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Animals’ limbs are stretching and warping because of climate change

Joel Asaph Allen is one of the most famous ornithologists in American history, and even a brief scanning of his career helps illustrate why. The 19th century scientist traveled from the Dakota Territory to Brazil in order to collect specimens. When his health made further expeditions impossible, he established himself as a top researcher and writer, even helping to found the American Ornithologists’ Union (now part of the American Ornithological Society). He later became the first curator of birds and mammals at the American Museum of Natural History and, eventually, the first head of its Department on Ornithology.

He also figured out an important biological rule about homeothermic (previously known as warm-blooded) animals, one that is becoming tragically relevant as climate change alters the planet. Known as Allen’s rule, it holds that, generally speaking, animals’ appendages evolve to increase in size as the temperature around them also increases.

According to a recent paper published in the journal “Trends in Ecology & Evolution,” Allen’s rule is manifesting itself in a number of animals because of climate change. In other words, animals’ bodies are adapting and changing in response to heat.

As the study’s coauthors write, “there is widespread evidence of ‘shape-shifting’ (changes in appendage size) in endotherms in response to climate change and its associated climatic warming.” This was seen in animals ranging from the great roundleaf bat, which saw an increase in the size of its wings, to wood mice, whose ears increased in length.

“Allen’s rule is concerned with the size of appendages – so we’re expecting that the size of ears, tails, beaks, and legs will increase in size, relative to the rest of the body, as temperatures increase,” Sara Marie Karin Ryding, a faculty member at the University of Deakin’s Centre for Integrative Ecology, told Salon by email. “Seeing that animals evolve in accordance with Allen’s rule (and previous studies have shown that animals evolve in accordance with Bergmann’s rule) also raises the possibility that animals will evolve in accordance with other biogeographical rules, such as Gloger’s rule (animals in warmer and more humid environments tend to be more heavily pigmented).”

Shannon Conradie, a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Zoology and Entomology in the University of Pretoria (and who did not contribute to the study), wrote to Salon that the study reinforces scientists’ concern about the future of our feathered friends.

“It has been shown in multiple studies that high temperatures and heat waves bring about risks in dehydration and hyperthermia avoidance,” Conradie explained. “Birds can lose up to 5% of their body mass through evaporative water loss in a couple of hours to avoid hyperthermia but this may result in lethal dehydration if temperatures remain high over the course of the day.”

While Conradie finds it “incredible” that some birds may develop larger bills to offset the effects of radiative heat loss, she notes that “one of the major concerns here is when do the changes become more detrimental than beneficial. There will likely be trade-offs and consequences of shape-shifting and I think we still have a lot to discover on how these changes influence species directly.”

One concern, for instance, is whether the change in bill size will affect evaporative heat loss when birds are in areas with a greater risk of fatal dehydration.

Ryding observed, when asked about some of the most striking changes noticed by the researchers, that “the biggest I think we’ve seen are Australian parrots, where species like gang-gang cockatoos and red-rumped parrots have increased beak size by 4-10%. This isn’t something you would notice immediately when looking at the birds, but it’s a measurable and functional difference for the birds.”

Ryding also pointed out that it was intriguing that “shrews in Alaska have also increased their tail length, which I think is especially interesting given that it’s a completely different animal, in a completely different place in the world.”

This particular manifestation of Allen’s rule also speaks to the way that climate change threatens biodiversity. Last year the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) reported that population sizes for “mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish” has dropped by 68 percent since 1970. Although it is likely impossible to quantify how much of this was caused by climate change, the WWF also noted that people are overusing the planet’s biocapacity by at least 56 percent.

“The steep global decline of wildlife populations is a key indicator that ecosystems are in peril,” Jeff Opperman, Global Freshwater Lead Scientist at the World Wildlife Fund and co-author of the freshwater section of the report, told Salon by email at the time. “Healthy ecosystems provide a range of benefits to humans like clean water, clean air, a stable climate, flood protection, and pollination of food crops. When populations decline and ecosystems begin to unravel so does nature’s ability to support human health and livelihoods.”

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Here’s the real crime Gen. Milley exposed: the cowardice of Senate Republicans

The Joint Chiefs chairman, Gen. Mark Milley, stepped outside the realm of his constitutional power to prevent Donald Trump from starting nuclear war with China or Iran.  It was definitely unconstitutional and probably illegal.  But he’s not the true villain in this story; the true villain is almost never mentioned in the press.

Trump’s advisers aren’t the villains, either, although Trump was just the latest Republican president advised by Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, whose partner in the years after they advised Nixon, Lee Atwater, had passed away from brain cancer after making a public apology for all the damage he did to our nation in the service of Nixon’s party and, later, George H.W. Bush (Willie Horton, et al).

And Nixon, too, presented such a threat to world peace and democracy in America that his own defense secretary, James Schlesinger, took actions remarkably similar to Milley’s, as was revealed by the Washington Post on Aug. 22, 1974. Schlesinger and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs George S. Brown (who’d just taken that post on July 1, 1974), the Post wrote, “kept a close watch to make certain that no orders were given to military units outside the normal chain of command.”

Specifically, Schlesinger and Brown were worried that Nixon would start a nuclear war to stay in power as he became increasingly under siege in the Watergate scandal.  Congress relieved them of that burden when Sen. Barry Goldwater walked over to the White House and informed Nixon that both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate were going to vote to impeach and remove him from office if he didn’t resign immediately.

Which highlights the true villains in the Milley story who are almost always overlooked in the press: Republicans in the U.S. Senate, led by Mitch McConnell, who twice refused to remove Trump from office after the House had impeached him.

It’s not like these senators didn’t know that Trump was an unstable narcissist who had both loyalties and financial ties to autocrats in Russia, Turkey and multiple other foreign countries. They not only knew but were informed in great detail during the first opportunity they were given to remove Trump from office in December of 2019. 

The impeachment managers laid out in excruciating detail the evidence that Trump had repeated for the 2020 election what he and his children had tried to do with Russia in 2016: solicit foreign interference in a U.S. election, this time by trying to bribe the president of Ukraine with the promise of American weapons. At any other time in American history that would have been prosecuted as outright treason.

For example, in the election of 1800, then-Vice President Thomas Jefferson benefited from what we’d today call a tabloid journalist, James Callender, publishing stories that explicitly suggested his opponent, then-President John Adams, had provoked the cold naval war with France that emerged from a scandal just to help his re-election chances. The charges of treason hurt Adams badly in that election, helping hand it to Jefferson.

While Adams almost certainly hadn’t committed treason to stay in office, Trump almost certainly did, or something close to it.  But the Republicans in the Senate were apparently unconcerned.

They knew by then that Trump and his family had both openly and secretly solicited and received Russian help in the 2016 election, that he’d trashed American intelligence agencies while elevating Russia’s in a public meeting with President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki back in July of 2018, and that he’d tried to strong-arm the president of Ukraine to manufacture dirt on Joe Biden.

Compared to Richard Nixon paying to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex and then lying about it afterwards, Trump’s behaviors were monstrous. But Republicans gave him a pass on his criminal behavior. Twice.

If slightly over a dozen of them had had the courage of the Senate Republicans in 1974, Milley never would have been in a position to worry that an American president might start a nuclear war just to hang onto power and thus avoid prosecution.

But Senate Republicans are proudly lacking in courage, patriotism or any sense of loyalty to our nation or its ideals; their only loyalties are to their own power and the billions their donors use to seduce and control them. 

Milley (and then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper) shouldn’t have had to take actions that may well have saved the republic if Trump had played out what he was considering.  

And the American media needs to put the blame for that squarely where it belongs: On Republicans in the U,S, Senate who chose their own self-interest over our country when Trump’s impeached fate was in their hands.

“Do better:” Advocates say Biden should seek to double refugee admissions

As the U.S. State Department announced Monday that it would seek to double the number of refugees resettled in the United States over the next year, migrant rights advocates implored the Biden administration to allow many more people into the country, while ensuring that actual admissions reach the target.

In a move that would fulfill one of President Joe Biden’s campaign promises, the State Department said in a statement that the administration “recommends an increase in the refugee admissions target from 62,500 in Fiscal Year 2021 to 125,000 in Fiscal Year 2022 to address needs generated by humanitarian crises around the globe.”

Reuters reports:

The plan to dramatically increase refugee admissions comes at a time when tens of thousands of Afghan refugees are on U.S. military bases awaiting resettlement in the United States. Many still at risk were left behind in the chaotic final days of the withdrawal of U.S. forces.

Biden… promised to reverse course after his predecessor, Republican President Donald Trump, cut the refugee cap to just 15,000, the lowest level in the history of the modern refugee program. Biden initially left that level in place, but backtracked in the face of criticism from immigration advocates.

Paul O’Brien, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said in a statement that the Biden administration can and should do more to welcome well over 125,000 refugees.

“Communities across the United States are ready to welcome their new neighbors, yet the White House continues to lag behind those eager to make this country their new home,” said O’Brien. “At a time when thousands of Afghans have been forced to flee their home to find safety, and Haitians are seeking safety on the southern border, the very least the United States can do is set a resettlement goal that meets the moment.”

“Anything but a robust commitment to humanitarian protections for refugees and asylum-seekers is a dismal failure,” he continued. “Local groups, faith-based institutions, universities, businesses, and entire communities have shown greater leadership in welcoming refugees than any we have seen from the White House in recent years.”

“The U.S. can and we must do better,” O’Brien added. “Amnesty International USA is calling for the Biden Administration to admit at least 200,000 refugees this fiscal year and uphold its legal and moral commitment to allow people to seek asylum.”

Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) — a national faith-based refugee resettlement agency — welcomed the administration’s announcement, but stressed the policy “must be accompanied by measures to make sure that actual admissions reach that target.”

O’Mara Vignarajah said in a statement that:

While the Biden administration raised the ceiling to 62,500 this fiscal year, the U.S. has only resettled about 7,500 refugees through its formal program during that time. Understandably, four years of the Trump administration’s assault on the refugee program coupled with pandemic challenges have hamstrung federal rebuilding efforts.

Raising this cap without dedicating significant resources, personnel, and measures to streamline the process would be largely symbolic. It is vital that we see more refugee processing officers out in the field conducting the necessary interviews. If the pandemic poses challenges to doing so, the administration should implement 21st-century solutions like remote interviews to ensure refugees move through the application pipeline.

“The world has largely adapted to the human realities of Covid-19,” said O’Mara Vignarajah, “we must ensure refugee policy and programming does the same.”

The administration’s announcement came on the same day as the publication of photos and video footage showing U.S. Border Patrol agents using horses to prevent Haitian asylum-seekers from entering the country from Mexico near Del Rio, Texas.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas responded to the burgeoning scandal by praising “the heroic work of the United States Border Patrol” and imploring people trying to legally seek asylum in the U.S. to stay out, saying, “I want to make sure that it is known that this is not the way to come to the United States.”

Minnesota GOP donor implicated in hush money scheme to hide sex trafficking operation: report

A new lawsuit alleges that GOP donor Anton Lazzaro, who last month was arrested and charged with underage sex trafficking, allegedly tried to bribe an underage girl with hush money to keep quiet.

Local news station KSTP reports that the lawsuit accuses Lazzaro of authorizing his attorneys to offer an underage girl and her family $1,000 in order to keep quiet about Lazzaro’s alleged sex trafficking operation.

In addition to the payments, the lawyers also asked the girl’s parents to sign a nondisclosure agreement that stated the girl and Lazzaro had “a consensual interaction in the recent past” and that required the girl and her parents to “not disclose the nature of the prior interaction with Mr. Lazzaro to the public.”

This tactic backfired, however, as the parents not only refused the offer but subsequently went to the police and informed law enforcement officials of Lazzaro’s actions.

The lawsuit further alleges that Lazzaro used his “power, wealth, influence, connections, and resources to recruit children… so that he could prey on them.”

A federal indictment unsealed last month against Lazzaro claims he recruited at least five underage victims for paid sex between May and December of 2020, and that he also attempted to recruit a sixth. The indictment also alleges that he “knowingly and intentionally interfered” with the FBI’s investigation of his activities.

“Sinister”: Legal experts horrified by Trump lawyer’s 6-point plan to overturn the 2020 election

A new CNN report on Monday revealed a memo from a lawyer working with former President Donald Trump that detailed a plan to overturn his loss to Joe Biden on Jan. 6. The report reveals findings from the new book, “Peril,” by reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

It included a copy of the memo from conservative law professor John Eastman, showing a six-point plan to leverage then-Vice President Mike Pence’s role as the president of the Senate to control Congress’s vote counting and throw out the votes of seven states.

