The policies in Congress’ $3.5 trillion budget package are popular — like, really popular

A video out Friday featuring numerous polls showing the popularity of the programs included in the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package that Democrats are trying to push through Congress—and narrated by one of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ top aides—offered a scathing indictment of those within the party who continue to oppose the sweeping investments in childcare, Medicare expansion, housing, higher education, and climate.

Warren Gunnels, the longtime staff director and policy advisor for Sanders (I-Vt.) who is sometimes referred to as the “keeper of receipts,” argues in the video that corporate Democrats like Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona are blocking an agenda that is widely supported by the American public.

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As The Nation‘s John Nichols noted, the video shows Republican pundit Meghan McCain repeatedly claiming aspects of the plan—including “expanding Medicare, paid family leave, tuition-free community college, ending child poverty and saving the planet didn’t poll well”—but that Gunnels masterfully “explains that she is scorchingly wrong.”

“I’m not quite sure what planet Meghan is living on, but right here on planet Earth the overwhelming majority of the American people—including ‘independent centrists’—support the $3.5 trillion… plan,” Gunnels says in the video.

He then runs through a list of surveys—including an August 12 Fox News poll that found a majority of likely voters favor spending $3.5 trillion on priorities including combating the climate crisis, health care, and childcare—to underscore the package’s popularity.

Noting the overwhelming support for some of the bill’s individual components, Gunnels says: “When 84% want to expand Medicare to cover dental, vision and hearing, and 81% want Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices, opposing these policies doesn’t make you a moderate. It doesn’t make you a centrist. It makes you an extremist.”

New report details dangerous weaponry brought by Capitol rioters — despite claims they were unarmed

Republican lawmakers have spent months gaslighting the American public on what transpired at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Although harrowing footage captured the deadly series of events that transpired, Republicans have adamantly attempted to downplay the incident and cover up multiple aspects of the insurrection.

One fact that hasn’t received enough coverage — and has also been falsely denied by many figures on the right — is the serious weaponry brought by some of the insurrectionists.

According to Mother Jones, some of Trump’s extremist supporters actually did carry guns into the federal building. “A Mother Jones investigation drawing on public video footage, congressional testimony, and documents from more than a dozen federal criminal cases reveals that various Trump supporters descended on DC that day armed for battle with guns and other potentially lethal weapons,” the publication reports.

Multiple individuals are also facing charges of carrying firearms on U.S. Capitol grounds. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and court documents, “at least eight others carried knives or tasers at the Capitol, including two defendants who allegedly committed assaults with tasers.” A number of others were also arrested in downtown Washington, D.C. Those individuals reportedly had ” rifles, pistols, explosive materials, and large supplies of ammunition.”

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Despite the existence of evidence, Republican lawmakers have repeatedly pushed back against those claims. “This didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) just weeks after angry Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. He added, ‘When you think of armed, don’t you think of firearms?’

During the hearings back in May, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) also claimed law enforcement officers found “zero firearms” on riot suspects. Former President Donald Trump had also echoed the same claim. “There were no guns whatsoever”‘ Trump said when he appeared on Fox News in July.

However, the defendants in the case appear to have made their intentions quite clear. One defendant, in particular, is Guy Reffitt of Texas. Facing a charge for unlawfully carrying a handgun, Reffitt sent a message to fellow members of the extremist organization known as the Three Percenters. He suggested that incidents like the Capitol insurrection are only the beginning of their efforts to take back the country.

“We took the Capital and put the POS Capital Hill on it’s [sic] heels,” said Reffitt, according to court documents filed by prosecutors. “This has only just begun and will not end until we The People of The Republic have won our country back. We had thousands of weapons and fired no rounds yet showed numbers. The next time we will not be so cordial.”

Can people with healthy habits skip the COVID-19 vaccine? Experts explain why the answer is “no”

I’m a fitness enthusiast. I also adhere to a nutrient-dense, “clean” eating program, which means I minimize my sugar intake and eat a lot of whole foods for the purpose of optimizing my health.

You might wonder how effective such a diet and exercise plan would be in the fight against COVID-19, since some have suggested — without supporting evidence — that vaccination may be unnecessary if a detailed wellness lifestyle is closely followed.

As a research scientist who has studied nutrition for close to 20 years, I have watched the wellness community’s response to the COVID-19 vaccines with great interest. While eating right can favorably impact the immune system, it is not reasonable to expect that nutrition alone will defend against a potentially life-threatening virus.

My experience with nutrition science

My lab group at the University of Memphis studies the effect of food and isolated nutrients on human health. In January 2009, we conducted an initial study of a stringent vegan diet. We enrolled 43 men and women who were allowed to eat as much plant-based food as desired, but drank only water, for 21 days.

The results demonstrated improvements in many variables related to cardio-metabolic health, such as blood cholesterol, blood pressure, insulin and C-reactive protein — a protein that increases in response to inflammation. We have since completed multiple human and animal nutrition studies using this dietary program.

My lab’s research has resulted in some 200 peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts and book chapters specific to nutrients and exercise, and the interaction between these two variables. The results of our work, as well as that of other scientists, clearly demonstrate the power of food to favorably impact health.

For many individuals, a positive change in eating habits results in such an improvement in clinically relevant measures like blood cholesterol and glucose that doctors can sometimes reduce or eliminate certain medications used to treat high cholesterol and diabetes. In other cases, these measures improve but the patient still requires the use of medications to control their disease. This tells us that in some situations, a great nutrition program is simply not enough to overcome the body’s challenges.

Nutrition and other wellness approaches do matter

Although certain natural products have been discussed as treatments for COVID-19, little emphasis has been placed on whole food nutrition as a protective measure. I think this is unfortunate, and I believe strengthening our immune system with the goal of battling COVID-19 and other viral infections is of great importance. And the evidence tells us that a nutrient dense diet, regular exercise and adequate sleep can all contribute to optimal immune function.

Regarding nutritional intake, a recently published study using a sample of health care workers who contracted COVID-19 noted that those who followed a plant-based or pescatarian diet had 73% and 59% lower odds of moderate to severe COVID-19, respectively, compared to those who did not follow those diets. Although interesting, it’s important to remember that these findings represent an association rather than a causal effect.

While people can use nutrition to help shore up their immune system against COVID-19, diet is only one important consideration. Other variables matter a great deal too, including stress management, nutritional supplements and physical distancing and mask-wearing.

But to be clear, all of those elements should be considered tools in the toolbox to help combat COVID-19 – not a replacement for potentially life-saving vaccines.

Vaccines are not perfect, but they save lives

I find it interesting that nearly all parents understand the importance of having their kids vaccinated against serious illnesses like mumps, measles and varicella. They do not expect that certain foods, or a nurturing environment, will do the job of a vaccine.

Yet, when it comes to COVID-19, this thought process is abandoned by some who believe that a healthy lifestyle will substitute for the vaccine, without seriously considering what the vaccine actually does to provide protection against the virus — something that a healthy lifestyle alone simply cannot do.

When contemplating whether to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, consider the following: All medications have risks, including things as seemingly benign as aspirin. Hormonal contraception — something used by millions of women every month — is thought to cause an estimated 300-400 deaths annually in the U.S. The same is true for cosmetic surgery, Botox injections and other elective procedures.

Many people are willing to accept the low risks in those cases, but not with those involving the COVID-19 vaccines — despite the fact that the risk of serious complications or death from COVID-19 far outweighs the low risk of serious adverse events from the vaccines.

No lifestyle approach, including strict adherence to a holistic, nutrient-dense diet — vegan, plant-forward or otherwise — will confer total protection against COVID-19. The vaccines aren’t perfect either; breakthrough infections do occur in some cases, though the vaccines continue to provide robust protection against severe illness and death.

I encourage people to do all they can to improve the health and functioning of their immune system, naturally. Then, seriously consider what additional protection would be gained from vaccination against COVID-19. When people make decisions based on the latest science – which is always evolving — rather than on emotions and misinformation, the decision should become much clearer.

Richard Bloomer, Dean of the College of Health Sciences, University of Memphis

Bullied, autistic and obsessed with presidents: How the 2000 presidential election changed my life

I love the word “neurodiversity.”

“Neurodiversity” — which refers to the idea that some conditions viewed as developmental disorders are actually normal variations in the brain — exists to de-stigmatize autism and spread awareness that some neurological differences can be normal and healthy. My favorite thing about that word, though, is how it implies that there are a great many ways life shapes each distinct neurological type. Like a lot of others with autism, I tend to develop obsessive interests about which I insatiably acquire extensive, detailed knowledge. Worlds have changed because certain interests have caught fire within specific autistic minds.

According to author and autism advocate Temple Grandin, there are three ways that autistic people can think: They can be visual thinkers, musical/mathematical thinkers or verbal/logic thinkers. From the moment I first read her theory, I knew that I was a word thinker. How could I not, when this is the way she would later describe them? “The word thinker may be poor at drawing but have a huge memory for facts such as sports statistics or film stars.”

I started with sports statistics. Thumbing through massive books brimming with historical data broken down by team and player, as a little child in the early ’90s I would impress my parents’ friends with memorized facts and figures about football lore. Shortly before the 1992 NFL season, I announced to my parents that I was going to be a Green Bay Packers fan. When they asked why I’d support a team from a distant state coming off a 4-12 season, I explained that they had won the first two Super Bowls and were the only team with green in both their uniform and name. Green is my favorite color, which gave these mathematical factoids profound significance to me. Luckily for me, the Packers’ fortunes changed for the rest of the ’90s, and I still vividly remember watching them cap off the 1996 season with a victory at Super Bowl XXXI. I spent the night regaling my parents’ friends with tales from various seasons in the nearly-30 year championship drought I hoped was about to end.

By the late ’90s, I had moved on to the entertainment industry. Film stars didn’t interest me, but since I aspired to be the next Steven Spielberg (I would end up reviewing movies instead), I felt I needed to know about box office revenues. There was a time when I could recite the top 100 highest grossing films without missing a beat, as well as offer amateur theories as to why certain movies succeeded or failed. In 1998, when “Titanic” became the highest grossing film of all time unadjusted for inflation, I was personally engrossed by news of its week-by-week financial saga, putting me at odds with peers who were gushing about Leonardo DiCaprio, Celine Dion and the special effects. (“Titanic” would lose its title to “Avatar” in 2010, which would later by supplanted by other blockbusters.)

Then I moved on to politics.

On some level society made the choice for me. It started in 1997, when I was 12, and after I survived an antisemitic hate crime. A group of my classmates held my head under water and, motivated by religious prejudice, chanted things like “Drown the Jew!” This didn’t on its own make me interested in politics, but it did cause a hyperawareness of how the world views me as a Jew. I suspect most Jews experience that stinging moment when they realize with sudden and vicious clarity that, for some people, they are hated simply because they fall into the category of “Jew.” People can draw very different lessons from this revelation. Mine were leftist.

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Yet my politics were shaped much more by being autistic than by being Jewish. Growing up I was bullied and socially isolated as a child, which made me strive to identify with others who are marginalized and mistreated. When I reached the age when my peers were taking on after-school jobs, I struggled with employment because I couldn’t naturally socialize, maintain eye contact, pay attention during menial tasks and “fit in” (a catch-all term that not-so-obliquely labels you as a misfit). This gave me a hyper-awareness that I was an outsider, and I coped with the anger and loneliness by gradually aligning myself with other outsiders.

That, in turn, brought me to politics. And once I was there, did I ever discover a world of fascinating, intoxicating information.

That passion perhaps deserves a bit of elaboration. To a certain type of autistic brain, the love of words and figures goes beyond an intellectual’s zest for knowledge. There is a comfort to the order found in statistics — a chaotic world can, through the right paradigms, make sense — that seems natural. It isn’t a chore to immerse one’s self in mathematical concepts and other abstractions; it is like stumbling across a home you didn’t know was there, but always suspected existed. And the home is always beautiful, at least if you know how to see rather than just look. When it comes to presidential elections every number is pregnant with meaning, representing the philosophies and choices of millions upon millions of individuals. Taken together, their raw life experiences wind up elevating one human being to the most powerful office in the world… and relegating many others to the dreaded status of “also ran.”

These were stories with significance, and my gateway drug was a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the legendary election between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, Theodore H. White’s “The Making of the President — 1960.” I devoured that tome and its three sequels, and in the process imbibed White’s vision into my very being. He waxed lyrical with a romanticized view of American politics, depicting it as an arena in which the loftiest small-d democratic ideals were brought to vivid life through glorious combat. Even more brilliantly, White used math to paint his picture in the same way that a painter uses different hues on a canvas. I was hooked, and soon moved on to other books about presidents, presidential aspirants and their politics.

Before long I could rattle off minutiae about the biggest popular vote winners in American history. Usually I would present these factoids to acquaintances as questions that I would immediately answer for them:

Question: Do you know who the biggest popular vote winners are in American presidential history?

Answering my own question: There are four who surpassed 60 percent! Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, Richard Nixon in 1972 and Warren Harding in 1920.

Question: Do you know how many presidents lost when they tried to get elected to another term?

Answering my own question: Ten! John Adams in 1800, John Quincy Adams in 1828, Martin Van Buren in 1840, Stephen Grover Cleveland in 1888, Benjamin Harrison in 1892, William Howard Taft in 1912, Herbert Clark Hoover in 1932, Gerald Rudolph Ford in 1976, James Earl Carter Jr. in 1980 and George Herbert Walker Bush in 1992!

This is who I was at the age of 15, the year of the 2000 election. Much has been said about that contest, but let me add: It was an exhilarating and devastating time to be a politics-obsessed Jewish American teenage autist.

Given that my parents had voted for Bill Clinton twice, their sympathies naturally went to Al Gore and mine followed. The ’90s had been prosperous and peaceful as far as my experiences went, and like many I gave credit to Clinton and believed Gore would deliver more of the same. I learned about Clinton’s achievements and rattled them off to whoever would listen. When it came to the issues, I cared mainly about gun control. As a “weird” Jewish kid who had been previously victimized by violence, I viewed events like the deadly 1999 Columbine massacre in terms of literal self-preservation. (I acquired a lot of useful knowledge about the history of the Second Amendment during this period.)

I also leaned Democratic because I had developed a sense of “patriotism” for my home state, Pennsylvania. There was a period when I would regularly check out books about William Penn and the colonial Pennsylvanians, and I saw their Enlightenment ideals continued more by modern liberals than conservatives. This was particularly true when it came to matters of religious freedom, and in the year 2000 I could quote Voltaire’s line about how “the so much boasted golden age” had “in all probability never existed but in Pennsylvania” in part for that reason. (I went through a Voltaire phase despite the French philosopher’s antisemitism because, being a rebellious teenager, I loved his style.)

I had an additional reason to support the Democrats when Gore picked Joe Lieberman as his running mate. It is hard to capture in words what this meant to a Jewish kid who had nearly been murdered as a so-called “Christ-killer” three years earlier. On some level, it felt as if America’s Vice President wasn’t just elevating Lieberman, but sending a message to Jews like me that he was watching our back. As a child, I had associated Jewishness with feeling rejected; Gore helped me see that, for millions of Americans, it was something to be embraced. By accepting Gore’s offer, Lieberman showed that it also wasn’t something to be afraid of displaying to the world. I was all too aware that presidents like Nixon, Harry Truman and Ulysses S. Grant had been notoriously antisemitic, so it meant a great deal to think America might have a president who would put a Jew one heartbeat away from the presidency.

As I learned more about Lieberman, I saw much of myself in him, a bookish and idealistic middle class Jewish kid from the northeast. I also enjoyed the synchronicity of this detail: he was a senator from Connecticut, which was true of the only other Jew ever offered the vice presidency. Thanks to White’s last “Making of the President” installment, I knew that Democratic nominee George McGovern asked Abe Ribicoff to run with him during the 1972 election. (When I mentioned Ribicoff’s name to my parents after reading that, I discovered my great-grandmother catered his 1931 wedding.) McGovern had lost that election with, I believed, tragic consequences for America. I hoped both Gore and America would not again suffer that fate.

My fixation on presidential elections broadly, and the 2000 contest specifically, did not help me socially. Most of my peers were uninterested in politics, and some of the interested supported George W. Bush. On one occasion my mother recalls me coming home very upset because a teacher had reprimanded me for being “too intense” on the subject.

