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Trump sought to settle scores during dark, 90-minute Georgia speech

Donald Trump traveled to Georgia on Saturday where the former Republican president repeatedly slammed the state’s GOP governor while describing America as a dystopian hellscape under President Joe Biden.

Trump has been livid since Kemp refused to overturn the state’s 2020 election, which was won by Biden.

“You’re not going to have a country left. If you want to have a country left you must elect no Democrats and vote only for America first Republicans,” Trump said near the beginning of the rally.

But he soon began attacking Kemp, who is facing re-election in 2022. And he repeatedly suggested likely Democratic Party challenger Stacey Abrams might be a better governor.

Trump demanded that Georgia voters replace Kemp and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

Trump’s fixation with his conspiracy theories about the 2020 election dominated his speech. Despite the controversial Cyber Ninjas audit in Arizona confirming he also lost that state, Trump demanded that the state decertify Biden’s victory.

Trump didn’t just criticize those who refused to go along with his “Big Lie” of election fraud, he also defended those who acted upon his conspiracy theories. Trump mentioned Ashli Babbit and said that people charged for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol are “being held prisoner, very unfairly.”

The 90-minute rant was detached enough from reality for Trump to deny having a big mouth while bragging about his honesty.

“Only Murders in the Building” makes me long to reconnect with our elders

We moved across the country during the pandemic, which is not something I’d recommend. Making new friends as an adult is always hard, but during a deadly pandemic, the opportunities have been nonexistent. Add in the fact that I work from home as a writer, I have a child too young to be vaccinated, and I’m partially deaf (and rely on lipreading). I don’t think I’ll make a new friend in this city until the pandemic ends.

In isolation, I’ve thrown myself into work. I had a novel publish last fall, my second is releasing in October, and I’m deep into writing another. I focus on helping my son feel safe in his new school and neighborhood. And, like a lot of people during the pandemic, I watch TV. Seeking distraction, I was surprised to find real comfort in the Hulu series “Only Murders in the Building,” along with a cast of main characters that feels more than familiar. 

“Only Murders in the Building” has been praised for its sharp writing, the return pairing of Steve Martin and Martin Short, the understated comic timing of Selena Gomez. But more than anything, it makes me miss friendships: specifically, my friendships with elders.

“Only Murders,” co-created by Martin and John Hoffman, follows three neighbors in an upscale New York apartment building, The Arconia. Despite never really speaking to each other before, the neighbors discover they all obsessively follow the same true crime podcast, a kind of “Serial” knockoff. When a young, wealthy neighbor is murdered at The Arconia, Oliver (Short), an out-of-work theatre director, decides the three of them should start their own podcast and try to solve the crime. Charles (Martin), an actor who starred as a TV detective decades ago, will narrate the podcast, with research assistance by Mabel (Gomez), a secretive artist.

But that isn’t really the story. It’s certainly not the show. The show is two elderly men and a young woman hanging out — an unusual pairing, but one I’m not unfamiliar with. 

Growing up quiet because of my deafness, I was encouraged as a child to do community theatre. My parents hoped that performing might “cure” me of shyness. At nine years old, I got the very first part I auditioned for: Amaryllis in “The Music Man.” Much of the cast were retirees, people who actually had time to commit to a nightly rehearsal schedule that lasted months.  

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The woman who played Mrs. Paroo — in the show, my piano teacher’s mother — taught me to write down my blocking in the script, what shorthand to use, where to stand in the wings so I couldn’t be seen by the house. She taught me words like “house” and “wings,” “stage right” and “stage left.” She told me stories of being a young woman in the theatre — warned me away from the fire curtain, the heavy red velvet drape with chains at the bottom. As a teenager, she had it come down on her onstage and broken her leg.

After the run of that show ended, I kept performing. From then on, until I left my hometown for college, I was always in a play, usually with a whole cast of older, amateur actors. I’m not sure I became less shy — I’m still an introvert — but I made so many new friends. And always, I heard such stories. Stories of the ’60s and ’70s, stories of guitar-playing and motorcycle crashes, escaped pet snakes, addictions and auditions, art and love. I felt I was raised by a dozen grandparents, who not only helped me learn to hit my mark and project my voice, but taught me about their day jobs, told me about their marriages and divorces, the children they did and didn’t talk to, their hopes and regrets. I didn’t realize how much I was missing the presence of older people’s wisdom, stories, and humor in my life until “Only Murders.”

In the show, the three neighbors get together after The Arconia is evacuated (the dead body having been discovered by police), and they all end up at the same restaurant across the street. They share a big booth with curved, leatherette sides. They listen to a podcast episode together, debate their theories over wine and food, sticking Charles with the check.

It’s the kind of night that can’t happen anymore, that hasn’t happened since the pandemic: when you meet by chance and have a great time. When you linger over wine and hope you can see each other again.

And they do. The trio think the death is solved — as the police do, ruling it a suicide — then Mabel and Charles both alight upon the same idea in the middle of the night. They run into each other in the elevator. (They run into each other a lot.) 

“Only Murders” thrives on these coincidences. It’s not a challenging or high-tension show. The trio do some questionable things, actually illegal, including breaking and entering — but their actions are presented with low stakes nonchalance. Crime isn’t really the focus here. Companionship is. It’s wish fulfilment but of the simplest kind: longing for connection, a sort of Nancy Meyers for friends.  

“Don’t we all feel like orphans here at times,” Oliver muses as he walks the autumnal New York streets alone. His purple coat flapping open and long scarf waving behind him like Isadora Duncan, he radiates deep loneliness, the kind of pain that swims in the eyes of a person who pretends to be fine.

Charles describes Oliver as just someone he passes in the elevator twice a month. He admits he knows no one at the apartment’s memorial service for the murdered neighbor, and continually gets people’s names wrong. He’s so anxious he throws up.

“The old men are sad characters,” Mabel’s mom tells her after she brings them home for dinner. Mabel answers, “Sort of. They’re also the first friends I’ve had in a really long time.”

All three live alone, estranged from family. The show alternates POV, at least in the first few episodes, giving the major players each a turn – and all have their difficulties. Oliver has money problems. Charles struggles with anxiety severe enough it impacts his relationships. Mabel keeps her backstory and her connection to the murder victim a secret, and has not been able to get her designer career started.

The show has surreal moments — all three characters see ghosts, of sorts — and in one of its most lovely sequences, loneliness is slowed down, distilled. After leaving his son’s house without getting to see his grandchildren, Oliver receives a text from Mabel. His face lights up at the interaction, and elated, he falls off a porch and bounces back up in slo-mo. Mabel imagines an engagement ring springing onto her finger. Charles makes a perfect single egg, rather than the omelette he cooks and throws away daily, the favorite of the almost step-daughter he lost. 

Mabel is like a surrogate granddaughter to Oliver and especially Charles, but the relationship is not cloying, nor does it descend into inappropriateness. Mabel corrects the older men when they say words like “secretary” and “slacks,” and delivers the line, “old white guys are only afraid of colon cancer and societal change.” But the show doesn’t probe much deeper than that. She’s Latina and the two men are white, a fact that is rarely addressed. In Mabel’s POV episode, she relates a reccurring dream of stabbing a stranger who breaks into her apartment and stands over her bed. But that darkness has not been returned to, not yet.

“I want you to be less mean,” Charles says to Mabel, after she makes a sarcastic quip. But they never say to Mabel that grooming, yellow flag: You’re an old soul. Neither of the older men hit on her.

Maybe that’s not realistic, but that’s also what I remember from my friendships with elderly actors. Feeling safe. I remember their protectiveness and wisdom. Don’t get married too soon, an older friend told me backstage during “A Christmas Carol.” He was playing Marley. I was about to graduate high school. He who goes great places, goes them alone, another senior friend said. I remember he stopped, corrected himself. She. 

My elder friends threw me a graduation party. They sent letters when I went away to school. We wrote back and forth for a long time — real letters. And then stopped. I stopped. Maybe because I didn’t follow their advice. I did marry too soon (and didn’t get divorced soon enough). I stopped performing, tired of dealing with the young men who were creeps, of the theatre world which isn’t very disability friendly or safe. I missed my friends. Performing wasn’t the same for me without them.

But also, my life isn’t the same without them.

Like Mabel, I lived in Manhattan after college and befriended an older neighbor. In his 90s, he wore a three-piece suit every day — usually, brown tweed — and every day, went out for a stroll with his cane. We would have long talks. I named my son for him.

I had been raised a state away from my grandparents, and maybe that is part of why I connected so strongly with senior actors in community theatre, missing that connection in my life. The grandmother I was closest to died when I was nine, having made the long trip to Ohio to see me as Amaryllis before she passed. She used to call me the “showgirl in the family.”

But even though our time together was limited, I think I learned all I know of glamour from her: her bright red lipstick, even in the desolate cornfields of Indiana; how she wore matched polyester pantsuits, even just to sit on the back porch and shuck beans. From my grandfathers, both farmers as everyone in my family was, I learned foraging, caring for the earth, and patience. 

But I was the outcast in the family, the weird one who acted and wrote and sang, and the senior citizens I met in theatre knew what that was like. We didn’t fit in, just like Charles, Oliver and Mabel. In a city of creatives, the older characters hold onto their lives of art desperately, riding ancient hits as long as they can.

And one of the things “Only Murders” gets very right is the gregariousness of elder creatives: Oliver’s scarves and theatre posters, Charles slipping in dialogue from his old hit show. Maybe Mabel, just trying to break into the art world, is the showgirl in their assembled family with her throwback glamour and quirkiness. In her POV episode, her childhood unfolds like a storybook, something I would have found in my school library in the late 1980s, like “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.” She spends her nights sketching (sometimes, on the walls of her apartment). And what would she use to stab the man of her nightmares? Her knitting needles.

It’s interesting that this show, which brings the unlikely team of two elderly men and a millennial woman together, is airing now, mid-pandemic, when we’re more disconnected and lonely than ever. 

I miss the letters I used to receive, often including newspaper clippings. I miss the stories inside. I miss living my life in a way that my elder friends would be proud of: bravely, boldly, without looking back, ready for adventure.

The adventures we can have now are mostly through screens: windows, laptops, TV. But I try to remember the lessons of those older friends who survived abuse, war, unemployment, in a bank failure, losing all the money they had saved to go to college, never getting to go to college at all — this is just a season in our lives.

In Victorian houses next to mine, two elderly men live. I wave to one man every morning. The other takes walks, no matter the weather. If our orange cat is sitting in the front window, he’ll make a special trip across the street to wave hello. Our cat is part of his daily walk. Maybe one day I will be too. 

In the absence of social interaction, all we have are these small encounters, random connections that take on great meaning. But I also know: all it takes is one friend. When Charles admits that he knows no one, Mabel says simply: “You know me.” 

As for “Only Murders,” I find that I don’t care who killed the murder victim. I don’t care if the crime ever gets solved. I just want to see three friends, two of them elderly, hang out. I just want to see human connections, a simple friendship, formed because of art — and because of love, holding on.

Yale’s failed Singapore venture: More American arrogance in Asia

Yale College’s much-celebrated venture into the wealthy island city-state of Singapore seemed a harmonious convergence, the host country paying all the bills of the Yale-National University of Singapore and Yale’s visibility and allure ascending among Southeast Asia’s burgeoning middle-class families.

Yet Singapore’s dismissal of Yale, announced late last month, illuminates a lot of what has driven the Taliban’s far-more brutal expulsion of America from Afghanistan: Americans’ own addiction to a drug cocktail of evangelical arrogance and materialist, militarist blundering.

As if to confirm its anti-democratic intentions, Singapore has followed its dismissal of Yale’s liberal education by introducing a Foreign Interference Act that, “under the guise of defending national sovereignty, will enable the government to designate any independent media outlet as a foreign agent and to censor its content,” according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF). Asia Sentinel reports that the act will shutter the independent website Online Citizen, one of the only Singapore-based outlets that tells readers what the government doesn’t want them to know.

Willful innocence of other countries and cultures has driven many American military and pedagogical misadventures abroad, and it has generated bitter ironies that might be instructive if they weren’t so often forgotten. For one, Yale is named for Elihu Yale, a governor of the East India Company, one of the world’s first multinational corporations, which acquired the island of “Singapura” for the British Crown in 1812. 

For another, Yale missionaries in Singapore and China a century later pursued “the evangelization of the world in this generation,” a goal of the American Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, whose archives rest, fittingly, in the Yale Divinity School. Yale’s would-be evangelists in China parented future Yale missionaries of a different kind: Both Henry R. Luce, co-founder of Time magazine, herald of the American Century in the 1940s, and John Hersey — whose novel “The Call” depicts Christian missionaries’ blindness to host cultures’ alien cultural depths — were born in China to missionary parents near the turn of the century.

Another century later, in 2003, Yale “missionaries” figured significantly in the design and prosecution of the Iraq War: President George W. Bush; Vice President Dick Cheney (a Yale dropout, but still), Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (who, as a Yale professor, had taught a student named I. Scooter Libby, a future top Cheney aide), “axis of evil” White House speechwriter David Frum and the neoconservative polemicist Robert Kagan (shown here preening about American power and being flattened by French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin). 

In 2011, other Yale professors and their National University of Singapore counterparts sat in a mansion on a hill atop New Haven, designing a curriculum for Yale-NUS College, a “new community of learning.” That community’s first president, Yale comparative literature professor Pericles Lewis, declared that he was witnessing “the liberal arts experience made manifest” and prophesied “a place of revelatory stimulation” in the campus that Singapore was building on the other side of the world.

Skeptical of such prophesies and resentful at not having been consulted or even informed about Yale-NUS before its contractual commitment was a fait accompli, most Yale faculty at a meeting in New Haven passed a resolution warning that liberal education would be hobbled by Singapore’s “lack of respect for civil and political rights.” The American Association of University Professors sent a public letter to the Yale community and to 500,000 American professors expressing its “growing concern about the character and impact of the university’s collaboration with the Singaporean government…. In a host environment where free speech is constrained, if not proscribed, faculty will censor themselves, and the cause of authentic liberal education, to the extent it can exist in such situations, will suffer.”

Yet Yale’s trustees and administrators and some faculty marched jauntily into the clutches of Singapore’s structures and strictures. Some trustees held material interests in Singapore, as I reported at the time. As a tightly-run, relatively safe port in the storms of global capitalist exploits, Singapore welcomed the Yale investors as advisers and officers of its sovereign wealth fund, the Government Investment Corporation, chaired by the prime minister, and Temasek Holdings, which designated Yale trustee Charles Goodyear IV as its CEO in 2009.

Another trustee, Fareed Zakaria, sketched the ideological interests in “The Future of Freedom,” praising Singapore’s model of state capitalism and even Lee Kuan Yew, then its brutally authoritarian, racist ruler.

Yale President Richard Levin, an economist and apostle of a neoliberal, “World is Flat” vision, believed that the new college would enhance and enrich Singapore as a global capitalist hub with a humanist global management and investment ethos that deflects nationalist, authoritarian undercurrents.

But those swift, dark undercurrents have resurfaced with a vengeance against neoliberal gambits and dreams. Authoritarian state capitalism is rising, not only in East Asia. Even Britain may become China’s virtual island colony off the coast of Europe, somewhat as Hong Kong and Singapore became Britain’s island colonies off the coast of Asia.

In 2013, a year after the Yale faculty resolution opposed collaboration with Singapore, former Harvard president Derek Bok told me that a “run-in” with Lee Kuan Yew years earlier had convinced him not to trust authoritarian rulers who ride the golden riptides of global finance, communications, labor migration and consumer marketing, using state coercion to enforce the cohesion that their societies once drew from Confucian, Islamic or even Western colonial traditions but that they’re losing to global capitalist inequities, escapism and consequent social crises.

Rulers in Kazakhstan, Abu Dhabi and other countries have also tried to harness liberal education to finesse the brutality and hypocrisy of “go-go” economic development, seeking American colleges’ imprimaturs and instruction in the “critical thinking” and felicity in writing and speaking that a liberal education can impart to their investors, managers and spokesmen. Recalling how Lee Kuan Yew invoked “Asian values” to justify imprisoning an officer of the Harvard Club there, Bok told me, “Nothing in that experience would tempt me to try to establish a Harvard College in Singapore.” 

Reinforcing such skepticism in 2015, John Berthelsen, editor of the independent website Asia Sentinel, reported that Lee Kuan Yew’s son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, speaking at a ceremony with Yale President Levin and Yale-NUS president Pericles Lewis inaugurating the new college, warned that education there “cannot be a carbon copy of Yale in the United States if it is to succeed. Instead, it has to experiment and adapt the Yale model to Asia.”

An irony in Lee’s warning hasn’t escaped Kenneth Jeyaretnam, former secretary general of Singapore’s opposition reform party, who told me that the Singapore government “thought that it could have the trappings of a world-class liberal arts college without the freedom that goes with it, and that it could be tightly managed and spun to show the superiority of Asian values. It didn’t work out that way.”

Lee and his father’s invocations of “Asian values” veiled their narrowly instrumentalist, meticulously repressive policies: In 2013, a five-part Wall Street Journal series documented Singapore’s abuses of migrant Chinese bus drivers, a paradigm of how it treats rights-less migrants who are one-third of its population. The country’s 2014 Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, is 0.478, one of the widest in the world. The Economist, hardly an anti-capitalist or human-rights organization, publishes a rigorous Democracy Index that ranks Singapore down with Liberia, Palestine and Haiti on its measures of political freedom. 