This would leave Trump in the lead with 232 Electoral College votes over Biden’s 228. Then, according to Eastman, Democrats would let out “howls.” (The whole memo shows open contempt for Democrats.) But if they object, he argued, Pence could declare the election inconclusive, at which point it would move into the House. And because Republicans control a majority of the House delegations, they could select Trump to carry out a second term.

“The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission — either from a vote of the joint session [of Congress] or from the Court,” the memo said. “The fact is that the Constitution assigns this power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter. We should take all of our actions with that in mind.”

Pence, of course, ultimately disagreed with these arguments and refused Trump’s pleas to carry out the plan. And despite the insurrection carried out by Trump’s followers on the Capitol that day, Pence fulfilled his role as expected, and Congress counted all the Electoral Votes as they were actually awarded, affirming Biden as the winner.

But even though the plan failed, the document remains a disturbing record of the time. It’s impossible to know what would have happened if Pence had tried to go along with the plan — there might’ve been outrage and chaos in the streets, just as there were outbursts of celebration when Biden was declared the winner in November 2020. But if the vice president could just throw out the votes of states he didn’t like, it would indisputably be the end of democracy in the United States.

Many legal experts found the document chilling, deeply disturbing, and absurd.

“This ‘plan’ is laughable, but we shouldn’t laugh,” said conservative lawyer David French. “If carried out, it would have led to the country’s greatest political crisis since April 1861. And Eastman was no mere internet crank. He was a law professor and close to POTUS in the final days.”

Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, agreed: “This memo is horrifying. As is the fact that it was written by a (former) law professor. As is the reporting that Pence agonized over the matter. As is so much else about how close we came to a coup (fine — an autogolpe) on 1/6. As is how little we’re doing to respond to it.”

Asha Rangappa, who teaches at Yale Law School, called the memo a “sinister plan” that would let “Trump to unconstitutionally grab and hold on to power.” She added: “Note, by the way, that he’s pretty confident the R’s would go along with it until then end.”

However, the CNN report notes that GOP Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, was a staunch opponent of the plan when it was presented to him.

“It was a dress rehearsal,” said Rick Hasen, a prominent expert in election law. “Here’s how to do the coup next time, with more loyalists in key places.” Hasen argued that there are various ways lawmakers could strengthen our elections against such attempts at subversion, including reform of the Electoral Count Act.

“Our Kind of People” and “The Wonder Years”: Two aspirational visions of Black life and prosperity

Sitting within the intersection of a Venn diagram that has “The Wonder Years” remake inside one circle and “Our Kind of People” in the other is none other than Diahann Carroll. Don’t dismiss this as a stretch until you consider the late great actor’s career in television, where she broke major barriers twice.

First came her starring role in “Julia,” making her the first Black woman to lead a series playing a nurse and a widowed mother living in an integrated neighborhood.

Although Carroll later admitted that the show was presenting “the white Negro,” her very presence in NBC’s primetime lineup placed her in American homes in the same year that Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was signed into law.

For that reason, Carroll bore the stress and criticism she sustained for playing a whitewashed role during an era of intense animus. “Julia” may not have been an accurate portrayal of what was going on in Black America, but it – she – was on the air and in front of everybody who owned a TV set.

Saladin K. Patterson’s remake of “The Wonder Years” also begins in 1968, but the common thread it shares with Carroll’s half hour isn’t the year but its intent. It show a view of that time that white Americans don’t typically consider, and a nostalgic, rarely depicted version of Black American life in that era.

Comedies featuring solidly middle class Black families on network TV and cable are far fewer in number now than in the post-“Cosby Show” years when they flourished on Fox, UPN and The WB. Even ABC’s “Black-ish” depicts an upper-middle class Black family living a life most would consider to be aspirational.

We’re much more likely to see the version of Black wealth perpetuated by reality TV shows such as Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of Atlanta,” “The Real Housewives of Potomac” or VH1’s “Basketball Wives” – all of which are direct or indirect descendants of Carroll’s “Dynasty” diva Dominique Devereaux, who Carroll was proud to claim as “the first Black bitch on television.” 

Lee Daniels’ first tribute to Carroll’s primetime soap goddess came in the form of Taraji P. Henson’s Cookie Lyon on “Empire.” But with “Our Kind of People” the executive producer and the show’s creator Karen Gist build an entire temple to the TV goddess Carroll originated.

Picture an insular section of Martha’s Vineyard, populated with Carroll’s daughters and sons, spiritually speaking, as opposed to Carringtons and Colbys. Even the name of this generation’s ruling family’s name, DuPont, is only a shade removed from Devereaux. The name sounds classy; the family’s behavior is classist.

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“Our Kind of People” is inspired by Lawrence Otis Graham’s non-fiction bestseller “Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class,” but plays like a Danielle Steele page-turner. Yaya DaCosta is Angela Vaughn, a haircare entrepreneur who inherits her mother’s styling talents, cosmetics recipes and a piece of prime real estate in the Vineyard’s Oak Bluffs.

She hopes to gain entry into the elite circles of Black society to secure funding to expand her small business into a haircare empire, drawing the attention of Raymond DuPont (Morris Chestnut) and his wife Leah (Nadine Ellis). But Leah is a queen bee, groomed by her all-powerful father Teddy Franklin (Joe Morton, basically giving us a bumped-up version of Papa Pope from “Scandal”) to slay all comers, especially the ones who are charismatic, attractive and new in town. The first two episodes explode massive secrets into the open and light the fuse on others, getting its hooks into soap addicts very early on.

But “Our Kind of People” tells a couple of stories about Black life that aren’t generally seen in primetime, especially on broadcast. Through DaCosta’s Angela it sparks a dialogue about the language and lineage of Black hair that’s intricate, detailed and celebratory. And this comes at a time when the entertainment industry is being, shall we say, moved to have open conversations about the discrimination Black performers face in hair and makeup trailers.

Another is subtler but important, which is that it depicts the exclusive stratum of Black America that runs on inherited generational fortune and power. There’s no shortage of rich Black characters on TV, whether scripted or somewhat real.

What we don’t often see are Black families whose money isn’t somehow connected to sports or the entertainment industry. Some of the “Potomac” housewives may claim lineages closer to that of the Franklins and DuPonts, but one gets the sense that they’d be turned away from membership in their secret societies for being, horror of horrors, too outwardly nouveau riche or “bougie.”

Shows like this bolster the illusion that the Black elite class is substantial and equivalent in power to the white elite, perhaps contributing to the misperception often argued on the right that the racial wealth gap can’t possibly be as wide as it is. But most folks with a working brain will know that it is neither this show’s duty nor its purpose to dispel that foolishness. You should watch because it’s a reliable weekly dose of sparkle, glam and extra-ness, along with plenty of hair inspiration, in a dreary world.

Where Daniels and Gist are whipping suds from a very modern depiction of rich folks, Patterson’s “The Wonder Years” looks back at an era considered innocent by the original 1988 version’s standard, which made a star out of Fred Savage (an executive producer on the remake). Boomers and Gen X loved that show because it took them back to a version of childhood that was nearly Spielbergian save for the tension between Kevin Arnold’s father and his teenage sister Karen, an antiwar hippie.

Savage’s Kevin experienced that era mainly through the lens of the social change that shaped popular memories of that era, but as a 12-year-old white kid living in the suburbs of Nonspecific Town, U.S.A. Kevin is mainly a witness to history.

Moments into the first episode of the reboot we see how life for Kevin’s Montgomery, Alabama counterpart Dean Williams (Elisha “EJ” Williams) is intimately tied to national policies concerning race and opportunity, and more closely linked to the war in Vietnam.

But setting the story in 1968 seems designed to show how eerily similar life’s problems then mirror ours today, with Black schools being defunded and closed and Black and white communities self-segregating. The script even references pandemic fears, except back then a flu strain was the source of our worries.

However, despite all that, this look back through time leans more intensely toward joy than sorrow. Don Cheadle’s gentle narration as adult Dean sets and maintains that tone, although Dulé Hill’s calm, fatherly presence as Dean’s father Bill, a musician who works as a professor to pay the bills, solidifies the show’s kindness. Really, though, this entire cast harmonizes beautifully, especially when Bill is seen romancing his wife Lillian (Saycon Sengbloh) in moments they steal for themselves.

There isn’t a lot in the first episode that announces much distinctness or originality in the overall approach of this new version of “The Wonder Years,” and maybe that’s the point. Dean’s sister Kim (Laura Kariuki) is a lot like Kevin’s sister Karen, only she’s more drawn to the views of Eldridge Cleaver than Martin Luther King, Jr. Still, how much of today’s broadcast primetime audience knows any substantial about Eldridge Cleaver? Not a lot, I’m guessing.

In the same way that Savage’s Kevin broke our hearts by mooning over Winnie, experiencing one of the darkest days in American history through Dean softens our perspective. There’s a turn in the pilot when the world changes in one news headline, but his most pressing concern, besides worrying about his parents, is whether his crush will ever notice that he’s alive.

As Cheadle observes in his narration, Dean and his friends grew up in a nice safe neighborhood and loving family, living the American dream in a place that’s still learning to tolerate their presence, in a culture that has yet to fully embrace folks who look like them. Seeing that play out in this new “Wonder Years” has a purpose, dispensed with the fuzziness of distant memory. One suspects not everyone will be in the mood for its cozy approach. But maybe it’ll fill the simple prescription Carroll tried to provide with “Julia”: “I’d like a couple of million of them [white Americans] to watch,” she told Ebony magazine back then, “and say, ‘Hey, so that’s what they do when they go home at night.'”

“Our Kind of People” premieres at 9 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 21 on Fox. “The Wonder Years” premieres at 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 22 on ABC.

How “Only Murders” foreshadowed the Gabby Petito media circus and citizen sleuthing

In what feels like a page out of an “Only Murders in the Building” episode, citizen sleuths have mobilized across social media platforms in response to the heartbreaking and mysterious ongoing case of Gabby Petito.

The 22-year-old was reported missing earlier this month after a four-month, cross-country road trip with her boyfriend Brian Laundrie, who returned home to Florida without Petito weeks ago. With Laundrie now missing too, the story has since ignited an explosion of bizarrely excited, true crime-obsessed vloggers and Tik Tokers, who are desperate to beat detectives to the punch — one Twitter thread theory at a time.

The “Only Murders” trio of citizen sleuths

The hyper-engagement and twisted opportunism of these clout-chasing true crime junkies feels eerily resonant with the subject matter and commentary featured in the Hulu murder mystery comedy. “Only Murders in the Building” follows Selena Gomez, Martin Short, and Steve Martin as three nosy neighbors united by their obsession with a true crime podcast. When their neighbor Tim Kono (Julian Cihi) dies under mysterious circumstances, the three are convinced their years of consuming true crime podcasts have made them uniquely qualified to solve their neighbor’s case, much to the chagrin of Detective Williams (Da’Vine Joy Randolph).

From the first episode of “Only Murders,” Williams is exhausted by the antics of self-appointed citizen sleuths, mobilized by true crime podcasts and convinced they can do the jobs of experts after listening to two episodes of “My Favorite Murder.” Her cynicism toward true crime junkies is validated as Mabel (Gomez), Oliver (Short) and Charles (Martin) break laws, tamper with evidence, and cross all kinds of lines to get to the bottom of Kono’s death.

“Only Murders” satirizes the opportunism and presumptuousness latent in many true crime content creators and consumers, champing at the bit to make a dime or at least go viral off the worst thing that’s ever happened to a young woman’s family. From the show’s first episodes, Oliver, a struggling Broadway director, is determined to make a podcast out of their late neighbor’s death, before they know anything about him, have any suspects, or have even spoken with the young man’s family. 

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At one point in the show’s third episode, Putnam compares the process of finding a suspect to their neighbor’s murder, to finding a lead in a Broadway production. “I’ve directed 212 theatrical productions,” he says, “and I’ve always found my lead. It takes a particular eye to know who’s got that special star-spark, who’s just a background player.” To Oliver, the possible killer of a young man in their building is a character to him, and the killing itself but a theatrical production. Oliver takes a heavy hand in branding the podcast, securing a wealthy and mysterious sponsor for it, and even networking with a titan of the true crime podcast industry, played by Tina Fey.

Eventually, Oliver has a change of heart about their podcast when Mabel reveals her close relationship with Kono, and the trauma she endured resulting from the loss of their shared friend years ago. But Oliver’s original approach isn’t so unlike the clickbait-y Tik Toks or thirsty Twitter threads invoking Petito’s name for personal gain, or further obfuscating an already complicated ongoing investigation with ignorant speculation. 

Self-appointed “Elle Woods” TikTokers seek clout

In real life, Petito’s case has similarly launched an avalanche of almost giddy Tik Tok analysis, with TikTokers like @robandhaley creating and sharing dozens of videos eagerly speculating about Petito’s case in the last two weeks, with millions of views, according to the New York Times.