“As it turned out, another student was attacking you for your support of Gore-Lieberman using what we now call ‘alternate facts’ to support his case,” she recalled. “Apparently, you rebutted with a litany of statistics that got the other student very upset.”

The teacher said he had reprimanded me because I was “on a roll” and would have continued for the rest of the class period if he had not intervened.

My intensity would only worsen after Election Day. When it came to the popular vote, it was the closest election since the ’60s. Moreover, it seemed obvious to me that the election was going to be stolen by Bush.

Question: Do you know which five elections before 2000 had a popular vote difference of less than one percent between the top two candidates?

Answering my own question: 1880, 1884, 1888, 1960 and 1968!

I was not happy — and the people around me knew it. To my friend Sal, I opened up about how I thought this was just like the 1960 election, and proceeded to detail all of the myriad controversies surrounding why that election was close and how the 2000 case was indisputably more egregious. I discussed the 1876 election with a teacher, comparing the chicanery from the Rutherford Hayes and Samuel Tilden campaigns with the actions of Bush and his crew. That teacher later told me that “what I really remember is your ability to recall the exact popular and electoral vote totals for any election that got mentioned. It was truly extraordinary that you could do that.” In the year 2000, I used the full measure of that knowledge to try to convince anyone who would listen that we were in the midst of a historic moment, as if somehow spreading that awareness would help the righteous side prevail.

That didn’t happen. Bush won and the rest, as they say, is history. For America, that means we had a president who won due to a 537-vote margin (out of six million cast) in a state controlled by his brother — and, like Trump in 2016, without having won the most votes nationally. I believed then, and still believe now, that the Bush political machine and Supreme Court misused their power, and that this misuse most likely explains why Gore lost Florida. I particularly believe that the poorly-reasoned decision Bush v. Gore stopped a process that would have flipped the state, and thus the election, to the Vice President. Despite these injustices, Gore displayed a sense of humor as he oversaw the certification of the electoral votes, while Vice President Mike Pence was vilified by Trump and his supporters (who attempted a coup) for eventually caving to the Constitution.

The contrast between the 2000 and 2020 elections is instructive. In the case of the Bush-Gore contest, there were legitimate questions that arose only after both campaigns saw that a single important state had a particularly close result. Trump, on the other hand, has a long history of being a sore loser, accusing his opponents of cheating in both the 2016 Republican primaries and the 2016 general election. He had repeatedly told his supporters that the only way he could lose in 2020 would be if the election was stolen, long before the Democrats chose Joe Biden as their nominee. The fact that Trump attempted a coup just shows that he lacked the character of Gore and his supporters. The fact that Trump was believed by millions is a tale of psychological phenomena like narcissism by proxy and malignant normalities, as well as Trump’s fascist brand of politics, and not one of actual election theft.

That is American history over the last 21 years. My own history since 2000 involved pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees in history; I’ve been in a PhD program since 2012 as I balance my scholarly pursuits with my journalism career. I also write a weekly column about political history parallels, and my personal history has given me a unique perspective on Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election. There is something uniquely infuriating about facing a Big Lie when you have devoted such a substantial portion of your neurodivergent mind to studying the truths that rebut it. I understand in the marrow of my bones why it means so much that none of the 10 previous presidents who lost an election outright rejected the result.

When I first read George Washington’s Farewell Address as a teenager, I lived in a world where his chief warning was only hypothetical — namely, that “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” might some day exploit partisanship to “subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

Now I live in a world where Washington’s prophecy has been realized, and where the statistics that I held sacred are being spat upon. The teenager inside me would tell you with absolute certainty that the only election to ever cause this much damage to our democracy was the 1860 contest. You shouldn’t need to be obsessed with electoral statistics to know how that one ended.

‘Unprecedented’: Ted Cruz accused of ‘undermining’ America’s national security

According to a report from the New York Times, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is taking withering fire for delaying dozens of appointments to the State Department and leaving multiple ambassadorship appointees in a holding pattern as he squabbles with President Joe Biden.

According to one Democratic senator, Cruz’s power play is both unprecedented in its scope and is putting the nation’s security at risk.

As the Times’ Michael Crowley writes, Cruz appears to be using his disagreement with the Biden administration over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that will transport gas from Russia to Germany to raise his political profile once again as he looks toward the 2024 GOP presidential nomination race.

Noting that the last Senate confirmation vote occurred on Aug. 11 with the confirmation of former Senator Ken Salazar (D-CO) as the ambassador to Mexico, the report adds that Biden administration is furious that the Texas Republican is “…delaying dozens of State Department nominees, including 59 would-be ambassadors, and vowing to block dozens more. Democrats call Mr. Cruz’s actions an abuse of the nomination process and the latest example of Washington’s eroding political norms. They also say he is endangering national security at a time when only about a quarter of key national security positions have been filled.”

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The Times reports, “While Mr. Cruz cannot entirely block Mr. Biden’s State Department nominees, he has greatly slowed the process by objecting to the Senate’s traditional practice of confirming uncontroversial nominees by ‘unanimous consent.’ His tactic means that each nominee requires hours of Senate floor time while other major priorities, including President Biden’s domestic spending agenda, compete for attention.”

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, scorched Cruz when talking about his obstructionism.

“It’s really an undermining of the nation’s national security process,” he explained. “What we have here is an unprecedented, blanketed holding of all nominees — regardless of whether they have anything to do with the policy issues at stake. That is not something I have seen in 30 years of doing foreign policy work,” before adding again, “This is unprecedented.”

Senator Christopher Murphy (D-CT) was considerably more blunt in his appraisal of Cruz’s motives.

“We can give him the benefit of the doubt that his goal is to micromanage U.S. foreign policy,” he stated before adding, “This is not about his objection to Nord Stream 2. This is to get a lot of eyeballs from a fight with President Biden.”

You can read more here.

Bored with beige pasta? Grab a head of broccoli and a blender

I admit that I foolishly began preparing myself for a return to a certain level of normalcy after getting vaccinated this spring. During the pandemic, my cooking habits became a mechanism of pure comfort and survival. I baked lots of bread, ordered trendy pasta shapes online and prepared carbohydrate-heavy plates — all just to feel something.

For quite a while, my diet existed on a spectrum of beige to slightly darker beige colors that mimicked what I ate when I was heartsick or ill. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I didn’t feel particularly vibrant after consuming so much beige.

RELATED: My 10-year carbonara journey

To break out of the rut, I did what a lot of people do. I went to the grocery store and bought a basket full of gorgeous produce. There were some luscious plums, which I ate in the style of William Carlos Williams (chilled from the refrigerator, drizzled with hot honey and a spoonful or two of ricotta). I also bought peppery radishes in kaleidoscopic pinks and purples, and sugar snap peas, which I snacked on while muted on Zoom calls. The small changes did my mental state a world of good — until I opened the crisper drawer.

Languishing there was an untouched head of broccoli and a couple of droopy carrots that had lost their snap. These vegetables were on their last legs, and I needed to make use of them sooner rather than later. I went through my mental catalogue of options. Curry, stir-fry or perhaps vegetable soup? I was either missing ingredients, or I simply wasn’t in the mood.

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But then I spotted a box of unopened orecchiette — and inspiration struck.

I lugged the blender down from the top shelf (I promise, it’s worth it!) and blitzed the vegetables with some salt and olive oil until they took on the consistency of a thick pesto. Through the culinary alchemy that emerges from the combination of garlic, parmesan and a splash of pasta water, the blended vegetables became a velvety-thick sauce.

It was delicious, filling and a great way to use my crisper drawer rejects. In the months since, this pasta has become a canvas for a variety of additions, such as crumbled Italian sausage, a handful of wilting spinach, a sprinkle of toasted pine nuts and the zest of a stray lemon. All are very good options, but the original version is equally satisfying — satisfying enough to have kept me from slipping back into my beige rut.

***

Recipe: Crisper Drawer Pasta

Serves 4

Ingredients:

1/2 head of broccoli (about 1 3/4 cups), including stems and florets
3-4 large carrots, roughly chopped
1/2 an onion (white or yellow) or 1 shallot, roughly chopped
2 cloves of garlic, peeled
4 tablespoons of grated parmesan cheese, plus more for serving
4 tablespoons of olive oil, divided
16 ounces of dry pasta (I prefer orecchiette or penne.)
Salt and pepper — or red pepper flakes — to taste
Optional: 1 to 2 tablespoons of cream or half-and-half

Directions:

1. In a large blender, add the broccoli, carrots, onion, garlic and 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Pulse until the texture of a thick pesto. Add salt to taste.

2. Add 1 tablespoon of olive oil to a large pan; if you’re using red pepper flakes, add to the pan over medium-low heat for a few moments to allow the flavor to bloom. Add the vegetable mixture to the pan, cooking slowly until the vegetables have softened and become fragrant, about 12 minutes.

3. Meanwhile, cook the dry pasta according to the directions on the box. Reserve 1/2 cup of pasta water and drain.

4. Add the pasta to the pan, along with the pasta water, the remaining tablespoon of oil and the parmesan cheese. Stir until fully combined, and simmer until the vegetable mixture forms a slick sauce over the pasta. If desired, add cream or half-and-half for creaminess.

5. Remove from heat and serve immediately, dusted with additional parmesan cheese.

More recipes for pasta night:

A baker’s 7 secrets for better dinner rolls

I can’t do Thanksgiving without some really good rolls on the table. Since the season is just about upon us, I tackled the concept in the most recent episode of Bake it Up a Notch, diving deep into all things dinner rolls and learning a lot along the way! This year, on top of all of the recipes (and there are many!), I wanted to share all of my favorite tips, tricks, and techniques for baking all kinds of beautiful dinner rolls. So right in time for fall and holiday baking, here are my seven top secrets for perfect dinner rolls, every time.

1. Pick the right dough for crusty vs. fluffy results

Dinner rolls can be made from either lean or enriched bread doughs. Enriched doughs are recipes that contain “enrichments” like butter, eggs, milk, and sugar. Examples of enriched doughs include brioche, challah, and Parker House rolls. Lean doughs contain no enrichments — they are just made of flour, water, yeast, and salt. Examples of lean doughs include baguettes, ciabatta, and plain varieties of sourdough. When choosing your ideal roll recipe, remember: If you’re looking for a fluffier roll, opt for an enriched dough. For a crustier roll, choose a lean dough.

2. Don’t put away the scale after mixing

I’m always gabbing about how much I love my kitchen scale. It’s the most accurate form of measurement, and will help yield the most consistent results, every single time you bake. This is especially important in bread baking, where I keep the scale on my work counter after I’m done measuring out my ingredients. After the dough rises, I weigh it, and divide the weight by the recipe’s yield. I use the resulting number to weigh out each portion of dough to ensure it’s evenly divided, and each roll is exactly the same size. Call me a perfectionist if you wish, but it only takes a little extra time, and ensures that the rolls bake evenly, too!

3. Know exactly what a “lightly floured surface” means

When it comes time to shape the dough, a lot of recipes direct you to handle your dough on a “lightly floured surface” — but what exactly does that mean? As a recipe writer, to me this term sort of just means: Use as much flour as you need so things don’t stick, but no more. See, every dough is a little different, and they will require a lot more flour than others. Some doughs, like ciabatta, are highly hydrated and therefore may require significant flour when shaping. Enriched doughs can also sometimes be sticky or tacky, which can make them a little more difficult to shape and thus will need a bit more flour than leaner doughs.

Here’s my rule of thumb: Use flour as needed to keep your dough from sticking to your work surface, hands, or rolling pin. Measure this a little bit at a time, adding more if needed. But don’t be throwing it around too generously, as using flour in excess can actually make the dough more difficult to shape.

4. Hack any dough recipe to make it ahead

The rolls my mom makes for Thanksgiving every year have the added benefit of being an overnight dough. She lets the dough rise overnight, and on the big day she bakes them first thing before the turkey goes in the oven. I’ve come to really rely on this tactic for meals outside of Thanksgiving; and really, if you’re hoping to make rolls to serve alongside a large meal of any sort, it can be convenient to be able to make the dough ahead. Beyond convenience, a slow-rising dough benefits from gaining a lot of lovely flavor. Most doughs can be adjusted to rise overnight with a few simple adjustments.

Instead of using warm liquid (water, milk, etc.) at the temperature the recipe suggests, use room-temperature liquid (about 70°F/21°C).
After mixing, allow the dough to rise at room temperature for the time called for in the recipe, then transfer the dough to the refrigerator for up to 12 hours.
Allow the dough to rest at room temperature for 30 minutes before beginning shaping.

5. Proof your dough perfectly

Proofing, or rising the dough, occurs at two stages: after mixing and after shaping. During this fermentation time, the yeast consumes carbohydrates; this releases carbon dioxide gasses in the process, which causes the dough to rise. In addition to physically rising during proofing, dough gains strength and flavor, too. Proper proofing is essential to achieving the proper crumb structure in the final rolls. The best way to determine if rolls are properly proofed are cues like visible puffiness, or the “poke test.” Use a finger to gently poke the surface of the roll.

Under-proofed dough will not hold an indentation — it will quickly spring back.
Properly proofed dough will hold a slight indentation, and slowly spring back (though not entirely).
Over-proofed dough will hold the indentation and not spring back.

Remember, enriched doughs typically rise slower than lean doughs. The higher the quantity of enriched ingredients (like milk, eggs, sugar, and butter), the slower the rise will go. This can be deceptive, so be sure to trust visual and tactile cues (like the poke test) over time cues.

6. Think beyond the round roll

I love a classic round roll, but there are so many more ways to make beautiful shapes with roll dough. Be sure to check out the newest episode of “Bake it Up a Notch,” where we show how to shape each of these shapes step-by-step! Here’s some of my favorite roll shapes:

Split-top or clover rolls: Instead of just rounding one piece of dough per roll, use two smaller rounds (split top) or three rounds (clover rolls).
Folded rolls (Parker House or lotus leaf-style): In this preparation, the dough is rolled into a flattened oval, then the dough is folded over onto itself. For classic Parker House rolls, the dough is brushed with butter before it’s folded.
Knotted rolls: In this method, the portioned dough is formed into a long strand, then “tying” it into a knot shape.
Braided rolls: Here, the dough is divided into either single or multiple portions, each are rolled into long strands, then woven into braided shapes.
Crescent rolls: The same method used for shaping croissants can be used to make very cute little rolls.
Pull-apart, fan, or accordion rolls: Methods that can be used for pull-apart loaves also work well for rolls. Usually pull-apart rolls are baked in a muffin pan to contain the pieces of dough, so that the rise and bake together in a neat roll shape.

7. Get ’em golden brown, once and for all

Rolls can be finished in a variety of ways to promote even browning, or even add flavorful finishes to the exterior. Here are a few ideas that I like to keep in mind as I’m getting ready to bake these puppies.

Scoring: Scoring the rolls with a lame, sharp blade, or scissors can provide decorative marks and/or create a designated spot for steam to escape during baking. This is most commonly done on lean dough rolls.
Egg wash: Either egg yolk (to aid in browning), egg white (to add shine), or whole egg wash (for both) can be brushed onto the surface of proofed rolls before baking. I mix the egg with a tablespoon or so of water to help it achieve a brushable consistency.
Butter basting: Rolls can be brushed with butter before, during, or after baking. While it doesn’t brown the surface as much as egg wash will, it does promote browning and adds a lot of flavor.
Garnishes and toppers: I love to finish my rolls with ingredients like flaky salt, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, caraway seeds, black pepper, and cheese can be added to the surface after proofing and before baking. Egg wash or water can help these garnishes better stick to the surface before and after baking.

Kraken lawyer Sidney Powell unwelcome at Trump resorts — they won’t even answer her calls: report

Former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell turned into a laughingstock as she pushed Qanon and election fraud conspiracies for Donald Trump, who is apparently not showing any loyalty to his former attorney.

“The ‘Kraken’ queen long ago removed herself from acceptability among the more respectable GOP circles with a constant stream of bizarre election conspiracy theories. But knowledgeable sources tell The Daily Beast that the places she’s unwelcome now include Trump properties, where advisers look to keep the former president away from her,” The Daily Beast reported Friday evening.

“Her unrelenting antics have put her on an informal list of people to intercept should they ever appear, or if they even just try to call the 45th U.S. president,” The Beast explained.

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The report comes as Powell faces legal sanctions in Michigan that could include disbarment.

