Spring Sale: Get 1 Year, Save 58%

Michael Strahan on going from Giants to GMA: “When you’re successful, people don’t see the failure”

“Oh, D! I heard you on NPR! I looked you up!” Rob screamed from the other side of the gym. “I didn’t know you were so inspiring with so many ideas! Sheesh! I’m still in disbelief!” 

I was at an overpriced fitness club in downtown Baltimore. For years I’ve known Rob as a slow, but snappy defender who had a solid corner jump shot, if he was wide open. And for years he has never said a word to me, other than “Foul!” Even when all of the guys at the gym would talk about sports or politics on the sidelines between games, Rob never really acknowledged me or any of the other Black players who weren’t Toms. I wasn’t offended because I didn’t really want his attention, and kind of wrote him off as one of those guys who thinks that all people who look like me are the same –– so pardon my shock at his happiness and new fandom. 

“D, we have to go out for a drink one day. There’s so much I want to pick your brain about,” Rob continued. “I felt everything you said. I just don’t know where to start.”

I gave Rob my number and told him to give me a ring, even though I had little free time, and even less interest in answering his questions or hearing what he had to talk about at. For what it’s worth, Rob was not the first. Now I’m no Jordan, not even close, but I was one of the better ballplayers at that gym during this particular time and was used to getting a cold vibe from guys like Rob. I don’t want to speak for Rob because I don’t know what’s in his heart; however, I was nice to him, as I am nice to most people for years. He was always extremely short with me, master of the one-word answer. I imagined he believed that I did not have much to talk about, that I played basketball all day and went home to whatever stereotypical world he dreamt up. Now that he had the opportunity to see and hear me on multiple public forums, I appeared to be different, worthy of his time, and not like the rest of the lanky Black guys who run ball at the gym.

That is a Black experience, and one that NFL Champion and Hall of Famer, Michael Strahan knows very well.

Many know Michael Strahan from his days as a New York Giant and most recently an award-winning co-host of “Good Morning America.” In a time where many professional athletes make the news for their off-field antics, especially after retirement, Strahan has constructed one of the greatest second acts in sports history and deserves to be mentioned with the likes of Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan when talking post-pro sports career success. Millions of people start their mornings off with Strahan, and he works extra hard to deliver not just the news, but the kind of upbeat energy working people need to make it through the week.

Strahan’s unique journey in sports, and transition to “GMA” has been beautifully documented in Season 2 of UNINTERRUPTED’s “More Than an Athlete” series, now available on ESPN+. I was lucky enough to discuss the series, and some of the most difficult aspects of Strahan’s journey, including dark moments on an recent episode of “Salon Talks.”

You can watch my “Salon Talks” episode with Michael Strahan here, or read a Q&A of our conversation below to hear him reflect on his career, why he thinks Black athletes should consider HBCUs as their first option and the reality of being more famous for television than as an NFL star. 

The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How did this whole project “More Than An Athlete” come about for you?

“More Than An Athlete” was with LeBron James’ SpringHill, they did it last year, and it featured LeBron James. As we know him, LeBron is a basketball player with so many other hyphens behind that. SpringHill approached me and my business partner Constance Schwartz and asked us if we wanted to be the subject of Season 2 and so my production company, SMAC [Entertainment] teamed up with SpringHill and we made it happen.

I am actually kind of surprised and excited and honored that those guys would come to me about that because you think of all the people out there who they could have gone to, and for them to come to me means a lot because I respect them so much. We just sat down and they followed me around, talked to everybody who had the opportunity to be around me throughout my career in my life and we put this thing together. It’s been a lot of fun to watch because it’s just interesting to see your career through somebody else’s eyes.

For me, the first thing that came to my mind was how come this didn’t exist a long time ago? Mainly because I think when a lot of times when people think about Michael Strahan, you’ve probably had one of the best transitions from professional sports to a second act in life. I will put your transition up there with Magic. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

It’s a beautiful transition and it’s an inspiring story. One thing I wanted to ask just to kick everything off is just in general, what does that term even mean to you—”more than an athlete”?

It means that you don’t settle for just the status quo. You don’t settle for, you’re an athlete and that’s all you can do. You don’t settle for the stereotype of what an athlete should be which is, people expect you to be one-dimensional. I pride myself in being able to do more than being a football player. Being able to do all the things I do now, physically is not as satisfying, glory is not as satisfying, running another man into the ground and getting the sack and jumping up is a lot more gratifying sometimes.

But just to know that I was able to transition from that guy to the guy who does a game show, delivers news, has the clothing company, a production company, all these things, it makes me even more proud because so many, especially now, don’t even know me from football, which means that the transition from athlete is complete. I think being more than an athlete means literally don’t limit yourself, be open to the opportunities outside of what you can physically do, show people that mentally you’re as talented as you were physically on whatever playing field that you played on.

A lot of people say you had it easy, right? And you I will say this in defense of those people, I think because you’re always smiling and your personality on camera, you make it look easy! Why do you think people feel like you had it easy?

You know, you may be onto something because I am smiling all the time, man. You may have given me the answer to that question I’ve been looking for for a long time. I think maybe that is it, or maybe people never understood my story because I came on into their consciousness at a time where I was already through a lot of that struggle that most people already know about. 

Most people probably don’t know I went to an HBCU. I was at Texas Southern, man, and then to go to the pros and do what I do now, I’m always smiling because I realized that there’s an alternative to doing what I’m doing, and that means not doing what I’m doing. I’m always happy and present to where I am because I appreciate where I am and where I came from and I don’t lose sight of that. And I think that’s why I’m always smiling and happy. Maybe that’s why people don’t think that I’ve had a tough road to get here. 

I also think that when you’re successful, people don’t see the failure. Even when they’ve seen you fail, if something works out that successful, they actually kind of forget about, “Oh yeah, that didn’t work, but I ain’t thinking about that because it’s working for them now.” And I have had a pathway to come up when it came to sports. Football was not easy for me. I didn’t grow up playing football, I had to figure it out and moved to this New York City where you either sink or swim, you get swallowed up by the belly of the beast in New York. I was able to stay afloat here. 

After playing football, to be honest with you, everything I do now is gravy, and not gravy because it’s easy, it’s gravy because I know physically and mentally, I’ve done about the hardest thing anyone can ever do that I’ll ever do. Everything I do now is just a blessing. I’m excited and I’m happy and I just hope people watch this and understand that it wasn’t always easy, but not necessarily just to watch me, but to understand within their lives that there are going to be some challenges too. You’re going to be in a place where you hope to get somewhere and you can see it down the road, the kids, and when you see it down the road, don’t give up on that dream tomorrow, stay there until that dream happens in a year, in two years, in five years, in 10 years. And I think a lot of people are too short-sighted to see that. Hopefully my story will show them that short-sightedness doesn’t get you where you want to go.

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

New York is a beast, man. I was in New York all last week and it’s like the money evaporates from your pocket. When I’m in New York, I walk up and down the street, I have to literally squeeze both of my pockets to make sure the money stays.

That’s on you, man. You’re living good. You’re having a good time in New York. That’s the problem.

I was talking to a young guy the other day, a musician, and he kept saying, he’s “self-made.” The first time he said it, I kind of ignored it, but then around the eighth time, I had to stop him and I said, “Well, it sounds to me like you have parents, right? Didn’t they contribute?” Nobody does everything alone, everybody has people. One of the things I loved about your story is that you talk about the people who helped you along the way. You talk about the friends and the family members and different situations where people poured into you to help you get you where you are. Why is there this obsession with all of these young kids talking about they’re self-made, they did it their own?

Well, I think that one thing that is, I don’t know if it’s taught or if it’s just innate or if you learn it, is humility. And I think being humble about where you are and what you have and what your life is, but also understanding that there’s no way you got there by yourself. There was someone along the way, you may have had a hard road to get there, you may have had to endure, a lot of people never had to endure, but you didn’t do it by yourself. I am very aware that I didn’t do this by myself. Yeah. Did I go train for football? Did I run around the field? Did I make plays? Yeah, but I had 10 other guys out there with me who were occupying other guys so that I was able to do that.

Away from football, I had coaches who encouraged me. I had business partners, my best friend, who encouraged me. I had Jay and Ian, these guys who every day throughout my life where I’m struggling or something going wrong, they’re the ones who say, “Hey, pick it up, stop feeling sorry for yourself.” I had my mom and my dad, two people who were the most influential people who believed in me when no one else did. You always have somebody who’s helping you. I am not self-made. I am made in a piece of many people. When I say that, I mean the people that I know personally who helped me through my life. 

I’m made in a lot of ways from a lot of people that I don’t even know, people that I admired. The way that they carry themselves, the way that they behaved, the way that I saw that they handled pressure, the way that they handled other people, people in my business that I look at and see how they operate and go, “That’s the way people operate in this business.” I am a part of them even though they may not know it. So none of us are self-made. We all have somebody who’s helped us along the way. 

Earlier, you talked about going to a HBCU. As an athlete, you are a great HBCU success story. And now we’re finally starting to see more players, some of the top players go to HBCUs. What do you think is going to take to make that shift?

We have Deion Sanders who went to Jackson State, Eddie George at Tennessee State. I think it’s taking a lot of known players who’ve made their career in football or basketball or whatever it may be, to go back to these schools and attract the top talent because these kids want to see someone that they’ve admired or someone that they’ve seen on TV, who’s had success. If you could have that person literally looking at you every day and coaching you and telling you the good, the bad and the ugly, and inspiring you, that’s going to make it attractive.

I’m proof of that you don’t have to go to a Big Ten school or an Ivy League school to be successful. We played on BET once in four years when I was at TSU, man. BET wasn’t even known for football, but that was a highlight for me. And I still think back to that day like it was yesterday — just to know that you can be successful wherever you are. As long as you put in the work, these scouts will find you. 

We all talk about being prideful, about being Black and supporting being African-Americans, but when it really comes down to the nitty-gritty, a lot of the time we run from that responsibility. It’s not that you’re responsible to a school or HBCU, but if you have an opportunity to support an HBCU, do your best to support them. And that’s all I ask for. For these kids, I understand the pressure of thinking you have to go to a larger program, but it’s been proven that you don’t have to in order to be successful in sports after.

I hope it continues because the schools benefit so much, especially getting that TV time.

Yeah, Deion Sanders at Jackson State is on ESPN. I’m like, “I don’t have to go to ESPN 25, I can go to ESPN without all the numbers behind it.” That’s a major achievement.

Deion, he’s turnt in the locker room. Sometimes I think he wants to put the jersey back on. 

Trust me, Deion will tell you he can put that jersey on. Deion would stub his toe and he’ll be out. Deion is not running anybody down anymore.

Are you more famous from “GMA,” or are you more famous from playing for the Giants?

Different types of fame. There’s football fame, where you walk down the street and every man and young kid you see, “Hey, Michael, how about the Giants? Thank you for that Super Bowl.” Then there is “GMA” famous, which is walking into a grocery store, going into a Mom & Pop even in the middle of nowhere and you walk into a place and they go, “Oh my God.” That’s the “GMA”famous. So I would probably say post-football famous, more than football famous. Football you got on the helmet, only so many people watch football, but with “GMA” and the game shows and when I was doing “Live!” with Kelly, that just kind of opened up a completely different world where it was more mainstream.

You could teach a class on a life after football.

You know, I do like help these young kids, young chaps, I call them kids but they’re young adults, but I like helping these guys, man. I want these guys to be successful and I want them to understand that, the more that I do what I do and the more guys who develop things outside of just sports, the better in this for all of us. There’s the room for all of us. 

My only ask for these young guys is that to become great at what your primary job is. Don’t lose sight of what your primary job is, and if you’re an athlete right now, your primary job is to be a great athlete. While you are being a great athlete in your primary, you can work on your secondary businesses or your secondary jobs or go and intern somewhere, learn. Being an athlete will get you into a room, but being qualified and smart and understanding about what you’re in the room for will keep you there. So don’t have your name just get you in the room so that the guy who invited you in can take a picture and go home and show his boys and his kids to say he took a picture with you. Go in the room and show that you belong there and you should stay in that room. And that’s how you build a career after sports.

As an athlete, you learn a lot on the field, you learn a lot from watching film, you constantly condition and train, you’re building and you’re working on yourself. As a journalist, how do you train? How do you get better, how do you actually work on your craft?

A lot of reading and you have to do the one thing that I hate, watch yourself. And I hate it. In football, we have a thing called self-scouting, where you watch and the coaches go back and they’ll watch the last three or four or five games that you played to make sure that they’re not repeating themselves, that they’re not getting stale so that you know what your weaknesses are, you know what your strengths are, and that’s what you have to do in television as well. I need to know what my strengths are, what my weaknesses are, what I need to work on and work on the weaknesses. Don’t always work on your strengths because you know you can do that.

And I think also what’s been important for me is to have honest people around you. That’s the thing, have people say like, “Hey, man, you screwed that up.” Or, “Why didn’t you ask this? Why didn’t you think about that?” You need to have people around you who push you and make you realize that you’re not perfect. And for me, that’s how I continue to try to get better, just watch myself, trust the people around me and wake up every day happy, man.

I bet the energy in a newsroom is way different with this administration versus the last administration. I bet even the whole flow of the day is just different. Have you learned anything about yourself over the past four years?

Yeah, that I know more about politics than I ever thought I would ever know. I know more about politics and what’s going on in the government and policy than I’ve ever known in my life and I attribute that to “GMA” because you have to be well-rounded to be on that show, you need to know a lot about a lot of things. And I’m sitting right next to George Stephanopoulos, so it’s like, I got a great resource there. I got Robin [Roberts] sitting there as a resource, so why not use them and ask them questions because they’ve been at this a lot longer than I have, and I’m not shy to do that. I’ve learned a lot about myself in terms of just how much I can take in and how much I can expand on what I know. You think you know a lot until you do a job like this and you realize that your world can be really narrow. It has really opened up my eyes to a lot bigger platform.

At a show as big as “GMA,” you’re going to have to cover some of the crazy things with the news that we might not always want to cover, but you have to because everybody watches and it’s so big. Me being a writer, I remember maybe like the second year into the Trump’s presidency, I was like, “Yo, eff this. I’m not writing about that no more.” The jokes are gone, the energy is not there, I’m just going to pivot and slide in a different direction. At “GMA,” you have to show everything and give good energy and something for us to look forward to early in the morning.

Well, it’s tough though. It’s tough because with politics you’re not going to make everybody happy. You’re going to have one side that doesn’t like this about your program and one side that doesn’t like that about your program, and one is going to be happy, one is not going to be, but I think all you can do is tell the truth and let people decide for themselves. And I think that’s what we do at “GMA,” we just tell the truth of what’s right in front of us. And you can’t get away from it, and I think the news cycle has changed a lot over the course of this presidency because now, we used to dedicate so much time to politics because there was always a quote, always something that made you go, “That’s unbelievable.” And now it’s settled down, kind of like what it used to be, where politics gets a smaller chunk and then we go on to what’s happening around the country and the world. I think it definitely, the vibe has changed. I’m not saying it’s an easier news cycle, but it’s a lot more emotionally manageable news cycle.

Please tell everyone where they can see the show and the series.

“Good Morning America,” 7 to 9 a.m. every day on ABC. “$100,000 Pyramid,” we just had our finale. And “More Than An Athlete” on ESPN+.

Sen. Ron Johnson, worth millions, paid almost nothing in 2017 state income tax–and won’t explain why

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., paid next to nothing in 2017 state income taxes compared to previous years, despite reporting an individual income of at least $450,000. 

According a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report released Thursday, the Republican lawmaker paid exactly $2,105 in state income taxes — a staggeringly small amount compared to the $60,000 average he paid over the past decade. 

Johnson’s office has declined to explain the aberration. “The senator had a smaller tax payment because he had less income to report in 2017,” said Vanessa Ambrosini, a spokeswoman for Johnson, told the Journal Sentinel. “The senator will not be providing media with his tax returns.”

There are myriad reasons Johnson’s declared income may have been substantially lower than what he’s reported in the past, Andrew Reschovsky, a professor emeritus of economics and public policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Channel 3000. For instance, Johnson may have made a sizable donation to a nonprofit organization, incurred significant business losses, or benefited from a special deduction. 

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

Johnson has not yet signaled whether he’ll run for a third term next year. If he does, Ambrosini told the Journal Sentinel, he will provide a similar “tax detail” to that seen in previous years. During his 2010 Senate race, Johnson provided three years of federal tax returns, though he failed to do the same in 2016.

According to Johnson’s most recent tax filing, the senator’s net worth lies somewhere between $16.5 million and $78.1 million, as of last year. Most of his wealth appears to have stemmed from a 2020 sale of his share in Pacur LLC, an Oshkosh manufacturer of plastics. 

“Wisconsinites deserve to know what Sen. Johnson is hiding in his financial records,” said Philip Shulman, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Democratic Party.

It isn’t the first time Johnson has been under scrutiny over tax issues. In August, ProPublica reported that the Wisconsin legislator threatened to vote against Donald Trump’s 2017 tax overhaul if the bill didn’t include a provision to “sweeten the tax break for a class of companies…known as pass-throughs” — a classification that allows those companies “to effectively skirt corporate income tax by letting profits directly pass through to owners, who then pay income tax on the gains,” ProPublica explained. Two of Johnsons’ major donors ended up being major beneficiaries of the tax break, which Johnson’s pressure secured. He then in turn voted yes on Trump’s tax plan. 

Johnson has also been widely criticized for his ardent support of Donald Trump. The senator voted to acquit Trump following the Capitol riot, which he claimed “didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me.”  Then, in March, the senator said in a radio interview that he would have been “a little more concerned” if the rioters were affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement or Antifa. His comments were widely panned by his colleagues in Congress.

