The $3.5 trillion bill corporate America is terrified of

Right now, Democrats are working to pass a $3.5 trillion package that will provide long overdue help for working Americans.

The final bill hasn’t yet been determined, so we don’t know the exact dollar amounts for all its policies. We’ll probably find that out in late September or early October. For now, the Democrats’ budget resolution frames what’s in the bill.

First, on families:

The bill would make permanent key benefits for working families, including the expanded child tax credit in the pandemic relief plan that sends families up to $300 per child each month but is now set to expire in December, and is estimated to cut child poverty by half.

It would also establish universal child care, for which low- and middle-income households would pay no more than 7 percent of their incomes.

And provide a national program of paid leave — worth up to $4,000 a month — for workers who take time off because they are ill or caring for a relative.

Next, on education:

The bill would reduce educational inequality by establishing universal pre-K for all 3- and 4-year-olds, benefiting an estimated 5 million children, and providing tuition-free community college – essentially expanding free public education from 12 years to 16 years.

It will also invest in historically Black colleges and universities and increase the maximum amount of Pell grants for students from lower-income families.

On health care:

The bill expands Medicare to include dental, vision, and hearing benefits and lowers the eligibility age. It also expands Medicaid to cover people living in the 12 states that have not yet expanded Medicaid, and makes critical investments to improve healthcare for people of color.

The big question is how far it will go to reduce prescription drug prices by, for example, allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies. That could reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending, and free up more money for other parts of the bill. But Big Pharma is dead-set against this.

Big corporations and the rich picking up the tab:

In another step toward fairness, all of these are to be financed by higher taxes on the rich and big corporations.

The bill would also increase the Internal Revenue Service’s funding so the agency can properly audit wealthy tax cheats, who fail to report about a fifth of their income every year, thereby costing the government $105 billion annually.

In addition, the bill tackles the climate crisis, which also especially burdens lower-income Americans:

There are a range of solutions – subsidizing the use of solar, wind, nuclear and other forms of clean energy while financially penalizing the use of dirty energy like coal; helping families pay for electric cars and energy-efficient homes.

The bill might include something known as a carbon border adjustment tax — a tax on imports whose production was carbon-intensive, like many from China.

The bill would also establish a Civilian Climate Corps, and invest in communities that bear the brunt of the climate crisis.

And the bill helps American workers:

It will hopefully contain much of the PRO Act, the toughest labor law reform in a generation.

Finally, the bill includes a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
This is all about making America fairer.

Remember: we won’t know the exact details of the bill for at least a month, but these are the main areas that it will focus on. The big challenge will be ensuring Senate Democrats remain united to get it passed. All of us will need to fight like hell.

Don’t listen to spending hawks who claim it’s too expensive or too radical. For far too long, our government has ignored the needs of everyday Americans, catering instead to the demands of corporations and the super-rich. No more.

It’s time to get this landmark bill passed and build a fairer America.

Black and accused of teaching “critical race theory”: Principal caught up in right’s new maelstrom

It was June 3, 2020, and James Whitfield couldn’t sleep. He hadn’t been able to sleep for the last several days. As a Black man, the deaths of three Black Americans, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, weighed heavily on his mind. Their slayings by white people had been dominating the news — sparking once again national conversations about race and racism in the United States.

Last summer, protest after protest made waves across the nation. It was no different in Texas, and Whitfield, who had weeks earlier been named the first Black principal at Colleyville Heritage High School, couldn’t just sit back. He said he felt like he had a platform that other Black Americans didn’t have and he wouldn’t let that go to waste.

At 4:30 a.m., he wrote a letter to the school community declaring that systemic racism is “alive and well” and that they needed to work together to achieve “conciliation for our nation.”

“Education is the key to stomping out ignorance, hate, and systemic racism,” Whitfield wrote. “It’s a necessary conduit to get ‘liberty and justice for all.'”

Then, the feedback to that letter was nothing short of spectacular, Whitfield said. He didn’t hear a single negative comment. He felt there was a consensus in the community. But, a little over a year later, his words would backfire.

At a July 26 Grapevine-Colleyville ISD school board meeting, Stetson Clark, a former school board candidate at Grapevine-Colleyville ISD, would use the letter to accuse Whitfield of teaching and promoting “critical race theory.”

At the podium, Clark named Whitfield four times, even though the board asked him not to criticize particular employees. The first time, someone in the audience yelled out, “How about you fire him?” Clark continued to name Whitfield, completely ignoring the rules, and called for the board to fire him.

“He is encouraging the disruption and destruction of our district,” Clark said.

When his time wrapped up, Clark walked away from the podium to cheers from the audience.

And in the ensuing days, Whitfield found himself at the center of the debate over how race is taught in Texas schools. He received a disciplinary letter from the district a few weeks later and was placed on administrative leave soon after that. On Monday, the school board will meet, and his future at the district could be at stake.

For some advocates and experts, Whitfield, 43, has become an example of what could happen to educators who try to address issues of racism or inequality in the classroom, especially now that Texas lawmakers have passed a new law targeting what they say is critical race theory.

Colleyville is a majority-white city with only 1% of residents identifying as Black or African American, according to census data. The median household income tops $150,000.

“I am the quintessential boogeyman for these people,” Whitfield said. “Anything that has to do with anything related to equity, or inclusion or diversity — they’re going to try to attach it to CRT.”

Republicans target critical race theory

Critical race theory is an academic discipline that holds that racism is inherent in societal systems that broadly perpetuate racial inequity. Teachers say that it’s rarely taught in high school classrooms, though some say the discipline informs their approaches as they try to make their lessons more inclusive in a state where only about a quarter of students are white.

Over the summer and spring, the perceived threat of critical race theory has turned into a Republican rallying cry in an apparent pushback against increased conversations about diversity and inclusion and unpacking implicit bias. Republican leaders have claimed it’s indoctrinating students and teaching white students that they are racist. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has called it a “ridiculous leftist narrative.” Gov. Greg Abbott has called for it to be abolished in Texas schools.

GOP lawmakers made it a priority this year to pass legislation to stop schools from teaching the discipline.

Lawmakers eventually passed House Bill 3979, which restricts how teachers can discuss current events, encourage civic engagement and teach about America’s history of racism. And during the second special session, lawmakers successfully sent Senate Bill 3, a more restrictive version of the house bill, to Abbott. Abbott signed SB 3 into law Friday afternoon.

Among other things, it bans schools from requiring political activism as part of a course and says teachers can’t teach that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex.” Neither SB 3 nor HB 3979 specifically mentions critical race theory.

Whitfield, who was the principal and didn’t teach classes, maintains that he never taught the subject, nor did he ever mention it to teachers, students or parents. In accusing Whitfield, Clark pinned his case on Whitfield’s stated belief that systemic racism exists.

“I am the first African American to assume the role of Principal at my current school in its 25-year history, and I am keenly aware of how much fear this strikes in the hearts of a small minority who would much rather things go back to the way they used to be,” Whitfield wrote in a Facebook post days after the accusations.

Clark did not respond to an interview request.

The school board meeting was not the first time Whitfield felt his race was affecting how he was being judged as a principal. In 2019, he was starting a new job as principal at Heritage Middle School — also in Grapevine-Colleyville ISD — when the district raised concerns about some photos on his Facebook page.

In 2009, he and his white wife had a wedding anniversary photoshoot on the beach and posted the images on his profile. In one photo reviewed by The Texas Tribune, the principal leaned over his wife — getting ready for a kiss — while they both lay on a beach.

At the time, the district asked him to take the photos down. He wondered how anyone had even found them — they were 10 years old and buried on his page. It felt like someone had dug through a decade’s worth of photos, seemingly looking for controversy.

Whitfield says he now regrets not asking what the request meant. Instead, he just changed his settings so no one else could see his photos. He said he didn’t want to “rock the boat” since he had just been promoted, and he thought that was the end of that discussion.

“When I was asked to take these photos down, I knew that a community member would have that kind of power over me,” Whitfield said.

“Some kind of political landmine”

For a time, the issue seemed to die down. In the spring of last school year, his employment evaluation offered areas for improvement, but gave no sign that his job would soon be at stake. In April, he signed a contract to return to Heritage High School for the 2021-22 school year.

Whitfield did not sign off on his evaluation though and instead sent a rebuttal letter to school administration, citing that the pandemic made things difficult.

Samantha Zelling, a senior at Colleyville Heritage, said Whitfield has been the most personable principal she has ever had. He was at every sports game, even the practices, she said. He would stand at the busiest corner of the high school and try to get to know his students, she said.

But problems arose again soon after the July school board meeting.

Behind closed doors, Whitfield said he felt the support of some board members after Clark’s comments, but publicly it wasn’t the same.

In the Aug. 16 disciplinary letter, titled a “Review of Past Events and Directives for Future Behavior,” GCISD Superintendent Robin Ryan brought up the photos. He called one of the pictures “overly intimate,” noting that it was the only photo in the shoot the district asked Whitfield to take down. Ryan said having this photo up was not appropriate for a middle school administrator.

Ryan also said Whitfield, who had discussed the situation with local media after the meeting, was dishonest with the press and that he “deliberately and dishonestly maligned the District.”

In the letter, Ryan also took exception to a Whitfield tweet regarding sending kids back to school without proper safety protocols, in which he said the “lack of regard for the health and well-being of our people is appalling!” While Whitfield did not mention the district in the tweet, Ryan argued that it didn’t matter because publicly, he is perceived as the principal of Colleyville Heritage.

Ryan concluded that Whitfield’s past and present behaviors violated the district’s professional ethical conduct, practices and performance policy and the district’s policy on ethical conduct toward professional colleagues. Both policies mention that the educator won’t harm others by knowingly making false statements about colleagues or the district and that the educator shall not be deceptive regarding school policies.

Whitfield was then given directives. One of them was to focus on his job, as Ryan believed Whitfiled had “been focusing on yourself and your personal concerns,” and to work on his areas of growth as identified in his evaluation. Whitfield was supposed to sign Ryan’s letter, but he refused. And on Aug. 30, he was put on paid leave.

He said he was given no reason for the decision. In a letter obtained by The Texas Tribune, Ryan tells Whitfield that he made the decision because “it is in the best interest of the District.”

“They took my keys. They took my badge. They took my computer,” Whitfield said. “Treated me like I was some criminal.”

In the aftermath, Whitfield has received an outpouring of support — from Facebook groups advocating for him to a petition to a student walkout on Sept. 9 and 10.

Zelling organized the walkouts with her friends. They have been staunch supporters of Whitfield since the July 26 meeting. Each day, about 100 students walked out, and they have been at board meetings speaking in support of Whitfield.

She said the timing of the school board is suspicious.

“If Stetson Clark did not speak at that meeting, I think Dr. Whitfield would still be principal,” she said.

Laura Leeman, a parent in the district, said she finds it hard to understand why the district didn’t publicly support Whitfield and why the district has not given the community any reason as to why he is on leave.

“The lack of response has been a dagger in our hearts,” Leeman said. “He was put there for a reason, and he was excelling.”

Joy Baskin, director of legal services for the Texas Association of School Boards, said it is unusual for a school district to work toward terminating a teacher’s contract during the school year or to discuss nonrenewal when the school year has just begun.

The easiest way for school districts to get rid of employees is to not renew their contracts toward the end of the school year. The district would still have to have good cause. If a teacher’s or administrator’s contract is terminated midyear, then the Texas Education Agency needs to be involved to conduct “mini trials,” she said.

Whitfield and his lawyer, David Henderson, said they don’t know what will happen Monday when the school board meets. One thing they don’t expect — but hope will happen — is that the school board acknowledges that he did nothing wrong and can get back to work.

Jorge Rodríguez, GCISD school board president, released a statement Aug. 6 acknowledging that Clark broke the meeting’s rules, that he wouldn’t let it happen again and that he had reached out to Whitfield after the meeting.

But the fight over critical race theory in Colleyville shows no sign of abating. This summer, Shannon Braun was elected to the GCISD school board. She promised during her campaign to remove critical race theory from the district.

Braun was endorsed by Allen West, former chair of the Republican Party of Texas and now candidate for governor of Texas. West has been a vocal opponent of critical race theory in schools and has called on conservative families to take over school boards.

Braun did not respond to an interview request.

The school district said in a statement that Whitfield was not put on administrative leave because of the accusations or because of the photos on his social media account that were brought to the district’s attention in 2019.

“We understand that members of our community have questions, but the District does not resolve personnel matters in the media,” district officials said. “We have established procedures for that which we are following.”

Monica Martinez, a University of Texas at Austin history professor, said the law is almost being implemented by parents, who are misinformed on what critical race theory is and are being asked to “hunt it out” in schools by different groups.

“What unfortunately can result is that accusations are made and different school districts are being pressured to act quickly,” Martinez said. “My concern is that these laws are going to be interpreted by parents or they’re going to be encouraged to interpret it.”

School boards across the country are being bombarded by parents who are fearful of this theory being taught in schools, Martinez said. The vagueness of Texas’ law also doesn’t help educators and school administrators who will scramble to not get in trouble.

In Dallas, a group called Save Texas Kids is calling for parents or anyone with knowledge of critical race theory being taught in schools to report it. The group is headed by Natalie Cato, a former Trump campaign field organizer.

Clay Robison, Texas State Teachers Association spokesperson, said teachers are going to suffer if cases like Whitfield’s keep arising in Texas. Going into election years, this debate has and will continue to become political and will be heavily discussed in school board elections, Robison said.

“It’s a shame that our teachers are put in this position of being careful that they don’t step on some kind of political landmine when all they’re trying to do is teach history, and teach the truth about our history,” Robison said.

As Whitfield’s fate is close to being decided, the prospect of not having a job isn’t keeping him awake at night. Instead, he said what’s making him lose sleep is that children are watching his case and that other educators could be next, especially educators of colors who are already scarce in Texas.

“Right now they’re experiencing firsthand and seeing with their own eyes what it can be like to be a Black man in America,” Whitfield said. “And you know what might be the long-term impact on these children? Do we have children that would have chosen to go into a career in education but see this and they’re like, ‘No, I certainly do not want to go down that path.'”

Editor’s note: A previous version of this article used the phrase “stir stuff up.” That paraphrase of what Whitfield said was changed to the words he himself used: “rock the boat.”

Disclosure: The Texas Association of School Boards, the Texas State Teachers Association and the University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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Centrist Democrats threaten Biden’s agenda over opposition to lower drug prices

After a trio of moderate House Democrats, led by Rep. Scott Peters, D-Calif, blocked a provision in President Joe Biden’s landmark infrastructure package allowing health officials to negotiate excessively high drug prices with large pharmaceutical giants last week, Arizona’s senior Democratic Sen. Krysten Sinema has reportedly joined her centrist collegagues in expressing opposition to the White House’s proposed prescription drug pricing reforms.

Throwing a wrench in the Democrats’ agenda to make life-saving drugs more affordable for millions of Americans, Politico reports that Sinema has told the White House she does not support a provision of the reconciliation bill currently being debated in the House of Representatives that would allow Medicare to negotiate prices for prescription drugs. While running for office in 2018, however, Sinema expressed clear support for lowering prescription drug prices.