“Two lawyers who currently work for Trump or in the former president’s inner orbit say they want absolutely nothing to do with her and have cautioned others in MAGAland to do the same. One said they’d recently deleted her phone number,” The Beast reported. “Two other people familiar with the matter said that ever since he left office in January, certain advisers and longtime associates to Trump have kept an informal shortlist of people who they should look out for, including at Trump’s private clubs or offices in Florida, New Jersey, and New York.”

Read the full report.

The allure of Netflix’s brutal “Squid Game” owes a debt to our predatory upbringing

Among the many reasons people watch shows from other countries is to enjoy how their cultures view the world, and what that paradigm tells us about ourselves. Right now, Netflix's "Squid Game" is commanding global attention with a show and tell that's fascinating a huge, rapt audience. According to the streaming service's own report, the South Korean thriller may become the company's most watched title ever. For various reasons the public should take that declaration with a beach's worth of salt; still, it's an impressive performance, especially considering the K-drama's hyperviolence.

How bloody is it? By the end of the first episode more than 250 people are gunned down in an enclosed arena for losing a round of "Red Light, Green Light." Nobody who signed up to play realizes that being eliminated means death. They are all led believe they're partaking in simple playground games like this for a shot at winning 45.6 billion Korean won, the equivalent of around $39 million in U.S. currency. It sounds like buying a lottery ticket, only with improved odds since each challenge involves participating in simple childhood fun instead of leaving the outcome solely up to chance. But losers have zero chances of dodging a bullet to the brain or heart; that part of the deal takes people by surprise.

What follows is more shocking – or it would be, if every participant weren't being crushed under a mountain of debt. In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the survivors vote on whether to leave the game. But their bleak financial circumstances lead many to reconsider and return, deciding that risk of a bloody, swift death is preferable to a hellish lifetime of digging out of an inescapable financial hole.

It really is an excellent distillation of how predatory capitalism works.

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Few people watching "Squid Game" are likely to be familiar with that term. (Heck, most of them probably don't even realize they're watching a K-drama.) But on a planet where the average income of the top 10 percent is 38 times higher than the average of the bottom half, plenty of folks are living with it. That counts anyone living paycheck to paycheck and doing their best to stay level on the rickety balance beam that is our economy, which is most people. Predatory capitalism is the beast snarling at their back and the one waiting at the bottom of the pit, jaws open wide.

Allegorizing this concept also distinguishes this series from other "deadly game" titles such as "Battle Royale" or "The Hunger Games." It's actually closer in spirit to Netflix's adaptation of "Alice in Borderland," although the terror at the center of that series and the manga it's based upon is existential. The enemy in "Squid Game" is material and relatable.

Series director and writer Hwang Dong-hyu has said in a previous interview that he designed the tale as a critique of capitalism, demonstrated by the desperation massive indebtedness stokes in each character. But for clarity's sake we should establish that predatory capitalism takes the principle to a darker place in that it accepts exploitation and brute domination as part of as necessary evils.

This encompasses so much more than simply owing money to a creditor, legal or otherwise. It normalizes a vicious kind of Darwinism in everyday interactions, driving our scramble to rise, increase our status and outdo others. Never does it acknowledge that very few people ever grow wealthy enough to achieve invulnerability, but maintaining that lie is necessary for predatory capitalism to continue feeding apex devourers.

Hwang writes this principle into each of his central characters, but it even informs the smallest details of the production. Even death, most often delivered by a faceless workers in pink jumpsuits who shoot losing contestants in the head, is packaged to resemble a gift: bodies are lifted into black coffins with pink bows on the lid before being anonymously disposed of.

Long before we see that, however, we meet lovable layabout Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae). Gi-hun is goofy and has a broad, friendly smile, but he's also a deadbeat dad who leeches money off of his elderly mother to sate his gambling addiction.

Emphatic capitalist striving has also ensnared Gi-hun's childhood pal Cho Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo), but Sang-woo had determination, intelligence and luck on his side, having attended a university to become an investment banker. Being 650 million in the red brings him to the games, the result of betting and losing his wealth alongside that of his clients . . . and his mother's.

Next to him North Korean defector Kang Sae-byeok (Jung Ho-yeon) looks virtuous, mostly because she has absolutely nothing to her name. Her goal is to make enough money to house her brother, who she's left at an orphanage, and to find her mother who was deported back to North Korea. She survives as a pickpocket, desperate to escape the gangster she used to work for, Jang Deok-su (Heo Sung-tae). Even he owes other criminals who'd prefer to take their payments out of his flesh.

On and on it rolls, a wheel driven by a merciless system and steered by hidden forces. An entire episode is devoted to a group of hedonistic VIPs who bet on the players, each wearing golden masks shaped like a predatory mammal, a raptor, or an avatar of fortune (a stag) or strength (an oxen).

A version of these heartless villains exists in every type of "deadly game" story, but Hwang intentionally plays up the callous stupidity of his shadowy titans. They spew terrible, obvious dialogue, misattribute cliched quotes and wager on the lives of others based on lewd jokes revolving around the number 69. Nothing about them indicates they deserve to be where they are more than the working class folks dying for their entertainment.

But these puppet masters aren't the sole destroyers in this story. They're simply the ones too far removed from their humanity to care about what they're doing to the little folks, using the ones who share breathing space with them as refreshment dispensers or furniture.

Squid Game (YOUNGKYU PARK)

With few exceptions, each of the centrally developed characters is some form of low-level monetary carnivore or scavenger, showing how predatory capitalism encourages us to cannibalize each other – even family. Gi-hun doesn't only take the meager cash his mother offers him. He also guesses her PIN and drains her bank account. Sang-woo lies to his mother about his life and the fact that he's financially ruined her, leaving her under the impression that he's traveling for work when he's actually hiding out from the police after stealing from his own clients.

The only extensively developed main characters who don't appear to be preying on others are Abdul Ali (Tripathi Anupam), a Pakistani worker whose employer kept his wages from him and who steals back what he's owed, and Oh Il-Nam (Oh Young-soo), an elderly man with a brain tumor.

Just like the rest, they're also being stalked, and view the games as the only way to get clear of what's hunting them. Then again, the game-makers selected every participant for reasons beyond what they owe. They target their weakness. Before Gi-hun, Sang-woo and the other hundreds of contenders gain an invitation to the game they enter a contest with a mysterious man (Gong Yoo, "Train to Busan") who persuades them to let him slap their faces for a chance to win pocket change.

Being broke isn't enough, you see. In order to submit to the games, a person must also be broken.

And this makes Gi-hun's story much sadder. Later in the series we find that he was fired from a solid factory job, then wiped out when the small business he attempted to launch afterward collapsed. That means Gi-hun followed every line of in the bootstrapping myth to the letter by working hard and playing by the rules, and he ends up in serious hock anyway.

One of the darker observations I read online about the appeal of "Squid Game" theorizes that at some point in the pandemic, many people might have accepted such an offer. Who could blame them if they did? One of the half-truths the games' masked Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) promises is that everyone in these games receives a fair shot, that nobody is discriminated against due to age, class or gender.

It's the meritocracy lie, gamified. Everyone who isn't part of the 1% receives assurances that the system is fair, right? Few being mauled by its gears want to acknowledge or even understand how impressively rigged the system is. Centralizing that lie is the way this story depicts carnivorous financial systems working exactly as they're supposed to, by dangling the prize just out of reach but close enough to see it and keep telling ourselves we'll get there. Even Gi-hun tries to reassure Sang-woo that he can recover from his debt without risking his life, insisting that his business school degree means he can always earn money, that he's better off that most. That simply isn't the case out in these streets.

Inside the game, though, Sang-woo thinks has better a shot. The weird sets he and everyone else walk through are an aesthetic bonus, externalizing the nightmarishness of their excessive financial burden. Contestants pass restless nights in spartan quarters resembling a school gymnasium. The maze of hallways and pastel staircases dividing that place and competition staging areas marry the geometrics of an M.C. Escher drawing to the innocent pinks, yellows and blues of a Barbie Dream House.

Squid Game (YOUNGKYU PARK/Netflix)

Then there's the misdirect of the games' innocence: One might look at the competition mounted to entertain the VIPs as a variation of "Floor Is Lava," except falling to the floor in this show actually kills people.

"Squid Game" refers to a South Korean playground contest that has specific rules, but whose play revolves around roughhousing and viciousness. Anyone who's played such games in childhood knows that making it past a goal line isn't always the point. Sometimes the object is to bruise the other kid – all in good fun, of course.

Upsizing that violence for adult players escalates the physical and psychological ruthlessness commensurate to the life and death stakes. To say a viewer learns to deal with the brutality of "Squid Game" is not a sufficient assurance for the squeamish, nor should it be.

But the bullets and blood may also obscure some of Hwang's key questions about humanity and societies, such as: Which is more dangerous to our collective health, desperation or greed? And which is more corrosive?

Hwang may have originally asked this in the context of South Korea's economic disparity, but the fact that the show is No. 1 the U.S., the U.K. and many other countries proves the universality of his message. Nothing is lost in the translation, whether you watch "Squid Game" with the subtitles on or dubbed. (Subs are the way to go, by the way.) And the director acknowledges this by having one of VIPs blithely mention in passing that the South Korean games are the best ones, implying similar lethal competitions are being played in other countries around the world.

Of course they are.

"Squid Game" is currently streaming on Netflix.

Poo politics & more: 5 questions about the International Space Station becoming a movie set

On October 5, an unusual crew will fly to the International Space Station. Director Klim Shipenko and actor Yulia Peresild will spend a week and a half on the station shooting scenes for the Russian movie “Challenge.” Peresild plays a surgeon who must conduct a heart operation on a sick cosmonaut.

This is an exciting — if controversial — development for the station, which orbits around 400 km above Earth. Commercial use of its facilities could be a funding avenue to keep it in orbit. A Japanese documentary and an American movie, starring Tom Cruise, are also in the works.

The station consists of 16 modules locked together in a cross configuration. There are six Russian modules in the Russian Orbital Segment, while the US Orbital Segment consists of 11 modules run by the US, Japan, and the European Space Agency. Spacecraft like the Soyuz and Dragon regularly dock with the station to bring crew and supplies, and return others to Earth.

Usually there are between three and six crew living on the station. The main work is scientific experiments, but as some parts of the station are over 20 years old, a lot of maintenance is also required.

Space stations in the movies are often very “space-agey” with futuristic minimalist interiors. By contrast, the International Space Station is a mess, more “Red Dwarf” than “2001: A Space Odyssey.” There are cables everywhere, walls cluttered with equipment, tools, food packages and notes, and over 6,000 objects lost by the crew.

Challenge, being the first (professional) space movie to be filmed in space, raises a number of questions. Here are five on my mind.

How will the cosmonaut crew react to a female “space tourist”?

After Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space in 1963, only four other Russian women have ever left Earth.

Svetlana Savitskaya was the second female cosmonaut in 1982. Her crewmates on the Mir space station presented her with an apron when she arrived, joking that she’d work in the kitchen. I’ve even heard a cosmonaut trainer say “space is no place for a woman.”

However, in Russia, medicine is seen as a female profession. Given that veteran cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev was sacked for objecting to the movie plans (he was later reinstated), I’m wondering what Yulia Peresild’s reception will be like.

What about using the space toilets?

Personal hygiene is challenging in the microgravity environment of the space station. Crew must be taught how to use the complicated space toilets, which use vacuum pumps to suck everything away from the body and into tanks. Urine is recycled to augment the station’s water supply — as the joke goes, yesterday’s coffee becomes tomorrow’s coffee.

Then there’s the politics of space poo. In 2009, strained relationships between Moscow and Washington resulted in Russian and U.S. crews being banned from using each other’s toilets. Crew complained that not being able to use the nearest toilet interrupted their work.

Peresild and Shipenko have been training since May in Russia’s Star City, and this presumably includes potty-training too. NASA only installed the first female-friendly toilet in 2020.

In the Russian segment where the filming will take place, there’s one old toilet designed for male anatomy. In female bodies there’s less separation between pee and poo, so NASA designed its new toilet to take this into account. Will Peresild use the NASA toilet by preference? She’ll be the first Russian woman to compare space toilet technology.

NASA’s new US$23 million female-friendly toilet was installed on the ISS in 2020. NASA, CC BY

How realistic will the surgery scenes be?

In space, uncontained liquids form bubbles and float around. This presents some challenges for heart surgery, especially as blood tends to pool in the upper parts of the body. There have been limited surgical experiments already in microgravity, but they have been done on artificial bodies, or animals such as rats.

Technology under development for future space missions, particularly long duration flights like those to Mars, includes robotic surgery and capsules that enclose the patient, with the surgeon operating on them through arm portholes. It will be interesting to see what choices are made to portray this key part of the film.

Will the film crew leave anything behind in space?

As a space archaeologist, I’m interested in whether this unusual activity will contribute to the archaeological record of the station. While the film crew will have to bring all their equipment with them, scientific experiments are prioritised due to limited cargo space when sending things back to Earth. Later crew may find objects left behind by Peresild and Shipenko, stuck to Velcro patches on the walls, or lurking in storage areas.

In the Russian Zvezda module, cosmonauts have made part of a wall into an informal gallery or shrine. Analysis of how the pictures displayed change over time shows it almost always features images of the Soviet space heroes Yuri Gagarin, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Sergei Korolev, as well as Russian Orthodox icons.

Peresild’s father is a well-known icon painter, so perhaps she will bring one to contribute to this display.

Lots of things get left behind in space — like these images of Russian space heroes hanging on an informal shrine. NASA, CC BY

What happens next?

After this flight, Peresild and Shipenko will officially be space travellers, as well as the first professional filmmakers in space. They’ll join the ranks of an elite group who’ve travelled into orbit.

Although the last year has seen numerous people who have just nudged into space on sub-orbital flights, including Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and the “civilian” crew, it still means something to actually live in space.

At least 45 films about space travel have received Oscar nominations for Best Visual Effects, but in the case of “Challenge,” the visual effects will be real.

Perhaps this will be a turning point in how space habitats are depicted in films. Will audiences prefer the glamorous fantasy, or replace their visions of future space travel with the gritty reality of a working space station?

Alice Gorman, Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University

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

Rudy Giuliani admits his election fraud “evidence” came from social media posts

Rudy Giuliani appears to have finally let slip the source for at least some of his evidence of widespread voter fraud in last year’s presidential election: social media.

To boot, the onetime mayor of New York City even admitted that he did not independently contact his sources or fact-check their claims, adding that doing so would have made him a “terrible lawyer.”

Giuliani shared the news in a deposition hearing in August, according to the Colorado Sun, which first obtained the court documents this week. The Denver-based defamation case, which concerns false claims about election security company Dominion Voting Systems, began after Giuliani and others shared baseless conspiracy theories about the company’s role in “rigging” the 2020 election against Donald Trump.

One employee in particular, Eric Coomer, brought the suit after he became the subject of a series of claims from various Trumpworld characters alleging he was at the center of a shady plot to elect Joe Biden.

Now, however, we know where those claims originated: on social media posts Giuliani saw — and then promptly forgot the details of. In fact, Giuliani admitted that he could not even remember which platform he saw these posts on, despite the fact that they spurred him to mount a monthslong quest to overturn the country’s presidential election.

“Those social media posts get all one to me,” Giuliani said. And when asked if he could remember anything else about the evidence he had been citing for months as justification for Donald Trump’s reinstallment, he said: “Right now, I can’t recall anything else that I laid eyes on.”

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Prior to the deposition, The New York Times tracked down what may have been the source of Giuliani’s claims about Coomer, which apparently first surfaced in comments made by right-wing podcast host Joe Oltmann.

The popular far-right media personality claimed to have infiltrated an “Antifa conference call,” which was attended by a Dominion employee who identified himself as “Eric.” He offered no proof to back up the tale, though that didn’t stop the claims from spreading like wildfire in the conservative media ecosystem.

Giuliani even parroted the claims in a press conference last November.

“One of the Smartmatic patent holders, Eric Coomer, I believe his name is, is on the web as being recorded in a conversation with Antifa members saying that he had the election rigged for Mr. Biden,” Giuliani said.

The Times also obtained a memo from the Trump campaign that reportedly showed the president’s high-level surrogates, including Giuliani, knew their claims about voter fraud were false. This included the idea Coomer was somehow an anti-fascist organizer.