Reporters Without Borders’ index of press freedom in 180 countries currently ranks Singapore near the bottom — No. 160, below Belarus and Sudan, its lowest ranking in the 10 years I’ve watched it drop down the list. The organization’s Index classifies Singapore as “very bad,” noting that “Despite the ‘Switzerland of the East’ label often used in government propaganda, the city-state does not fall far short of China when it comes to suppressing media freedom. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s government is always quick to sue critical journalists, apply pressure to make them unemployable, or even force them to leave the country.” (For the record, Afghanistan ranked No. 122, although that has not been updated since the U.S. departed.)

The prime minister and ruling People’s Action Party have a long record of using fine-spun, Kafkaesque legalism to block freedom of expression. Jothie Rajah’s invaluable Authoritarian Rule of Law describes their methods. Even university faculty and opposition-party leaders who speak out have been convicted by Singapore’s judiciary, bankrupted when they couldn’t pay the exorbitant fines, and, in some cases, effectively exiled.

Small wonder that Yale-NUS has been kept ever more tightly in its paymaster Singapore’s pocket. The “Yale” in its name designates merely a hired consultant. As of 2025, even that name will be gone. The many students and professors who feel betrayed by having been admitted this year under false pretenses to a college that will cease to exist after their graduation in 2025 are protesting vigorously, but to no avail.

A comprehensive, Sept. 7 Yale Daily News story reports Singapore’s claim, seconded by former Yale President Richard Levin, that the closure reflects only financial, not political problems. But Levin believes that the financial problems were surmountable. Some Singaporeans consider Yale-NUS an objectionably elitist enclave, with too many international students (approximately 40 percent of the student body), but opposition-party leader Jeyaretnam tells me that “elitism doesn’t seem to have been an issue, since 14,000 students signed the petition opposing Yale-NUS’ closing.”

Part of Singapore’s reason for dismissing American pedagogy is “navigational” in a geopolitical sense: Lee Hsien Loong likens his country to a small but doughty craft breasting powerful riptides of global economics and politics. As Beijing and Washington vie for influence in East Asia, Foreign Policy magazine reports that “China … is working hard to influence Singaporeans to take a more accommodating position toward Beijing.” Most Singaporeans and rulers are ethnically Chinese and regard China more favorably than do people in Malaysia, Indonesia or Australia. Singapore’s removal of Yale may be what it considers a modest concession to China and a way to control the college ever more tightly amid the sea change.

But a deeper reason for Singapore’s expulsion of Yale is the same one that’s been given to justify America’s expulsion from Afghanistan: For all its glitter and wealth-generating capacity, American liberal capitalism has been undermining itself with manic speed, along with the civic-republican institutions, beliefs, and liberal education that have given the system its legitimacy. Today’s ubiquitous, intrusive casino-like financing and algorithmically driven consumer marketing are groping, goosing, intimidating, surveilling, addicting, stupefying and indebting so many millions of Americans that the United States has less and less of value to export to Afghanistan or Singapore.

As I reported in Dissent magazine in 2018, the private equity baron Stephen A. Schwarzman has donated $150 million to Yale, his alma mater, to transform its historic Commons into a hive of junior business startup platforms, performance spaces and lounge areas, all of it renamed the Stephen A. Schwarzman Center. You don’t have to believe that Afghanistan will be better off for spurning such glitter, or that Singapore will be better off for repressing criticisms of its lockstep discipline, to acknowledge that the philosopher George Santayana’s vision of the American as “an idealist working on matter” and a bearer of the requisite civic virtues has been hollowed out by Americans’ obsessions with buying and consuming “matter.”

Unable or unwilling to do for New Orleans or Detroit what we couldn’t for Kandahar or Kabul, Americans are losing their mastery of the arts and disciplines of their own domestic nation-building and democracy promotion, along with liberal education’s great conversation across the ages about lasting challenges to politics and the human spirit. 

Yale excelled at these pursuits in 19th- and early 20th-century America, but it has lost its way. We’ll need to renew our own civil society’s institutions, including its colleges, as “places of revelatory stimulation,” where the experience of liberal education is “made manifest” more vividly than it has been in most of our lifetimes.

Governments paid to develop the COVID vaccines. Big Pharma wants to hoard the patents

Watching the news these days, I am often reminded of a scene from the second “Lord of the Rings” film, in which hobbits Mary and Pippin try to convince the tree-like Ents to join in the fight against evil to save Middle Earth. The Ents form a circle and, very slowly, begin conversing with each other in all their different tree languages. After what feels like an eternity, one of the hobbits asks if they have reached a decision. The Ent leader leans over with a smile and says the Ents have just finished saying hello. Meanwhile, Middle Earth is literally burning.

This is oddly reminiscent of the international crisis today. Almost a year ago, India and South Africa proposed a resolution for a patent waiver for all COVID-19 related technologies at the World Trade Organization (WTO). Essentially, the patent waiver is an assertion that a company’s patent will not be enforced; in the case of a vaccine, it means that any company or government, not just the vaccine’s creator, can use the same recipe to make the same vaccine.  

India and South Africa proposed this resolution after they realized that rich nations were quickly buying up all the vaccine doses in pre-purchasing agreements, while pharmaceutical companies showed no intention of sharing their patents and know-how with producers in developing countries.

Since their proposal, little has happened. In the eleven months since, various drafts of the resolution have been kicked around the WTO, but no final draft has been submitted and no vote scheduled. Maddeningly, one of the chief arguments Big Pharma posits for opposing the waiver is that it would take too long to build production facilities.

Fortunately for would-be vaccine producers in lower- and middle-income countries, this claim about timing is false. Evidence shows that once technology is transferred to generic drug makers, it takes on average six months to start producing vaccines. One company in Argentina was able to get up and going in three months.

But this isn’t the only lie Big Pharma is pushing to persuade rich members of the WTO that a patent waiver is unnecessary. For months, the pharma lobby has argued that even if all patents are waived, generic companies won’t be able to manufacture doses unless the originator company gives up their know-how. They say this, of course, with a straight face as if this isn’t completely in their own power to do.

In May of last year, the World Health Organisation (WHO) launched the COVID-19 Technology Transfer Pool (C-TAP), intended to serve as a global knowledge fund where pharma companies and research institutions could pool their relevant intellectual property and know-how. The aim was to ensure that all information would be publicly available in one place. The knowledge fund was created in the early days of the pandemic when world leaders shouted for a “people’s vaccine,” and governments threw heaps of taxpayer money at pharma companies to develop them.

To get an idea of why know-how transfer is important, imagine the most complex piece of Ikea furniture you’ve ever built. In this analogy, the patent is the thing that tells you what all the pieces and parts are that make up your dresser.  If you don’t want to end up putting the wooden screw in the wrong place, you need the know-how printed in the instructions, which is exactly what the pharma companies are refusing to share.  Moderna has very benevolently said it will not enforce any of its patents (though some might not be valid anyway) during the course of the pandemic, but has thus far refused to give up its know-how so that other companies can copy its vaccine making recipe.

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This situation could easily have been avoided. While the U.S. and other countries were busy dishing out money in unprecedented amounts so that companies like Moderna could produce vaccines in record time, they neglected to contractually require pharmaceutical companies to contribute their patents and know-how to the C-TAP. As of today, the C-TAP is empty of any relevant intellectual property for COVID vaccines — including patents, data, and technology.

Another argument Big Pharma gives against the patent waiver is that it will undermine innovation — because, in their words, companies will be less likely to invest in making vaccines if they think they won’t make enough money to cover their costs.

This argument is easily debunked. Much of the cost of innovation was paid for in public funds. The Oxford (AstraZeneca) vaccine received 97% of its funding from public institutions. The Moderna vaccine was 100% funded by US taxpayers. And Pfizer received nearly half a billion from the German government. This means that taxpayers de-risked the pharma companies of their investment to the tune of $112 billion in less than a year.

Pharma companies also say that pooling intellectual property is useless because vaccine manufacturing is at full capacity and there aren’t any more generics companies out there that could make vaccines. This is also not true. Teva Pharmaceuticals in Israel announced they were giving up plans to manufacture vaccines because they did not manage to negotiate a license, and companies in India and Canada have said they are ready and willing to begin producing vaccines once they have access to the know-how and patent rights are waived.

While WTO member states are busing arguing over how to phrase the patent waiver, the pharma lobby has argued that developing countries should make use of the so-called “TRIPS flexibilities” that allow for compulsory licensing. These provisions allow countries to bypass patents without the owner’s consent, but only for domestic use. There is one provision known as Article 31bis which allows for the export of pharmaceutical products, but it is so cumbersome and difficult to use that it has only been used once. A generic drug company in Canada is trying to use Article 31bis to produce 15 million doses for Bolivia, but in six months hasn’t managed to get a compulsory licence because their request is lost in an administrative juggernaut.

While the WTO is deciding whether to get its act together, poor countries have had to rely on charity handouts from COVAX, a worldwide initiative for equitable vaccine access, to deliver vaccines. So far, there have been over six billion doses of the COVID vaccines distributed globally, but they have been far from equitably distributed; notably, only 2% have gone to the African continent.

On September 16, the WHO announced that COVAX will have to slash 150 million doses for Africa, and that an additional 470 million doses are needed to reach the goal of vaccinating 40% of the population by year end. Last week the continent recorded 8 million cases. The actual number is apt to be much higher. 

Big Pharma is quick to point out that they have brokered contracts with manufacturers in India and South Africa, the same two countries that have requested the waiver, and that because they are actively engaging with biotech companies there is no need to waive patent rights. Yet many of the doses produced in those developing countries were not for domestic use, and instead were shipped off to rich countries who already had contracts for more doses than they have people.

Johnson and Johnson, the maker of the single-dose vaccine, is producing 600 million doses at the Indian biotech company Biological E, but will likely export those doses to the EU and the US. Last month former UK Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that 10 million doses produced in South Africa were being shipped abroad, despite the fact that only a small fraction of the African population had been vaccinated.

The reason for this inequality is simple. The pharmaceutical companies have monopoly rights so they get to decide who gets the vaccines and at what cost. Earlier this year Oxfam reported that Pfizer and Moderna are charging governments as much as $41 billion dollars more than the cost of production for vaccines, and that vaccines could be five times cheaper if pharma companies weren’t profiting from their monopolies.

In February, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that Pfizer resorted to “bullying tactics” with two Latin American countries during negotiations, which led to months of delays and included the request that sovereign assets be used as collateral for payments. If generics companies in the developing world didn’t have to worry about being sued for patent infringement, they would be one step closer to producing vaccines for their own people and at a price they can afford.

In May of this year, President Biden managed to shock the pharma industry when his administration announced its support for the patent waiver. But despite his support, the waiver still faces an uphill battle at the WTO where all 164 member states much reach a consensus, with any single nation able to issue a veto. This means that a final resolution of the waiver is likely to be a much-watered down version of the original, and that is if any resolution gets a vote at all.

In their opposition to the waiver, the pharma industry has forgotten that a patent is a bargain between society and an inventor. It allows the inventor to receive financial compensation in the form of a temporary monopoly while society enjoys the benefit of the invention. In most cases this bargain equally benefits both sides and encourages innovation so that society can evolve. But something about that bargain is fundamentally broken when society gives the pharma industry billions of dollars to fund medical research, and is then held to ransom with zero say in how that medicine is used.

Like with many things in life, there isn’t one easy solution that will solve a very complex problem. Big Pharma is right to say a patent waiver alone won’t close the growing disparity in vaccine distribution, but it is a necessary part of a multi-faceted solution that includes know-how transfer and temporarily forfeiting intellectual property rights in order to put saving lives first and profit second. Breaking the patents and sharing the know-how would give developing countries the tools they need to be self-reliant in a time of crisis so that they do not need to depend on the charity handouts of wealthy nations who have monopolies on producing life-saving medicines.

Book review: A scientist’s life in the treetops

When you consider that “upward of half of all terrestrial creatures live about 100 feet or more above our heads,” as biologist Meg Lowman notes in “The Arbornaut: A Life Discovering the Eighth Continent in the Trees Above Us,” it makes sense for scientists to go to where the action is. But it’s only been in recent decades that researchers have systematically explored the canopies of the world’s tropical and temperate forests, in large part due to the efforts of so-called arbornauts like Lowman.

It’s daunting work, and often dangerous. And while there have been others in the past who have used ropes and climbing gear to conduct scientific research, Lowman in 1979 pioneered a simple method of rigging a tree for climbing using a slingshot. Essentially, from the ground she shoots a weighted fishing line into the upper branches of the tree, then attaches that fishing line to a nylon cord and hauls it over the same pathway. She then ties a heavier climbing rope to the nylon cord and pulls it up and over the support branch.

Lowman and an Australian colleague also did groundbreaking work building canopy walkways. During a field trip with Earthwatch, an organization that matches citizen scientists with researchers around the world, one of the volunteers got her hair caught on the climbing rope. She had to cut her hair without cutting the rope to free herself — a dicey situation, especially for a volunteer. So Lowman and the owner of the lodge at which they were working discussed how they could bring climbers safely into the canopy via an aerial path. This would also be a boon for research, as many researchers could work in the canopy at the same time. The next year, the world’s first canopy walkway was constructed in Lamington National Park in Queensland, Australia. Lowman has also accessed the canopy using construction cranes and an inflatable raft attached to a dirigible.

The book traces her scientific career, from her study of plants and bird eggs as a child in upstate New York, to her undergraduate years studying tree growth and her master’s research studying tree phenology (spring leafing), and finally to her Ph.D. work, where she got into her specialty: the effects of plant-eating insects on the leaves of tropical trees. The field was understudied because most researchers didn’t access the canopy to measure it — and it’s that access that Lowman developed.

She repeatedly notes that there is a research bias when scientific findings are based on studies done just on the forest floor or in the lower parts of trees, excluding the canopy. She likens it to looking just at someone’s big toe to diagnose an illness.

One of Lowman’s recurring themes is the importance of the scientific process, which she expresses as a series of iterative questions; indeed, the longest section of the book describes her Ph.D. research and the additional sub-studies she did to rule out bias in her main study. The reader is bombarded with experiment after experiment that Lowman conducted to answer smaller questions that arose during the course of her research, like whether insects are drawn to eat the water-resistant ink she uses to label leaves; whether they can find their way back to their food source if they fall out of the canopy; and whether young or old leaves are more toxic to the creatures.

Lowman also discusses the struggle of women in science, writing that “over my 11 years in Australia, I experienced more sexual advances by male colleagues during fieldwork than can be counted on both hands.” She married an Australian rancher during her postdoctoral research and recalls coping with rural Australia’s sexist attitude toward professional women like her. She writes about doing canopy research from a cherry picker bucket while pregnant and how she hid her scientific journals inside copies of Woman’s Weekly magazine so her mother-in-law wouldn’t find fault in her homemaking. She applied for a professorship at an Australian university but was denied because she says the hiring committee believed “a farmer’s wife, and especially a young mother, could not possibly undertake a professorship.” But when she was offered a visiting professorship at Williams College in the U.S., she took it, marking the end of her marriage and the beginning of her long career as a single mother and scientist.

After she left Williams due to a change in administration, Lowman cycled through a series of positions in American museums and resigned from each one after what she claims was poor treatment by her immediate (male) superiors for being a woman in science. As Lowman writes: “My female peers and I may have been trailblazers in field biology, but we bruised ourselves on a glass ceiling every time we reached beyond what was expected, so much so that I came to anticipate — and even worse, tolerate — the bruises.” This section, while brief, highlights the problems for women in science, and shows that, in the absence of female mentors, women at the top of the science ladder have little support to keep them there.

Canopy Meg, as Lowman is known, is now a “freelance explorer-author” who runs two organizations: the TREE Foundation, a nonprofit promoting forest research and education, and Mission Green, which promotes building canopy walkways and ecotourism to preserve biodiversity. Lowman sees herself as a bridge builder in more than the literal sense. “Part of the joy of scientific discovery is sharing it with others,” she writes.

Now in her late 60s, she has been instrumental in getting scientists who use wheelchairs into the canopy via her rope techniques. For 25 years, she has hosted annual trips to the Peruvian Amazon for citizen scientists who want to learn about the tropical forest canopy. Her canopy work has taken her to Malaysia, where she hosted a “BioBlitz” to help volunteers identify all the species they could find in the forest in 10 days. She has also worked with researchers and local priests in Ethiopia to protect the remnant forests that surround their churches. And in India she worked with local scientists to train arbornauts and enhance canopy studies by hosting an international conference.

Structured more or less chronologically, the book’s timeline is nevertheless a bit confusing in places. Though Lowman writes in the first person, it’s expository prose, filled with minutia about tree life and her research methods, but with virtually no dialogue to liven things up. She winds up telling, not showing, readers her life story, and while her writing is generally accessible, the frequent use of Latin names and detailed scientific descriptions might be distracting for a non-specialist audience.

Nonetheless, Lowman has had a fascinating journey. While she may have been a lone arbornaut when she started climbing into the forest canopy, she is now one of hundreds worldwide. “As an arbornaut,” she writes, “I shout ceaselessly about the importance of trees and how they keep the planet healthy as well as all of humankind.”

* * *

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

“The Morning Show” reveals just how unfair the aftermath of sexual misconduct can be

Apple TV+’s “The Morning Show” is back to continue its examination of the behind-the-scenes drama of an infotainment program that was rocked by a sexual harassment scandal.

Much of “The Morning Show” thus far has paralleled the saga of Matt Lauer, who was terminated from his hosting duties at NBC when several women alleged he had raped and harassed them back in 2017. Lauer initially sought a $30 million payout from NBC but was ultimately denied, and the company also refused to pay him severance or pay the remainder of his multi-million dollar contract. 

“The Morning Show,” of course, goes a different route, instead highlighting one of several ways abusive men with power are able to evade accountability or go on living highly privileged lives while their victims face consequences.