Trump covered up colonoscopy for fear he would become the butt of late-night TV jokes: Book

It appears one of the big lingering questions about Donald Trump’s presidency may have finally been answered, courtesy of former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham’s new book, “I’ll Take Your Questions Now.”

Back in 2019, Trump took a mysterious trip to Walter Reed Medical Center, sparking rumors of poor health and speculation about the possible causes. Well, Grisham says the jaunt was simply to get a routine colonoscopy — though Trump kept a tight lid on that information for fear that he would become the butt of late-night TV jokes. 

Furthermore, the former commander-in-chief refused anesthesia for the procedure so that he would not have to transfer power to former Vice President Mike Pence even momentarily, according to the Huffington Post.

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

Adding insult to injury, the very thing Trump was seeking to prevent appears to have finally happened Wednesday night, when late-night host Jimmy Kimmel used the news as a punchline.

“I have to say, it gives me a lot of satisfaction as a late-night talk-show host to know that he opted to stay awake while they augured his innards with a sewer snake specifically because he didn’t want us making fun of him,” Kimmel said, appearing alongside a chyron that read “WHAT AN A**HOLE.”

“He gave us a colonoscopy for like four years. It’s time we gave one back.”

The procedure, which screens for colorectal cancer, is recommended at regular intervals for people over the age of 45. Despite the unpleasant nature of the procedure, in which a camera is placed in the patient’s rectum, regular colonoscopies are credited with saving countless lives each year — in fact, according to the Mayo Clinic, at least 1 in 20 American adults will be diagnosed with colorectal cancer during their lifetime. Early detection is incredibly important in successfully treating the disease. 

You can watch the full “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” clip below via ABC:

“Dumplin'” star Danielle Macdonald on new opera comedy & pursuing her dreams: “I never had a Plan B”

Danielle Macdonald often plays formidable characters. In her new, light-as-an-aria rom-com, “Falling for Figaro,” Macdonald plays Millie, a fund manager living in England with her boyfriend Charlie (Shazad Latif of “Profile“). When she is offered a big promotion at work, she turns it down, claiming it is not who she wants to be. Instead, she opts to take a year to follow her lifelong dream of singing opera. 

Unschooled, but not undeterred, Millie heads to the Scottish Highlands to seek tutelage from an unorthodox teacher and former diva, Meghan Geoffrey-Bishop (a droll, withering Joanna Lumley). Millie soon finds herself attracted to Max (Hugh Skinner), Meghan’s other student, who also works at the pub where Millie is staying. As she practices in the hope of winning the annual “Singer of Renown” contest, Millie makes some decisions about her life.

Macdonald is appealing as a young woman who gets out of her comfort zone. As she finds her voice — and generates acclaim for her performance in a qualifying contest — Macdonald shows how Millie’s confidence increases but she still has insecurities. 

The actress recently spoke with Salon about her new film, performing music and comedy, and what gets her out of her comfort zone.

I love Millie’s line about being “irresistibly attracted to the tragedy of it all,” when she talks about why she loves opera. What drives you as a performer? 

I would say, well, not the tragedy of it all. I fell in love with acting when I was a teenager and it was something that I couldn’t explain at all. It drew me in. I love being able to learn new skills and see different perspectives that I wouldn’t otherwise if I didn’t play these characters and get in the headspace of someone else. It’s really kind of amazing.  

Millie pursues opera, which she says is not something she is doing on a whim. If you were not living the dream of acting, what might you be doing with your life?

I don’t know. I never had a Plan B. This is what I really love doing. It was always that. If I couldn’t act, I’d be involved in the making of films in some way. It’s always appealed to me. But all I want to do is act. It’s not like I have editing skills. [Laughs] No Plan B for me. 

“Falling for Figaro,” like “Patti Cake$” and “Dumplin’,” which you also starred in, are competition stories. They certainly provide meaty roles and characters for audiences to root for, but what is the appeal of these narratives of ambition and self-doubt?

There is something about competition movies that allow for the ups and downs in life and the challenges that we face in a two-hour period. I’m really drawn to these kinds of film because they are the ups and downs you experience, just told in different stories with different characters. It just feels like life. There are great moments, there are sad moments, there are funny moments, and there are bad moments — all of them. It’s always a journey, so to see the ups and downs of people’s lives and thoughts and emotions, and feelings is appealing to me in any movie. I like to see growth in characters. It feels more fulfilling. 

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

What can you say about your penchant for playing headstrong characters? While I’ve seen you play vulnerable in “Bird Box,” I find you often get cast as women who are not to be challenged. Millie claims she is simple, but she is really more complicated than she admits. What are your thoughts about her? 

We are all a helluva a lot more complicated than we give ourselves credit for. There is a lot that goes into us. At some moments, we feel that we’re incredibly boring and other moments, we are facing every emotion under the sun in one go and have to figure it out. It’s never easy, to be honest. We are all more complicated. What’s interesting about Millie is that regardless of how simple she thinks she is she maybe finds more complications pursuing her dream because she is faced with more challenges. Her heart and her dreams are on the line. Before, maybe she was pretty simple. It was, go work at a job she doesn’t really like, and come home. It’s very straightforward. Now, the journey we see is Millie finding out that there is more in life, and it is more complicated. And, she is more complicated because she’s feeling more. We all come to those stages where we don’t know what to do next, and we delude ourselves, but it’s about getting through it and learning from the process. 

Do you have any real life experiences that reflect this?

Always! There have been many cases where I think I’m less complicated than I am. [Laughs] I definitely think that there have been times where, realistically in this industry, you have to believe you will book a job that thousands of people are auditioning for. “Yeah, this will be easy, I’ll do it, I’ll work.” Not that it will be easy, but you have to have a sense of bullheadedness and self-confidence in this industry because you face a lot of rejection. You are going to be wrong. You are not right for this or get it. But you have to keep going and convince yourself to keep going.

Falling for FigaroDanielle Macdonald in “Falling for Figaro” (IFC Films)

“Falling for Figaro” provides you with another opportunity to do comedy. Can you talk about playing up the comedy? Millie takes herself and her work seriously, but she’s not a serious person.

Yes, she’s the straight one in the world of comedy in this film. But at the same time, she does have a playful sense of humor and goes with the flow. She’s a very open person. There are so many different experiences she has in the film and she just says, “Yes.” That’s an amazing quality and very unique for a Type A personality, which she is. That’s where the comedy can come in. She is so open to new experiences because she likes to be in control of everything.

Millie takes lessons from Meghan, a teacher who pushes her. Did you ever have a teacher or mentor who molded you or inspired you with tough love? Where do you get your inspiration or motivation? 

A lot of people have inspired me over the years, but there was never one defining moment. I remember the first drama performance I ever did that anyone ever saw. I got to play the funny character in it, and I remember people actually laughing while I was on stage. I thought this is actually working! I was in eighth grade. That was a big moment. After that I thought I can actually do this. There were a lot of people after that who believed in me, and that has helped. I’ve had a lot of support, and an amazing team, and friends. That support keeps carrying me, but the drive comes from within. 

Millie is made to feel worthless, and asked to suffer for her art. That also extends a bit in her potential relationship with Max. What are your thoughts about how we suffer for our love and art? 

I think there are a lot of benefits that come from being in this industry, but there are some life experiences you won’t ever have because of it. I would have loved to have gotten a degree from university, but I had the opportunity to act, so I won’t have that college experience that other people have. I had to give that up, but I got to follow my passion and dream. We can’t always have everything, so it is picking and choosing what feels right for you. So, if something is a big regret, it’s never too late. You can go and do that. If one thing is not making you happy, and something else will make you more happy, I would say that’s where to go. There will always be sacrifices, no matter what you do. But we do like to suffer for art and that makes us feel more fulfilled with it. I really felt this one because I really suffered for it! Everyone has their different processes. 

You have now performed rap and opera (sort of) on screen. What can you say about learning the craft of these very different genres?  

They are so different, and they were both very foreign to me. Don’t get me wrong, I know some opera, and I knew rap, and liked it a lot, but I didn’t know full extent of it. But you never really know the full extent of it until you delve into it, I’ve discovered. You take one step in, and realize, I had no idea there was so much to this! It was fun. I booked tickets to an opera in LA, “Light in the Piazza,” which is an operetta, and then I saw a very traditional Italian, very tragic opera in Montreal right before I started filming — and it was amazing. It was three-and-a-half hours long but the tragedy and dramatic-ness of it, talk about suffering for your art! You feel everything, and it is really entertaining. I loved it. I listened to so many songs and clips on YouTube and kept the repetition up so it would become familiar to me. I immersed myself in the whole world of opera. 

What would you sing if you were to perform karaoke? 

I always do it, and I never do it alone, “Tiny Dancer.” That always comes up. The last song I duetted at karaoke was “Stuck in the Middle with You.” I have a super eclectic taste in music. I love classic hits, and ’80s power pop rock, 2000 pop punk, rap, a lot of different things. 

Can you share something you have you done in your life that has taken you out of your comfort zone?  
I’ve done so many things that have taken me out of my comfort zone. On every job I have done something that takes me out of my comfort zone as well. Performing is absolutely terrifying to me. That is maybe the number one thing that scares me, and for some reason, I keep doing movies with music in them, and I have to keep performing. I can sing, in my opinion, badly. I learned to rap and performed for “Patti Cake$,” but because it’s spoken word, it terrified me less. Moving to America, halfway across the world by myself when I was 18, was definitely not in my comfort zone. But when something really scares me, that’s when I want to take the leap. Because I know I’m going to grow from it. 

What haven’t you done that you want to do?

There is so much I want to do. I want to travel to many countries, and I want to become fluent in Italian. I am learning Italian, but I am not there yet. So hopefully, that will take [root] one day.

“Falling for Figaro” is in theaters and VOD on Friday, Oct. 1.

Joshua Weissman’s cinnamon French toast has nothing to apologize for

Maybe it’s the pandemic that forced our hands, but competence is cool. Not too long ago, a collective frustration with all the rigors of adulting seemed mildly charming. Now, mastery of a skill set is the new “I can’t even.” And cooking is the new takeout.

There are few better exemplars of culinary capability than Joshua Weissman. On his wildly popular YouTube channel (closing in on five million subscribers) the 25 year-old chef demystifies the kitchen, creating clever home versions of fast food favorites, “but cheaper” interpretations of classics like sushi rolls and gourmet burgers, and ambitious from scratch projects like croissants. His persona is curious, reassuring and a little firm — the encouraging teacher who instills confidence by telling you that yes, you can do this.

His debut, “An Unapologetic Cookbook,” offers a similar attitude. “If you want a specific outcome, whatever it is,” Weissman observed during a recent phone call, “it could be something in your professional life, it could be if you’re playing a video game, it’s going to require some level of effort. Now, does good food require effort? Yes. Does it have to require lots of time? Not always. But I just want people to look at the fact that if something takes time, that’s perfectly okay.”

Beginning with “cooking foundation” recipes for things like breads, cheeses and stocks, Weissman’s book then moves the reader on to both simple and more elaborate applications for those building blocks. After all, if you learn how to make bread, imagine what a game changer it’ll be for your grilled cheese sandwiches. Or cinnamon toast. Or French toast. There are recipes for all of them in “Unapologetic.”

I love French toast because it is objectively sensational, and also because it’s fast and idiot-proof. Do pancakes intimidate you? French toast is your best friend. And if you’ve ever made it, you already know — the industrial brunch complex propaganda that it’s some expensive, weekend only thing is a giant lie. You can, of course, rise to Weissman’s challenges and make your own bread and your own butter — and feel pretty great about your achievement. Or you can simply, as he also suggests, use the store bought versions of your ingredients and still wind up pretty damn satisfied. Here, I’ve reverse engineered his recipe a little to adapt to his cinnamon toast, a delicacy he correctly describes as a “perfect food.” The result is rich, eggy, incredibly nostalgic — and far too good to wait for Sunday to enjoy.

***

Recipe: Cinnamon toast French toast

Inspired by Joshua Weissman’s “An Unapologetic Cookbook”

Serves 2

Ingredients:

  • 2 tablespoons of granulated sugar
  • 1 teaspoon of cinnamon
  • 1/2 teaspoon of sea salt
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1 egg yolk
  • 1 cup of half and half (or 1/2 cup of heavy cream and 1/2 cup of whole milk)
  • 4 slices of your favorite bread, preferably that you’ve thickly cut yourself (I used challah here — little on the stale side is ideal.)
  • Softened butter for the pan and more for topping

Directions:

  1. In a small bowl, combine your cinnamon and sugar.
  2. In a medium bowl or pie dish, whisk together eggs, yolk and salt until combined.
  3. Add your half and half and whisk again.
  4. Heat a heavy skillet over medium flame, and melt your butter.
  5. Add two slices of bread to your egg and milk mixture, letting them get thoroughly soaked.
  6. With a slotted spatula, add the bread to your pan and cook for 2 – 4 minutes, until browned and set. Flip and cook another 2 minutes or so.
  7. Remove your first two slices of bread from the pan and plate them, and then repeat the process with your next two slices.
  8. When all your French toast is done, top each slice with a pat of butter and spread to all four corners. Sprinkle liberally with cinnamon sugar. Top with whipped cream, if you’re feeling it.

 

More Quick & Dirty: 

Salon Food writes about stuff we think you’ll like. Salon has affiliate partnerships, so we may get a share of the revenue from your purchase.

 

More healthcare workers quitting could “bring healthcare system to its knees”

As COVID-19 vaccine mandates go into effect in various states and hospitals across the country, a small percentage of healthcare workers are quitting in protest. In upstate New York, six out of the 18 staff members in the maternity department at Lewis County General Hospital in Lowville quit rather than comply with the New York state’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The loss of staff meant that the hospital had to temporarily pause delivering babies over the last couple of weeks.

“The math is just not working,” said Gerald Cayer, chief executive officer of Lewis County Health System, at a news conference. “The number of resignations received leaves us no choice but to pause delivering babies.”

While this one instance in upstate New York made headlines across the country, the trend is being observed in other communities. On Monday, a North Carolina-based hospital system announced that more than 175 of its 35,000-plus employees were fired for not complying with its vaccine mandate. Any loss of staff due to people not complying with the vaccine mandate, while small, is expected to exacerbate an already fragile healthcare system as healthcare workers have already been quitting in droves, generally due to burnout.

Indeed, a mix of a national shortage of nursing staff, vaccine hesitancy among some health care workers, and burnout are poised to put America’s healthcare system in an extremely precarious situation. Specifically, the nursing shortage could “have long-term repercussions for the profession, the entire healthcare delivery system and, ultimately, on the health of the nation,” the American Nurses Association (ANA), warned in a September letter to US health secretary Xavier Becerra.

In a recent survey from the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN), 66% of 6,000 critical care nurses surveyed said they had considered leaving their jobs because of the pandemic.

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon’s weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.

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

Bettencourt said there’s “not a fast way” to replace nurses who leave.

“There will be consequences for years after the pandemic, to try to restore our nursing workforce if we lose this many nurses,” Bettencourt said.

While most nurses don’t want to quit, many feel as if they have no choice because of how their work has negatively affected their mental health since the pandemic began.

Christiaan L., who asked to keep their last name private, has been an ICU critical care nurse since 2015. Even before the pandemic, he said he experienced a bout of burn-out when working two different jobs, which amounted to almost 70 hours per week of work. At the beginning of the pandemic, he had a baby. That, coupled with the stress of being a nurse during the pandemic, spurred him to quit his job at a hospital that he once believed he would work at for the rest of his career.

Now, Christiaan is a traveling ICU nurse, which provides him more flexibility, money, and more time to spend with his family.

“The thing that I’ve always loved about critical care and the ICU setting is, yes, we see a lot of really sad and tragic stuff, but there were also enough positive outcomes — I could see the influence of our work on making someone better, and that’s kind of what kept you around,” he said. “Since the pandemic has started that really hasn’t been the case . . . the celebrations are very far in between, it just seems to be kind of tragedy after tragedy, and it definitely takes a toll on your emotional psyche.”

Christiaan characterized the experience of being a nurse during the pandemic as an emotional rollercoaster.

“It comes in waves,” he continued. “Some days you feel like you just want . . . to check out from it all and you just go through the motions. And some days it just hits you, like an emotional wall and you just break down.”

When asked what could make work better, Christiaan said “a better understanding from the public of what we go through.”

“It’s an interesting position to be in, where you can go through so much tragedy and sadness in a shift and then you go home and someone online is saying, ‘Well it’s not real, it’s a fake thing,” he said. “But also from an organizational standpoint, making sure there’s adequate staff, that you’re getting the breaks that you need to even just get drinks and go to the bathroom and eat lunch or just to step outside and get a breath of fresh air — there are a lot of things organizations can do to kind of make workplaces a little more tolerable.”

Other nurses quit or left their jobs not due to burnout, but because they refuse vaccination — a seemingly contradictory position given that healthcare systems are the most clear vantage point from which to observe how many more severe cases of COVID-19 occur in unvaccinated patients compared to vaccinated ones.

Fortunately, the latest numbers from the American Nurses Association say 90% or more of nurses are vaccinated, far above the national average of 66.8% of adults fully vaccinated. Still, even just a small percentage of workers quitting due to the vaccine mandates could strain the system. As Troy Bruntz, president and CEO at Community Hospital in McCook, Nebraska, said: “It doesn’t make us feel too confident that this isn’t going to turn into something short of a nightmare for American health care.”