“We need to make health care more affordable, lower prescription drug prices, and fix the problems in the system – not go back to letting insurance companies call all the shots,” posted Sinema.

We need to make health care more affordable, lower prescription drug prices, and fix the problems in the system – not go back to letting insurance companies call all the shots. #AZSen pic.twitter.com/rlGiOGyeBf

— Kyrsten Sinema (@kyrstensinema) March 9, 2018

As Kaiser Health News notes, Sinema has since become “a leading recipient of pharma campaign cash,” collecting $121,000 in campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry from 2019 to 2020.

Over in the House, Peters was joined by centrists Kathleen Rice, D-N.Y., and Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., all of whom voted “no” during a three-day markup of the bill by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, according to Politico. The bill consequently saw a 29-29 tie, preventing it from passing out of committee.

People familiar with the matter told Politico that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., had spent days convincing the moderates to back down. The committee’s, Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., also made multiple public pleas to the coalition.

The provision is estimated to bear a windfall for the average drug consumer, saving them $700 billion over a decade – a sum that would shore up other elements of the healthcare system, like Obamacare and Medicare, per The Los Angeles Times.

Back in July, Salon reported on Peters’ apparent flip-flop on H.R. 3, a Democratic-backed House bill aimed at radically reducing the price of high-cost drugs. Peters supported the measure in 2019. But in the years following, he received hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions from Big Pharma. Later he told Roll Call that the bill was a bad idea, saying that it would “dry up all the private investment that does that research.”

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Despite the intra-party opposition, Democrats have signaled that they will stand their ground on the drug pricing provision now that it’s being tucked into Biden’s infrastructure plan. Pelosi spokesperson Henry Connelly told Politico that the policy “will remain a cornerstone of the Build Back Better Act as work continues between the House, Senate and White House on the final bill.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., long a crusader against Big Pharma, called the industry “the most powerful industry on Capitol Hill.”

“The pharmaceutical industry has spent over $4.5 billion on lobbying and campaign contributions over the past 20 years and has hired some 1,200 lobbyists to get Congress to do its bidding,” Sanders tweeted on Wednesday. “Now is the time for Congress to show courage and stand up to the greed of the pharmaceutical industry. The American people will not accept surrender.”

On Wednesday, Democrats launched an alternative effort to ram the bill through the legislature, Politico reported, passing identical language on drug pricing through the House and Ways Committee with a 24-19 party line vote. Still, the bill is sure to face an uphill battle in being greenlit by the House and Senate.

Peters has said that the measure will not move forward unless the party finds a compromise. “I’ll be around all week and happy to talk to any senators who want to finalize something so that we can get done before next week,” he told The Los Angeles Times. “Enough of us have expressed concern that we should be working on a different course. I want to be constructive.”

The drug lobby has by and large backed the centrist’s offensive, citing the apparent need to balance innovation with affordability. However, as Salon noted back in July, many drug price advocates have argued that this concern may be overblown.

“I love absurdist comedy”: Ryan Phillippe on his career evolution and the fun of playing a rich jerk

Ryan Phillippe displays his comic chops in “Lady of the Manor,” a touch of silliness about a Savannah estate where Lady Wadsworth (Judy Greer) once lived. Phillippe plays both Lady Wadsworth’s husband (in a flashback) and her descendant, the lazy Tanner Wadsworth (his name also refers to his complexion) in the present day. When Tanner fires the estate’s historic guide (because she won’t sleep with him), he impulsively hires Hannah (Melanie Lynskey), a stoner who ends up being stalked by Lady Wadsworth’s ghost.

“Lady of the Manor” offers Phillippe to play another rich, mischievous guy (think “Cruel Intentions,” or “The Lincoln Lawyer“), and he is pretty amusing being cockblocked by the ghost of Lady Wadsworth, which prompts him to performs ungentlemanly acts.

The actor talked about his new film, his career as a whole, and his love of comedy.

You have some pretty amusing bits in “Lady of the Manor,” from some brash, funny lines that talk down to people, to your comic reactions when Tanner is cockblocked. You have only made a handful of comedies in your career — “MacGruber” comes first to mind. What appeals to you about being funny and why don’t you make more comedies?

Well, I’m not thought of that way, honestly, by very many people, so the offers don’t come as frequently for drama and action. But I love it because it is such a completely different way to work, and there is something so freeing about playing a character that is ridiculous and kind of over the top. There is a license that comes with that. So often, when you’re the protagonist in a feature, or the male lead, there are so many unspoken rules about behavior or the type of character you have to be for an audience to relate or connect. With this, you have the freedom to be silly and play and try different things. I had just finished the “MacGruber” series. So many times, when you are doing dramatic work, you are dreading certain scenes where you have to get really emotional, or angry, or dealing with the loss of someone you love, and that all ties into your own personal experience and becomes taxing emotionally at times. This is the complete opposite. I get to go and be a silly douchebag for the day, which is real fun.

You play, as even the proper Lady Wadsworth admits, “a real dick” in this film. You often get cast as spoiled, entitled characters in films, yet come from a modest background. What can you say about your penchant for playing rich douchebags?

I guess I was a little bit jealous, maybe, growing up with what some people had — when people would be pulling into the high school parking lot in a brand new BMW, and I was in my beat up Hyundai. So, it is a chance to get back at, or make fun of, some of the people I have come across in my life that had more than I did. It is an opportunity to make some sort of statement about privilege and wealth. I also think that playing something that is so far from yourself is liberating and fun. I love when I lose myself in a character, and the times I am happiest with the work I have done are in those roles where I don’t see myself on screen anymore and I am watching a character. That’s exciting for me.

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Your character, Tanner, has a robust sex life. You’ve played many seducers in your career. You exude smarmy charm here, as when you dine with Hannah and get her drunk. This is awkwardly worded perhaps, but how do calibrate playing up or down your sex appeal when in a role?

It is something that I’m not terribly aware of or cognizant of when I am approaching a part. In that sense, it’s a byproduct in a way. I don’t see myself that way, personally. I don’t think of myself in those terms, so it’s really not something at the fore of my consciousness when I’m playing a part.

Tanner is lazy and does not have much of a work ethic. Yet as an actor, you seem to work frequently, and have recently started developing projects both as a producer (“Shooter,” and “The 2nd”) and even wrote and directed a feature (“Catch Hell”). What can you say about doing more work behind the camera?

It is something that I love, and I am getting more and more comfortable with as I age, the notion of being behind the camera. I’ve done this for 30 years now, and you just learn a lot I’ve been lucky to learn from Robert Altman, and Eastwood, and Kim Pierce, who have taught me a lot about filmmaking. It seems like a waste not to do something with that. I’ve worked on projects that have had a budget of $1 million and have had a budget of $100 million, and everything in between. You learn how to be efficient and maximize time on set and how to get the best out of your crew and the production at large. That comes from time you put in, and the number of projects you’ve done. You can work with a really talented director, but they have not had nearly the amount of time on set that you have. Working with Ridley Scott and Altman was an education. That was my collegiate experience, learning on set, and I want to do something with that knowledge. Actor-directors have different insight that maybe others for certain projects and certain material that can be really valuable and effective.

Your career seems to shift back and forth between films and TV. Do you prefer playing a role where you can develop a long arc (e.g., in a series like “Damages” or “Secrets and Lies”) or do you prefer to move from character to character to do different things? Where do you think you do your best work?

I don’t know. The industry has shifted so heavily. Everyone now does film and TV, or all the people who used to only do film are also doing television now. The business has changed so much from when I started and it [has evolved]. It comes down to the story you are trying to tell and [making it] enjoyable for the audience it is intended for and given them something worth watching, and I think that can happen in either medium. It does seem more today that the best writing and character development is happening in television. That will always be a lure for actors. You want the time to take a character from one point to another and not have it be within the confines of a 90-minute or two-hour movie. I found the experience of making “Shooter” really rewarding and getting to live with that character for three seasons and develop as it went. The difference between the two is not what it used to be. When you are on a TV set, it’s shot like a film. That didn’t use to be the case. TV has gotten a lot more cinematic. The line has been blurred.

You will probably be most remembered for your role in “Cruel Intentions,” or for playing a gay teen in “One Life to Live,” and turned in strong dramatic performances in films like “Breach” and “Stop-Loss.” You have also worked with Robert Altman (“Gosford Park”) and Clint Eastwood (“Flags of Our Fathers”) and have appeared in an increasing number of action films. What observations do you have about your career and the opportunities you’ve had? “Lady of Manor” is so different from what I have seen you do.

You never want to get bored or complacent or stop challenging yourself. I’m glad I’ve not been typecast to any dramatic extent. Part of it is that I have to be interested in it to make it good or give a good performance. It has to be something that I want to see, or appeals to me, or connects with my sense of humor. As you get older, you just realize we all have a finite amount of time and are not guaranteed anything. You can only do so many projects. It does start to become about, “Well, who am I working with? Am I going to like them? And are we going to have a good time making this project? And how far away is it, and what is the commitment?” Because I have kids. There are so many things that factor into the choices you make when you are older that weren’t relevant when you were younger. So, I do find myself evaluating things differently in terms of what I am going to give my time and effort to and take away my personal life for. That is something I wasn’t nearly as focused on in the earlier part of my career, and now the experience matters a lot as well as material. You want to have an enjoyable experience and work with people you like.

How would you describe your sense of humor?

I love absurdist comedy. I have a dark sense of humor. But I like it to have elements of intelligence. I am a huge fan of Tim Heidecker — the whole “On Cinema” universe to me is one of my favorite things of the last 10 years. I like all comedy. I grew up idolizing the cast of “SNL,” so getting to work with some of them now is so rewarding and fulfilling. I’m a comedy nerd. That hasn’t been a large part of my career, but it’s what I seek out in my personal time when I’m looking for something to watch.

“Lady of the Manor” is currently in select theaters and available on demand and digital.

California seeks to make its low-carbon living more affordable

Moving to a city is one of the best ways to shrink your carbon emissions: Apartments are more energy efficient than single-family homes, and public transportation works better in urban areas. But many of the most environmentally friendly cities in America have closed their doors to newcomers with regulations that make new housing expensive, and leave neighborhoods racially and economically segregated.

All of this is especially true in California, where mild weather and ambitious climate policies allow residents to live lightly — but only if they can afford the sky-high cost of housing. On Friday, however, California got a trio of new laws that will cut away some of that red tape and allow more homes to be built. Denser cities should shorten commutes, lower emissions, and make for more equitable housing.

Though the laws won’t make housing affordable on their own, together they strike a significant blow against efforts with zoning rules to keep cities rich and white, said David Garcia, policy director at The Terner Center for Housing Innovation, at the University of California, Bekeley.

“These votes are very symbolic because single family zoning has been so sacrosanct,” he said. “It’s kind of a sea change.”

One law, Senate Bill 9, permits Californians to build duplexes, or split their properties, in areas with zoning ordinances designed to allow only a single family per lot — which comprises two thirds of zoned land in California, Garcia said. Headlines from around the state suggest that the new law has abolished single family zoning. That framing frustrates Stephen Menendian, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley who studies the way policies affect inequality.

The new law erodes the effects of single family zoning, he said, “but it in no way overrides or abolishes it.”

That’s more than a semantic distinction: A study from the Terner Center shows that it would make economic sense for 700,000 landowners to build new homes on their lots as allowed under the new law. That’s as much housing as California builds in a year. But, notes Garcia, one of the authors of the report, far fewer will actually do it. While that could help combat California’s housing crisis, it is not enough to overcome cities’ use of zoning rules to keep poorer people from moving in and neighborhoods segregated by wealth or race. “It will help, but it’s not a lot in the big picture,” Menendian said.

Another law, Senate Bill 10, reduces the hurdles cities have to leap to change their zoning codes and let in more residents. It allows local governments to relax zoning rules in urban areas with plenty of public transit, without going through the California Environmental Quality Act’s lengthy review process.

“The California Environmental Quality Act is an important law, but increasingly over the years it’s been used to stop infill [building homes in cities], public transportation, and other environmentally responsible actions,” said California State Senator Scott Wiener, who wrote the law.

Senate Bill 10 won’t force the change of any zoning codes, but for cities like Berkeley, California, that have been trying to abolish exclusionary zoning, it could speed things up. “This new law will cut maybe five to 10 years off the rezoning process.”

The third law, Senate Bill 8, extends an existing law that prevents cities from using the usual regulatory tricks to close the doors to new residents: It prevents them from downzoning to allow fewer people in, or hiking up building permit fees.

California has been the poster child for a state with solid climate policies, but such high prices that it limits the diversity of the residents governed by those rules. The high cost of housing in the state has pushed people out of cities and into wildfire zones, or out of the state entirely. These new laws won’t change that reality on their own, but they are part of a larger effort.

California is the place illustrating just how bad a housing crisis can be for the environment. But it’s also the place testing out a lot of methods to undo that crisis.

Massive numbers of new COVID-19 infections, not vaccines, are the main driver of new variants

The rise of coronavirus variants has highlighted the huge influence evolutionary biology has on daily life. But how mutations, random chance and natural selection produce variants is a complicated process, and there has been a lot of confusion about how and why new variants emerge.

Until recently, the most famous example of rapid evolution was the story of the peppered moth. In the mid-1800s, factories in Manchester, England, began covering the moth’s habitat in soot, and the moth’s normal white coloring made them visible to predators. But some moths had a mutation that made them darker. Since they were better camouflaged in their new world, they could evade predators and reproduce more than their white counterparts.

We are an evolutionary biologist and an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Pittsburgh who work together to track and control the evolution of pathogens. Over the past year and half, we’ve been closely following how the coronavirus has acquired different mutations around the world.

It’s natural to wonder if highly effective COVID-19 vaccines are leading to the emergence of variants that evade the vaccine — like dark peppered moths evaded birds that hunted them. But with just under 40% of people in the world having received a dose of a vaccine — only 2% in low-income countries — and nearly a million new infections occurring globally every day, the emergence of new, more contagious variants, like delta, is being driven by uncontrolled transmission, not vaccines.

How a virus mutates

For any organism, including a virus, copying its genetic code is the essence of reproduction — but this process is often imperfect. Coronaviruses use RNA for their genetic information, and copying RNA is more error-prone than using DNA. Researchers have shown that when the coronavirus replicates, around 3% of new virus copies have a new, random error, otherwise known as a mutation.

Each infection produces millions of viruses within a person’s body, leading to many mutated coronaviruses. However, the number of mutated viruses is dwarfed by the much larger number of viruses that are the same as the strain that started the infection.

Nearly all of the mutations that occur are harmless glitches that don’t change how the virus works — and others in fact harm the virus. Some small fraction of changes may make the virus more infectious, but these mutants must also be lucky. To give rise to a new variant, it must successfully jump to a new person and replicate many copies.