This season, Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) and Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) are back to being co-hosts and rivals after joining forces last season to expose their network covering up sexual misconduct. The series also decides to continue the story of Mitch Kessler (Steve Carrell), the infamous “Morning Show” host who was terminated for sexually harassing fellow employees, including the show’s talent booker Hannah Shoenfeld (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who later killed herself.

Although none of us care or have asked what happens to ousted sexual abusers, “The Morning Show” appears determined to tell us from Mitch’s point of view. And the unglamorous answer is, not a whole lot. Mitch’s days so far seem spent eating gelato and feeling sorry for himself in a beautiful new house in Italy where he lives alone. In the most recent episode released Friday, we learn in addition to Mitch’s contract being paid out, his enabler, former UBA President Fred Micklen (Tom Irwin) received a $119.2 million payout from the fictional UBA network, and we’re not the only ones who know this. 

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Since Hannah’s tragic death, her family is suing UBA, blaming Hannah’s employer for inflicting the distress that seemingly led to her death by overdose. This season, network executive Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup) receives word that the family is demanding a $119.2 million settlement — an apparent nod to the generous payout involving Mitch’s sexual misconduct at UBA, and a demand that will all but force the lawsuit to go to trial. 

Since the advent of #MeToo, at least, most sexual harassment-related payouts are hefty sums paid to the victims not the perpetrators. Earlier this year, Harvey Weinstein’s victims agreed to a $17 million payout, which will at least attempt to compensate for the trauma he inflicted upon dozens of women. For victims of workplace sexual harassment who are employed by the government and seek compensation, the cost of sexual harassers’ bad behaviors is footed by taxpayers.

On “The Morning Show,” instead of being offered a payout, Hannah had been offered a significant promotion and raise in exchange for her silence, when she first attempted to report the incident of Mitch taking advantage of her. Now, after her death, her family is seeking the same payout that Mitch received for leaving UBA.

Hannah’s story is a tragedy that looms throughout the early part of this season, even as the same petty dramas and conflicts have picked up again, and UBA’s “Morning Show” scrambles to piece together some semblance of normalcy. Her story is especially haunting as it ultimately suggests that no compensation or benefit could really heal a victim or negate their trauma. Hannah’s raise didn’t save her life — and likewise, her family knows that $119.2 million, a sum that may or may not be paid, won’t bring her back. 

Rather, the specific demand for the same payout that was given to the man who harmed Hannah is a sharp, poignant criticism of the ways that powerful men who have harmed or allegedly harmed women continue their lives, undisrupted. Mitch’s comfortable, ex-pat life in Italy is one version of this, but many more continue to unfold all around us, in real time.

Johnny Depp, accused of domestic abuse by ex-wife Amber Heard, excoriated “cancel culture” while simultaneously accepting the honorary Donostia Award at this year’s San Sebastian Film Festival. Last month, CNN reported former “Good Morning America” boss Michael Corn had been accused of sexually assaulting two women, only to comfortably land as a head of news at Nexstar. Louis CK is back on tour, posing sarcastically before “SORRY” signs in a manner that suggests he actually isn’t very sorry at all for the inappropriate sexual acts he’s confessed to. “Cancel culture” sure doesn’t seem to have the stigma or impact that these men are claiming it does. 

In many cases, life goes on for men like Mitch and Fred, with or without a $119.2 million payout and an Italian mansion with a view. They may be denied an opportunity here and there, for valid concerns about workplace safety, but for sexual harassers with a lower profile, many can move from workplace to workplace unscathed. 

Per the Harvard Business Review, the former employers of workers who leave over sexual misconduct issues don’t have a legal obligation to tell their workers’ new employer about this misconduct. In high-profile cases involving the Red Cross in 2012, and Reuters in 2016, Harvard Business Review notes that individuals accused of harassment and misconduct at these employers were easily able to find jobs at equally prominent institutions, shortly after.

Much of Mitch’s screen time this season of “The Morning Show” has been cringe-inducing thus far. His story feels like an uncomfortable plea for audiences — many of whom have endured mistreatment not unlike what Mitch has perpetrated — to feel sorry for an abusive, exploitative man now living a luxurious life in Italy. Thankfully, at the very least, the haunting continuation of Hannah’s storyline disrupts this pity party, reminding us whose lives often can and can’t go back to normal after sexual trauma.

The Morning Show” releases new episodes on Fridays on Apple TV+.

FDR once tried to purge disloyal Democrats — would it work for Biden to do the same?

Allan Lichtman has a track record of accurately predicting presidential elections, and is generally an astute observer of the American political scene. So I paid attention when Lichtman, a political science professor at American University, told me it would be disastrous for President Biden to go to war against Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and the other centrist Democrats jamming him up in Congress. 

Lichtman was fully aware that progressives were eager to purge obstructionist Democrats, or at least punish them somehow for constricting or defeating Biden’s legislative agenda. I had already spoken to a historian — Harvey J. Kaye, the editor of “FDR on Democracy” — who pithily summed up the logic behind that point of view.

“Look, there’s two choices,” Kaye said. “For the sake of the future, he should literally go after them, period.” His “them” clearly referred to Manchin and Sinema. “But for the sake of democracy in the near term, what happens if the Republicans win?” Kaye added that he could not understand “why Biden hasn’t called Manchin” and the others and told them that their political survival depended on toeing the line.

In my conversation with Lichtman, he quoted humorist Will Rogers‘ famous quip: “I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat.” Kaye said basically the same thing. I reached out to both of them for Salon about the most conspicuous example of a president turning against legislators from his own party: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempt to purge right-wing Democrats in the 1938 midterm elections. My primary question was about what lessons Biden could learn from that moment, given that his own presidency may go down in flames because of intransigent “moderate” Democrats.

FDR certainly wasn’t the first Democratic president to turn against members of his own party. In 1918, Woodrow Wilson campaigned against five Southern legislators who opposed his World War I policies, and only one of them actually defeated his Wilson-backed challenger. But that was a different era, when the Democratic Party’s chaos led to an ideological vacuum. Instead of trying to fill that vacuum, Wilson weeded out politicians who opposed him on a specific set of policies that were widely supported by both parties. So there’s no clear parallel to Biden in 2021.

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Roosevelt’s situation was at least somewhat similar. He explicitly wanted the 1938 midterm elections to realign the Democratic Party in a more liberal direction. Speaking to the nation in a “Fireside Chat” on June 24, Roosevelt characterized the coming primaries as containing “many clashes between two schools of thought, generally classified as liberal and conservative.” Liberals recognized “that the new conditions throughout the world call for new remedies,” while conservatives do not “recognize the need for government itself to step in and take action to meet these new problems.” Concerned that obstructionist members of Congress might roll back his achievements in creating unemployment insurance, old age pensions, anti-monopoly measures and regulation of the financial industry, Roosevelt accused them of wanting a return “to the kind of government that we had in the 1920s.” He didn’t need to remind his listeners that those policies had plunged America into the Great Depression. As he saw it, Democrats needed to rid themselves of the conservatives who hindering his vision before they destroyed his new liberal coalition.

Well: It didn’t work. FDR targeted Rep. John J. O’Connor of New York, then chairman of the House Rules Committee, along with 10 Democratic senators, and only O’Connor was defeated in a primary. This was more than an immediate political setback for Roosevelt, although it definitely counted as that. (Democrats lost seven seats in the Senate and 72 in the House, although they started out with such a huge margin they still retained control of Congress.) In a way, his desire to realign American politics along more ideological lines worked. Right-wing Democrats from the South realized they had common cause with conservative Republicans from the Midwest, and their “conservative coalition” controlled Congress for a generation, shaping national policy regardless of which party officially had a majority. If anything, Roosevelt weakened the liberal cause rather than strengthening it. His only consolation was that many of the policies he was worried would get targeted wound up staying intact.

While the parallels between Roosevelt’s predicament and Biden’s are inexact, they are similar in the big ways that count. Biden’s critics on the left want him to wage political war against the likes of Manchin, Sinema, and Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, middle-path Democrats who appear willing to sacrifice his entire agenda in the interest of “bipartisanship.” It sounds like strength. It almost certainly would not work.

As Kaye pointed out, Biden simply doesn’t have the votes that FDR did, either in Congress or the nation at large. Roosevelt was a deeply beloved figure who had won re-election in 1936 in what at the time was the biggest electoral landslide in history. Biden, although he won decisively in 2020, has a narrower mandate. Lichtman noted that attacking moderate Democrats would imperil the Senate, where even one lost seat would swing the 50-50 body to the Republicans. If Democrats wanted a coalition large enough to render the “centrists” irrelevant, they would need to turn out in larger numbers and elect more Democrats to Congress and local offices. That hasn’t happened, and at this moment Biden’s legislative coalition is not large enough, nor is his popular support deep enough, even to contemplate Roosevelt’s strategy — which, again, did not even work out for the most popular president of the 20th century.

The underlying problem, perhaps, is that the Democratic Party, in its current form, is fundamentally incompetent. Salon executive editor Andrew O’Hehir addressed this a recent article about Democrats’ failure to eliminate the filibuster and protect voting rights.

This isn’t a nice thing to say about a bunch of mostly sane and approximately reasonable people, but here’s the truth: If you set out to design a left-center political party that was fated to surrender, little by little, to authoritarianism — because of circumstances beyond its control, because of internal indecision and ideological fuzziness, because it faced an entrenched and deranged opposition party, because of whatever — you could hardly do better than the current version of the Democratic Party.

This isn’t just about Kyrsten Sinema flipping on prescription drug prices right after taking large campaign donations from Big Pharma. Democrats seem incapable of addressing the fundamental problems with our economy and lacks the internal cohesion to stand up to Republicans who are using Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election to erode or eliminate democracy. Those issues can’t be corrected by defeating Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — which is also probably impossible and likely undesirable. The Democratic Party’s best hope is to make itself relevant and vital again, which is a much larger problem.  

Host for extremist sites subpoenaed by law enforcement following Jan. 6, hacked documents show

Researchers of online extremism were given a treasure trove of information following the hack and release of documents from Epik, a provider of internet services which rose to prominence working for those who had been kicked off other platforms.

“The breach of Epik’s internal records has cast a spotlight on a long-hidden corner of the Internet’s underworld, and researchers expect it could take months before they can process the full cache — the equivalent of tens of millions of pages. Many are digging for information on who owns and administers extremist domains about which little was previously known,” The Washington Post reported Saturday.

Extremism researcher Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, explained the importance of the lead to the newspaper.

“This is like the mother of all data lodes because Epik was at the center of so many of the extremist websites and organizations that people like me study. Epik was the place of last refuge for a lot of these sites,” said Beirich, co-founder of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “And as the data is analyzed and looked at more deeply, we’re going to see this ecosystem in a way that was simply not possible before.”

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The leak is also shedding light on the law enforcement response to the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump seeking to overturn the 2020 election, which was won by Joe Biden.

“The data includes internal memos describing apparent subpoenas from law-enforcement agencies for information about Epik-registered websites, including two domains, Thedonald.win and Maga.host, in the weeks after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6,” the newspaper reported. “One of the internal notes, which appeared to have been written by an Epik employee, mentions a grand jury subpoena, a request to preserve records for 90 days and a nondisclosure order — a court-approved document that law enforcement can secure to prohibit tech companies from telling customers what information they’d shared as part of an investigation. ‘DO NOT tell Registrant,’ read the note, which did not include further details of the investigation.”

Read the full report.

 

‘Pureblood’: Anti-vax TikTokers circulate new meme to promote COVID vaccine misinformation

A new trend circulating on TikTok is further contributing to the anti-vaccination extremism and the rapid spread of misinformation regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to Crooks and Liars, the hashtag #PureBlood shows that supporters of the far-right are not only “unable to distinguish between J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter wizarding world and their own, but simultaneously appear either oblivious to the fact that either they’re identifying with the story’s fascists, or perhaps wink-and-nudgingly embracing their eugenics.”

Vice reporter Tess Owens initially reported on the disturbing trend. According to Owens, self-proclaimed “purebloods” are individuals who are not vaccinated for COVID. In one TikTok video on the topic, the onscreen caption read, “We will No longer be referred To as Unvaxxed… We simply go by….” Then the phrase “Pureblood” appeared on the screen in red letters.

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One TikTok influencer named Lyndsey Marie helped popularize the trend when she made a declaration in support of it. In a video, she said, “From now on, I refuse to be referred to as ‘unvaccinated. I want everyone to now call me Pureblood.” The video, which received more than 250,000 views before Marie changed the viewing setting to private, has spawned a number of other similar videos from other TikTokers.

According to Daily Kos writer Aysha Qamar the latest pureblood trend underscores a growing problem on TikTok, as it has become a driving force for the spread of more Covid misinformation.

“A newly released Homeland Security briefing found that insurrectionists used TikTok to spread information about the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and interfere with the National Guard during the riot and information about how to access the White House via tunnels and sabotage railroad tracks. According to the briefing document, domestic extremists have been using TikTok since October of 2019 to “recruit adherents, promote violence, and disseminate tactical guidance for use in various terrorist or criminal activities.

“According to another report published in August 2021 by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (IDS), at least 491 accounts were found that shared a combined number of 1,030 videos that promoted hatred, extremism, and terrorism. … At the time of writing the report, the Institute found that 81.5% of the extremist videos they identified on the platform were still live.”

Social media networks are continuing their fight against misinformation, but content is plentiful.

Why reducing lead exposure is part of an Orange County city’s new climate pledge

The city council of Santa Ana, the predominantly Latino county seat of Orange County, California,  approved a cutting-edge resolution this month that not only declares a climate emergency, but simultaneously pledges that the city will limit or prevent exposure to lead and other environmental toxins among its population of more than 300,000 people.  

The resolution, approved by a 6-1 vote on Tuesday, September 7, ensures that initiatives implemented to slow the climate crisis are paired with policies to mitigate economic inequalities, environmental injustices, and public health risks tied to pollution in vulnerable communities. 

By passing the measure, the city council acknowledges the impact of climate change in driving up temperatures, increasing the frequency of extreme heat events, and exacerbating drought. As a remedy, the city is pledging to implement policies that promote decarbonization and electrification of buildings and transportation, mitigate greenhouse gas emissions across all industries and communities, and accelerate a clean-energy transition. In the resolution, Santa Ana declares its intent to transition to 100 percent clean, renewable, zero-carbon emission energy sources for its electric power supply before 2045. 

The council then goes beyond simply climate, connecting warming to winds that can reintroduce soil lead into the atmosphere as soil dust. It commits to investigate and implement policies to limit or prevent exposure to lead and other environmental toxins from new and existing sources. Additionally, the city pledges to consider further measures to remediate contaminants putting Santa Ana residents in harm’s way. 

The resolution drew praise from across the country, including from Ruth Ann Norton, president and chief executive officer of the nonprofit Green & Healthy Homes Initiative in Baltimore, Maryland, who has spearheaded efforts to aggressively reduce childhood lead poisoning. She views Santa Ana’s resolution as a potential model that lays the groundwork for other cities to tackle issues that she sees as inseparable.  

“What we’re really seeing here is the understanding and the crescendo of environmental justice and climate and legacy pollution all coming together as properly interlinked,” said Norton, who specifically applauded the resolution’s centering of healthy housing and public health as an integral part of the city’s efforts to address the climate crisis. 

Santa Ana City Councilmember Jessie Lopez, who introduced the resolution earlier this year, told Grist that the current council is taking a step previous ones had failed to take: acknowledging the lead contamination that exists throughout the city. “The fact is that we have known about lead in the city for a really long time, and what has been done about that? Absolutely, to the best of my knowledge, nothing,” Lopez said at last week’s meeting. “So yes, we need something like this to keep ourselves accountable, and not just to do that, but to acknowledge the issues in our community.”

Lopez, who was elected to the city council last fall, was born and raised in one of Santa Ana’s densely populated central city neighborhoods. She said she first learned of the city’s soil-lead contamination issues through the public advocacy organization Orange County Environmental Justice, or OCEJ,  which is part of a coalition of residents, advocates, and academic scholars that has for more than three years raised awareness about the dangers of lead exposure in Santa Ana. That coalition has conducted soil lead testing throughout the city, and pressed city officials and the Orange County Health Care Agency to more aggressively address the problem. 

In 2020, it released a study, led by a team of researchers at the University of California, Irvine, that analyzed more than 1,500 soil samples collected throughout the city. The survey found a higher incidence of lead contamination in the city’s poorest neighborhoods — areas with the highest percentages of young children, residents without health insurance, and renters. 

The research followed on findings from my own 2017 investigation that found soil lead levels surpassing what the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment considers dangerous for children in nearly a quarter of more than 1,000 soil tests conducted in the city’s predominantly immigrant and low-income neighborhoods. That same investigation showed that the ratio of Santa Ana children who had dangerous levels of lead in their blood exceeded the state average by 64 percent, and that Latino children represented a majority of children who are lead poisoned statewide, based on public health data. 

What concerned Lopez, and ultimately led to her proposing the resolution the city council passed last week, was a lack of action on the part of the city, which is nearly 78-percent Latino and also skews young, with about 27 percent of the population under the age of 18. (By comparison, statewide in California 22.5 percent of the population is under 18.) After all, in 2012, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had declared that no level of lead is safe for children. 

The resolution’s passage was a victory for OCEJ. Patricia J. Flores Yrarrázaval, the organization’s project director, was especially pleased that the measure will tackle lead exposure in tandem with renter protections to prevent the displacement of residents during and after home remediation clean-up efforts. This is one of the key policy recommendations the organization has pressed for during discussions with the city about addressing lead contamination in the current update to Santa Ana’s general plan.  “One of our biggest concerns is trying to make these policies comprehensive and intersectional,” said Flores Yrarrázaval. “We need things like rental protection in order to make sure that current residents ​​— the residents who really built this city — can benefit from a healthier environment.” 