But when asked by lawyers during the August deposition hearing, Giuliani admitted that he didn’t bother to fact-check the claims, or even reach out to Oltmann at all.

“It’s not my job in a fast-moving case to go out and investigate every piece of evidence that’s given to me,” Giuliani said.

“Why wouldn’t I believe him? I would have to have been a terrible lawyer… gee, let’s go find out it’s untrue. I didn’t have the time to do that.”

A controversial study claims researchers can “treat” some autism symptoms in early childhood

It isn’t easy being autistic. For that matter, it isn’t even easy talking about being autistic.

I say this as an autistic journalist who vividly remembers the moment in 2012 when the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove the diagnosis “Asperger’s Syndrome” from its official manual. As soon as I saw the headline, I was struck by the symbolism. By literally banishing a term about autism from the medical lexicon, the APA had underscored a deep, ongoing tension that exists among the autistic community and its advocates. They had also unintentionally given trolls a new cudgel with which to bully neurodiversity activists, as for several weeks I received a flurry of scientifically illiterate emails claiming the reclassification of “Asperger’s Syndrome” actually meant the condition was “fake.”

As that experience indicates, part of the conversation about autism out of necessity involves reducing stigmas and bullying behavior. Research and the needs of social justice make it clear that autism is often more akin to a language difference; the term “neurodiversity” reinforces the crucial concept that autism is natural, not inherently unhealthy.

Yet autistic individuals continue to face hardships everywhere from our legal system and the workplace to casual social interactions. Autistic people benefit immensely when researchers develop ways for them to more effectively function, particularly in areas where mistreatment is rampant.

The balance, experts agree, is to focus on making life easier for autistic people rather than treat autism as a condition to be “cured.”

Enter a new study published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

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The researchers behind the article claim that they have developed a form of parent mediated therapy that could help reduce some of the long-term disabilities associated with autism spectrum disorders. The iBASIS-Video Interaction to Promote Positive Parenting (or iBASIS-VIPP) provided parents with children between nine months and three years of age with guidance on how to have a positive social-communicative relationship with their young ones. Researchers found that children in the group whose parents received the preemptive intervention were three times less likely to meet the clinical threshold for an autism diagnosis as those in the control group. All of the children had been chosen because they displayed potential autistic traits.

The study does have its limits. Children may change their diagnostic classification after the age of three, although it is unlikely, and the scientists will have to follow up with patients in later childhood to fully assess whether preemptive treatment actually worked. That said, study co-author Andrew Whitehouse — a professor of autism research at the Telethon Kids Institute and the University of Western Australia — made it clear that researchers believe their studies could have important implications for autistic individuals.

“The findings highlight the limitations of how diagnoses are used by health, disability and education systems,” Whitehouse told Salon by email. “Systems that provide access to support based on the presence or absence of a diagnosis are flawed, and can lead to children missing out on services that they desperately need.” Whitehouse argued that the study proves caregivers will be more successful if they view autistic patients as distinct individuals, not as examples within a category.

“We can be more effective in providing support by seeking to understand ‘who’ someone is (that is, their strengths and challenges) rather than ‘what’ a child is (that is, what diagnostic criteria they may meet),” Whitehouse explained. “System change requires evidence and advocacy. We hope that the evidence provided in this study will be a powerful catalyst for that change.”

Whitehouse also emphasized that he did not view the study as an attempt to “cure” autism.” Indeed, iBASIS-VIPP itself is delivered not to the children, but to the parents; the goal is to teach parents how to better raise autistic children.

“Contrary to any sense of ‘opposing’ autism, this therapy cherishes neurodiversity by attending to and understanding it, giving equal opportunity to these babies for a social environment that is adapted and responsive to them as individuals,” Whitehouse explained. “The developmental improvements the babies experienced are a consequence of creating an environment that supports neurodivergence. The baby is able to benefit like any child from an adapted social environment.” He emphasized that neither he nor the study argue that autism can be “prevented” or “cured.”

Even so, some autism advocates have raised concerns.

“Autism is not a disease and not something that should be cured or lessened, so how this study assessed the impact of intervention on ‘autism behavior severity’ may cause concern amongst many autistic people and their families,” Tim Nicholls, a spokesperson from the UK’s National Autistic Society, said in a statement.

“There are some strong technical points in this research, but there will be questions about its general premise … It’s important that any further study into very early intervention doesn’t seek to lessen ‘severity’ – early intervention should be about supporting autistic people with the biggest challenges they face.”

He added, “For effective research to be done in this area in the future, autistic people must be involved in every stage.”

The absolute best way to cook french fries, according to so many tests

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

* * *

I have a friend who jokes that the sinister underbelly of this column is that each month, I am forced to identify the exact point at which a delicious food becomes revolting. After I hard-boiled hundreds of eggs, I couldn’t look at one for a year. And I still haven’t recovered from 2019’s porterhouse sear-off.

So it is with much delight that I report that there is simply no volume at which French fries become disgusting. They are an unimpeachably delicious food. Even in mediocre configurations — looking at you, wedge — French fries are tender, starchy vehicles for salt and sauce. (The single exception to this otherwise objective fact is shoestring fries, which are bullshit, and which are also chips.)

There is, of course, much variation when it comes to the finer points of a French fry. Some are better for scooping up mayonnaise. Others have crispy crags ideal for catching crystals of kosher salt. Others have tender, creamy interiors perfect for mopping up the sauce from steak au poivre.

Below, I have tested six different shapes of French fry and seven different cooking methods in an effort to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each. There were definite winners, and there were soggy losers.

Let’s dive in.

Controls

For all tests, I used russet potatoes and Diamond Crystal kosher salt. I used vegetable oil in every trial except for the steamed + bake test, as the recipe I adapted called for olive oil, and I was worried about cutting down on flavor in a method that had already axed deep-frying.

I tasted all batches plain, as well as dipped into mayonnaise alone, ketchup alone, and a mixture of Huy Fong Chili Garlic Sauce and mayonnaise. (No one asked me to do that last bit, with the sauces, but they can’t fire me for it either.)

* * *

Round one: Shape

All shapes were tested with the fried method.

Straight-Cut

Adapted from The Lazy Cook and Food Network.

Slice 1 pound of russet potatoes (roughly 3 medium potatoes) into strips about 1/3 inch thick.
Place in a large bowl of ice water and soak the potatoes for about 1 hour. Drain, then thoroughly pat dry or spin in a salad spinner until dry.
Add about 4 inches of vegetable oil to a heavy saucepan or Dutch oven. Heat over medium-high until the oil registers 300°F on an instant-read thermometer.
In batches to avoid overcrowding, carefully add the potato strips and cook for about 5 minutes, until pale and floppy, flipping every minute or so. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on a towel-lined sheet pan.
Adjust the heat to get the oil up to 400°F. Add the potatoes and fry again until golden, about 5 more minutes. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on the lined sheet pan. Sprinkle with kosher salt.

Straight-cut French fries are a classic shape that are neither overrated nor underrated. When properly fried to a golden crisp, each fry could be used as a sort of flat-head shovel for condiments. The main difference between a straight-cut fry and its thicker cousins (the frite, the wedge) is the ratio of creamy inside to crunchy outside. I like the ratio of a straight-cut fry when I’m eating them as an entrée, or alongside something that doesn’t offer any opportunities for sopping.

Crinkle

Adapted from My Recipes.

Use a crinkle cutter to slice 1 pound of russet potatoes (roughly 3 medium potatoes) into strips about 1/2 inch thick.
Place in a large bowl of ice water and soak the potatoes for about 1 hour. Drain, then thoroughly pat dry or spin in a salad spinner until dry.
Add about 4 inches of vegetable oil to a heavy saucepan or Dutch oven. Heat over medium-high until it registers 300°F on an instant-read thermometer.
In batches to avoid overcrowding, carefully add the potato strips and cook for about 5 minutes, until pale and floppy, flipping every minute or so. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on a towel-lined sheet pan.
Adjust the heat to get the oil up to 400°F. Add the potatoes and fry again until golden, about 5 more minutes. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on the lined sheet pan. Sprinkle with kosher salt.

Crinkle-cut fries have roughly 4,000 times as much to offer as straight-cut fries if, like me, you value texture. The pucker and furrow of each fry’s shell provided a great deal more crunch than straight sides ever could, and also meant that more salt stuck to the freshly fried specimens. The staircased sides also made for little pockets of sauce each time the fries were dipped, and if “little pockets of sauce” doesn’t release a material amount of serotonin in your brain, this may be the wrong column for you.

Waffle

Adapted from Food.com.

Use a crinkle cutter to slice 1 pound of russet potatoes (roughly 3 medium potatoes) into chip-shaped slices about 1/4 inch thick, rotating the potato 90 degrees after each slice to achieve a waffle texture (you can also cut the rounded edges for more squared shingles).
Place in a large bowl of ice water and soak the potatoes for about 1 hour. Drain, then thoroughly pat dry or spin in a salad spinner until dry.
Add about 4 inches of vegetable oil to a heavy saucepan or Dutch oven. Heat over medium-high until it registers 300°F on an instant-read thermometer.
In batches to avoid overcrowding, carefully add the potato slices and cook, flipping every minute or so, for 2 to 3 minutes, until pale and floppy. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on a towel-lined sheet pan.
Adjust the heat to get the oil up to 400°F. Add the potatoes and fry again until golden, 3 to 4 more minutes. Drain on the lined sheet pan and sprinkle with kosher salt.

Waffle fries are a one-way ticket to muttering, “Crispy, lacy edges? Oh, hell yes,” to yourself in your kitchen in the middle of the day. There’s much less soft interior to a waffle fry than there is to, say, a cottage fry, which is great for anyone who is all about the crunch and less interested in the baked potato of it all. These fries also turned out to be quite evenly cooked, thanks to all the holes in the center.

Cottage

Slice 1 pound of russet potatoes (roughly 3 medium potatoes) into chip-shaped slices about 1/3 inch thick.
Place in a large bowl of ice water and soak the potatoes for about 1 hour. Drain, then thoroughly pat dry or spin in a salad spinner until dry.
Add about 4 inches of vegetable oil to a heavy saucepan or Dutch oven. Heat over medium-high until it registers 300°F on an instant-read thermometer.
In batches to avoid overcrowding, add the potato slices and cook, flipping every minute or so, for 4 to 5 minutes, until pale and floppy. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on a towel-lined sheet pan.
Adjust the heat to get the oil up to 400°F. Add the potatoes and fry again until golden, about 5 more minutes. Drain on the lined sheet pan and sprinkle with kosher salt.

Cottage fries are supposedly so named because each one looks like a shingle on the roof of a cottage. Like a roof shingle, a cottage fry is not a fry in the traditional sense — it’s more like a wide, flat tater tot, or a tiny disk of baked potato. That’s not a bad thing — it just means that the potatoey interior is front and center in the culinary experience. It makes for a creamy, plush bite with complementary crisp. It should be noted that cottage fries are excellent for scooping up piles of tartare or finely minced salads, and that their surface area makes for satisfying salt to potato. It should also be noted that if you invited me over to a New Year’s Eve party and served me cottage fries topped with crème fraîche and caviar, I would talk about it with great excitement every day for the rest of my life.

Wedge

Adapted from All Recipes and Williams Sonoma.

Slice 1 pound of russet potatoes (roughly 3 medium potatoes) into wedges about 2/3 inch thick.
Place in a large bowl of ice water and soak the potatoes for about 1 hour. Drain, then thoroughly pat dry or spin in a salad spinner until dry.
Add about 4 inches of vegetable oil to a heavy saucepan or Dutch oven. Heat over medium-high until it registers 300°F on an instant-read thermometer.
In batches to avoid overcrowding, add the potato wedges and cook, flipping every minute or so, for 7 to 9 minutes, until pale and floppy. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on a towel-lined sheet pan.
Adjust the heat to get the oil up to 400°F. Add the potatoes and fry again until golden, about 7 to 8 more minutes. Drain on the lined sheet pan and sprinkle with kosher salt.

Wedge fries get a lot of hate. They are similar to the traditional steak fries (which I did not test because I somehow just forgot? Potato brain? Please don’t fire me, Emma!!!!), in that they are wider and plumper than a finger. This means that properly cooked wedge fries offer up a lot of starchy interior, which can be used to mop up a pan sauce, or chicken drippings. The batch I tested were delicious, with only moderate airport-steak-house vibes, though their interior to exterior ratio meant that they didn’t get enough salt per capita.

Curly

Adapted from Food52.

Peel 1 pound of russet potatoes (roughly 3 medium potatoes) and spiralize them on the largest noodle blade of your spiralizer machine.
Break up any really long noodles into more of a fry length (or don’t, live your life), then transfer to a large bowl of ice water and soak the potatoes for about 1 hour. Drain, then thoroughly pat dry or spin in a salad spinner until dry.
Add about 4 inches of vegetable oil to a heavy saucepan or Dutch oven. Heat over medium-high until it registers 300°F on an instant-read thermometer.
In batches to avoid overcrowding, add the potatoes and cook, flipping every minute or so, for about 4 minutes, until pale and floppy. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on a towel-lined sheet pan.
Adjust the heat to get the oil up to 400°F. Add the potatoes and fry again until golden, about 4 to 5 more minutes. Drain on the lined sheet pan and sprinkle with kosher salt.

I love a good curly fry more than I love some humans I see regularly, but it’s tough to make a convincing version at home without a professional spiralizer. Using a generic vegetable spiralizer to approximate the curly shape turned out to be good, but not great — the resulting fries were thinner than a traditional curly boy, which unfortunately made them more like a curvy shoestring. They tasted more like a chip than a fry, with very little softness. The main strength of these at-home fries — beyond the obvious one, which is that they looked delightful — was that they were the crispiest of the bunch, and remained crispy for two days sitting out on my countertop. (Which, I feel compelled to mention, is probably not something you should do, for food safety reasons. But I’m not your mom!)

* * *

Round Two: Cook Method

All shapes were tested with straight-cut, except the steamed + baked.

Photo by Julia Gartland. Prop stylist: Alya Hameedi. Food stylist: Anna Billingskog.

Fried

Adapted from The Lazy Cook and Food Network.

Slice 1 pound of russet potatoes (roughly 3 medium potatoes) into strips about 1/3 inch thick.
Place in a large bowl of ice water and soak the potatoes for about 1 hour. Drain, then thoroughly pat dry or spin in a salad spinner until dry.
Add about 4 inches of vegetable oil to a heavy saucepan or Dutch oven. Heat over medium-high until it registers 300°F on an instant-read thermometer.
In batches to avoid overcrowding, add the potato strips and cook, flipping every minute or so, for about 5 minutes, until pale and floppy. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on a towel-lined sheet pan.
Adjust the heat to get the oil up to 400°F. Add the potatoes and fry again until golden, about 5 more minutes. Drain on the lined sheet pan and sprinkle with kosher salt.

These probably should have been labeled “double fried,” since the technique calls for an initial jaunt into hot oil for a few minutes, then a draining and cool-down period, and a second fry sesh in hotter oil. It’s a ubiquitous method among us potato heads, and it’s common for a reason: It produces classic fries with velvety insides and snappable exteriors that hold their shape long after their second oil bath. If you’re deep-frying French fries and considering skipping the second round of frying, don’t. You can’t get the 5 minutes of your life back, but would you even want to if you spent it eating mediocre fries when greatness was so achievable?

Boiled + Fried (aka McDonald’s Copycat Fries)

Adapted from Serious Eats.

Slice 1 pound of russet potatoes (roughly 3 medium potatoes) into strips about 1/3 inch thick.
Place the potatoes and 1 tablespoon of white vinegar in a saucepan. Add 1 quart of water and 1 tablespoon of kosher salt. Bring to a boil over high heat. Boil for 6 to 8 minutes, until the potatoes are fully tender but not falling apart. Drain and spread on a towel-lined sheet pan. Pat dry.
Add about 4 inches of vegetable oil to a heavy saucepan or Dutch oven. Heat over medium-high until it registers 300°F on an instant-read thermometer.
In batches to avoid overcrowding, add the potato strips and cook, flipping every minute or so, for about 5 minutes, until pale and floppy. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on the lined sheet pan. Let cool to room temp, about 30 minutes.
Adjust the heat to get the oil up to 400°F. Add the potatoes and fry again until golden, about 5 more minutes. Drain on the lined sheet pan and sprinkle with kosher salt.