Whatever the reason is, hospitals are feeling the strain of worker shortages — and fear how it could soon get worse.

“This pandemic has stressed a system that was already very stressed, and nurses who were already feeling the effects of some of the strains on our healthcare system before the pandemic are just at their breaking point,” Bettencourt said. “At the beginning it was about not having enough personal protective equipment to keep ourselves safe. Now because so many nurses have left, and there are so many patients and just not enough staff to take care of them, nurses are forced to provide care that is not what we think is best for the patient.” 

Bettencourt feared this would affect quality of care.

“I think that’s what’s most demoralizing is that we know we could do better if we had more resources, more staff, and not this flood of patients,” she added.

Bettencourt added that if there are any healthcare workers who are hesitant about the vaccine that they should talk to a nurse they trust.

“Nurses have been the most trusted profession for the last 19 years,” she said. “So if you know a nurse, and someone you trust is a nurse, have a conversation with them about vaccination. We are hoping that people can actually trust us to be accurate, and a good source of information in this age of misinformation.”

Bettencourt said the future of healthcare depends on what happens now.

“People choosing to be vaccinated or not affects whether we’re going to have a healthcare system able to meet our needs when we have health emergencies going forward,” she said.

Jan. 6 committee subpoenas “Stop the Steal” organizers: “A lot of coordination and planning”

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot issued subpoenas on Wednesday to organizers of the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” rallies held in Washington during the hours before the deadly attack on the Capitol.

The panel issued subpoenas for testimony and a “sweeping range of records” related to 11 individuals “tied to the events and rallies leading up to the January 6th insurrection, including the January 6th rally at the Ellipse that immediately preceded the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol,” the committee said in a news release. The panel said the subpoenas were part of its efforts to “collect information from them and their associated entities on the planning, organization, and funding of those events.”

The subpoenas went out to Amy Kremer and her daughter Kylie Kramer, who head Women for America First (WFAF), the group that organized the “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse on the morning of Jan. 6, as well as previous pro-Trump rallies and bus tours. The committee also issued a subpoena to former Trump campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson, who assisted in organizing the Jan. 6 rally and communicated with former President Donald Trump and top aides about the rally and “other events planned to coincide with the certification” of the election results, according to the committee. The subpoena also cited press reports that Pierson met with Trump in the Oval Office on Jan. 4, where he asked if a rally could be arranged “where people like [Ali] Alexander and Roger Stone could speak.”

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

Alexander organized the march on the Capitol with the help of several Republican members of Congress, he has claimed. Stone spoke at a pro-Trump rally on Jan. 5 and was seen the following day with members of the Oath Keepers, a far-right group whose members have been charged with leading the invasion of the Capitol. Stone created the Stop the Steal Organization years earlier and appears to bear “as much responsibility as anyone” for the Jan. 6 events, Salon’s Roger Sollenberger previously reported. Alexander and Stone have not been subpoenaed but the committee previously issued document requests to the National Archives for all communications between the White House and Alexander and Stone, among others.

The committee also subpoenaed Cindy Chafian, founder of the pro-Trump Eighty Percent Coalition, who submitted the first permit application for the Jan. 6 rally on behalf of WFAF. It also issued subpoenas to Caroline Wren, a Trump fundraiser who was listed as a “VIP Advisor” on the paperwork for the rally, and Maggie Mulvaney, the niece of former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and an aide to Rep. Carol Miller, R-W.Va. Mulvaney was listed as the “VIP Lead” on the rally paperwork.

Other subpoenas went out to Justin Caporale and Tim Unes of Event Strategies, a company that was listed on the rally permit paperwork; Megan Powers, who was listed on the paperwork as the “Operations Manager for Scheduling and Guidance;” Hannah Salem, who was listed as “Operations Manager for Logistics and Communications;” and Lyndon Brentnall, who was listed as “On-Site Supervisor.”

“The Select Committee is investigating the facts, circumstances, and causes of the January 6th attack and issues relating to the peaceful transfer of power, in order to identify and evaluate lessons learned and to recommend to the House and its relevant committees corrective laws, policies, procedures rules, or regulations. The inquiry includes examination of how various individuals and entities coordinated their activities leading up to the events of January 6,” Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., wrote in the subpoenas.

The letters were issued days after the committee subpoenaed former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, former deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, senior Pentagon appointee Kash Patel, and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.

The committee also sent records requests to dozens of telecom and social media companies seeking records on hundreds of people related to the riot, including about a dozen House Republicans, most notably House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who vowed to retaliate against the companies if they comply with the request.

The committee has also started reaching out to dozens of criminal defendants who have pleaded guilty to charges in connection with the riot, according to The New York Times.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a committee member, told CNN that the panel is looking to “figure out exactly what the relationships were between the official rally organizers and the White House and the violent insurrectionists who launched the violence on that day.”

Raskin said Trump wants the public to believe that the riot was “some kind of spontaneous eruption of hugs and kisses towards the officers.”

“That’s pretty divorced from reality,” he said. “There was obviously a lot of coordination and planning that took place and we are going to reconstruct it.”

Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., another committee member, told the outlet that there will be a “steady drumbeat of additional subpoenas and requests for information.”

Thompson last week told the network that criminal contempt charges are “on the table” if the subpoena targets refuse to cooperate.

“Our problem is we can’t wait forever for people to talk,” he said. “We have to get information. So, this is a matter of cutting the time allotted for the committee to do its work to get it done.”

Infrastructure bill debacle proves Elizabeth Warren right: To get things done, first fix corruption

During the 2020 Democratic primary, Sen. Elizabeth Warren made fighting corruption her number one priority. It may not have seemed that way in the press, which tended to characterize the senior senator from Massachusetts as a female Sen. Bernie Sanders. Most coverage focused heavily on her bold economic ideas, such as a wealth tax. But when she was actually asked what her major focus in politics was, Warren never hesitated to say that fighting corruption should come first — because of her commitment to passing progressive economic policies. 

“The rich and the powerful have been calling the shots in Washington forever and ever,” Warren told Vox’s Ezra Klein in 2019, explaining why she was intent on passing a massive anti-corruption bill meant to curtail the influence of lobbyists and influence of moneyed interests on Capitol Hill. 

“Look closely, and you’ll see — on issue after issue, widely popular policies are stymied because giant corporations and billionaires who don’t want to pay taxes or follow any rules use their money and influence to stand in the way of big, structural change,” she wrote in her plan announcement. 

Warren’s view is, sadly and perhaps surprisingly, not popular. Republicans clearly don’t view corruption as a bad thing these days — that’s one more reason why they love Donald Trump. But even on the left, where everyone says they’re against corruption and voters in particular always sign off on the idea that ending corruption is a good idea, there’s a gulf between saying you’re against it and actually working to eradicate it. If more agreed with Warren to make corruption a priority target, we might not be watching President Joe Biden’s bold agenda slowly fall apart now. 

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

When it comes to brass tacks, not enough people are willing to put in the effort required to make fighting corruption a real agenda item. Activists are more likely to put their time into causes like health care and climate change. Democratic politicians, when they get power, are also attracted to policy fights that offer tangible rewards, such as increased social spending, rather than the more abstract and far-flung discourse about lobbyists and corruption. And voters definitely reward politicians for these priorities, which is one reason why Warren lost handily in the primary to Sanders and Biden. 

But as the current debacle playing out on Capitol Hill demonstrates, Warren was right all along. Democrats and their voters may want to pass progressive legislation that addresses wealth inequality, climate change and lack of health care. But corrupt business interests keep stopping them. It’s like trying to make a dress when someone keeps stealing your sewing machine. You can have the pattern and the fabric and the vision, but if you don’t have the means to put it all together, you will never get that dress made. 

Biden and Sanders are learning this the hard way as their dual vision for the Build Back Better plan — an expansive set of bills meant to address climate change, reduce poverty, ensure child care, expand health care, and build up American infrastructure, among other things — teeters on the edge of collapse. After spending months carefully constructing a two-track plan where moderate Democrats would support the progressive agenda, in exchange for progressives supporting the moderate agenda, a handful of centrist Democrats in the House and Senate are about to blow the whole thing up by reneging on their end of the bargain. And while there are multiple reasons for this backstabbing behavior, it’s hard not to notice that the undue influence of lobbyists. 

The two biggest names in the Senate Betrayal Caucus are, of course, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Both are throwing their weight around, clearly trying to derail Biden’s agenda while claiming to have no such intention. Instead, they come with an endless array of incoherent, even nonsensical, explanations as to why they can’t just suck it up and vote for the two-bill track the Democratic caucus agreed to vote on. There’s now an entire cottage industry built around psychoanalyzing these two: What do they want? What will get them to “yes”? Why won’t they just tell us what they want, so we can give it to them? Why are they making so little sense? 

Everyone has a favorite reason, but the likeliest is the boring one: They’re being dodgy because they don’t want to be honest about their real motives. Looking at their track records, it’s hard not to notice that both deeply enjoy being wined and dined by some of the sleaziest lobbyists and fundraisers on Capitol Hill. Manchin, for instance, blew off fellow Democrats begging him to support voting rights in favor of going to a fundraiser held by oil and gas executives who have a financial interest in keeping working people from voting. Sinema is deep in cahoots with industry lobbyists who want to tank Biden’s agenda, holding fundraisers with anti-Biden groups and taking money from the pharmacy industry, right before doing an about-face to block fair pricing drug policies she previously claimed to support. 

It’s not just those two. The price control policy for pharmaceuticals is one of the most wildly popular items in the Biden agenda — at least with voters. But a small group of Democrats in the House pulled that item out of the bill, and they’re barely trying to pretend it’s for any reason other than to appease pharmaceutical lobbyists. They likely know that politicians and voters may say they oppose corruption, but that actually doing something to stop it never becomes a priority. 

Lobbyists have Sinema’s ear, but her own party and voters do not. The Democratic party in Arizona is threatening a vote of no confidence against her, and her response was somewhere between a shrug and throwing them the finger. Activists are crowdfunding for a primary challenger against her. It is possible she is such an egomaniac that she thinks she’s going to have a great re-election after teeing off her own voters, of course. But it’s also hard not to wonder if she isn’t influenced by the knowledge that she’s all but guaranteed a well-heeled job in lobbying if she loses re-election. Notably, a lifetime ban on politicians becoming lobbyists is part of Warren’s anti-corruption bill. If it was law, then Sinema might be making more pro-voter choices, rather than treating her constituents as an annoying inconveniences. 

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

Corruption isn’t a sexy issue, but focusing attention on it can pay huge dividends when it comes to advancing progressive causes. Take gun control, for instance. Decades of rational argumentation and emotional appeals did little to move the needle, policy-wise. Even in the face of children being murdered in schools repeatedly, Republican politicians have successfully blocked all bills, and Democrats didn’t even bother making it a priority when they got power. Eventually, however, gun control advocates started to look away from the ideological arguments and toward the influence of the gun industry, through its main lobbying arm, the NRA.

Once they did that, real progress started to happen. Investigations revealed that the NRA was a thoroughly corrupt organization and that its leadership was on the take. Then the lawsuits started to fly. Now the organization is in very real danger of collapse — not because of its views, but because of its corruption. It might be too late, and Republicans may be too dug in on their gun mania to ever start to moderate. But without the NRA in their ear all the time, there could be a real chance to persuade even just a few Republicans to support common sense reforms that are backed by the majority of Americans. But only if the NRA is gone — and coming at them from a corruption angle was the path to this possibility. 

It’s admittedly a tough sell, even to Democrats. Most Democrats have been happy to back bills that tackle the issue in similar ways to what Warren proposes, and many seem to understand that they would benefit from a more level playing field, where wealthy interests have less influence over policy and politics. Still, as with most legislation that Democrats want to pass, anti-corruption bills have been torn apart on the shores of the filibuster. And the two people who are doing the most to make sure the filibuster remains and anti-corruption bills have no chance of passing? You guessed it: Manchin and Sinema. Corruption on Capitol Hill is a grotesque a house of mirrors, and until that changes, real progress will be an impossibly tall hill to climb. 

Think beyond pie with our best savory pumpkin recipes

Normally you may think of pumpkin as an ingredient for sweet desserts like pie (obviously), cookies, crème brûlée, pudding and mousse, bread and muffins, and so, so much more. But there are so many savory pumpkin recipes that make use of fall’s favorite gourd, too. Think soup and stews, baked cheesy pasta, and basic roast side dishes. Ahead, get to know 20 of our most savory pumpkin recipes. Then try them yourself!

* * *

Our best savory pumpkin recipes

1. Pumpkin Soup with Porcini Crostini

A duo of pumpkin and spaghetti squash team up for this warm and cozy vegan soup that’s served with porcini and Parmesan crostini for a meaty, umami-packed bite.

2. Pumpkin-Gochujang Pasta with Crispy Garlic Chips

Roasted pumpkin not only brings a vibrant orange hue to this pasta recipe, but it also makes spaghetti an instant fall favorite. Pump up the heat by mixing puréed pumpkin with a tablespoon of gochujang, plus buttermilk and pasta water.

3. Sheet-Pan Mac and Cheese with Pumpkin and Brown Butter

If you’re the type of person who likes eating the crunchy top layer off of baked macaroni and cheese, this sheet pan pasta is for you. It’s one even layer of crispy pasta topped with cheddar cheese, panko breadcrumbs, and pumpkin seeds.

4. Short Rib and Pumpkin Chili

Our readers chose this recipe as their all-time favorite one-pot meal, which means the long ingredients list is worth the effort! Crushed tomatoes, black beans, cooking pumpkin, and short ribs create a hearty cold-weather stew.

5. Kale and Italian Sausage Lasagna with Pumpkin Béchamel

This isn’t like the lasagna that you’d get at a typical red sauce joint. Layers of kale, Italian sausage, spiced pumpkin béchamel, sage ricotta, and fresh mozzarella bring autumnal flavor between every layer of lasagna noodles.

6. Pumpkin ‘Brain’ Chutney

After you’ve carved a pumpkin for Halloween, don’t dump the innards in your compost. Turn them into chutney! This vegan preparation makes use of the “webbings” from inside the pumpkin and turns them into a savory pumpkin dish that you can serve with rice or roti.

7. Pumpkin Beer and Goat Cheese Soup

As soon as the first six-pack of Oktoberfest or pumpkin beer hits the shelves, it’s officially fall. Roasted sugar pie pumpkin is cooked with warm spices and your favorite pumpkin beer and then is puréed into a creamy, warm concoction. Top with goat cheese and toasted pepitas.

8. Chickpea, Pumpkin, and Sage Stew

“A one-dish pantry meal to usher you into fall. The bulk of this dinner comes down to canned chickpeas, canned pumpkin purée, a handful of quick-cooking pasta, and a quart of chicken brothtossed together in a pot; the rest, of course, involves simply simmering and seasoning with a few fresh ingredients,” writes recipe developer Caroline Wright.

9. Cheese Fondue Stuffed Roasted Pumpkin

Your Halloween party just got infinitely better with this autumnal, crowd-friendly appetizer. Two kinds of cheese—Emmental and Gruyere —fill a sugar pumpkin along with toasted bread cubes and a spiced cream mixture.

10. Kaddo (Afghan Pumpkin with Yogurt and Tomato Sauces)

Sweet, cinnamon-y roasted pumpkin meets garlicky yogurt and a fragrant tomato sauce in this savory pumpkin recipe from Joy Huang of The Cooking of Joy.

11. Pasta al Forno with Pumpkin and Pancetta

You can guarantee that this five-cheese (count ’em…five!) baked pasta with a creamy pumpkin purée and salty pancetta will be on our dinner table week after week this fall.

12. Crispy Fried Pumpkin with Salted Egg Yolk

Bookmark this recipe and start the process for making salted egg yolks, because it takes a few weeks. But once it’s ready, you can dive into the rest of the cooking process.

13. Curried Kale, Pumpkin, and Potato Pie

Pack in more flavor, more filling, and more pumpkin with this deep-dish savory pie. It takes a few hours to prepare, so save this recipe for a chilly weekend cooking project.

14. Pumpkin Mush

Don’t judge a book by its cover…or in this case, a recipe by its name. Sure, mush may not exactly sound appealing, but spiced grits mixed with puréed pumpkin is exactly what we want to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

15. One-Pot Penne with Sausage, Pumpkin and Fennel

For a quick-cooking, family-friendly dinner that requires very little clean-up, turn to this savory pumpkin recipe.

16. Tuscan Bean Soup with Pumpkin and Kale (Zuppa Frantoiana)

As soon as the temperature dips below 60℉, our dinners turn from grilled fish and veggies to soups and stews that warm the soul. This savory pumpkin recipe made with cranberry beans, potatoes, pumpkin, and Tuscan kale fits the bill.

17. Sweet and Salty Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

“Thanks to a sweet and salty coating of balsamic vinegar, vanilla, brown sugar, olive oil, and salt, this recipe is a fun change from your typical roasted pumpkin seeds,” writes recipe developer Phyllis Grant.

18. Pumpkin Seed and Jalapeño Gremolata

Recipe developer Alison Cayne recommends serving this herby, pumpkin-y sauce with roasted chicken or pork, or drizzled over avocado toast or eggs.

19. Pumpkin Gnocchi with Walnut Pesto

Oh my gourd, this is the best upgrade to gnocchi ever—using both pumpkin and Russet potatoes for the dough gives the pasta an orange color and autumnal flavor.

20. Caribbean-Style Chicken Soup

This is the perfect recipe to make mid- to late-September, as it calls for seasonal favorites like corn on the cob and pumpkin that you can only find at the same time during the last few days of summer.