The bottleneck of transmission is what limits the ability of a new variant to infect another person. Vaughn Cooper via Biorender, CC BY-ND

Transmission is the important bottleneck

Most viruses in an infected person are genetically identical to the strain that started the infection. It is much more likely that one of these copies — not a rare mutation — gets passed on to someone else. Research has shown that almost no mutated viruses are transmitted from their original host to another person.

And even if a new mutant causes an infection, the mutant viruses are usually outnumbered by non-mutant viruses in the new host and aren’t usually transmitted to the next person.

The small odds of a mutant being transmitted is called the “population bottleneck.” The fact that it is only a small number of the viruses that start the next infection is the critical, random factor that limits the probability that new variants will arise. The birth of every new variant is a chance event involving a copying error and an unlikely transmission event. Out of the millions of coronavirus copies in an infected person, the odds are remote that a fitter mutant is among the few that spread to another person and become amplified into a new variant.

How do new variants emerge?

Unfortunately, uncontrolled spread of a virus can overcome even the tightest bottlenecks. While most mutations have no effect on the virus, some can and have increased how contagious the coronavirus is. If a fast-spreading strain is able to cause a large number of COVID-19 cases somewhere, it will start to out-compete less contagious strains and generate a new variant — just like the delta variant did.

Many researchers are studying which mutations lead to more transmissible versions of the coronavirus. It turns out that variants have tended to have many of the same mutations that increase the amount of virus an infected person produces. With more than a million new infections occurring every day and billions of people still unvaccinated, susceptible hosts are rarely in short supply. So, natural selection will favor mutations that can exploit all these unvaccinated people and make the coronavirus more transmissible.

Under these circumstances, the best way to constrain the evolution of the coronavirus is to reduce the number of infections.

Vaccines stop new variants

The delta variant has spread around the globe, and the next variants are already on the rise. If the goal is to limit infections, vaccines are the answer.

Even though vaccinated people can still get infected with the delta variant, they tend to experience shorter, milder infections than unvaccinated individuals. This greatly reduces the chances of any mutated virus — either one that makes the virus more transmissible or one that could allow it to get past immunity from vaccines — from jumping from one person to another.

Eventually, when nearly everyone has some immunity to the coronavirus from vaccination, viruses that break through this immunity could gain a competitive advantage over other strains. It is theoretically possible that in this situation, natural selection will lead to variants that can infect and cause serious disease in vaccinated people. However, these mutants must still escape the population bottleneck.

For now, it is unlikely that vaccine-induced immunity will be the major player in variant emergence because there are lots of new infections occurring. It’s simply a numbers game. The modest benefit the virus would get from vaccine evasion is dwarfed by the vast opportunities to infect unvaccinated people.

The world has already witnessed the relationship between the number of infections and the rise of mutants. The coronavirus remained essentially unchanged for months until the pandemic got out of control. With relatively few infections, the genetic code had limited opportunities to mutate. But as infection clusters exploded, the virus rolled the dice millions of times and some mutations produced fitter mutants.

The best way to stop new variants is to stop their spread, and the answer to that is vaccination.

[You need to understand the coronavirus pandemic, and we can help. Read The Conversation’s newsletter.]

Vaughn Cooper, Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, University of Pittsburgh and Lee Harrison, Professor of Epidemiology, Medicine, and Infectious Diseases and Microbiology, University of Pittsburgh

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

No, the COVID-19 vaccines don’t cause male infertility — but COVID-19 might

Unsubstantiated rumors that the COVID-19 vaccine causes impotence have entered the public discourse because of comments made by rapper Nicki Minaj.

It started when Minaj recently tweeted that she would not be attending last week’s Met Gala due to its vaccination requirement. “They want you to get vaccinated for the Met,” she wrote in a since-deleted tweet. “If I get vaccinated it won’t for the Met. It’ll be once I feel I’ve done enough research. I’m working on that now.”

Later, she suggested that the vaccine might be linked to male infertility, a suspicion that she said stemmed from a story she heard about her cousin’s friend.

“My cousin in Trinidad won’t get the vaccine cuz his friend got it & became impotent. His testicles became swollen,” she wrote on Twitter. “His friend was weeks away from getting married, now the girl called off the wedding. So just pray on it & make sure you’re comfortable with ur decision, not bullied.”

Minaj’s incredible reach — 22.8 million follow her on Twitter — combined with the anatomical peculiarity of the anecdote helped make her story about her cousin go viral, spawning memes, condemnations from public health officials, and even sparking a rebuttal from Trinidad and Tobago’s Health Minister, who said there was no record of any such incident in the Caribbean nation.

As other health experts attested as well, there is no scientific evidence that the COVID-19 vaccine will negatively affect a male reproductive system. Yet contracting the virus itself can cause male reproductive health issues.

“I am not aware of any evidence that any of the COVID-19 vaccines cause male infertility, impotence, or swollen testicles,” Allan Pacey, Professor of Andrology at the University of Sheffield, told Salon. “However, I am aware of published reports that catching COVID-19 can be associated with testicular pain, an increased frequency of erectile dysfunction, and a temporary reduction in sperm production.”

Channa Jayasena, a Clinical Senior Lecturer and Consultant in Reproductive Endocrinology and Andrology at Imperial College, concurred.

“There is no evidence that the COVID-19 vaccine causes impotence or testicle swelling in men,” Jayasena said. “However, a recent study suggests that mild COVID-19 infection (not the vaccine) may slightly reduce your sperm count and quality.”

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Indeed, this message has been confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Society for Male Reproduction and Urology (SMRU), the Society for the Study of Male Reproduction (SSMR) and many more medical experts.

There have been studies specifically related to COVID-19 vaccines and fertility. Ranjith Ramasamy, Director of Reproductive Urology at the University of Miami, co-authored a study looking at sperm count in 45 men between the ages of 18 and 50 years old.

“In this study, no significant changes in sperm parameters were seen following COVID-19 mRNA vaccination of males at 3- and 6-month follow-up,” Ramasamy told Salon. “Thus far, vaccines have been proven to be safe and effective in combating COVID-19 with no evidence indicating they can negatively impact the sexual health of males or females.”

Despite this, Minaj’s comments reflect an ongoing false narrative in anti-vaccine and alternative health groups: that vaccines cause infertility in both women and men. Similar to unsubstantiated fear around how the COVID-19 vaccines might harm a woman’s reproductive system, male infertility is often used as a way to cause fear around getting vaccinated.

But why are the two — vaccines and fertility — often linked in anti-vaccine propaganda?

Experts speculate that it is, in part, because fears of infertility play on common, deep human fears. In some cases, a lack of research around a topic can create a breeding ground for misinformation. And other times, myths stem from a misinterpretation of a study.

Unlike some previous instances of scientific misinformation having its origin in retracted studies, it is unclear exactly where myths about the COVID-19 vaccines harming the male reproductive system originated from. Aside from Minaj’s remarks, it is possible that scientific evidence around fevers causing a temporary decline in sperm count have been manipulated.

As the Society for Male Reproduction and Urology (SMRU) and the Society for the Study of Male Reproduction (SSMR) explained in a joint statement: “It should be noted that about 16% of men in the Pfizer/BioNtech COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial experienced fever after the second dose. Fevers can cause temporary declines in sperm production.”

Therefore, if a man experiences fever as the result of the COVID-19 vaccine, the joint statement said, that man may experience a temporary decline in sperm production.

“But that would be similar to or less than if the individual experienced fever from developing COVID-19 or for other reasons,” the statement explained.

Conversely, there is scientific evidence that suggests getting infected with COVID-19 can affect male fertility, as multiple researchers described. Ramasamy worked on a separate study where he and his colleagues analyzed the autopsy tissues of the testicles of six men who died of COVID-19 infection. They found that in three of the men, there was a decreased number of sperm. The same study showed that a COVID-19 infection could lead to severe erectile dysfunction. The researchers speculated it could be because the infection causes reduced blood supply to the penis.

As Ramasamy previously wrote: “These findings are not entirely surprising. After all, scientists know other viruses invade the testicles and affect sperm production and fertility.”

Any women or men who are concerned about their reproductive health and COVID-19 should get vaccinated, experts advise.

“I would urge all men (and women) to get vaccinated when they get the opportunity,” said Pacey.

Make Giada De Laurentiis’ pumpkin cupcakes with chocolate frosting, a sweet treat for fall

Fall is here! Whether you celebrate the new season with a cup of pumpkin spice coffee or a slice of pumpkin pie, nothing is better than trying out a new seasonal recipe at home and tasting the full flavors of fall.

For those who feel a pumpkin pie is too predictable, why don’t you try Giada De Laurentiis’ new recipe for pumpkin cupcakes with chocolate cream cheese frosting? This recipe will surely double your happiness because, like she said on Instagram, “pumpkin + chocolate = ❤️”

https://www.instagram.com/p/CT-E26Pp1vH/?utm_medium=copy_link

This is a simple two-part recipe: one set of steps for cupcakes and another for the frosting. While this may sound intimidating, Giada’s recipes are very beginner-friendly. Even if you’ve never baked before, this recipe calls for basic ingredients — including boxed cake mix and canned pumpkin — with straightforward instructions. For that reason, you can get 36 miniature cupcakes done in an hour, making them perfect for a small fall get-together.

The cupcakes themselves only require three steps: mix ingredients, fill the molds and bake. The frosting? Even less complicated. Just mix the ingredients well and spread the frosting on the top of the cupcakes. Keep in mind, however, that you’ll want the cupcakes to cool completely before frosting, otherwise the frosting will melt.

Then comes the fun part. Decorate your cupcakes with any add-ons you like. Giada recommends mini-chocolate chips, sprinkles, colored sugar and small candies. These 80-calorie cupcakes are not only a perfect not-so-guilty sweet treat for cravings, but also a must-have to indulge in the season’s flavors.

They’re also perfect to share with loved ones. A basket of pumpkin cupcakes with chocolate frosting says “I love you” and “thank you” for you. Read the full recipe here.

N.C. court strikes down voter ID law for “unconstitutional” targeting of Black voters

A North Carolina court on Friday struck down a Republican voter ID law that it said was intended to discriminate against Black voters.

A 2-1 majority of the Wake County Superior Court ruled that the 2018 law “was motivated at least in part by an unconstitutional intent to target African American voters.” The majority opinion said that the law was “motivated in part for a discriminatory purpose” and “would not have been enacted in its current form but for its tendency to discriminate against African American voters.”

Republican state lawmakers first passed a voter ID law in 2013 but a court ruled that it was explicitly designed to discriminate against Black voters, writing that lawmakers relied on data that sought to “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.” Voters in 2018 backed a referendum to require photo ID to cast a ballot and Republicans rushed through a new version of their law during a lame-duck session shortly after Democrats won enough seats to end the GOP’s veto-proof supermajority in the legislature. The new version expanded the number of acceptable forms of ID but the court ruled Friday that the new law written after the referendum also discriminated against Black voters, citing an analysis finding that Black voters are more than twice as likely to lack a photo ID than white voters and are more likely to face undue burdens because of disproportionate poverty rates.

A group of Black voters who brought the lawsuit wrote in their complaint that the voter ID law would require “voters to take time away from work, forgo compensation, and arrange or pay for transportation to travel for potentially hours,” creating an “undue burden” or even an “insurmountable barrier” to voters who simply want to cast a ballot.

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While the court did not find racist intent by Republican lawmakers who passed the law, they wrote that the law targeted Black voters for political reasons.

“We do not find that any member of the General Assembly who voted in favor of (voter ID) harbors any racial animus or hatred towards African American voters, but rather … that the Republican majority ‘target[ed] voters who, based on race, were unlikely to vote for the majority party,” the majority opinion said. “Even if done for partisan ends, that constitute[s] racial discrimination.'”

The judges also criticized the way the law was passed after courts found that the state’s 2011 Republican gerrymander was unconstitutional because it sought to dilute the voting power of Black voters.

The voter ID law is “the only legislation implementing a constitutional amendment ever to be enacted in a post-election lame duck session in North Carolina,” Judges Michael O’Foghludha and Vince Rozier Jr. wrote, and only happened after another court ordered Republicans to redraw the district maps.

That “suggests that Republicans wanted to entrench themselves by passing their preferred, and more restrictive, version of a voter ID law,” they wrote.

Friday’s ruling showed that “the state’s Republican-controlled legislature undeniably implemented this legislation to maintain its power by targeting voters of color,” Allison Riggs, the lead attorney in the case, said in a statement.

Republicans vowed to appeal Friday’s ruling. An appeals court last year blocked the law from being enforced while the case was heard.

The ruling comes as other Republican-led states, motivated by former President Donald Trump’s false narrative blaming his election defeat on spurious allegations of voter fraud, have passed new voter ID laws and other restrictions aimed at preventing illegal voting, even though data has repeatedly shown that is virtually nonexistent.

“It is more likely that an American will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls,” the Brennan Center for Justice said in a report investigating the prevalence of voter fraud.

An extensive state audit after the 2016 election found just 508 possible fraud cases out of 4.8 million votes, and only one of those involved someone impersonating another voter at the polls. Ironically enough, that was a Trump voter who voted illegally on behalf of her deceased mother. Most of the other cases involved former felons voting before they had ended periods of probation or parole. Another North Carolina court found last month, coincidentally, that the state’s felon disenfranchisement law is unconstitutional.

At least 35 states have voter ID laws on the books but not all of them require a photo ID as North Carolina’s law would. Eighteen states have photo ID requirements but accept varying forms of identification.

“Other, less restrictive voter ID laws would have sufficed to achieve the legitimate nonracial purposes of implementing the constitutional amendment requiring voter ID, deterring fraud, or enhancing voter confidence,” the majority opinion said.

North Carolina’s law faces additional lawsuits in state and federal court. The NAACP has filed a challenge to the law’s constitutionality in federal court and has also filed a separate state lawsuit arguing that the legislature did not have the right to put the constitutional amendment on the 2018 ballot because Republicans only had the requisite supermajority as the result of their illegal gerrymander.

U.S. to ease travel restrictions amid COVID surge

Foreign nationals who are flying into the U.S. must show proof of vaccination and also test negative for COVID-19 within three days of departure to the U.S., according to a “new international air travel system” that drops travel restrictions for visiting foreign nationals starting in early November.

The new travel system comes after much frustration from European governments. Last week, Stavros Lambrinidis, European Union ambassador to the U.S., wrote on Twitter, “fully vaccinated, pre-flight-tested Europeans could today visit the US in full safety, but are still kept out by the outdated #travelban.”

Indeed, fully vaccinated, pre-flight-tested Europeans could today visit the US in full safety, but are still kept out by the outdated #travelban. Personal & business travel is hugely important for long-separated families & for the US and EU economies. https://t.co/iXsb1b0fdE

— Jovita Neliupšienė (@EUAmbUS) September 13, 2021

White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients specified that the new system will not only apply to Europe, but also China, Iran, Brazil, South Africa, and India.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will also play a role in the new travel system, detailing what vaccines will qualify and defining who is fully vaccinated.

For unvaccinated Americans traveling back to the U.S., there will be “stricter testing requirements,” said Zients. Unvaccinated Americans must test negative one day prior to departure and test negative again after returning.

