-Fi signals,” Kurczy says. So the quiet zone is pretty noisy.

Kurczy discovered one group less likely to break the rules: electrosensitives, who believe they are essentially allergic to radio waves. The World Health Organization does not recognize electromagnetic hypersensitivity as a medical diagnosis. Nevertheless, starting in the mid-2000s, people began moving to Green Bank because they believed radio waves made them sick, and today their number has grown to over 100, Kurczy estimates.

Sensitives make good observatory neighbors, unlikely as they are to set up Wi-Fi networks. Kurczy ultimately develops skepticism toward the condition — noting that electrosensitives “seemed to be fleeing something in their lives aside from electromagnetic radiation” — but he’s sympathetic to their possible motives. At one point, he wonders if the original electrosensitive resident’s reaction to cell service and Wi-Fi was an “intense manifestation of the kind of tech overload that we all experience at one time or another. Although she was an extremist, there was something very human about her search for quiet.”

Spies and sensitives intrigue Kurczy, and he explores their influence on the region, as well as the complications of disconnection, like students lacking internet infrastructure, and dicey emergency services. The county — whose biggest employers are in health care, education, hospitality, and government — has a median household income of about $41,000, compared to the U.S. average of approximately $69,000.

“The Quiet Zone” also examines Pocahontas County’s darker side. “It did not occur to me that a community bathed in quiet could be anything but idyllic,” he concedes. And yet he learns about Patch Adams, the clowny doctor made famous by the eponymous movie, who took millions of dollars to build an innovative rural hospital that was reportedly never actually built. Unsolved murders cast shadows in the forest. The remnants of a once-powerful neo-Nazi group, formerly headquartered here, live in the hills.

“The vision that drew me in turned out to be a mirage,” he writes. The Quiet Zone, he learns, is not a modern-day Walden.

Kurczy has a tendency to interpret these seamier sides as symptoms of the Quiet Zone itself, rather than as instances of general human badness — as can happen when you begin by seeing a place as inherently other. He never quite acknowledges that most any place you look at closely enough is going to be a microscale version of wider society. “The Quiet Zone” demonstrates, if inadvertently, the fractal nature of civilization –- smartphones or not.

In the end, though, Kurczy comes to appreciate the intrinsic value of such a weird, barely connected community. “For the electrosensitives seeking relief from their pain, for the astronomers in need of a quiet sky, for the hippies desiring a peaceful landscape, for the tech-addicted tourists forced to go offline, the Quiet Zone was an unexpected refuge,” he writes. “It was an escape, at its best, from ourselves.”

Sarah Scoles is a freelance science journalist based in Denver, and the author of the books “Making Contact,” “They Are Already Here,” and the forthcoming “Mass Defect.” From 2010-2012, she was a public education officer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Green Bank facility.

“Kellogg’s on strrr-ike”: 1,400 Workers walk off job to protect benefits

Roughly 1,400 workers who make Corn Flakes, Froot Loops, Frosted Flakes, Raisin Bran, and Rice Krispies walked off the job on Tuesday to demand a fair contract, bringing all of the Kellogg Company’s U.S. cereal factories to a halt in one of the nation’s latest strikes.

Anthony Shelton, president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM), on Tuesday expressed the union’s “unwavering solidarity with our courageous brothers and sisters who are on strike against the Kellogg Company” in four cities: Local 3G in Battle Creek, Michigan, where the company is headquartered; Local 50G in Omaha, Nebraska; Local 374G in Lancaster, Pennsylvania; and Local 252G in Memphis, Tennessee.

Local to any of these?
Go show your support! 📢🪧🍕#KelloggStrike pic.twitter.com/7o1xyZaMe2

— BCTGM International (@BCTGM) October 5, 2021

“For more than a year throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Kellogg workers around the country have been working long, hard hours, day in and day out, to produce Kellogg ready-to-eat cereals for American families,” Shelton said in a statement.

Daniel Osborn, president of Local 50G in Omaha, told the Associated Press that as the coronavirus knocked people out of work, remaining employees were often forced to put in 12-hour shifts, seven days a week.

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“Kellogg’s response to these loyal, hardworking employees,” Shelton said, “has been to demand these workers give up quality healthcare, retirement benefits, and holiday and vacation pay.”

According to Shelton, “The company continues to threaten to send additional jobs to Mexico if workers do not accept outrageous proposals that take away protections that workers have had for decades.”

Last month, the Kellogg Company announced its plan to slash more than 200 jobs at its Battle Creek plant over the next two years.

An issue that hasn't been noted in Kellogg's strike coverage so far, the company announced just a few weeks ago plans to cut 212 jobs at the Battle Creek, Michigan facility. https://t.co/rGaoEyLC1k

— Michael Sainato (@msainat1) October 6, 2021

Kellogg is also trying to institute a two-tier employment system in which “new hires will make less money, have higher health insurance payments, and will not earn a pension,” according to the union, which characterized the company’s proposal as a divide-and-conquer strategy that asks “the current workforce to sell out the next generation of Kellogg workers.”

“Kellogg is making these demands,” Shelton continued, “as they rake in record profits, without regard for the well-being of the hardworking men and women who make the products that have created the company’s massive profits.”

Shelton added that BCTGM is “proud of our Kellogg members for taking a strong stand against this company’s greed and we will support them for as long as it takes to force Kellogg to negotiate a fair contract that rewards them for their hard work and dedication and protects the future of all Kellogg workers.”

Citing Osborn, AP reported that the Kellogg Company, which said it is “implementing contingency plans,” is expected to “try to bring non-union workers into the plants at some point this week to try to resume operations and maintain the supply of its products.”

While BCTGM has not officially called for a boycott, a union spokesperson reportedly told HuffPost labor reporter Dave Jamieson that “supporters and consumers could certainly support the Kellogg workers and their fight for a fair contract by choosing NOT to buy Kellogg cereals while the strike is ongoing.”

On Twitter, the union shared a link where supporters can contribute to strike funds.

Kellogg Locals are still working on establishing their strike funds. At the moment we have 2 of the four linked here: https://t.co/IqPUwHAtS5

Will update as others go up!#KelloggStrike #1u pic.twitter.com/ScgkMEoFBm

— BCTGM International (@BCTGM) October 6, 2021

The strike against Kellogg started just one day after nearly 99% of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), a 60,000-member union of film and television production crews, voted to go on strike if studios don’t agree to a fair deal for the industry’s lowest-paid workers.

Both actions could be early signs of a potential surge in worker organizing, as AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler noted.

• 2,000 @CWADistrict1 hospital workers
• 1,000 @MineWorkers at Warrior Met
• 1,400 @BCTGM Kellogg workers

And hundreds—if not thousands—more working people across the country who are stepping up for the respect & dignity they deserve. #Striketober #1u https://t.co/ionrmSBEwr

— Liz Shuler (@LizShuler) October 5, 2021

The Guardian reported last week that “tens of thousands of workers around the U.S. could go on strike in the coming weeks in what would be the largest wave of labor unrest since a series of teacher strikes in 2018 and 2019, which won major victories and gave the American labor movement a significant boost.”

Kellogg’s workers aren’t the first BCTGM members to strike during the pandemic.

In July, aound 600 workers at a Frito-Lay plant in Topeka, Kansas walked off the job to fight against forced overtime hours, low pay, and other conditions that BCTGM Local 218 members deemed unacceptable.

In August, hundreds of BCTGM members working at Nabisco plants in multiple states went on strike to demand better working conditions and to protest the foreign outsourcing plans of Mondelez International, the snack maker’s parent company.

Both strikes ended with workers ratifying new collective bargaining agreements.

The disturbing festival bringing together gun nuts, Trump supporters and a doomsday church

Freedom Festival is a far-right event held in Greenley, Pennsylvania and organized by a combination of fringe Christians and gun manufacturers. The speakers at this year’s event will include former National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch and former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, and according to Daily Beast reporter Jose Pagliery, their presence at Freedom Festival underscores the ever-increasing radicalization of the Republican Party.

“Few Americans are even aware that the gun company Kahr and a rural Pennsylvania doomsday church — both run by the same ultra-rich Korean family — hold an annual ‘Freedom Festival’ that attracts gun enthusiasts and the type of people who attach ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flags to the back of their trucks,” Pagliery explains in an article published on October 8. “But in the wake of the failed January 6 insurrection, the event’s amalgamation of sovereign citizens and alt-truthers has taken on a new meaning. And now, it’s even got an all-star lineup.”

Ryan Busse, a former gun industry executive, warns that the presence of a former NRA spokesperson at Freedom Festival is “legitimizing” extremism.

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Busse told the Beast, “It’s going to send a message across the country that this is normal, that this is OK. This is American fascism being developed right before our eyes. This is like 1936 Germany in a symposium.”

Busse went on to say, “The one that concerns me the most is Dana Loesch. She’s treated by gun consumers like royalty, and here she is legitimizing this insanity. That scares me.”

Busse finds Freedom Festival’s combination of religious extremism, guns, conspiracy theories and Trumpism to be incredibly toxic.