Olympic swimming medalist Klete Keller pleads guilty to felony for role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot

Olympic gold medalist Klete Keller has pleaded guilty to a felony charge for participating in the January 6 Capitol riot and plans to cooperate with law enforcement in testifying against other rioters. 

Keller, who earned five medals over three Olympic games with the U.S. swimming team, admitted to obstructing an official proceeding before Congress after federal prosecutors dropped six of the seven charges leveled against him as part of a plea deal. U.S. district judge Richard Leon has recommended the athlete serve between 21 and 27 months in prison, though his final sentence could fall outside this range. 

“Keller admitted that, at the time he entered the building, he believed that he and others were trying to obstruct, influence and impede an official proceeding. Keller pleaded guilty this afternoon in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to obstruction of Congress and agreed to fully cooperate with law enforcement in this investigation,” read a Justice Department press release. 

Keller, 38, was arrested in January when investigators spotted him on video wearing a U.S. Olympic Team jacket, towering over other rioters because of his tall frame. Prosecutors said the medalist at one point “squared off against police, shouted about Democratic lawmakers, and shook off officers who attempted to usher him out of the building,” CNN reports.

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

Days following the insurrection, Keller admitted to destroying the phone and memory card that he brought to the event, which contained evidence of his being there, per his plea. 

Keller’s lawyer, Edward MacMahon, told the presiding judge that the athlete is “obviously trying to make amends for the terrible decision he made on January 6,” adding, “He’s embarrassed by what he did that day and wants to make amends to the court and to the American people.”

The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee told CNN back in January that it looked down on anyone who participated in the riot. “We support the right to peacefully protest and express values and viewpoints in a respectful and lawful manner — that is what makes our democracy strong,”  the organization said. “Sadly, that is not what happened in this case.”

Keller, best known for swimming the 4×200-meter freestyle relay at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, has won two gold, one silver, and two bronze medals over the course of his athletic career. 

But outside of swimming, Keller’s personal life has been tumultuous, according to The New York Times. During his swimming career, the athlete struggled with insomnia and malaise, leading to an “emotional breakdown.” In 2014, after he and his wife divorced, Keller reportedly lived out of his car for about ten months, without visitation rights to his children. By 2020, Keller grew increasingly engaged in American politics, according to his since-deleted social media accounts. Friends of the swimmer described him to The Washington Post as a right-wing gun enthusiast, strongly backing Trump’s re-election ahead of the Capitol riot.

Trump may run again and the nation’s mood darkens: Here’s what Biden must do

Joe Biden has told us several times he’s an eternal optimist.

Whether he’s trying to salvage an infrastructure package, work on the debt ceiling, dealing with China, Afghanistan, or the pandemic that’s killed more than 700,000 Americans, during his first nine months in the Oval Office Biden and his press secretary Jen Psaki have smiled at reporters and reiterated just how upbeat the president really is.

I’ve been able to personally ask him just three questions in nine months, and it’s telling that in one of those three interactions he told me he was eternally optimistic. It’s his go-to catchphrase, and you have to hope he’s not like Chip Diller shouting, “Remain calm. All is well,” in “Animal House” — only to be trampled by a panicked crowd later.

On Wednesday I again asked Psaki about this optimism at the end of her daily briefing. If Biden is so eternally optimistic, I asked, is he optimistic he can get any Republicans to flip and vote with the Democrats — since he can’t seem to get Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema to do so?

“He’s always an optimist, Brian. Always,” Psaki said.

Remain calm. All is well.

Behind the scenes, high-ranking officials who feel comfortable enough to talk say there’s often another side to Biden — the Biden I remember from the Senate. That Joe Biden is less optimistic, more pragmatic and can be tough and stubborn, traits he needs as he’s trying to wield his influence and power against all odds to accomplish something few believe he can — getting Republicans and Democrats to work together for a common cause.

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

This action is deemed so futile by some that there is seemingly no end to speculation that the U.S. is headed for a dark calamity of riots and a civil war-like dystopia that will look like a cross between a zombie movie and “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”; not to mention the potential (shudder) re-election of Donald Trump in 2024.

There’s hellfire a-coming, if you listen to these people. A recent Washington Post opinion piece claims we are in the middle of a constitutional crisis, thanks to Trump’s actions and what Biden faces in his futile struggle to bring the country together.

I’m reminded of Bruce Willis’ line in “Die Hard”: “Welcome to the party, pal.”

We’ve been here since the 2016 election, and it is truly and furiously frightening that only now are some beginning to understand the damage done to the American way of life in the last five years, just how menacing and charismatic Donald Trump remains and how cancerous he is to life in general — not to mention the uphill battle Biden is trying to fight in order to deal with it. It’s even more telling that most of these people who don’t understand seem to be elected Democrats who are too busy arguing with each other to see the bigger picture.

You don’t have to go any further than acknowledging the politicization of a pandemic in which more Americans have died than during the 1918 flu pandemic, when medical science was a pale shadow of what it is now, to understand how far from normal things are.

If anything, we are beyond a constitutional crisis. It is now a crisis of survival. Can humanity survive when so many people deny scientific facts, and the world is literally on fire and drowning at the same time? The stakes could not be higher. A recent study from the journal Science reported that if you’re under 40, you can expect an “unprecedented” life of extreme heat waves, droughts and floods. You will live through seven times as many heat waves, twice as many wildfires and nearly three times as many droughts, crop failures and river floods as your grandparents. Never mind the pandemic.

Meanwhile the U.S. is ripping itself apart due to the continued actions of a narcissist — our former president, who apparently pulled former press secretary Stephanie Grisham aside while both were on Air Force One to tell her he didn’t have a toadstool-shaped penis, as reported by one of his paramours in social and mainstream media. 

This alone is enough to lead some to give up hope while simultaneously melting into hysterical laughter. The truly minacious has merely become the mundane and that has caused some to throw in the towel, convinced that Trump will not only be the Republican candidate for president in 2024, but because of his continued cries about voter fraud, the GOP will manipulate state and local election laws to ensure his re-election. Those who believed Trump would fade from view after losing in 2020 have been deemed “delusional.”

But Michael Cohen, the former Trump fixer who turned against his puppeteer, doesn’t buy it. “I’m not even convinced he will run,” Cohen told me. “He just wants the money.” Cohen may well be right, but millions of Americans, faced with Trump’s current antics, are more pessimistic — no matter how optimistic Biden says he is. That’s because whatever Trump ultimately wants, right now he controls the Republican Party and anyone who’s not along for the Trump ride is thrown from the elephant. That scares millions of Americans.  

Compounding the pessimism are the acts of congressional Democrats who are fighting with each other, and the fact that many believe that Biden’s optimism is really a function of how out of touch he is with current events. There is growing concern that those two points of drama will give the Trumplicans an opening to seize power in the midterms — without even needing to cheat to do so.

The problem is, you can’t really hear Biden for the screams and rants from the banshees aligned with Trump. Biden believes that actions speak louder than words — what he forgets is that in today’s media landscape, your actions often are your words. For example, Biden does not spend much time before reporters. He’s had only one full press conference in the White House since he got there nine months ago, and that was only to a small cadre of reporters, the numbers reduced to a mere handful because of pandemic restrictions.

Still, many on Biden’s staff think he’s spent too much time with the press answering too many questions — I was told that as recently as Wednesday evening. It’s simply not the case, and while some in the White House think it isn’t wise to do so, Biden better wake up to the fact that he’s not getting his message out — at least not as loudly as his opposition gets its message out — and no amount of eternal optimism will help if no one can hear you. 

The appearance of bedlam in the Democratic Party over infrastructure and the debt ceiling may be just that, an appearance. But it is certainly adding to the concerns of people who fear an authoritarian takeover of the government. If you look at Texas, Florida and other states where voter suppression is real and a woman’s right to choose has been extremely compromised, you can understand that these concerns are real — and that eternal optimism is viewed as being either naïve or out of touch.

A break in the supply chain that may cause a slowdown in domestic automobile production, along with questions about how strong the economy will be in the fourth quarter of this year and the first quarter of 2022, are also cause for concern. Many do not share Biden’s optimism that all is well.

It’s perfectly true that the Trumpers will convince themselves of anything that Donald says or does. But Biden still doesn’t seem to understand he has to cut through the clattering, monotonous, chest-beating Trump bile that’s infected this country. People are concerned, and rightly so, that a party of fascist authoritarians is poised to sweep aside democracy and take over.

For Biden to maintain his optimism and convince others he’s not just whistling in the dark, he needs a few legislative victories, a continued solid improvement in the economy and real progress in getting the pandemic under control. He also needs to speak out more about what he’s done and what he’s doing. His falling poll numbers are a byproduct of being outshouted in the court of public opinion by the former president and his band of mouthy mutants.

Actions may speak louder than words, but Biden has the bully pulpit at his control — he cannot allow himself to be bullied by an outlier who was twice impeached and whose minions include some of the most sanctimonious, authoritarian troglodytes ever to disgrace the American political stage.

Wildfire smoke is here to stay. Here’s how to clean the air inside your home

The fierce wildfires that broke out across much of the western United States this summer, spreading smoke across hundreds of miles, continue to pose a serious health hazard to millions.

More are expected this fall. That’s a major health concern because microscopic particles in wildfire smoke, carried by the wind, can penetrate deep into your lungs and travel into your bloodstream. One study linked wildfire smoke exposure to a twofold increase in the rate of asthma and a 40% rise in strokes and heart attacks. Other research tied smoke to hospital admissions, ER visits and premature deaths.

The standard advice is to stay inside when heavy smoke is in the air. But the smoke can get into your house or apartment. So you might want to consider investing in equipment to clean the air inside your home, especially with climate change likely to continue escalating the scope and intensity of the fires.

“I think we have fires enough now that people should think of this as something they want to buy,” says Deborah Bennett, a professor of public health at the University of California-Davis. “Even if they only turn it on during the fires, there’s going to be plenty of times when they’re going to have it turned on.”

There are many options for cleaning the air in your home, depending on your circumstances and — of course — your budget.

If you have an HVAC system, it likely recirculates air that’s inside the house rather than drawing in air from outside. But if you have an air conditioner with a “fresh air” system that brings in outside air, you should turn off the fresh air setting on heavy smoke days. If you don’t know how, seek professional advice.

And be sure to close all doors and windows; otherwise, your efforts will be in vain.

You can convert your HVAC unit or furnace into a better air-cleaning system by installing a higher-efficiency filter capable of catching a large proportion — though it won’t get 100% — of the tiny smoke particles.

To cope with wildfire smoke, many public health and air quality experts recommend what’s known as a MERV 13 filter. MERV, or “minimum efficiency reporting value,” is a scale from 1 to 20 that rates a filter’s ability to capture particles. MERV 1 is the lowest rating, indicating the least impact on air quality, while filters rated MERV 17 or higher are used in hospital operating rooms and clean rooms.

You can buy MERV 13 filters at large stores such as Costco, the Home Depot and Lowe’s or online from multiple vendors. A MERV 13 should cost around $20, or substantially less if you buy packages of them.

Before you install a new filter, check first with an HVAC professional to make sure your system can accommodate it. The more efficient the filter, the more it reduces airflow, diminishing the cooling capacity of an air conditioner and requiring more energy to run the heater.

If you don’t have central air, or you have it and want to augment your system’s ability to clear the air, consider buying a portable air cleaner with a high-efficiency particulate air, or HEPA, filter, which can remove almost all particles of the tiny size found in smoke.

You can put it in the room you use most during the day, then move it to your bedroom at night. If the smoke gets really bad, put it in the room of your choice and stay there as much as possible.

“If you have an appropriately sized air cleaner with a true HEPA filter and you put it in a room and close the doors and windows, you have clean air really fast,” says Sarah Coefield, an air quality specialist with the Missoula City-County Health Department in Montana, which has had its share of wildfire smoke in recent years.

If you have kids, or share the home with other people, you should ideally have one air cleaner for each bedroom. Alternatively, you may need to put everyone in one room at night during a smoke emergency.

Portable HEPA air cleaners cost anywhere from under $100 to over $1,000, depending in part on the number of square feet they can clean effectively. To clean a room, you can get a perfectly good one for under $200.

All air cleaning devices sold in California must be certified by the California Air Resources Board, which posts a list of air cleaners it has certified. You might also want to look at Consumer Reports’ list of best and worst air cleaners and at a review of those selected by The New York Times’ product review website, Wirecutter.

Public health experts warn that you should avoid devices that are sold as air cleaners but actually emit ozone, the main component of smog. The air resources board also publishes a list of ozone-emitting devices.

Gina Spadafori, a resident of West Sacramento, has both a central HVAC system with an extra-thick filter and a portable HEPA air cleaner she keeps in her bedroom. Spadafori, 63, has serious asthma and has long been concerned about the air quality in her house.

In recent years, she has endured numerous days of hazardous wildfire smoke and that has changed the way she uses her HVAC. “I probably use the fan-only setting more than I have in the past to just filter the air rather than heating or cooling it,” she says.

On bad air days, she turns the portable air cleaner on an hour before she goes to bed and closes the door so it will “super-clean that air” and she’ll get a good night’s sleep. “It’s just sort of a second line of defense,” she says.

There is a lower-cost option: Make your own air purifier by attaching a high-efficiency filter to an electric box fan. You can get a suitable fan for around $30 and the filters for around $20 — or cheaper in bulk.

The website montanawildfiresmoke.org publishes a how-to guide for building such a contraption. The Environmental Protection Agency has an FAQ on box fan air cleaners with instructions for building them.

The EPA recommends using only box fans built in 2012 or later, because earlier models could overheat and cause a fire.

Lab testing has clearly shown such do-it-yourself devices are safe, though they may heat up the room and produce more noise than a portable HEPA cleaner, according to the EPA.

For those who can’t even afford to make an air cleaner from a house fan, nonprofits and local government agencies have provided help. People who don’t have a lot of money are likely to live in older, leakier housing that lets more smoke in. They are also more likely to have chronic illness and thus be in greater need of clean air — yet less able to afford it.

Climate Smart Missoula, a Montana nonprofit, has distributed around 500 air cleaners to low-income and homebound people in recent years, said Amy Cilimburg, its executive director.

In California, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District is providing 3,000 air filtration devices to low-income people with respiratory conditions in nine counties. The American Lung Association has also donated air cleaners to people in need.

But these efforts are tiny compared with the gaping need, said Cilimburg, who thinks the federal and state governments, hospitals and insurers should step in. She envisions a day when medical staffers at a clinic will tell a patient, “‘Oh, look, given x, y or z, you should just take one of these HEPA filters home with you.'”

This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.

Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

Why the “Swiss Army knife” of climate solutions is so controversial

As countries around the world firm up their commitments to cut carbon emissions, many are turning to an emerging solution with an uncertain future: hydrogen gas. This lesser-known fuel has been called the “Swiss Army knife” of climate solutions. It has the potential to replace fossil fuels in industrial processes, transportation, buildings, and power plants, and does not emit any greenhouse gases when it’s burned.

But this idea of an emissions-free hydrogen-fueled world is a long way off. Currently, hydrogen is primarily used by oil refineries and in the production of fertilizer. Today, 99 percent of the world’s supply of hydrogen is made from natural gas and coal, producing annual emissions on par with those of the United Kingdom and Indonesia combined, according to the International Energy Agency. 

Scaling up cleaner ways to produce hydrogen and new ways to use it will require significant investments in research and development, and likely subsidies or a price on carbon to make it competitive with fossil fuels. The Biden administration is starting down this path, with a goal to cut the cost of clean hydrogen by 80 percent by 2030. The bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed the Senate in early August allocates $8 billion to create four “clean hydrogen hubs” that would demonstrate its production and use in four different applications.

But with the clock ticking to prevent climate impacts from getting worse, experts are debating whether chasing after clean hydrogen for every possible use is wise. Some climate advocates are worried that it risks taking attention and resources away from technologies that are already available and could cut emissions more quickly. For example, natural gas utilities say they eventually want to deliver clean hydrogen to people’s homes to power their heaters and stoves, but electric heating and cooking appliances that can be powered by renewable electricity are already on the market now.

“We’re really rooting for hydrogen to work,” said Sasan Saadat, a senior research and policy analyst at the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice. “But we don’t want to be wasting this resource in ways just to ensure there’s a longer life for the business model of combustion-based energy incumbents.” Saadat is one of the authors of a recent report that distinguishes between the most promising, “least-regrets” ways to use clean hydrogen, and areas where policymakers should forget hydrogen and pursue other solutions. 

It’s a complicated debate that turns more on politics, money, and time than it does on technology. None of the experts Grist spoke with disagreed that there’s a stronger case for using hydrogen to decarbonize some activities than others. But several said it was too early to rule out its widespread potential. 

“It is reasonable to ask how people should spend taxpayer money in the most productive way,” said Julio Friedmann, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “But at the same time, we’re trying to do something so unprecedented and difficult that I think it is premature to amputate emerging ideas and options.” 

To wrestle with these arguments, it’s important to understand clean hydrogen’s central challenge. Unlike fossil fuels, it cannot be dug out of the earth. We have to make it. And no matter how it’s made, energy is lost in the process. 

Unlike the hydrogen produced with natural gas or coal today, so-called “green hydrogen” is made by zapping a water molecule with renewable electricity, splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen. With existing technology, this results in a loss of 20 to 40 percent of the initial energy. That loss jacks up the price of green hydrogen, making it harder for it to compete with other sources of energy. It also means that relying on green hydrogen requires building a lot more wind and solar power than we might otherwise have to. Wind and solar projects already face challenges overcoming community opposition, and some countries have limited land availability to support renewables. 