This method, which was intended to replicate fast-food French fries, demanded the most time and attention. It called for three distinct phases of cooking and an optional overnight freezing step (which I skipped, because I was tired). But the rest of the effort was well worth it. The resulting fries had the best texture, and the best flavor. If I could adopt them and enroll them in pageants, I would. They were perfectly soft and almost melty on the inside, with exteriors as crisp as shrimp chips. Even after just the boil stage, the potatoes were faintly delicious from the vinegar; I made a note to try this next time with twice as much vinegar in the same amount of water. The vinegar flavor was subtle but additive in the final fried product, a winner through and through.

Air Fried

Adapted from The Washington Post.

Slice 1 pound of russet potatoes (roughly 3 medium potatoes) into strips about 1/3 inch thick.
Place in a large bowl of ice water and soak the potatoes for about 1 hour. Drain, then thoroughly pat dry or spin in a salad spinner until dry.
Heat an air fryer, with the rack or basket inserted, to 425°F.
In a large bowl, toss the dried potato sticks with 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil until well coated.
Depending on the size of your air fryer, you will need to air fry the potatoes in two or three batches. For each batch, spread the potato sticks in an even layer in the air fryer basket. Avoid stacking the fries for best results; it’s okay if they touch. Air fry until browned and crisp, 12 to 16 minutes. Sprinkle with kosher salt.

These potatoes never got quite crispy enough, despite sporting custardy interiors — the overall effect was more of diner potato skins than of French fries. Also, I found myself missing the layer of grease that settles into a fried fry like a well-worn jacket — they didn’t feel nearly as rich without it. In the future, I would use my air fryer for frozen tater tots or something breaded, like croquettes, sooner than using it to try to make French fries from scratch.

Boiled + Air Fried

Adapted from The Washington Post.

Slice 1 pound of russet potatoes (roughly 3 medium potatoes) into strips about 1/3 inch thick.
Combine potatoes, 2 1/2 cups of water, 2 tablespoons of freshly squeezed lemon juice, 1/2 teaspoon fine salt, and a big pinch of baking soda. Cover and bring to a rolling boil. Uncover and cook until tender but still firm, about 3 minutes. Drain and spread on a towel-lined sheet pan. Allow to dry for 5 minutes.
Heat an air fryer, with the rack or basket inserted, to 425°F.
In a large bowl, toss the dried potato sticks with 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil until well coated.
Depending on the size of your air fryer, you will need to air fry the potatoes in two or three batches. For each batch, spread the potato sticks in an even layer in the air fryer basket. Avoid stacking the fries for best results; it’s okay if they touch. Air fry until browned and crisp, 12 to 16 minutes. Sprinkle with kosher salt.

This batch was a bit crispier than the other air fryer batch, but still didn’t compare to the deep-fried versions. The lemon juice didn’t contribute nearly as much flavor in the boil phase as the vinegar did in the boil phase of the McDonald’s copycat batch. They were a little greasier — in a satisfying way — than the other air fryer batch, but they still tasted like an imitation of the real thing.

Shallow-Fried (I Sodi)

Adapted from I Sodi via Alta Editions.

Slice 1 pound of russet potatoes (roughly 3 medium potatoes) into strips about 1/3 inch thick.
Place in a large bowl of ice water and soak the potatoes for about 1 hour. Drain, then thoroughly pat dry or spin in a salad spinner until dry.
Heat about 2 1/2 cups or about 1 inch of vegetable oil in a medium skillet over high heat until hot but not smoking. Check the temperature by adding 1 sage leaf; it should sizzle immediately as it contacts the oil. If it doesn’t, heat the oil a bit longer. If the oil starts to smoke, remove the pot from the flame for a minute or so. Careful! If the oil is too hot, the oil will fly out of the pan when you add the potatoes.
When the oil is hot, all at once, carefully add the potatoes. The oil should be at the same level as the top of the potato sticks; it should not cover them completely (as in deep-frying).
Keep the flame on high or medium-high; it might take a moment or two for the oil to start bubbling, but it will if it is at the right temperature. Once the oil bubbles, check the heat — it should be medium to high. Cook, turning the potatoes once or twice with a large spoon or tongs, until a nice golden brown, 22 to 30 minutes. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on a towel-lined sheet pan, then sprinkle with kosher salt.

I added this method to the list because I’ve never had fries quite like the ones at New York’s I Sodi, where they are on the menu as patate fritte. The patate fritte come heaped in a bowl with fried garlic and sage, and I’ve always queried whether they would be quite as good without all the artifice. I’ll skip ahead: Good god, these were delicious. The process was a bit nerve-racking. Within 5 splattery minutes of being added to the oil, the potato pieces began sticking to the bottom of the pan and breaking up a bit. Things settled down as the fries began to form their shells, and somehow, they began to smell like funnel cake. The result was crispy, deeply flavored fries — they were second only to the McDonald copycat boiled and fried batch. Despite only a single round of frying, their insides were extremely tender.

Steamed + Baked

Adapted from Food52.

Peel and cut 1 pound of russet potatoes (roughly 3 medium potatoes) into thick fries, about 3 inches in length and 3/4 inch in width. Heat the oven to 500°F.
Bring 1 quart of water to a simmer in the bottom of a steamer. Place the potatoes on the steaming rack, place the rack in the steamer, cover, and steam just until a knife inserted in a potato comes away clean, 10 to 12 minutes. (The potatoes should not be cooked through, or they will tend to fall apart.)
Transfer the steamed potatoes to a bowl and drizzle with 1 tablespoon of olive oil. Carefully toss to coat evenly with oil. (The potatoes can be prepared to this point several hours in advance. Set aside at room temperature.)
With a large slotted spoon, transfer the potatoes in a single layer to a baking sheet. Discard any excess oil or liquid. Bake until the potatoes are crisp and deep golden brown, 10 to 20 minutes, flipping the potatoes halfway through. Remove from the oven and sprinkle with kosher salt.

I had very high hopes for these, both because my editor Emma texted me “I fondly remember eating these one night,” and because I was excited to see what flavor olive oil could add. My overwhelming impression was that they required quite a few pots, pans, and bowls between the steaming and the tossing and the baking, and the result was essentially just a good, crispy baked potato. Because there was so much interior, but the crust was unfried, they lacked the flavor of some of the other batches — I would love to try this with tallow, to see if it adds anything. Either way, these would also be great layered with sour cream and covered in chives.

Cold-Fried

Adapted from The Washington Post.

Slice 1 pound of russet potatoes (roughly 3 medium potatoes) into strips about 1/3 inch thick.
Place in a large bowl of ice water and soak the potatoes for about 1 hour. Drain, then thoroughly pat dry or spin in a salad spinner until dry.
Place them in a large pot over high heat. Add enough vegetable oil to cover by 1 inch.
Cook the potatoes, undisturbed, until the oil starts to sizzle and reaches 225°F, 8 to 10 minutes,
Using a spider or tongs, stir the potatoes gently, to ensure they aren’t sticking together. Continue cooking until the oil reaches 325°F and the potatoes turn golden brown and appear crisp, another 10 to 15 minutes. If the potatoes appear to be cooking too quickly or become dark brown, lower the heat slightly. The total cooking time will depend on the width of your potatoes. Fry until they’re brown and crisp.
Drain on a towel-lined sheet pan and sprinkle with kosher salt.

This method was quite similar to the shallow-fried batch, except that I didn’t have to let the oil heat before adding the potatoes. It was certainly the most straightforward of all the methods, and produced very solid specimens with a lot of flavor. They weren’t quite as shattery-crisp as the shallow-fried batch, but they were better than the steamed + baked batch, as well as the air fryer batches. Alas, their insides had the tiniest bit of snap, as if they hadn’t cooked through as completely as some of the other trials.

* * *

In conclusion

I should probably see a doctor, because I could still eat more fries!

Best shapes

Crinkle Cut: The cranny-lovers fry
Straight: Classic for a reason
Waffle: A fry but also a shovel

Best methods

Shallow Fried: I’m tearing up just thinking about it
Boiled + Fried: Vinegar and elbow grease went a long, long way

Steven Van Zandt’s memoir “Unrequited Infatuations” details the transformative power of taking risks

As a rock guitarist, actor, activist, radio commentator and now author, Steven Van Zandt has lived many lives. But make no mistake about it: He believes in the power of rock ‘n’ roll. He lives it, breathes it, brings it to life on the stage, and, with his new memoir, “Unrequited Infatuations,” magnificently on the page.

Tracing his early days through the present, this autobiography by the E Street Band guitarist and “Lillyhammer” star is infused with the same passion and candidness with which he has lived his life, which he describes as a “cautionary tale.” “Unrequited Infatuations” is rife with the highs and lows, joys and conundrums that have marked his progress to rock’s loftiest plateaus and life’s most crushing ebbs. But Van Zandt’s story is also about having the courage to take logic-defying, outrageous risks.

While Van Zandt’s love affair begins with the music of Bo Diddley and Elvis Presley, the emergence of the Beatles marked one of his life’s greatest epiphanies. “The Beatles on Ed Sullivan had the cultural impact of a spaceship landing in Central Park,” he writes. “Except that we’d seen spaceships land before in movies like ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still.’ There was no warning or precedent for the Beatles. They were as alien as anything on that spaceship, completely unique, and in a way that could never happen again. You can only be that different once. Everything about them was special. Their hair, clothes, sound, attitude, intelligence, wit, and especially their accent. But they were mostly different for one very big reason. There were four of them. They were a band.”

Van Zandt would never forget the “unbridled joy” of hearing the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” for the first time. Or meeting Bruce Springsteen. “In those days, if you met another guy who was in a band, you were friends,” Van Zandt recalls. “If you both had long hair, you were friends. And if you both had long hair and were in a band, you were best friends. That was it. No thunder. No lightning. Just two misfit kids who had found a common tribe. It was the beginning of a lifelong brotherly love affair.”

For Van Zandt, making music with Springsteen proved to be a lifelong passion. In one of the book’s finest anecdotes, he remembers a day in 1969 when “Bruce called me and asked if he could switch to the Telecaster. I know that sounds funny, but growing up when we did, your guitar was your identity. And I was the Telecaster guy. Bruce had his weird converted bass guitar for a while and then a Les Paul, which probably proved to be too damn heavy. I said OK. I had been trying a Stratocaster out lately and liked it. And anyway, guitar playing was starting to feel kind of over. The Rock world was about to undergo a major transformation.”

As “Unrequited Infatuations” makes resoundingly clear, earning renown with Springsteen — one blockbuster tour and album after another — was one of the great privileges of his life. But at the same time, so was the moment in the 1980s when, seemingly risking everything, Van Zandt left Springsteen and the E Street Band on the cusp of global fame with the “Born in the USA” LP.

Looking back on this chapter of his life, Van Zandt writes that “occasionally you need to be untethered.” It all began when “Bruce and I had our first fight, one of only three we would have in our lives. I felt I had been giving him nothing but good advice and had dedicated my whole life and career to him without asking for a thing. I felt I’d earned an official position in the decision-making process. He disagreed. So I quit. Fifteen years. We finally made it. And I quit. The night before payday.”

Yet as Van Zandt’s story powerfully demonstrates, the musician discovered the essence of his life’s passion in the moment when he gave up everything. Taking such an incredible risk led to a second life as a solo artist, as an actor, and when the chips were down, an activist determined to foment genuine change in the world through his work in Nicaragua and South Africa. As history well knows, he would wind his way back to Springsteen and the E Street Band. But as with the best and most honest of life stories, “Unrequited Infatuations” reminds us that it’s the getting there that matters.

Listen to Ken’s interview with Steven Van Zandt from March 2021 on “Everything Fab Four“:

Subscribe today through Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, RadioPublic, Breaker, Player.FM, Pocket Casts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Bill Maher defends Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, says they “have their thumb” on average voter

“Real Time” host Bill Maher defended an obstructionist streak among moderate Democrats this week, saying Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema “might have their thumb more on the pulse on the average Democrat” than the hundreds of other Congresspeople and Senators who support the advancement of a $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill and a $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill that the party had planned to pass in unison.

Manchin and Sinema, however, blew up those plans Thursday when they walked away from negotiations over the reconciliation bill. Maher, for his part, seemed to agree with their decision.

“They’re mad at them because they’re not progressive enough, forgetting that they only got elected because they’re not progressives! They’re moderates,” Maher said.

“Here’s my question: Does spending more money make you a better person? Or a bigger moderate? Maybe these two … might have their thumb more on the pulse on the average Democrat in the country.”

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

The Democratic infighting on Capitol Hill over the bills has obscured nearly all else in Washington recently, as lawmakers struggle to placate the pair of moderates who hold immense power in the evenly divided Senate chamber. President Joe Biden even jumped into the fray this week, telling Congress that he wanted to wait on an infrastructure vote until there was a deal on the reconciliation bill — essentially siding with House progressives.

Nancy Pelosi did agree to postpone the vote for a few weeks — though it remains unclear whether Sinema and Manchin will come to the table.

Maher called the situation: “A stupid, stupid game of chicken.”

“And of course at the last minute, the Democrats had to back down. But Nancy Pelosi blinked, which is itself new.”

You can watch the whole segment below via HBO:

Quit making fun of the Cyber Ninjas’ Arizona “audit” — the fascists are still winning

Just over a week ago, the company that calls itself the Cyber Ninjas announced the results of its supposed “audit” of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County, Arizona, the state’s major population center. Their findings were disappointing to hardcore Trump conspiracy theorists: Joe Biden’s margin of victory actually increased by 99 votes, and there was no finding of systemic errors or election fraud.

In response, Donald Trump’s critics and detractors among the news media, the liberal “resistance” and the general public resorted once again to laughter and mockery, resplendent in self-satisfaction that Trump’s false claims had been debunked once again. All this was taken as one more example of how stupid, foolish and out of touch with reality Trump and his cultists really are.

If liberal schadenfreude were a drug, many of the Trump opposition were “high on their own supply” after the Arizona announcement.

As Trump’s opponents dance in celebration of what they believe to be embarrassing setbacks for Trump and his movement, they had better beware of the pitfalls all around them. In reality, the fake audit in Arizona — which is soon to be copied in other states, including Texas — is another victory for Trump and the Republican-fascist movement in its war against American democracy.

Too many among the mainstream news media and political class are unwilling to acknowledge this fact, because they are products of, and beholden to an obsolescent way of thinking about politics and American society.

That world of “normal” politics is dying, and gradually being replaced by a malignant new normalcy. In response, new rules and frameworks must be adopted if we really want to stem the fascist tide. But decades of habit and personal, financial and emotional investment in a political and social system that rewarded American elites and their mouthpieces are not easy to reject.

To accept that new reality is a type of narcissistic injury; one’s own obsolescence is a difficult thing to admit. It is a frightening and distressing to feel the old order turning into dust and sand as it slips through your fingers. In that moment, it’s tempting to cling even harder, until there is nothing left to hold onto. Charles Pierce describes this in a recent essay at Esquire:

The scope of what is happening to self-government in this country seems to be far beyond the ability of many of our professional observers to contemplate. There is a straight line from angry school board meetings, to suppressive state election laws, to the continued thrall in which Trumpism holds the conservative movement, to the recalcitrance that will be demonstrated in the Congress over the next few days. The straight line continues beyond the events of this week, and you’re not going to like where it eventually ends up.

If you still doubt that the fake election audits are successful tactics for Trump and the Republican-fascist movement, consider these facts:

Trumpism and other forms of fascism are fantasies dominated by backward reasoning. The leaders and followers have already decided that they have been betrayed, and will use any means available to win and keep power. They have committed themselves to a set of false “truths” in service to the cause. Reality as it actually exists will be bent and twisted to “prove” that these fantasies and their alternate reality are real.

For Trump and his followers, it is a declared truth that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him. They will unanimously reason backward from that conclusion to find the supposed proof. Whatever these so-called audits actually find will be viewed as evidence that the 2020 election was rigged and that Joe Biden is an illegitimate usurper.

These fake audits are a key component of the Big Lie, and strategically effective at maintaining control of the hearts and minds of Trump’s followers and the Republican Party. Public opinion and other research has consistently demonstrated this; for example, more Republicans now believe the Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election than did immediately after the insurrection of Jan. 6.