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The new travel system will only apply to airline travel, leaving the land border policies with Canada and Mexico intact, meaning tourists from those countries are still barred from entering the U.S.

Currently, the measures include no new guidance for domestic air travel in the U.S., but Zients has said new guidance is not off the table and the Biden administration has been considering it.

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My number one parenting trick? Always save those two last bites

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

In 2008, my then-boyfriend Joseph and I almost broke up over a chicken wing. It was a typical Sunday evening at a college-town pub, filled with mediocre beer, half-off wings, and gripes about grades. As was our custom, our Caribbean crew ordered more wings than we needed. That fateful night, one wing perched alone on the platter, when Joseph requested the bill and . . . a box.

“Um, a box?” our friend John asked in his deep Trinidadian accent.

Sensing scrutiny, Joseph replied curtly, “I’m full now, but I’ll want to eat it later.” And from there, a…colorful discussion arose over the merits of his last bite. (I sided with John, hence the near-breakup.) Surely two bites of a burger or one chicken wing will not stave off starvation or lead to climate collapse. I held firm until Joseph — my now-husband — and I had kids, which is when reality asserted itself.

Of all the lessons motherhood has taught me, the most salient comes from my own mum: “It’s always better to say ‘Here it is’ than ‘Where is it?'”

The truism holds for whatever “it” is: an extra diaper; the bubbles; a half-eaten granola bar. It’s more about practicality than principle. When our son was in kindergarten, I made it a point to have some morsel of napkin-wrapped baked good in my pocket — pocket, people! — to give to him the second he burst out the doors of school. (“Panic” is a kid anticipating a snack with no snack in sight.) For my son, it was more than just a mini-muffin or half a cinnamon-raisin bagel. It was an emotionally stabilizing tool to offset hanger.

Save the two bites. Today I can admit that even a measly leftover wing can pack a powerful punch: Strip the meat off the bone, place it on a single tortilla, sprinkle it with shredded cheese, microwave it for 30 seconds, and top with jarred salsa. The result is a relatively respectable chicken quesadilla that not only sates you in the moment, but satisfies a core value of “waste not, want not.”

Same goes for that one slice of banana bread (which can become French toast), half a cup of fried rice (stuff it into a bell pepper), and bean stew (add water!). And let’s be honest, fellow parents: How often have you forgotten to feed yourselves? Top two bites with an egg, some tofu, or some chutney, and you can stay out of the hanger zone yourselves.

So defend your fridge turf — and yourself from judgment — vigorously. Keep those little bowls and Tupperware toward the front of the fridge shelves, so you remember to eat the precious little bites before they go bad.

As for Joseph, he couldn’t be more thrilled that I have come to see his wingy truth: It’s always easier to revisit a snack than it is to create a new one — kids or no kids.

Trump Organization’s chief financial officer heads to court as New York state prosecutors close in

Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, as well as a number of the firm’s attorneys, is set to appear in a New York state court on Monday.

More than two months after Weisselberg’s formal indictment for alleged tax fraud, Monday’s appearance marks Weisselberg’s first publicly since the charges were brought. It comes on the heels of two state investigations by New York state Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., who have both worked in concert to probe a number of alleged crimes by the Trump Organization, including tax fraud, in Manhattan Criminal Court.

“Beginning from at least 2005 to on or about June 30, 2021, [Weisselberg, the Trump Corporation, Trump Payroll Corp. and ] and others devised and operated a scheme to defraud federal, New York State, and New York City tax authorities,” prosecutors wrote, arguing that Weisselberg benefited from an “off-the-books” payment scheme,” according to Law & Crime. The scheme allegedly allowed the executive to pay for around $359,058 in tuition expenses for multiple family members, new beds, flat-screen televisions, and more.

NPR reported that James and Vance are aggressively pursuing the charges. Adam Kaufmann, a former investigations division chief at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, suggested to NPR that “the district attorney may be considering further charges or defendants.”

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Weisselberg, who has already pleaded not guilty to the charges, faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted of grand larceny in the second degree – the prosecutors’ most signficant charge, according to The Wall Street Journal. The organization’s lawyers have repeatedly called the case politically motivated. One attorney, Alan Futerfas, has further argued that the case should be settled in civil rather than criminal court.

On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the investigation has also narrowed in on Matthew Calamari, the Trump Organization’s chief operating officer. Similar to Weisselberg, Calamari and his son, the firm’s chief of security, have both reaped company benefits that may have constituted tax violations, including corporate-sponsored cars and apartments.

Back in 2019, Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, testified to Congress that the elder Calamari knew information that would back up claims of Donald Trump deliberately overstating the financial value of his real estate assets – claims that are a part of related civil investigation led by James.

It is uncertain whether the proceeding against Weisselberg will bear information to warrant a charge against Trump himself. Bloomberg News reported that it’s unlikely Weisselberg, 74, will “flip” on Trump because the state is expected to dole out a far lower sentence than the maximum. Other attorneys knowledgeable with the case say that the consequences of turning on Trump might be more severe than the executive’s potential prison sentence.

“It’s better for him to take the jail term than suffer the consequences to his bank account if he pleaded guilty,” said New York defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor Adam Frisch.

Weisselberg has worked for the Trump Organization since 1973, starting as a bookkeeper for the former president’s father. Trump hired him as CFO, for which he was paid $940,000 a year, around two decades ago.

Trump quietly unleashes his mob

There’s been a ton of reporting and analysis on Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s new book, “Peril”, most of it focusing on the final days of the Trump administration — which by all accounts were even more of a chaotic mess than we could see from the outside (and we saw plenty). The bizarre antics from the president and his henchmen regarding the election results were unprecedented and continue to this day.

But one of the most chilling quotes from the book that I’ve seen so far comes from this review of the book by history professor Eric Rauchway in the Washington Post. As we knew, Vice President Mike Pence tried every way he could to come up with a rationale to do Trump’s bidding and refuse to ceremonially confirm the electoral count in the joint session of Congress on January 6th. On that morning, before the fateful rally that inspired the insurrection, Pence came to the White House to reluctantly tell his boss that he just didn’t have the power to do that under the Constitution:

Gesturing at some of his supporters already gathered and shouting outside the White House, Trump asked, “Well, what if these people say you do?

When Pence demurred again, Trump mused, “wouldn’t it almost be cool to have that power?”

As Rauchway points out, “the president was willing to find authority in the mob if he lacked it in the law.” It’s entirely possible that if the mob had succeeded in finding House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or the vice president or had been able to corner some of those elected officials in the Capitol that day, Trump would have gone along with it. All the recent books, including “Peril” have Trump watching the event unfold and being unmoved by exhortations to step in from everyone from his daughter Ivanka to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, to whom he reportedly said, “well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”

That comment about the mob conferring the power to overturn the election results got me thinking about the timeline on Jan. 6 and it occurs to me that Trump only issued his pathetic video in which he said he loved the gathered rioters but implored them to go on home once it became clear that all the officials had gotten away safely and there was no longer any chance his supporters would succeed in finding them. He had waited to see if they could physically force the Congress to overturn the election.

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As predicted, the “Justice forJ6” rally last Saturday was a non-event. More media showed up than protesters, largely because the organizer has no talent for organizing and the word on all right-wing social media was that the FBI was going to arrest everyone. As I noted earlier, Trump himself said it was a “set-up.” But in case anyone wondered where he stood on the premise of this rally, which is that the federal authorities are unjustly holding peaceful protesters as political prisoners, he left no doubt when he issued his statement in solidarity. “Our hearts and minds are with the people being persecuted so unfairly relating to the January 6th protest concerning the Rigged Presidential Election. In addition to everything else, it has proven conclusively that we are a two-tiered system of justice.”

ABC’s Jonathan Karl reported on “This Week” that when he’s interviewed Trump for his new book, it’s clear that Trump has no regrets:

I was absolutely dumbfounded at how fondly he looks back on January 6th. He thinks it was a great day. He thinks it was one of the greatest days of his time in politics.

Trump is still flouting the law and openly condoning the violent insurrection. As Rauchway said, he “finds authority in the mob.” He’s always engaged in lurid rhetoric and has nudged his followers and police to beat protesters and the like. But starting with his calls to “liberate” states that were trying to mitigate the spread of the pandemic, he has been backing insurrectionist and vigilante activity. And his followers are listening.

We’ve seen threats and intimidation against government workers and public health officials for months. Congressional representatives are under constant threat having to hire private security and bodyguards. We are starting to see violence in everyday interactions between local officials and their constituents. School board meetings have become fraught with locals citizens yelling at officials that they know where they live and they will find them. Last week GOP Congressman Anthony Gonzales announced that he would not run for reelection in Ohio because ever since he voted to impeach Donald Trump after the insurrection he and his family have needed security due of the risk of violence from Trump supporters. Trump quickly put out a statement indicating his elation at the success of that intimidation:

NEW!

"1 down, 9 to go!" – President Donald J. Trump pic.twitter.com/HpqIyVPYCe

— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) September 17, 2021

The 9 he refers to are the other Republicans who voted to impeach him. He is using the “authority of the mob” to chase his perceived enemies in the GOP out of politics and to send a message to all the other Republicans that they will be subject to the same treatment if they cross him.

All the recent polls show Trump is as popular as ever with Republicans. His obsessive attention to his Big Lie seems to have hardened their attitudes with more of them believing he was cheated than believed it last January. The vast majority of his voters have lost faith in the electoral system to deliver a fair result and will likely not accept anything but a victory going forward, particularly if Donald Trump is on the ballot.

Rauchway’s review of “Peril” features an unexpected insight into President Biden’s view of Trumpism. He writes:

Biden regards the -ism, not the man, as the real threat; Trump put the nation in peril because he evoked and organized a darkness that was already there.

That darkness isn’t going away. It is energized and stimulated by the strong threat of violence that is running through our politics. Like its leader Trump, it sees the “authority in the mob” as the best way to preserve its dominance in a culture it believes is slipping away. Biden is right that Trump is not the real threat. The threat is the violent beast he has unleashed and there isn’t any obvious way to put it back in its cage.

Michaela Coel makes Emmys history — but “Ted Lasso,” “The Crown” and white actors sweep the night

At Sunday night’s 73rd Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony, Michaela Coel made Emmys history. The creator, writer and star of HBO’s “I May Destroy You” became the first Black woman ever to take home the top honor in the Writing for a Limited Series category, besting Scott Frank (Netflix’s “The Queen’s Gambit”), Brad Ingelsby (HBO’s “Mare of Easttown”) and the Disney+ “WandaVision” nominee slate of Chuck Hayward, Peter Cameron, Jac Schaeffer and Laura Donney. When Coel took the stage she unfolded a small piece of paper and shared her acceptance speech.

“I just wrote a little something for writers, really: Write the tale that scares you, that makes you feel uncertain, that isn’t comfortable. I dare you,” she said. “In a world that entices us to browse through the lives of others to help us better determine how we feel about ourselves, and to in turn feel the need to be constantly visible – for visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success – do not be afraid to disappear from it, from us, for a while, and see what comes to you in the silence.”

She finished by dedicating her limited series to sexual assault survivors. In total, her speech lasted 53 seconds.

Pointing that out is relevant, because Coel’s win followed that of Scott Frank, who directed “The Queen’s Gambit,” and Governors Award winner Debbie Allen.

Allen is an actor, producer, director and choreographer who has been working in the industry for more than 30 years and has five Emmys, a Golden Globe and is a Kennedy Center nominee. She accomplished all of this while overcoming racism and sexism in the industry.

Thus, when producers started signaling her to wrap up her speech just as she was warming up, and Allen declared, “Honey, turn that clock off, I ain’t paying no attention to it. Turn it off, turn it off!” the room erupted in cheers. Few have earned their right to speak to the industry without a time limit, because it is understood that those people treat such moments as precious and use them well.

Allen is one of them. She spoke for two minutes and 50 seconds about the courage it took to be the only woman in the room on most occasions, to keep going, and on top of that, to bring other people with her.

Frank came to the stage with a detailed two-page peroration and zero intention of editing what he had to say. The rest of the winners mostly adhered to time constraints, joking about being played off while dashing through their list of thanks. Not this director. Strains of Andrea Bocelli’s “Time To Say Goodbye” came up multiple times, once quite loudly, but Frank kept talking for a total of three minutes and 28 seconds. Nobody cut his mic.

To quote comedy performer and writer Keisha Zollar‘s observation, the contrast of these three speeches, and the fact that a white male director was allowed to go as long as he wanted while women winners cut their speeches short, sent some fascinating signals about “who takes up an appropriate amount of space, who could take more and who just TAKES” in the TV industry.

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And it goes quite a distance in explaining how and why, in a pandemic year when TV became more central to our lives than ever and hundreds of shows were put in front of us, Television Academy voters honored 12 shows in 27 Emmy categories, according to fellow TV writer Rick Porter. Twelve. Out of those, only one individual Emmy award went to a person of color. That would be Coel.

The triumphs of “Ted Lasso,” “The Crown,” “Mare of Easttown” and “Hacks” are worth of celebrating, mind you. Each won big at this year’s Emmys, with “Ted Lasso” earning Apple TV+ four awards on Sunday including the statue for outstanding comedy series, a best comedy actor win for Jason Sudeikis, and supporting actor victories for Brett Goldstein and Hannah Waddingham.

The complete sweep in the top drama categories by Netflix’s “The Crown” is more telling, though. This show has 21 Emmy wins, including the seven it netted Sunday for outstanding drama, best actress in a drama for Olivia Colman, a best actor win for Josh O’Connor, and individual supporting performance wins for Gillian Anderson and Tobias Menzies, another writing Emmy for Peter Morgan and a directing win for Jessica Hobbs.

Between “The Crown” and “The Queen’s Gambit,” Netflix won more Emmys than HBO. Streamers dominated, all told. That said, HBO Max’s “Hacks” gave “Ted Lasso” stiff competition on the comedy front, netting Jean Smart a best comedy actress win and scoring writing wins for Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky, and a directing win for Aniello.

HBO’s “Mare of Easttown” duked it out with “The Queen’s Gambit” among the limited series categories, with the Netflix show taking home the top prize and “Mare” herself, Kate Winslet, winning best actress. Co-stars Juliann Nicholson and Evan Peters scored hardware in their respective supporting actor races.

But take a closer look at Colman and O’Connor’s categories. O’Connor won over “This Is Us” star and three-time Emmy winner Sterling K. Brown, “Lovecraft Country” lead Jonathan Majors, “Bridgerton” star Regé-Jean Page and Billy Porter, who slayed the final season of “Pose.” Colman’s win meant “Pose” star Mj Rodriguez, “Lovecraft Country” lead Jurnee Smollett and “In Treatment” star Uzo Aduba went home with nothing.

For that matter, the majority of Peters’ competition for supporting actor in a drama came from people of color, including “Hamilton” stars Daveed Diggs, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Anthony Ramos, and Paapa Essiedu from “I May Destroy You.”

These are among the categories hailed in post-nominations round-ups as reason to be hopeful about the Emmys diversifying its choices. The Hollywood Reporter calculated that 44 percent of the acting nominations and at least half of the nominations in the lead drama actor and actress races went to performers of color.