The strategy of addressing climate change while also tackling existing environmental burdens in low-income communities is an approach that advocates like Ruth Norton of the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative have pushed for with federal agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Energy. The idea is that before working on climate-forward improvements such as energy efficiency, weatherization, and electrification in low income and older communities, those places must first achieve a baseline of health and safety. That means addressing lead contamination and the conditions and structural factors that trigger asthma, for example. 

“Ground zero really is: Address these contamination issues so that we can advance the other work and investment that needs to happen,” Norton said. “These things, some of them may be seen as lofty ideas or goals; they are actually extraordinarily practical when you get to the implementation side of what is needed and what we have longed incrementalized and not invested in.” 

Specifically addressing lead within the larger climate emergency resolution made sense to Lopez, who considers exposure to the toxic metal to be part of the broader environmental injustices occurring in Santa Ana, in addition to disparities in who within the city limits suffers from extreme heat and air pollution. Putting lead at the center of a climate plan that will create an overall healthier environment for Santa Ana residents means that funding for this issue will be prioritized, she said, noting that the city has already applied for federal Housing and Urban Development funds to address hazards from lead-based paint. 

“It’s not something that we’re going to have a solution for overnight,” said Lopez. “But I know that this is a really good step.” 

Rapture in the Zoom

During the first July of the pandemic, my brother died on the floor of his living room in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Already for months we’d been reminded via Zoom how people can disappear in a blink. Thunder cracks and bulbs darken. Suddenly, faces freeze, startled, as if Mt. Vesuvius had just erupted and they’d caught their first sight of falling ash. My last conversation with my brother was via text. My last update about my brother was via Facebook. I found his body by calling the police in Tulsa and requesting a welfare check, so technically, they’re the ones who found him. He was on the floor, the officer told me two hours later. The living room floor. It looked like he’d collapsed while heading to the kitchen for a snack.

On Zoom, people are often abruptly snatched away: one taken, the rest left, like the rapture. My brother disappeared like someone fading into cyberspace, caught between breakout rooms. My younger brother drove from Kansas to Tulsa that night to close up the house. “It was like a crime scene,” he said. I pictured yellow tape, chalk outlining the shape of a body. You forget, from a distance, about the messiness of death.

As I made plans to drive to Tulsa from Pennsylvania, that image repeated in my mind: my brother falling, my brother lying there for who knows how long, moments, hours, days, his frantic cat pawing at him.  Did he know he was dying? Did he suffer? Did he try to call for help? It was hard to bear this thought. To imagine the waiting, the hoping, the dawning of understanding. What was I doing those last hours as my constant, my closest of kin, the brother who frustrated and exasperated and entertained and amused me, quietly left this earth?  

Sometimes on Zoom, movements turn jerky like stop-motion claymation, or supermodels freezing into sequences of seductive poses. Or eyes and cheeks and mouths dissolve into a series of squares. And then the people shapeshift back to themselves, back to fluid human movement, like nothing ever happened. So I think about my brother, maybe this was a mistake, maybe that wasn’t actually him, maybe he’s actually in a hotel or hospital somewhere, maybe this was a practical joke, maybe it was just a brief blip of the internet.

But often on Zoom, when people freeze the internet fails to recover, and they are abruptly zapped away, wiped from the screen, with everyone else’s squares rearranging and enlarging to take their place.

My younger brother and cousins arrived in Tulsa before me. I drove up to what looked like a garage sale, furniture crowding the driveway. “It smelled pretty bad,” said a cousin. “We just wanted to get it out of the house.”

For some reason, I thought he meant everything smelled like cat pee. The first thing I noticed, walking into the sweltering living room, was the big black stain on the hardwood floor. It was the first thing anyone would notice, but we all carefully avoided staring at it. I knew it was the place where my brother had fallen and died, but I couldn’t quite process that stain, the idea that death is this messy thing that leaves behind its imprint in wood. I kept imagining there had been an overflowing litter box here, or that the cat was so distressed that she peed and pooped everywhere. My cousin’s new wife, an RN, told me that she’d cleaned up the floor. I said, “Oh, thank you for cleaning up the cat poop,” and she exchanged a glance with her husband.

My cousin said gently, “It wasn’t from the cat. There was blood and tissue everywhere.”

His wife had paused to retch as she scrubbed up blood, a piece of an ear. “I’m not immediate family, I didn’t know him that well,” she told me. “I didn’t want any of you to have to do it. I did it as respectfully as possible.” It looked like he pitched forward, she said, hit his head on the tile, split it open.

So did he stumble, did his legs go out, did he sustain a head injury, did he have a stroke, a low blood sugar episode, a heart attack?  Did the blow to the head take him out right away? Did the cat wander around crying as fluids seeped into the floorboards?

We are all only one fall from our lives changing forever, one of my boyfriend’s sisters said recently. Though I am younger, I too have a terror of falling. About ten days before she died, my mom fell inside the train station where she’d arrived to visit me. For so many people — my step-grandma, my boyfriend’s father, a friend who was energetic into her 80s — a fall is the beginning of the end.  

Almost six months before my brother fell in his living room and died, I fell and broke my arm. I’d been tubing, only moments before pummeling down an icy lane in an inner tube that slipped and skittered from side to side, threatening to plunge into an adjoining lane. The cold felt brutal, the wind like a wall my head kept bashing into until I was dizzy, my heart pounding. I was desperate to stop, go inside, warm up. The inner tube cruised to a halt, but when I stood, my peripheral vision disappeared. Blackness closed in. My feet hit unpredictable every-which-way ridges of ice and I went slamming down. My left arm shot out to catch me.

After my brother’s death, the funeral home was hushed, solemn and serious. Death during COVID is so complicated, most of the usual rituals impossible. Time Magazine reported that Jewish people couldn’t sit shiva together, mourners had to skip the Islam ritual of washing the body, Catholic priests had to settle for drive-through funerals. A friend stranded in Spain read to her father for eight hours over Zoom at his deathbed in Nebraska, just kept reading until he took his last breath.

I couldn’t imagine a funeral that would be appropriate for my brother, who would have rolled his eyes at stately music and weeping mourners. If he were here, he’d have made a joke. The whole idea of a funeral seemed tonally wrong and overcomplicated, shipping his body back to Kansas and then deciding who would be allowed to attend in masks, properly distanced, so as not to exceed space limitations. My little brother and I agreed that we weren’t going to do that, nor were we going to do a formal ceremony online, a laptop screen facing a gravesite. We decided on cremation.

Six months before, I’d raised my face from the snow and said to my boyfriend, “I can’t get up.” But at the top of the hill, a row of figures in bright puffy coats waited poised to barrel toward me, and panicked, I struggled back onto my feet. I couldn’t move my arm. I couldn’t move my fingers. My arm was crumpled and a dazzling field of snow spread around me, the lodge an impossible six feet away. I grabbed for a fencepost. It was just a flimsy stake holding a flimsy net marking off tubing lanes. If I took a step, I was going to fall again. My world had abruptly, senselessly narrowed from a long list of projects and tasks and plans to a desperate need to take a few steps through this dizzy whirling pixilated excruciating pain.

Someone slid an inner tube under me and dragged me to the lodge, out of harm’s way.

A couple of weeks after my fall, I asked my big brother, “Didn’t Dad have some kind of vertigo issue? Some inner ear problem?” He didn’t remember. He wasn’t that interested in talking about it. Maybe he knew he had bigger issues.

Sitting at a card table a few feet from the black stain on the floor, we all — my little brother, my big brother’s best friend, my cousins — speculated, as you do after a death, needing to bear witness somehow to the last hours of a life. What exactly was my brother doing? Had the TV been on when the police arrived? Packages and books had been piled all over the couches and chairs, so where had my brother been sitting? Where had he been sleeping in the oppressive heat? A cousin told me that there was a recliner by the wall under the air conditioner, that maybe he was napping there before he rose. My brother’s friend said no, my brother had probably just gone to that end of the room to plug in his phone, was turning to clear a place on the couch but fell before he got there.

I wonder about his last thoughts. Did his body seize? Did he feel a sharp pain through his chest and down his arm? Did he grab his chest, gasping? Stagger sideways, go down, like a character on TV having a heart attack? Or did his head go light the way mine does when I’m dizzy and suddenly the earth tilts and rocks like a ship in a storm? How long did he lie there? The idea that it might have been hours or even days was agonizing.

My little brother insisted that he’d tried to crawl across the floor to his phone just three feet away. My little brother swore that there were handprints on the floor, scratches in the stains as if it had been clawed by fingernails. A cousin said no, he was likely gone before he hit the floor. Or maybe he died when he cracked his head on the bricks. There was, after all, so much blood. No, there wasn’t that much blood, another cousin said.

I pictured my brother’s phone plugged in a couple of feet from where he fell. I imagined the texts beeping in. The phone ringing a few feet from where he lay. Me, my younger brother, my brother’s boss, the phone ringing and ringing, chiming and dinging.

I was back at work the next week, in Zoom meetings with cameras and mics mostly turned off, so the screen felt like a cemetery, rows of rectangular gravestones with names carved on them. I resumed Zoom gatherings with friends, where it looked like you were studying others when you were really just looking at yourself. When you trained your gaze on the faces of others, your eyes instead seemed downcast, lost in daydreams. I hosted a Zoom memorial for my brother, thinking about how when you stared into the camera, that white pinpoint of light, it appeared that you were looking others right in the eye. And yet you weren’t looking at them at all. You were peering into a mythical beyond, the abstract blinding light of the afterlife.

Being on Zoom is like being outside of your own body, watching yourself from a distance. It was sometimes a shock to find myself rapidly returning to mine. Like when a mild stress reaction while calling the probate attorney or getting a COVID test before a procedure at the hospital suddenly escalated until I was so tight and tense I felt locked into place. As if my body was preparing itself to fight or flee, muscles forming an armor, rigid as steel. It could happen unexpectedly, like when I went to the bank to open an estate account. The bank officer insisted I put down the word “Executrix” next to my name. Young, clean-shaven, tie knotted at his throat, he even helpfully spelled the word executrix for me. I followed his directions even though the word made me feel demure, like a minx-like female named Trixie up to my wily feminine tricks, and I wished I’d just written, instead, the more active-voice, more decisive executor, or the more accurate representative. Afterward I felt wracked with tension, like someone at war with herself, telling myself that none of this mattered, really, in the face of death. In the midst of wondering if my brother suffered, if he knew in those final moments, or hours, or days, what was happening to him.

The medical examiner’s report came back. There had been no attempt to determine a time of death. My brother’s death was attributed to hypertensive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. I closed out bank accounts and claimed life insurance and stopped car insurance payments and tracked down a storage unit in Ohio. I sorted through credit card bills listing every purchase of restaurant food while my brother was on the road, every subscription service he’d belonged to. I gathered checks, signed Nancy McCabe, Executrix, and turned them over to the estate account. One day in the mail I got a bill from an urgent care clinic for a visit three or four weeks before my brother had died. I asked for his records, hoping to learn something new, but it turned out he’d gone in for leg muscle pain. In the end, I had to accept how little I would ever know about my brother’s final hours.

But sometimes I still wondered, retreating to my backyard after hours suspended in that strange out-of-body experience that is Zoom during the pandemic. That summer, for the first time ever, I’d planted things, and now I sat among my crazy tangles of oregano and mint, chives and parsley, my spurting strands of fountain grass, my wilting lettuce, the tickseed’s yellow flowers, the complicated green heads of the stonecrop, some hanging pots of geraniums that bloomed pink and red. On those breaks from the computer, the phone, the endless paperwork and details and tasks that follow a death, I swung, gazing out at the looming trees in the wood beyond my yard with their spooky draping layers of pine needles and drooping, weeping branches. There was something peaceful about staring into all of that green.

Next August, I would be older than my older brother would ever be, I calculated. I stared off into the trees ruffled by a light breeze, thinking about my brother’s fall, remembering the day I broke my arm. How as I lay, face planted in snow, it felt like I was in a long dark tunnel, and nothing mattered, nothing, nothing that I’d thought was important only moments before. As the blackness crowded my brain, it seemed so easy to just let it.

My friend whose father died in Nebraska while she Zoomed with him from Spain told me that he, too, had fallen and lain for days before someone found him and whisked him to the hospital. She too was haunted by the hours that he lay alone on the floor, but later he didn’t remember it as hours, didn’t remember feeling frantic or terrified. Time compacts during such emergencies, my friend told me. And now, looking back, it’s as if my own winter fall, despite all of the pain and inconvenience that had accompanied it, had been a kind of gift. Had shown me that with the urgency of all-consuming pain comes a kind of peace, a knowledge that you can die right then and there without resistance or regret. Shock provides insulation against panic and despair, hastens some semblance of acceptance.  

So maybe this insight was accurate, or maybe it was just one of those beliefs that helped me find comfort. Maybe it was one of those illusions, like how my brother and I joked as children about the miniature people inside the TV. An illusion like the home movies where my brother still appears to be alive as he blows out birthday candles or sits in a corner of the couch with a book propped in front of his face. An illusion like how when I watch my own image on a screen, I appear to be real, when in actuality I am nothing but pixels and soundwaves.

The secret ingredient in this magical grilled cheese is pumpkin butter

Nothing beats a good grilled cheese sandwich. It should be noted that there’s a whole spectrum of “good.” 

Sometimes, a basic grilled cheese — you know, the standby white bread and oozy American cheese variety — hits just right. Other times, you want something that’s a little more complex, with multiple cheeses and a few add-ons. 

My ultimate fall grilled cheese sandwich definitely veers a little towards the fancier side. I stumbled into making it when I had the (not quite sober) late-night thought, “What would a pumpkin spice grilled cheese taste like?” When I finally vocalized this query, it was initially a joke. The seasonal creep that the proliferation of pumpkin spice, and all the controversy that it represents, has been well-documented. 

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But then, I considered it. I love a tart smear of fruit jam on a grilled cheese sandwich. Why not try one with some pumpkin butter loaded with ground ginger and cinnamon, which I make to kick off every fall? I set out to build a sandwich around that flavor. Here’s what I came up with:

Homemade pumpkin butter 

If you’ve never had pumpkin butter before, it will change how you think about pumpkin spice — especially if you’ve only ever used it in pumpkin pies and coffee drinks. It’s easy to make, too! I do a half-hour shortcut version, which is made from simmering down canned pumpkin with warm baking spices and dark brown sugar until it becomes thick, shiny and caramelized. 

Caramelized shallots 

To really amplify the almost burnt-sugar notes of the pumpkin butter, I reached for a couple of shallots, which I minced and put over low heat on the stove with a little bit of oil and butter. Caramelizing shallots is an endeavor in patience; it takes about 15 minutes for them to take on a uniform, jammy consistency. However, it’s absolutely worth it.

Goat cheese and gruyère 

Squash of all sorts, including pumpkin, tend to pair beautifully with cheese, especially those with creamy and nutty notes. That’s why I opted to double-up on the cheese in this sandwich with a creamy, tangy goat cheese and a full-bodied and earthy gruyère. 

Milk bread 

I was torn between a full-flavored, slightly sour rye bread and a soft, spongy milk bread (from my favorite Japanese bakery, Chako). Both are actually great options, but let me tell you: Slices of milk bread brushed with just a little bit of Kewpie mayo crisp up perfectly in a pan. 

I’ve played with some extras as well — thick-cut bacon, calabrian chili and peppery arugula are winners — but this sandwich stands up as-is. 

***

Recipe: The Ultimate Fall Grilled Cheese

Makes 1 sandwich

Ingredients:

Pumpkin butter

  • 1 15-ounce can of pumpkin purée
  • 1/4 cup of dark brown sugar
  • 4 tablespoons of maple syrup
  • 2 teaspoons of cinnamon
  • 2 teaspoons of ground ginger 
  • 1 teaspoon of ground cloves
  • 1 teaspoon of ground allspice 
  • 1/2 cup of water

Sandwich 

  • 2 thick slices of milk bread
  • 1/2 tablespoon of Kewpie mayonnaise, divided
  • 2 ounces of crumbled goat cheese 
  • 2 ounces of shredded gruyère 
  • 1 shallot
  • 3 tablespoons of butter, divided
  • 1/2 tablespoon of neutral oil 

Directions:

1. In a small saucepan, combine all of the ingredients for the pumpkin butter. Bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce the heat to a low simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally until the pumpkin butter is thickened and slightly darker in color. Remove from heat and place in a sealable jar or container. It can be refrigerated for up to 2 weeks.

2. For the caramelized shallots, slice the shallot and place it in a small pan alongside 1/2 tablespoon of butter and 1/2 tablespoon of neutral oil. Bring the heat up to medium-high and stir consistently until the shallots are a uniform brown, about 5 minutes. Reduce the heat to low and caramelize the shallots until they become jammy, stirring occasionally for about 10 more minutes. Remove from heat and set aside. 

3. For the grilled cheese, brush the milk bread with the Kewpie mayonnaise. Spread one of the slices with 2 tablespoons of pumpkin butter, the caramelized shallots and then stack it with the goat cheese and gruyère, followed by the remaining slice of bread. 

4. Add the remaining butter to a small pan, and once it melts over medium-high heat, add your sandwich. Cook for a total of 5 minutes, flipping midway through. Remove from the pan once the cheese is melted and the bread is a toasty brown. 

More inspired pumpkin ideas: 

How to make buttermilk substitutes for fluffy pancakes on the fly

Buttermilk has a huge range of uses in your kitchen. If you bought a bottle to make pancakes, you could end up using the extra for everything from fried chicken to peach sherbet. But what if you don’t have any — and don’t want to go to the store? Or you did go to the store and they’re all out? Today, we’ll break down how to make your own buttermilk substitutes, and share some highly recommended recipes to put them to good use.