Some Twitter users have put forth extensive theories just based on the different coloring of Petito’s hair in recent pictures and videos from shortly before her disappearance. This has caused some amateur detectives to dub themselves Elle Woods, in reference to Reese Witherspoon’s iconic character in the 2001 comedy “Legally Blonde,” in which a key witness is caught in a lie based on Elle’s deep knowledge of haircare.

The obsession with Petito’s disappearance has sparked a number of conversations about how we respond to the tragic disappearances and killings of young women. The case exposes how true crime has desensitized many of its fans to horrific violence and instead fostered an eager voyeurism, a phenomenon that “Only Murders” skillfully mocks. A young woman is dead, with unsettling evidence pointing to her boyfriend’s possible involvement in her death, and vloggers and social media users are excitedly consuming her story, making “Legally Blonde” jokes as her family mourns. 

None of this is to say there’s no value in crowdsourcing information about ongoing, mysterious cases, or elevating media attention and awareness. Many true crime junkies clearly have no shortage of time to research or help out, and mass mobilization often churns out at least one or two helpful details, every now and then, as seen in Netflix’s true crime documentary, “Don’t F**k With Cats,” in which cat lovers online unite to catch a killer.

Still, most ordinary citizens simply don’t have the resources, clearance, or expertise and detective skills to take up this much space in the investigation. Worse, many of the participants in the social media circus we’re witnessing around Petito don’t seem as interested in helping her family as they do, in helping themselves and their own social media accounts.

Missing White Woman Syndrome and its shortcomings

What’s striking about the immediate cultural obsession and extensive national media coverage of Petito’s case is that it blatantly reflects the centering of whiteness and white narratives in our society. It’s a textbook case of what social scientists have long called “Missing White Woman Syndrome,” or selective attention paid to missing person cases involving young, white, upper-middle-class women or girls. 

In contrast, among the many individuals devoted to Petito’s case, you’d be hard pressed to find one person who could name any of the unsaid numbers of missing Indigenous women, or many missing and killed women and girls of color from lower-income backgrounds. Just in Wyoming, the state where Petito may have been killed, 710 Indigenous people who are primarily women and girls are known to be missing. Missing White Woman Syndrome speaks to a double standard in whose lives are valued, and who is deemed relatable and worthy of attention, care, and mobilization for justice in a society and media landscape steeped in whiteness.

Citizen sleuths have chosen to wield this private tragedy as a public opportunity, and their self-serving analysis is often unsurprisingly void of important considerations about power and race — how Missing White Woman Syndrome has erased other victims, and how Laundrie’s identity as a white man may have allowed him to evade police action and suspicion, disappearing days ago amid the investigation. There’s certainly been little to no conversation about police departments’ systemic failures to handle possible domestic abuse cases, perhaps owing to the prevalence of domestic abuse among police officers themselves.

Despite this, Missing White Woman Syndrome often does little to no good for white women themselves, relegating their lives, their pain, their innermost struggles to just another true crime podcast episode for millions to gawk at.

The subject of Oliver, Mabel and Charles’ podcast in “Only Murders in the Building” notably isn’t a white woman, but a young Asian or mixed race man, and a presumably affluent resident, having grown up in their luxury apartment building. In this way, the series flips the traditional script of the true crime podcast with their mystery subject’s identity. As a result, the show might just prompt audiences to question why in real life, we’ve heard so few podcasts about stories with subjects like Kono, and instead heard so many about white, female subjects like Petito. 

Since Petito’s case first drew widespread media attention earlier this month, Laundrie has gone missing, shortly after being named a person of interest. Petito’s family has very publicly demanded that Laundrie’s family cooperate with the ongoing police investigation. Then, on Sunday evening, the FBI announced it had found human remains in Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest consistent with descriptions of Petito. The following day, ABC7 reported police had searched Laundrie’s home, and seized his car and other evidence, all while he remains missing.

The case continues to develop at a rapid rate, with new developments announced on what feels like an hourly basis. As the “Only Murders” gang quickly discovers amid their fictionalized, on-screen sleuthing, their mystery subject had friends, family, loved ones struggling to process his death. This realization of the humanity at the heart of their investigation prompts them to slow their roll — and we can only hope the TikTok detectives of real life will eventually take a similar cue.

James O’Keefe claims Project Veritas was scammed by hackers

Project Veritas, the activist group founded by James O’Keefe whose sting operations against Democratic and left-wing organizations have often blown up in the past, is now claiming that it was scammed by hackers posing as attorneys.

In a video released last week, O’Keefe alleges that hackers secretly monitored his correspondences with outside attorneys, later replicating the lawyers’ names and email addresses with slight variations so they could hoodwink the activist into paying them a $165,000. 

“It appears the fraudsters were watching, waiting for an invoice to be sent to us and then pounced, impersonating them, replying to a real email as the lawyer’s name the moment the invoice came,” O’Keefe said in the video. 

The alleged scheme comes on the heels of news that the organization’s New York headquarters was destroyed by Hurricane Ida. 

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On Tuesday, Project Veritas released another video featuring a person who claims to be a registered nurse employed by the Department of Health and Human Services. Jodie O’Malley, alleges in the video that the federal government fails to report “dozens” of adverse reactions to the vaccine, namely congestive heart failure. 

In the video, O’Malley interviews an apparent Health and Human Services emergency room doctor, Maria Gonzalez, who tells her that “the government doesn’t want to show that the darn vaccine is full of sh*t.”

“I’m calling for an investigation,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., a staunch anti-vaxxer, tweeted in response to the video.

The New York Times reported earlier this month that while the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine is associated with an elevated risk of myocarditis, the side effect “remains rare,” with Covid-19 “more likely to cause myocarditis than the vaccine is.”

In May of this year, The New York Times reported that Project Veritas played a central role in a “network of conservative activists” attempting to root out public officials that displayed insufficient fealty to Donald Trump during his presidency. The group, the paper reported, apparently ran undercover operations against the FBI, recruiting various women to go on dates with bureau agents and record them making anti-Trump remarks. Many of the group’s operatives were reportedly trained to infiltrate various trade unions and Democratic campaigns – an effort led by Erik Prince, the scandal-plagued founder of security contractor Blackwater Worldwide. 

In 2017, O’Keefe attempted to smear The Washington Post for shoddy journalistic ethics, reportedly feeding the paper a false story about a woman claiming to have been impregnated by Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. After finding inconsistencies in the woman’s story, the Post observed her walking into Project Veritas’s headquarters.

Over the years, O’Keefe has coordinated similar operations against the Hillary Clinton campaign, the American Federation of Teachers, George Soros’ nonprofit Open Society Foundations, and the League of Conservation Voters. 

Most of the group’s funding is reportedly funneled through Donors Trust, a right-wing nonprofit donor-advised fund largely sponsored by Koch brothers. The Donors Trust, once called “the dark-money ATM of the conservative movement,” allows its contributors to remain anonymous by virtue of its nonprofit status. 

Beyond bolognese: A primer to 6 delectable, lesser-known pasta sauces that deserve some love

Many are familiar with the customary stalwarts of the Italian and Italian-American pasta sauce lexicon, from bolognese and amatriciana all the way to vodka and alfredo. However, some exponentially delicious sauces have “fallen through the cracks” in terms of cultural and culinary appeal — and it’s time that that changes.

The interplay between pasta and sauce can be a marvelous thing. Pasta dishes, at their core, strike a perfect harmony between sauce, pasta and garnishes. The disparate components should work in tandem — allowing for a final dish that is greater than the sum of its parts.

While some dishes are referred to as their sauce first and foremost (like primavera, cacio e pepe or carbonara), others are very dependent on the noodle primarily, like spaghetti and meatballs. 

Furthermore, some sauces more or less require a particular pasta shape or type in order to be properly enjoyed; for example, I primarily eat bolognese with orecchiette, the little ‘ears’ filling up with copious amounts of sauce and positively walloped with grated cheese. Another “genre,” if you will, is stuffed pasta — ravioli, cannelloni, manicotto, tortellini and tortelloni and agnolotti — which are excellent, but aren’t necessarily the kinds of pasta you’d eat on a daily basis. 

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One of the first, if not the first, recipes I ever mastered was Rachael Ray’s Gemelli with Roasted Red Pepper Sauce. The brightness and pungency of the pepper-laced tomato sauce, the chew of the pasta, the verdancy of the fresh parsley — it’s all as fresh as a daisy. The aroma of this sauce is one of my favorite things on earth. When I first made the dish, I was the ripe age of 13 years old, and I assure you that I was the only 7th grader who would rush home to start cooking. I’d sit at my desk throughout the school day restlessly, visions of recipes and ingredients dancing in my head like sugar plums. 

When I did get home, I’d race into the kitchen, but then start carefully delving into the recipe as listed: mincing the shallots and onions, pureeing the roasted peppers, grating the Parm. Looking back now, that dish is truly a harbinger of all that was to come for me from a culinary perspective, and I’m honored and indebted to Ray for being one of many inspirations that resulted in my now-career. 

About a decade later, I graduated to Anne Burrell’s bolognese, which was a formative moment in learning about patient, mindful cooking — coaxing every single drop of flavor out of a dish, not rushing, taking your sweet ol’ time on a weekday afternoon in order to ensure the most incredible end product imaginable. It’s also, to this date, the pinnacle of all bolognese; I have never tasted better. As Burrell instructed, I took my sauce to the point of burning repeatedly, adding water just as the bottom of the pan became almost too dark, allowing it to loosen and deglaze, then reducing exponentially yet again, and playing this game until the sauce was absolutely perfect and ready to be tossed with the pasta. 

Almost yet another decade later, my current primary pasta favorite right now is paccheri, which is essentially jumbo-sized rigatoni. It can be a challenge to squeeze an entire paccheri in your mouth, which makes them one of the very few fork-and-knife pastas shapes. Retro! (For an idea of how to use paccheri and a glimpse into this next decade of my pasta cookery, check out this super autumnal recipe I developed a few weeks ago.)

In order to help shine a light on the lesser-known pasta sauces, here’s a run-down of some of the best. So hopefully one — or more — of these resonate with you and you find yourself whipping up a new pasta favorite soon. 

Boscaiola 

As La Cucina Italiana notes, boscaiola is “perfect for autumn,” so we’re just about to enter its prime season. Boscaiola is characterized by mushrooms, white wine, cream and bacon, but there are many variations beyond thoe staples. It’s deeply flavored, rich and earthy with a hint of porky smokiness, and its flavors can be deepened even further with the addition of specialty or dried mushrooms, as noted by Serious Eats.

Squid Ink

Who on earth decided to incorporate squid ink into pasta? Because I’d like to thank that person — because squid ink pasta is stupendous!

As Best of Sicily notes, “squid ink” is sometimes actually seppia or cuttlefish ink, especially when served in Italy. Cuttlefish hails from the Mediterranean and looks like a mix of squid and octopus. As The New York Times notes, the ink was also used in cooking throughout Spain, in dishes like arroz negro and black paella.

Prior to being incorporated into pasta and other dishes, squid or seppia ink was primarily used in writing. “Sepia” — yes, like the Instagram filter — is actually a reference to this ink, which was often used in certain photographs. 

Zozzona 

Properly made zozzona is rich, silky, and viscous, emulsified by egg yolk, a combination of guanciale (pork jowl), tomato and aromatics. Iit is wildly flavorful, but can also be quite filling. It is a Roman dish that is reminiscent of amatriciana and carbonara, but has a subtle twist. Some variations also contain sausage. Bonus: The name is ridiculously fun to say, too.

Pesto alla Trapanese 

Trapanese pesto is wildly different than Genoese: it is Sicilian and made of cherry tomatoes, almonds, and mint or basil. Its color is obviously very different than Genoese pesto, and the swap of herbs and nuts makes a major difference in flavor. It’s also important to note that some Genoese pestos call for Parmigiano Reggiano, while Trapense sometimes has Pecorino, which is markedly sharper and can sometimes even have a subtly astringent bite.

Gricia

Essentially the quieter twin of carbonara, but sometimes with guanciale instead of pancetta and — the biggest distinction — no egg.

Di Manzo

Prior to eschewing red meat, this was one of my absolute favorite pastas, which I first ordered from a local Italian-American pizzeria that had a $9 lunch special. It was small, but absolutely perfectly made: al dente rigatoni, uber-tender short rib, and just the right amount of tomato, herbs, aromatics and cheese. It also has just the right amount of difference from bolognese, with perfectly tender, toothsome short rib taking the place of browned ground beef. It is really an exceptional dish.

 

Martha Stewart’s classic take on apple crumble celebrates fall flavors one bite at a time

Cooler temperatures and knit sweaters are just around the corner, which means it’s finally time to turn up the heat inside the kitchen with autumnal delicacies that warm both the body and soul. From spice cakes and strudels to tarts and pies, the list of this season’s favorite confectionaries is endless!