Another possibility is to add carbon capture technology to existing, natural gas–based hydrogen production to make so-called “blue hydrogen.” But this method requires additional energy to run the carbon capture and storage machinery. The potential climate benefits of blue hydrogen are also diminished, if not erased, by the fact that the natural gas system is rife with leaks that send the potent greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere. Those leaks would have to be greatly reduced for the emissions math on blue hydrogen to equal “clean.”

So the biggest constraint on what we use clean hydrogen for is supply. But as hard as it will be to produce cleaner varieties of hydrogen, virtually all experts agree that it is necessary for at least one reason: fertilizer. “Our demand for fertilizer isn’t gonna go away,” said Rebecca Dell, the director of the industry program at the Climateworks Foundation, a philanthropic group that supports climate solutions. “We need to move that to a clean process in the future, and there isn’t really a substitute process.”

Beyond fertilizer, there’s rough consensus that clean hydrogen is a strong contender to cut emissions from many of the “hard to decarbonize” parts of the economy – activities that cannot easily be powered by clean electricity. These include long-haul trucking, shipping, aviation, and steelmaking. Hydrogen company Air Liquide, which produces both fossil fuel-based and renewable energy-based hydrogen, told Grist that producing it at scale for these uses “will then allow nascent segments to emerge and thrive.”

“Looking at end-uses one by one without considering the entire system would not allow each and any of them to benefit from one another,” spokesperson David Asselin said.

But Sara Gersen, a lawyer for Earthjustice and co-author of the organization’s recent report on the potential for hydrogen technology, said she sees a disconnect between these more clear-cut cases for clean hydrogen and the ones the fossil fuel industry is lobbying for, like burning it in power plants.

“Utilities and project proponents are trying to get approval for new fossil gas plants under the guise of, ‘oh, maybe one day, this could be converted at some unknown cost to operate on green hydrogen,'” she said. The report mentions Danskammer, an upstate New York energy company that has proposed building a new natural gas-fired power plant and argued that it is in line with climate goals because the plant will be capable of burning a blend of clean hydrogen and natural gas, which would lower emissions, and could eventually be converted to run fully on hydrogen. Entergy Texas, an electric utility, recently made a similar proposal.

“We want policymakers to shut that down and say, ‘No, you need to take advantage of the clean energy solutions that are available today,'” said Gersen. Danskammer did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.

A key argument from hydrogen’s proponents is that it can make use of existing fossil fuel infrastructure, and in some cases utilities are repurposing existing power plants to use hydrogen. In Utah, an old coal plant is being retrofitted to run on a blend of natural gas and clean hydrogen, with a goal of eventually using 100 percent clean hydrogen. New York State is testing blending at an existing natural gas plant in Long Island. 

But blending hydrogen with natural gas is unlikely to significantly reduce carbon emissions in the nearterm. Jack Brouwer, director of the Advanced Power and Energy Program at the University of California, Irvine, where he conducts research on a broad range of hydrogen applications, told Grist that commercially available power plant technology can currently burn a blend of up to 30 percent hydrogen gas and 70 percent methane. According to a peer-reviewed study from 2019, a 30-percent hydrogen blend would only reduce the emissions from burning natural gas by about 12 percent. 

Gas utilities are also proposing blending hydrogen into the natural gas delivered to homes and buildings. But much of the pipeline system in the U.S. is unable to carry more than about 20 percent hydrogen, if that much, because it damages the pipes. Higher loads of hydrogen would require utilities to replace their pipelines with different materials, likely passing those costs on to customers. Customers would also need to either modify their current appliances or buy new ones.

Expected emission reductions of blending hydrogen with natural gas. The calculations are based on a formula Earthjustice

For Brouwer, blending green hydrogen into the natural gas system, whether for power plants or homes, is still very much worth doing — not so much for the greenhouse gas benefits, but to create a new market for solar and wind power. Right now, California has a problem where prices for solar energy are getting very low in the middle of the day, at peak generation, which is discouraging the development of more solar in the state. If California set a green hydrogen blending mandate, for example, it would create more demand, since renewable energy is needed to make green hydrogen. But Brouwer said that blending clean hydrogen with natural gas is only a stepping stone. “The gas system has to be either eliminated or completely decarbonized,” he said.

Critics of hydrogen have another concern that has nothing to do with efficiency or economics or even climate change. While burning hydrogen in a power plant or furnace doesn’t emit greenhouse gases, it does emit nitrogen oxides, a pollutant that is harmful to human health. “We have this opportunity as we’re decarbonizing our economy to finally address the deep environmental injustices of burning fuel in power plants in communities that don’t benefit from the costs of low energy, but do bear the health costs of its pollution,” said Saadat. 

However, Saadat and Gersen do believe clean hydrogen could be useful to the electricity grid via a different solution: Hydrogen fuel cells. Fuel cells generate electricity through a chemical reaction rather than combustion, and do not produce pollution. They are much smaller systems than power plants, and could be hooked up to the grid in an array, similar to grid-scale battery projects. 

Gniewomir Flis, the hydrogen project manager at the Berlin-based think tank Agora Energiewende, said fuel cells are unlikely to be an option for at least a decade because at this point they are much more expensive than traditional combustion-based power plant technology.  He also noted that the companies that build power plant technology are working to lower nitrogen oxide emissions, and that the industry has said it can solve this issue within the decade. 

Whether for power plants or fuel cells, hydrogen can be stored underground in large quantities, much like natural gas, so many see it as a key tool to provide clean, long-duration backup electricity during seasons when there is less sun and wind to power the grid.

Perhaps the most controversial potential use for hydrogen is re-making our pipeline system to deliver it into homes and buildings. Flis called the idea of burning 100 percent hydrogen in buildings a “politically unpalatable solution.” By his analysis, since low-carbon hydrogen is so expensive, it would either mean handing enormous subsidies to utilities or raising customers’ rates by at least five times. Flis also estimates that in Europe, installing an electric heat pump would save a customer about $23,000 to $35,000 over the next 25 years compared to installing a hydrogen boiler.

Others, however, look at the challenge of fully electrifying buildings — and more or less forcing gas utilities to shutter — and find that politically unpalatable. “Yes, electric heating is much more efficient, but we need to consider the reality of abandoning massive infrastructure in place,” said Steve Griffiths, the senior vice president of research and development at Khalifa University in the United Arab Emirates, in an email. 

Griffiths stressed that many other reports have looked at the future of clean hydrogen and come to similar conclusions as Earthjustice. But he argued that these analyses lack context. “Techno-economic factors alone are not what will make hydrogen a key fuel for energy transitions,” he said, writing that social, cultural, and political factors also help or hinder energy system changes. Griffiths was the lead author of a recent review paper on hydrogen that took into account these other factors.

Michael Liebreich, an independent energy analyst and advisor, said home heating is the “frontline in the hydrogen culture wars.” “There’s enormously heavy lobbying for hydrogen in heating,” he said, “because it would use the gas distribution network, and that’s a very expensive asset we built over many, many decades, and the companies who own it don’t want to walk away.”

In the U.K., where Liebreich lives, gas utilities have been promoting a full switch to hydrogen since at least 2016, when an industry-sponsored study found that the gas network in the city of Leeds could be converted to carry low-carbon hydrogen to homes at minimal cost to customers. By 2023, a heavily subsidized pilot program in a neighborhood in Scotland will be the first to deliver 100 percent green hydrogen to a network of about 300 homes. Participants will receive free appliances, and their gas bills will not go up for the duration of the pilot, which is set to run through 2027.

In the U.S., gas utilities in New York, Massachusetts, California, and other states have said that clean hydrogen could be part of a low-carbon fuel mix they could deliver to customers in the future to meet climate goals. They are banking on public acceptance of clean hydrogen and other lower-carbon gases, like biogas, for survival. “We don’t make money on molecules,” Jonathan Peress, the senior director of business strategy and energy policy at SoCalGas, a California gas utility, told Grist. “We make money by providing a transportation and delivery service to our customers.” SoCalGas is engaged in several partnerships to ramp up the use of hydrogen, including an initiative to make Los Angeles a hub for affordable green hydrogen. The company has proposed blending hydrogen into its gas network, but its application to the California Public Utilities Commission was dismissed in July for being incomplete.

Liebreich, who has famously ranked the potential uses of clean hydrogen into a “ladder” based on which he thinks are most likely to succeed, doesn’t see much of a future for hydrogen in buildings. But he also doesn’t see a problem with governments spending some money to support these kinds of trials because a lot of learning will come out of it. “We’ll just come to some point when they’ll say, ‘We have tried to build 67,000 homes heated by hydrogen, we now have a much better understanding of the economics — it makes no sense at all,'” he said. “Or, ‘It makes sense only in these very small numbers of niches.'”

But for Gersen and Saadat, who have watched as companies like SoCalGas have fought policies that would speed up the switch to all-electric buildings, there’s simply no time to wait around and see whether clean hydrogen will work out. 

“We are really eager to make sure that the vague promise that hydrogen might be available as a decarbonization technology in the future doesn’t derail the urgent investments that we need today,” said Gersen.

These kinds of trade-offs are difficult to suss out. There’s no guarantee that the $2 billion or so the U.S. might spend on a residential heating “clean hydrogen hub” would otherwise go to electrification or any other climate solution. Or that it’s possible to get a bill passed in Washington, D.C. right now that doesn’t involve throwing some bones to the fossil fuel industry. 

But storms, droughts, wildfires, and other impacts of climate change are already intensifying. Carbon is accumulating in the atmosphere, and the emissions we can avoid today and over the next 10 years may be worth a lot more — in terms of lives lost, communities displaced, damages from natural disasters — than a breakthrough solution to cut emissions in 2030.

Lauren Boebert hired QAnon superfans to run Shooters Grill, staff her campaign office

In public, Rep. Lauren Boebert has attempted to distance herself from the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, at least since she entered politics. Yet, she has personally hired QAnon adherents to manage her restaurant and work in her Colorado campaign office.

In November 2020, just after Boebert was elected to Congress, QAnon follower Mona Demicell shared on Facebook that she and her husband Bud, a fellow QAnon adherent, were moving to Rifle, Colorado, to work for the incoming congresswoman. Bud Demicell is now the general manager of Shooters Grill, while Mona does accounting for the restaurant and also works in Boebert’s campaign office next door. 

According to Mona’s Facebook post on Nov. 13, 2020, Bud was due to arrive in Rifle from the couple’s hometown of Pueblo, Colorado, on Nov. 21 — a distance of nearly 300 miles — and would be “couch surfing” until Mona and their son arrived in the area. Less than a week later, Shooters Grill updated its Facebook profile picture with a staff photo that included Bud Demicell (back row, left) as well as Boebert’s mother, Shawna Bentz. A few months later, the Demicells began renting a home in Rifle that was listed for $1,750 per month.

Both Bud and Mona Demicell have posted on social media numerous times in support of QAnon, and have reposted conspiracy-laden messages from self-appointed “master Q comms decoder” David Reinert. For example, one Reinert post later reposted by Bud, who now runs Shooters Grill, featured 27 images that attempted to tie Donald Trump’s social media posts together into a meaningful narrative, or what Reinert calls a “marker.” 

“Possibly the biggest post to date,” it read. “Go slow. Follow the trail. The last BOOM will be Magical. MARKER.” 

That very same month, Bud reposted another of Reinert’s messages, which read as follows:

Who funds it?

George Soros.

When did they start?

During OBAMA’s Crime Spree.

What is the plan?

DESTRUCTION of AMERICA.

Can you hear me now?

INFILTRATION instead of INVASION.

Who is Barack Hussein Obama…Really?

“You’ll find out.”

The people “hero worshipping Obama are going to be in for the shock of their lives.

That is if they’re able to break their programming.

Travis View, a QAnon researcher and co-host of the “QAnon Anonymous” podcast, said that Boebert has carefully avoided embracing the conspiracy theory too obviously.

“Lauren Boebert has always tried to maintain some distance between herself and QAnon,” View told Salon. “For example, in July of 2020, she tweeted that ‘QAnon = fake news’ and that she’s ‘not a follower.’ However, as evidenced by her willingness to appear on a QAnon show, her statement that she ‘hopes’ Q is real and her closely associating with QAnon followers, she at very least appears to be cozy with the QAnon community.” 

Boebert didn’t respond to a Salon request for comment on this story. 

In July 2020, Bud Demicell attended a protest at the Christopher Columbus statue in Pueblo along with several Proud Boys and the FBI-listed “outlaw” motorcycle gang, Sons of Silence. That protest turned violent and Demicell allegedly “put a revolver” to the stomach of an “antifascist” activist. 

Now Bud Demicell is running for Rifle City Council. His campaign website boasts that his “vast business management and financial experience, and his strong leadership skills make him the optimum candidate for Rifle City Council.” In 2018, the Demicells discharged almost $60,000 in debts through a Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceeding.  

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

According to a 2016 filing, Bud Demicell was an assistant manager at a Walgreens store in Pueblo, earning $20,000 a year, while Mona Demicell was unemployed and receiving $16,000 in disability. Additional FEC filings show Mona as disabled. According to Boebert’s recent financial disclosure, Shooters Grill lost $226,234 in 2020 and $143,233 the prior year, raising the question of how she manages to keep her employees on the payroll. 

Mona, who now works both at Shooters and in Boebert’s campaign office, was thanked by name by Boebert in a November 2020 press release for “organizing, calling voters, distributing yard signs, attending rallies and volunteering to do all that made this a true grassroots campaign. I can never thank them enough for all they did to support my campaign, but I’ll sure try. Thank you!” 

In the months and years leading up to that, Mona repeatedly expressed her enthusiasm for the QAnon conspiracy theory, which falsely alleges that Democrats and prominent liberal celebrities are running a secret child sex trafficking ring. In July of 2020, she tweeted a reply to Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell, “#wwg1wga #TheBestIsYetToCome #LaurenForColorado.” A month later, Mona simply posted a large Q logo and in May of 2020, she tweeted, “Welcome to the ‘alt-right, nut-job, conspiracy group’!! You’re in excellent company! #wwg1wga.” (That abbreviation stands for the QAnon slogan, “Where we go one, we go all.”)

In August of 2019, Mona posted a large QAnon logo to Facebook along with the caption, “Let’s take notice of our fellow Patriots! Let’s get the Q memes going and shout-outs where yall are from! Get some popcorn and enjoy the show! God bless! And remember…! WWG1WGA!!!”

Also, in August of 2019, Mona replied on Facebook to a post about the QAnon Code of Ethics. “I barely go [sic] the very general basics before Polis petition hit. Now I can’t keep up with it! Sept 6th — back to Q.” Mona has also posted memes relating to the right-wing militia group known as Three Percenters, along with other QAnon related content.

A month earlier, Mona posted a tweet from the user @StormIsUponUs (a QAnon reference) to her Facebook page with the hashtag “WWG1WGA.” That specific post, reflecting a reality-proof immersion in the QAnon worldview, reads: “These blackouts in major cities are likely white hat EMP attacks to disable the security measures of hidden enemy facilities as part of ongoing raids by federal law enforcement in the wake of Epstein’s arrest. We have never seen anything like this. #TheStormIsHere.”

In May 2020, Boebert told a right-wing podcast, “Everything that I’ve heard of Q, I hope that this is real. Because it only means that America is getting stronger and better, and people are returning to conservative values.” In that interview, Boebert attributed her knowledge of QAnon to her mother, but in an October 2020 interview with FOX21, she denied that she or her mother were QAnon followers. “I’m not a follower of QAnon,” she said. “My mom is not a supporter of QAnon, she just talked to me about it one time.”  

In June this year, Mona Demicell replied to a post on Facebook by saying, “Love our Lauren Boebert and her sweet momma, Shawn Bentz!!”

8 powerhouse pantry staples parents need to make dinner happen

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

You live and breathe by lists, Google Docs, or a cryptic collage of sticky notes on the fridge. We’re right there with you, parents. But no matter how organized you are, it can feel like a Sisyphean task to get dinner on the table for the whole crew seven nights a week. Even with the occasional pizza delivery in the mix, a well-stocked pantry is key.

Yes, you’ll want to keep the obvious things on hand, like canned beans (humble chickpeas turn decadent when braised in olive oil) and spaghetti (a sauce of lemon, Parmesan, and olive oil is weeknight nirvana). But miracle-worker staples will expand your on-the-fly cooking repertoire even further, and let’s face it: When it comes to kids, the more dinner options, the better.

Canned wild salmon

Yeah, yeah. “Tuna this” and “tuna that.” Sure, it’s great, but shelf-stable canned wild salmon also has plenty of omega-3s, and can be a protein-packed savior. Toss it into a hearty salmon-forward rigatoni cut with heavy cream. Let kids find the secret salmon playing hide-and-seek in balls of sushi rice for seaweed-wrapped onigiri. Or combine leftover mashed potatoes with salmon, bread crumbs, mayo, and eggs for simple pan-fried salmon patties.

Oyster sauce

This classic Chinese condiment instantly adds a deep umami note to stir fries (everything from this asparagus and mushroom number to this minced pork and bean sprout stunner) or even fried rice (cue this Thai-basil-spiked delight). Oyster sauce even makes a simple dipping sauce for pan-fried tofu and steamed greens like broccoli or spinach, and is a killer marinade for beef, chicken, and veggies. Don’t worry too much about fussy eaters crumpling their faces at the word “oyster.” When it remains an anonymous player, kids are so bowled over by its salty tang that they don’t ask questions.