* * *

What is buttermilk, anyway?

Traditionally speaking, buttermilk is a liquid by-product of butter-churning. Here’s the gist: You start with cream, churn (or food-process) until it separates, and end up with butter and buttermilk. If you’re making American-style butter — with fresh cream as the starting point — the buttermilk will be equally fresh. If you’re making cultured butter — with crème fraîche as the starting point — the buttermilk will be as tangy as expected, but not quite as thick as what you’d find at the supermarket (more on that in a bit). Because the butter claims most of the fat and little of the protein, old-school buttermilk is also naturally low-fat and rich in protein.

But perhaps you’ve seen (and possibly been confused by) recipes calling for whole-milk buttermilk, like this Cracklin’ Cornbread from chef Sean Brock. In the past, this would have been an oxymoron. These days, however, commercially available buttermilk “is just cultured milk,” according to dairy farmer Randy Lewis. “It has nothing to do with butter. And whether it’s full-fat or low-fat depends on the milk you start with.”

Can I really make my own buttermilk at home?

Sure! To make modern-day buttermilk, you just need to culture milk. This can be accomplished with a culture like Flora Danica. Or — just like making homemade yogurt or crème fraîche — you can add buttermilk to milk (The Joy of Cooking recommends ½ cup buttermilk to 1 quart skim milk, both room temperature). Let the two become one over a day or so, depending on how warm or cold your kitchen is.

That said: If you don’t have something like Flora Danica, a starter’s worth of buttermilk, or a bunch of time to spare (hey, me neither), worry not. This is where homemade buttermilk substitutes you can make with fridge and pantry staples come in handy.

Easy buttermilk substitutes

Milk plus lemon juice or vinegar. Estimate 1 cup of milk (any type works) to 1 tablespoon of acid. Stir together and leave at room temperature for about 10 minutes, or until curds start to form, then use right away.

Plain or Greek yogurt, thinned with milk or water. Add milk or water, splash by splash, to any kind of yogurt (or even sour cream or crème fraîche) until you reach a buttermilk-esque consistency, and whisk until smooth.

Kefir. This cultured dairy product has a similar thickness to commercial buttermilk. What’s more, if a recipe calls for whole-milk buttermilk and you aren’t able to find that in stores, whole-milk kefir is your next best bet.

Powdered buttermilk Dehydrated buttermilk powder can be found at specialty markets online and consists of exactly what it sounds like. Add a few tablespoons of buttermilk powder to a cup of water for an excellent substitute that doesn’t require keeping a bottle or carton in the refrigerator. You can also add buttermilk powder directly to dry ingredients for a flavor boost.

* * *

Very good ways to use buttermilk

Buttermilk Mochi Pancakes

These pancakes will taste richer, more buttermilk-y, and more complete in any side-by-side taste test — all thanks to one little ingredient switcheroo. The end result is a fluffy, extra-satisfying texture you have to experience to believe.

Buttermilk Waffles

This buttermilk waffle recipe that welcomes buttermilk substitutes recipe is adapted from the base of Kenji Lopéz-Alt’s Bacon, Cheese, and Scallion Waffles on Serious Eats (just with more butter). Make a big batch — they reheat beautifully.

Buttermilk Biscuits with Sausage Gravy

Bake buttermilk biscuits, cook up a pan of meaty gravy, and prepare for a breakfast so hearty and satisfying it will force your bowl of cereal into retirement.

Punjabi Buttermilk Stew with Spinach Dumplings

Similar to chili, this buttermilk stew tastes better as the days go by and the flavors develop. It has a rich, tangy taste thanks to the buttermilk, punctuated by the sharpness from the garlic and ginger.

Strawberry Buttermilk Gelato

This excellent no-cook ice cream is perfect for summer: Quick and easy, no need to turn on the stove, and it highlights summer berries at their peak. The creamy texture and tang of buttermilk and sour cream balance it out.

Classic Southern Buttermilk Bathed Fried Chicken

Chef James writes that this recipe for took nearly 20 years to develop, and we think it shows. The result is intensely flavorful and expertly spiced chicken with a crisp, dark skin reminiscent of parchment and juicy, flavorful meat thanks to a pre-frying buttermilk soak.

Buttermilk Chocolate Chip Cookies

The colossal cookies have a slightly cakey texture and a gooey, moist center. The touch of tang from the buttermilk is the perfect counterbalance to the incredible sweet, slightly salty dough.

Instant Pot Buttermilk and Leek Mashed Potatoes

The world’s easiest mashed potatoes are made in the Instant Pot, and this buttermilk-infused recipe that puts leeks front and center is no exception. All variations are fair game with these potatoes: If you don’t feel like rinsing and chopping leeks, swap in shallots, more garlic, a yellow onion, or nothing at all.

Maida Heatter’s Lemon Buttermilk Cake

This light, moist, lemony cake is genius for so many reasons: It’s powerfully puckery. It’s got both more fresh lemon juice and zest than you’d expect or normally see in a recipe, and the flavor holds up under heat.

Buttermilk White Beans with Eggs and Greens

Boil beans with a bit of onion and garlic and, once they’re tender, cool with a generous amount of buttermilk and fresh garlic. As they soak, the buttermilk adds lots of acidity and tanginess, while the garlic adds depth of flavor.

Biden decries “outrageous” treatment of Haitians at border — but keeps deporting them

After several days of global outrage over footage of mounted U.S. agents using their horse reins as whips and menacing Black migrants at the southern border, President Joe Biden on Friday finally condemned the conduct, while his administration continued mass deportations to Haiti.

A reporter asked the president whether he takes responsibility for the “chaos that’s unfolding” at the border and if he was failing to deliver on his campaign promise to restore the moral standing of the United States, in part by ending the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

“Of course I take responsibility. I’m president,” Biden said, adding that it was “horrible… to see people treated like they did: horses nearly running them over and people being strapped. It’s outrageous.”

“I promise you, those people will pay,” he said of the mounted agents, noting that a federal investigation is underway. “There will be consequences. It’s an embarrassment. But beyond an embarrassment, it’s dangerous; it’s wrong. It sends the wrong message around the world. It sends the wrong message at home. It’s simply not who we are.”

Biden had been under pressure to speak out about the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents’ recent actions at the border.

“The horrific conduct by CBP in Del Rio, Texas, including officers charging into crowds of Haitian asylum-seekers on horseback, violently dispersing them, taunting them, and forcing them away from safety, is reprehensible and underscores a deeper problem of systemic and racist treatment against Haitian and other Black migrants in the U.S. and at the southern border,” said Paul O’Brien, executive director at Amnesty International USA.

Former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro said Friday that “I’m glad to see President Biden speak out about the mistreatment of Haitian asylum-seekers.”

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“But his administration’s use of Title 42 to deny them the right to make an asylum claim is a much bigger issue. End Title 42,” Castro added, referring to a controversial policy first implemented under former President Donald Trump that the Biden administration is still using to swiftly deport people on public health grounds due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Castro, on Thursday, had slammed Biden’s silence about the CBP agents as “baffling and disappointing,” and said—referring to one of Trump’s senior advisers—that “this administration’s use of Stephen Miller’s Title 42 policy is a terrible error—in more ways than one. It should end.”

Responding to Biden’s Friday comments, the humanitarian aid group No More Deaths said that federal agents attack migrants “every day in the remote desert, away from cameras,” and that “the problem isn’t a few bad apples… it’s a system rotten to the core.”

During a Friday afternoon press conference at the White House, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas addressed the agents’ actions and the resulting investigation.

The secretary explained that the use of horse patrol units has been halted in the area, at least for now, and “the agents involved in these incidents have been assigned to administrative duties and are not interacting with migrants while the investigation is ongoing.”

He also confirmed there are no more migrants at the encampment in Del Rio, Texas, where about 15,000 people, mostly Haitians, had gathered days earlier to seek asylum. The Biden administration has faced criticism for responding by ramping up deportations.

Daniel Foote, the administration’s special envoy to Haiti, resigned in a Wednesday letter that highlighted the current conditions of the Caribbean country, which is still reeling from the July assassination of former President Jovenel Moïse that was followed by an earthquake and tropical storm.

Foote wrote that he will not be associated with the “inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti, a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs,” adding that the Biden administration’s “policy approach to Haiti remains deeply flawed, and my recommendations have been ignored and dismissed.”

The Associated Press reports that “a U.S. official with direct knowledge of the situation said six flights were scheduled to Haiti on Friday, with seven planned Saturday and six Sunday, though that was subject to change. The official was not authorized to speak publicly.”

Mayorkas said that as of Friday, about 2,000 people had been deported to Haiti over the past week on 17 expulsion flights; another 12,400 migrants will have their cases heard by an immigration judge; and 5,000 are being processed by the Department of Homeland Security.

The DHS chief also noted the limitations of the U.S. asylum system and defended the administration’s Title 42 expulsions, declaring that it’s a “public health imperative” not an immigration policy and has been broadly applied to migrants regardless of their home country.

“Title 42 inflicts immense harm—stranding asylum-seekers in grave danger where they are targets of brutal kidnappings and attacks, turning away Black and LGBTQ asylum-seekers to suffer bias-motivated violence, separating families, and endangering public health,” Human Rights First tweeted Friday, calling on Biden to scrap the policy, which his administration is currently defending in federal court.

Noting the dire conditions in Haiti, Amnesty’s O’Brien said that “these mass deportations demonstrate that the government is not committed to upholding the rights and well-being of the asylum-seekers they are sending back to danger.”

“The U.S. government has a moral and legal responsibility to welcome Haitians and all people who have fled their homes in search of safety,” he added, “and the Biden administration can and must do better.”

We need to stop giving the Ted Bundy treatment to violent men like Billy Milligan

Decades before Zac Efron portrayed notorious serial killer and rapist Ted Bundy in 2019’s “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile,” Leonardo DiCaprio was being considered for the role of a man named Billy Milligan. In 2015, the year after Milligan’s death, DiCaprio was again set to play the man  accused of rape and possible killer in a screenplay called “The Crowded Room,” though the project has yet to materialize.

Where Bundy is a household name, something of a celebrity and even a twisted sex symbol, Milligan might just eclipse him, with “Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan” now streaming on Netflix. The four-part documentary series presents the fascinating, horrific and outrageous story of Milligan, an Ohio man who was accused of kidnapping and raping three female college students in the 1970s. Milligan claimed he had multiple personality disorder, and that one of his 24 personalities was responsible for the alleged kidnappings and rape without his knowledge or control. As a result, he was acquitted of these crimes because of an insanity plea.

Today, he remains practically absolved of the crimes he’s confessed to, as he emerges as something of a rockstar via projects like “Monsters Inside.” Through these stories, Milligan is elevated from a man some call a rapist to cultural legend, while his victims are buried. Notably, none of them or their family members are featured in “Monsters Inside,” as it instead pores over every detail of Milligan’s life.

As the documentary takes place 40 years after the alleged rapes, director Olivier Megaton told Salon the production had contacted and tried to include the victims – but many were either dead or unreachable. Still, there were certainly other ways the docuseries could provide care, focus or screen time to the impacts of sexual violence, but we see little to none of that. We’re instead treated to an onslaught of sometimes warm reminiscing and jokes that humanize Milligan, a man accused of tormenting women, who are treated as a footnote in the greater story.

Similarly, both Bundy and Milligan are already beneficiaries of white, male privilege. Their escapes, and their ability to at different times evade arrest and imprisonment from our racist criminal justice system by not appearing “dangerous,” are directly owed to their whiteness. And today, their places as seductive cultural icons who supposedly charmed their female victims are owed to their whiteness, too. The documentary further amplifies this privilege, once against spotlighting the perpetrators of violence . . . to what purpose?

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Throughout “Monsters Inside,” even after Milligan admits to the crimes yet was acquitted, we watch him live some semblance of a normal life between confinement in varying mental institutions. He continues to have sexual relationships with staff and visitors, even having a wedding ceremony with one woman at a facility, and continuing to date women throughout his life. At one point, he easily escapes an Ohio facility to start a new life in Washington state with the help of a man named Jim Murray. 

In the series, Murray fondly recalls his experience aiding the dangerous man’s escape from a mental facility, as if it were a run-of-the-mill buddy road trip. While in Washington, evidence strongly suggests Milligan killed a missing man named Mike Madden. Still, years later, Milligan gets the celebrity treatment, is flown out to Los Angeles by filmmaker James Cameron, who was interested in making a movie about Milligan’s life, and even meets stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito. One of Milligan’s friends recalls visiting him in LA, as he lived a lavish, “high roller” lifestyle, according to the documentary.

Beyond Milligan’s treatment as a Hollywood star — a feat not even Ted Bundy could brag about — “Monsters Inside” is rife with interviewees with predominantly positive or highly sympathetic words to say about Milligan. Memories from Milligan’s brother and sister portray an unfairly maligned, misunderstood man, a humorous uncle, a genius artist.

Those who do acknowledge that Milligan had harmed others, treat these acts as tangential, unimportant. Murray, who seems to have faced no consequences for helping Milligan escape, also recalls directing a local play in Ohio, and casting his pal for a part.

“People only knew Billy as a rapist,” Murray says, explaining his casting decision as a way to show people “another side” to Milligan.

In contrast, only one FBI agent is brutally honest about his disgust with the media treatment of Milligan, saying “no one cared about Billy’s victims.”

“Monsters Inside” is a sprawling project of bothsideisms about the supposed duality of a man who admitted to rape. One woman who had dated Milligan and was interviewed by the documentary recalls a night on which Milligan swore he would kill her, prompting her to seek the protection of her brother. Shortly after, her brother says in the documentary that Milligan called them, alluding to having killed Madden in Washington, and saying he could kill both of them without consequence “because of his mental illness.”

To be clear, the documentary hardly seems supportive of Milligan, but its neutrality and significant screen time devoted to friends and family who are ambivalent about the rapes comprise yet another example of the true crime genre’s callousness toward gender-based violence.

There may be many literal sides and personalities to Milligan, but why does that matter? While this is certainly a fascinating legal case study, why should we care about him, or how “complicated” he was, more than we care about the women who say he harmed them? Or more than we care about sexual assault victims, in general?

Much of the first two episodes of the docuseries focus on questioning whether Milligan’s multiple personality disorder is real, implying the existence of personality disorders is somehow still up for debate in 2021. Or, specific to Milligan, the debate suggests that his violence is excusable based on whether or not he’s “faking” his condition. But truthfully, having multiple personality disorder doesn’t absolve rape, and nor should we implicitly suggest violence is innate to and therefore excused by personality disorders and mental illness.

Billy Milligan’s story is undeniably the sort of material that Hollywood and the massive, multi-billion-dollar true crime industry subsist on. But in our consumption of these wildly popular tales, we become desensitized to horrific crimes. And it’s through this desensitization, this obsession with stories of people we’ll never know, that violent men become legends and household names, while their victims and the traumas of sexual violence are all but erased.

“Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan” is now streaming on Netflix.

Trump tells right-wing network host failed Arizona audit “didn’t look at the real numbers”

Real America’s Voice host David Brody asked former President Donald Trump the one question many Americans would probably like to know the answer to: Will Trump accept the results now that the Arizona election audit is complete? For months, the embattled former president and his allies have questioned the election results in battleground states President Joe Biden won.

Although Republican lawmakers led the Arizona audit, the results actually determined Trump lost by a larger margin than initially reported. So, when Brody interviewed Trump on Friday, Sept. 24, he immediately addressed the elephant in the room by asking the big question. In fact, according to Mediaite, Brody even went a step further and used some of Trump’s own words against him.

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“Mr. President, I want to give you a chance also to respond to the news out today about this audit. Maricopa County, Arizona, the draft of the report done by, in your words, highly respected auditors is out, apparently confirming Biden’s win in the state. Are you prepared to accept those results? What’s your sense of it?” Brody asked.

Although numbers don’t lie, Trump appears to be dead set on continuing to push the Big Lie.

Well, no, because they they just took a small part and they didn’t look at the real numbers. Now the numbers are going to be announced. The real numbers are going to be announced at four o’clock today.

As I understand it, Arizona is having a conference and they found many votes that were terrible, terrible votes. In other words, they found that they were false votes, phantom votes, whatever you want to call them.

So I have to see, because I’m not involved in it, I’m just watching like everybody else. And we’ll have to see what it is. The from what I heard, the report is a very strong report. But, you know, they wanted to get out ahead of it like they always like to do, whether it’s on Russia or Russia or Ukraine, Ukraine, they want to get out ahead of it. So we’re going to have to wait.

It said it’s going to be, I guess, Eastern Time. It’s going to be released at four o’clock. I’ve actually heard the results of the report is very damning, but they don’t want to say that. They want to get way out ahead where long before the report. I’ve heard the report is very damning.

“Imagine” at 50: Why John Lennon’s ode to humanism still resonates

Fifty years ago, John Lennon released one of the most beautiful, inspirational and catchy pop anthems of the 20th century: “Imagine.”

Gentle and yet increasingly stirring as the song progresses, “Imagine” is unabashedly utopian and deeply moral, calling on people to live, as one humanity, in peace. It is also purposely and powerfully irreligious. From its opening lyric, “Imagine there’s no heaven,” to the refrain, “And no religion too,” Lennon sets out what is, to many, a clear atheistic message.

While most pop songs are secular by default – in that they are about the things of this world, making no mention of the divine or spiritual – “Imagine” is explicitly secularist. In Lennon’s telling, religion is an impediment to human flourishing – something to be overcome, transcended.

As a scholar of secularism and a devout fan of the Beatles, I have always been fascinated by how “Imagine,” perhaps the first and only atheist anthem to be so enormously successful, has come to be so widely embraced in America. After all, the U.S. is a country that has — at least until recently — had a much more religious population than other Western industrialized democracies.