If the anticipation of the fall season has got you in the baking spirit, look no further than to Martha Stewart for some added inspiration. The queen of baking has blessed us with her own rendition of apple crumble, a must-try fall staple that incorporates two of the season’s most celebrated ingredients: apples and cinnamon.

The classic apple crumble features a crackly top layer with no additional bottom crust, which makes the dish a less doughy version of traditional apple pie. And unlike pie, apple crumble bakes faster and is easier to assemble — Stewart’s recipe only needs 25 minutes to prep.

To start, toss together apples, granulated sugar, 2 tablespoons of flour (unbleached all-purpose is preferred), lemon juice, cinnamon and salt in a large mixing bowl. Transfer the filling to a buttered 2-quart baking dish.  

In a separate bowl, use an electric mixer to beat both butter and brown sugar until fluffy. Mix flour and salt until the mixture forms large clumps. Sprinkle this mixture on top of the filling and bake until the center is bubbling and the top layer is golden brown in color.     

Let the crumble cool and finish it off with a heaping scoop, or two, of vanilla ice cream. If you’re craving a strong kick, enjoy with a cup of black coffee or a shot of espresso. Full recipe here.

In first UN speech, President Biden declares U.S. has “turned the page” on war

President Joe Biden delivered his first United Nations General Assembly address as president on Tuesday, with rallying cries of global cooperation in the midst of the many crises facing the world in recent months. 

“To deliver for our own people, we must also engage deeply with the rest of the world,” he said to the world leaders and diplomats watching from New York and around the world, signaling a stark contrast with his predecessor’s isolationist ideals.

But this call for global unity has taken on new meaning following the turbulent year that Biden has faced since taking office in January. With the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and a vaccine rollout rife with inequality, the undeniable effects of climate change, increasing cyber threats and the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, — to name a few — Biden sought to remind world leaders of America’s historic leadership role within the international community.

And reiterated his belief in the power of democracy. “No matter how challenging or complex the problems we’re going to face, government by and for the people is still the best way to deliver for all of our people,” he said. 

And yet, Biden’s efforts to reassert himself as a stabilizing force came at a time when many key allies have had doubts about the president’s word. 

Last week, Biden announced that the U.S. will join a multilateral security agreement with Australia and Britain — dubbed AUKUS — to build a fleet of eight nuclear-powered submarines. This new strategic partnership, however, resulted in Australia backing out of a $66 billion contract with France. Signed in 2016, the two countries had agreed to build 12 conventional diesel-electric submarines. 

France now claims that they were not forewarned of Australia’s intentions to sign onto the new partnership, setting off a diplomatic crisis between France, Australia and the U.S.

“The fact that for the first time in the history of relations between the United States and France we are recalling our ambassador for consultations is a serious political act, which shows the magnitude of the crisis that exists now between our countries,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told France 2 over the weekend.

Since then, several top European Union leaders have expressed their dismay at President Biden’s actions, accusing him of disloyalty to the transatlantic alliance.

In an interview with CNN, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called U.S. treatment of France “not acceptable,” and expressed her concern over lack of communication about the new security strategy in the Indo-Pacific. “We want to know what happened and why. And therefore you first clarify that before you keep going with business as usual.” 

These sentiments were echoed by European Council President Charles Michel.

“The elementary principles for an alliance are loyalty and transparency,” he said in comments to reporters in New York prior to the UNGA, as reported by Politico. “We are observing a clear lack of transparency and loyalty.” 

But as Biden used his speech to try to reassure his allies following one diplomatic crisis, he also addressed another. The president indicated his desire to move forward from the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, looking forward to better ways of handling conflict.

“As we close this period of relentless war, we’re opening a new era of relentless diplomacy,” he said. “Of using the power of our development aid to invest in new ways of lifting people up around the world. Of renewing and defending democracy.” 

He ended his address with an urgent plea to his fellow leaders, and a call to action to face the challenges rocking the global community: “We cannot afford to waste anymore time. Let’s get to work. Let’s make our better future, now. We can do this. It’s within our power and capacity.”

 

Odd methane plumes on one of Saturn’s moons may be evidence of life, study says

Peculiar readings from Saturn’s moon Enceladus have spurred researchers to probe the possibility that life might exist on the bizarre world in the outer solar system.

In 2005, NASA’s Cassini Saturn orbiter took images of geysers blasting particles of water ice into space from fractures near the moon’s south pole. The observation led to speculation that there may be a vast ocean tucked between the moon’s core and its icy shell.

As Cassini flew through these plumes, it was able to sample their chemical makeup. The orbiter detected dihydrogen, methane and carbon dioxide at unexpected levels. More peculiarly, the amount of methane detected in the plumes raised eyebrows, as methane production can be a sign of life as we know it.

The observation of a peculiar amount of methane — combined with an observation of dihydrogen (H2) and water ice — left astrobiologists puzzling over the possibility that Enceladus might be a habitable place for life. But methane, dihydrogen and water ice are not a smoking gun: methane can be produced by natural chemical reactions, and its existence alone isn’t necessarily an indicator of life.

In order to figure out why Enceladus was spewing methane, researchers at the University of Arizona and Paris Sciences et Lettres University in France constructed mathematical models to calculate the probability that different natural processes might explain the Cassini data.

“We wanted to know: Could Earthlike microbes that ‘eat’ the dihydrogen and produce methane explain the surprisingly large amount of methane detected by Cassini?” said Régis Ferrière, an associate professor in the University of Arizona Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and one of two lead authors of the study published in Nature Astronomy in July. “Searching for such microbes, known as methanogens, at Enceladus’ seafloor would require extremely challenging deep-dive missions that are not in sight for several decades.”

Methanogens, or methane-producing bacteria, exist on Earth in droves. They live underwater, in swamps and marshes, and in the guts of most animals, including humans. 

However, there are natural geologic processes, unrelated to life, that can produce methane. On Earth, methane is often produced at a slow rate via hydrothermal activity. This occurs when cold seawater seeps into the ocean floor and moves through rocks to a close heat source, and then spews back into the water through a hydrothermal vent.

Still, much of Earth’s methane is produced in methanogenesis, the biological process by which methanogen bacteria consume carbon dioxide and belch methane. Using a statistical model, researchers of the aforementioned study concluded biological methanogenesis is the most likely cause of Enceladus’ ample methane production.

“Obviously, we are not concluding that life exists in Enceladus’ ocean,” Ferrière said. “And biological methanogenesis appears to be compatible with the data. In other words, we can’t discard the ‘life hypothesis’ as highly improbable. To reject the life hypothesis, we need more data from future missions.”

Indeed, it is possible that Enceladus’ methane is the result of a chemical breakdown of primordial organic matter that may be present in the core of Enceladus. Through the hydrothermal process, it is also possible that dihydrogen, methane and carbon dioxide are present in the plumes, because Enceladus formed through the accumulation of organic-rich material provided by comets.

“It partly boils down to how probable we believe different hypotheses are to begin with,” Ferrière said. “For example, if we deem the probability of life in Enceladus to be extremely low, then such alternative abiotic mechanisms become much more likely, even if they are very alien compared to what we know here on Earth.”

However, some in the astronomy community aren’t convinced by this paper.

“We know that water ice exists on Enceladus and can break to produce dihydrogen (H2),” said Avi Loeb, Harvard physicist and author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. “And there are many chemical paths to make methane without life.”

Loeb added that the combination of methane, dihydrogen and water ice “is definitely not sufficient evidence for the chemistry of life as we know it.”

“Complex organic molecules would be a better indication,” Loeb added.

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Where is #TheResistance now? Democrats should fear their base now more than ever

If there was ever a time to hit the panic button in the Biden era, Monday was that day.

Monday marked one week before so-called moderates in the House of Representatives attempt to force a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure package passed at the center of President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. With his approval ratings stalling due to the double hits of a lackluster response to the delta variant and continued vaccine hesitancy holding down economic recovery, along with a messy withdrawal from Afghanistan that included the fatal drone bombing of 10 civilians, mostly children, Biden is now facing threats of sabotage from the very people with whom he made a political bed for decades in D.C. 

Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona were out on Monday with a pair of demands for their fellow Democrats facing a confluence of deadlines, both real and arbitrary. Manchin, the chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, who has reportedly sought to “remake President Biden’s climate legislation in a way that tosses a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry,” now says he would like to delay action on Biden’s agenda until 2022. That’s just ahead of the midterm elections, so we all know Manchin’s suggestion is the fast lane to nowhere. Sinema, for her part, is throwing a last-minute wrench in negotiations to take up for Big Pharma in opposing Democrats’ plans to allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices directly. 

Also on Monday, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear oral arguments in the case against Missippi’s abortion law in December, likely dismantling the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade by June. Just weeks before, the high court laid the groundwork for this when it upheld Texas’ ban on abortions. At least one abortion provider in the state has already been sued. 

Monday was also the day that Senate Democrats, rebuffed by the Senate Parliamentarian the day before, frantically introduced an attempt at a legislative workaround to the ruling that granting legal status to immigrants isn’t budgetary, and thus can’t be included in the filibuster-proof reconciliation bill. Never mind that in 2005, the Republican-controlled Senate used reconciliation to pass immigration reforms citing citizenship as a significant economic and budgetary issue, because Manchin and Sinema have decided that defending a relic of Senate rules is more important than defending Democrats’ majorities in Congress — or even democracy for that matter. (Republicans even fired the Senate Parlimentarian in 2001 after he ruled against one of their tax cut proposals.) 

Immigration matters, as the world saw on Monday with images of U.S. border patrol agents whipping their horse reigns as they corraled Haitian migrants back into the Rio Grande at the Texas border with Mexico, under a Democratic administration, too. Thanks to a cadre of radical right-wing justices pushed onto the federal bench by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell during Donald Trump’s presidency, the Biden administration is forced to implement Trump’s extraordinarily draconian Remain in Mexico policy which prohibits asylum seekers from entering the U.S. while awaiting review. Now the Biden administration has enlisted the Defense Department to help in one of the fastest, large-scale expulsions of refugees from the United States in decades.

So where is #TheResistance? 

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For the most part, moderate members of the Democratic caucus in Congress were not flooded at their home districts during the August recess, even as they very publicly threatened to hijack Biden’s agenda. Activists like those with Rev. William Barber’s Poor People’s Campaign have consistently applied pressure to Democrats like Manchin, but without the masses in the streets protesting the horrific images of Haitians hunted on horseback under the Biden administration with the same fervor present when protesting kids in cages under Trump, it’s little surprise things stay the same.

“The policies that are being enacted now and the horrible treatment of these innocent people who have come to the border must stop immediately,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., calling the practice “xenophobic,” said on the Senate floor on Tuesday. “We must allow asylum seekers to present their claims at our ports of entry and he afforded due process.” 

A march for citizenship on Tuesday in Washington D.C. aligns Schumer with House progressive and Squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. Democrats are not in disarray, in fact, they are more unified they have ever been; they’re just being held hostage. 

“I have been working hard on my portion of it,”  Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., the chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, told reporters of the multi-trillion dollar reconciliation package. “If it’s actually going to happen, we’re doing pretty well. So but I, you know, I mean, go ask Manchin or Sinema.” 

The chaos we are currently watching in Washington, D.C. comes down to the personal interest of these two. 

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Manchin currently maintains ownership stakes in two coal companies that he founded, including one run by his son, Joe Manchin IV. The senior “Manchin has personally grossed more than $4.5 million from those firms,” The Intercept reported. Former Manchin aides with fossil fuel industry clients are able to directly lobby the senator. The same pattern is present with Sinema’s newfound opposition to Medicare drug price negotiations despite its overwhelming popularity across the partisan divide. (Even Donald Trump talked big about lower prescription drug prices.) 

In 2009 there were 60 Democratic Senators (briefly). Now, a dozen years later, it is an epic struggle to get the country to elect 50 Democratic senators, after a decade in which the GOP descended into open white fascism. This trendline looks ominous. The flaw in the “Vote Blue No Matter Who” electoral strategy is that what gerrymandered maps and politically polarized sorting leaves us with too often is razor-thin margins where the Who really does matter. Sure Republicans didn’t repeal Obamcare when they had control of Congress under Trump, but they passed the main priorities for both of their bases: corporate tax cuts and stacking the federal bench with conservative judges.  

The donors can’t be the only people Democrats in Congress are afraid of. The time is now for #TheResistance to make its return back to the streets — before it’s too late. 

Ex-Rand Paul aide pardoned by Trump now charged with funneling Russian cash to Trump’s campaign

Longtime Republican operative Jesse Benton has been charged with funneling tens of thousands of dollars from a Russian national to former President Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee, the Justice Department said Monday.