When it comes to selecting winners, however, voters’ tendency to gravitate toward familiar titles showed up in force, shutting out outstanding work from non-white performers and series centering them. “Ted Lasso” is an inclusively cast show, but only one of the main leads isn’t white — and among all the actors nominated, Nick Mohammed went in as the underdog.

“The Amber Ruffin Show” also was longshot in a category that includes 23-time Emmy winner “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.” But the highly acclaimed “A Black Lady Sketch Show” had a one-in-two chance of winning in the Variety Sketch category and still lost to 81-time Emmy winner “Saturday Night Live.” Award show voters tend to reward previous victors, but even that is absolutely ridiculous.

It also means that when the Academy’s largely white voting body had the option to select winners that didn’t fit the status quo of white actors they know, they went with the folks who look like them. No offense to Colman, but not even she expected to win her category. (She also gets points for giving a bleeped shout-out to her fellow Brit with “Michaela Coel, f**k yeah!”) Voters could have rewarded Porter’s work in the best actor race; instead they went with the British guy who did a solid but not exactly unforgettable job of playing Prince Charles.

Set all of this against an awards telecast hosted by “The Neighborhood” star Cedric the Entertainer, co-executive produced by Reginald Hudlin and featuring Reggie Watts as its DJ and MC Lyte as the announcer, and the dissonance escalates. The comic’s pre-recorded skits were duds, but he did a fine job in his live bits, although about half of his monologue probably lost many of CBS’ regular viewers who bothered to tune in.

Cedric the Entertainer may not have presented a watertight case that hosted telecasts are better than ones that forgo an anchor, but he didn’t entirely bomb either. Between the lighthearted Emmys-themed sing-along to the late Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend” and an understated In Memoriam whose acoustic performance by Leon Bridges and Jon Batiste hit all the right notes, the production fit the intimacy of this year’s setting.

Some — OK, Seth Rogen — would say it was too close. “There’s way too many of us in this little room. What are we doing?” Rogen said in his bit. “They said this was outdoors. It’s not! They lied to us! We’re in a hermetically sealed tent right now!”

But a tent is a tent, including one staged at the L.A. Live events deck. Some are much more expansive than others, metaphorically speaking. Some claim to be open for political purposes while still being shaped by the same people who have been responsible for limiting who we see and which stories they’ll tell for decades now.

So women who won, including Smart, acknowledged they’re being played off. The “Hacks” creators joked about it but ultimately conceded their time at the podium. But Frank, a man most people have never heard of, just kept talking. And talking. Occasionally he’d look up with a dismissive wave of his hand and say, “Really? No,” or “Seriously? Stop the music,” as if being played off were a new concept.

Later “Queen’s Gambit” executive producer William Horberg praised star Anya Taylor-Joy with “you brought the sexy back to chess,” moments before declaring, “patriarchy has no defense against our queens.” Not once did we hear Taylor-Joy speak. What was that about the patriarchy again?

Sunday’s telecast lasted three hours and 14 minutes, and most of it was the furthest thing from uncertain and uncomfortable.

Still, Coel proves it’s possible to speak powerfully and convey gratitude a very short amount of time, taking up a concise amount of space when she could have taken up more. Allen and anyone receiving accolades for decades worth of work in the industry and service to her community deserves to go long; she took up an appropriate amount of space by uplifting with her words and committing to inspire.

Speaking to women and young people across the country and the world, she said, “It’s time for you to claim your power, claim your voice, sing your songs, tell your stories,” she said. “It will make us a better place. Your turn.”

With any luck the voters and future Emmy telecast producers will take those words to heart when the work of the people to whom she’s speaking shows up in front of them. But if this year’s outcomes and displays of entitlement are any indication, we have a long way to go before the gatekeepers genuinely commit to stepping back from the mic to applaud others striving to be seen and be heard.

Rev. William J. Barber II: America is now at the “most critical time, between life and death”

The Republican Party is currently trying to inject lethal poison into America’s body politic in a systematic effort to prevent Black and brown people, and other core Democratic constituencies, from voting. It has become clear that today’s Republicans actively view majoritarian democracy as their enemy. It is no exaggeration to say that fascism, white identity politics and white supremacy are being deployed to create a 21st-century American apartheid.

In fact, the Republican goal goes beyond entrenched minority rule by whites. More specifically, it envisions a nation dominated by a white male plutocracy in which Christian nationalism and authoritarianism are protected by law and where property will always be valued above human rights and human dignity. Resistance and other forms of dissent will de facto become illegal. In this context, “centrist” Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin must be seen as collaborators in the Republican assault on democracy.

It is also true that the Republican Party is poisoning American society through its willful negligence regarding the coronavirus pandemic, which has now killed at least 670,000 people in the United States. While the Biden administration has done a remarkable job in promoting vaccines and other efforts to defeat the pandemic, its efforts are being systematically sabotaged by its political opponents. It is now estimated that at least one of every 500 Americans has died of COVID-19, and public health experts agree that a large proportion of those deaths could have been prevented.

COVID has been especially devastating for Black people, Latinos and Native Americans, as well as older people and those with disabilities or pre-existing illness. In total, the American people have lost many millions of years of life because of this plague.

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If American democracy were a patient, its current status would be critical and unstable. To heal and recover will require more than treating the evident symptoms, but also confronting the deeper ailments that afflict our nation.

To discuss those questions and much more, I recently spoke with the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, president and senior lecturer at Repairers of the Breach. He is also the architect of the Forward Together Moral Movement, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and author of several books, including his most recent, “We Are Called to Be a Movement.” He is a frequent guest on CNN, ABC and MSNBC as well as Democracy Now! His essays and other writing have been featured in leading publications, including the Washington Post and the New York Times.

In this conversation, Rev. Barber explains that America’s crises of democracy, racism, poverty, wealth and income inequality, religious nationalism, ecological collapse and more must be confronted in a holistic and systemic fashion if the country is to be rehabilitated and transformed. Barber argues that it was a mistake focusing too much on Donald Trump as an individual, rather than the ways his rise to power and the emergence of an American fascist movement revealed a much deeper and older disease.

He also warns that Republican attacks on Black and brown people’s voting rights (and civil rights more broadly) are a weapon used to damage the progressive cause and hurt Americans on both sides of the color line. Barber urges the Democrats to find their moral principles and stand up for the average American, especially the poor and working classes, instead of becoming obsessed with public opinion polls, “bipartisanship”, and seeking compromise with the evident evil embodied by today’s Republican Party.

This conversation has been edited, as usual, for length and clarity.

People are feeling exhausted by the Republican Party’s torrent of attacks on democracy and society. What would you tell those folks about staying motivated and fighting off despair?

As you know, the infamous Dred Scott ruling deemed that a Black man has no rights that a white man ever has to respect. Frederick Douglass was asked two months after that to speak to an abolitionist group. People were depressed and not sure of what to do next. Frederick Douglass didn’t lie. He said, this is bad, this is monstrous. Douglass also said, the courts are against us, the magistrates are against us. But that is just one side of the story. Douglass continued, saying that every attempt to stop the abolitionist movement has only served to embolden and intensify our agitation. The fight is not off, the fight is on.

Right now, what I see too much of is an unwillingness to fight, a type of acceptance of the situation. I was asked on “Morning Joe,” what if I go to West Virginia and push Sen. Manchin, and we lose the next election there? I responded, “Why do you all start with, ‘What if you lose?'” What if you inspire the hundreds of thousands of poor, low-wealth people in that state who are not voting? Have you seen how many of those voters there are in West Virginia? If you got those low-wealth, low-income voters, the Democrats could get a marginal victory.

It’s not impossible to do, but you can’t move them if you don’t at least fight for fundamental things. For example, fighting for the $15 living wage, There has to be a return by the Democrats to a fundamental understanding that there are some things which are bigger than just the latest poll number. We must fight and win.

Jim and Jane Crow were not vanquished. Those demons are being summoned up and empowered by the Republican Party and their war on democracy, and specifically on Black and brown people’s voting rights and human rights. If one lacks a historical perspective, this seems insurmountable. How do you reconcile the past and the present in terms of these struggles of justice?

First of all, we should have never suggested that if you get rid of Trump then you get rid of the problem. Donald Trump was not the problem; he was the symptom. Trump was the beneficiary of the Southern strategy, which was launched some 50 years ago by the Republicans. They decided that the way to win is to intentionally divide the country by making the Republican Party the party of white people who were angry about the victories of the civil rights movement.

Again, Donald Trump is more of a symptom of a larger problem. In that way, he is like the mucus that comes out of your nose when you have pneumonia.

To win, we need to move beyond isolating the problems facing this country. We need to focus on systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, denial of health care, the war economy and religious nationalism — all as one issue. In total, these are interlocking injustices.

The battle over voting rights and democracy we are experiencing right now should never have been discussed as a type of new Jim Crow. This is not Jim Crow. It is really “James Crow, Esquire.” The same kinds of laws that were passed in Texas are being passed in West Virginia, where there are hardly any Black people. Racism is operative in the Republican Party’s attacks on voting rights, but it is not just motivated by racism.

These new bills are being backed by the Koch brothers, among others. The goal here is to silence and shut down the progressive voice. The extremists who have hijacked the Republican Party by using “James Crow, Esquire” are looking at the long game. This is not just Jim Crow. Don’t make this just a Black issue. Show the racist side of this issue that, yes, in Texas, they’re trying to block people of color, but those laws are also going to hurt disabled people and women. In West Virginia they’re doing the same thing, but the majority of people who are going to be hurt in that state are white, poor and low-wealth voters. This is an attack on democracy itself.

Why is there so much fear and refusal by too many to use the proper moral language, to speak the truth, about Trumpism, the Republicans and this attack on democracy? This is a moral struggle. There is so much cowardice. How do you maintain your moral clarity?

We do it by building a movement across the country, such as with the Poor People’s Campaign and the national call for moral revival. We stay among the people who are most impacted, and they will keep the fight in you.

It’s hard to not have courage when you’re around people who fight every day, and they keep their courage. We saw this is in West Virginia at our anniversary caravan and gathering to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the Battle for Blair Mountain, where Black and white miners fought together for their rights.

That’s part of the problem for Democrats. They don’t talk to the people. They talk about the people, they talk at the people, but they don’t bring the people in. By comparison, we stay emboldened by staying clear on our moral foundations. Part of the problem is with language, “left versus right” and “moderate” and “conservative” is too puny. It’s not about left versus right, it’s about right versus wrong.

The second reason is that too many politicians are not really reading the Bible, the book they put their hands on when they were sworn into office. The Bible makes it very clear that some things are evil. For example, there are members of Congress and others in government who do not seem to realize how ugly it is to go to John Lewis’ body, laying in state in the Rotunda — whether you are a Republican or a Democrat — and claim that you love him but then go and fight against everything he stood for.

Another example: Democrats and others have said what the Republicans are doing is the worst attack on voting rights since after the Civil War. Well, if it’s the worst attack since the Civil War, how do you compromise on the solution?

If 700 people were dying every day from poverty before COVID, how do you not call that, to borrow from Dr. King, a form of government-sponsored murder? Poverty destroys lives. Poverty is not the result of the immoral actions of poor people. Poverty is the result of bad public policy.

What can the average American, everyday people, do in their daily lives to maintain clarity and struggle for justice?

When I tell folks to join the movement, I do not mean join an organization. You haven’t heard me one time say that the Poor People’s Campaign is an organization. That grows out of our way of organizing, which is modeled on the Reconstruction movement of the 19th century.

You are part of a movement when you agree with the core principles and incorporate the struggle into your life. In essence, the movement becomes your meditation. The movement becomes your courage, hooking up with other people becomes your strength. It becomes your day-to-day activity. It is not just participating in a march.

Learning from American history, the 1963 March on Washington happened because there were 400 or 500 cities where people were already engaged and involved in activities such as civil disobedience. Many folks forget that at the end of the 1963 march, Martin Luther King said, “Go back.” Folks remember “I have a dream,” but King finished with, “Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back, go back, go back. Go back, keep fighting.”

When we summon moral language and describe our struggle as a moral movement, what we are really saying is that this is why I’m alive. This is what’s going to get me up in the morning, not my alarm clock. This is what my life purpose is. You don’t fight systems on your own. You don’t try to figure out what you can do by yourself. “We” is the most important word in the justice vocabulary. It’s not what I can do, it’s what we can do.

America feels like it is about to burst. There is something profoundly wrong in American society right now. So many forces of destruction and evil and other troubles are coming together and there has been no closure.

Well it is. There can’t be any closure until we face it. It can’t be. This is not new to this society. Imagine Black slaves year after year with no closure. One of the things we have to realize is that this is not new in the American reality, but what is also not new in the American reality is people who find, in the midst of those moments, their purpose and their courage.

My question is, can America survive? Can America survive with over 87 million people uninsured or underinsured? Can America survive with these fundamental attacks on democracy? America is already to some degree an oligarchy. Decisions are being made by money in politics rather than the votes of people. We are about to burst, and we are bursting.

Now the question is, where’s the energy going to go? Because it’s going somewhere. And it is always when a nation is about to burst that moral movements are birthed. If you do not have the moral movements, then that energy can go in directions that are utterly destructive. But that bursting can also be a birthing. As has been explained to me, when a woman has a baby, it is the most critical time between life and death, and the most creative time.

Is this moment in America going to be a tomb or a womb? Is it going to be the burying of democracy, or is it going to be the birthing of a new freedom?

The best way to store cilantro to prevent sad, slimy leaves

Cilantro, parsley, basil, and other leafy herbs can spoil quickly if they’re not stored properly. Brown, wilted, and sometimes even watery leaves are a cook’s worst nightmare (you know, alongside cuts and burns, kitchen fires, and burning the holiday roast). Cilantro is an essential herb in so many dishes such as Báhn mì, and especially in Mexican cuisine, too. So what is the best way to store herbs like cilantro to keep the leafy herbs fresh for weeks? Ahead, find four of our team’s tried-and-true tricks for storing cilantro to ensure that the leaves and stems stay fresh.

How to store cilantro

Salad spinner

Everyone’s favorite wedding registry item isn’t just for rinsing greens before making homemade Caesar salad or a colorful WFH lunch. “I recently cleaned a lot of cilantro and stored it in a salad spinner with a bit of water at the bottom and that worked well,” said Food52 food editor Emma Laperruque. Try this method out using our favorite spinner from the Food52shop!

Glass jars

Assigning editor Rebecca Firkser is a fan of storing a bunch of cilantro in glass jars with a few inches of water and covering them with reusable plastic bags from the grocery store. This method keeps the cilantro fresh for days in the refrigerator. Just be sure to replace and refill the jar with clean water every two to three days.

Ice cube trays

A super-easy way to store cilantro so that it stays fresh is by freezing the leaves and stems in ice cube trays. Place one teaspoon of chopped cilantro leaves and stems in each ice cube tray and then fill each section with good-quality olive oil or water. When you want to use cilantro, just pop a cube or two out and let them defrost or melt in a pan. The leaves won’t look as fresh and crisp as if you plucked them straight from the stems but their flavor will be just as pronounced.