The former NRA member told the Beast, “It’s what I fear: anything that will gin up people to buy more guns, hate people more, and vote for people like Trump. It’s all of that on steroids. Doesn’t the Klan meet in the dark out back behind uncle’s barn? This is right out in the open.”

Idaho asks Mike Lindell to pay up for pricy election audit

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell is being asked to foot the bill of a pricy audit in the state of Idaho, which began after the bedding magnate spread a series of wild conspiracy theories about the state’s handling of the 2020 election.

Despite Idaho representing one of the largest victories for former President Donald Trump, Lindell believed that he had won the state by an even larger spread — and sent election officials there a document titled “The Big Lie.”

After looking at Lindell’s “evidence,” Idaho Chief Deputy Secretary of State Chad Houck immediately concluded “there was something amiss” with the claims being made.

“This document alleged electronic manipulation in all 44 counties. At least seven Idaho counties have no electronic steps in their vote counting processes,” Houck told local TV station KMVT last month. “That was a huge red flag, and once we knew, we could either prove or disprove fairly directly.”

So the state conducted an audit to definitively prove the pillow maven wrong — an effort that was apparently successful.

Houck appeared on CNN Thursday morning to share the results, and later asked the pillow maven to put his money where his mouth is.

"We will be totaling up the expenses that were incurred in the [review] process and we will be sending him a bill," Idaho Secretary of State Chad Houck says as as an audit disproved a document apparently created by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, alleging vote fraud in Idaho in 2020 pic.twitter.com/iuo6pj0pYR

— CNN This Morning with Audie Cornish (@CNNThisMorning) October 7, 2021

“Lindell comes out with these claims that across the state universally, every county in the state of Idaho. And for that matter, every county in the United States was actually off by about 8.4%,” Houck told CNN host John Berman. “We looked at that and said that is an absolute impossibility.”

Houck continued: “We have seven counties in the state of Idaho that could not be mechanically manipulated because they actually still tally their votes. They’re small enough to do that in a paper ledger or tally book. How would you manipulate a paper ledger?”

The Republican state official also said that they would be sending Lindell a bill for the entire review process.

“We will be totaling up the expenses that were incurred in the [review] process, and we will be sending him a bill.”

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“This was never about Mike Lindell; this was never about a partisan position on this,” Houck added. “This is about going after the integrity of not only the election system in Idaho, but people going after the integrity of the election system as a whole.”

Lindell and his team of lawyers didn’t return a Salon request for comment on whether or not he intends to pay up. Instead, Lindell floated another batch of wild claims, which included the assertion that his team had identified an 850-year-old that voted in the 2020 election.

“I’ll give you an example today, 2650 people over the age of 100 [voted in the 2020 election],” he claimed. “Now you might say ‘well, that could be.’ 2000 of them were over 200 [years old].”

In recent weeks, amid his quest to appear before the Supreme Court and argue his election fraud claims, the pillow tycoon has also taken to knocking on voters’ doors to ask if they’re dead or not.

In “No Time to Die,” Daniel Craig gets a proper, action-packed Bond send-off

James Bond (Daniel Craig, in reportedly his last appearance in the role) is retired in “No Time to Die,” the latest big-screen outing for Ian Fleming‘s spy. And director Cary Joji Fukunaga‘s film — at 163 minutes, it is the longest in the history of the franchise — wants it to be seen on the big screen.

As for whether it is worthwhile, the long and the short of it is that this entry in the series has a series of lengthy expository scenes that set up the exciting action set pieces — just like every other Bond film. However, “No Time to Die” is mostly enjoyable and never dull. Call it Craig’s second-best of his five Bond films, just below “Casino Royale.”

Craig is as cool as ever as Bond, and he commences with his derring-do, dispatching baddies with considerable aplomb. He is unflappable driving his souped-up Aston Martin, even when he does donuts to foil his pursuers. He can come out guns blazing to subdue those who want to kill him — although a sequence in a stairwell feels way too much like a video game. He even manages to survive a near-death experience at sea, because, well, it is No Time to Die.

Alas, Bond’s punny one-liners in this adventure are kind of lame.

But back to the beginning. “No Time to Die” opens with a child-in-peril sequence. A young girl and her mother are targeted by a masked man who spares the child. Cut to Bond and Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux reprising her role from “Spectre”) in Italy where they are having a romantic getaway. But when Bond goes to pay respects to the late Vesper Lynd, he gets wind of a double-cross and a chase sequence follows. How things end up provide the film with its pre-credit sequence. (Cue the familiar James Bond theme music and Billie Eilish‘s rendition of the title song.)

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The intrigue continues five years later when Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) contacts Bond who is enjoying his retirement to do “one last job for old time’s sake.” Felix and Logan Ash (Billy Magnussen), a U.S. State Department guy, need Bond to go to Cuba to get Valdo Obruchev (David Dencik) who has a DNA-targeted weapon that uses nanobots and relies on skin contact to kill.

The Cuba sequence is arguably the film’s highlight. Bond meets Nomi (Lashana Lynch), who is known as 007 now that Bond has retired — they banter in a fun game of one-upmanship — and Paloma (Ana de Armas, Craig’s “Knives Out” costar), who has had about three weeks of training. Paloma is fantastic, kicking ass in a dress to die for no less, and de Armas plays her as nervous and naïve, which is amusing. In contrast, Nomi is tough as nails and not to be messed with, even if Bond makes her work extra hard to prove herself worthy of the number. That Bond relies on both women to assist him in his various missions is appealing. (The series seems to have done away with the “Bond Girl” trope here, offering female action heroes of color, a nice development).

The Cuba section of the film also shows that Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz, reprising the role) is still controlling things even though he is in a maximum security prison. “No Time to Die” introduces its chief villain around the halfway mark, and he is Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), the masked man from the opening sequence. It would perhaps spoil a twist to reveal the connection between Safin and Blofeld, but what can be told is that Waltz plays up Blofeld’s sinister nature in his one big scene (shades of “Silence of the Lambs“) whereas Malek is a bland villain here. What is even more dispiriting, the Oscar-winning actor appears to be channeling Peter Lorre, even down to his accent and cadence. The biggest flaw in “No Time to Die” is not that Safin has only a few scenes, but that he is not very menacing when he is onscreen. (Malek’s Safin could rate as the blandest Bond villain).

Thankfully, there are other pleasures. An enjoyable sequence had Bond, well, bonding with Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and Q (Ben Whishaw) when he needs the later to crack a flash drive he pocketed in Cuba. There is also some tension between Bond and M (Ralph Fiennes) which provides the film with a kind of moral undergirding. Granted, “No Time to Die” is jerry-rigged to be pure escapism — it is certainly not deep — but it is nice that M grapples with some weighty decisions, which include the possible start of international warfare.

Fukunaga nimbly keeps all the elements in play. There are picturesque locations (Italy!), there are some breathtaking aerial stunts(!), and there are some clever gadgets (Bond’s watch!). Only the film’s extended finale, which takes place on a disputed island between Japan and Russia, feels stretched out.

But overall this Bond delivers what fans have come to expect from a 007 film, no more, no less.

“No Time to Die” is only in theaters beginning Friday, Oct. 8.

Unearthed video shows N.C. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson calling homosexuality “filth”

At least one North Carolina state senator is calling on Mark Robinson, the state’s lieutenant governor, to resign following the release of an unearthed video in which Robinson derides members of the LBTGQ+ community as “filth.”

“There’s no debate here,” said state Sen. Jeff Jackson, a Democrat. “This is open discrimination. It is completely unacceptable. Mark Robinson should resign.”

In the video – first published by conservative media watchdog Right Wing Watch — Robinson is shown addressing the Asbury Baptist Church in Seagrove, North Carolina, back in June, according to NBC affiliate WRAL, ranting about the apparent takeover of the state’s education system by the left.

“I’m saying this now, and I’ve been saying it, and I don’t care who likes it: Those issues have no place in a school,” Robinson tells the audience. “There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality — any of that filth.”

He added: “And yes, I called it filth. And if you don’t like it that I called it filth, come see me and I’ll explain it to you. It’s time for us to stop letting these children be abused in schools, and it’s not going to happen till the people of God stand up and demand different, same ones that established those schools to begin with.”

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The term “transgenderism” is not a commonly used by transgender people, according to the LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD, and has historically been used to stigmatize them as having some kind of medical “condition.”

The North Carolina official further criticized liberals’ apparent use of “critical race theory” in classrooms, while tarring Black Lives Matter activists as “morons,” “socialist liars” and “nitwits” for their recents effort to defund the police.

“Black lives do not matter to Black Lives Matter,” Robinson claimed. “You know how I know that? Because if they did, you know where they would be instead of being at the police station? They would be down there at the gang hangout, at the drug dealer’s house burning that down. They’d be down at the abortion clinic burning that down if Black lives really mattered.”