Jesse Benton, a former campaign aide to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., “conspired to illegally funnel thousands of dollars of foreign money from a Russian foreign national” to back Trump’s 2016 campaign, Justice Department prosecutors said in an indictment unsealed this week.

Prosecutors say Benton and Doug Wead, a conservative author and former campaign adviser to Ron and Rand Paul, solicited an illegal campaign donation from the unnamed Russian national and then falsified campaign finance filings to make it appear that the donation came from Benton.

The indictment alleges that Benton arranged for the Russian to attend a Trump campaign fundraiser in Philadelphia to get a photograph with the candidate, “in exchange for a political contribution.” The two men “concealed the scheme from the candidate, federal regulators, and the public,” prosecutors said.

The filing does not name Trump but the details match a $25,000 donation Benton made that month to a joint committee raising funds for the Trump campaign and the RNC, according to The Washington Post.

The Russian wired $100,000 to Benton’s consulting firm, according to the indictment. Benton used $25,000 to buy a ticket for the Russian national to attend the fundraiser and kept the other $75,000 for himself, according to the filing.

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Benton and Wead are each charged with one count of conspiracy to solicit and cause an illegal contribution by a foreign national, one count of contribution by a foreign national, one count of contribution in the name of another and three counts of making false entries in an official record. Each charge carries a maximum penalty of five to 20 years in prison.

Benton and two other aides were previously convicted in 2016 of trying to buy an endorsement for Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign. Financial records showed that campaign aides secretly paid $73,000 to a company owned by an Iowa state senator who switched his endorsement to Paul. Benton, who is married to Paul’s granddaughter, pleaded for leniency and pledged that he would “walk a righteous path.” He was sentenced to two years of probation and a $10,000 fine. Prosecutors say the 2016 scheme was hatched and executed days before and after Benton’s sentencing.

Benton, who also worked on Rand Paul’s 2010 Senate campaign and at one point lived in the basement of the senator’s house, later served as the campaign manager for McConnell’s 2014 re-election bid but resigned after the illegal 2012 payments were reported. He went on to work for the pro-Trump Great America super PAC but resigned in 2016 after he was charged.

Benton was caught in a secret video by the British newspaper The Telegraph in 2016 offering to disguise a $2 million contribution to Trump from reporters posing as representatives of a Chinese national while working for the super PAC. Benton offered to funnel the money through his own PR firm and into nonprofits that are not required to disclose their donors, which would then donate to the super PAC, according to the report. The investigation triggered a federal complaint against Benton and the Trump campaign for soliciting money from foreign nationals.

Last year Trump issued a presidential pardon to Benton at the urging of Rand Paul.

Wead, who worked in the George H.W. Bush White House and later authored “Inside Trump’s White House: The Real Story of His Presidency,” has hired former Trump lawyers Jay Sekulow and Jane Raskin to represent him.

“Doug Wead is a respected author and supporter of charitable causes,” Sekulow said in a statement to Politico. “He has pleaded not guilty to the charges and will continue to respond appropriately in court.”

Supreme Court announces December date for case directly challenging Roe v. Wade

Abortion rights advocates geared up for a major fight as the U.S. Supreme Court announced Monday it will soon hear arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case in Mississippi which poses a direct challenge to Roe vs. Wade.

The high court confirmed it will consider the case December 1 after months of speculation regarding when it would take up the dispute over Mississippi’s ban on most abortion care after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

The question before the court, as the Center for Reproductive Rights explains, is “whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortion are unconstitutional.” In the landmark 1973 Roe decision, the Supreme Court affirmed the right to abortion care before fetal viability, usually around 24 weeks.

“The fate of Roe v. Wade and legal abortion is on the line,” tweeted Rewire News Group, which reports on reproductive rights.

Mississippi’s restriction makes no exception for pregnancies that result from rape or incest, only allowing abortion care “in medical emergencies or for severe fetal abnormality.” Providers who administer abortions in violation of the law could have their medical licenses revoked and face fines.

The court will hear the case three months after it refused to intervene in Texas, allowing that state’s six-week abortion ban to take effect at the beginning of September. The Texas law allows private citizens to take legal action against anyone who helps a person to obtain abortion care after that point, with plaintiffs who prevail in court entitled to $10,000 and recovery of their legal fees. Republican governors in several other states have said since the Texas law was permitted to go into effect that they plan to seek similar legislation.

The Texas case has led reproductive rights advocates to warn that the Supreme Court cannot be counted on to protect Roe.

NARAL Pro-Choice America noted that the Mississippi case will be the first abortion case the court hears since Justice Amy Coney Barrett—one of three anti-choice judges appointed by former President Donald Trump—joined the court, resulting in a 6-3 right-wing majority.

The court’s announcement on Monday followed the filing of an amicus brief in the Mississippi case by nearly 900 state legislators who support reproductive rights and justice.

“Since so many state legislators have been leading the assault on reproductive rights, it only makes sense that state legislators be the first to defend them,” Arizona Democratic Rep. Athena Salman said in a statement. “By adding my name to this amicus brief, I join hundreds of powerful, strong reproductive freedom champions standing up for the rights of all.”

The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), was among 72 organizations that filed a separate amicus brief following the Supreme Court’s announcement.

“In our brief, we explain that the devastating impact of allowing a pre-viability abortion ban to stand—or overturning the right to abortion explicitly—denies the liberty and equality of women and all people who can become pregnant,” NWLC said.

Tucker Carlson warns Pentagon’s vaccine mandate is attempt to weed out “men with high testosterone”

Fox News host Tucker Carlson, now the channel’s most vocal vaccine skeptic, made a number of baseless remarks about the vaccine on Monday, claiming that the Pentagon’s recent vaccination mandate was an effort to weed out Christians and “men with high testosterone” from the military. 

“This was specifically designed to separate the obedient from the free,” Carlson said during a broadcast. “Can’t have any of the latter category.”

“The point of mandatory vaccination is to identify the sincere Christians in the ranks, the freethinkers, the men with high testosterone levels and anyone else who doesn’t love Joe Biden and make them leave immediately,” he added. 

Carlson further compared the military’s suicide death toll to that of COVID-19’s, saying that suicide has killed “many, many times more [than latter].”

“In just a few months last year,” he said, “156 service members killed themselves. So military suicide is an actual crisis the Pentagon might want to address.”

Later, the host pointed to an internal PowerPoint presentation the military apparently used to combat vaccine skepticism. One of the slides sarcastically asked: “How many children were sacrificed to Satan because of the vaccine?”

Thinking the question is somehow anti-Christian, Carlson argued: “The presentation proceeds to list the so-called tenets of Satanism which are taken from the Temple of Satanism website. So here you have the United States Army doing PR for Satanists.”

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There is little to no evidence that vaccines are unsafe for use. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), 7,653 have died following vaccination between mid-December 2020 and mid-September 2021. This accounts for roughly 0.002% of vaccinated Americans, according to The Independent.

“Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem,” the CDC explained. 

Regardless, Carlson and other Fox News personalities have continued to rail against the mask and vaccine mandates, even when the channel has itself implemented internal policies apparently aimed at mitigating COVID-19 exposure. 

Back in August, Fox issued a directive asking employees to identify whether they are vaccinated “for space planning and contact tracing purposes in conjunction with DCD/state city health and safety guidelines. Fox Corp. has meanwhile said that over 90 percent of its staff are vaccinated, according to The Daily Beast, and requires unvaccinated employees to undergo regular testing. 

Trump “revelations” are an indictment of America’s political class: They knew, and did nothing

At times during the last five or so years, some of us have been living in the future. Sometimes just a day or two, but at other times it has felt like a week or perhaps even a month. During rare moments of immense clarity, it’s like being in a time warp, a year or two ahead of the rest of the world.

I’m talking about those of us, both with and without prominent public platforms, who have consistently sounded the alarm about Trumpism, American neofascism and the escalating crises to come. We were mostly ignored, and sometimes mocked and derided. The truth, one suspects, was too painful to accept for those Americans who for reasons of self-interest, cowardice, willful ignorance or indifference found it convenient to ignore our warnings.

It’s clear that far too many Americans held tightly to the illusion of “normalcy” and a naive faith in the “institutions” of democracy. That was a bit like trying to hold onto a life preserver in a hurricane. 

For those who have understood the rising tides of American neofascism and the associated evils of Trump and his movement, the entire experience has often felt futile and frustrating. So why do we persist? 

I can speak only for myself. Black Americans have many checks paid to us by American society — figuratively stuffed into our pockets and wallets, or hidden in shoeboxes or mattresses — marked with the words “insufficient funds.” America’s democracy is a work in progress; Black people are arguably its main architects and caretakers. Black folks have saved America from its own worse impulses many times over. That relationship is emotionally, physically and financially abusive. But we soldier on loving this country, because it is our own and we have built it with our stolen labor, creativity, genius, suffering, loss and pain.  

As James Baldwin explained, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” I take that wisdom as my motivation when I feel my energy beginning to wane.

We of the Cassandra coalition warned that Donald Trump and his movement would bring destruction to the United States. We were correct.

We warned that Trump and his movement would cause pain and ruin that few could imagine possible in the “greatest country on Earth.” We were correct.

We warned that Trump had shown himself to be a mentally unstable white supremacist enamored of violence, and that his evil pathologies would infect an entire country. We were correct again.

We warned that Trump was clearly a fascist and an authoritarian, as well as a malignant narcissist and perhaps even a sociopath or psychopath who feels no loyalty to anyone but himself. We were repeatedly proven to be correct.

We told you that Trump, the Republican Party and their followers posed an existential threat to America democracy. I hardly need to belabor the point.

In too many ways, Trump and the larger white right’s antisocial and destructive behavior has become so normalized that the continuous “revelations” about the criminal aberrations of the Trump regime are losing their power to move the public and the political class. This is a classic example of the rule of diminishing returns, but it does not make what has been unleashed by the Age of Trump any less dangerous.

As reported by CNN and other media outlets, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s new book about the presidential transition period, “Peril,” reveals that Donald Trump was so out of control, dangerous and apparently unhinged after his defeat last November that Gen. Mark Milley and other senior military and civilian leaders made a sort of private pact to protect America and the world from him.

“Peril” details that after Trump’s coup attempt and his followers’ attack on the Capitol, Milley “felt no absolute certainty that the military could control or trust Trump and believed it was his job as the senior military officer to think the unthinkable and take any and all necessary precautions.” Milley described those days after Jan. 6 as the “absolute darkest moment of theoretical possibility.”

Woodward and Costa also report that Milley spoke to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who agreed that Trump was “crazy” and had been so “for a long time.” It’s hardly a secret that Trump is widely viewed as mentally unstable by Washington insiders and the political class, including members of his own party.

Milley and other national security officials were concerned that Trump would use the country’s military, up to and including nuclear weapons, to start a war with China or Iran. The results would have been immensely damaging to world peace in security, at the very least, and could have led to a cataclysm. To prevent such an outcome, Milley reached out to the senior commander of the Chinese military to reassure him that the situation was under control and Trump would not be allowed to do something reckless.

Around the same time, then-CIA Director Gina Haspel reportedly told Milley, “We are on the way to a right-wing coup. The whole thing is insanity. He is acting out like a six-year-old with a tantrum.”

In so many ways, these “revelations” about Trump and his regime’s misdeeds are like the picture on the front of a jigsaw puzzle box. We know what the final image will look like, but still need to put together the pieces. So the end result is something of an anticlimax.

Most important, perhaps, that picture is a damning portrait of America’s political class. As a group, its members understood that Donald Trump and his regime were an existential threat to American democracy. For various reasons, they did little or nothing about it.  

Of course, most leading Republicans were complicit, if not active conspirators, with Donald Trump and his malevolent plots. But senior Democrats also knew of Trump’s dangers to American democracy and society. Like President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland today, they did not act with any urgency to investigate and prosecute Trump and his Republican confederates, or to hold them accountable for their crimes against democracy and the American people.

Many journalists and others in the news media likewise understood that Trump and his regime were immensely dangerous to democracy, the rule of law, the Constitution and American society. Again, too many of them chose to stay silent or to speak of such things only indirectly or through euphemism. 

Much the same can be said of America’s national security officials. There were certainly honorable whistleblowers, but there were not enough of them, nor did they sound the call clearly enough. Courage was in short supply when the country most needed it.

The coroner’s report on American democracy will list many causes of death. Near the top of that list will be a failure of political and moral leadership.

As the Trumpist movement escalates its assault on American democracy and society, the country’s political and leadership class cannot reasonably claim the defense of ignorance, or protest that this was all so “unprecedented” and came as a total surprise.