Since being released as a single on Oct. 11 1971, “Imagine” has sold millions, going No. 1 in the U.S. and U.K. charts. And its popularity has endured. Rolling Stone magazine named “Imagine” as the third greatest song of all time in 2003, and it regularly tops national polls in Canada, Australia and the U.K.

Countless recording artists have covered it, and it remains one of the most performed songs throughout the world – the opening ceremony of this year’s Olympics Games in Tokyo featured it being sung by a host of international artists, a testament to its global appeal.

But not everyone is enamored of its message. Robert Barron, the auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, responded to the recent Tokyo rendition by lambasting “Imagine” as a “totalitarian anthem” and “an invitation to moral and political chaos.” His issue: the atheistic lyrics.

Numerous attempts have been made since “Imagine” was released to reconcile Lennon’s anthem with religion. Scholars, those of faith and fellow musicians have argued that the lyrics aren’t really atheistic, just anti-organized religion. Others have taken the sledgehammer approach and just changed the lyrics outright – CeeLo Green sang “And all religion’s true” in a televised rendition on New Year’s Eve 2011.

In interviews, Lennon was at times ambiguous about his beliefs on religion and spirituality, but such ambiguity is at odds with the clear message of “Imagine.” The song’s irreligious ethos is frank. The first verse speaks of there being “no heaven,” “no hell” – “Above us, only sky.” In such clear, distilled words, Lennon captures the very marrow of the secular orientation. To me, Lennon is saying that we live in a purely physical universe that operates along strictly natural laws – there is nothing supernatural out there, even beyond the stars.

He also expresses a distinct “here-and-nowness” at odds with many religions. In asking listeners to “Imagine all the people, livin’ for today,” Lennon is, to quote the labor activist and atheist Joe Hill, suggesting there will be “no pie in the sky when you die,” nor will a fiery eternal torture await you.

Lennon’s lyrics also give way to an implied existentialism. With no gods and no afterlife, only humankind – within ourselves and among each other – can decide how to live and choose what matters. We can choose to live without violence, greed or hunger and – to quote “Imagine” – exist as a “brotherhood of man . . . sharing all the world.”

It is here that Lennon’s humanism – the belief that humans, without reliance upon anything supernatural, have the capacity to create a better, more humane world – comes to the fore. Nihilism is not the path, nor is despondency, debauchery or destruction. Rather, Lennon’s “Imagine” entails a humanistic desire to see an end to suffering.

The spirit of empathy and compassion throughout the song is in line with what scholarship has found to be strong traits commonly observable among secular men and women. Despite attempts to tie Lennon and “Imagine” to blood-lusting atheists like Stalin and Pol Pot, the overwhelming majority of godless people seek to live ethical lives.

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For example, studies have shown that when it comes to things like wanting to help refugees, seeking to establish affordable health care, fighting climate change and being sensitive to racism and homophobia, the godless stand out as particularly moral.

Indeed, secular people in general exhibit an orientation that is markedly tolerant, democratic and universalistic – values Lennon holds up as ideals in “Imagine.”

Other studies reveal that the democratic countries that are the least religious – the ones that have gone furthest down the road of “imagining no religion” – are the most safe, humane, green and ethical.

“Imagine” was not the first time Lennon sang his secular humanism. A year before, in 1970, he released “I Found Out,” declaring his lack of belief in either Jesus or Krishna. Also in 1970, he put out the haunting, scorching “God.” Beginning with a classic psychological explanation of theism – that humans construct the concept of God as a way to cope with and measure their pain – “God” goes on to list all the things that Lennon most decidedly does not believe in: the Bible, Jesus, Gita, Buddha, I-Ching, magic and so on. In the end, all that he believes in is his own verifiable personal reality. Arriving at such a place was, for the bespectacled walrus from Liverpool, to be truly “reborn.”

But neither “I Found Out” nor “God” achieved anywhere near the massive success that “Imagine” did. No other atheist pop song has.

Phil Zuckerman, Professor of Sociology and Secular Studies, Pitzer College

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

Days before SB8 went into effect in Texas, I found out I was pregnant

It’s the weekend, and I am having a staring contest with a plus sign. I am pregnant, and the worst abortion ban in Texas since Roe was won is going into action in a few days. My first thoughts? “S**t, s**t ,s**t, s**t,” followed by: “NOT AGAIN.”

I had my first abortion at 19, during my sophomore year of college. I was nine weeks pregnant. The guy that got me pregnant paid for my abortion, but did not go to my appointment with me. I remember going to the clinic three times: First, for my ultrasound, tests, and consultation. Second, for my abortion. Third, for my follow-up after my abortion.

Waiting at the clinic, I felt utterly alone. Others in the room appeared to be there with their mothers or friends. I didn’t tell my mom. I am abortion-positive, I am pro-abortion. I help run an abortion fund, and I have been a reproductive justice organizer in Texas for years. Despite my work and her openness to discussing her experiences with abortion and miscarriage with me, I couldn’t bring myself to tell my mother. I still haven’t told her about that abortion, or this more recent one I had. I feel like I am failing her somehow by not telling her. But I don’t think I can look her in the eyes and tell her.

Despite this, I endeavor to write publicly about my abortion — to tell my story to strangers, anti-abortion protesters, and random people I will never meet on Twitter. I want to tell my story because, for many of us, it feels like the walls are closing in — and providing support for each other is important.

My senior year of high school, I drove my friend to get her abortion. I held her hand tightly and we just sat in silence. I wish I could have felt that comforting grip when I was 19 and in that abortion clinic. And I wish I could have felt that grip now.

Sitting on the toilet in my bathroom with the fan on, I clutched my pregnancy test and slumped down with my head on my lap. Tears dripped down my cheeks; I lacked the strength to wipe them off. All I could think about was how much of an idiot I was.

How could this happen? I rued. I take my birth control religiously. My partner didn’t even finish inside of me.

I reckoned that if God were real, this was his way of playing a sick joke on me. Like many, I did everything right and still ended up in this place.

I took five pregnancy tests later that day. All positive.

Every. F**king. One.

Now, I had a serious problem. I knew all of the clinics in the city I currently lived in were completely booked until September 1st. I did the math: I was definitely already more than six weeks pregnant. I have a few reproductive health conditions that make my menstrual cycle irregular, and adding birth control into the mix makes it even more unpredictable. With SB8 looming, Texan clinics were already overwhelmed — and I knew I was not going to be able to make an appointment at a clinic to be seen in time. I also knew that I did not want to be pregnant at all. I needed to have an abortion.

So I had one. At home. 

I had an abortion at home because I couldn’t access an abortion before the abortion ban took place — my access was already stripped from me before September 1st.

Texas has a dramatic political history with abortion. Roe v. Wade was ruled in Texas. And now, we have an almost certainly unconstitutional six-week ban and a $10,000 bounty up for any pro-life anti-abortion vigilante who reports people for aiding in someone’s abortion. That includes people like me; I could get sued for $10,000.

All of this was on my mind while I had my abortion at home.

Once it was over, I was nauseous. I transitioned between my bathroom and my bed, lining my nook with absorbent pads and fighting a headache that stayed with me for days. I vomited several times.  The pain was unbearable; I took the maximum amount of pain medication that I was allowed, and slipped in and out of sleep. I bled. A lot. But when my bleeding began to subside, a relief fell upon me.

And for the first time in nine years, I prayed. 

SB8 is going to force many people, including me, to find alternative ways to have abortions. That’s because abortion bans do not, and never have, stopped abortions from happening. Abortions happened before Roe v. Wade, they will happen after Roe v. Wade, even with SB8 in effect. Do you hear that, Governor Abbott? Abortions post–six weeks are still going to happen in Texas. And I hope you have many restless nights knowing that, and thinking about it.

Abortion bans have always been about control, and we have seen this through the enactment of the Hyde Amendment. Rosie Jimenez was a young Latina woman living in South Texas, and was one of the first women to die as a result of the Hyde Amendment, which prevented her from using her Medicaid to cover the cost of a safe abortion in a clinic. Across the street from the clinic where she had an abortion before the Hyde Amendment, Rosie died from complications. She had a voucher in her purse that would have covered the cost of an abortion at a clinic, but which she couldn’t use.

 Rosie Jimenez died because of abortion bans, trying to build a life for herself. Many others have died under similar circumstances. As our elected officials are trying to control people and limit their options for safe abortions, the Rosies of our country are forced to take matters into their own hands. While many people have more access to information on safe abortion practices that they can manage themselves, I still think of the people that are going to go an unsafe route— due to lack of knowledge of other practices, fear, or access.

SB8 is a spit and slap in the face to Texans. But it will not stop us from providing abortion care to our communities. Abortion clinics, funds, providers— we are here for you.

No matter what.

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Bill Maher hits back at Whoopi Goldberg in ongoing feud over “Black national anthem”

Talk show host Bill Maher hit back at Whoopi Goldberg Friday night during an episode of his HBO show “Real Time,” the latest in an ongoing feud between the two television personalities over the NFL’s new pregame ritual of playing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” known as the Black national anthem, in addition to the actual national anthem. 

“New rule,” Maher said Friday, the phrase marking a longtime segment on the show. “the only time there should be two national anthems is when the other team is from Canada.” 

He then addressed Goldberg’s comments specifically, which she made earlier this week on the popular daytime TV juggernaut “The View.”

He said the women-led talk show “devoted a lot of time” to the topic, with Goldberg talking about the history of the song itself “while somehow avoiding what I actually said.”

“When it comes to an anthem, it doesn’t have to be the one that we currently use, but it has to be just one. You know, because it’s a national anthem,” Maher said.

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“Symbols of unity matter,” he continued. “And purposefully fragmenting things by race reinforces a terrible message that we are two nations hopelessly drifting apart from each other. That’s not where we were 10 years ago, and it shouldn’t be where we are now.”

The feud began earlier this month when Maher said that the addition of a separate anthem segregated by race, in addition to similar trends on college campuses, essentially heralded a return to segregation “under a different name.”

A few days later on “The View,” Goldberg lamented having to “re-educate people” on the need for parallel institutions for people of color. “We have gone backwards a good 10, 15 years,” she said.

Maher, needless to say, disagrees. 

“We need to stop regarding this new woke segregation as if it’s some sort of cultural advancement,” Maher said Friday. “It’s not.”

Watch the entire segment below via HBO:

Our favorite pies to eat for breakfast

In a season when there’s too much good produce for our arms to carry, when our refrigerators and counters and all available places in our kitchens are overflowing with plums and cherries and peaches and berries, why does pie — pie, with its endless variations, its willingness to be filled with anything delicious — need to be relegated to dessert? Here are 13 reasons to have pie for breakfast. (Not like you really needed any.) 

1. Perfect Coconut Cream Pie

You put coconut in your granola and cream in your coffee, right? This breakfast pie is the same thing. Promise.

2. Plum Tart

It’s like fruit salad. On top of an olive oil-almond crust. And it just so happens to be one of our reader’s all-time favorites.

3. Raspberry Swamp Pie

The early bird gets the worm . . . or in this case, the best slice of raspberry custard pie. Make it during summer when raspberries are at their best and brightest (especially since this recipe calls for an entire pound of them!).

4. Lazy Mary’s Lemon Tart

Some people like to start their morning with a mug of hot water and a wedge of lemon. We get it. It soothes your throat, aids digestion, and is a calming way to start your day. However, we prefer a perkier, sweeter start to our day in the form of this simple Meyer lemon tart.

5. Martha Stewart’s Slab Pie

It might be a stretch to call this slab pie a granola bar that you can take on the go, but it has all the fixings of a sweet breakfast, starting with the sour cherry filling and ending with Martha’s beloved buttery paté brisée crust. 

6. Maple Walnut Cream Tart

You’d drizzle maple syrup on pancakes or waffles for breakfast, right? So why not use the sweetener to make this New England staple — maple whipped cream piled into mounds within a meringue crust and topped with candied walnuts.

7. Savory Plum Tart

This tart can double as lunch, if there are any leftovers. The savory edge comes from a little bit of fresh basil and balsamic vinegar, which is drizzled lightly atop a mascarpone cheese and plum filling. 

8. Cherry Almond Torte

Almonds are packed with protein, which means that this sour cherry torte is basically a protein bar. So you can have a few bites (or a full on slice) at dawn and then take the world by storm ’til dusk.

9. Peach Tart

Really. How can you say no to this? When peaches are in season (June through August in most parts of the country), we feel that they should be embraced at every meal throughout the day but especially breakfast. 

10. French Silk Pie With Chocolate-Coffee (Grounds) Crust

Skip your morning Starbucks run and eat a slice of this coffee-infused pie instead. There is no better way to wake up and start your day than with a luscious chocolate pudding swirled into a coffee-chocolate cookie crust. You know you want to! 

11. Quiche Lorraine with a Buckwheat Crust

If you’re here for the OG breakfast pie (aka a quiche), this classic version featuring bacon, shallots, and Swiss cheese should fit the bill. Using a combination of all-purpose flour and buckwheat flour in the crust adds an incredible nutty flavor and extra-flaky texture. 

12. Breakfast Casserole

We will not be referring to this as a casserole but rather by its true identity, which is a slab pie. That’s really all a casserole is after all, and now we have an excuse to eat pie for breakfast but in the form of a savory, stick-to-your-ribs, meat-and-potatoes kind of way.

13. Quiche, Any Way You Want It

We didn’t necessarily save the best for last (though this is certainly quite a delicious recipe), but we did save the most realistic for last. A quiche is probably what you had in mind when you searched for breakfast pie recipes. If you’re not into the idea of eating Lemon Meringue Pie at 8 a.m., first of all, we probably can’t be friends. But second of all, I’ll throw you a bone and present a make-your-own quiche with whatever add-in ingredients that you please — roasted or sautéed veggies, pan-fried breakfast meat, and a melty cheese.

The women who appear in Dante’s “Divine Comedy” are finally getting their due, 700 years later

When Dante Alighieri died 700 years ago, on September 14, 1321, he had just put his final flourishes on the “Divine Comedy,” a monumental poem that would inspire readers for centuries.

The “Divine Comedy” follows the journey of a pilgrim across the three realms of the Christian afterlife – hell, purgatory and paradise. There, he encounters a variety of characters, many of whom are based on real people Dante had met or heard of during his life.

One of them is a woman named Sapia Salvani. Sapia meets Dante and his first guide, Virgil, on the second terrace of purgatory. She tells the two how her fate in the afterlife was sealed – how she stood at the window of her family’s castle and, with troops gathering in the distance, prayed for her own city, Siena, to fall. Despite their advantage, the Sienese were slaughtered – including Sapia’s nephew, whose head was paraded around Siena on a pike.

Sapia, however, felt triumphant. According to Dante and medieval theologians, she had fallen prey to one of the seven capital vices, “invidia,” or envy.

The portrayal of Sapia in the “Divine Comedy” is imbued with political implications, many of which boil down to the fact that Dante blamed the violence of his time on those who turned against their communities out of arrogance and greed.

But the real Sapia was even more interesting than Dante would have you believe. Documentary sources reveal that she was a committed philanthropist: With her husband, she founded a hospice for the poor on the Via Francigena, a pilgrimage route to Rome. Five years after witnessing the fall of Siena, she donated all her assets to this hospice.

Sapia is one among many characters from the “Divine Comedy” that deserve to be known beyond – and not just because of – what Dante decided to say about them in his poem. With my students at Wellesley College, I’m reviving the real stories behind the characters of Dante’s masterpiece and making them available to everyone on Wikipedia. And it was especially important for us to start with his female characters.

Why women?

Among the 600 characters appearing in the “Divine Comedy,” women are the least likely to appear in the historical record. Medieval authors tended to write biased accounts of women’s lives, motives and aspirations – if not ignore them altogether. As a result, the “Divine Comedy” is often the only accessible source of information on these women.

At the same time, Dante’s treatment of women isn’t free from misogyny. Scholars such as Victoria Kirkham, Marianne Shapiro and Teodolinda Barolini have shown that Dante relished turning women into metaphors, from pious maidens to villainesses capable of bringing dynasties to their knees.

A recreation of Dante Alighieri’s death mask at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy. Vincenzo Pinto/AFP via Getty Images

For this reason, fuller pictures of Dante’s women have been elusive. As a researcher, you’re lucky if you can come across a contemporary who supported or built upon Dante’s tangled reinvention, or documents in which the woman in question is mentioned as mother, wife or daughter.

Putting together the pieces on Wikipedia

The more my students asked me about the women in the poem, the more I wondered: What if we found a way to tell everyone their stories? So I approached Wiki Education, a nonprofit that fosters the collaboration between higher education and Wikipedia, to see if they would partner with me and my students. They agreed.

The recipe behind Wikipedia’s two decades of success is its stunning simplicity: an open encyclopedia written and maintained by a worldwide community of volunteers who draft, edit and monitor its free content.

Wikipedia’s status as a crowdsourced work is one of its greatest strengths, but it’s also its greatest weakness in that it reflects the world’s systemic flaws: The vast majority of Wikipedia contributors identify as male.

In 2014, only 15.5% of Wikipedia’s biographies in English were about women. By 2021, that number had risen to 18.1%, but that was after more than six years of sustained efforts aimed at bolstering the representation of women on Wikipedia by creating new entries and referencing scholarship authored by women.

Knowledge as advocacy

For my students, researching and composing Wikipedia entries on Dante’s characters doubled as advocacy.

Writing for Wikipedia is different from writing an essay. You must be unbiased, avoid personal flourishes and always back your statements with external references. Rather than producing an argument, you offer readers the tools to build an argument of their own.