Robinson reportedly doubled down on his remarks with ABC11 on Friday, telling the outlet: “We are not talking about the fight for equality and if those people want to challenge me on that, that’s fine. What I’m talking about are intimate details and yes, there is material out there that shares intimate details about homosexuality, about sexuality in general, to our students. That has got to stop.”

Asked about the lieutenant governor’s comments, Gov. Roy Coopers said that “North Carolina is a welcoming state where we value public education and the diversity of our people. It’s abhorrent to hear anyone, and especially an elected official, use hateful rhetoric that hurts people and our state’s reputation.”

Robinson has also made “hateful and discriminatory” comments about the LGBTQ+ community in the past, state Sen. Jackson noted.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Robinson posted via Facebook that he will “pray for the souls of all those killed,” but added that “homosexuality is STILL an abominable sin and I WILL NOT join in ‘celebrating gay pride’ nor will I fly their sacrilegious flag on my page.”

The years-old post was flagged in a report by Cardinal & Pine last year detailing his long history of using racist, homophobic, sexist, and anti-semitic language.

LGBTQ+ advocates, however, told NBC that Robinson’s language is far from reflective of the state’s populace.

According to a poll conducted by Public Policy Polling, 67% of the state’s voters support legislation that enhances or creates more discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ residents. And recently, the North Carolina legislature rejected a GOP-backed proposal to ban transgender residents from using bathrooms that correspond with their gender.

GOP governors who ended unemployment benefits failed to spur job growth, September numbers suggest

The September jobs numbers released on Friday suggest that the GOP governors who decided to end federal unemployment payments failed to accomplish their goal of jumpstarting the economy out of its pandemic-era mire — something experts predicted months ago.

According to the Bureau of Labor, employers reported 194,000 new jobs, a far cry from the 500,000-plus expected by analysts. The labor force likewise shrank by 183,000 since August, though unemployment did see a slight dip from 5.2% to 4.8%.

President Biden has pushed back on claims that the numbers indicate a serious level of contraction, stressing that the unemployment rate hasn’t fallen below 5% since the beginning of the pandemic. Biden also noted that the monthly average job growth is still around 600,000 under his watch, suggesting the administration is slowly but surely steering the economy back to health.

“The monthly total has bounced around, but if you look at the trend, it’s solid,” Biden said.

Recently, the debate around monthly job growth has mapped onto distinctly political lines, as Salon’s Brett Bachman reported back in May, when the Department of Labor released a similar batch of less-than-stellar jobs numbers.

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At the time, conservative pundits and politicians aggressively pounced on unemployment benefits, suggesting with scant evidence that Americans were no longer motivated to work, thereby causing a massive “labor shortage.” In the months following, over two dozen Republican governors jumped to end their federal unemployment programs, promising an economic rebound in return.

This week’s numbers, however, appear to fly in the face such promises.

Last month, Axios reported that states that discontinued benefits saw roughly half the job growth enjoyed by states that maintained the program. Neil Irwin, senior economics correspondent for The New York Times, this week echoed a similar sentiment, citing “no surge in participation in the labor force” despite the “labor shortage woes that many business groups” have pushed.

In a Friday analysis, Matt Bruenig, founder of the People’s Policy Project, pointed out the wide discrepancy in the number of people who lost their unemployment benefits in September (about 8 million) and the number of people who acquired work (about 194,000).

“194,000 jobs is equal to less than 3 percent of the people who were removed from the UI rolls in September,” Breunig said. “At this rate, it would take 3.5 years for jobs-added to equal the number of people who lost their pandemic UI benefits.”

It remains unclear precisely why September’s numbers fell so far below analysts’ expectations, but many have speculated that the pandemic continues to hold back economic growth. During the summer, many schools expected to reopen in September, but another surge in COVID-19 cases dashed those hopes, potentially leading to a wave of economic cutbacks.

“All the evidence points toward pandemic [unemployment benefits] not being the main factor,” Nick Bunker, economic research director for North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab, told CNBC. “The best estimate right now is that it’s the pandemic itself.”

According to NPR, the jobs numbers may be artificially depressed because sudden seasonal changes in school hiring.

Some analysts found that the discontinuation of benefits may have even contributed to the underperforming labor market.

Peter McCrory, an economist at JPMorgan Chase Bank, wrote that “the loss of benefits is associated with a modest decline in employment growth, earnings growth and labor force participation.”

Others have speculated that workers are readjusting their professional priorities amid the pandemic. According to a Pew poll, roughly 66% of unemployed Americans have seriously considered switching jobs.

“It’s not just money, sitting on both sides of the scale,” Melissa Swift, global leader of workforce transformation at consulting firm Korn Ferry, told Axios, citing the challenges of working with an understaffed team, juggling parenting with work, or being the only person of color at one’s place of work. “We basically burned out the global workforce over the last year. One of the ways people deal with burnout is switching employers.”

Trump’s D.C. hotel raked up millions in debt despite foreign investments

Donald Trump’s Washington hotel ran up more than $70 million in debts, all the while claiming that the property was raking in millions, according to a series of bombshell documents released by the House Oversight Committee.

The committee, led by Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, D-N.Y., has effectively undertaken the first official review and public release of Trump’s financial documents to date, CNN reported.

According to Maloney and Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, D-Va., who released a joint press release on Friday, the Trump International Hotel publicly reported a total income of more than $156 million from 2016 to 2020. But in that same period, the hotel quietly hemorrhaged millions, prompting Trump to take out a $27 million loan from one of his own holding companies, DJT Holdings LLC. Less than $3 million of that loan was ever repaid.

“By filing these misleading public disclosures, President Trump grossly exaggerated the financial health of the Trump Hotel,” said the committee, which added in a subsequent letter to the General Services Administration (GSA) that the findings warrant more federal scrutiny.

The committee further alleges that Trump collected $3.7 million from foreign governments and received “preferential treatment” from Deutsche Bank, which allowed Trump to defer payments on a $170 million six-year loan, according to The Washington Post.

In the past, Trump has been accused of violating the foreign emoluments clause for hosting various foreign leaders at the hotel without congressional approval – but the former president has successfully batted away these accusations.

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The newly unveiled documents are by far the clearest accounting of the Trump hotel’s financial struggles, which investigators have failed to fully ascertain, largely due to aggressive pushback from the former president’s legal team.

“For too long, the president has used his complex network of business holdings to hide the truth about his finances,” Maloney said. “The committee will continue to vigorously pursue its investigation until the full truth comes to light so that Congress can address the unresolved ethics crisis left by Trump and prevent future presidents from profiting off of the presidency.”

The House Oversight Committee has investigated the GSA’s management of the Trump hotel’s lease for years, according to CNN. Back in 2019, the agency’s inspector general said that the GSA “ignored the Constitution” when it came into the job.

Now, Maloney and Connolly are arguing that newly unveiled documents question the “agency’s ability to manage the former President’s conflicts of interest during his term in office when he was effectively on both sides of the contract, as landlord and tenant.”

Trump and his legal team have repeatedly called any investigations into his finances “politically motivated,” saying that they amount to harassment campaigns designed to dismantle Trump’s financial prowess and tarnish his reputation.

“Free Solo” filmmakers recreated Thai soccer team cave rescue: “A massive and chaotic operation”

In June of 2018, 12 youths aged 11-16 and their soccer coach were trapped inside the Tham Luang cave in Northern Thailand. The emotion-filled documentary, “The Rescue,” by Oscar-winning filmmakers E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (“Free Solo”), out Oct. 8, recounts the 16-day mission that unfolded. Thai Navy SEALs were brought in to coordinate the seemingly impossible effort, and British cave divers Rick Stanton and John Volanthen were brought on board because they had the specialized skill set needed to reach the team.

The combined rescue efforts however, had a race not just against time but against the elements — water levels were rising, monsoons were predicted, and oxygen in the cave was dwindling. Moreover, they had to find a way to get the boys and their coach out safely. When Rick and John saved four pump workers trapped in a cave chamber during an investigatory dive, they got a sense of how difficult diving out 12 boys and an adult would be.

“The Rescue” features incredible footage of the on-the-ground and in-the-cave efforts. (Some scenes were recreated for the documentary). The filmmakers interview Stanton and Volanthen as well as Richard Harris, who helped the divers find a way to safely rescue the team. That’s not a spoiler. Even if viewers know the outcome, it is hard not to hold one’s breath as “The Rescue” unfolds, or not be moved to tears by the end.

Vasarhelyi and Chin chatted with Salon about their remarkable and inspiring new documentary, the challenges they had making it, and what they do for good flow.

I have to ask how you got the incredible footage you did. It seems as if you had cameras on the ground and in the cave from the moment the story hit the news. Can you explain how you shot, what you recreated, and how you assembled the film?