Coconut milk

This magical ingredient instantly ups the drama of whatever you’re cooking and mellows spice levels to accommodate tiny palates. It’s stellar in mildly spiced coconutty dal packed with coriander, turmeric, and cumin, or Southern-by-way-of-South-Asia coconut milk grits, which serve as a perfect base for any stir-fry or simple roast chicken. You can also use it to pep up ho-hum canned white beans cut with wilted chard, or transform a leftover carton of white rice into a super-simple rice pudding for dessert.

Peanut butter

While obviously the key to emergency PB&Js, this stuff is capable of so much more. Doctor it with soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, sesame oil, and a pinch of sugar to toss with hot noodles for the easiest peanut butter noodles of all time. It’s also a fabulous accompaniment to no-cook Vietnamese summer rolls. Speaking of which: Make these a vegetarian affair with avocado, cucumber, carrots, red onion, and mixed greens, or take a walk on the carnivorous side with strips of soy-splashed steak.

Jarred pesto

Chances are, you have a batch of this already in your fridge or pantry. And rightfully so — what can’tpesto do? Chuck it into a bowl of hot pasta with butter and call it dinner. Drape it over canned chickpeas and cubes of mozz for a breezy side. Spoon it over caramelized butternut squash for a study in sweet-savory contrasts. It’s sandwich-friendly, too: Smear it on a toasted roll and just add leftover rotisserie chicken.

Panko

If something is crunchy and fried, the likelihood of your child eating it rises exponentially. And guess what? You don’t need to deep-fry to get that golden brown result; panfrying is fast and cleanup-friendly to boot. So consider it your go-to technique for leftover chicken, tofu, veggies, or almost anything else. Panko bread crumbs are generally flakier and dryer than most other types, so they tend to take on less oil during frying for lighter, crunchier fare. You can follow a recipe (this one for herbed chicken cutlets is great), but really all you need is this basic frying formula: Coat your chosen ingredient in flour. Dunk the floured ingredient in egg wash. Cover the whole thing in seasoned panko. Shallow fry in hot oil until golden brown. Voilà! Dinner.

Barbecue sauce

This sweet-salty-smoky standby is like a mealtime Swiss Army knife: It’s a condiment, marinade, and dip, all rolled into one. Brush it onto kebabs stacked with tempeh and veggies, chicken thighs simply sizzled under a flaming broiler, or burger patties in need of some extra oomph. There are few things a top-notch barbecue sauce won’t improve. If one night your kid turns her nose up at dinner, whatever it may be, offer barbecue sauce as a dip and see what happens.

Olives

Not every youngster loves olives, but the ones who do are often gaga for them. For those in that camp, olives are a fantastic way to zhuzh up couscous or braised Moroccan chicken dishes. You can even blitz them with garlic, capers, olive oil, and lemon juice for a French-inflected tapenade, ideal for toasts. Olive lovers will appreciate a good variety, from purple-gray Kalamatas to mild green Castelvetranos. If you’re serving them to young kids, just make sure to go for pitted varieties so errant pits aren’t a concern.

Texas two-step: Ending abortion rights and voting rights are part of the right’s long-term plan

Decades of strategizing by anti-abortion forces and a relentless conservative focus on winning the courts culminated this month in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision to allow the nation’s most restrictive rollback of reproductive rights to go into effect. The decision effectively prohibits most abortions in Texas and provides a road map for red state legislatures nationwide to evade judicial review and undo Roe v. Wade in their states as well.

But that wasn’t the only careful right-wing project that contributed to this back-door assault on five decades of constitutional protections and Supreme Court precedent. This decision is inextricably bound to the long-term GOP war on voting rights, itself a two-front effort between red state legislatures and a conservative Supreme Court majority. 

You might even call it a Texas two-step. First, unelected, tenured judges did what elected Republicans didn’t feel empowered to do in 2006 and put a stake into the Voting Rights Act. Then, after blessing a new generation of sophisticated voter suppression methods, as well as providing a green light for partisan and racial gerrymanders, uninhibited lawmakers — untethered from nearly any accountability — can pass laws dramatically out of step with voters, like the new Texas abortion bill. This court then smiles on those efforts as well. (And of course, all this is amplified and encouraged by the right-wing media ecosystem.)

It’s a nifty closed loop that has the added benefit of sheltering Republicans from any consequences for their extremism, and from any real fear that a changing electorate will threaten entrenched one-party rule. 

This isn’t even the first time that the Supreme Court and Texas legislature have danced in this fashion, though nearly a decade ago, it was the Roberts court that led.

When Chief Justice John Roberts authored a 5-4 decision in the 2013 Shelby County case, hobbling the Voting Rights Act and putting an end to pre-clearance in states, like Texas, that had a longstanding history of racially motivated voting chicanery, Texas did not wait long before showing America that, contrary to Roberts’ sense that things were “dramatically” different in the South, in reality little had changed. 

That very afternoon, Texas jumped to take advantage of Roberts’ decision by enacting a deeply restrictive voter ID law that requires specific forms of identification to vote. This would be the first post-Shelby voting restriction in Texas, but hardly the last. The new law demanded an ID that 600,000 Latino citizens lacked; it allowed a ballot to be cast with a gun license but not a student ID. It enabled Republicans to place barriers before the rising electorate of young and Hispanic voters who lean Democratic and help ensure themselves a hold on power.

It was a magnificent two-step. When a Republican Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act in 2006, nearly unanimously, and the 25-year extension was signed into law by President George W. Bush, GOP leaders whipped the votes for passage, fearing that it would be bad for the Republican brand to be seen as hostile to voting rights. It’s a story that Jesse Rhodes tells brilliantly in his book “Ballot Blocked.” GOP leaders wanted to make inroads with Latino and Black voters, and worried that Hurricane Katrina and the souring economy and Iraq war might make that a challenge during a tough midterm year. They didn’t want to also be seen as keeping minorities from the polls.

So the voting rights putsch was outsourced to the courts. Bush appointed, and the GOP Senate confirmed, two Supreme Court justices known to have a very limited view of the Voting Rights Act’s scope and relevancy: Roberts as chief justice and Samuel Alito to replace the retiring Sandra Day O’Connor. Roberts, as a young Justice Department official in the Reagan administration, had lobbied aggressively against the 1982 reauthorization of the VRA. 

When the court did the GOP’s dirty work, hollowing out the pre-clearance mechanism that Republicans viewed as untenable to take on through the political process, the Roberts decision offered Congress the option to revisit and update the pre-clearance formula. But once the courts had dealt its blow, the Republican majority had no appetite to revisit the VRA and those efforts crashed in Congress. That’s the case to this day: When the Democratic House voted on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act earlier this summer, every House Republican opposed the bill, and it would appear to have little chance of surviving a GOP filibuster in the Senate.

Texas Republicans may well have seen the Shelby County decision coming when they passed a draconian voter ID bill — initially blocked under pre-clearance in 2012 — ahead of the court’s ruling. During that same period, Republican lawmakers also prepped new state legislative and congressional maps that were the subject of much complicated litigation from 2011 through 2018. 

The legal history here becomes convoluted: Courts originally blocked the first maps enacted by Republicans in 2011. A federal court rejected them under pre-clearance, finding that these lines made it tougher for minority voters to elect a candidate of their choosing. As the 2012 elections neared, a three-judge panel ordered tweaks to the legislative maps — but these were supposed to be temporary fixes while the legal challenges worked their way through the courts. 

But when the Shelby decision came down, as the Texas Tribune observed, Texas suddenly no longer needed to pre-clear its maps. Republican leaders disingenuously cloaked themselves in a map they could claim was drawn by the courts, when really those judges had only approved the first step in a much longer process. How could we be diluting minority voters, the state protested, when we just took the courts’ map? Lower federal courts disagreed, and developed a rich evidence file that delved deep into the 2011 mapmaking process and referred to the 2013 GOP strategy as “discriminatory at its heart.”

Once again, however, the Supreme Court stepped in. In 2018’s Abbott v. Perez, the Supreme Court overturned those lower court decisions that found Republicans had diluted minority votes in multiple state house districts. They OK’d what had been called a racial gerrymander of the state legislature which judges said went “out of its way” to preserve GOP power at the expense of Latino voting power, with “serious costs to our democracy.”

That 5-4 decision, written by Justice Alito, insisted that when it comes to redistricting, the good faith of the legislature must be assumed. Alito blithely dismissed a 150-page lower court report that laid out, county by county, the precise machinations that Republican mapmakers used to crack and pack growing numbers of Latino voters, and even a careful study of which Latino voters were most likely to turn out. (Those unlikely to vote could also be carefully distributed in order to make districts appear to resemble a “minority opportunity” district, without actually being one.)

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused the majority of ignoring “undeniable proof of intentional discrimination,” contributing to the deliberate underrepresentation of minority voters and doing “great damage” to both equal opportunity and equal participation in the political process. The majority decision, she wrote, “blinds itself to the overwhelming factual record” in order to “allow Texas to use electoral maps that, in design and effect, burden the rights of minority voters.”

Texas isn’t a red state or a blue state. It’s a voter suppression state, with some of the lowest turnout numbers in the country, in part because the state — with the full support of the U.S. Supreme Court, since the 2013 Shelby County case — makes it so difficult to vote. By 2014, Texas turnout had plunged to the lowest in the nation, just 28.3 percent according to the Elections Project. A sexy 2018 U.S. Senate race between Ted Cruz and Beto O’Rourke helped push that number higher, but the Elections Project still found Texas mired among the lowest 10 states in the nation.

Political scientists will long debate the impact of redistricting, voter ID laws and other restrictive techniques, as well as the Roberts court’s rulings on the VRA and gerrymandering, on the democratic backsliding that has become a feature of so many red state legislatures and contributed to the growing crisis of GOP minority rule. But no one needs an advanced degree to see the effects of this two-step on extreme legislation on reproductive rights, among other issues, coming from Texas, Ohio, Georgia, Alabama, Missouri and elsewhere — despite zero indication that voters in these states desire these new restrictions or have moved anywhere near as far right on these issues as their representatives. 

Perhaps the problem is that this Supreme Court has made it exceptionally difficult for voters to get rid of their representatives when they go too far, and that this has emboldened lawmakers who no longer fear that their extremism might lead either to defeat or reproach from the courts. Indeed, this Supreme Court, under Alito’s lead, has encouraged legislatures to go a step further. After the ruling on the Texas law, in which justices threw up their hands at the novel workaround created by empowering citizens to turn in anyone involved in making an abortion possible, the signal to every other state was this: Go as far as you want. This court has your back.

The message to the rest of the nation is clear as well. When voting rights are hollowed out, it opens the door to an assault on every right you hold dear and any policy that matters to you, whether that’s reproductive rights, labor rights, gun control, the environment, or whether or not your kids can be asked to wear masks at school during a pandemic. 

If voters want to change those policies, Samuel Alito says tough. He can’t be voted out of office — and his colleagues just keep tilting the rules so your legislators can’t be either. 

As redistricting begins in state legislatures nationwide, Republican state legislators are building up their own walls of protection. If Democrats want to reverse course before a potential generation of GOP minority rule, 2022 could be the last chance. Congress must protect voting rights. And we all must prioritize state legislative and secretary of state races. We invest now to win next November — or the Texas two-step could be playing in your state next.

More than half of America’s 100 richest people exploit special trusts to avoid estate taxes

It's well known, at least among tax lawyers and accountants for the ultrawealthy: The estate tax can be easily avoided by exploiting a loophole unwittingly created by Congress three decades ago. By using special trusts, a rarefied group of Americans has taken advantage of this loophole, reducing government revenues and fueling inequality.

There is no way for the public to know who uses these special trusts aside from when they've been disclosed in lawsuits or securities filings. There's also been no way to quantify just how much in estate tax has been lost to them, though, in 2013, the lawyer who pioneered the use of the most common one — known as the grantor retained annuity trust, or GRAT — estimated they may have cost the U.S. Treasury about $100 billion over the prior 13 years.

As Congress considers cracking down on GRATs and other trusts to help fund President Joe Biden's domestic agenda, a new analysis by ProPublica based on a trove of tax information about thousands of the wealthiest Americans sheds light on just how widespread the use of special trusts to dodge the estate tax has become.

More than half of the nation's 100 richest individuals have used GRATs and other trusts to avoid estate tax, the analysis shows. Among them: former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg; Leonard Lauder, the son of cosmetics magnate Estée Lauder; Stephen Schwarzman, a founder of the private equity firm Blackstone; Charles Koch and his late brother, David, the industrialists who have underwritten libertarian causes and funded lobbying efforts to roll back the estate tax; and Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs. (Powell Jobs' Emerson Collective is among ProPublica's largest donors.)

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

More than a century ago amid soaring inequality and the rise of stratospherically wealthy families such as the Mellons and Rockefellers, Congress created the estate tax as a way to raise money and clip the fortunes of the rich at death. Lawmakers later added a gift tax as a means of stopping wealthy people from passing their fortunes on to their children and grandchildren before death. Nowadays, 99.9% of Americans never have to worry about these taxes. They only hit individuals passing more than $11.7 million, or couples giving more than $23.4 million, to their heirs. The federal government imposes a roughly 40% levy on amounts above those figures before that wealth is passed on to heirs.

For her part, Powell Jobs has decried as "dangerous for a society" the early 20th century fortunes of the Mellons, Rockefellers and others. "I'm not interested in legacy wealth buildings, and my children know that," she told The New York Times last year. "Steve wasn't interested in that. If I live long enough, it ends with me."

Nonetheless, after the death of her husband in 2011, Powell Jobs used a series of GRATs to pass on around a half a billion dollars, estate-tax-free, to her children, friends and other family, according to the tax records and interviews with her longtime attorney. By using the GRATs, she avoided at least $200 million in estate and gift taxes.

Her attorney, Larry Sonsini, said Powell Jobs did this so that her children would have cash to pay estate taxes when she dies and they inherit "nostalgic and hard assets," such as real estate, art and a yacht. (At 260 feet, Venus is among the larger pleasure ships in the world.) Without the $500 million or so passed through the trusts, he said, Powell Jobs' heirs would have to sell stock that she intends to give to charity to pay her estate tax bill.

Sonsini said Powell Jobs, whose fortune is pegged at $21 billion by Forbes, has already given billions away to charity and paid $2.5 billion in state and federal taxes between 2012 and 2020. "When you look at an estate that may be worth multiple billions, and all the rest is going to charity, and you put it in perspective, what is the problem we're worried about here?" Sonsini asked. "This is not about creating dynasty wealth for these kids."

In a written statement, Powell Jobs said she supports "reforms that make the tax code more fair. Through my work at Emerson Collective and philanthropic commitments, I have dedicated my life and assets to the pursuit of a more just and equitable society."

Others whose special trusts ProPublica identified, including Bloomberg and the Kochs, declined to comment on why they'd set up the trusts or their estate-tax implications. Representatives for Lauder didn't respond to requests to accept questions on his behalf. Schwarzman's spokesperson wrote that he is "one of the largest individual taxpayers in the country and fully complies with all tax rules."

A typical GRAT entails putting assets, like stocks, in a trust that ultimately benefits a person's heirs. The trust pays back an amount equal to what the trust's creator put in plus a modest amount of interest. But any gains on the investments above that amount flow to the heirs free of gift or estate taxes. So if a person puts $100 million worth of stock in a GRAT and the stock rises in value to $130 million, their heirs would receive about $30 million tax-free.

In 1990, Congress accidentally created GRATs when it closed another estate tax loophole that was popular at the time. The IRS challenged the maneuver but lost in court.

"I don't blame the taxpayers who are doing it," said Daniel Hemel, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. "Congress has virtually invited them to do it. I blame Congress for creating the monster and then failing to stop the monster once it became clear how much of the tax base the GRAT monster would eat up."

Users of the trusts extend well beyond the top of the Forbes rankings, ProPublica's analysis of the confidential IRS files show. Erik Prince, founder of the military contractor Blackwater and himself heir to an auto parts fortune, used the shelter. Fashion designer Calvin Klein has used them, as have "Saturday Night Live" creator Lorne Michaels and media mogul Oprah Winfrey.

"We have paid all taxes due," a spokesperson for Winfrey said. A representative of Klein did not accept questions from ProPublica or respond to messages. A spokesman for Michaels declined to comment.

Prince also did not answer questions. "Hey if you publish private information about me I'll be sure to return the favor," he wrote. "Go ahead and fuck off."

The GRAT has become so ubiquitous in recent decades that high-end tax lawyers consider it a plain vanilla strategy. "This is an off-the-shelf solution," said Michael Kosnitzky, co-leader of the private wealth practice at law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. "Almost every wealthy person should have one."

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

ProPublica's tally almost certainly undercounts the number of Forbes 100 members who use shelters to avoid estate taxes. ProPublica counted only those people whose tax records or public filings explicitly mention GRATs or other trusts commonly used to dodge gift and estate taxes. But a wealthy person can call their trusts whatever they want, leaving plenty of trusts outside of ProPublica's count.

This month, the House and Senate are hammering out proposals to raise revenue to help pay for the Biden administration's plans to expand the social safety net. The legislative blueprint released by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., would defang GRATs and other trusts, which would still be legal but no longer be as useful for estate tax avoidance. If the provision makes it into law, "it would put a major dent in GRATs," said Bob Lord, an Arizona attorney who specializes in trusts and estates.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has proposed going further in undercutting estate tax avoidance tools. But the prospect of any reform is uncertain, as Democrats on Capitol Hill struggle to find the votes to pass the package of spending and tax changes.

GRATs are commonly described by tax lawyers as a "heads I win, tails we tie" proposition. If the investment placed in the GRAT soars in value, that increase passes to an heir without being subject to future estate tax. If the investment doesn't go up, the wealthy person can simply try again and again until they succeed, leading many users to have multiple GRATs going at a time.