America in the Age of Trump and beyond is like a darker version of the famous folk tale about the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But in this 21st century dystopian version of that classic story, the boy is an adult, and he was telling the truth about the wolf — or rather the pack of wolves, which has begun attacking and eating the villagers. Instead of fighting back or defending themselves, the townspeople and their leaders just look away and go about their daily business, having convinced themselves that ignoring the wolves will somehow keep them safe. Once the wolves’ bellies are full, they reason, they won’t eat anyone else and will wander away, and gradually life will get back to “normal.” But there is no normal to get back to, and the wolves cannot be so easily satisfied. That story does not end well for the village and its people. 

I got a “mild” breakthrough case. Here’s what I wish I’d known

The test results that hot day in early August shouldn’t have surprised me — all the symptoms were there. A few days earlier, fatigue had enveloped me like a weighted blanket. I chalked it up to my weekend of travel. Next, a headache clamped down on the back of my skull. Then my eyeballs started to ache. And soon enough, everything tasted like nothing.

As a reporter who’s covered the coronavirus since the first confirmed U.S. case landed in Seattle, where I live, I should have known what was coming, but there was some part of me that couldn’t quite believe it. I had a breakthrough case of covid-19 — despite my two shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the second one in April.

I was just one more example of our country’s tug and pull between fantasies of a post-covid summer and the realities of our still-raging pandemic, in which even the vaccinated can get sick.

Not only was I sick, but I’d exposed my 67-year-old father and extended family during my first trip back to the East Coast since the start of the pandemic. It was just the scenario I had tried to avoid for a year and a half.

Where did I get it? Who knows. Like so many Americans, I had loosened up on wearing masks all the time and physical distancing after getting fully vaccinated. We had flown across the country, seen friends, stayed at a hotel, eaten indoors and, yes, even gone to a long-delayed wedding with other vaccinated people.

I ended up in quarantine at my father’s house. Two rapid antigen tests (taken a day apart) came back negative, but I could tell I was starting to feel sick. After my second negative test, the nurse leveled with me. “Don’t hang your hat on this,” she said of the results. Sure enough, a few days later the results of a PCR test for the coronavirus (this one sent to a lab) confirmed what had become obvious by then.

It was a miserable five days. My legs and arms ached, my fever crept up to 103 and every few hours of sleep would leave my sheets drenched in sweat. I’d drop into bed exhausted after a quick trip to the kitchen. To sum it up, I’d put my breakthrough case of covid right up there with my worst bouts of flu. Even after my fever broke, I spent the next few weeks feeling low.

Of course, I am very lucky. I didn’t go up against the virus with a naive immune system, like millions of Americans did before vaccines were widely available. And, in much of the world, vaccines are still a distant promise.

“You probably would have gotten much sicker if you had not been vaccinated,” Dr. Francesca Torriani, an infectious-disease physician at the University of California-San Diego, explained to me recently.

As I shuffled around my room checking my fever, it was also reassuring to know that my chances of ending up in the hospital were slim, even with the delta variant. And now, about a month later, I’ve made a full recovery.

The reality is breakthrough cases are becoming more common. Here’s what I wish I’d known when those first symptoms laid me low.

1. Is it time for a reality check about what the vaccines can — and can’t do?

The vaccines aren’t a force field that wards off all things covid. They were given the green light because they greatly lower your chance of getting seriously ill or dying.

But it was easy for me — and I’m not the only one — to grab onto the idea that, after so many months of trying not to get covid, the vaccine was, more or less, the finish line. And that made getting sick from the virus unnerving.

After all, there were reassuring findings earlier this year that the vaccine was remarkably good at stopping any infection, even mild ones.

“There was so much initial euphoria about how well these vaccines work,” said Dr. Jeff Duchin, an infectious-disease physician and the public health officer for Seattle and King County. “I think we — in the public health community, in the medical community — facilitated the impression that these vaccines are bulletproof.”

It’s hard to keep adjusting your risk calculations. So if you’d hoped to avoid getting sick at all, even slightly, it may be time for a “reset,” Duchin said. This isn’t to be alarmist but a reminder to clear away expectations that covid is out of your life, and stay vigilant about commonsense precautions.

2. How high are my chances of getting a breakthrough case these days?

It used to be quite rare, but the rise of delta has changed the odds.

“It’s a totally different ballgame with this delta phase,” said Dr. Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in San Diego. “I think the chance of having a symptomatic infection has gone up substantially.”

But “quantifying that in the U.S. is very challenging” because our “data is so shoddy,” he said.

The vaccinated still have a considerably lower chance of getting infected than those who aren’t protected that way. Los Angeles County collected data over the summer as the delta variant started to surge: Unvaccinated people were five times more likely to test positive than those who were vaccinated.

3. How careful do I need to be if I want to avoid a breakthrough?

Looking back, I wish I’d taken more precautions.

And my advice to friends and family now is: Wear masks, stay away from big gatherings with unvaccinated people and cut down on travel, at least until things calm down.

The U.S. is averaging more than 150,000 coronavirus infections a day (about twice what it was when I fell sick), hospitals are overwhelmed, and the White House has proposed booster shots. Scientists are still making sense of what’s happening with breakthrough cases.

In many parts of the U.S., we’re all more likely to run into the virus than we were in the spring. “Your risk is going to be different if you are in a place that’s very highly vaccinated, with very low level of community spread,” said Dr. Preeti Malani, a specialist in infectious diseases at the University of Michigan. “The piece that’s important is what’s happening in your community.”

4. What does a “mild” case of covid feel like?

In my case, it was worse than I expected, but in the parlance of public health, it was “mild,” meaning I didn’t end up in the hospital or require oxygen.

This mild category is essentially a catchall, said Dr. Robert Wachter, who chairs the Department of Medicine at the University of California-San Francisco. “Mild” can range from “a day of feeling crummy to being completely laid up in bed for a week, all of your bones hurt and your brain isn’t working well.”

There’s not great data on the details of these mild breakthrough infections, but so far it appears that “you do way better than those who are not vaccinated,” said Dr. Sarang Yoon, an occupational medicine specialist at the University of Utah who was part of a nationwide study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on breakthrough infections.

Yoon’s study, published in June with data collected before the delta surge, found that the presence of fever was cut in half, and the days spent in bed reduced by 60% among people with breakthrough infections, compared with unvaccinated people who got sick.

If you’re vaccinated, the risk of being hospitalized is 10 times lower than if you weren’t vaccinated, according to the latest data from the CDC. Those who get severely and critically ill with a breakthrough case tend to be older — in one study done before delta, the median age was 80.5 — with underlying medical conditions such as cardiovascular disease.

5. Can I spread it to others, and do I need to isolate?

Unfortunately, you still have covid and need to act like it.

Even though my first two tests were negative, I started wearing a mask at my house and keeping my distance from my vaccinated family members. I’m glad I did: No one else got sick.

The delta variant is more than twice as contagious as the original strain of the virus and can build up quickly in your upper respiratory tract, as was shown in a cluster of breakthrough infections linked to Provincetown, Massachusetts, over the summer.

“Even in fully vaccinated, asymptomatic individuals, they can have enough virus to transmit it,” said Dr. Robert Darnell, a physician-scientist at The Rockefeller University.

The science isn’t settled about just how likely vaccinated people are to spread the virus, and it does appear that the amount of virus in the nose decreases faster in people who are vaccinated.

Still, wearing masks and staying isolated from others if you test positive or have symptoms is absolutely critical, Darnell said.

6. Could I get long covid after a breakthrough infection?

While there’s not a lot of data yet, research does show that breakthrough infections can lead to the kind of persistent symptoms that characterize long covid, including brain fog, fatigue and headaches. “Hopefully that number is low. Hopefully it doesn’t last as long and it’s not as severe, but it’s just too early to know these things,” Topol said.

Recent research from the United Kingdom suggests that vaccinated people are about 50% less likely to develop long covid than those who are unvaccinated.

This story is from a reporting partnership that includes NPR and KHN.

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An emergency room doctor’s view of the COVID crisis

In late winter 2020, when the full gravity of Covid-19 was only starting to come to light in New York City, journalist Dan Koeppel sent a text to his cousin, Robert Meyer, an emergency room doctor at the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.

“How are you doing? I’m worried for you.”

“Hanging by a thread,” Rob replied.

“Are you seeing a lot of cases?”

“Yes.”

“On a scale of 1 to 10, where do you think you are?”

The answer arrived 10 minutes later: “100.” After that, Koeppel encouraged Meyer to text, email, and call him about what was going on, as a coping mechanism. It eventually became a diary of sorts, and that, combined with interviews with Meyer’s colleagues, became “Every Minute Is a Day: A Doctor, an Emergency Room, and a City Under Siege.”

Montefiore is affiliated with the neighboring Albert Einstein College of Medicine and is home to the second-largest medical residency program in the United States, after the Mayo Clinic. It is part of a sprawling system with many buildings, labs, classrooms, and even housing for residents. Montefiore is the largest employer in the Bronx, “one of the poorest, least healthy urban counties in the U.S.,” as the book points out. The area is also filled with nursing homes. All of these factors came together during the pandemic to flood the hospital’s ER.

Meyer’s nearly 25 years at Montefiore had given him a wealth of experience, and he and his colleagues were prepared for everything. Everything except Covid-19. But in fairness, no hospital was ready.

As early as January, doctors at Montefiore had started to hear about patients with symptoms similar to the U.S.’s first confirmed patient, who had returned from Wuhan to his home in Washington state on Jan. 15 and tested positive for Covid-19 a few days later. Around the same time, Meyer reports hearing stories of New Yorkers coming to the hospital complaining of symptoms like fever, cough, and fatigue and being treated for the flu and released. One doctor told him that they had sent information about a suspected case to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but there was no response. Later on, Meyer muses: “Were they Covid? Later studies would say probably, but at the time Covid-19 wasn’t even on our radar.”

By early March, positive Covid-19 cases were detected in New York and the number of patients admitted to the hospital with Covid-19 started building slowly — and then exponentially. Because of its location near many nursing homes, the Montefiore ER saw many of the city’s sickest patients. Meyer and Koeppel are not shy about pointing out the systemic factors that made everything about the pandemic worse for this hospital. “Life in the Bronx is hard and resources are scarce,” they write. “All those comorbidities that have led to all those Covid fatalities in poor communities around the world were preventable in a way that Covid itself wasn’t.”

Through Meyer’s eyes, the authors paint a gruesome scene of the early days of the pandemic: ERs packed with stretchers, not enough ventilators, and soon, not enough personal protective equipment. The speed with which the virus took hold was unexpected, even for medical professionals, which led to overcrowding and the turning away of patients. By the second Saturday in March, the hospital was running out of places for those who didn’t make it through. Triage tents were set up outside. Doctors were starting to get sick; some would eventually die.

The learning curve was steep, and as new information became available, the protocols for handling and treating patients evolved. But chaos ensued in those early weeks. For example, the ER was overwhelmed with so many people needing lung X-rays that normal safety precautions were cast aside, leaving doctors and staff routinely exposed to radiation. For the beleaguered hospital staff, there was just not enough time and too much to do.

As the pandemic continued, Meyer realized that a core element of his doctoring had changed: his relationship with his patients. No longer did he have the time to get their full story and profiles. They couldn’t even see his face. He didn’t have the time to get to know them, and they couldn’t have their families with them while they fought to survive. The struggle to retain humanity and tenderness in the face of unrelenting tragedy is returned to again and again: “When you face an emergency room where it seems like everybody is dying, where there’s no room to move, where every patient is gasping for air, you just can’t be the doctor you want to be.”

And so he finds ways to make small connections, even after death. To make it easier on a woman who has snuck past security to see her father’s body, he wraps gauze around his head to close the open mouth that occurs when rigor mortis sets in. He learns about patients after they’ve died from the relatives who call and text. But it never feels like enough, and even at the end of the book, Meyer questions his emotional responses to his patients.

Meyer details the fear doctors felt in the ER and that they brought home with them; the fear of infecting their families, or that they themselves are infected and don’t know it yet. As doctors start to become sick with Covid-19 — or have family members who get seriously ill or die — what was once professional becomes very personal.

 

Though the book is a bit choppy in places, with frequent chronological shifts, the authors consistently place the pandemic in a larger context: the community, the sociopolitical environment, the systemic failings. They discuss the inequities of the health care system, both in the Bronx and in the U.S. as a whole, and how Covid-19 exacerbated them. While the book mostly avoids politics, the authors make note of the reality that, early on in the pandemic, “the biggest city in the richest, most powerful nation in the world is on its knees.”

The book ends in the fall of 2020, making it more of a snapshot in time rather than a comprehensive chronicle of the pandemic. When the book leaves Meyer, he doesn’t yet know that the fall would bring more outbreaks and school closures — and many more deaths. Even with the vaccine being rolled out, the winter of 2020 and the first part of 2021 would bring plenty of heartache. He has no way of knowing about vaccine refusal and emerging variants, not to mention infection numbers returning to those of the early days of the pandemic.