E. Chai Vasarhelyi: When we signed on to make this film, we knew we had a great story; we also knew there was no footage. What you are watching is a mix of things, this forensic sifting that transpired in terms of news footage, to try to create what was happening outside of the cave — because we weren’t there for the actual events. So, a shot from CNN, or from a local Thai website. We were living off of fumes. There was such slim picking. But at the same time, there were a few things shot by divers themselves, like Dr. Harris anesthetizing a child or the oxygen meter. Those were very important. And then there was this rumor that really turned on the divers’ memories. One said, “I remember more than just finding the kids. I remember leading them in a motivational cheer.” Because he’d never seen the images, he was doubting his own memory. Even if it was just that one clip, it inspired us to pursue the Thai Navy SEALs to see if they had filmed. That was a really long process, but what you see in the film is that mix. We eventually succeeded. The Thai Navy SEALs had this incredible footage that really brought it to life. What you see in the reenactments are in the underwater scenes, because the Thai Navy SEALs never went beyond Chamber 3. So, the reenactments are the underwater or the stuff with children in the cave; most of this footage has never been seen before.

Jimmy Chin: We negotiated for two years with the Thai Navy SEALs just to convince them to sit down to interviews with us. You have to remember they are a covert special operations military team. They don’t advertise what they do. They agreed to be on camera but getting the footage was a whole other ordeal. Normally we would go in person, establish a relationship and build trust, but we couldn’t do it over zoom. But then Chai flew to Thailand and did the two-week quarantine and went to the Admiral’s house and knock and asked, “Can we talk about this some more?”

Vasarhelyi: I called first, and he said no . . .

Chin: We got it. It wasn’t like they handed it over. They flew a couple of the Thai Navy SEAL delegates who carried the drives to our editing studio to work with us on it. That was a really big challenge, and timing-wise, we got the footage in June. Our picture lock was June 1. The last few months have been very all hands on deck.

You give viewers a sense of the dangers of the situation and the risks many of the men take in their rescue efforts. Can you describe how you learned the details of the situation and then broke things down so viewers can follow the action?

Vasarhelyi: A lot of people participated in this rescue and the story has all these details. We were always so challenged by that — there was too much to fit. It takes 18 days, and the children were only found on the 11th day. You don’t really have a true decision moment, and then the same thing happens 13 times. So, there are a lot of narrative constraints, but leaning into the constraints, and taking the time to build that understanding, proved more rewarding. Allowing the space to go into the story of the cave and the legend of the princess, and the monk, it allowed it to exist from all these multiple points of view.

Chin: The amount of time and energy spent in just establishing the baseline of the story and getting it accurate — because we were hearing from so many different sources what was happening, and people didn’t know that the other people were doing. It was a massive and chaotic operation. We tried to bring that together so people could understand what actually happened, and then build the emotional landscape and everything else around it.

Vasarhelyi: We learned about a lot of the details by doing the recreations when we had the actual participants wearing the actual stuff and showing us how they did it. No one was in the cave with them. That was a special process. The gravity of what they did really comes to life when you see them bind the wrist of child behind their back and their legs and submerge their head. That’s our job as filmmakers is to convey that, and we only learned it in the reenactments.

Likewise, you use animation to show not only the geography of Tham Luang, but also some of the mythology around it. The film explains the myth of the cave and Nang Non, and also introduces Kruba Boonchun, a monk whose prayer soothed anxious families, and who predicted the rescue. Can you discuss the importance of the cave’s folklore, the guardian spirit, and Thai beliefs? That was really important and often more interesting than the rescue.

Vasarhelyi: That is my favorite part of the movie. How do we know that Kruba Boonchun and all those prayers didn’t save children? That’s why Jimmy and I really wanted to make this film, so we can listen. My mom, she’s there. Faith is really important and dignifying the faith and respecting it is really important to us.

Chin: It was really important to us as Asian filmmakers, because there is this East meets West story/subtext to it. It highlights why we wanted to make film. All of these people came from different countries, cultures, and belief systems to save these kids. Who’s to say whose belief systems really contributed to rescue?

Vasarhelyi: There is also something kind of self-referential in that so much of traditions and religions in how you tell the story. I’m particularly delighted by our end credit sequence where we had the same Thai painters and artisans imagine how they would tell the story in images. You know this rescue will become legend in some way.

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I like that the coach teaches meditation to calm the boys. John and Rick and Richard and Chris who did the dive were inspiring as they talk about controlling their emotions, too. That was an interesting parallel. And even though many of them said they “don’t play well with others,” yet here work together as a very effective team? Can you talk about the personalities involved?

Chin: They are clearly great characters, but personality-wise, cave diving is the most extreme end of diving and scuba. It reminded us — my peer group in the climbing world, that do a very specific and extreme end of the climbing disciplines — you have to be a certain type of person to be drawn into crawling into a muddy hole and submerging yourself underwater. We talk about it in the film. They are misfits and never felt they belonged anywhere. This was a deep calling for them and lifestyle for them. Their entire lives are centered around doing this very specific activity because it brings a lot of peace and joy and satisfaction. This life they live is very intentional.

Vasarhelyi: Everyone who participated in the rescue found their place and being their best self. What is interesting about the divers is that they dedicated their lives to something that is obscure, weird, or random because they are misfits and can’t fit, and they found a place to fit. Suddenly, this event shows that you can put this very strange skill to great use. It also allows them the opportunity to show their character; they make these impossible decisions and they are incredibly generous and make the absolutely moral decision.

There is some real bureaucracy involved in his mission, from calling in American soldiers from Japan, and the British cave divers, Australians, and more. I was surprised that things were sometimes very territorial on the ground given the urgency of the situation. Can you talk about the strategizing? It seemed like everyone wanted to be the hero, but no one wanted to shoulder the blame if things went south.

Vasarhelyi: The divers were willing [to shoulder the blame]. That is the whole point. They really believed that saving one child would be a success and understanding the immense toll it would take on them should a child die on their watch. Dr. Harris, he would forever be known as the guy who killed a kid. Who is ever going to let him anesthetize them?

Chin: They had everything to lose, and they made the hard decision because it was the right decision. When you are managing a rescue situation and scenario that is that huge and complex, it’s very complicated because there is external pressure from a lot of different places you might not think about. In Thailand, there is bureaucracy, and political and PR considerations. It’s delicate. It would be the case in any country when it’s being scrutinized by the entire world. There was a lot to manage and a lot of people involved were feeling a lot of pressure.

Likewise, the film has a very powerful moment where Rick and John find the soccer team alive. The had been told the rescue is possibly a lost cause — and feel guilty about that. But once they realize they can save them they have to figure out how to do the impossible. Richard Harris talks about the confidence he needs to instill in others to make this happen. Can you discuss the complex emotions at work with these men?

Vasarhelyi: I think it’s like an absolute morality. If you are the only person in the world who can do something, you realize you won’t succeed, but you are the only person who can do it. And it is for someone else’s kid, who you have not met before. They are their best selves. That still moves me. If we can all be our best selves, the world would be a lot different. They made a great, generous effort.

Chin: They are not getting paid. They are volunteers. They are electricians, IT consultants, and retired firemen. That is the beauty of story. Hopefully it inspires people. Anybody and everybody has the potential to be their best selves.

I’m curious why you did not interview the coach or any of the kids on the team about their experiences. I assume that was deliberate. I like that you did that, but can you discuss that decision?

Vasarhelyi: I’m proud of the film we made. There was a rights situation with this story, which is not normally a thing in nonfiction. One network owned the children’s rights and the families’, and another acquired the divers’ rights. We didn’t have access. That is why we pursued the Thai Navy SEALs footage so doggedly. Those images have never been seen. I feel them enough now. It’s bittersweet.

Given the mindset of the men in this film, and say, Alex Honnold in “Free Solo,” I appreciate that you like to film adrenaline junkies, either high up or underground. What do you do, other than make films, that gets your blood flowing?

Vasarhelyi: Jimmy is also a professional athlete, so he is going to argue that they are not adrenaline junkies.

Chin: I would argue that is a misperception. My only peer group is not climbers and professional athletes. When I think about these types of athletes or people, they are the most calculated people that I know. You wouldn’t survive otherwise. They are professional risk assessors. Their entire lives are centered around mitigating risk, assessing risk, and calculating risk. That’s because, as Alex has said before, “If I’m feeling adrenaline, then things have gone seriously wrong.” He can’t be adrenalized when he’s doing this stuff. It’s too calculated. You are trying to calculate so you don’t feel adrenaline in some ways.

Vasarhelyi: It’s like they say, “I put my emotions in a box and the box on a shelf and it’s there.” This is what Alex does share with the divers — you have to control your emotions because as Terry says, emotions are death in a cave, panic is death. But to answer your question about what we do for adrenalize, I like balloons, magic, glitter, and unicorns with my kids. I have a flow state and that’s pumpkin picking. I love work, but I also really love the fun we have as parents. People in Jimmy’s world are always talking about flow, and I think getting successfully through the airport with the children happy is my flow state. I crush it. My greatest challenge is executing the perfect drop off plus the conference call at the same time and no one knows!

Chin: She does that very well. I still climb and ski and surf and run for my personal well-being and meditation.