For example, Herb Simon, founder of the country's biggest shopping mall empire and owner of the Indiana Pacers, was one of the most prolific GRAT creators in records reviewed by ProPublica. Since 2000, he has hatched dozens of the trusts, often more than one a year. In an interview with The Indianapolis Star in 2017, the octogenarian Simon said, "It's always a big tax problem" for the next generation when someone dies, "but we've worked that tax problem. We won't have a problem with that."

A spokesperson for Simon didn't respond to questions for this article.

Mentions of these trusts have periodically surfaced in the press after being disclosed in securities filings, as was the case with trusts held by Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. In 2013, Bloomberg News published a groundbreaking series on GRATs, mining securities filings and other records to reveal how the mega-rich, including casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and such families as Walmart's Waltons, had perfected the use of the device.

ProPublica's data shows that Michael Bloomberg, the majority owner of the company that bears his name and No. 13 on Forbes' list of the wealthiest Americans, is himself a heavy user of GRATs. Over the course of a dozen years, he repeatedly cycled pieces of his private company in and out of the trusts — often opening multiple GRATs in one year. During that time, hundreds of millions of dollars in income flowed through Bloomberg's GRATs, giving him opportunities to shield parts of his fortune for his heirs.

ProPublica described the transactions (but not the name of the person engaging in them) to Lord, the trusts and estates attorney. The GRAT is "the perfect loophole to avoid estate and gift tax in this situation," said Lord, who is also tax counsel for Americans for Tax Fairness and an advocate for estate tax reform.

When Bloomberg ran for president in 2020, he vowed to shore up the estate tax. "Owners of the biggest estates are expert at gaming the system to reduce what they owe," a campaign fact sheet for his tax plan said. Bloomberg vowed to "lower the estate-tax threshold, so that more estates are taxed," and to "shut down multiple estate-tax avoidance schemes." His fact sheet offered few details as to how he would do that, and it didn't mention GRATs.

The legislation Congress is now considering to curtail GRATs would leave open other options for estate tax avoidance, including a cousin to the GRAT known as a charitable lead annuity trust, or CLAT, which contributes to charity while passing gains from stocks and other assets on to heirs. And the legislation would grandfather in existing trusts, meaning that those who have already established trusts would be able to continue to use them to avoid paying estate taxes.

That has set off a predictable push by tax lawyers to get their clients to create tax-sheltering trusts before any new legislation takes effect.

Porter Wright, a law firm that offers estate planning services, told existing and potential clients it was "critical" to evaluate opportunities because "the window may close very soon. There are important and time sensitive issues which could substantially impact the amount of wealth you are able to transfer free of estate and gift tax to future generations."

The Proud Boys have a new strategy: Going mainstream

When former president Donald Trump told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during a debate last fall, it thrust the relatively unknown extremist group into the public consciousness and fueled a “massive spike” in members’ activity.

“In the aftermath of that, suddenly everyone was talking about who the Proud Boys were and people were submitting applications to join the group,” the Southern Poverty Law Center senior research analyst Cassie Miller told NPR for a story published Wednesday.

Hampton Stall, senior researcher with the Armed Conflict Location Event Data Project (ACLED), added: “The election period was a massive spike of Proud Boys activity in the street that honestly started right after that debate.”

The ACLED found that between October and January, the Proud Boys “became visible to a degree previously unseen,” appearing at more than 40 protests, demonstrations and riots. Many were Stop the Steal rallies that culminated in the Capitol insurrection — and even Jan. 6-related conspiracy charges against 15 Proud Boys members have not resulted in a significant setback for the burgeoning organization.

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

“They’re simply switching up their organizational style,” Miller told NPR. “Now they are organizing more at a local level, they’re hosting local rallies, or they’re joining into other rallies around political flashpoints like critical race theory or anti-masking. … What they want to do is normalize their brand of politics, which is one that is authoritarian, that wants to push the creation of a more hierarchical society where men, and white men in particular, retain the most power.”

The Proud Boys’ new strategy has put them “firmly in the constellation of far-right causes that coalesced on America’s streets over the summer.” In August, more than half of events where Proud Boys were present turned violent, and the group is now pursuing “a deliberate strategy to forge alliances with disparate elements on the right.”

“Trump’s welcoming of the Proud Boys into his fold on a debate stage one year ago may have given them the legitimacy they sought,” NPR reports. “But ultimately, Miller and Stall said the profound shift of America’s political right suggests that the group has found firm footing among a more mainstream audience even with Trump out of office, and it won’t be disappearing anytime soon.”

Four more GOP Reps. under scrutiny for potential stock trading violations

After a year full of headlines about Congressional scrutiny over members’ stock trading practices, it appears four more GOP representatives may have run afoul of laws meant to prevent insider trading on Capitol Hill — in addition to a fifth Republican who has already seen scrutiny for the same trading activity earlier this year.

According to an analysis of financial disclosure documents compiled by Insider, the four members of Congress — Reps. John Rutherford of Florida, Rick Allen of Georgia, Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania and Victoria Spartz or Indiana — all failed to file paperwork for stock trades within the 45-day federal deadline required under the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act of 2012.

In addition, Rep. Blake Moore of Utah missed the deadline by several days on at least three trades — two involving the electric car company Tesla and another involving Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant — the second stock-trading scandal this year involving the freshman Congressman. 

The transactions Allen failed to report were by far the largest, worth as much as $200,000 in all. During its analysis Insider identified at least seven stock holdings the four-term Georgia representative listed in 2019 but disappeared on his 2020 disclosures — despite the fact that any sales would have to be disclosed. 

Up to $65,000 in Walmart and Home Depot stock were also listed on Allen’s 2020 disclosures, but there was no record of the corresponding purchases at any point in his Congressionals tenure.

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

Rutherford also missed the mandatory reporting deadline on at least five trades made by her husband worth up to $75,000, while Spartz failed to disclose the purchase of up to $50,000 in Simon Property Group, Inc., a commercial real estate firm. 

“This transaction was made by Rep. Spartz’s husband’s IRA and reported within 45 days of the transaction, as Mr. Spartz was informed to do,” Spartz’s spokesperson Micah Bock told Insider. “Based on our review of the code, we’ve inquired with the nonpartisan House Ethics Committee to clarify the definition of ‘notification’ to eliminate any ambiguity.”

Rutherford’s spokesperson, Alex Lanfranconi, also told Insider that the Congressman had rectified the situation and would not be facing a fine for the situation.

“Any late periodic transaction reports have been submitted in full and accepted by the House, without fine,” Lanfranconi said. “Rep. Rutherford is in regular contact with the House Ethics Committee to confirm all disclosure requirements are met in full.” 

Kelly, for his part, reported late one purchase made by his wife over the summer, worth up to $15,000 in Beauty Health Company, which Insider notes is known for a popular skin-care treatment. 

These stock-trading issues are one of the rare points of synergy this year in a deeply divided Washintgon, with at least 34 Congresspeople — in both parties and both chambers — identified by news organizations as potentially violating the STOCK Act. 

These include Sen. Tommy Tuberville and Reps. Pat Fallon and Blake Moore, who Salon reported earlier this year had failed to disclose dozens of trades worth up to $22 million.

Salon also discovered in July that Fallon had dumped $250,000 worth of Microsoft stock just weeks before the company’s high-profile cloud computing deal with the Pentagon, valued at up to $10 billion, was abruptly cancelled. He sits on the House Armed Services Committee’s brand new Subcommittee on Cyber, Innovative Technologies, and Information Systems, which has oversight over the deal in question.

“When members of Congress trade individual stocks and fail to disclose those trades, they break the law and diminish the public’s trust in government,” the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center wrote in ethics complaints against the three lawmakers. 

Still, fines for stock trading misconduct are incredibly low — often as little as $200 — and complaints are rarely forwarded to the Justice Department or the Securities and Exchange Commission for criminal investigation. 

“The recent prevalence of STOCK Act violations in the House shows that merely the threat of a fine is not deterring members of Congress from breaking the law; real accountability is necessary,” the CLC added in its complaints.

Making the “Only Murders in the Building” nearly silent episode

The recent episode of  “Only Murders in the Building” was presented without its usual audio this week, as the show continues its investigation of a murder from a unique POV, this time centering a deaf character. While this posed certain challenges for the show, it ultimately made for an illuminating and suspenseful episode.

In “The Boy From 6B,” viewers experience events mainly from the perspective of Theo Dimas (James Caverly), a young deaf man whose history growing up in the Arconian apartment building is inextricably linked to the mysterious death of fellow resident Tim Kono (Julian Cihi). In centering Theo’s perspective, the episode is almost entirely inaudible, relying on sign language with subtitles, keen visuals and clever, creative scene-setting.

Theo is the son of Teddy (Nathan Lane), the wealthy benefactor of the true crime podcast that friends Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short) and Mabel (Selena Gomez) are producing of their murder investigation. It turns out that about a decade ago, Theo had often spied on the activities of Mabel and Tim Kono’s friend group around the Arconian. On one fateful night, Tim witnessed Theo accidentally pushing their friend Zoe (Olivia Reis) off the building’s roof to her death.

“Even though Theo appears to be a villain, in some ways, the episode for me was really an unmasking of a vulnerable character,” said director Cherien Dabis in an interview with Salon.

As a queer woman of color who’s familiar with on-screen marginalization, Dabis told Salon she was honored by the opportunity to help meaningfully and accurately represent the deaf community’s experiences.

The episode also details Teddy’s efforts to protect his son from the inevitable consequences if his part in Zoe’s death is revealed. Not only did Teddy threaten Tim as a potential witness, but it turns out the father-son duo is also in the business of grave-robbing, a secret that Tim was looking into before his death. The sordid past and the current criminal activities do not look good for the Dimases as possible suspects in Tim’s death.

Despite the rather grim storylines, “Only Murders” keeps the tone light while focusing on the main trio’s poignant intergenerational friendship, bonded through their love of murder podcasts. Part noir and part madcap adventure, what unfolds on our screens is sheer, delightful chaos that even had to be scaled back before becoming the final product that aired.

“At some point, there were coffins with trap doors underneath that we were going to spend a lot of time exploring, and Oliver was going to be in one,” episode co-writer Ben Philippe told Salon.

How to make Theo’s story pop

As the episode’s star, Caverly played a significant role in aiding Dabis’ research for the episode, suggesting different documentaries and on-screen representations of deaf characters to watch, and offering valuable guiding prompts. 

“He asked, ‘How is a deaf audience watching this, who aren’t going to be able to hear the difference between Theo’s storyline and the storyline of our hearing characters, going to see the difference between them?'” Dabis said. “‘How will they see the difference between the point of view of Theo versus the trio?’ And it was a really great question that challenged me to find a visual language for differentiating those two storylines.”

Dabis ultimately settled on taking the “noir aspect a little bit further” for Theo, and “capturing him with wide angle close ups as often as possible” to give his presence in every shot more weight than we’ve seen previously.

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

Philippe also worked closely with Caverly as he co-wrote the script with Stephen Markley. The partners tried to be intentional about not reproducing stereotypes about deaf people or people with disabilities. That could range from making the characters become inspirational just for having different abilities or on the flip side, having “super powers like X-Men.” 

LIke Dabis, they didn’t want to portray Theo as a villain either. Despite the challenges and new territory presented for writing the episode, Philippe says he and Markley were determined to accurately include and represent a deaf character’s experience. 

“Sometimes writers don’t want to touch the stove, and instead of writing a diverse cast, it’s just, ‘Let’s just not write that, let’s just make this character a cis, straight white person who has no disabilities,'” he said. “And I think we pushed back against that, to sort of represent someone who is deaf but be thoughtful on this every step of the way. That meant sometimes swings we wanted to take with the stories received pushback, and that’s what’s great about having actors like James who are very involved in how we treat the script.”

From there, as the writers set out to properly represent a deaf character’s experience, they were increasingly drawn to Theo.

“It went from being not so much about the concept but about, ‘Who is this person?'” Markley told Salon. “That was one of the great experiences, uncovering who Theo was, what had happened with him, where this darkness in him had come from, and how he was walking through life in this wound, his relationship with his father, with Zoe. Just that journey of discovering Theo was the joy and promise of the episode.”

Three illuminating exchanges with Theo

Nathan Lane in “Only Murders in the Building” (Craig Blankenhorn/Hulu)

According to Philippe, what started out as a “fun challenge” of having little to no audio quickly became slightly less fun as the two first-time television writers broke down the episode. 

“At some point, we were just like, ‘Oh god, can they say just one line? Maybe they’re coughing?'” he joked. Eventually, the duo figured out how to approach key scenes that would develop Theo’s character and build our understanding of his fraught history at the Arconian.

The episode opens years before the events of the show with Teddy, a musical enthusiast, attempting to force his deaf son to listen to his favorite song, “My Boy Bill” and then becoming upset when he’s not successful. Teddy eventually backs down and apologizes, but the scene painfully reflects his struggle to accept his son’s deafness, which sets the tone for their embattled relationship throughout the series.

“It’s terrifying for a 30-minute comedy,” Markley said about the scene. “It just creates this well of emotion for Theo at the very jump.”

“No one is the villain of their own story,” Philippe said of their inspiration for the scene. “We decided pretty early on that the center of the relationship between Theo and Teddy is that they love each other, this is parental love, and it’s really twisted, but ultimately Teddy is trying his hardest to care for his son Theo.”

Dabis wanted to send a message with that scene as well. “To Theo, his deafness is not a problem that needs to be fixed,” she explained. “That’s something that James really wanted me to understand. And I think the deaf community at large wants people to understand that being deaf, it’s not something that needs to be fixed. We see that in this scene very clearly.”

In this single 30-minute episode, Philippe and Markley tried to reveal as much as possible about Theo’s history. This meant including a familiar exchange in ASL between Theo and the Arconian’s doorman, Lester (Teddy Coluca), in which the two greet each other and sign their shared disdain for the Arconian’s privileged residents.

The scene was a subtle nod to just how long Theo has lived at the Arconian. “Theo’s been this kid around the building for years and years,” Markley explained. “So, there’s clearly people within the building who have interacted with, or taken a liking to him, or had relationships with him, and Lester felt like the right person.”

Then, with a flashback to that fateful New Years Eve night 10 years ago, Theo has an argument in ASL with his crush Zoe on the roof of the building. Before events spin out of control and she falls from the roof in a tragic accident, Theo criticizes Zoe for “touring” other people’s lives, as she regularly breaks into fellow Arconian residents’ apartments to snoop out of boredom. This prompts Zoe to tell Theo he’s “confused about which way the pity flows.”

“We wanted it to be more than just a typical teenage break-up melodrama,” Philippe said, of writing the devastating exchange, and the glimpse it offers into the ableism Theo has faced. “Zoe is like, ‘No, you don’t get to judge me, you get to worship me from afar because you’re the loner weirdo.’ Both Markley and I wanted the scene to say something more than just, ‘I hate you!'”

According to Dabis, the exchange is meant to present a moment of truth between Theo and Zoe, while also holding a mirror to societal ableism. “The line is this really, incredibly hurtful thing that probably feels like Theo’s worst nightmare,” she explained. “You know, these fears that people are looking at him and just pitying him.”

Inside Charles and Jan’s sexy Scrabble date night

Steve Martin and Amy Ryan in “Only Murders in the Building” (Craig Blankenhorn/Hulu)

Although Theo is the center of the episode, the show’s hearing leads still get plenty of screen time . . . albeit almost entirely silent as well. 

“We wanted the silence of the episode to not just live in Theo and his deafness, but also have a bigger role for all branches of the story,” Philippe explained. 

One one hand, Mabel and Oliver’s story lends itself to soundlessness. The two stake out a morgue to catch Theo in the act of grave-robbing, and therefore must be silent in order not to get caught.

On the other hand, Charles spends the episode on a date with neighbor Jan (Amy Ryan). This created a unique challenge, but one that transformed into a hilarious and provocative opportunity to showcase a different kind of flirting and courtship. When the two find their way back to Charles’ apartment, they embark on an intimate and let’s say, not-so-safe-for-work scrabble game. With nothing but soft, evocative music playing, the two spell out words like “wood,” “wet,” “sexy” and “hard.”

“The idea of an intimate scrabble game where you’re both talking and sharing words and your state of mind without saying anything [aloud] felt like the right place for a date,” Philippe said. “It also feels very Charles-like that this would be his idea of a lovely evening . . . New York City is such a loud place, it’s constantly just noises and exhaustion, and the idea of Charles and Jan having a date being portrayed mostly silently felt right.”

For Markley, inspiration for Charles and Jan’s intimate scrabble date, rather than the cheesy montage of the couple making stops all over the city that he and Philippe had initially considered, came from an unexpected source — a poem by Jean Arp that reads:

Soon silence will have passed into legend 
Man has turned his back on silence 
Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation . . . 
tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.

“It’s this idea that our modern life is now full of cacophony,” Markley said. “It’s where you have earbuds in your ears, you’re listening to seven podcasts at two-times speed, and you’re just never stopping to see what’s going on. I think that idea let us go through Theo’s point of view, but also our hearing characters’ point of view.”

Much of the episode’s beauty lies in its silence, and at different points, its slowness and intimacy, in a gripping departure from what we’ve seen on “Only Murders” so far.

“Conceptually, this show is just so loud, in the best sense of the word,” Philippe said. “You have all these amazingly fun characters, it’s in New York City, and they’re always talking, putting together this mystery, having all those scenes in rooms full of people.  . . . But this episode was just a fun, creative challenge.”