Plastic bags

An easy way to store herbs like cilantro is by wrapping the cilantro stems in a slightly damp paper towel (try our reusable paper towels!)and placing the bundle in a plastic Ziploc bag, which ensures that the cilantro leaves don’t turn brown too quickly. Secure the paper towel with a rubber band to ensure that the herb bundle stays fresh. Admittedly, this is the least eco-friendly method, but it takes up the least amount of space, so if you have a small refrigerator, this may be the best option for you.

With the 9/11 anniversary behind us, can America wake up from its 20-year nightmare?

Looking back on it now, the 1990s was an age of innocence for America. The Cold War was over and our leaders promised us a “peace dividend.” There was no TSA to make us take off our shoes at airports. (How many bombs have they found in those billions of shoes?) The government could not legally tap a U.S. phone or read private emails without a warrant from a judge. And the national debt was only $5 trillion — compared with more than $28 trillion today.

We have been told that the criminal attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — whose terrible anniversary was observed last week — “changed everything.” But what really changed everything was the U.S. government’s disastrous response to them.

That response was not preordained or inevitable, but the result of decisions and choices made by politicians, bureaucrats and generals who fueled and exploited our fears, unleashed wars of reprehensible vengeance and built a secretive security state, all thinly disguised behind Orwellian myths of American greatness.

Most Americans believe in democracy and many regard the United States as a democratic country. But the U.S. response to 9/11 laid bare the extent to which American leaders are willing to manipulate the public into accepting illegal wars, torture, the Guantánamo gulag and sweeping civil rights abuses — all of which have undermined the very meaning of democracy.

Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz said in a 2011 speech that “a democracy can only work if its people are being told the truth.” But America’s leaders exploited the public’s fears in the wake of 9/11 to justify wars that have killed and maimed millions of people who had nothing to do with those crimes. Ferencz compared this to the actions of the German leaders he prosecuted at Nuremberg, who also justified their invasions of other countries as “preemptive first strikes.”

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“You cannot run a country as Hitler did, feeding them a pack of lies to frighten them that they’re being threatened, so it’s justified to kill people you don’t even know,” Ferencz continued. “It’s not logical, it’s not decent, it’s not moral, and it’s not helpful. When an unmanned bomber from a secret American airfield fires rockets into a little Pakistani or Afghan village and thereby kills or maims unknown numbers of innocent people, what is the effect of that? Every victim will hate America forever and will be willing to die killing as many Americans as possible. Where there is no court of justice, wild vengeance is the alternative.”

Even the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, talked about “insurgent math,” conjecturing that for every innocent person killed, the U.S. created 10 new enemies. And thus the so-called Global War on Terror fueled a global explosion of terrorism and armed resistance that will never end — unless and until the United States ends the state terrorism that provokes and fuels it.

By opportunistically exploiting 9/11 to attack countries that had nothing to do with it, like Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria and Yemen, the United States vastly expanded the destructive strategy it used in the 1980s to destabilize Afghanistan, which spawned the Taliban and al-Qaida in the first place.

In Libya and Syria, only 10 years after 9/11, U.S. leaders betrayed every American who lost a loved one on Sept. 11 by recruiting and arming al-Qaida-led militants to overthrow two of the most secular governments in the Middle East, plunging both countries into years of intractable violence and fueling radicalization throughout the region.

The U.S. response to 9/11 was corrupted by a toxic soup of revenge, imperialist ambitions, war profiteering, systematic brainwashing and sheer stupidity. The only Republican senator who voted against the war on Iraq, Lincoln Chafee, later wrote, “Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.”

But it wasn’t. Very few of the 263 Republicans or the 110 Democrats who voted for the Iraq war in 2002 paid any political price for their complicity in international aggression, which the judges at Nuremberg explicitly called “the supreme international crime.” One of them now sits at the apex of power in the White House.

Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s withdrawal and implicit acceptance of the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan could serve as an important step toward ending the violence and chaos their predecessors unleashed after the 9/11 attacks. But the current debate over next year’s military budget makes clear that our deluded leaders are still dodging the obvious lessons of 20 years of war.

Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress with the wisdom and courage to vote against Congress’ war resolution in 2001, has introduced a bill to cut U.S. military spending by almost half: $350 billion per year. With the miserable failure in Afghanistan — a war that will end up costing every U.S. citizen $20,000 — one would think that Lee’s proposal would elicit tremendous support. But the White House, the Pentagon and the Armed Services Committees in both the House and Senate are instead falling over each other to shovel even more money into the bottomless pit of the military budget.

Politicians’ votes on questions of war, peace and military spending are the most reliable test of their commitment to progressive values and the well-being of their constituents. You cannot call yourself a progressive or a champion of working people if you vote to appropriate more money for weapons and war than for health care, education, green jobs and fighting poverty.

These 20 years of war have revealed to Americans and the world that modern weapons and formidable military forces can only accomplish two things: They can kill and maim people, and they can destroy homes, infrastructure and entire cities. American promises to rebuild bombed-out cities and “remake” countries it has destroyed have proven worthless, as Biden has acknowledged.

Both Iraq and Afghanistan are turning primarily to China for the help they need to start rebuilding and developing economically from the ruin and devastation left by America and its allies. America destroys, China builds. The contrast could not be more stark or self-evident. No amount of Western propaganda can hide what the whole world can see.

But the different paths chosen by U.S. and Chinese leaders are not predestined, and despite the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the U.S. corporate media, the American public has always been wiser and more committed to cooperative diplomacy than America’s political and executive class. It has been well-documented that many of the endless crises in U.S. foreign policy could have been avoided if America’s leaders had just listened to the public.

The perennial handicap that has dogged America’s diplomacy since World War II is precisely our investment in weapons and military forces, including nuclear weapons that threaten our very existence. It is trite but true to say that when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Other countries don’t have the option of deploying overwhelming military force to confront international problems, so they have had to be smarter and more nimble in their diplomacy, and more prudent and selective in their more limited uses of military force.

The rote declarations of U.S. leaders that “all options are on the table” are a euphemism for precisely the “threat or use of force” that the UN Charter explicitly prohibits, and they stymie the U.S. development of expertise in nonviolent forms of conflict resolution. The bumbling and bombast of America’s leaders in international arenas stand in sharp contrast to the skillful diplomacy and clear language we often hear from top Russian, Chinese and Iranian diplomats, even when they are speaking in English, their second or third language.

By contrast, U.S. leaders rely on threats, coups, sanctions and war to project power around the world. They promise Americans that these coercive methods will maintain American “leadership” or dominance indefinitely into the future, as if that were America’s rightful place in the world, to be sitting atop the globe like a cowboy on a bucking bronco.

A “New American Century” and “Pax Americana” are Orwellian versions of Hitler’s “Thousand-Year Reich,” but are no more realistic. No empire has lasted forever, and there is historical evidence that even the most successful empires have a lifespan of no more than 250 years, by which time their rulers have enjoyed so much wealth and power that decadence and decline inevitably set in. This describes the United States today.

America’s economic dominance is waning. Its once productive economy has been gutted and financialized, and most countries in the world now do more trade with China and/or the European Union than with the United States. Where America’s military once kicked open doors for American capital to “follow the flag” and open up new markets, today’s U.S. war machine is just a bull in the global china shop, wielding purely destructive power.

But we are not condemned to passively follow the suicidal path of militarism and hostility. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan could be a down payment on a transition to a more peaceful post-imperial economy — if the American public starts to actively demand peace, diplomacy and disarmament, and finds ways to make its voices heard.

We must get serious about demanding cuts in the Pentagon budget. None of our other problems will be solved as long as we keep allowing our leaders to flush the majority of federal discretionary spending down the same military toilet as the $2.26 trillion they wasted on the war in Afghanistan. We must oppose politicians who refuse to cut the Pentagon budget, regardless of which party they belong to and where they stand on other issues. Our organization, CODEPINK, is part of a new coalition to “Cut the Pentagon for the people, planet, peace and a future.”
We must not let ourselves or our family members be recruited into the U.S. war machine. Instead, we must challenge our leaders’ absurd claims that the imperial forces deployed across the world to threaten other countries are somehow, by some convoluted logic, defending America. As one translator paraphrased Voltaire, “Whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
We must expose the ugly, destructive reality behind our country’s myths of “defending U.S. vital interests,” “humanitarian intervention,” “the war on terror” and the latest absurdity, the ill-defined “rules-based order” whose rules only apply to others — never to the United States.
We must oppose the corrupt power of the arms industry, including U.S. weapons sales to the world’s most repressive regimes and an unwinnable arms race that risks a potentially world-ending conflict with China and Russia.

Our only hope for the future is to abandon the futile quest for hegemony and instead commit to peace, cooperative diplomacy, international law and disarmament. After 20 years of war and militarism that have only left the world a more dangerous place and accelerated America’s decline, we must choose the path of peace.

Definition of “evangelical” is becoming less about religion and more about politics: poll

A new analysis from the Pew Research center revealed that the word “evangelical” no longer means born-again. Instead, the data shows that it has become more about President Donald Trump and being a Republican.

NBC News reported that the term has become less about faith, religion or the church and instead become a political distinction.

“People who embrace the label use it to signal that they’re against immigration, science and abortion and to signal a belief that discussions of racism in America are antithetical to their idea of America,” said NBC.

According to the Pew survey, Trump scored more evangelical support in 2020 than he did in 2016. Sixteen percent of people moved from calling themselves “evangelical” from 2016 to 2020. That group, however, didn’t support Trump in the election.

NBC also cited a recent PRRI survey showing that evangelicals don’t blame the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol on militias, white supremacist groups, Donald Trump or conservative media. They instead blame left-wing groups, to the tune of 57 percent. Also, 68 percent of white evangelicals in the survey say that Trump is a “true patriot.”

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Writing for the New York Times on Sunday, columnist Charles Blow took the data to its natural conclusion, that evangelicals have exchanged religion for power.

He recalled an editorial by Franklin Graham denouncing former President Bill Clinton for his extra-marital affair. Donald Trump didn’t get the same treatment when it was revealed he had an interest with adult film star Stormy Daniels when his wife was recovering from having their child.

“Mr. Clinton’s sin can be forgiven, but he must start by admitting to it and refraining from legalistic doublespeak,” wrote Graham in 1998. “According to the Scripture, the president did not have an ‘inappropriate relationship’ with Monica Lewinsky — he committed adultery. He didn’t ‘mislead’ his wife and us — he lied. Acknowledgment must be coupled with genuine remorse. A repentant spirit that says, ‘I’m sorry. I was wrong. I won’t do it again. I ask for your forgiveness,’ would go a long way toward personal and national healing.”

It has become clear that starting with Graham, evangelicals have followed to abandon principles and turn to worship power, he explained.

“The hypocrisy of white evangelicals, taken into full context, shouldn’t have been shocking, I suppose, but as a person who grew up in the church (although I’m not a religious person anymore), it was still disappointing,” he wrote. “I had grown up hearing from pulpits that it was the world that changed, not God’s word. The word was like a rock. A lie was a lie, yesterday, today and tomorrow, no matter who told it. I had hoped that there were more white evangelicals who embraced the same teachings, who would not abide by the message the Grahams of the world were advancing, who would stand on principle.”

NBC’s report noted that there might be more people calling themselves evangelicals, but that those people have found Jesus so much as evangelicalism is now a place accepting of racism, against immigrant and LGBTQ people and searching for some kind of 1950s “misplaced nostalgia.”

Blake Chastain, host of the “Exvangelical” podcast told Axios that people would once “meet at a bar and speak in hushed tones about ‘how weird that church was.'” Those conversations now happen on social media where people are finding that they’re not alone. Searches for “Exvangelical” have increased, Google Trends said. So is “religious trauma.”

Madison Cawthorn says he “always” has a knife on him after school board incident

Rep. Madison Cawthron (R-NC) spoke to the Henderson County school board about why mask requirements in schools are wrong. While he was there, however, one person spotted what appeared to be a knife underneath Cawthorn’s wheelchair, wrote New York Magazine.

The photo spread and the district was forced to contact authorities, promising to cooperate with their investigation in the interest of “the safety of our staff, students, and members of the public in our schools and on our properties.” It’s a Class 1 misdemeanor in North Carolina to bring a knife onto public school property, though the Henderson County Sheriff’s office already said they’re letting him off of any accountability.

“Although unacceptable, occasionally a person inadvertently possesses a knife,” the statement said.

A political action committee asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to investigate “and take appropriate action.”

“The letter includes further documentation about when and where Cawthorn carries the knife in the form of a photograph published in the January 18, 2021 issue of New York,” said the report. “The image, taken by photographer Gabriella Demczuk on the morning of January 6 as Cawthorn made his way to speak to the crowd that would go on to storm the Capitol, shows the congressman’s fist raised in the air.”

There’s “an object bearing a knurled, rounded metallic-colored end with a black face, a large hole, and an apparent screw head, bearing a strong resemblance to the Microtech SBD Dagger,” said the note.

It’s also a violation of Washington, D.C. laws against the possession of a dangerous weapon and rules against weapons in the U.S. Capitol. Rules say that he can have the knife in his office, but not on the floor of Congress.

“Per the Capitol Police, knives fall under the related, ‘dangerous weapons’ category, and it’s not clear if a similar exception is made for members of Congress who carry them,” said New York Magazine.

The piece recalled an excerpt from John Boehner’s recent autobiography in which Rep. Don Young (R-AK) “pulled a ten-inch knife from his pocket (he was known for carrying one or more knives everywhere he went), flipped the blade open, and held it up to my throat.”

The Raleigh News & Observer asked Cawthorn if he brought his knife on school property, but he pretended, “I don’t really know anything about that.”

During an interview in his office in January, New York Magazine confessed, “I’ve always got a hunting knife on me.”

Read the full report at New York Magazine.

The California Republican Party is broken. The Newsom recall proved it

In the end, Larry Elder could not deny the inevitable judgment of California voters, and on Tuesday night he conceded with unexpected grace and near humility. His hopes of unseating Gov. Gavin Newsom in a recall election ended with a landslide defeat that left no room for excuses or conspiracies.

The talk radio agitator, along with the remnants of the California GOP, lost the recall fight by at least 2 million votes. “We may have lost the battle but we are going to win the war,” Elder told supporters gathered for an election night party in Costa Mesa, but he had been prepared to take a much darker turn.

Just days earlier, former President Donald Trump claimed the California recall was “probably rigged,” before a single vote was counted. A website paid for by the Elder campaign repeated the claim and provided a petition “demanding a special session of the California legislature to investigate and ameliorate the twisted results.” On election eve, Elder refused to explicitly promise to accept the results, win or lose.

However unintentionally, the insinuations of voter fraud only served to underline how broken the GOP has become in California. The latest “rigged” conspiracy was in defiance of simple math in a state where verified Democratic registration is double that of Republicans. Joe Biden had just won the nation’s most populous state in 2020 with 63.5% of the vote, easily crushing Trump by more than 5 million votes.