All of this raises the question of whether the book would have benefited from some more time. Was there enough space for Meyer to fully examine his experiences while still in the thick of it? Would the story have been better told from an outside, more objective point of view? How have the administrators and medical staff of Montefiore adjusted to cope with the ups and downs of the crisis? Questions like these inevitably make the narrative feel unresolved, even as it succeeds as a vivid first-hand account of a doctor’s daily struggles on the front lines.

But that may be the authors’ primary goal. “We may not be able to stop the next pandemic,” Meyer concludes, “but we can be better prepared if we don’t forget this one.”

Jaime Herndon is a medical and parenting writer who also writes about popular culture in her spare time. Her work has appeared in New York Family, Book Riot, Fiction Advocate, Today’s Parent, Motherly, Healthline, and Health Union, among other publications.

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

Nevada GOP Senate candidate threatens election lawsuits — 14 months before anybody votes

Nevada Senate candidate Adam Laxalt, a Republican with a well-known name in the Silver State, is already stoking fears of voter fraud and vowing to file lawsuits to “try to tighten up the election” — 14 months before any actual votes are cast.

Republican candidates around the country have ripped a page from Donald Trump’s playbook, launching spurious claims of fraud about elections that haven’t happened yet, in an apparent effort to blame potential defeats on unspecified and evidence-free claims of “irregularities.” California Republican Larry Elder, who hoped to be elected governor after the recent recall election targeting Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, launched a website claiming voter fraud days before votes were even counted. (In the event, the vote against the recall was so overwhelming Elder has stopped talking about it.) But Laxalt, who was endorsed by Trump after filing multiple lawsuits contesting Joe Biden’s narrow 2020 victory in Nevada, is breaking new ground by making such claims more than a year before a single vote is cast.

“With me at the top of the ticket, we’re going to be able to get everybody at the table and come up with a full plan, do our best to try to secure this election, get as many observers as we can, and file lawsuits early, if there are lawsuits we can file to try to tighten up the election,” Laxalt told radio host Wayne Allyn Root in an interview last month after Root claimed that “Trump won Nevada” and said the election had been “stolen.” The comments were first flagged by Jon Ralston, editor of the Nevada Independent, and later reported by the Associated Press.

The comments set off alarm among some Nevada Republicans, according to Ralston, who drew a comparison to failed 2010 U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle. Angle held an early polling lead over then-incumbent Sen. Harry Reid, a Democrat, until she veered sharply to the right, alienating key conservatives in the state.

“She went on with friendly interviewers, got comfy and said damaging things,” Ralston said on Twitter. “Laxalt will only do Newsmax, OAN, Joecks TV and will keep making mistakes. That’s why GOPers here are worried.”

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Laxalt is the grandson of Paul Laxalt, a Nevada Republican legend who served both as governor and in the U.S. Senate. His biological father, as he revealed less than 10 years ago, was former Sen. Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican and close ally of Ronald Reagan, who had an extramarital relationship with Laxalt’s mother when she worked on Capitol Hill. Laxalt served one term as Nevada attorney general and ran for governor in 2018, losing to Democrat Steve Sisolak despite Trump’s endorsement. He later served as co-chair of Trump’s 2020 campaign.

“Adam Laxalt led Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and now he’s running the same Big Lie playbook for his 2022 Senate campaign,” said Andy Orellana, a spokesperson for Nevada Democratic Victory, which is working to re-elect Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, who would be Laxalt’s opponent in the 2022 general election. “He knows he can’t win on the issues, so Laxalt is pushing frivolous preemptive lawsuits in an effort to limit Nevadans’ voting rights and potentially overturn the election when he loses.”

Laxalt led multiple lawsuits on behalf of Trump’s campaign, leading the Las Vegas Sun editorial board to dub him the “Nevada version of Rudy Giuliani.” 

Laxalt insisted in the interview with Root that the problem with those lawsuits was not that the campaign’s failed to produce any evidence of fraud but only that that the suits were not filed in time.

“There’s no question that, unfortunately, a lot of the lawsuits and a lot of the attention spent on Election Day operations just came too late,” he said.

In fact, Laxalt filed his first failed challenge of the 2020 vote before Election Day, seeking to stop the count of mail-in ballots in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas and is home to three-quarters of Nevada’s population. After Trump’s defeat, Laxalt repeatedly pushed conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud, without provide any actual evidence.

“I’m telling you, there are improper votes,” he insisted at the time. “We don’t know if it’s 2,000, 10,000 or 40,000. I believe it is in the thousands.”

Laxalt also pushed a claim that more than 3,000 non-residents had voted by mail in the 2020 Nevada election. Trump allies filed a lawsuit over the claim — but then dropped them after it became clear that many of the ballots Laxalt described were linked to military post office boxes overseas or locations around the country where military personnel are stationed, suggesting they were legally cast by troops and their family members.

Laxalt filed a post-election lawsuit alleging widespread voting irregularities and asking a court to overturn Biden’s victory and declare Trump the winner. A judge in Carson City, the state capital, rejected the challenge, writing that the campaign’s evidence had “little to no value” and “did not prove under any standard of proof that any illegal votes were cast and counted, or legal votes were not counted at all, for any other improper or illegal reason.” Trump’s campaign appealed the decision, arguing that the court did not take into account “expert” testimony provided by the campaign. The Nevada Supreme Court rejected that challenge, writing that the campaign failed to identify any “unsupported factual findings” in the earlier ruling.

“Last time Laxalt (and other anti-voter allies) pushed lies like this, they lost. Again and again,” the States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan group that supports fair and secure elections, said on Twitter in response to Laxalt’s latest lawsuit threat. “The fight is so far from over. Lies about election integrity are spreading past the 2020 presidential election.”

In fact, Biden won Nevada by more than 33,000 votes — making Laxalt’s unsupported claims about non-resident voting irrelevant — and the results were certified by the state Supreme Court. Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske launched an investigation into voter fraud allegations that found no evidence of widespread fraud or irregularities.

“While the NVGOP raises policy concerns about the integrity of mail-in voting, automatic voter registration, and same-day voter registration, these concerns do not amount to evidentiary support for the contention that the 2020 general election was plagued by widespread voter fraud,” she wrote in a letter to the state Republican Party in April — after the party censured her for refusing to support the false claims of election fraud that have seemingly become GOP doctrine.

But the absence of evidence has apparently done little to assuage Laxalt as the state’s Republican Party continues to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from its baseless fraud claims. Laxalt’s campaign did not respond to questions from Salon.

In a statement to the AP, Laxalt declined to specify what kind of lawsuits he believes woiuld “tighten up the election” or to say whether he would accept the election results if he loses. But criticized the Democratic-led state legislature for passing a bill to send mail-in ballots to every registered voter.

“Without a single Republican vote, Democrats radically changed the election rules in the final stretch of last year’s campaign and many voters lost confidence in the system as a result,”  he told the outlet. “Their partisan transformation of Nevada’s system handed election officials an untested process that generated over 750,000 mail-in votes, unclean voter rolls, loose ballots and virtually no signature verification. Nevadans have a right to more transparency and voters deserve confidence in the accuracy of election results, and I will proudly fight for them.”

Asked about the former attorney general’s argument, a spokesperson for Cegavske told Salon that the secretary of state is “not commenting on Mr. Laxalt’s concerns beyond what she has been saying all along – that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.”

Laxalt later bragged on Twitter that his promise to attack the 2022 election in advance “seems to be triggering the media” after it was reported by Nevada outlets. “I stand by what I said on Wayne Allen Root’s [sic] show,” he said, insisting that he simply wants “free” and “secure” elections.

“In fact, Laxalt is the one threatening to undermine secure and fair elections,” argued Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent. “Indeed, as this demonstrates, for Trumpist politicians, the refusal to commit to respecting legitimate election losses is now a badge of honor.”

Laxalt expects to face off against Cortez Masto next November, though he still has to get past a Republican primary that is nine months away. Democrats have accused him of preemptively trying to undermine democracy.

“Laxalt knows he can’t defend his record of pushing Trump’s interests and those of his special interest donors over hardworking Nevadans, so 14 months before the election he’s already plotting to revive the Trump playbook — threatening self-serving lawsuits in an effort to make it harder for Nevadans to vote,” Jazmin Vargas, a spokesperson for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said in a statement. “Nevadans see right through Laxalt’s corrupt and dishonest tactics and will reject him again in 2022.”

Eccentric Christian reporter causing headaches for Jen Psaki, White House press corps

White House press secretary Jennifer Psaki has an odd problem on her hands: a longtime White House correspondent from an obscure Christian website — that publishes little or no actual reporting — is raising a fuss over no longer being allowed to enter her personal office whenever he wishes. This previously unreported West Wing drama has led the reporter in question to call for an investigation. 

Matthew Anthony Harper, a former chaplain who is the self-appointed White House correspondent for a little-known media outlet called InterMountain Christian News, says his access to administration sources is being restricted. Harper says this started last week, and now claims he is the target of a “harassment” and “intimidation” campaign crafted by White House press assistants. 

“A Secret Service person was giving me a hard time, saying I couldn’t be there,” he told Salon in an interview, referring to Psaki’s office. He said the agent told him “that I didn’t have clearance,” adding that he was “confused about why I’m being banned from this.” That incident, Harper said, occurred last Wednesday, Sept. 15. 

After that incident, Harper said he now has to travel around the White House press area with an “escort,” which he claims no other reporter is compelled to do. Harper does not have a “hard” (i.e., permanent) press pass, and says the White House took this measure as part of a systematic “harassment and intimidation” campaign by the Biden administration over his specific questions about “human rights.” He added, “I know they’re singling me out.”

Harper believes there is only one way to get to the bottom of this convoluted tale: through a broad investigation into alleged White House wrongdoing. He sent what he calls a formal “complaint” by email to Psaki and press office chief of staff Amanda Finney last Thursday, calling for them to investigate their own operation.

“I’ve had unrestricted access without an escort to the Press Secretary’s office for almost 5 years but now after my continuing and challenging Human Rights violation questions, they are giving me this problem,” Harper wrote in an email with the subject line “Christian media complaint.” He reiterated his claim that a Secret Service officer had given him a “hard time” and barred him from Psaki’s office unless he was escorted. 

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“It’s sometimes difficult to get appointments with any press secretary,” said longtime White House correspondent Brian Karem, now a columnist for Salon. “You have to do your job and keep working till you get what you need. I cannot fathom that anyone in that press office would just categorically dismiss any reporter.” As for the complaint filed by Harper, Karem said it struck him as “inappropriate.”

Other established White House reporters who spoke with Salon, as well as other sources familiar with the matter, said that Harper was only recently prevented from “floating” around Psaki’s office in the “upper press” area of the White House. That is not customary for reporters without a hard press pass, which Harper does not possess. 

Reporters who have attended countless White House press briefings told Salon that Harper has occasionally appeared at Q&A sessions in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room. One, however, said they had legitimately never heard of him, while several others said they had never read any of his reporting. Harper also describes himself as White House correspondent for an Israeli news service called Newsrael, which appears to be a small-scale news aggregation blog, with very few articles under his byline.

Harper has been a West Wing mainstay for years, although there is not much evidence that he is a legitimate news reporter of any description. His most memorable moment in the White House may have come in July 2012, when he asked Jay Carney, then-President Obama’s press secretary, a somewhat bewildering “spiritual question.” 

Harper told Salon, “I was very popular with the media that day. That was an electrifying experience.” 

Other members of the White House press corps said Harper was known for asking oddly specific and seemingly irrelevant questions about Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s former prime minister. 

Harper explains his mission at the White House on his LinkedIn page: “In November 2001, I felt God calling me to establish a Christian News Source for our Treasure Valley Idaho/Oregon area beginning with our online ‘Christian Resources and Events Directory’ which later developed into the Treasure Valley Christian Newspaper and recently into the InterMountain Christian Newspaper covering the states of Idaho, Oregon, Utah, Wyoming and now Colorado.”

Harper describes himself as co-founder, publisher and president of the InterMountain Christian News group. Salon’s research could not find evidence of actual reporting or other journalism created by Harper and InterMountain, beyond a large number of amateurish YouTube videos watched by only a handful of people. 

Harper apparently first appeared in the White House’s briefing room in the summer of 2011. In 2019, during Donald Trump’s presidency, he created a minor media moment for his singing in the briefing room.

Last month, Harper got in a question to national security adviser Jake Sullivan. 

In a video Harper posted last week from the White House, he discussed “the plight of the Uighurs in the Chinese internment camps and those in southern Mongolia and Tibet and also Taiwan that are greatly impacted by the aggression of the Chinese Communist Party,” which appears to be the issue he believes has led to his supposed persecution. The video then cuts to Harper inside the briefing room, saying, “I am Dr. Anthony Harper here in the James Brady press room in the White House — so many crucial issues to talk about.” 