And yet the very act of writing an entry about a person does advance a specific argument: that their life is worth being the focus of attention, rather than an easily forgettable name in the backdrop of a grand narrative. This choice is a radical one. It’s an affirmation that someone possesses historical value beyond the fact that they provided a spark of inspiration to an author.

Pursuing this goal was not without challenges; it could be difficult to maintain an unbiased tone while telling stories of violence and abuse.

That was the case with Ghisolabella Caccianemico, a young woman from Bologna sold into sexual slavery by her brother, Venèdico, who hoped to form an alliance with a neighboring marquis. Dante told his readers a “filthy tale” that would make them indignant. In it, Ghisolabella is a silent victim surrounded by men.

However, we turned Ghisolabella into the subject of her story, threading the fine line between giving a starkly objective account of the violence she suffered and preserving her dignity.

“Ghisolabella’s extramarital relation[s] with the marquis, though against her will, was ruinous to her status,” wrote my student, citing early 20th-century scholars who canvassed the archives of Bologna for evidence on Ghisolabella.

“Dante’s inclusion of Ghisolabella,” she added, “eternalizes Venèdico’s sin.”

Turning the tables on Dante

Researching these women also turned into an opportunity to upend Dante’s personal views.

Take Beatrice d’Este, a noblewoman Dante criticizes for marrying again after her first husband died. Dante was outraged by widows who dared to remarry instead of remaining forever faithful to their late spouses. Not everyone, however, agreed with his defamation of Beatrice.

To tell Beatrice’s story, my student just needed to look into the right places – namely, an exceptional article by Deborah W. Parker, who put Dante’s treatment of Beatrice into context.

Parker explains how Beatrice was likely pressured into her second marriage and tried to negotiate her place in a world that subjected her to slander. By having the family crests of her two husbands carved side by side on her tomb, she made a pregnant statement about her identity and allegiances.

Thanks to our work, in addition to Ghisolabella and Beatrice d’Este, there are now over a dozen biographies of these women on Wikipedia: Alagia Fieschi, Cianghella della Tosa, Constance of Sicily, Cunizza da Romano, Gaia da Camino, Giovanna da Montefeltro, Gualdrada Berti, Joanna of Gallura, Matelda, Nella Donati, Pia de’ Tolomei, Piccarda Donati and Sapia Salvani. They join Beatrice Portinari and Francesca da Rimini, the only two historical women from the “Divine Comedy” who had acceptable entries on Wikipedia prior to our work.

As feminist theorist Sara Ahmed writes in “Living a Feminist Life,” “citations can be feminist bricks: they are the materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings.”

One brick at a time – one page, revision or added reference at a time – Wikipedians can broaden our understanding of the past, centering women’s stories in a world that has long edited them out.

Laura Ingallinella, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Italian Studies and English, Wellesley College

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

Eyewitness accounts, video confirm reports of Tigrayan children held in concentration camp

In the Tigray region of Ethiopia, beginning in November 2020, children who should have been laughing with friends and studying in school were instead locked up, crying, starving and abused in concentration camps, according to multiple eyewitness reports that have been corroborated by satellite imagery and analysis, as well as cell phone video footage smuggled out by an escapee. 

Ethiopian federal forces, abetted by special forces, paramilitary groups, militia and police acting under the authority of the Amharan regional government, locked up in multiple locations hundreds of children of all ages — and even pregnant women, infants and toddlers — along with thousands of Tigrayan adults and senior citizens. These people appear to have been held in harsh conditions, systematically starved and beaten because of their ethnicity and with no judicial process or valid legal pretext. That is the definition of a concentration camp. This is a previously unreported part of an ongoing genocidal campaign led by Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed — ironically enough, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate — against various ethnic groups, including Tigrayans, Kimant, Gumuz, Ogaden (Somalis), Agew, Irob, Afar and Sidama, as well as Oromo people who fight to exercise the constitutional right to self-administration within a federal system.

The current civil conflict within Ethiopia is too complicated to explain here, and this report concerns just one aspect of it. As often happens in war, accusations and counter-accusations involving alleged war crimes have been made by the warring factions, which are primarily, the Ethiopian federal government forces, the Tigray regional government forces, the Amhara regional government forces and Amhara militia, and the Eritrean government forces. The Ethiopian embassy in Washington has not responded to Salon’s questions about the specific and detailed evidence of human rights abuses presented in this report. If an official response arrives subsequent to publication, it will be included here.

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This report is based on eyewitness accounts by dozens of people from five ethnic groups, including 11 former prisoners who were interviewed in four different refugee camps in eastern Sudan. Doctors have recounted their treatment of another seven former prisoners, including young children. Satellite imagery from Maxar (a space technology company based in Westminster, Colorado) and Planet Labs (an Earth imaging company based in San Francisco) corroborates these eyewitness reports. So does video footage which one former prisoner shot on his cell phone before he escaped a previously unreported concentration camp in western Tigray, located in the notorious Abbadi warehouse compound in Mai Kadra.

The cell phone footage admittedly does not conform to classic notions of what a concentration camp looks like, as in World War II films.There are no bars, guard towers, German Shepherds, barracks, searchlights or coils of razor wire. In the videos, prisoners can be seen eating popcorn, drinking coffee, teasing each other and making jokes in Tigrigna, the language of the Tigray people.

Dr. Mebrahtom Yehdago, 37, in Tenedba refugee camp, SudanDr. Mebrahtom Yehdago, 37, in Tenedba refugee camp, Sudan. (Jonathan Hutson)

“Young children who were imprisoned and abused”

“We are seeing a generation of Tigrayan refugee children, many of whom are growing up with a sense of hopelessness,” said Dr. Mebrahtom Yehdago, 37, from Humera. He is a Tigrayan doctor and refugee in Tenedba refugee camp in eastern Sudan. “As a doctor, I feel so disturbed, sad, and angry to see these kinds of situations. These children are innocent. These are young children who were imprisoned and abused. How can we get the world to pay attention and do more to help the children?”

Dr. Mebrahtom outlines the cases of former child prisoners in concentration camps whom he has treated: four boys, ages 2, 9, 13 and 15. The two-year-old was imprisoned with his mother in the Mai Kadra concentration camp – which satellite imagery shows is in the Abbadi warehouse compound, a bit north and across the street from the police station, just as eyewitnesses reported. They were imprisoned from Nov. 14 to Nov. 27, 2020, until the mother paid their captors — the Fanu, the Amhara militia and the Amharan Regional Police — a ransom of 50,000 Ethiopian birr (about USD $1,086) for their release. 

The toddler presented with physical complications, Dr. Mebrahtom said, including recurrent diarrhea, dehydration, malnutrition and pneumonia, as well as psychological issues. For example, when the boy sees a large group of people, he starts shouting and crying. His mother says he is remembering their hardship in captivity. 

Their captors provided no food or water. About twice a week, according to former prisoners who escaped, Doctors Without Borders (or MSF, its French acronym) workers from Abdelrafe would distribute packets of digestive biscuits and fill two large water tanks. MSF repaired one water tank and installed another, without which the prisoners would have had only a few sinks in the bathrooms, where toilets and floors were overflowing with feces. MSF also built a new bathroom. The prisoners in Mai Kadra, like those in other concentration camps in western Tigray, survived by pilfering and roasting sesame seeds stored in the warehouses where they were held captive. This meager sustenance came from bags of seeds that the Amharan forces had looted from Tigrayan farmers and hauled to the warehouses on trailers pulled by tractors. The tractors in Mai Kadra were stolen from the Abbadis, a wealthy Tigrayan family who had owned the warehouse compound. 

Satellite imagery shows tractors hooked to trailers near the compound garage. Some prisoners who had Amharan relatives or friends, and who could get money brought to them, paid bribes to Amharan militia guards. In exchange, the guards would allow two or three small boys, around eight years old, to run to the market and return with a kind of flat bread called injera, which the prisoners would distribute. 

Former prisoners estimated that the total number of prisoners in Mai Kadra was more than 3,000; some said the number was closer to 8,000. And of that number, eyewitnesses reported that at least 400 were children of all ages. There were more than 10 pregnant women, at least two of whom gave birth in a warehouse (one with severe complications). There were newborns, infants, babies, toddlers, young children, preteens and teenagers, as well as elderly people, some in their 70s and 80s. Multiple witnesses reported seeing “two old men who starved to death.”

Mostly the children cried, former prisoners reported. They cried because they were hungry and had no money for injera. They cried because they were separated from a parent. They cried because they were sick. 

Solomon KahsaySolomon Kahsay, holding the Tecno cell phone that he used to shoot video from inside a concentration camp in Mai Kadra, photographed in Um Rakuba refugee camp (Jonathan Hutson)

Resourceful resisters

The Tigrayan prisoners proved themselves to be resourceful resisters. They boys who fetched injera from the market started running other errands, to get smuggled cell phones recharged, or to buy solar chargers. One escapee, Solomon Kahsay, 32, posed for a photo holding the Tecno cell phone with which he shot three videos inside the concentration camp. He shot the videos on Nov. 30, 2020, during Hidar Tsion — an annual religious holiday dedicated to St. Mary — which the prisoners celebrated with coffee and popcorn brought by a boy from the market. Before he was locked up, Solomon drove a three-wheeled taxi called a bajaj.

Satellite imagery from Planet Labs geolocates the cell phone footage as a strong positive match with the Abbadi warehouse compound, according to analysts with the London-based nonprofit Vigil Monitor. Several eyewitnesses, interviewed separately in different refugee camps, authenticated the videos and identified people, places and things in the videos. For example, eyewitnesses recognized a three-year-old boy whom his mother carried on her back and an eight-year-old boy in a green, striped T-shirt — one of the market runners.

Screenshot of cell phone video taken by Solomon shows an eight-year-old boy in a green striped T-shirt. Escaped prisoners reported that this boy was one of several captive boys whom Amhara militia guards would allow to buy food from the local market.

“We are here to kill you”

Dr. Mebrahtom described the case of a 15-year-old boy, imprisoned in the same place in Mai Kadra. He is an insulin-dependent diabetic. When he asked for permission to buy insulin from a local pharmacy, his captors said, “We are not here to treat you; we are here to kill you. We are gathering the Tigrayan refugees here to kill them.” 

The dividing line between a normal jail, prison or detention center and a concentration camp is clear enough: The latter is defined by arbitrary arrest and detention in harsh conditions based on ethnicity, during a conflict and without judicial process, especially where people are locked up indefinitely for no valid legal purpose (such as a quarantine or relocation on humanitarian grounds for the purpose of saving lives). The Abbadi warehouse compound in Mai Kadra appears to qualify as a concentration camp under those standards.

The Fanu freed the Tigrayan teenager on Nov. 29, 2020, after extorting from his family 15,000 birr (about $326). He had been locked up for two weeks. Although the boy now lives in a refugee camp, he has fallen through the cracks due to apparent corruption and lack of bureaucratic oversight, the doctor and other refugees explained. The boy has no ration card and does not know where he will sleep on any given night. When the doctor offers him money, the boy responds, “What is the importance of this?” He argues that his life is pointless.

Dr. Mebrahtom explains that the abuse of Tigrayan children in Mai Kadra was not unique. It was part of a pattern which the doctor has seen, and which other eyewitnesses confirmed in interviews, which also involved children locked up in various sites in the regional capital of western Tigray, Humera. For example, the doctor has treated a 9-year-old boy who had been imprisoned for four days in the old police station in Humera. 

Eyewitnesses who had been incarcerated in the old police station, and who were subsequently transferred to the Yitbarak warehouse in Humera, from which they escaped, reported that the only food and water available in the station (administered by the Amhara Regional Police) was whatever the prisoners could buy and have brought in from outside. And in the Yitbarak warehouse (sometimes called the Tabarak warehouse), prisoners subsisted by pilfering sesame seeds from bags looted by the Amhara and stored in the warehouse. So this young child, like hundreds of other children and adults imprisoned in multiple locations, had to survive on handfuls of seeds and a little water, with an occasional supplement of a piece of injera or a few digestive biscuits. I asked the doctor who had arrested the 9-year-old boy, and why.

“The Amhara militia arrested him and beat him with sticks on different parts of his body because they said he is the son of a Tigrayan militia member,” the doctor recounted, reading from his medical notes. “They traumatized his left eye, which he lost.” His uncle ransomed the boy for 1,000 birr after four days. 

The boy’s eye socket healed with a clean scar and no infection. But he has no prosthetic eye, not even an eye patch. So the boy does not see himself as a whole person. Inside, the doctor said, he carries deeper scars. 

“He has suffered psychological trauma,” Dr. Mebrahtom reports. “He has poor appetite and difficulty sleeping. He cries. He is not interested in playing with his peers. His mood is depressed. He is withdrawn and communicates very little. He stays near his mother.”

The mother reports, “He wakes up at midnight and cannot go back to sleep. He stares and says, ‘For me, it is meaningless to live.'”

There is a psychologist available in the camp, whom the boy has seen. But the boy says that he feels that talk therapy makes no sense for him because they cannot replace his eye. He cannot imagine living a productive life without an eye.

Tigrayan refugee children in Um Rakuba, SudanTigrayan refugee children in Um Rakuba, Sudan (Jonathan Hutson)Tigrayan refugee children practice Tae Kwon Do in Um Rakuba refugee campTigrayan refugee children practice Tae Kwon Do in Um Rakuba refugee camp. (Jonathan Hutson)Tigrayan refugee girl in Um Rakuba, SudanTigrayan refugee girl in Um Rakuba, Sudan (Jonathan Hutson)

The doctor cites the case of a 13-year-old boy, the son of an Orthodox Christian priest, who was arrested while watching cattle. The Fanu stole his family’s cattle and brought him to the Dansha police station, where he was imprisoned from Nov. 10 to Nov.18, 2020. 

“The Fanu tied his hands behind his back with a rope,” the doctor said. “They beat the ligature with a stick. As a result, he experiences weakness, a partial paralysis, in both hands. He did not receive medical treatment in detention.” The Fanu released the child after his father paid 1,000 birr (about U.S. $22).

“He is depressed; his mood is very low. He is distracted, doesn’t sleep well, and has lost hope,” the doctor reported. “He says, ‘I have no means of living a good life because my hands are useless.'”

The boy reported: “The Fanu said, ‘We were created to cleanse your people from the surface of the earth.'” The boy believed them.

“The beaten children said nothing. But tears slid down their faces”

Ashanafe Syoum, 27, a Tigrayan man who escaped from HumeraAshanafe Syoum (Jonathan Hutson)

Ashanafe Syoum, 27, is a Tigrayan man who saw captive children when he was locked up in two locations in Humera. He reported:

On the fourth month, day nine of the Ethiopian calendar (Dec. 18, 2020), I was arrested and jailed in Humera because I am Tigrayan. The Amhara Regional Police arrested me and put me in the Gatar police station. When I entered, there were 180 Tigrayan male and female detainees, including about eight or nine children. 

The Tigrayan children ranged in age from 10 to 15. The children sat near their families. They were so quiet because they were afraid. The children saw the police beat us, and they were afraid that they would be beaten, too. 

I saw the police beat some children with sticks, too. When they beat the boys, they would say, “You are the son of the junta [a reference to the Tigration People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF].” When they beat the girls, they said, “Daughters of junta.” If they found children without their father, they would assume that the father must have left to fight for the TDF [Tigrayan Defense Forces]. The beaten children said nothing. But tears slid down their faces.

I was jailed there for two months and one week. The police gave the detainees nothing to eat or drink. But some prisoners collected money to send one person to go buy bread and water and bring it back, so that we could share it. We would each get a two-liter bottle of water for drinking and a three-liter water bottle per person for washing, about every three days. But sometimes, we could go a week without more water. Neither the Red Cross nor the MSF came when I was there. 

After two months and one week [on Feb. 25, 2021], they transferred me to another prison, called Bet Henset, or House of Corrections. It was bad, too. If family members came to the prison to provide food to a prisoner, the Amhara special forces, who guarded us, would say, “No. It is enough. Go away.” Sometimes, we did not get enough water there. 

There were a lot of children in Bet Henset. There were more than 50 babies, ranging in age from a one-month-old,to a six-month-old to a one-year-old. There were about 70 children who were about five or six years old. Some would sleep next to their mothers; others would sleep next to their fathers. There were about 50 children who were around 10 to 14. There was no infant formula, baby food or special food for the children. When I was there, I did not see any Red Cross or MSF workers or hear about any coming to Bet Henset.

I was in Bet Henset about two weeks before four of us escaped.

Dr. Mebrahtom and three escapees, including Ashanafe, gave permission for their photos to be published, showing their faces and using their names. One escapee, Solomon, is photographed holding the Tecno cell phone which he used to shoot the cell phone videos showing children and adults inside the Mai Kadra concentration camp. 

Escape from Mai Kadra

Kiros Berhane, the first man to escape from the Abbadi warehouse compound in Mai KadraKiros Berhane (Jonathan Hutson)

Another escapee, a 38-year-old tractor driver named Kiros Berhane, was the first man to escape from the Mai Kadra concentration camp, leaving through the south-facing warehouse door in the first of four groups who escaped over a four-day period. He reported:

When I arrived [in early November 2020], there were more than 6,000 detainees. The buildings are huge. There are two big warehouses inside the compound, and other two-story buildings for offices. They were not fully finished. The construction was still taking place. There were walls on top where they planned to build an additional floor. But the roof had not been added yet.

The roofless walls atop the warehouses appear in satellite imagery and in the cell phone video footage.

Kiros continued:

I can’t say the exact number of children, but there were a lot. The children smelled bad because most had been beaten and injured. They beat us all when they captured us outside the warehouse. They beat everyone again as we entered. And they cut the cross from my necklace when I entered. They took crosses from the necks of many detainees. They tried to take every detainee’s money, phone and some clothing, too. But some detainees were able to have phones. For example, some of us were sending children from the warehouse to the market, after three or four weeks, to bring us injera and to smuggle us some cell phones. The children had to get written permission from the Amhara to run errands. But this opportunity came later. 