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Newsom won by essentially the same margin as his landslide victory in 2018 against another weak Republican candidate, John Cox.

The shrinking Republican base in California has only grown more extreme as traditional conservatives and moderates exit a party that once dominated in California. While traditionally liberal states like Maryland and Massachusetts have managed to elect moderate Republicans as governor in recent years, California has become a lost cause.

“It was a strong Republican state when Republicans weren’t this anti-immigrant, this anti-woman, this anti-science,” says Melahat Rafiei, secretary of the California Democratic Party. “So it isn’t that the people changed. The Republican Party went to a place where people couldn’t go.”

If more than 50% of voters had voted yes on the recall, Newsom would have been replaced by the leading challenger: Elder.

But the possibility that the country’s most populous, most progressive state could be taken over by a far-right minority through a recall election turned out to be a mirage. Its success always depended on low turnout from apathetic Democrats. That was before voters got a good look at the leading Republican in the race to replace Newsom.

Elder is against gun control and policies to fight climate change, is anti-choice and has called for a minimum wage of zero. He is a regular guest on Fox News.

In a normal gubernatorial election, Elder would have no chance in California. After nearly 30 years as a talk radio flamethrower, Elder has name recognition but little support beyond those who already share his far-right, libertarian views. Until the recall, he had never run for office or put in the hard work of building a genuine political constituency.

The loudest voices against Newsom and his strict measures to fight the spread of the coronavirus turned out to represent an extreme minority view, as exit polls showed this week. The vast majority of voters supported the stay-at-home orders, the mask mandates in schools, the vaccine mandates for state workers.

While voters who were already battered from 18 months of COVID-19 were increasingly alarmed by the unexpected rise of the delta variant, Elder promised to eliminate all those protections “before I have my first cup of tea” as governor. It was a typically provocative statement from Elder that might light up the phone lines for his radio show, but it was no path to victory. Californians do not want to become Florida.

A high-volume mix of libertarian and shock jock will draw a crowd on AM talk radio every time, but “the Sage of South Central” was unprepared to expand on his core following. True to his character and broadcast history, Elder refused to adjust his policies to fit the California electorate in 2021. Hubris killed the radio star.

Elder’s delusional hard-right campaign made no sense in California but was only a symptom of a larger problem for the GOP. Moderates have left the party, not necessarily to become Democrats but simply to escape a GOP now defined by Trump and echoed by Elder.

The GOP will never again prevail in the state it once dominated until it adopts policies and a persona that isn’t politically repulsive to the mainstream. In 2021, that seems out of reach. One traditional Republican in the race was the moderate former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, who came in a distant 3rd, his less than 500,000 votes just a fraction of Elder’s support.

Newsom’s decisive victory has strengthened the governor for reelection in 2022 and positioned him as a potential presidential candidate later this decade. But many voters were genuinely enraged last year when he was photographed maskless for dinner at the exclusive French Laundry restaurant in Napa Valley, after creating restrictions on public gatherings in response to the pandemic. The revelation pushed the recall signature gathering effort over the finish line, ultimately costing $276 million in taxpayer dollars.

This week’s vote was an expensive lesson at a moment of national crisis and a self-inflicted wound. Newsom will have to make up for that as the state continues to fight COVID-19, climate change, ongoing wildfires and an exploding homeless population.

* * *

Back in 2003, the last governor recall election was a source of entertainment, with a long list of candidates that not only included Teutonic movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger but also Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, former child star Gary Coleman, porn actress Mary Carey and punk rocker Jack Grisham. To get on the ballot, would-be pols needed only 65 signatures of registered voters and a $3,500 fee. Jay Leno invited many of the 135 candidates onto an episode of The Tonight Show for a laugh.

There were serious politicians running too, but none stood a chance against the star power of Schwarzenegger. Earlier that summer, his Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was a massive hit, earning $433.4 million in ticket sales worldwide. More importantly, Gov. Gray Davis had lost the enthusiasm of his constituents, with an anemic approval rating of 26%. He was an easy target for the actor-bodybuilder, who complained about “special interests” and the governor’s unpopular “car tax.”

Schwarzenegger’s popularity meant he could easily cross party lines in a state that was then more evenly divided, while holding moderate positions on abortion rights, the environment and gun control. There was also a staggering state debt that the incoming “Governator” was ultimately unable to solve. It tripled during his two terms in office.

But none of that approached the dire life-and-death stakes of the pandemic that Newsom has faced during his first term. COVID-19 has killed almost 68,000 Californians so far, but a majority of voters have come to see Newsom’s mask and vaccine mandates, and last year’s shelter in place order, in a more positive light. With a new threat posed by the delta variant rising, about a third of voters said the pandemic was the race’s most important issue, according to a CBS News exit poll.

This time, few voters were interested in hearing about the quirkier candidates running in a recall election. There was too much at stake in the MAGA era to take the amateurs seriously.

Caitlyn Jenner, who enjoyed outsized media attention early in the campaign, didn’t even land in the top 10 with 1.1% of the vote. Her campaign as a “compassionate disrupter” was a garbling of previous Republican slogans and had few takers. Despite huge name recognition as a Karsdashian TV family member and her distant past as an Olympic decathlon champion, Jenner ended up only five places above onetime billboard pinup Angelyne in the final results.

Now that Elder has had a taste of life as a high-profile politician, he may not be willing to surrender that spotlight. He could be a candidate again in 2022, sidelining any moderate Republicans who might actually have a chance statewide against Newsom. As he promisedan interviewer on KMJ radio in Fresno on Election Day, “I’m not going to leave the stage.”

“I know some Republicans who are really tied in knots — they do not want him to run,” says Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, longtime observer of state politics and retired professor of the practice of public policy communication at USC. “What you’ve got to do in a regular general election is to reach out to moderate Democrats, to reach out to ‘no party preference’ voters. And even if he tries, it’s going to be very difficult given his record on issues.”

In a state where Democrats enjoy a supermajority in the Legislature, none of Elder’s proposals ever had any chance of becoming law. He’s good at picking fights and reading ad copy into a microphone, but he’s added nothing to the conversation about the path forward in California. Owning the libs is not a means of governing.

The recall election only sounded the alarm for voters. Now that it’s over, Democrat Rafiei is grateful for the recall as a “dress rehearsal” for 2022. “Now we’re fired up even before we needed to,” she says. “This was supposed to be an off year — but there are no more off years. Our activists are ready.”

26 fascinating facts about “The Exorcist”

From Krampus to Santa Claus, the holiday season is filled with all sorts of memorable characters. On December 26, 1973, the studio executives at Warner Bros. added a new kind of yuletide tot into the mix: Regan MacNeil, a demonic tween famous for her distaste for pea soup and unholy attitude toward religious relics. And now the iconic horror movie is about to get a reboot, courtesy of David Gordon Green and Danny McBride.

1. “The Exorcist” is based on a true story.

William Peter Blatty’s novel is based on the real-life 1949 exorcism of a young boy, known by the pseudonym Roland Doe. The story became national news, and caught the interest of Blatty, who was a student at Georgetown University at the time (hence the change in location).

2. William Peter Blatty wrote “The Exorcist” novel in a cabin in California

In “Beyond Comprehension: William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist,” one of the featurettes on Warner Bros.’s special 40th edition Blu-ray, Blatty returns to the scene of “The Exorcist”‘s beginning: the cabin in the hills of Encino, California where he wrote the novel more than four decades ago.

3. The was some controversy surrounding “The Exorcist“‘s R rating

Typically, the simple act of being given an X rating is enough to cause a bit of controversy for a movie. In the case of “The Exorcist,” the fact that the MPAA slapped it with an R rating instead of an X was what ruffled more than a few feathers. In a 1974 article for The New York Times, Roy Meacham wrote that by giving “The Exorcist “an R rating, they were essentially saying that the movie was suitable for children to see, as long as they were accompanied by an adult, but argued that the organization “certainly wasn’t thinking about the youngsters and the possibility of traumatic damage to them from the movie’s unremitting and violent assault upon the emotions.” Meacham relayed an incident about a young girl being “removed from a showing . . . and placed in an ambulance.”

4. Police in Washington, D.C. threatened to arrest anyone who sold a ticket to “The Exorcist“ to any non-adults.

Meacham’s article made specific mention of Washington, D.C. being a prime place where children and teens were interested in seeing “The Exorcist” — partly because it had been shot in the area and they were excited to see their neighborhoods on the big screen. But local police acted swiftly to ban any underage moviegoers from entering a screening of “The Exorcist” (regardless of whether they were accompanied by an adult):

“Early in the morning on New Year’s Day, Washington became the first city ever to bar children from a film the review board said they could see. After conferring with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, officers from the police department’s morals division warned the management of the Cinema Theater that arrests would be made if any more tickets were sold for use by minors. A sign was put up at the theater’s box office reading, As a result of a ruling by the U.S. District Attorney’s Office, no one under the age of 17 will be admitted to The Exorcist.’ Advertising for the film now carries a similar warning.”

Despite the negative publicity, the MPAA stood behind its R rating. They stated that the movie’s lack of nudity or overt sexuality meant it qualified for an R, not X, rating.

5. UK audiences has a hard time finding “The Exorcist“ for many years.

While “The Exorcist” was a box office hit when it was released in the UK in 1974, a handful of local religious groups protested the film’s release and ended up getting it banned in certain areas. But it faced an even bigger challenge several years after being released on VHS. While the movie was released without issue in 1981, the 1984 Video Recordings Act led to the movie being pulled from shelves in 1988. (Because the film featured a 12-year-old girl there was concern that it would be particularly appealing to kids in that same age demographic). It took more than a decade for the film to be made available to home viewers; in 1999, it was finally re-released.

6. The name of the demon in “The Exorcist“ is Pazuzu.

Though it’s never stated in the film, the demon that takes possession of Regan MacNeil has a name: Pazuzu, which is taken from the name of the king of the demons in Assyrian and Babylonian mythology.

7. Mercedes McCambridge provided the voice of the demon in “The Exorcist.“

The woman Orson Welles once dubbed “the world’s greatest living radio actress” was hired to provide the voice for Linda Blair’s most demonic moments, a decision that became the source of much controversy when McCambridge was not credited for her performance. Some say that this decision was solely McCambridge’s, who claimed that she didn’t want to take away from Blair’s performance, then later changed her mind. Under the threat of legal action, her name was quickly added to the credits.

8. Chain-smoking and whiskey helped McCambridge achieve Pazuzu’s raspiness in “The Exorcist.“

Sounding like a demon has its downsides. In the case of McCambridge, she believed that chain smoking and a diet of raw eggs and whiskey were the key to a great vocal performance.

9. Pig squeals were a key part of “The Exorcist“‘s sound design.

Much of Regan’s moaning and grunting were created by remixing pig squeals. When the demon is finally exorcised from her body, the sound you hear is a group of pigs being led to slaughter.

10. “The Exorcist“ was the first horror film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

The horror genre has never gotten much love from the Academy. Though there still seems to be a bias against scary movies during awards season, “The Exorcist” earned 10 Oscar nominations in 1974, including a Best Supporting Actress nod for Linda Blair, who was just 15 years old at the time. Unfortunately, the teenager’s nomination was met with much controversy as word about McCambridge’s contribution to the role spread.

11. Violet Beauregarde was considered for the role of Regan in “The Exorcist.“

Denise Nickerson, who most famously played Violet Beauregarde in Mel Stuart’s “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,” was in contention for the role of Regan. But then her parents got a hold of the script and, troubled by what they read, pulled her from the production’s shortlist of young actresses.

12. Linda Blair’s mother loved “The Exorcist“ script.

Ironically, Linda Blair’s agents never even considered her for the role, though they did send the producers more than two dozen other young actresses to consider. It was Blair’s mother who brought her to the attention of the studio’s casting department and Friedkin.

13. William Peter Blatty insisted that William Friedkin direct T“he Exorcist.“

Blatty made a smart decision when he sold the rights to his novel, but stayed on as one of The Exorcist‘s producers. That way, his opinion would have to matter. And while the studio had its own short list of directors to approach for the gig — Arthur Penn, Peter Bogdanovich, Mike Nichols, and Stanley Kubrick among them — Blatty only had eyes for Friedkin, believing that the film would benefit from a grittier style, similar to what Friedkin had done on “The French Connection.“ When the studio told Blatty that they had hired Mark Rydell for the film, Blatty stood his ground — and won!

14. Marlon Brando was the studio’s first choice for Father Merrin in “The Exorcist.“

It was Friedkin who vetoed this decision, believing that any movie starring Marlon Brando would immediately become a “Brando movie,” which would detract from the story at hand. The role eventually went to Max von Sydow.

15. Max Von Sydow was only 44 at the time of shooting “The Exorcist.“

It took many hours in the chair with makeup artist Dick Smith to age the actor the 30 or so years the role required. Some have even joked that there are scenes in which von Sydow is wearing more makeup than the demonic Regan. Von Sydow’s three-hour daily aging process was achieved with a mix of stipple and liquid latex.

16. Jason Miller was a last-miller — albeit intentional — substitution in “The Exorcist.“

There were a few big names being bandied about for the role of Father Karras, with Jack Nicholson in the early mix before Blatty settled on Stacy Keach. But then Friedkin happened to see a performance of “That Championship Season,” which was written by and starred Jason Miller. Friedkin knew they had found their man and, as he recounted in his 2013 memoir, “The Friedkin Connection” (part of which is excerpted in the 40^thedition Blu-ray), they purchased Keach out and in stepped Miller, in his feature acting debut.

17. “The Exorcist“‘s out famous image is based on a series of René Magritte paintings.

“The Exorcist”‘s most iconic image — the one that would eventually serve as its poster and movie box art—is of the moment that Father Merrin arrives at the MacNeil residence and, illuminated by a street lamp, looks up at the home. This image was inspired by René Magritte’s “Empire of Light“ paintings.

18. “‘The Exorcist’ steps” are still a popular tourist attraction.

At the end of M Street in Washington, D.C. is where you’ll find one of the film’s location landmarks: a set of stone stairs onto (and down) which Regan “throws” Father Karras from her window. Understandably, they have come to be known as “‘The Exorcist’ Steps.” Rumor has it that on the day of filming the scene in which a stuntman rolled down the steps, Georgetown students who lived nearby rented out their rooftops to the tune of $5 per person so that interested onlookers could get a better view.

19. Throwing anyone down “The Exorcist“ stairs from rehab’s window would be impossible.

Yes, even for a kid with demonic strength, because, in reality, Regan’s window was located about 40 feet from the top of the stairs. It was a bit of Hollywood magic-making — a.k.a. the addition of a wing built by the production’s set decorators — that made the trajectory of Karras’s untimely tumble seem possible.

20. Many of “The Exorcist“‘s cast and crew members believed the set was cursed.

Filming in the U.S. took place in both New York City and Washington, D.C. After a number of eerie incidents on the New York City set, including a studio fire that forced the team to rebuild the sets of the house interiors, Blatty and Friedkin regularly brought in a priest, Father King, to bless the cast, crew, and set when production moved to D.C. By the end of the film’s production, nine people associated with its making had passed away.