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

You deserve a fancy fish sandwich — here’s the very best quick lunch to make when working from home

Early in my work-from-home days writing for a daily food news site, I learned the hard way that if you don’t carve out time for lunch, you may find yourself at 3 p.m. shoveling in alternating hunks of cheese and bread with one hand while typing a greasy-fingered email with the other, screaming “I can have it all!” to no one. 

Hence, I try to take an hour each midday to make and eat lunch. 

Some days, the anticipation of homemade lunch energizes me. I’ll griddle ham-and-kimchi sandwiches or chop a big pile of spinach for 15-minute palak “paneer” with halloumi while conducting a lively, one-sided conversation with my dog Herbie. When time is shorter, I’ll make chilaquiles using leftover takeout tortilla chips, jarred salsa and canned black beans — capped with sliced avocado and a squirt of lime. Or I’ll fry a couple of eggs in a big skillet with smashed garlic cloves and whatever vegetable I have on hand, finish said mélange with lemon juice and torn herbs, then heap it on buttered toast. 

RELATED: When you drink Chardonnay, the spaetzle get bigger

Do I occasionally become insolent at the very thought of preparing weekday lunch and order falafel sandwiches instead? Yes.  

Being a writer, I also occasionally use lunch prep as a procrastination tactic. For instance, cooking and cooling farro at 10 a.m. for that day’s hearty lunch salad distracts nicely from an impatient blinking cursor on a blank page. So does pre-soft boiling eggs or par-cooking sweet potatoes for hash. 

Lately, I’ve gotten into the habit of stocking up on frozen, locally caught fish fillets. (In my case, that means whitefish, walleye or trout.) This fast-cooking protein inspires myriad lunch options. Fried fish tacos! Quick-simmered fish curry! Oven-roasted fish with dill and olives!

Want more great food writing and recipes? Subscribe to Salon Food’s newsletter.

My favorite is undoubtedly pan-seared fish sandwiches with herby mayo. It’s fast and dead-easy to make but feels fancy because of the fussy compound mayo, ruffly lettuce and pillowy bread — like the sort of lunch you order with a glass of white wine at a posh gastropub downtown. There, the housemade kettle chips would come in a cute wire basket lined with paper, and you’d feel guilty about smearing your white-cloth napkin with grease and mayo. 

Of course, this wouldn’t happen in my house because we use paper towels as napkins . . .

***

If you can’t find ciabatta rolls, stick with a similarly tender bread, such as bolillo rolls, lightly toasted pullman or sourdough bread slices, so the fish stays intact in the sandwich when you bite down. 

Recipe: Fancy Fish Sandwiches with Basil-Caper Mayo

Serves 2

Ingredients:

  • 1/2 cup mayonnaise
  • 1 tsp chopped capers
  • 2 tsp minced chives or green onion
  • 1/2 tsp lemon zest
  • 1 Tbsp chopped basil leaves
  • Freshly ground black pepper, as needed
  • Juice of 1 lemon, divided
  • Salt, as needed
  • All-purpose or rice flour, as needed
  • 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
  • 2 6-oz. firm-flesh fish fillets, patted dry on both sides (I like whitefish, walleye, halibut and cod.)
  • Grapeseed or canola oil, as needed
  • 1 tsp butter
  • 2 ciabatta rolls, split
  • A few leaves butter or bibb lettuce
  • Kettle chips, for serving

Directions:

In a small bowl, whisk together the mayo, capers, chives, zest, basil, a few grinds of black pepper and a scant 1 tsp lemon juice. Taste the mayo and adjust with salt and pepper as needed. Set aside.

Scatter about 1/3 cup flour over a plate. Season with 1 1/2 tsp salt and the cayenne. Dredge both sides in the seasoned flour, shaking off the excess. 

Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat, and add a couple tablespoons of oil and the butter. Ease the fillets into the skillet, and cook them undisturbed for 2 minutes. Rotate 90 degrees to ensure even browning on the first side, and cook for another minute until golden. Flip the fish, and cook for another 3 minutes, or until the fish flakes easily when you prod it with the spatula’s edge. (This might vary based on the thickness of the fish; keep an eye on it.) Remove the fillets, set them on a plate or the cutting board, and spritz generously with lemon juice. 

Meanwhile, lightly toast the ciabatta rolls and smear both sides liberally with the compound mayo. Lay a leaf or two of lettuce on the bread, then top with the fish. Close the sandwich, carefully slice it in half and serve immediately with a pile of kettle chips on the side. 

A variation: Thin the basil-caper mayo with extra lemon juice. Thinly shave some fennel or cabbage and a little red onion, then toss that in the mayo to make a quick slaw. This tastes delicious piled right on the fish sandwich. Plus, any leftover slaw conveniently doubles as your side salad.

More by this author:

Ex-Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski accused of groping GOP donor during charity event

Corey Lewandowski, the onetime campaign manager for Donald Trump’s 2016 White House run, was accused of making unwanted sexual advances toward a GOP donor this past weekend, according to a POLITICO report. 

Trashelle Odom, the wife of Idaho construction executive John Odom, told the outlet that the former Trump aide non-consensually touched her at a fundraising event Sunday evening, groping her legs and buttocks, and spoke to her inappropriate and in sexually graphic terms. Odom added that Lewandowski proceeded to “stalk” her over the course of the night. 

“On the evening of September 26 in Las Vegas, Nevada, I attended a dinner to support a charity and spend time with wonderful friends,” Odom said. “[Lewandowski] repeatedly touched me inappropriately, said vile and disgusting things to me, stalked me, and made me feel violated and fearful.”

“I want other women to know that you can be heard, too, and together we can stop terrible things like this from happening,” she added.

UPDATE: Lewandowksi was fired Wednesday from his role as supervisor of Trump’s “Make America Great Again Action” super PAC following Odom’s allegations of sexual harassment. 

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

The incident reportedly played out during a charity event for substance abuse at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino’s Benihana restaurant. Odom, just one of about two dozen major GOP benefactors, was seated next to Lewandowski as part of a four-day conference hosted by Victoria’s Voice Foundation. During the conference, Lewandowski apparently made several remarks about the size of his genitalia and showed her his room key. 

The Trump confidant allegedly told Odom that “he is very powerful and can destroy anyone,” Odom recalled in a statement released by her attorney. At one point, POLITICO reported, attendees had to physically shield Odom from Lewandowski as he followed her into a bar, where the group later ushered her in a different direction. 

Lewandowski, who has a wife and four children, has neither confirmed nor denied Odom’s allegations. “Accusations and rumors appear to be morphing by the minute and we will not dignify them with a further response,” his lawyer, David Chesnoff, said in a statement.

Lewandowski, 48, first came into the national spotlight when took a role as Trump’s campaign manager in 2015. However, he was swiftly dismissed from his role in April 2016, just a month after he was caught on video grabbing the arm of Michelle Fields, a Breitbart reporter, during a Florida press conference. The Trump aide was charged with battery following the incident, though the charges were ultimately dropped. 

In 2017, Lewandowski was again embroiled in legal trouble when singer Joy Villa filed a police report alleging that Lewandowski slapped her bottom twice during a holiday party held at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. 

Odom’s allegations come amid separate rumors that South Dakota GOP Gov. Kristi Noem, who has a husband and three children, was engaged in an extramarital affair with Lewandowski, according to a report by right-wing news site American Greatness. The claim, backed by multiple anonymous sources, has yet to be corroborated by other outlets.

Instead of just getting vaccinated, anti-vaxxers are drinking iodine antiseptic

Another ineffective treatment for COVID-19 is being promoted in anti-vaccine and science-skeptical circles.

First there was hydroxychloroquine, then ivermectin; now, according to multiple reports, some Americans are gargling and/or ingesting the iodine-based liquid Betadine to prevent COVID-19 — instead of getting vaccinated.

Betadine is the brand name for povidone-iodine, an amber-colored liquid typically sold as a 10% solution as an antiseptic for cleaning wounds and skin. A 0.5% solution is sold as a gargle for sore throats, but the manufacturer cautions people not to swallow it. Recently, the manufacturer warned consumers not to consume Betadine to treat COVID-19, or rely on it as a form of treatment.

“Betadine Antiseptic First Aid products have not been approved to treat coronavirus,” reads a statement on the manufacturer’s website. “Products should only be used to help prevent infection in minor cuts, scrapes and burns. Betadine Antiseptic products have not been demonstrated to be effective for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19 or any other viruses.”

Depending on which type of Betadine one ingests, side effects can range from stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, fever, extreme thirst, being unable to urinate to diarrhea, vomiting, and burning a person’s gastrointestinal tract.

As mentioned, there isn’t sound scientific evidence that Betadine would treat or prevent COVID-19. So how did this trend start?

While a precise timeline is hard to reconstruct, several sources on social media promoted the use of Betadine to treat COVID-19 starting at the end of last year. Specifically, one video of a purported doctor went viral in April 2021; in it, the doctor states that Betadine helps treat and prevent COVID-19.

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon’s weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.

Those who are supporting claims that Betadine could be an effective way to treat or prevent COVID-19 often point to a couple of studies suggesting that in in vitro experiments, different antiseptics decrease the viral load of COVID-19. Yet as experts previously interviewed by Salon attest, in vitro studies are often meaningless. 

Studies based on in vitro test-tube or cell culture work “raises eyebrows” to a virologist, Dr. Benhur Lee, a Professor of Microbiology at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told Salon last month in a discussion of an in vitro ivermectin study. As Lee explained, “in vitro” refers to studies that take place in test tubes, petri dishes, or outside of human patients. Lee notes that what happens in vitro might not necessarily translate to the human body.

“I can increase the concentration of sodium chloride (table salt) by 50% to my tissue culture cells and show inhibition of most viruses,” Lee said. “But I don’t go asking people to eat as much salty food as possible to combat virus infections, much less SARS-CoV-2.”

Lee characterized the belief that in vitro studies will translate to an effective treatment “magical thinking.” 

Like many myths about COVID-19 drugs, the idea that Betadine is a viable treatment grew from shaky scientific evidence and was perpetuated by seemingly authoritative figures on social media.

For example, a 2020 study found Listerine, Iso-Betadine, and Dequonal mouthwashes might decrease the viral load of saliva, thus lowering the transmission of SARS-CoV-2. A more recent study found that Listerine and Chlorhexidine disrupted the Covid virus under in vitro conditions. But no real world evidence or trials in humans suggest that gargling with mouthwash or Betadine could have an effect on COVID-19.

Even if these did kill novel coronaviruses in one’s mouth, that wouldn’t be enough to halt the virus.

“It’s not like your cells get infected and then they secrete a bunch of virus and they’re done,” virologist Angela Rasmussen told the New York Times. “Infected cells are constantly making more virus. It’s a timing issue.”

The manufacturer of Listerine is also warning against consumers using the mouthwash as a treatment for COVID-19.

“Although there are recent lab-based reports (in vitro studies) of some LISTERINE® Mouthwashes having activity against enveloped viruses, including coronavirus, the available data is insufficient, and no evidence-based clinical conclusions can be drawn with regards to the anti-viral efficacy of LISTERINE® Antiseptic mouthwash at this time,” the company states. “More research is needed to understand whether the use of mouthwashes can impact viral transmission, exposure, viral entry, viral load and ultimately affect meaningful clinical outcomes.”

Not only are the manufacturers strongly warning against this — but many doctors and public health experts are, too.

“Potassium iodine, for example, is a form that, if enough is ingested, it can cause some really severe gastrointestinal issues,” Scott Schaeffer, managing director of the Oklahoma Center for Poison and Drug Information, told the Oklahoman. “Betadine and those type of products are very low in concentration. If a person were to get a pure form of iodine, like the potassium iodine, it could potentially cause pretty significant burns in the mouth, the throat, the esophagus. The last thing you want to do is burn a hole in the stomach or the esophagus.”

Luckily Schaeffer told the newspaper that they haven’t seen an uptick in calls to internal or external iodine-related calls.

“Four of them were the typical type of thing where a child gets into either an iodine supplement or a Betadine bottle, picks it up and drinks from it,” he said. “The other was a person who was gargling with Betadine, but for a sore throat, and didn’t mention COVID, so I’m inclined to think that it was not with the intent of treating or preventing COVID.”

According to the local news channel WJXT in Jacksonville, Florida, the state’s poison control center has only received one call in the last month of a person misusing betadine to treat COVID-19.

21 best fall cocktails for fireside sipping

It’s fall, y’all, and while sipping apple cider and pumpkin spice lattes are a given, finding the perfect fall cocktail recipe isn’t so easy. After a season of spritzes and rosé wine, we’re craving cocktails that are equal parts refreshing and cozy. From apple cider margaritas to mulled wine, we rounded up our best fall cocktails (and a couple of mocktails too!).

* * *

Our best fall cocktail recipes

1. Whiskey and Apple Cider Syrup (aka the only fall cocktail you meed in your life) 

Is that a hint of orange? A tinge of yellow? As soon as the leaves start to change, grab your favorite rye whiskey, a gallon of apple cider (locally made, if possible!), and a couple of other easy aromatic ingredients to prepare the ultimate fall cocktail.

2. Spicy Apple Cider Margarita

Normally margaritas make me think of booze cruises at sunset and trips to the tropics, two things that aren’t my typical fall activities in New England. But this recipe gets an autumnal spin thanks to the inclusion of apple cider and cinnamon.

3. Autumn Ash

If you’re not too keen on Scotch whiskey, this cocktail might make you change your mind. St. Germain elderflower liqueur infuses the robust liquor with floral notes and apple brandy brings all-American sweetness.

4. Apple Rye Punch

I could go on and on about how perfect this autumnal punch is for your next fall harvest festival, but really, who hosts those? No one, right? So let’s just say that you’re hosting some friends and it happens to be fall and you’re looking for a cocktail to make? This crowd-friendly punch is it.

5. Irish Hot Chocolate

Some fall days are warm and beautiful. Others can be, frankly, quite frigid. When the temperature drops below 50, sip a mug of this hearty hot chocolate, which is our new favorite fall cocktail.

6. Old Fashioned

It’s a classic year-round, but somehow an Old Fashioned just tastes better as a fall cocktail.

7. Session Manhattan

This twist on a Manhattan features two kinds of vermouth (both sweet and dry), plus amontillado sherry. The dark, bewitching hue is totally apt for a Halloween cocktail.

8. Spiced Bourbon Cocktail with Pomegranate Syrup

Homemade cinnamon pomegranate syrup and a squeeze of citrus juice dress up Kentucky bourbon for one of our favorite fall cocktails.

9. Figgin’ Delicious

When you picture the base for a fall cocktail, whiskey and bourbon probably come to mind first, right? But don’t underestimate the power of gin! “This one is one of my favorites, combining muddled figs with a hit of maple syrup, tart lime, and spicy ginger beer, all circling around the complex flavors of gin,” writes recipe developer fiveandspice.

10. Mulled Wine Sparkler

Serve this festive fall cocktail for Thanksgiving dinner. The combination of red wine and prosecco mixed with mulling spices will appeal to both white and red wine drinkers and pairs well with almost every dish at the feast.

11. The Tom Cat

“This cocktail recipe, inspired by a nineteenth-century British gin recipe, is an updated version of the original Old Tom gin cocktail, with the addition of mezcal from Mexico for smokiness, vermouth for sweetness, and bitters for complexity,” writes recipe developer Jody Eddy.

12. Winter Spritz

You only need four ingredients — Campari, blood orange juice, apple cider, and oranges — to make this cold weather spritz. Sure, it has winter in the name but we promise it’s just as good during autumn.

13. Bourbon Sour with Honey-Plum Syrup

Food52’s resident bartender Elliott Clark calls this bourbon-based cocktail the perfect one to celebrate fall just as the leaves start to turn. Our homemade plum-honey syrup adds a touch of sweetness with one of the season’s best fruits.

14. The Fall 75 – Fall Champagne Cocktail

A French 75 is a pretty perfect cocktail, but it doesn’t exactly scream fall. So we mixed champagne with cognac, blood orange juice, and a vanilla-berry syrup for a seasonally appropriate sip.

15. Hot Toddy

This classic warming lemony, whiskey-based cocktail will give you all the fuzzy fall feels.

16. Smoky Pear and Ginger Margarita

Fresh ginger, candied ginger, and pear juice usher in our favorite fall flavors for this mezcal margarita.

17. Change of Address from Eric Nelson

Looking for a nonalcoholic cocktail recipe for fall? Leave it to Julia Bainbridge to come up with a totally wacky combination of Coca-Cola, maple syrup, and soy sauce that somehow works brilliantly.

18. Spiced Pecan Margarita from A-K Hada

“This margarita hits all of the warm baking spice notes you’d find in pecan pie, thanks to a homemade tea and pecan orgeat (a sweet syrup typically made with almonds and orange flower water),” writes recipe developer A-K Hada.

19. Apple Peel Bourbon Ginger Shake-Up

If it’s got apple in the name and it’s after October 1st, then I’ll take a double, please and thank you. This fall cocktail is made with our homemade ​​Apple Peel Bourbon, plus triple sec and two varieties of bitters.

20. Fresh Apple Shrub

OK, this isn’t exactly a cocktail. It’s a recipe for drinking vinegar, in which fruit (in this case, apples) are steeped in a combination of vinegar and sugar for a few days. From here, you can drink it as is for a refreshingly not-sweet non-alcoholic cocktail or mix it with liquor for a fall beverage.

21. Kentucky Hot Toddy

A hot toddy is undeniably the perfect cold-weather beverage. Instead of just a lemon wedge floating in the cocktail, we added both Meyer lemon and blood orange juices to the bourbon-honey blend for a better-than-ever fruity flavor.