“The Rescue” releases in select theaters Friday, Oct. 8

Did COVID-19 secretly unite (rather than divide) us? A new documentary argues just that

Living through history is not always pleasant. Generations from now, historians will study how humanity coped with the pandemic in the 2020s. That’s because the COVID-19 pandemic has been an inflection point in history, an event that transforms the world. It is easy to overlook this as we’re caught in its throes; yet considering that more global tragedies related to issues like climate change and income inequality are in the offing, that analysis will offer more than merely academic insights.

There are real individual human beings making this history, men and women from all walks of life who view themselves not as tiles in a mosaic but as ordinary people trying to get through the day during unprecedented times. Netflix is sharing their stories in its new documentary, “Convergence: Courage in a Crisis,” and does so by showcasing similar experiences from across the globe from humans of all walks of life. There is the heroism of a Syrian refugee and volunteer hospital cleaner, Hassan Akkad (also a co-director), who fights to end a terrible injustice, and of a Miami doctor desperate to protect Florida’s homeless community. When a volunteer in Wuhan helps medical workers visit the city where the outbreak all began, there is a visceral sense of tension from anyone who can imagine the stress of such a trip.

To better understand this film — and its surprising argument that humans converged in this crisis — Salon spoke with Orlando von Einsiedel, an Oscar-winning documentarian (for his short “The White Helmets”) who led a group of ten co-directors to bring these stories to the screen. “Convergence: Courage in a Crisis” premieres on Netflix on Tuesday, Oct. 12. This interview has been edited for length, clarity and context.

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What broader lessons did you learn from looking at how these different cultures have adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic? What are the guiding principles that humanity can take away from this experience?

When we began, this started off as a film about individuals around the globe responding to the pandemic. I think the film morphed into a story about individuals around the world, responding to the flaws in society that the pandemic has massively exposed and then civil society rising up to plug those holes. I think that’s one of the things we’ve seen around the world in a number of places. What are those flaws — injustices, social inequities, big flaws like racial injustice? I think those are the things that COVID specifically has really shown us. It’s been like a magnifier.

Can you give specific examples that really struck you while you were making the film?

In Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, there is a community where water is shut off at eight o’clock and the protagonist whose story we follow in the film talks about how the government has everyone need to wash their hands and has those sorts of health measures in place. And yet the water for that community is turned off. I think that shows enormous inequality in Brazil, for instance.

I suppose one of the major ethical questions that exists right now in terms of COVID-19 discourse is, to what extent should we respect cultural differences versus to what extent should we insist on people following public health precautions? In the United States, as I’m sure you know, there are many people who oppose mask mandates, vaccine mandates, social distancing, and other public health measures. Does the documentary provide any insights in terms of how we should approach those questions?

Actually we decided from the beginning to not focus on the everyday politics of COVID. We tried to tell a human story. Yes, we focused on countries where COVID has been politicized, because I think that has shown those have been the places where we’ve seen the pandemic play out at its worst, and it’s been the hardest to control it. But the film doesn’t sort of delve into the every day politics of COVID in that regard.

Where does it draw the line in terms of the kinds of political issues it does explore and the ones that it does not?

Ultimately we follow the stories of our protagonist at the hands of the film. So it’s, where do their stories take us? If the story then explores inequities in Miami to do with unhoused individuals, or inequities in a Brazilian favela, or injustices against migrant workers, then we explore those issues.

Now I’m wondering, in terms of the broader lessons from your film, people like me who think about things in historical terms wonder what will the long-term impact be of the COVID-19 pandemic on humanity? Because something that literally affects every human being alive in such a profound way is going to have permanent consequences. Have you given thought to this question? And if so, what kinds of answers do you think your documentary provides?

One of the things I hope the documentary does is highlight the commonalities between us. I’d like to think that the film focuses on some of the things which pull us together. I believe that it’s global events like this, that show that we are all living on a small planet, that can help us in the future tackle these big global issues.

Do you think this is a lesson that humanity is learning? Or is it the lesson that we should learn?

Well, it’s definitely a lesson that we should learn. I think COVID has highlighted that enormously, whether or not the leaders in place at the moment are the best equipped to learn from those lessons. I don’t know. But I think one of the effects was just to show just how connected we all are, and how to solve these global crises we have to work together.

Your documentary is appealing because it covers the experiences of people from all over the world responding to this same event… You said that the lesson is that we need to view ourselves as a global community in terms of practical efforts. What would that look like? Whether in the United States or Brazil or China or Russia, or anywhere else? What would it look like for real world political change to occur that would better serve everyone, whether it’s through COVID-19 or climate change or any other crisis?

I guess the very simple answer to that is working together. [WHO Executive Director- General] Dr. Tedros Adhanom in the film very much says that. This is what he’s been very much tasked with doing, is trying to put people together to work together in global solidarity. I think that is key. How can you just solve COVID in one country? You can’t. This is a global problem. Everybody has to pull together. And to your point, how do you solve climate change? It involves everybody working together. There’s no point just one country working on this decision in isolation. The world doesn’t work like that. We are all interconnected and therefore we have to work together on this stuff. As I said earlier, I think COVID can be a real lesson to all of us, but to solve these problems, we have to work together.

Senate Democrats reveal Biden’s DOJ blocked parts of probe into Trump’s coup plot

A top Department of Justice career official thwarted a Democratic-backed Senate Judiciary probe into Trump’s effort to overturn the election, arguing that the ambit of the committee’s inquiry was far outside the legal limit.

Official transcripts released by the Democrat-led committee on Thursday reveal that DOJ lawyer Bradley Weinsheimer made “a dozen” attempts to curtail the investigation, even when the Biden administration has promised heightened transparency for the proceeding.

In one exchange, Weinsheimer effectively pulled the plug on multiple lines of inquiry with Byung Pak, the former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia. Pak abruptly resigned from his post back in January, later telling the Senate Judiciary Committee in August that he would have been fired by Trump for failing to back Trump’s claims of election fraud in Georgia.

In the transcript, Democratic investigators ask Pak if his office came up with any evidence for Trump’s now-debunked claim that 2,560 felons had voted in the Peach State. But Weinsheimer stopped the line of questioning in its tracks, arguing that it was outside the scope of the committee’s inquiry, according to POLITICO.

“You’re getting into specific investigations that don’t have anything to do with specific pressure put on Mr. Pak, and so I would object,” Weinsheimer said.

“It seems to me that it is inherent in understanding … whether there were particular things that [White House chief of Staff Mark Meadows], the President thought that Mr. Pak’s office ought to be looking into that they were not looking into,” replied Sara Zdeb, chief oversight counsel for Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, D-Ill.

On Thursday, Durbin released an official committee reporting culminating an 8-month investigation into Trump’s attempted weaponization of the DOJ. In the report, the committee details that Trump made multiple failed bids to pressure top DOJ officials into probing his baseless claims of election fraud. The president at one point nearly replaced the then-acting attorney general Jeffrey A. Rosen with another official who was more sympathetic to his election conspiracies, but the plan never materialized.

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The newly-released transcript also features an interview with Rosen in which Weinsheimer again brings the proceedings to several standstills.

In one back-and-forth, Republican counsel Josh Flynn-Brown asked Rosen whether his agency opened cases into Trump’s fraud allegations prior to 2020 election certification.

“I would object to that question,” Weinsheimer interjected. “It’s beyond the scope of the authorization.”

“I think it’s precisely in scope and a very critical question for him to answer,” Flynn-Brown replied.

Frustrated, Flynn-Brown later added: “I think in the Donoghue interview I had five objections. In the Rosen interview, I had one. I have two now. So let’s see how many I can rack up today,”

“Then I recommend you stay within the scope, and I won’t object,” Weinsheimer rebutted.

Back in July, the DOJ formally waived executive privilege for interviews with Trump, his staff, and advisors surrounding the events that preceded the Capitol riot on January 6.

“The extraordinary events in this matter constitute exceptional circumstances warranting an accommodation to Congress in this case,” the department wrote at the time. “President Biden has decided that it would not be appropriate to assert executive privilege” on this issue.

Still, it appears that the DOJ is insistent on preserving certain DOJ “prerogatives,” POLITICO noted, which is allowing the agency to effectively stall the committee’s probe.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the committee’s top Republican, argued that Weinsheimer’s pushback contradicts the department’s insistence on openness.

“It’s remarkable that while President Biden took the extraordinary step of waiving executive privilege to publicize the former president’s deliberations with his top advisers, Biden’s own Justice Department thwarted the same level of transparency when asked about records the Department provided and what it did to actually investigate claims of irregularities in the 2020 election,” Taylor Foy, a Grassley spokesperson, told POLITICO.

It isn’t the first time the DOJ, now led by Biden-appointed Attorney General Merrick Garland, has been accused of protecting Trump.

Back in June, the DOJ announced that it would continue to defend Trump in his defamation lawsuit against former journalist E. Jean Carrol, who accused the former president of sexually assaulting her in the 1990s. The agency also convinced a federal judge to throw out a lawsuit filed by several protesters who were forcibly cleared out of Lafayette Square during the George Floyd protests back in June.