Asked whether he merits a White House press pass given his apparently minuscule audience, Harper responded that he’s not at the White House to “win a popularity contest.” He admitted his audience “might not be as large as CNN,” but said it is “important,” and that national news outlets are “promoting” and “playing” his questions lobbed at Biden officials. “One of my questions went viral in Jerusalem,” he said.

“There are a lot of Jewish and Christian people in America,” Harper continued. “They are really speaking against the Muslim Uighurs issue,” Harper added that he has repeatedly asked the White House for comment and has not received a satisfactory answer. “Rare earth elements!” he added, just before the end of the conversation. 

On Monday night, Salon learned that Harper has asked fellow members of the White House press corps to “pray” about his West Wing access problems. He said he plans to apply for a hard White House press pass in October, and hopes not to have “any problems with that.”

A senior White House official originally told Salon they would comment on Harper’s claims, but no response was received before this article was published.

More than 3 million new documents uncovered in Trump tax fraud case: report

An attorney for Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, said in court Monday that he believes more indictments are coming in the case.

“We have strong reason to believe there could be other indictments coming,” attorney Bryan Skarlatos said at a pre-trial hearing in New York State Supreme Court, according to a report from CNN.

Asked about the pending indictments, CNN’s Kara Scannell said: “There was no further elaboration on that point, and we don’t know exactly who could be charged or how many people.”

Scannell added that Skarlatos asked the judge for more time to deal with discovery in the case, as he receives more evidence from prosecutors.

“He said he just received today a manilla envelope that he held up in court with a bulge in it,” Scannell reported. “And he said within that, he was told there were 3 million documents. He said these documents were found in a co-conspirator’s basement, and they were tax documents. So certainly a lot more information getting transferred from prosecutors to the defense.”

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s impeachment rant goes off rails: “God will no longer provide protection”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., explained on Monday why she supports articles of impeachment against President Joe Biden.

In a floor speech, Greene said that she was prompted to file articles of impeachment because of “his disgraceful actions having to do with Afghanistan.”

According to the Georgia Republican, Biden is guilty of treason because he gave “aid and comfort to the enemies.”

Greene also pointed to the “security crisis created at our southern border, which today is actually being invaded.”

The lawmaker then veered into a rant about abortion.

“But heading into this week, perhaps the most evil and disgusting thing that is going to happen in this 117th Congress is the bill that’s going to be introduced that makes it a federal law to allow abortion up until the day of birth,” she complained. “This wall [in the House chamber] says ‘In God We Trust’ and if that is the case then this Congress will reject this evil bill and protect the innocent unborn.”

Greene added: “If this nation becomes a nation where we have such a federal law that can kill a baby up until the day of birth then God will no longer provide protection and his grace over America.”

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

“Reservation Dogs” creator on evolving the show’s representation & storytelling: “It’s not finished”

Sterlin Harjo’s journey to becoming a filmmaker began with watching movies with his father, when he was a kid growing up in Holdenville, Oklahoma. His family wasn’t rich, but his dad’s friend worked at the local cable company and got them HBO.

“We just devoured those movies, and they had a profound influence on me,” the “Reservation Dogs” co-creator recalled in a recent conversation. “When you’re from a small town, you gravitate towards pop culture. And it kind of helps you. It’s like mythology, right? It’s like, cinema is our form of storytelling and mythology, and it helps inform how you handle conflict, and how you move through life.”

Harjo’s coming-of-age in the 1990s informs the “Reservation Dogs” world. The title may be a nod to Quentin Tarantino‘s era-defining flick, but the mood he, co-creator Taika Waititi  and the writers braid together contains threads of everything ’80s and ’90s cinema: from “Platoon” to “Friday,” from “The Goonies” to “The Lost Boys.”

But coming of age stories like “Stand By Me,” “Rumble Fish,” “The Outsiders,” and “Boyz n the Hood,” films where the young heroes face darkness, most directly influence the first season. When you understand that, you get why the title is also a misdirect.

It implies that Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Elora Danan (Devery Jacobs), Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) and Cheese (Lane Factor) are a band of thieves or even vigilantes, that people think they’re cool. All that is wishful thinking.

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Bear can’t fight. Willie Jack and Cheese just want to hang out. Elora Danan is the one among them who has enough ambition to realize their California dream, but that mission floats on an ocean of unresolved sadness.

Their adventures form the heart of the show, Harjo said, “but [it’s] also about living life, and kind of how pop culture helps sort of guide you through this life, through the darkness. And that’s an escape, right?”

But for millions of people who watch those ’90s classics and don’t see anyone who looks like them on-screen, it’s also an arrival.

Indigenous teens don’t have a “Stand By Me,” or popular movie comedies devoted to illuminating their experience. When FX greenlit “Reservation Dogs,” Harjo and Waititi seized the opportunity to create their own coming-of-age stories. This time Indigenous young people get to be the ones making us laugh, cheer or cry, in a story produced by an all-Native writers’ room.

This matters, of course. What resonates with the audience are the show’s universally relatable themes of impatience and youthful naiveté, and our first experience with massive loss experienced anew through these characters.

“I love storytelling from underrepresented communities,” Harjo stated. “I love storytelling. I love foreign cinema. I love European cinema, I love Latin American cinema. I don’t know, I’ve always just been a person that absorbs all of this work, and with ‘Reservation Dogs’ I found a way to really express the love for those versions of storytelling and cinema through the point of view of these kids.”

In telling the story of four teenagers living in a rural Oklahoma town, “I wanted to basically shout out and give homage to a lot of these influences,” Harjo explained.  “It’s like the Wu Tang clan, you know? They gravitate towards ideas that aren’t necessarily their experience. But there are things that they identify with in those experiences. So really, when making the show, I was like, ‘Let’s pull these influences, and kind of give homage to all of them.'”

“What I hope that ‘Reservation Dogs’ does is open the world up to telling different types of Native stories,” he added.

The FX on Hulu show is not the first comedy about an Indigenous community to debut in 2021, mind you. That honor goes to “Rutherford Falls,” which was co-created by Sierra Teller Ornelas.

However, “Reservation Dogs” is decidedly centered on the lives of its Indigenous characters. Its white characters are the ones flitting about the periphery for once, displaying a comical ignorance of their Indigenous neighbors while living beside them.

Its popularity may be additionally helped by the fact that the cast includes familiar actors like Zahn McClarnon and Gary Farmer, who have appeared in dozens of movies and TV projects, but rarely as the star or in a comedic role.

What these very different comedies have in common is that they honestly portray parts of the country few non-Natives visit, and far too many still stereotype or romanticize.

Harjo’s and Waititi’s reverence for cinema also gives “Reservation Dogs” room to incorporate mythological figures like Deer Lady (Kaniehtiio Horn) and treat them like mundane figures, part of the local color, in the same way Jim Jarmusch might.

Mentioned just as frequently in conversations about “Reservation Dogs” is the concept of representation, a term slung across the shoulders of any pop culture “first.” Whether that designation is a badge of honor or places an unfair burden on those creating the art in question depends on situational context. And Season 1 of “Reservation Dogs” got it from both sides.

The very element that earned the show critical acclaim attracted passionate, angry criticism, which is the script’s assumption that popular culture is a common language transcending race and socioeconomic status. Our love of movies is part of that, but another artform wedded to the show’s overall feel is music, hip-hop specifically.

“When you have a culture where their identity has been stripped away through genocide . . . hip-hop was there to help us with our identity, I think,” Harjo said. “So it has a profound effect in Native communities because it wasn’t white. And there’s something very punk rock, very ‘standing up to the man’ about it. That’s something that we identified with and needed to do ourselves.”

Through this mash-up of music and film touchstones “Reservation Dogs” steeps the audience in the uniqueness of its Oklahoma community and the range of personalities that make the place unique.  

Bear, for instance, is haunted by a sense that he has a mission and a destiny, and by the spirit of an ancestral screw-up who shows up at inopportune times to nag him. Bear’s ghost friend may be real or a manifestation of his shame about his aimlessness or both. He’s definitely funny.

Another specter hanging around Bear, and Elora Danan, Willie Jack and Cheese, is the loss of a close friend who died by suicide. Each is still grieving, and anyone watching can relate to the way tragedy can taint a place that already feels small. It’s no accident that all great coming of age stories are about escape.

But neither FX nor the people making “Reservation Dogs” foresaw the backlash resulting from an episode about Bear and his mother Rita (Sarah Podemski) featuring Bear’s deadbeat dad, a rapper named Punkin’ Lusty played by Native hip-hop artist Sten Joddi. Punkin’s song “Greasy Frybread” is a hit in the show’s version of Indian Country.

But on social media it became a magnet for accusations that the character and the series itself are anti-Black. The critique extended to the opening scene of the premiere where the kids steal a delivery truck from a Black driver causing him to lose his job.

Bear and the gang find this out at their favorite spot, a local joint that has the best catfish in town and is co-owned by a Black man named Cleo (Darryl W. Handy).

Afro-Indigenous people are part of Native communities around the country and have a significant presence in Oklahoma, where the show is shot. So does hip-hop. In fact, Harjo created the characters of Mose and Mekko for underground rap artists Lil Mike and Funnybone.

Viewers pointed out that the driver and Cleo are the only Black characters featured with any prominence in the first season, and compared to Mose and Mekko, receive only a few lines and negligible screen-time.

But that furor is auxiliary to the anger stoked by “Greasy Frybread,” Punkin’ Lusty and Joddi, a guest star who appeared in one episode. In 2014 Joddi shared social media posts using the N-word and an image that likened Beyonce to Goldar, the “Power Rangers” villain with an ape’s face. He deleted the posts, but not before they were screen captured and widely shared.

Joddi posted an apology on Twitter afterward and announced that he will not be appearing in the second season of “Reservation Dogs. ” FX confirmed this to Salon in a statement shared on Sept. 17.

“We were recently made aware of past racist comments by Sten Joddi and we condemn those comments in the strongest possible terms,” the statement reads. “We are glad he has taken responsibility and apologized for his remarks, and we are encouraged that he is going to take the necessary steps to better educate himself.”

Joddi’s departure doesn’t necessarily fix the other criticisms, some of which are valid – specifically, the show’s lack of Afro-Indigenous characters.

But others aren’t fair or misinterpret the intent behind certain scenes. For example, Bear’s guilt over wronging the man who drove the truck he helps steal incites a realignment of his moral code. Admittedly, on any other show lacking characters of color this contextualizing would not be a sufficient excuse; it makes lead character’s personal growth contingent on a Black man’s suffering.  

Nevertheless, one wonders why this show is such a lightning rod for anger when other ensemble comedies lacking non-white characters or featuring a few underdeveloped ones haven’t been criticized nearly as vociferously. (Does “Rutherford Falls” get a pass because the story features a Black mayor whose defining trait is competence? Or because people hold Teller Ornelas’s fellow co-creators Ed Helms and Michael Schur to a different standard?)

“Reservation Dogs” is getting a second season, giving it a chance to expand and evolve. The good news is that it was already a great show. Now it can be even better.

Season 1 necessitated establishing the audience’s connection to these characters and life on this reservation, a part of American culture few non-Natives experience on a regular basis. That means spending lots of time with the central characters.

That’s what the show did: beyond the pilot and the finale, five episodes out of the eight focused on each of the main characters and their family, with Cheese’s story expanded alongside that of McClarnon’s rez cop and Farmer’s recurring character Uncle Brownie receiving his own adventure. That left one half hour for the writers to lean into the comedy of the ‘hood purely for its own sake.

Harjo planned for a 10-episode first season but the eight he was given required him to remove episodes that weren’t directly involved in furthering the action, including the story of their catfish spot, one of the centers of the foursome’s existence, and its owners Rob (Macon Blair) and Cleo (Handy).  He says he’s excited to bring that script back next season.

“It’s hard sometimes because I can’t represent everyone. And, you know, we try to tell a good story,” he explains. “You don’t go into telling a story by saying, like, ‘I’m gonna be representing Native America like it’s never been represented before.’ That wasn’t the point. The point was just telling a real, truthful story.”

He acknowledged the weight of that, along with the excitement of knowing the finale “Reservation Dogs” isn’t the end of our time with Bear, Elora Danan, Willie Jack, Cheese and the wider rez community.

To make his point he returns to the realm of movie memory. “When you get to the end of ‘Stand by Me,’ and everyone’s walking away, and the voiceover is talking about what happened to everyone, and everyone is disappearing, there’s beauty in that. There’s sadness. That’s not how this season ends. It’s a finale, but it’s not finished. It feels like the beginning, honestly.”

The entire first season of FX on Hulu’s “Reservation Dogs” is currently streaming on Hulu.