These fake audits and others will be used to provide false credibility to the Republican-fascist movement’s attacks on democracy. If the fake audits “confirm” that Biden actually won — a self-evident fact — then the process has been shown to be “fair,” creating a new norm in which the Republican-fascists and their operatives can “audit” any and all future elections in the future. Once this process becomes institutionalized, it can be used as a tool to undermine or overturn any elections won by Democrats.

The fake audits will also allow right-wing operatives to gain information about and access to voting systems, which will make vote theft, vote rigging and other types of real election fraud much more likely.

These fake audits are also a means of encouraging right-wing terrorism and political violence directed against Democrats and other designated enemies of the Republican-fascist movement. The Big Lie and its many associated little lies about the 2020 election have already resulted in violent threats and acts of intimidation against state and local election officials. These threats have become so extreme that many of experienced election workers are resigning or being forced out, and in many cases replaced by Trump Republicans in a coordinated campaign to control or undermine future elections.

Armed right-wing paramilitaries and other street thugs were present among the crowd in Phoenix waiting for the results of the fake audit. These threats of terrorism and other violence are not implied: If Trump and the Republicans lose elections or lose political power, the possibility of bloodshed grows more severe.

Belief in the Big Lie and the need for fake audits of the 2020 election has become a litmus test and loyalty oath for the Republican-fascist movement. If a Republican elected official, or even a private citizen, rejects these claims, they are to be purged from the movement for “disloyalty.”

Donald Trump will in all likelihood be the 2024 Republican presidential nominee. The Big Lie and endless rounds of election “audits” are an excellent fundraising tool. Based on his previous behavior, Donald Trump will also use this money to line his own pockets.

In a new interview at Politico, Rick Hasen, a law professor at UC Irvine and expert on democratic institutions, explains the dire political crisis that America is facing and the role that “election subversion” — as seen in these fake audits — plays in the fascist onslaught:

So, Georgia recently passed a new voting law. One of the things that law does is it makes it a crime to give water to people waiting in a long line to vote — unless you’re an election official, in which case you can direct people to water. That’s voter suppression — that will deter some people who are stuck in a long line from voting. Election subversion is not about making it harder for people to vote, but about manipulating the outcome of the election so that the loser is declared the winner or put in power.

It’s the kind of thing that I never expected we would worry about in the United States. I never thought that in this country, at this point in our democracy, we would worry about the fairness of the actual vote counting. But we have to worry about that now….

In 2020, things shifted. The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier “stolen” election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just deserts. And if [you believe] Trump really won, then you might take whatever steps are necessary to assure that he is not cheated the next time — even if that means cheating yourself. That’s really the new danger that this wave of voter fraud claims presents.

The fake audits in Arizona and elsewhere are not a joke.Those who choose to laugh are driven by self-interest, anxiety, fear and denial. They are retreating from the ugly reality of the situation, and from the hard work that will be necessary to save or redeem democracy.

Experts find Arizona’s ‘hoax’ audit was even worse than it looked: “Made up the numbers”

For months, far-right conspiracy theorists and supporters of former President Donald Trump hoped that Cyber Ninjas’ audit of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County, Arizona would show that he really won the state — only to be disappointed when the audit showed what election officials already knew: President Joe Biden won Arizona.

The Cyber Ninjas didn’t find what they were hoping to find, to be sure. But according to a newly released report by three elections experts, the entire review was flawed and unreliable anyway.

According to New York Times journalists Michael Wines and Nick Corasaniti, “The experts, a data analyst for the Arizona Republican Party and two retired executives of a Boston-based election consulting firm, said in their report that workers for the investigators failed to count thousands of ballots in a pallet of 40 ballot-filled boxes delivered to them in the spring. Investigators went through more than 1600 ballot-filled boxes this summer to conduct their hand recount of the election in Maricopa County, the most populous county in the state. Both they and the Republican-controlled (Arizona) State Senate, which ordered the election inquiry, have refused to disclose the details of that hand count.”

Wines and Nick Corasaniti add, “But a worksheet containing the results of the hand count of 40 of those boxes was included in a final report on the election inquiry released a week ago by Cyber Ninjas, the Florida company hired to conduct the inquiry.”

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The three election experts who scrutinized Cyber Ninjas’ audit are Benny White, a data analyst for the Arizona GOP; Larry Moore, founder of the election consulting Clear Ballot Group; and Tim Halvorsen, the Clear Ballot Group’s former chief technology officer.

In their scathing report, the experts slammed Cyber Ninjas for having “zero experience in election audits” and said, “We believe the Ninjas’ announcement that they had confirmed, to a high degree of accuracy, the election results of the second-largest county in the country is laughable.”

“The Ninjas made up the numbers,” the report said, calling it a “hoax.”

It explained: “An enormous discrepancy of 15,692 missing hand counted ballots from 40 boxes out of out of 1,634, supports our opinion that the Ninja’s hand count of ballots was so far off the Senate’s machine count of ballots that any statements about the vote counts (e.g., that Trump lost 261 votes) are meaningless.”

Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, isn’t surprised by the experts’ findings. Hobbs, who has been attacking the Cyber Ninjas audit as a partisan joke, said, in an official statement, “It was clear from the start that the Cyber Ninjas were just making it up as they went. I’ve been saying all along that no one should trust any ‘results’ they produce; so, it’s no surprise their findings are being called into question. What can be trusted are actual election officials and experts, along with the official canvass of results.”

Nonetheless, Cyber Ninjas Rod Thomson, according to Wines and Nick Corasaniti, said, “We stand by our methodology and complete final report.”

The many betrayals of “Ted Lasso”

“Here we go again. Give Ted another idea he’ll take all the credit for,” Nate grouses in the latest heart-wrenching episode of “Ted Lasso.”

AFC Richmond assistant coach Nate Shelley (Nick Mohammed) has just sought out head coach Ted’s (Jason Sudeikis) approval for a tactic called the “false nine,” which would pull back strikers to midfield. As an American football coach who knows little to nothing about soccer, Ted agrees to try out the play in a routine brainstorming exchange. But the mood changes the moment Ted leaves the room, and Nate privately expresses his resentment with the statement above.

Since the beginning of this emotional second season of Apple TV+’s Emmy-winning comedy, former fan-favorite Nate has been going down what can really only be called “a path.” The ex-kit manager was promoted to assistant coach, a role that has come with simultaneous feelings of gratitude and frustration when Nate perceives he isn’t properly respected for his contributions . . . especially when it makes the ignorant American coach look good.

This downward spiral into insecurity and cruelty comes to a head in the last shocking moments of the episode, which is preceded by hints of Nate’s true feelings.

Who’s the boss?

It begins innocuously enough as fellow assistant coaches Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) and Beard (Brendan Hunt) try to assure Nate that supporting Ted is part of their communtal job. Hell, it’s in their titles to “assist.” Undeterred, Nate voices a question he’s possibly been pondering all season:

“You guys ever want to be in charge? You’re the boss? Get all the credit?”

His coworkers both appear visibly uncomfortable, before Beard offers a charming response, comparing teamwork and collaboration in nature. “The forest is a socialist community, and trees work in harmony to share the sunlight,” he says.

It’s a nice thought, but it’s clear that Nate is definitely not buying Beard’s rosy views.

The next clue about what Nate feels he deserves occurs outside of work. While trying on suits with the team’s marketing/PR manager Keeley (Juno Temple), they share an exchange about their mutual desires to lead empowered careers and “be the boss.” As a former model, she is offering her fashion expertise and appears particularly excited when Nate dons an all-black suit, not unlike the attire that Keeley’s own boyfriend Roy wears.

Keeley, who is receiving recognition from Vanity Fair as a “Powerful Woman on the Rise,” perhaps inadvertently encourages Nate’s ambition and scheming by hyping him up to do whatever it takes to be successful.

“People like you and I, we can’t help but dream big,” she says. “And no one is going to fight harder for their dreams than us, right? The scariest part of all of this is making the decision to go for it.”

The next thing we know, Nate “goes for it.” He kisses Keeley – a woman who is in a committed relationship – without her consent. While she tries to awkwardly downplay the incident to make him feel better and less embarrassed, Nate returns to the dressing room and spits at his own reflection in disgust.

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It’s not the first time we’ve seen Nate malevolently gazing into a mirror this season. No matter what advice he’s been given or what he wears, nothing seems to give him the ego boost he desires and make him the man he wants to see reflected. A black suit does not suddently transform him into the beloved Roy Kent, and “making himself big” in the mirror doesn’t give him the confidence that team owner Rebecca (Hannah Waddington) naturally exudes.

That sad dressing room scene is the last time viewers see Nate in the episode. But his name comes up once more, in a crucial moment.

The betrayal

In the final mintues of the episode, Ted receives texts from The Independent journalist Trent Crimm (James Lance), who has been reporting on and following Richmond’s progress under Coach Lasso from the beginning. Trent tips him off about an upcoming story he’s publishing revealing that Ted’s sudden absence from a game weeks earlier wasn’t due to a stomach bug after all, but was in fact a panic attack.

And one last text: Nate leaked that information.

It’s a devastating moment for “Ted Lasso” fans, drawn in by the show’s abundant positivity and ragtag team that’s presented as an extended family – sharing dating dilemmas, personal loss and even Christmas dinners away from home. This betrayal shatters that illusion, mostly invented by Ted himself, reminding us that the AFC Richmond Greyhounds are, at the end of the day, a business. This is how big businesses, and capitalism at large, operate, no matter how many “BELIEVE” posters the football club might hang on its walls.

Power-hungry, aspiring “bosses” like Nate will do what they usually do to acquire power: push others out of the way. After all, it’s all he’s known personally, having been relegated to the sidelines and as the butt of jokes for years before Ted finally recognized Nate’s strategic smarts.

There’s also a deeper message at play here. Nate seems to equate “being the boss,” “fighting for your dreams,” and “going for it” with hurting and taking something away from other people. In this episode alone, he seems set on taking Ted’s coaching position and (unsuccessfully) attempts to steal Roy’s girlfriend. Earlier in the season, we watch Nate consistently bully and disrespect the replacement kit man, owing to his own insecurities.

This is the attitude of someone who feels entitled but doesn’t have what they want. If Nate isn’t happy, he doesn’t want to look in the mirror – literal or metaphorical. It’s easier to believe someone else is at fault for his misery. Ted Lasso is getting all the attention, yet relies on everyone else for his winning plays and isn’t reliable emotionally. In exposing Ted’s mental health issues to the media, Nate can rationalize it to himself: What’s a little violation of consent when it means that Nate can finally discredit his undeserving boss? And wouldn’t Richmond be better off with someone more competent at the helm?

Then again, Nate’s meteoric rise from cleaning cleats to being lauded for brilliant plays should have been expected to have growing pains. As many employees will attest to, answering to managers who know how to perform the duties of a job but not the interpersonal aspects – the actual managing of other people – can lead to toxic work environments. Nate knows soccer; he doesn’t know coaching or managing. Therefore he doesn’t recognize that he and the team are the beneficiaries of Ted Lasso’s interpersonal skills if not his knowledge of the game. It’s why he’s angry every time someone points out his grey suit as the one Ted gave him; in Nate’s mind, he owes Ted nothing. At the same time, Ted has been so caught up in his own issues that he doesn’t see he’s imperfectly prepared Nate for his new bump in status. Ted doesn’t check in on anyone unless a perfomances on the pitch are affected. This man, who’s more cheerleader and philosopher than strategic mastermind, has betrayed his responsibilities to Nate.

Nate’s dark turn also speaks to a bigger issue with how “Ted Lasso” has thus far treated its relatively few characters of color — primarily as vehicles to advance white characters’ stories and development. Richmond’s beloved Sam (Toheeb Jimoh), a Black man, has a romantic relationship with Rebecca, which allows her to find a sense of identity after her disastrous marriage. And more recently, Dr. Sharon Fieldstone (Sarah Niles), a Black therapist, moves Ted’s character forward from his unresolved grief.

Meanwhile, Nate started off as a shy, bumbling background character with self-esteem issues, frequently pulled in for comedic relief. Now, as of the end of this week’s episode, he still has self-esteem issues, but they’ve twisted so that he’s decisively become the show’s villain as the instrument to knock Ted Lasso down.

Trent Crimm? More like Trent Cringe!

Beyond the Nate of it all, the episode’s cliffhanger revelation implies an additional betrayal. Specifically, Trent’s text disclosing Nate as the not-so-anonymous source for the story is cringe for another reason: journalistic ethics. No matter what viewers (or even Trent) think about Nate’s despicable actions or Ted’s good nature, revealing an anonymous source is a breach of trust.

Television and movies seldom bother to accurately portray basic conventions of media and reporting (think: the journalists of political drama “House of Cards” often sleeping with sources). But on top of being a show with a significant and growing viewership, “Ted Lasso” has also impressed upon its audiences that Mr. Trent Crimm is a Very Serious journalist, which makes his behavior inexcusable. He’s the one who’s violated consent this time.

Public distrust of media is at an all-time high, and many consumers have little to no idea what reporting involving anonymous sources entails thanks to the lies of our last president. A popular television show depicting a presumably credible, respected journalist breaking rules and playing favorites with Coach Lasso almost certainly isn’t going to help alleviate rampant media illiteracy.

Ultimately, for all the issues that go hand-in-hand with Nate’s dark descent and his back-stabbing of Ted, the themes of his story are worth exploration by the show. It’s an interesting and important concept: how a sudden influx of power can transform a deeply insecure person for the worse, and how businesses and companies that purport to be “families” are often anything but.

If “Ted Lasso” has previously been accused of toxic positivity and being out-of-touch with harsher realities, this episode and Nate’s arc in particular, take us in an entirely new direction. Nate’s betrayal of Ted may have felt shocking, but his change in demeanor has been a long time in the making this season. Starting shortly after he received an influx of attention and support on social media after a successful game, his eyes were at once glued to his name on Twitter. From then on, we watch as Nate’s obsession with his image and status grows and grows. This is what society has impressed upon him as important, and as a result, he embraces Machiavellian ways.

Aside from this episode’s eyebrow-raising writing of a character of color and misrepresentation of Journalism 101, it presents a compelling, relevant story from which we can all learn something. Nate is — among many things — a symbol of how capitalistic greed and thirst for individual fame and glory can tear teams apart from the inside.

“Ted Lasso” premieres its Season 2 finale on Friday, Oct. 8 on Apple TV+

An “Army of the Dead” heist prequel & the return of “You”: Here’s what’s new on Netflix in October

October is the perfect time to curl up with a pumpkin spice latte and scary movie, and Netflix’s catalog of new titles this month delivers plenty of content to choose from.

Of course, before you move on to enjoy the thrilling new shows and movies, including many Netflix originals coming soon to the platform, don’t forget to say good-bye to the titles that will be leaving this month, too. Catch the dream within a dream within a dream that is 2010’s “Inception,” or “Legally Blonde,” the classic, hot pink comedy that made Reese Witherspoon a household name, as both movies leave Netflix on Halloween.

As for followers of Dan Brown’s unadulterated trash, two movies based off his books, “Angels & Demons” and the “Da Vinci Code,” will both be departing on Oct. 31 as well, so indulge yourself with those ho-hum mysteries if you want to turn off your brain.

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As for what’s coming to Netflix, after a nearly two-year hiatus, “You” is back in its third season with more bloody hijinks than ever, while the Halloween thriller “Night Thieves” is the perfect centerpiece for a mid-autumn spooky movie night. Whether you live for Halloween or are just trying to binge your way through to the holiday season, Netflix has got you covered.

Here are highlights of what’s coming:

“Diana: the Musical,” Oct. 1

Few figures in modern history are as universally beloved as Princess Diana, the people’s princess whose story is oft told and retold — this time in musical form with “Diana: the Musical.” This latest version of the classic story was filmed in advance of its Broadway opening.

“The Guilty,” Oct. 1

Infrequent bather Jake Gyllenhaal stars in this latest cop thriller about a police detective turned 911 phone operator, thrown into what at first seems to be a quest to save a distressed caller, but turns into so much more.

According to Salon’s review, the movie itself has its problems, but Gyllenhaal makes the effort of watching worthwhile:

Viewers are supposed to side with Joe, who strongly believes he is doing the “right thing” at all times. But he is not a particularly likeable character. He shouts at everyone he talks at (not to) and demands that they do what he wants, regardless of protocol. He is the quintessential “entitled” white male police officer dictating that he is “doing his job” — even when he is not doing what he is supposed to. Joe’s flawed character is also what makes “The Guilty” so interesting.