Arizona Republicans tell Congress: Biden’s victory was “free, fair and accurate”

Former President Donald Trump continues to promote the false and totally debunked claim that he won Arizona in the 2020 election. But when three Arizona Republicans testified before the House Oversight Committee on October 7, they reiterated that in fact, now-President Joe Biden won their state fairly and decisively in 2020.

The Republicans were former Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett and two members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors: Chairman Jack Sellers and Vice-Chairman Bill Gates (not to be confused with the tech entrepreneur).

Sellers told members of the House Oversight Committee, “The election of November 3, 2020 in Maricopa County was free, fair and accurate.” And Gates had a stern warning during his testimony, stressing that the United States is in deep trouble if other members of his party refuse to accept democratic election results.

Gates testified, “If elected officials continue to choose party over truth, then these procedures are going to continue on — these privately funded government-backed attacks on legitimate elections. As a Republican who believes in democracy, I dreamed of one day going to a nation that was trying to build a democracy and help them out. Perhaps a former Soviet republic like Belarus or Tajikistan. I never could have imagined that I would be doing that work here in the United States of America.”

The Republicans’ testimony before Congress follows the release of Cyber Ninjas’ report on its audit of the election results in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix (Arizona’s largest city). The audit, which found that Biden did, in fact, receive the most votes in Maricopa County, was not an official government recount. Rather, Cyber Ninjas is a Florida-based private firm run by Doug Logan, a far-right MAGA Republican and QAnon supporter — and even Cyber Ninjas found that Biden won Arizona. Logan refused to testify during the hearing.

The Cyber Ninjas audit, which was ordered by MAGA Republicans in the Arizona State Legislature, was pointless. After the initial vote count in November 2020 showed a Biden victory in Arizona, those votes were recounted by actual election officials and confirmed that Biden won the state.

I chopped 75 pounds of onions a day — here’s how I learned to stop crying

For some people, working in a restaurant means the chance to put their hard-earned culinary degree to use. For me, it meant lots and lots of crying. After I graduated from a fancy liberal arts college and failed to get a salaried office job with a business casual dress code and summer Fridays, I decided to take a different path in order to get my dream job working as a food writer. I met with the chef at a French restaurant in suburban Connecticut and said I loved the Barefoot Contessa and cooking and wanted a job. He looked me up and down and didn’t think I had what it took to work in a restaurant but felt I deserved a chance (I only know this because months later, I asked him point-blank “why in the world did you ever hire someone like me?”).

On my first day as a stage (aka an unpaid cooking intern), I arrived 15 minutes early, sat in the maroon and cream French bistro chairs on the sidewalk patio in front of the restaurant for 25 minutes, waiting for someone to walk by and open the front door, because I didn’t realize there was a back entrance. It took lots of wandering and several embarrassing stares from dog walkers and young mothers walking their babies in overpriced strollers for me to discover the “employee entrance.” After I found my way in, I was promptly yelled at by the sous chef for not tying my apron properly, not bringing my own set of knives (why would I spend money on knives? Shouldn’t they be provided?), and not putting a wet towel under my cutting board to prevent it from slipping and sliding on the metal table (this is a genius trick and one that everyone should try).

Throughout my first few weeks, I did the same tasks day after day — stripping thyme leaves off woody sprigs, peeling potatoes, rinsing frisée in the world’s largest salad spinner, sneaking freshly baked macarons when the pastry chef turned his back, and slicing onions. Lots and lots of onions. All of these tasks were ones I had done for years as a home cook. What makes cooking in a restaurant so different from home cooking — aside from the late hours, the incredible use of curse words, and paying customers — is the sheer volume of ingredients that need to be prepared.

Stripping thyme sprigs isn’t so daunting when it’s three to four sprigs. But when it’s a gallon-sized plastic bag filled with bundles of thyme, well reader . . . there’s just not enough thyme on my hands to prep it all. The average person brings their potatoes home from the grocery store in a reusable shopping bag; in restaurants, cardboard moving boxes packed with fresh spuds are brought in on industrial hand trucks. French restaurants go through a lot of onions to make French onion soup. Try 50 to 100 lbs, which amounts to 100 to 200 onions.

Even if you’ve never worked as a line cook, you have probably cried from cutting an onion. Imagine doing that, but hundreds of times, every two to three days, using the world’s dullest knife, standing in clogs, and listening to NPR (the pastry chef’s preferred radio station)I would wipe away my tears with the stained sleeve of my chef’s coat and constantly had to reassure the rest of my kitchen staff that I was fine, no one died, no my boyfriend didn’t break up with me…it’s just the onions. While everything around me — from the creme brulee to steak au poivre — was being torched with fire, my eyes were scorching. The pain was profound and surely doubled my prep time as I’d have to dry my tears after every few chops. I had to figure out a way to minimize the waterworks, so I didn’t look even more unqualified than I already was.

I don’t remember exactly how I discovered the trick that worked better than all the rest to keep me from crying while cutting onions. I tried every hack you’ve heard of. I chewed gum (refreshing, but not a solution), stuffing a slice of bread in my mouth (delicious because it was brioche, but also not a cure), wearing goggles (breaking news: Ray-Bans may look cool and protect your eyes from the sun, but not alliums).

At one point during the grueling prep process, I must have decided to wash my hands in cold water in a too-tiny stainless steel sink and found that the cold water instantly relieved my burning, watering eyes. Since the coolness from the water offset the warm irritation in my eyeballs, I decided to take it one step further by taking a moment to myself in the walk-in refrigerator. Not cold enough. So I walked a few steps to the right into the icy walk-in freezer and…ah, sweet relief.

I became quite efficient at incorporating this hack into my prep schedule. Cut three onions, walk swiftly to the freezer, stick my head inside, take a deep breath, rinse, and repeat. Did I look strange and suspicious? Yes, yes I did. But I was already the only line cook who wore patent leather black Danksos instead of the muted, matte charcoal clog that the rest of the cooks wore, and tied an apron printed with aqua- and purple-colored moose around my filthy white jacket every morning. Everyone else wore black Crocs, baggy black pants, and thin white aprons provided by the restaurant. Looking like I didn’t know what I was doing was kind of my schtick in the kitchen at this point.

But turns out, I wasn’t a total novice. The cold air thing is real. One popular hack for cutting onions without crying includes peeling an onion under cold water (seems messy and impractical to me, but some swear by it). Others say that freezing an onion and then cutting it can help prevent you from looking like you just re-watched the Titanic for the fiftieth time. It works because when onions are cut, they release an enzyme called allinase, which, aside from the tear-inducing burn, is not harmful to be around. “Allicin is extremely volatile and, as soon as it’s produced, allicin moves through the air, reaches the membrane on our eyes, and irritates it. In response, our eyes secrete tears to wash away the allicin and we begin to cry,” explained Nik Sharma in this article.

Anything cold, like freezing an onion, cutting it in the sink under running water, or running your entire forearm under water, may help reduce the chances of crying while cutting onions. Unlike cooking and baking, it’s not a perfect science, but I managed to get my tears under control (or at least got better at running to the bathroom quickly to hide them).

Nowadays, I’m back to cutting only two or three onions at a time from the comfort of my home kitchen. There are no more late nights, no more paying customers, far fewer burns and cuts, and way less stinging. But I’ll still rinse my forearm under cold water or stick my head in a (much smaller) freezer. 86 my tears.

Joe Biden complains Kyrsten Sinema is ignoring his calls — but she talks to Mitch

President Joe Biden is frustrated that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., is refusing to budge in negotiations on his Build Back Better plan and won’t even return his calls, according to CNN.

Biden has sounded “exasperated” at Sinema and fellow holdout Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who have rejected the $3.5 trillion price tag of the Democratic proposal to expand health care and family care, provide paid family leave, combat climate change, provide free community college and lower housing and prescription drug costs.

Biden has complained to lawmakers that the two senators “don’t move” from their positions and has even “contended that Sinema didn’t always return calls from the White House,” sources told CNN’s Manu Raju.

Sinema and her aides have repeatedly said that she would not negotiate publicly. Democratic leaders are also rankled that she doesn’t appear to be negotiating much in private either. Sinema’s office says she has been clear about her demands, but Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., complained on Wednesday that Sinema refuses to tell Senate colleagues what exactly she would support in the bill.

“Sen. Sinema’s position is that she doesn’t quote-unquote negotiate publicly,” Sanders said during a news conference. “I don’t know what that means. We don’t know where she’s coming from. Tell us what you want.”

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Sinema has faced growing criticism from constituents and even the threat of a Democratic primary opponent over her refusal to support Biden’s signature bill. Although she told lobbyists earlier this year that “senators need to hear from their constituents,” activist groups now say Sinema has ignored the “Black, brown, and indigenous communities who elected her.” The New York Times reported that Sinema has “effectively cut off communication with the local progressive groups that worked to elect her in 2018.”

Sinema was heckled by protesters while teaching a class at Arizona State University last week and later confronted in a campus restroom, which Democratic leaders have condemned. But Sanders refused to sign a joint statement condemning the protesters because it did not include a condemnation of Sinema’s stance on the bill, according to emails obtained by Axios.