I know of a man named Solomon, who drove a bajaj. Solomon had a phone and was locked up with us.

For the first month, all we had to eat was sesame seeds which had been looted from a Tigrayan guy named Gerbreselasay. “Fento” was his nickname. Fento means the Ace from a deck of cards; Fento used to like to play cards. They killed Fento outside and stole his tractor with the sesame seeds and put it in a warehouse. These sesame seeds were in addition to the sesame that had belonged to Abbadi, which was already in the warehouse. I saw them drive off some of Abbadi’s sesame seeds with a tractor. And I saw a tractor bring in seeds looted from Fento.

They started collecting us and making us stand in lines. Some Welkait Amharans who had grown up with us, and who knew our names, started making lists of our names and ethnicity. They took 180 Tigrayan people and put them in a separate room. Within a day, they took the 180-some young men; they took them away but did not bring them back to the prison. I saw this and decided to escape.

They also took a group of pregnant women, women with young children, old people and sick people, about 400 people, put the women in a bus and the men in a truck. They drove them toward Shire. They said, “We will take you to Shire.” Some people said they left them near the Tekeze River, toward Shire. Some people say the Eritrean Army soldiers found them on the road and killed 80 of them.

The mother and her three-year-old boy who appear in the cell phone video footage were among the prisoners released on the western side of the bridge that crosses the Tekeze River toward Shire, the gateway to central Tigray. It is not known whether they survived the reported ambush by Eritrean soldiers.

Kiros continued, explaining how he decided to lead an escape at 5 p.m. on the 12-hour Ethiopian clock, on the fourth month, day 19 of the Ethiopian calendar. For Americans, that would be 11 p.m. on Dec. 28, 2020:

In the fourth month, day 19, I decided to escape after I saw them make a list of the young Tigrayan men and took them away, never to return. I believed that I would soon be with them. We had been studying the metal door at the rear of the warehouse for a month. The door faces south. The main door is huge, big enough for a tractor to drive through. There is a little door inside it. 

There was a sliding latch on the inside of the little door. At the same time, there was an automatic lock with a key for use on both sides of the door. But the automatic lock didn’t work. So, we learned that we could just slide the inside latch to open the door. If the automatic lock had worked, then we could not have escaped. 

The little door opened toward the inside. It did not squeak when we opened it initially. A lot of people escaped after us, over a period of four days. It is possible that one of the later groups lubricated the door hinges. But the first group of escapees did not. 

We played with the guards by giving them money to play cards and drink alcohol, and get drunk, so that we could escape. 

The first group escaped in the fourth month, day 19. I am the one who decided to escape. I am the one who opened the door after a group of us had been studying the door and thinking about it for a month. There were eight men in the first group. We escaped at 5 p.m. on the Ethiopian clock. It was in the night. We ran west, toward Sudan. We had four one-liter bottles of water, which we call Highlands, plus some digestive biscuits from MSF that we had saved.

We ran without rest all night and the following day. We slept when we neared the border with Sudan, on the Ethiopian side, in a place called by its owner’s name, Yamane’s “gerag.” We used to fix our tractors in his garage [“gerag”], next to his field. So we knew he was a friendly Tigrayan who had been born in Shire. But no one was there when we arrived.

We crossed the border with Sudan at a place called Allow. We were tired. We could not find water. We found Sudanese militia working in the fields. We went to them. They took our phones. But they gave us water. We entered deeper into Sudan, in a big agricultural camp called a “campo.” After that, Sudanese civilians drove us in a big lorry filled with sesame seeds to Hashaba. They brought us to Hashaba and dropped us on the road. Some villagers led us to Village 8 refugee camp in Hashaba.

Over the next three days, other groups escaped and made their way here. Some females escaped, and some men and women were shot outside Mai Kadra while escaping. I am fine today. We are in a good situation. We have food. We have something to drink here. We can eat good meals from our country. Maybe soon, we will be able to go back to our country.

“We told jokes to keep from going crazy”

One man who was caught in an escape attempt suffered a severe beating, according to the accounts of former prisoners. They said the Amharans tied his legs and tied his arms behind his back and made him lie in the sun for two days in the courtyard, outside the shade of the big neem tree that stands there. Prisoners stopped attempting to escape after the fourth wave, when the Amharans reportedly began shooting escapees in the streets. 

Every former prisoner referenced the neem tree, which is visible in satellite imagery and in the cell phone videos. Prisoners also described unfinished construction atop the warehouse roofs, and the fact that the two warehouses sat inside a compound at right angles to each other. They referenced outside stairs leading to a warehouse roof. They described tractors as well. All these features and objects can be seen in satellite imagery and cell phone video footage.

(Satellite image 2021 Maxar Technologies) (Satellite image 2021 Maxar Technologies)

Solomon reported that he shot the videos on a religious holiday when prisoners with connections had pooled money and paid bribes to send young boys to the market to bring treats, which they shared with those who had no money. He explained, “We told jokes to keep from going crazy. We smiled on the outside. But inside, we had different emotions.”

Screenshot from cell phone video taken by Solomon, showing a red tractor in the courtyard of the warehouse compound in Mai Kadra, and uncompleted construction atop a warehouse roof, just as former prisoners had described.

Five paths to freedom

There were five paths to freedom from the Mai Kadra concentration camp: 

  1. the Amharan regional government released some who paid a ransom — an illegal act of extortion which confirms that there was no valid legal purpose for holding the prisoners; 
  2. they released some who claimed Amharan ancestry, which confirms that the Ethiopian government was arresting Tigrayans because of their ethnicity; 
  3. after several weeks, they released some old people, sick people, pregnant women and women with young children, although one witness among the released prisoners — a woman who returned to Mai Kadra — reported that the Amharans released these Tigrayans into a deadly ambush by Eritrean soldiers allied with Ethiopia’s federal government; 
  4. more than 150 Tigrayans escaped Mai Kadra over a four-day period; and 
  5. some died of starvation and disease due to lack of adequate nutrition or sufficient medical care in captivity.

At the end of each interview, each eyewitness considered the question, “When peace comes, how will your life be different?”

They said that peace must come for everyone, on all sides of the conflict. They spoke of their yearning to reunite with family members, to rebuild their homeland and to return their children to school and to normal routines. Not a single person spoke of a desire for vengeance. They all hoped that the world would hear their stories and that the international community would respond.

Specifically, the refugees, including former prisoners, want the UN and NGOs to regain unfettered access to western and central Tigray in order to have a full accounting of each location where captives were held, including a full report on what populations were imprisoned, under whose authority and under what conditions. And they want culturally appropriate psychological and social support for doctors and nurses treating refugees, for survivors of sexual assault and for children of all ages who were imprisoned.

This reporter plans to go into Tigray to walk the sites of the concentration camps and interview former prisoners and their captors. And to find the three-year-old boy and his mother, two former prisoners whose faces stare from the video footage that Solomon smuggled out of Mai Kadra when he escaped. This is the first visual evidence corroborating eyewitness reports that the Ethiopian government has locked up children of all ages in concentration camps, starved them, beat them and told them they would die, in hopes that the world would turn a blind eye.

OK “Ted Lasso” fans, time to have a conversation about our dear, wonderful Sam Obisanya

When we’re fully in the flush of a new, deep romance we tend to find little wrong with our lover. Each utterance is pure poetry. Every step glides on silk. Their attention is ambrosia, their style flawless.

But it’s only a matter of time before a friend plays the well-meaning killjoy by asking questions like, what does this guy really want? Does he have any lifelong friends, and what are they like? Is there something in his past or present that may inform how he’ll behave once the lust wears off?

What we’re getting at here is, how much do we really know about Sam Obisanya?

In case you’re sensing the urge to defend the honor of that other Perfect Boyfriend on “Ted Lasso” – the one who isn’t Roy Kent, but who Roy Kent respects enough to trust with his copy of “A Wrinkle in Time” – we’re not trying to pick a fight here.

We love Sam. Honestly, we do. Look at most of the AFC Richmond football team: they’re handsome, single and athletic. But they’re also immature, unrefined, and as Jamie Tartt demonstrates, complete himbos.

Not our Sam. He quotes Rainer Maria Rilke, unironically claims “Ratatouille” as his favorite film and doesn’t suffer from a chronic case of dumpster mouth. He’s intellectually curious and emotionally intelligent, and he loves his parents – especially his father, whose loving support inspires Sam to maintain his integrity above all else. His earliest move in his second season arc was to reject a spokesperson opportunity with Dubai Airlines, Richmond’s major financial sponsor, after his father shared that its parent company is destroying the environment in his homeland, Nigeria.

Sam led the team in a spur-of-the-moment protest, where the entire team played a game with tape placed over the Dubai Air logo on the their jerseys. His boss, Rebecca, could have had him fired. Instead, thanks to a technology-enabled courtship, the two end up in a fiery tryst she breaks off before it goes too far.

Rebecca lets him down ever so sweetly in the episode “No Weddings and a Funeral” when she whispers, “Sam . . . you’re so kind and loving and wise. But . . . there’s just this one issue that I can’t get past.” Here, the viewer is primed to predict their age gap is the problem – she’s in her 40s, he’s 21 – given that she’s fretted about it with him and the few friends who know about their affair.

But while this show wrings pleasure out of the obvious, its emotional revelations are never arrived at so simply. “What is it?” Sam asks.

“You’re wonderful,” she whispers, and when he asks why this is bad thing, Rebecca tells him that he could really hurt her. To maximize the tragedy, this exchange takes place in a closet in Rebecca’s childhood home right after her father’s funeral, a highly vulnerable moment for anyone. But the scene is notable for its tight quarters, tight shots and low voices; it is strangely intimate, warm and achieves a balance between sadness and hope. And the only reason we’re not utterly shattered is that Sam takes it well by being understanding, gently optimistic and implying, quietly, that he doesn’t intend to give up.

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People were supposed to fall in love with “Ted Lasso” in its second season, or more in love, provided you’d already tumbled for the show. Instead the Discourse (capitalization intentional) has been passionately mixed. The same sweetness that had people swooning in its arms during in first season became cloying  . . . to some  . . . in its second.

But Roy and Sam are the few subjects upon which many people agree. Contrasting those two, however, highlights the relative paucity of Sam’s character development.

There are justifiable reasons for this that anyone can read on the series call sheet: Roy has been a major character since Season 1, and Brett Goldstein, who plays him, is also a writer on the show. Only one other character who is a player on the Richmond team, striker Jamie Tartt, is part of that rank.

Sam is a recurring figure who proved such an effective foil to Jamie that they bumped up his prominence in Season 2. And the man who makes the player so seductive, Toheeb Jimoh, imbues him with a divine blend of gentlemanly grace and a burgeoning youthful confidence.

Now, based on all of these descriptions one may be led to think Sam’s character has been quite extensively developed. But most of what I’ve written has been mentioned by others in conversation or gleaned from close viewings of Sam exchanging texts or phone calls with his dad. It’s only slightly more detail than the type of trivia one might find on a dating app like Bantr, inviting us to assign all types of fantasy assumptions that haven’t borne out in the script.

But the difference between hanging charming details around a character’s neck and writing layers into his personality that expand him from a minor role to a major one is the difference between knowing someone’s address – which we do, courtesy of the eighth’s episode’s close – and spending time with them, in their space.

Ten episodes into the second season we’ve yet to do the latter or fundamentally know anything substantial about Sam beyond the playlists and reading material we’d encounter on his iPad, and how he behaves in the moment.

Understand, this is not a relationship deal-breaker with this show. Indeed, “Ted Lasso” deserves to be applauded for resisting the urge to heave all their weight into the flashback method favored by shows with large ensembles, as popularized by “Lost.”

It’s an effective, efficient means of spreading the audience’s investment across multiple characters, but it has also been plowed into the ground, particularly after “Orange Is the New Black” pounded that narrative mechanism into scrap. We should be very glad this show hasn’t gone there.

However, there are a few warning signs in the way the writers are building Sam up in our imaginations without adequately shoring up the character’s foundation.

All of those qualities people love in Sam – his calm consideration, gentleness and perpetual optimism – flirt with some “White Lotus” version of an ideal African man. And it also underscores the ways that Sam is very often used as a device this season. Instead of assigning direct focus to his own growth, Sam’s storyline becomes part of Jamie’s redemption arc and Rebecca’s healing process, and part of the reason Ted starts to recognize that his repressed feelings about his father’s suicide may be behind his panic attacks.

Sam is, essentially, a good guy whose dad raised him right and cultivated in him a taste for reading and Disney’s animation catalogue. But we don’t know what scares him or gets him out of bed each day, any more than we know those things about Dani “Futbol is Life” Rojas or the team captain Isaac McAdoo, who moonlights as an a master barber and dispenses a scary version of tough love.

Calling this out in such a lovable character featured on a show I adore is painful.  But such thoughts wouldn’t occur to me if Sam were allowed to be flawed and human as opposed to either a romantic magazine ad or a houseguest who guilelessly points out how Christmas reminds him of colonialism, in the same episode where his white host recoils at the thought of eating goat.

By the way, this is not necessarily indicative of a larger problem with the way the series looks at race (which, for the most part, it sidesteps) proven by the arcs for Sarah Niles’ Dr. Sharon Fieldstone and Nick Mohammed’s Nate Shelley. This is especially evident in Dr. Sharon’s steady introduction, through which the writers display care in lending individual quirks and breathing true interiority into a character who could have easily become another TV trope.

But they successfully navigate around the-Black-woman-therapist-as-modern-wise-woman type by revealing her flaws, hinting she has a few unhealed wounds she bandages by skillfully tending to others.

Remembering how we came to embrace Niles’ character is why our disappointment with Sam’s present arc is simply that, as opposed to a reason to end things. That would be silly. There are far greater crimes than painting a gorgeous picture, the details of which could be played up by adding more shadow.

Then we remember that our relationship with “Ted Lasso” is still quite new. Another season is on its way, with additional pickups likely to be announced up thanks to its Emmys conquest in major comedy categories, including top prizes for the show and its star and co-creator Jason Sudeikis. That means the comedy should have many opportunities ahead to expand other stories, hopefully starting with Sam.

Even Sam knows he’s worth the effort and wait, telling Rebecca before granting her the space she asks of him: “There’s something I should warn you of: I’m only to going to get more wonderful.” From his lips to the writers room, we hope he speaks the truth.

New episodes of “Ted Lasso” premiere Fridays on Apple TV+.

“The Convincer” still holds up for Nick Lowe’s toughest critic — himself

Nick Lowe has the heart of an artist.

This month, the celebrated singer-songwriter marks the 20th anniversary of his album “The Convincer” with a bravura rerelease. When it originally entered the soundscape, the critically acclaimed LP had everything going for it but timing. “The Convincer” dropped on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

The original release may have been overshadowed by international tragedy, but for Lowe, “The Convincer” has aged particularly well. That’s saying a lot for the musician, who has proven time and again to be his own worst critic. As he told me in a recent conversation, “I really don’t think I’m much good at all because it’s all always in the ear of the beholder.”

In a career that has produced the solo hit “Cruel to Be Kind” and, as a mega-anthem for Elvis Costello, “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding,” he has seen his share of success. But when it comes to his own work, Lowe keeps returning to “The Convincer.” He even goes so far as to allow that it’s his “favorite record.”

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This is a remarkable admission from the same artist who told me, “I’m always disappointed with what I do. It’s never good enough. And I judge each record I’ve made on the degree to which it has failed.” By Lowe’s highly critical standard, then, “The Convincer” succeeds admirably because, to his mind, “it’s not bad,” which makes it “the best record I’ve ever made.”

Admitting he “has painted a bit of a bleak picture” of the record-making process, Nick Lowe-style, the musician attributes the sonic returns of “The Convincer” to the painstaking experience of its original production. He fondly recalls developing the record in advance with co-producer Neil Brockbank and fellow musician Bobby Irwin, “cheerleaders” who previewed the songs over convivial bowls of pasta.

By that point, Lowe had already slaved over the compositions, working away until he was able to “strip away everything about me” — all “my little tricks and conceits” — until the song has been whittled down so much that he feels “like I’m singing a cover song.” Only then, when he has excoriated all of the “flim-flam” and removed the “fat off of the bones,” does he believe that the song is once and truly written.

“That’s when I like my stuff,” he said, “when I feel like it’s something that somebody else has written and that I’ve had nothing to do with it.”

When it came to the studio, Lowe was backed by a superb band for “The Convincer,” with Geraint Watkins on the keys, Steve Donnelly on lead guitar, and Robert Treherne on drums. For Lowe, the studio is about capturing the moment. 

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“What I was trying to do was more akin to making a jazz record,” said Lowe about capturing the best performance in the heat of the moment. “That’s when it turns into a pop record, then you can put as many overdubs and backing vocals and everything, but the essence of the thing was alive.”

With the rerelease of “The Convincer,” the results speak for themselves. From the opening swagger of “Homewrecker” and cool optimism of “Let’s Stay in and Make Love,” Lowe’s vocals shimmer with a smooth confidence. The album is well-served by a trio of bonus tracks, including a rip-roaring cover of “Mama Said” and “A Different Kind of Blue,” Lowe’s revealing take about his creative mindset.

With albums like “The Convincer,” Lowe found himself feeling “excited again,” as if he were in the face of “something we hadn’t heard before. Everything’s been done in pop music,” he observes, but “I always want to do something that creates a brand new sound,” even if he may invariably fall short. In songwriting, Lowe reminds us, “it’s the cross you have to bear.”