“Maid,” Oct. 1

Based off the memoir “Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive” by Stephanie Land, this new series tells the story of a single mother named Alex who relies on housekeeping to make ends meet after escaping an abusive relationship as she tries to give her young daughter Maddy a better life. Emotional yet humorous, “Maid” is the story of a single mother’s strength, resilience and love for her daughter.

“Bad Sport,” Oct. 6

Netflix’s latest documentary series examines shocking stories of sports and crime, told by athletes, coaches and law enforcement officials. Stories include Indycar driver Randy Lanier’s marijuana-smuggling operation, a horse hitman’s insurance fraud ring, the biggest match-fixing scandal in Italian football history and more.

“There’s Someone Inside Your House,” Oct. 6

Speaking of perfect Halloween night thrillers, “There’s Someone Inside Your House” is an instant classic, following Makani Young as she moves from her small town in Nebraska to Hawaii, where her classmates are being stalked by a killer set on exposing their darkest secrets. The killer terrorizes Makani’s classmates all while wearing life-like masks of their own faces. Creepy much?? “There’s Someone Inside Your House” is based on the Stephanie Perkins novel of the same name, with Patrick Brice, director of “Creep,” directing.

“The Baby-Sitters Club” Season 2, Oct.11

A much-needed palate cleanser for audiences of all ages, “The Baby-Sitters Club” returns for its second season. Based on the best-selling and still-beloved Ann M. Martin book series of the same name, this modern adaptation follows best friends Kristy Thomas, Mary-Anne Spier, Claudia Kishi, Stacey McGill, and Dawn Schafer as they navigate the ups and downs of middle school, and grow their burgeoning baby-sitting business along the way.

“My Name,” Oct. 15

Following the massive success of death competition thriller “Squid Game,” “My Name” is another action-packed Korean thriller series, telling the story of a revenge-thirsty woman who joins forces with a powerful crime boss, entering the police force undercover to do his bidding.

“You” Season 3, Oct. 15

Penn Badgley and Victoria Pedretti are back as Joe and Love, two ferocious killers who have finally shown each other who they really are. Since running away from their shared crime scene in Los Angeles at the end of Season 2, the couple have since married and are now raising a son in Northern California’s Madre Linda, surrounded by tech entrepreneurs, social media influencers, and judgmental mommy bloggers. What could go wrong?

“Found,” Oct. 20

Three different girls adopted by different American families each travel to China, looking to meet their birth parents in this poignant new Netflix documentary.

“Night Teeth,” Oct. 20

Be careful who you pick up off the side of the road: In this perfect Halloween night thriller, a college student chauffeur picks up two mysterious women who are presumably party-hopping across Los Angeles. He soon discovers their horrifying, bloodthirsty intentions, and is launched into a fight for his life.

“Sex, Love & Goop,” Oct. 21

Look, we are always down to hate-consuming Goop content. After “The Goop Lab,” the latest Netflix original series follows couples’ journeys toward more pleasurable sex and deeper intimacy — all with the guidance of Gwyneth Paltrow and a team of experts. Will vagina candles be part of this?

“Sex: Unzipped,” Oct. 24

Join Saweetie and a cast of sex-positive puppets (who we’d sure turn to for sex ed) in what Netflix is calling its “funniest, filthiest and furriest” new comedy special yet. Saweetie will also be joined by a panel of sex experts to give us the facts.

“Army of Thieves,” Oct. 29

A prequel to Zack Snyder’s zombie heist flick “Army of the Dead,” “Army of Thieves” follows a mysterious woman (Nathalie Emmanuel) who convinces a bank teller (the scene-stealing Dieter before his demise, played by Matthias Schweighöfer) to join her in a shocking heist across Europe.

“Colin in Black and White,” Oct. 29

From Colin Kaepernick and Ava DuVernay, this drama series tells the story of Kaepernick’s early years in high school, and the coming-of-age that made him the activist he is today.

Here’s the full list of everything coming to Netflix this month.

Oct. 1
“A Sinister Sect: Colonia Dignidad”
“Diana: The Musical”
“Forever Rich”
“The Guilty”
“MAID”
“Paik’s Spirit”
“Scaredy Cats”
“The Seven Deadly Sins: Cursed by Light”
“Swallow”
“A Knight’s Tale”
“An Inconvenient Truth”
“Are You Afraid of the Dark?” Season 1
“As Good as It Gets”
“Awakenings”
“B.A.P.S.”
“Bad Teacher”
“The Cave”
“Desperado”
“The Devil Inside”
“Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood”
“Double Team”
“The DUFF”
“Eagle Eye”
“Endless Love”
“Ghost”
“Gladiator”
“Hairspray”
“The Holiday”
“Jet Li’s Fearless”
“The Karate Kid”
“Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life”
“Léon: The Professional”
“Malcolm X”
“Observe and Report”
“Once Upon a Time in Mexico”
“Project X”
“Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”
“Rumor Has It…”
“Seinfeld” Seasons 1-9
“Serendipity”
“Spy Kids”
“Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams”
“Spy Kids 3: Game Over”
“Step Brothers”
“The Ugly Truth”
“Till Death”
“Titanic”
“Tommy Boy”
“Unthinkable”
“Waterworld”
“Zodiac”

Oct. 3
“Scissor Seven” Season 3
“Upcoming Summer”

Oct. 4
“On My Block” Season 4

Oct. 5
“Escape The Undertaker”

Oct. 6
“Bad Sport”
“Baking Impossible”
“The Blacklist” Season 8
“Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things”
“The Five Juanas”
“Love Is Blind: Brazil”
“There’s Someone Inside Your House”

Oct. 7
“The Billion Dollar Code”
“Sexy Beasts” Season 2
“The Way of the Househusband” Season 1 Part 2

Oct. 8
“A Tale Dark & Grimm”
“Family Business” Season 3
“Grudge / Kin”
“LOL Surprise: The Movie”
“My Brother, My Sister”
“Pokémon the Movie: Secrets of the Jungle”
“Pretty Smart”

Oct. 9
“Blue Period”
“Insidious: Chapter 2”

Oct. 11
“The Baby-Sitters Club” Season 2
“Going in Style”
“The King’s Affection”
“Shameless” (U.S.) Season 11

Oct. 12
“Bright: Samurai Soul”
“Convergence: Courage in a Crisis”
“Making Malinche: A Documentary by Nacho Cano”
“Mighty Express” Season 5
“The Movies That Made Us” Season 3″
“Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It”
“Smart People”

Oct. 13
“Fever Dream / Distancia de Rescate”
“Hiacynt”
“Reflection of You”
“Violet Evergarden the Movie”

Oct. 14
“Another Life” Season 2
“In the Dark” Season 3
“One Night in Paris”

Oct. 15
“CoComelon” Season 4
“The Forgotten Battle”
“The Four of Us”
“Karma’s World”
“Little Things” Season 4
“My Name”
“Power Rangers Dino Fury” Season 1
“Sharkdog’s Fintastic Halloween”
“The Trip”
“You” Season 3

Oct. 16
“Misfit: The Series”
“Victoria & Abdul”

Oct. 19
“In for a Murder / W jak morderstwo”

Oct. 20
“Found”
“Gabby’s Dollhouse” Season 3
“Night Teeth”
“Stuck Together”

Oct. 21
“Flip a Coin -ONE OK ROCK Documentary”
“Go! Go! Cory Carson” Season 6
“Insiders”
“Komi Can’t Communicate”
“Life’s a Glitch with Julien Bam”
“Sex, Love & Goop”

Oct. 22
“Adventure Beast”
“Dynasty” Season 4
“Inside Job”
“Little Big Mouth”
“Locke & Key” Season 2
“Maya and the Three”
“More than Blue: The Series”
“Roaring Twenties”

Oct. 24
“We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks”

Oct. 25
“King Arthur: Legend of the Sword”

Oct. 26
“Roswell, New Mexico” Season 3
“Sex: Unzipped”

Oct. 27
“Begin Again”
“Hypnotic”
“Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight Part 2”
“Sintonia” Season 2
“Wentworth” Season 8

Oct. 28
“Luis Miguel – The Series” Season 3
“The Motive”

Oct. 29
“Army of Thieves”
“Colin in Black & White”
“Dear Mother”
“Mythomaniac” Season 2
“Roaring Twenties”
“Thomas & Friends: All Engines Go”
“The Time It Takes”

Low health literacy is a “silent pandemic” that affects the majority of Americans

Our doctors speak at least two languages: English and Medicalese. Medicalese sounds like English but is sprinkled with terms from ancient and classical languages that can sound foreign to even the most educated person. To doctors, the language of medicine is clear and familiar. To you, it might as well be Greek. Not just to you, but also to policy makers, journalists, and insurers—all those who are supposed to convey information so that can you understand it and can act upon it.

It’s Greek to me too.

I was once consulting for a pharmaceutical company that wanted to increase patient adherence to rheumatoid arthritis medication. We were in a sleek conference room, sipping the latest in gourmet coffee. I was feeling confident and competent. Then the marketing and product teams started throwing strange terms at one another — like code words to a secret club to which they all belonged. Someone said, “anti-TNF.” Someone else retorted, “subcutaneous.” From across the room I heard, “biologic” and “biosimilar.” These words sounded familiar, but that only made matters worse, because then I thought I understood them.

This presented a dilemma. On the one hand, I had been hired because of my academic credentials, industry experience, and unique insights. I should have been commanding authority, not standing at the club door, embarrassingly ignorant of the secret code. On the other hand, I could not do my work unless I knew what my clients were talking about. To find my way out of the predicament, I said, ever so humbly, “My PhD is in psychology, not medicine, so I don’t quite understand. Would you mind explaining?”

I needed to ask. Patients also need to ask when they don’t understand something their doctor is saying. I used my academic credentials to avoid what I feared would be professional humiliation and thus saved face. Crucially, such credentials are something patients often don’t have. Creating an environment in which we feel safe to ask questions is the first step in improving our health literacy.

Ninety million American adults are estimated to have low health literacy. Functional literacy is the ability to use reading, writing, and computational skills well enough to meet the needs of everyday life. With health, this includes our ability to read and understand information, to follow treatment instructions and regimens, to provide our doctors with information about our symptoms and medical history, and to inquire about the treatments they offer.

Health literacy actually falls on a spectrum; people don’t just have “high” or “low” health literacy, and not every one of us can perform every health task. Here is how well we perform with functional health literacy:

Only 12 percent of the US adult population has the highest proficiency level of health literacy. They can, for example, use a table to calculate their share of health insurance costs for a year.
About half the population has an intermediate level of health literacy. Though unable to use the insurance table described for the first group, they can still read the instructions on a prescription label and determine when to take a medication.
About a quarter—21 percent—of the population has a basic level of health literacy. Though they cannot read instructions on a prescription label and determine when to take their medication, they can read a pamphlet and give two reasons why a person with no symptoms should be tested for a disease.
At the lowest, below-basic level of health literacy is 14 percent of the population, who cannot perform any of the tasks above. Still, they can read a set of short instructions and identify what they are allowed to drink before a medical test.

Regardless of your health literacy level, you can get sick, need plenty of meds, face exorbitant out-of-pocket fees, or have debilitating chronic health conditions. You need to figure out whether to get tested for colon cancer if you’re over fifty and whether it’s okay to have a few beers if you’re on an antidepressant.

You can get sick at any age. Functional health literacy decreases with age, and does so faster than other aspects of cognitive ability. This has consequences: seniors with inadequate health literacy are 50 percent more likely to die than are those with adequate health literacy, even after accounting for education and socioeconomic status.

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Health literacy also involves both social skills and advanced cognitive skills to critically analyze information. The skills are interconnected, yet different. For instance, interventions have increased the functional health literacy levels of immigrants, but not necessarily their social or critical-thinking health literacy levels. People still needed help asking questions and reviewing materials critically, even when they could read the materials. If patient involvement is dough, the social and critical-thinking aspects of health literacy are the yeast that make it rise.

You probably know why people don’t ask questions. I had to muster up the courage to ask for explanations in my meeting with the pharmaceutical company. (TNF stands for “tumor necrosis factor,” a substance in the body that causes inflammation.) Patients have it harder. Patients might be paying customers, but that does not erase the power and knowledge imbalance between them and their health-care providers. On top of the pain and fear that come with illness, “patients with limited health literacy might not feel empowered to speak up or ask questions; they might be self-conscious, embarrassed, or deferential.”

Low-literacy adults ask fewer questions than do patients of higher literacy levels. They are also less likely to request additional services or seek new information. In hand-surgery clinics, for example, patients of adequate health literacy asked significantly more questions about their therapeutic regimen and had longer visits than patients of limited health literacy. With the help of interventions that build their skills and confidence—for example, when physicians encourage patients to ask questions—patients can participate effectively in their care, achieving better health outcomes and better care experiences at lower costs. Only a third of the hand surgeons asked patients if they had questions, but when they did, about 80 percent of their patients actively participated.

Excerpted from “Your Life Depends on It: What You Can Do to Make Better Choices About Your Health” by Talya Miron-Shatz. Copyright © 2021. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

QAnon extremists make inroads with Mormons: report

The most prominent Mormon politician in the United States, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, has been vehemently critical of former President Donald Trump for refusing to denounce the extremist far-right QAnon cult. QAnon supporters who are religious are most likely to be White fundamentalist evangelicals, but according to Religion Dispatches reporter Cristina Rosetti, the movement has been making inroads with Mormons.

Citing data by the Public Religion Research Institute in a recent article, Rosetti explains, “Earlier this year, PRRI offered statistics for the intersection of Q-belief and religion, noting that White evangelicals, Hispanic evangelicals and Mormons are most likely to believe the ideas espoused by Q. This includes 21% of Mormons who believe in QAnon, and 18% who specifically believe that ‘the government, media and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.'”

In contrast to all the far-right White evangelical churches that have engaged in coronavirus denial during the COVID-19 pandemic and held dangerous superspreader events, many Mormon leaders have promoted safety.

Rosetti observes, “Things grew complicated in 2021 as the (COVID-19) vaccine became widely available. The leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the largest branch of Mormonism, acted quickly during the pandemic to close temples and offer guidelines for Church meetings, including social distancing and masks. In addition, they encouraged vaccines, referring to the medical technology as a ‘literal godsend.’ On January 19, 2021, the president of the Church and other senior members of leadership received their own vaccination, sparking both applause and outrage.”

The journalist continues, “Members with political disagreements felt ostracized, and some began questioning their membership in the LDS Church altogether. Others took these events as confirmation that the hierarchy of the Church had gone astray.”

The QAnon cult believes that the United States’ federal government has been infiltrated by an international cabal of Satanists, pedophiles, child sex traffickers and cannibals and that Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 to fight the cabal. QAnon supporters in the Republican Party include Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado.

On January 6, QAnon supporters were among the extremists who — along with other far-right groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers — attacked the U.S. Capitol Building.

Joe Manchin has made $5.2M from his coal company — and gets big donations from fossil-fuel industry

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., was the key obstacle to reaching a deal this week on passing both the Democratic infrastructure bill that passed the Senate last month and the broader bill to address climate change and provide $3.5 trillion over 10 years for a vast range of spending that would impact the lives of poor and middle-income people. As a result, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed back the House infrastructure vote, suggesting it might come on Friday. (At publication time, that had not yet happened.)

Progressives in the House so far have held fast against passing the infrastructure bill — which they support — without also getting the Senate, including Manchin, to approve the broader bill, with the measures that Biden campaigned on. That bill would create universal pre-K, saving the average family an estimated $13,000 annually; lower the costs of some child care; give free school meals to 9 million children; add dental, eye and hearing coverage to Medicare; lower costs for Obamacare enrollees; lower drug prices; invest in climate-change measures that would reduce carbon emissions, lower energy bills, create thousands of conservation jobs, and mitigate wildfires; and fund both school repairs and construction of new schools.

The White House says the investment of $3.5 trillion will be funded by raising taxes on the rich and slightly boosting corporate taxes (though still far below historic rates). The bill’s investments will generate much more in revenues than they cost, by slowing the impact of climate change, improving education and so on.

Manchin, however, has consistently balked at the initial price tag and refused to vote for anything over $1.5 trillion. He has also objected to the bill’s climate-change measures, calling some of them “very, very disturbing.”