Sinema, who is a leading recipient of donations from the pharmaceutical industry and corporations and industry groups lobbying to defeat Biden’s bill, reportedly opposes the Democrats’ proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug costs — even though she campaigned on that issue in 2018. She also reportedly opposes tax increases on corporations and wealthy individuals (despite previously calling for them to “pay their fair share”).

Despite complaints from fellow senators, her constituents, and now the president that she appears unwilling to negotiate, Sinema has found time amid this legislative battle for Biden’s agenda to meet with business lobby groups that are eager to kill the Build Back Better legislation.

Last month, Sinema charged members of business groups opposed to tax hikes up to $5,800 per person to attend a 45-minute fundraiser. Last week, she flew from Washington back to Arizona, with a spokesman saying she had an important medical appointment to treat a foot injury. The New York Times reported that she was also scheduled to attend a fundraising “retreat” with donors at a high-end resort and spa.

Amid her standoff with her own party, which has caused her poll numbers to plummet, Sinema has gotten the backing of a pharma-funded group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

McConnell has urged fellow Republicans to praise Sinema publicly and privately assured his party earlier this year that Sinema would successfully block Biden’s proposed tax increases on corporations and the wealthy.

The Republican leader earlier this week relented on his opposition to helping the Democrats raise the debt ceiling, offering a short-term increase in hopes of lowering the pressure on Sinema and Manchin to change Senate filibuster rules in order to raise the debt limit, Republican sources told the New York Times. McConnell called Sinema and Manchin to discuss the deal even before informing members of his own party, according to Politico. Democrats, including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, only learned of the deal McConnell floated to Sinema and Manchin through a press release.

Sinema’s bizarre positioning has bewildered Democrats in her state, where she is apparently trying to craft a new image as a John McCain-style “maverick.” But while her support has ticked up slightly among Republicans, it has plummeted among Democrats and independents, according to a recent Morning Consult poll.

“The activists, the people who are going to knock on doors, those guys are done with her,” Steven Slugocki, the former chairman of the Maricopa County Democratic Party, told Politico. “Arizona is a rapidly changing state. It is turning blue very quickly. I don’t know what her end game is.”

Garrick McFadden, the former chairman of the state Democratic Party, said that Sinema should not be labeled a “centrist” but an “obstructionist.”

“I don’t understand the calculus,” he told Politico. “It’s not like we’re asking her to do the Bernie Sanders or the Elizabeth Warren agenda. It’s the Joe Biden agenda.”

Facebook and Trump: America is sleepwalking towards fascism

AT&T and Facebook are unaccountable. Donald Trump’s still free. This week saw an overwhelming number of stories all pointing to the same conclusion: American authoritarianism is on the rise, juiced and protected by some of the richest and most powerful people in the United States.

Due to a combination of whistleblowers, investigations, and, in many cases, utter shamelessness on the part of fascism enablers, this is now out in the open. And yet, despite Democrats controlling both Congress and the White House, serious action to fight back and save American democracy remains underwhelming to nonexistent.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, for instance, released a sobering report this week detailing the extent of Donald Trump’s efforts to force the Department of Justice to fabricate evidence for use as a pretext to nullify the 2020 election. The report details nine separate instances of Trump pressuring acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to enact a scheme, concocted by another DOJ lawyer named Jeffrey Clark, to overturn the election. Trump was not exactly subtle about what he expected from Rosen. On January 3 — three days before Trump resorted to inciting violence in a last-ditch effort to overthrow the election — Trump called a meeting and opened it by complaining, “One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election.”

As Heather “Digby” Parton writes at Salon, “The president of the United States tried for weeks to get the Attorney General to overturn the election. That is the definition of an attempted coup.”

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Senate Republicans are defending Trump on the grounds that this effort failed, which, as I point out in today’s Standing Room Only newsletter, is the equivalent of saying attempted murder isn’t a real crime. And the reason they’re defending him is not mysterious. He’s going to run again in 2024 — and will try to steal the election again, as well — and he does so with the full support of the GOP establishment, which is manipulating state election laws to make it easier for Trump next time.

This week, as well, Reuters published a disturbing report exposing how One America News, which can aptly be described as an authoritarian propaganda channel supporting Trump’s demands to be installed illegally as president, is being bankrolled by the communications giant AT&T.

OAN’s founder, Robert Herring Sr., not only claims that OAN was started at the request of AT&T executives but that court records show “AT&T has been a crucial source of funds flowing into OAN, providing tens of millions of dollars in revenue.” AT&T defends this by saying they offer “many news channels that offer viewpoints across the political spectrum,” but of course, OAN is not “news,” because they heavily supported false claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent. OAN is profiting handsomely from Trump’s insurrection, as the “network’s online audience soared in November after conservative mainstay and OAN competitor Fox News affirmed Joe Biden’s victory.”

Fascist propaganda, it turns out, is very good business indeed. This ugly reality, that there’s money to be made in elevating false, authoritarian propaganda, was also highlighted in the rolling news stories this week around Facebook, stemming from the revelations offered by whistleblower Frances Haugen.

Haugen collected thousands of documents during her time working for the civic integrity department at Facebook, which she says was marginalized precisely because having civic integrity is not good for profit. Haugen’s documentation demonstrated what many have long suspected based on public evidence: Facebook knows that right-wingers are using their platform to spread disinformation and undermine democracy. They just don’t care because authoritarian disinformation is wildly popular and therefore good for business.

This is why the right is freaking out and spreading conspiracy theories to discredit Haugen. They depend heavily on Facebook to distribute their false, inflammatory propaganda, and without it, their efforts to undermine democracy would lose a lot of power.

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These stories are all troubling. The situation is clear-cut. There’s a powerful authoritarian leader gunning to destroy democracy and install himself as the nation’s leader. He has not just the full support of a major political party and the political power to arrange the laws to make this happen for him, but a propaganda apparatus that touches every corner of American life. Corporate interests may front like they oppose this, but behind the scenes, they offer material support to fascists because they see doing so as profitable. None of this is a secret.

And yet … nothing substantive is being done.

The Senate Judiciary released a report detailing Trump’s extensive efforts to overthrow democracy, and yet there’s not a whiff of a hint that there’s any movement from the Department of Justice to hold him criminally accountable for his actions. On the contrary, the DOJ is helping Trump, by shielding his Justice Department appointees from being questioned by congressional investigators. The assault on free and fair elections on the state level has been thoroughly documented, but legislation that would prevent these anti-democratic actions is moribund in a Democratic-controlled Congress because a couple of Democratic senators prioritize the filibuster over democracy itself. Democrats control some of the most powerful offices in the land, and yet they act helpless to stop the ongoing coup effort being conducted by a private citizen in Florida who has a criminal rap sheet many times longer than should be necessary to put him away for years.

There curiously has also been no accountability for the corporate interests who support rising fascism because it’s in their financial interests to do so.

Haugen’s whistleblowing efforts focused heavily on attempts to expose Facebook’s role in spreading right-wing disinformation, but when she was brought up for a Senate hearing, it was to talk about teen girls and self-esteem, a problem even the Insurrectionist Caucus is happy to pull faces and claim to be upset by. It’s an important issue, to be sure, but in the face of the literal end to American democracy, it’s questionable whether teen self-esteem should be the main priority for the Senate when it comes to Facebook.

There’s just no way out of it. The country is sleepwalking its way into an authoritarian overthrow of democracy.

There’s plenty of journalism and exposés on all of these social forces Trump is exploiting to capture the White House in 2024. Yet, despite all of the noise, there’s little in the way of action to change things. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Democrats have real power, and even if a couple of no-good centrist Democrats are standing in the way of electoral reform, there are surely other actions that could be taken to stop Trump. A lack of imagination and political cowardice, however, is inducing this attitude of helplessness in Democrats. And it’s one that Trump will all too easily exploit to get his way.

Marisel Salazar thinks if you can eat it, you can probably put adobo on it

Welcome to Marisel Salazar’s Pantry! In each installment of this series, a recipe developer will share with us the pantry items essential to their cooking. This month, we’re exploring 8 staples stocking Marisel’s Panamanian, Cuban, and Japanese kitchen.

When you think of Latin American cuisine, Panama may not jump to your mind; we’re mostly known for the canal, as a financial hub, and for our breathtaking beaches. Our food is a mix of African, Spanish, and indigenous (like the Kuna Indians) techniques, dishes, and ingredients, with rice, beans, and corn as basic staples. Since the country is surrounded on both sides by oceans, we have incredible seafood, tropical fruits, and vegetables. In fact, our unique terroir has contributed to the worldwide popularity of the award-winning Geisha coffee.

Due to the construction of the canal in November 1903, more than 50,000 workers migrated to Panama from the West Indies, like Jamaica, Martinique, Barbados, and Trinidad. The new arrivals brought their cooking cultures with them, which embedded itself into the food as Afro-Panamanian cuisine. Think: salted cod stew, fried and marinated fish, corvina ceviche, fried plantains, and coconut rice.