This comes despite the recent and very troubling UN climate report that said some climate change effects are already here and will be irreversible for centuries, at least.

But why is Manchin, who chairs the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources — a key position in ensuring the country pursues more climate-friendly policies — so adamantly against taking the proper steps to address or at least curb the effects of climate change?

Manchin has a vested and longstanding interest in the coal industry as a senator from West Virginia. The state is second in the nation in coal production and coal is part of its identity. Between 2011, the year covered by his first Senate disclosure filing, and 2020, Manchin raked in a total of $5,211,154 in dividend income from Enersystems, a coal and energy resource company he founded in 1988 before entering the public sector, according to annual financial disclosures. The senator earned $491,949 in dividends last year alone, as journalist Alex Kotch reported this summer.

The filings show that Manchin has made an average of $521,115, more than half a million dollars, every year from Enersystems. Dividend income from before Manchin took office isn’t public, but since he joined the Senate, the least he has made from Enersystems is $243,663, in 2015. The most was $865,065 in 2012.

Enersystems represents a staggering 71 percent of Manchin’s investment income, according to FinePrint. It accounts for 30 percent of his net worth. His stake in the company is worth as much as $5 million. Manchin, in other words, has a vested interest in creating policies to keep coal profitable.

And the family business isn’t Manchin’s only conflict of interest. He rakes in cash from other big names in the fossil fuel industry.

It’s no surprise Manchin has scoffed at legislation to address climate change. In 2019, he slammed the Green New Deal, telling CNN’s Chris Cuomo, “I’ve got to work with the realities and I’ve got to work with the practical.”

In reality, climate change action is not only necessary, it is very practical. In fact, some of the world’s biggest automakers have already ramped up efforts to phase out gas-powered vehicles in exchange for electric-vehicle fleets, in line with Biden’s plan for a national framework of EV charging stations.

Earlier this year, Unearthed, Greenpeace U.K.’s investigative unit, obtained video of now-former Exxon lobbyist Keith McCoy discussing 11 senators he called crucial to Exxon’s interests, referring to Manchin in particular as “the kingmaker.”

McCoy bragged about speaking with Manchin’s office on a weekly basis. Environmental groups based outside Manchin’s home state, however, reportedly said they enjoy far less access than Exxon has.

According to FEC filings, Manchin has taken a combined $12,500 in campaign contributions from ExxonMobil’s PAC since 2012. The most recent contributions came during Manchin’s last race, in 2018, and totaled a combined $5,000.

Manchin took in donations from several other big names in the oil and gas business as recently as April, when he accepted $5,000 from Marathon Oil’s PAC. The list goes on and on. According to data compiled by OpenSecrets, the senator has taken more money from the fossil fuel industry in the current election cycle than any other Democrat.

With additional research by TYT News Assistant Zoltan Lucas and TYT Investigates Intern Jamia Zarzuela.

The advanced placement exams’ grading system gets low marks

Every May, millions of high school students in the United States and across the globe take specialized tests known as advanced placement (AP) exams. Offered for 38 subjects, ranging from staples like calculus and physics to specialized topics including computer science and psychology, the exams are high-stakes affairs. For the students who take them, a good AP exam score can enhance their academic transcripts, boost their chances of winning scholarships, help them gain admission to top-tier institutions, and earn them college credit, potentially saving thousands of dollars in tuition costs. At the more than 22,000 high schools where AP curricula are offered, taking the exams has become a rite of spring.

Afterward, a different kind of ritual takes place: Thousands of test readers — high school or college instructors with teaching experience in the exam subjects — gather to simultaneously grade the exams over the course of two week-long sessions. Multiple choice responses are graded electronically, but answers to free-response questions — which, depending on the subject, can account for about a third to more than half of a student’s score — are graded by humans. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, exam readers gathered in a Cincinnati convention hall, where they were grouped into tables, with each table assigned one multipart question to score; post-Covid exams have been graded online, with readers grouped within virtual tables.

I know this because for four years, I served as a reader for the AP environmental science exam, and what I saw troubled me: Despite steps taken by exam administrators to standardize the scoring process, I noted multiple inconsistencies and irregularities in the exam scoring. As a seasoned instructor, I worry about the impacts these irregularities might be having on students’ lives and learning outcomes, where points associated with a “borderline response” can make the difference between receiving college credit or not.

The problems largely center around the ever-changing exam scoring rubrics — the official lists of approved responses that readers use to assess answers. At the beginning of scoring week, table leaders talk their readers through each rubric and use sample student responses to calibrate the readers’ scoring accuracy for each part of their assigned question. Once scoring ensues, table leaders constantly double-check scored responses to ensure readers are assigning points in congruence with the rubric.

Inevitably, subjectivity seeps into the process. Take, for example, this free-response question from the 2021 AP environmental science exam, which at one point asks the student to “identify one natural mechanism of soil erosion.” If an exam taker interprets that directive to include both primary and secondary mechanisms of soil erosion — a reasonable reading of the question — acceptable answers could include wind, precipitation, and flowing water as primary mechanisms, but also topsoil removal and wildfire as secondary mechanisms that facilitate erosion. But very possibly, a response like wildfire, which has only recently been recognized as a major contributor to soil erosion — and which is largely absent from the eastern U.S., where the big testing companies are based — might initially be missing from the rubric.

When a scientifically valid response isn’t included in the rubric, a reader has two choices: They can follow the rubric to the letter and mark the response wrong, penalizing the student for a novel but correct response; or they can bring it to the attention of their supervisors, who discuss the response with the reader and then pass judgment on whether or not to accept the answer. If the supervisors approve the answer, it’s marked correct and then added to the official rubric. But even then — as I discovered my years reading exams — the current system doesn’t allow for retroactive corrections of exams with previously scored questions where students gave the same novel answer. This means that when novel answers are added to the rubric over the course of the scoring week, exams graded later in the week are more likely to receive higher scores.

To be clear, the wildfire scenario is hypothetical. (Although official scoring rubrics of prior exams are available online, as part of a contractual agreement I signed I’m not allowed to discuss specifics of students’ responses.) But during my time as an exam reader, I witnessed similar cases where valid responses — responses that, as a university instructor, I would find acceptable on a college-level exam — were marked incorrect simply because they were not included in the original rubric. Other exam graders have told me of similar experiences.

Each year, when I flagged valid student responses that weren’t included in a given question’s rubric, the outcomes depended on the personalities of my table leader, the exam question writer, and other supervisors. Sometimes, my proposed additions were received with curiosity and flexibility — and with respect for the science and my scientific expertise — and the scoring rubric was altered. In other cases, they were met with suspicion and rigidity, nothing was changed, and every student who had the correct, yet off-rubric answer, lost the point.

Some exam readers privately told me of cases where leaders of two different tables assigned to score the same question disagreed on the acceptability of a valid off-rubric response. (The readers indicated that in these cases, they were obligated to go with their table leaders’ decisions, and a response marked correct at one table might be marked incorrect at a different table.)

While the broader impacts of such scoring failures are almost impossible to quantify, the impact on an individual can be considerable. Every point is crucial on an AP exam, and points lost unfairly could initiate a costly domino effect: A student’s final exam score could suffer, as could their academic transcripts, their odds of college admission, their chances at securing financial aid, and their time to graduation.

The Educational Testing Service (ETS) — the nonprofit that contracts with the College Board to administer the AP exams and develops and administers other standardized tests, including the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) — has come under fire for scoring irregularities before. In 2006, the organization paid out $11.1 million to settle a class action lawsuit over scoring of a middle- and high-school teacher certification test. “About 27,000 people who took the exam received lower scores than they should have, and 4,100 of them were wrongly told they had failed,” reported The New York Times. (The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, or FairTest — an advocacy organization that advised the lawyers representing the plaintiffs in the suit — provided me with a copy of the settlement agreement, shared tax documents filed by the College Board, and clarified for me the relationship between ETS and the College Board. A FairTest attorney who litigated a different case against ETS provided a legal review of an early draft of this essay.)

Students and teachers deserve better from ETS and the College Board — and so does the American public. According to recent tax filings, the College Board nets close to $500 million annually for its AP exams alone, and a portion of that money comes from U.S. taxpayers: The Every Student Succeeds Act provides funding to states and districts to subsidize AP exam fees for low-income students, fees that range from $94 to $143 per exam. In other words, we all have a stake in the exams’ fairness and transparency.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the College Board took significant steps to invest in improved technology for students preparing for and taking online AP exams. Similar steps should be taken by ETS to shore up the exam scoring. Whenever an exam reader encounters a novel, off-rubric response that they believe is scientifically valid, the response should be vetted by an on-call pool of university instructors serving as independent reviewers, who can assist with updating the scoring guidelines as needed. The scoring software used by ETS should be updated to consistently ensure that whenever a new response is added to the rubric of acceptable answers for a free-response question, previously graded responses from that year’s exam are revisited and rescored.

Administered wisely, AP exams can be a force for educational good, promoting intellectual curiosity and critical thinking skills that will serve students for a lifetime. By the time someone sits down to take an exam, they will have invested many months preparing for it, and their college careers may hang in the balance. At the very least, we should give everyone a fair shake.

* * *

Jeanine Pfeiffer taught undergraduate and graduate courses in the biological and environmental sciences at the University of California, Davis, San Diego State University, and San Jose State University for 22 years. She currently provides strategic advising for tribal nations, government agencies, environmental nonprofits, and field practitioners.

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

Marco Rubio wants to go after corporations — but there’s a catch

Marco Rubio is trying to get ahead of the Republican pack, unveiling a legislative offensive against the left’s so-called “woke” agenda, introducing a bill that would incentivize shareholders of large public companies to sue company directors who engage in “wokeness.”

The 21-page bill, dubbed the “Mind Your Own Business Act,” federally prohibits corporate executives from making “non-pecuniary” decisions to promote the company’s “public image” or “employee morale,” creating a cause of action for shareholders aggrieved by a company’s interest in “wokeness” over profit-maximization. Shifting the burden of proof onto executives, the measure would “require corporate directors to prove their ‘woke’ corporate actions were in their shareholders’ best interest.”

Rubio’s bill rattles off several examples of how executives have apparently allowed “political bias” to undermine their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. It implies that businesses have in the past denied goods and services to particular states and industries, promoted race and sex stereotyping, and used board and members to advance political agendas.

“No more legal tricks that shield these corporate executives from accountability,” Rubio announced in a press release. “If they really believe that being woke is good for business, they should have to say so – and prove it – under oath in court.”

But critics say that the bill’s nebulous nature casts endless doubt over how it would actually be implemented, with some even arguing it applies the very kind of big government approach to big business that Republicans typically detest.

“It makes no sense,” said Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush. “Corporations don’t have to maximize profits,” he told Salon in an interview. “It’s a complete fallacy that directors have to maximize profits. They can focus on the interests of labor, the environment, and a range of concerns.”

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“What if business firms don’t think “profit maximization” is the most important thing?” echoed Lawrence B. Glickman, a professor in American Studies at Cornell University, over email. “What if they believe that investments in the future—and thus lower or no dividends to shareholders—are more important? And what about their duties to their employees?”

At present, there is no provision in federal corporate law that mandates corporations to maximize their profits or returns to shareholders – a fact recently affirmed by the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not,” the court wrote. To boot, neither state codes nor corporate case law have ever set a clear precedent for such a requirement. In fact, both confer broad discretion to executives when it comes to ensuring corporate welfare.

When shareholders sue company directors for breaching their fiduciary responsibility (i.e. derivative suits), they again do so under the jurisdiction of state laws. But Rubio is pushing for the “federalization of corporate law,” Painter said – and that’s an approach Republicans would normally decry as fascist or anti-capitalist.

Such Republican rhetoric has been common in the past decade, with politicians like Rubio repeatedly emphasizing the apparent need to protect state rights’ from federal overreach, particularly when it comes to social issues.

Back in 2015, just months before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, Rubio argued that same-sex marriage should be individually resolved on a state-by-state basis, saying in a CBS interview: “States have always regulated marriage. And if a state wants to have a different definition, you should petition the state legislature and have a political debate. I don’t think courts should be making that decision.”

This year, Rubio again alluded to states’ rights in his opposition to the John Lewis Act, a Democratic-backed voting rights overhaul. “Democrats want unaccountable bureaucrats in Washington to run our elections in Florida,” he said in a June press release. “Not only is that unconstitutional, it is reckless.”

Other critics of Rubio’s bill have claimed that it would be shut down by existing legal precedents.

In fact, a doctrine already exists to prevent aggrieved shareholders from filing the kind of frivolous suits that would arise from Rubio’s bill, argued UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge. “At present,” he wrote on his blog, “the sort of woke decisions … almost certainly would be insulated from judicial review by the business judgment rule.” This rule makes the presumption that business directors are serving the interests of their corporations, placing burden of proof to on plaintiffs to argue otherwise. But Rubio’s measure fails to make explicit mention of this doctrine, posing questions around how the two would be compatible.

Rubio’s “Mind Your Own Business Act” comes amid a broader GOP effort to offload the responsibility of law-and-order onto Republican voters.

Last month, Texas enacted a near-total abortion ban that incentivizes its residents to sue anyone who aids, provides, or receives an abortion after six weeks into pregnancy. The measure effectively puts a $10,000 minimum bounty on wrongdoers, allowing plaintiffs to collect tens of thousands of dollars in compensation. In the lead-up to both the 2016 and 2020 elections, Donald Trump similarly encouraged his supporters to engage in illegal poll watching over baseless fears around voter fraud. Voting rights advocates widely condemned Trump’s rhetoric as an intimidation tactic that might lead to voter suppression.

In some cases, Trump has overtly promoted vigilante violence, Salon’s Heather Digby Parton noted last month. Ahead of a 2017 rally, Trump promised his supporters that he’ll “pay the legal fees” if they “knock the crap” out any protesters at the event. That same year, the former president claimed that there were “very fine people on both sides” of Charlottesville, Virginia’s “Unite the Right” rally, which drew hundreds of neo-Nazis and counter-protesters together in a violent clash.

The GOP’s deputization of its own voters can be traced back to America’s brutal treatment of racial minorities, Glickman said. “I think this is part of a long tradition of the sanctioning of extralegal violence—you can go back to the Fugitive Slave Act, the KKK and other vigilantes during Reconstruction, and lynching.”

In 1850, Congress passed a second version of the Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed slave-owners to contract private bounty-hunters to recover enslaved people who had escaped into free states. The law also punished anyone who aided or abetted in the escape of fugitive enslaved people with a six-month prison sentence and a fine of $1,000 (roughly $35,000 in 2021). Slave-owners were known to publish reward offers in newspapers for runaway enslaved people.

During the Jim Crow era, Stefanie Lindquist wrote in the The Conversation, the country saw a privatization of the electoral system that was again weaponized against Black Americans. For example, from 1889 to 1953, Lindquist wrote, the Jaybird Association, an all-White Democratic political organization, single-handedly ran its own “pre-primary” to vet party candidates for office. The effort was designed to combat the biracial coalition of former Republicans that had maintained control of the county government since 1869.

Rubio’s law also comes amid an apparent growing rift between the GOP and corporate America.

Back in April, big businesses like Coca-Cola and Delta backed away from Georgia’s GOP-backed restrictive voting bill in response to progressive outrage over the bill’s potential to suppress minority voters, even though these very companies had donated to the measure’s sponsors. The move earned corporate America harsh criticism from the GOP, which accused it of falling into hands of “woke” left operatives. In the aftermath of the fatal January 6 Capitol riot, a number of corporations similarly promised to suspend donations to the 147 Republicans who voted to nullify President Biden’s 2020 election win. However, many of these pledges were summarily jettisoned, according to The Los Angeles Times, which found that companies like Cigna, AT&T and Intel broke their promise many months later.

But Painter, Bush’s chief White House ethics lawyer, told Salon that it’s in Corporate America’s best to dispense with the Republican Party.

“This thing keeps accelerating, but this can move toward authoritarianism, where corporations are used – with their money and so forth – to install authoritarians to power,” he said. “An awful lot of businesses supported the Republican Party enough in 2016. They didn’t like Trump, but they helped Trump get in through contributions made to the Republican Party, because they didn’t like the Democrats.”

Commentators on both the left and right have expressed extreme doubt over the “Mind Your Own Business” Act’s potential passage. Matt Stoller, Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project, told Salon that the measure is “not going to pass and it would likely be unconstitutional.”