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Originally from Panama, I’m an immigrant turned American citizen. The majority of my extended family (apart from my mother, sister, and myself) lives between Panama City and Colón. We left when I was a toddler and lived in Honolulu and Okinawa, Japan, before coming to the contiguous U.S. Despite being a working single mother, who at one point was also going to college, my mom made sure we had comida casera, or home cooking. Despite our pleas for the whimsical boxed, processed foods we saw on the few American cable channels we received abroad, or that were offered at the commissary (that’s the military grocery store, made available to us by Mom’s husband at the time) when we had access, Mom always preferred to cook, so much so that I called her “Maria Stewart.” Her name is indeed Maria, but she’s also a fantastically clever cook.

Even as an immigrant abroad, my mother loved Martha Stewart and Jacques Pépin. I knew who Julia Child was before I cared to know about famous chefs — my mother was always referencing her in conversation as if they were girlfriends. “Oh, Julia did this, Julia did that.” And then there was famed Cuban cook and food celebrity Nitza Villapol, actually known as the “Cuban Martha Stewart.” Villapol’s cookbooks like Cocina al Minuto are fundamental for home cooks, with basic, traditional Cuban recipes like picadillo, vaca frita, and arroz con Pollo — plus creative ways to make up for ingredient deficiencies from food rations. Growing up on a tight budget, we never bought lavish ingredients, and always made creative substitutions. We bought bone-in, skin-on chicken on sale because it was cheaper than boneless skinless (though I would argue tastier, too). We were sustainable, and practiced zero-waste or closed-loop cooking before those terms became trendy. We had to use every scrap of food — or freeze it for later — to make sure that the monthly mortgage and health insurance payments were made. I was incredibly aware of our financial situation from a very young age, but we never lacked flavor, in life or in the food my mother made.

Her enthusiasm for making gourmet-ish meals for her daughters always stuck with me, and molded my own cooking style. Not only did she parent me as her child, but also as a cook.

Growing up whisked all over the world, I developed a fearless palate, always curious to try something new. I ate sea cucumbers and natto in Japan, poi in Hawaii, and morcilla when I lived in Madrid as a young adult. My cooking style is a blend of all the countries I’ve lived in — how could it not be? It’s Panamanian, Cuban, Spanish, Japanese, Hawaiian, and American, but there are eight essential ingredients that I always keep on hand from all of these cultures that find themselves in most of my recipes.

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My 8 Panamanian, Cuban and Japanese essentials

1. Manzanilla Olives

You see hints of Spanish colonialism in Panamanian cuisine with the Manzanilla olive. These plump, meaty, brine-soaked, greenish-brown gems add instant umami to any dish. The pimiento-stuffed variety makes food pop with their red color when sliced and adds zest to drinks (hola, martinis!). Some say there’s a slight almond undertone to Manzanilla olives.

I like to save the brine to sprinkle onto meats, use as a part of salad dressings, or flick onto anything that needs acid. Toss whole olives into salads, tomato soup, red-sauce-coated pasta, chicken or beef dishes, and plenty more. Lots of tomato references, right? Tomato is a Manzanilla olive’s best friend.

2. Yuzu Kosho (Yuzu Paste)

Rising in worldwide popularity and culinary renown is yuzu paste (also known as yuzu kosho). Yuzu is an East Asian citrus fruit. This thick, acid-green-colored paste is a fermented Japanese condiment made from chile peppers, yuzu peel, and salt. Kosho refers to the chiles. The flavor is aromatic, bright, fresh, and citrus-forward, but also a bit bitter from the peel and hot from the chiles. It is used in dishes like Japanese hot pot (or nabemono), soups, sashimi, and one of my favorite comfort food dishes: Japanese tuna fish sandos, with Japanese mayo, aonori, yuzu paste, mirin, and rice vinegar, all on milk bread.

3. Sazón

Sazón means “seasoning” in Spanish, and this seasoning specifically is a staple ingredient in Latin American cooking. Sazón is known for its distinctive savory taste and the red-brown color that it brings to food. It is a pungent spice blend of achiote or annatto, salt, cumin, coriander, garlic, oregano, and black pepper. It adds color and flavor to meats, fish, poultry, soups, and stews — without adding heat.

Rub it on steaks, pork, chicken, and fish as a marinade before grilling, frying, or baking. Sprinkle it in soups and stews or add to beans and rice. It’s also the prime flavor in arroz con pollo. I love using sazón in less traditional ways as well: a sprinkle on my eggs (scrambled, fried, deviled — any style works), shaken onto French fries (think of it like Old Bay in this case), or a light dusting on top of a bagel schmeared with cream cheese.

Recipe: Arroz Con Pollo Panameño

4. Adobo

Similarly to sazón, if you can eat it, you can probably put adobo on it. Another essential in the Latin American cupboard, adobo is a blend of five-plus spices, usually salt, garlic, turmeric, black pepper, and oregano (but the exact mix can vary). This is a savory, all-purpose product used for grilling, roasting, frying, or sautéing — great for adding instant savoriness. It’s widely used as a base seasoning for meats, fish, stews, sauces, beans, stock, and vegetables. I use it almost like a security blanket — I will always throw in a dash to whatever savory dish I’m cooking, just in case.

5. Aonori (Dried Seaweed)

Also known as anori, these dried and crumbled seaweed flakes are my pièce de résistance, used to bring umami flavor and a “from the sea” aroma to Japanese dishes like soups, soba, or udon noodles, as well as my favorite tuna fish sandos. It comes in either flakes or powder — I prefer flakes. I’ll sprinkle it onto salads, eggs, rice, broiled salmon, and, my newest obsession, mayo to dip fries in. Which brings us to . . .

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6. Kewpie Mayo

If ever there were a mayo that could inspire a cult obsession, Kewpie’s the one. Maybe that’s why the mayo mania stretches so far in Japan that there are even mayo-flavored ice creams and chips available at restaurants and stores. I love this thick and creamy, tangy and sharp, yellow-tinted mayo so much that I even have a fan-girl tote bag dedicated to it, stamped with a Kewpie baby doll: I am a total mayora (that’s the Japanese word for someone addicted to mayo). The key differences between Japanese-style Kewpie mayo and the American counterpart are that Kewpie is made only with egg yolks, rather than whole egg, and no water, both of which contributes to Kewpie mayo’s thicker texture. Most notably, the alluring nature of Kewpie comes from MSG. Search the label and you will see it uses vinegar, yet no added sugar or salt — the MSG brings all the seasoning it needs.

I use Kewpie mayo anywhere I would use American mayo (burgers, deviled eggs, French fries, and sandwiches, to name just a few). And if the flavor alone doesn’t inspire you to replace your current mayo with the Kewpie brand, its unique packaging and product design will. Unlike jarred mayos, it comes in a borderline-flimsy red-and-clear squeeze bottle with the iconic Kewpie baby welcoming you with open arms, wrapped in decorated cellophane. (This baby isn’t as random as you might think: A Kewpie is actually a type of doll, characterized by a large head, big eyes, chubby cheeks, and a curl or topknot on top of its head.)

Recipe: Arroz con Piña

7. Sofrito

Sofrito is la salsa madre, the mother sauce, of Hispanic cooking. Also known as recaito in some Latin American countries, sofrito is what I would say is the third member of the Holy Latin Trinity, along with adobo and sazón. This mixture of chopped aromatics gets cooked down until saucy, then used as the foundation for meat and seafood dishes, stews, soups, beans, and rice.

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While it differs slightly from country to country, tomatoes are the heart of sofrito, along with garlic, onions, bell peppers of all colors, achiote, cilantro, oregano, and/or parsley. Sofritos can vary in color from red to orange to green. Puerto Rican sofrito, known as recaito, is typically green due to the heavy use of culantro, a green herb that tastes like a stronger cousin of cilantro. Cuban sofrito uses tomatoes, red bell peppers, and diced ham. It can be homemade or bought at the grocery store in tubs or individual frozen cubes. Sofrito is another one of the foods that evokes the history of Spanish colonialism in Latin America: introduced by colonizers and adapted to the availability of ingredients found in Latin America. Supposedly, sofrito comes from Catalonia and was used as far back as the 1300s, where hints of it were known as “sofregit.”

8. Worcestershire Sauce

We call this “English sauce” in my family because it is exceedingly difficult to say with a perfect American accent, let alone a Spanish accent. Lea & Perrins has always been my family’s brand of choice. We came across it while living abroad for a time on military bases, and it was accessible in Panama due to the heavy American influence on the culture and cuisine. There is so much happening in a simple shake from the bottle: vinegars, fermented onions and garlic, molasses, tamarind paste, cured anchovies, chile pepper, and spices. It’s powerfully umami, delightfully sour (thanks to tamarind and vinegar), and the faintest bit sweet from molasses. It’s a go-to marinade (by itself or in addition to other ingredients) for chicken in my family and another one of those “dot the i’s and cross the t’s” ingredients that we add to every savory recipe — just in case.

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