21. “The Exorcist“‘s Regan preferred Andersen’s pea soup.

By now it is well known that the substance Regan projectile vomits onto Father Karras in one of the film’s most famous — and disgusting — scenes is pea soup. But more specifically, it’s Andersen’s pea soup, mixed with a little oatmeal. Campbell’s soup was tried, but the crew apparently didn’t like the effect as much.

22. Jason Miller’s disgusted reaction to being covered in said pea soup in “The Exorcist“ is authentic.

Friedkin was known for sometimes using manipulative tactics in order to elicit the most authentic reactions possible from his actors. Miller was told that the substance would hit him in the chest only; whether that was a lie or the equipment misfired is debated. But Miller’s disgusted reaction is absolutely real. Unsurprisingly, the scene only required one take.

23. “The Exorcist“ made a few audience members nauseous, too.

So many, in fact, that some theaters began handing out “The Exorcist “barf bags with every ticket.

24. Several versions of “The Exorcist“ have been released.

If the only time you’ve ever seen “The Exorcist” was during its original theatrical release, watching it today might seem like you’re watching a different movie altogether. And in some cases, you might be. As is the case with a handful of other classic films, different cuts of “The Exorcist” have been released over the years. In 2000, audiences were treated to “The Exorcist: The Version You’ve Never Seen,” while “The Exorcist: Extended Director’s Cut” arrived in 2010.

25. “The Exorcist“ is a bona fide franchise.

Given the success of the original “The Exorcist,” it was only a matter of time before a sequel appeared. In this case, that happened four years after the original movie’s release with 1977’s “The Exorcist II: The Heretic,” which again featured Linda Blair and Max von Sydow. The film, which holds an abysmal 15 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, is regularly cited on Worst Movie Ever lists. In 1990, The Exorcist III, which is set 15 years after the events of the original film, was released to mixed reviews.

Two attempts at a prequel were also made: Paul Schrader directed “Dominion: Prequel To The Exorcist,” which was eventually scrapped and retooled by Renny Harlin as 2004’s “Exorcist: The Beginning.” But Schrader’s version ended up being released a year later anyway.

26. “The Exorcist“ is about to get a reboot.

In 2018, David Gordon Green and Danny McBride breathed new life into John Carpenter’s “Halloween” franchise with a direct sequel to the original film starring Jamie Lee Curtis (with two more films on the way). On July 26, 2021, it was announced that the duo — along with writers Scott Teems and Peter Sattler—would be teaming up with Blumhouse to create a new “The Exorcist“ trilogy for Peacock. The trilogy will follow the same pattern as the Halloween movies in that the initial film will be a direct sequel to Friedkin’s original movie and will bring back original star Ellen Burstyn. “Hamilton”‘s Leslie Odom Jr. will also star.

Netflix’s “My Unorthodox Life” urged ultra-Orthodox Jewish women to talk publicly about their lives

Over the past four years, Netflix has released several shows related to people leaving the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. These shows include “One of Us,” “Unorthodox” and most recently the reality TV show “My Unorthodox Life.”

Each time, many in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community have raised questions regarding their representation.

We are an anthropologist and a philosopher who have been analyzing how mainstream media depicts ultra-Orthodox Jews who leave their communities, known as “exiters” or “OTD” — which means “off the derech,” the Hebrew word for path. We also study how these individuals tell their stories through the media.

Our research shows that by sensationalizing stories of suffering within exiters’ experiences, notably those of women, mainstream media has created a shallow narrative about the exiting process.

But with “My Unorthodox Life,” ultra-Orthodox women responded to the image being projected in the show in an unpredecented way. Instead of just discussing it privately and informally, many women participated, for the first time, in a public social media campaign to tell their own stories.

Mass media’s picture of religious Jews

Mainstream TV typically tells exiters’ stories in a context of wider criticisms of ultra-Orthodoxy, which is presented as religious extremism or fundamentalism. While Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox worlds are extremely diverse in their practices of Jewish laws, known as Halakha, popular depictions do not encapsulate this plurality. Women are generally cast in the leading roles, with the shows drawing on a liberal feminist trope of exposing religious life as traumatizing and oppressive.

In “My Unorthodox Life,” this narrative is somewhat altered. While traumatic experiences are mentioned, the main story is about the successes of the protagonist, Julia Haart, once she exits ultra-Orthodoxy.

The journey Haart and her family take from religiosity to secularism over the show’s nine episodes is key to Haart’s professional and personal achievements. The secular and liberal world, characterized as a place of creation of a new set of values, is portrayed as a path for emancipation.

The transition or the “fight out of the community,” as expressed in the show, is presented as what has enabled the protagonist to build her religiously and sexually diverse and inclusive family. These values would have been inconsistent with a strict interpretation of Halakha.

This standpoint is also advanced to understand Haart’s success as a CEO and co-owner of a fashion company. After following tziniut — Jewish codes of modesty — for most of her life, she becomes highly involved in the creation of secular women’s clothing, from lingerie to footwear. This avenue out of Orthodox modesty norms, lived as a restrictive rule by Haart, is mainly shown by the creation and presentation of clothes uncovering the body. As Haart says in the show, “every little crop-top, every mini-skirt” is an “emblem of freedom.”

In contrast, several productions made outside of the North American mainstream media by women exiters such as Malky Goldman, Pearl Gluck, and Melissa Weisz have told more nuanced stories about their former community in short films and plays.

These productions, however, do not draw large audiences.

#MyOrthodoxLife

Since 2018, we have also been interviewing ultra-Orthodox women in Montreal and New York about their use of social media, in particular Instagram and TikTok. Because religious authority restricts and filters the access to the internet and social media, their presence on these platforms is still controversial within the community.

If they are active on social media, it is usually to promote their businesses. Sometimes they are engaging in criticism of ultra-Orthodoxy to transform it from within, on issues such as divorce, equal pay, birth control and modesty. The debates and discussions are often kept private and restricted to women.

While these women previously did not engage with the public, the release of “My Unorthodox Life,” with its focus on prosperity, drove them toward voicing their own successes.

Since mid-July 2021, when “My Unorthodox Life” premiered, women began posting under the hashtag #MyOrthodoxLife — a snub to Netflix’s #MyUnorthodoxLife. The goal was to reach a broad audience and oppose negative representations by highlighting their financial prosperity and fulfilling religious life.

Many of the posts feature stories of women who are professionally accomplished and educated, contradicting the Netflix show’s perspective that success and religiosity are an oxymoron. To do so, they published numerous online messages exposing their religious life of following Orthodox Judaism precepts while also highlighting their careers.

The primary objective of the movement is to reject the too simplistic representation provided by the reality TV shows and allow women to expose the richness of their lives through their own lens.

The activist Rifka Wein Harris reflected the opinions of many other Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox women when she stated that Haart’s story was deceptive and diminishes their success stories.

For many of the women, being religious and respecting Jewish laws are an essential part of their identity, guiding them through different aspects of their lives.

One post from the movement reads: “I am orthodox . . . and I am fulfilled. I am orthodox . . . and I achieved A Level results that ranked in the top 5% of the country. I am orthodox . . . and I studied my undergraduate degree in one of the best universities in the UK.”

In response to this social media campaign, Haart told The New York Times: “My issues and the ways that I was treated have nothing to do with Judaism. Judaism is about values and community and loving, kindness and beautiful things. I feel very proud to be a Jew.”

Her statement appears to be an attempt to distinguish Judaism and, implicitly, Orthodox Judaism from what she characterized as “fundamentalism” in the show. However, several women engaged in the movement are coming from the same community as the one Haart labeled as “fundamentalist.”

Hashtag #MyOrthodoxLife has permeated almost every social media platform. Photos, videos blog posts and articles circulate under the hashtag on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn and WhatsApp.

Shaking up religious and secular media

By revealing their faces and voices to the general public, these women contradict their invisibility in ultra-Orthodox media, implicitly defying religious authority. In upcoming publications, including a book to be published by the New York University Press, we document these women’s online activism and its disruption of religious norms.

Not all women disagree with Haart’s portrayal of ultra-Orthodoxy. Some seized on #MyOrthodoxLife as an opportunity to pursue and air internal criticism. Adina Sash, a prominent Jewish activist and influencer, supported the show as a depiction of Haart’s individual journey and the ultra-Orthodoxy’s need for change. The Orthodox podcaster Franciska Kosman used the show as a springboard to discuss the challenges women face in the Orthodox world, as well as how the faith’s presence in secular media could improve.

We argue that the #MyOrthodoxLife movement resonates with what anthropologist Ayala Fader has identified as “a crisis of authority” occurring within ultra-Orthodoxy: the increased defiance against religious authority.

But this criticism of religious authority has gone beyond those questioning the faith and exiters that scholars have documented. It has become more present among observant ultra-Orthodox Jews and other advocates of religious beliefs and practices.

“My Unorthodox Life” — love it or hate it — eventually surpassed its one story of a Jewish woman’s religious life. It led to unexpected responses creating an alternative space for public and nuanced discussions about Orthodoxy, ultra-Orthodoxy and gender.

Jessica Roda, Assistant Professor Jewish Civilization (Anthropologist/Ethnomusicologist), Georgetown University and Alexandra Stankovich, Ph.D. candidate and graduate research assistant, Université de Sherbrooke

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

As the culture war engulfs their schools, kids say adults aren’t listening to them at all

Face masks. Critical race theory. Bathrooms. Remote learning. Schools and schooling have become a flashpoint for America’s culture war — for adults. But in actually talking to adolescents across the country, I discovered that grown-up fears and fury are disconnected from students’ most pressing concerns.

Ariana Lemus, a 16-year-old from San Mateo, California, said she feels like a pawn: “Most of the problems that adults are talking about,” she said, “it’s a lot less important to us right now. They’re saying, ‘This is for the kids,’ but they’re not really listening to us kids.”

She and her sister Karina, an eighth-grader, learned remotely all year last year. Because school days were shorter and it was easier to get distracted, Karina said, “We didn’t get to learn as much as we could have.” Ariana agreed: “I struggled a lot with turning things in on time. It didn’t really feel like school.” But this potential learning lost doesn’t stress the sisters out.

“I have faith I’ll catch up eventually,” Ariana said, echoing Bradshaw Cuff Jr., a 14-year-old from Bowie, Maryland. As Bradshaw told me, “I don’t think I really learned anything new, because the stuff we were learning is stuff that I had already learned in the past grade. And I lost a good amount.” He feels for other kids that “are just falling behind and aren’t where they’re supposed to be,” and sees that as a real, significant problem, but said, “It’s not necessarily something I worry about, because I’m good at catching up very fast.”

Ariana and Karina Lemus (Photo provided by the family)Relationships matter most to students

Bradshaw is more concerned about how disconnected he started to feel.

“My whole personality changed from being up and wanting to do a lot of fun stuff to being like, ‘I’m just trying to chill.’ I was probably three times less happy.”

He prefers the old version of himself, and wants to feel motivated again.

“The students are a good reason that I want to go to school, that I enjoy going to school,” he said. “So when I didn’t really have social contact with all the students, I didn’t really feel like paying attention.” He kept in touch with close friends, but says he “kind of fell off” with everyone else. Making new friends over Zoom felt impossible.

Bradshaw Cuff Jr. (Photo provided by the family)Eighth grader Leah Schneyer-VanZile has felt a similar sense of isolation this past year and a half. Though she had the option of hybrid learning, she ended up staying home all last year. Now, the 13-year-old from Arlington, Massachusetts said, “I can’t wait to just be in school and have real classes and have a binder.”

The hardest part of remote learning was not being able to develop relationships, she said.

“I couldn’t tell you a single thing about a bunch of my classmates, because they didn’t have their cameras on and they never talked,” she added.

During class, Leah did connect with one kid in a breakout room. But they never could transition from friendly to friends. In ordinary years, Leah said she’d make that jump easily, saying to herself: “They’re really nice. I’m going to walk to my next class with them.” She often thinks about one day in sixth grade: “I was just walking out of the building to the bus, past my locker, just waving. ‘Bye, so-and-so’ and ‘Bye, so-and-so.’ And it was so nice. I’m not best friends with all of them, but I know them.”

Leah Schneyer-VanZile on her fist day of 8th grade (9921) (Photo credit Carolyn Schneyer)Both Bradshaw and Leah put a finger on a phenomenon researchers call “weak ties,” a happiness uptick humans experience from brief interactions with acquaintances. Close bonds are important, but these casual friendships are too, especially for adolescents who are developmentally primed to maximize social interaction and exploration.

“My friend who was in hybrid [learning] was talking to me about this guy who asked her for her Snapchat,” Leah said, “and she was like, ‘His friend came up to me and whispered, because he was really nervous.’ I didn’t get any of that. I want to have a crush again.”

Child after child told me this was what they missed most about going to school: relationships.

With teachers too. They think teachers generally worked hard and most said they believe their own teachers truly care. (If they’d heard about tensions between some parents and teachers’ unions, they didn’t let on). But it isn’t just other students they want more access to and attention from.

Sullivan Davis said he’ll now never take for granted cooperative learning opportunities and being able to raise his hand in class. As the Durham, North Carolina eighth grader told me, “It was mostly just ‘learn this, show that you learned it, move on’ type of assignments. It was so dull.” He felt anxious and frustrated when he tried his hardest and would still “mess up” because of software issues that teachers could have easily sorted out in person.

Aiden Cuff, Bradshaw’s younger brother who is starting sixth grade, said of distance learning: “You can never tell the teacher if you’re going through stuff.” He rated his happiness level during the pandemic at “zero” and said now that he’s in school he feels “super relief.”

Aiden Cuff (Photo provided by the family)But not everyone studied from home last year. Liv and Elin Hendrickson attended school in person in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. After a few months at home with “workbooks and online assignments” in the Spring of 2020, Liv noticed a big difference upon returning to campus last Fall. “It’s easier for me to concentrate if I’m around my friends,” she said, “and if I need help with something and the teacher’s busy helping someone else, I can be like, ‘Hey, can you help you with this one thing?'”

Where they live, remote learning is more of a doomsday scenario. They even have what Liv called “online days” at school akin to a fire drill. For a few hours, “we have to basically pretend like we’re online,” she said. If they have a question for their teacher, “We have to email them and message them online.”

Masks and gender-inclusive bathrooms don’t need to be a big deal

Masking is optional there, and seventh grader Liv said, “It’s a little weird to be only one out of a few people wearing masks in your classes. Some of our teachers do, but not all of them.”

This lack of uniformity impacted her sibling’s ability to focus. Elin, who’s in sixth grade, said, “You’re not really thinking about, ‘Oh, what is this assignment today?’ You’re just kind of thinking, ‘Do these people have COVID?’ It’s scary to change classes every 45 minutes, being unvaccinated and knowing there’s definitely a few people in here that have it. But I am still glad I am not remote.”

Further demonstrating that “back to normal” policies had their own challenges for kids, Elin had to drop out of extracurricular activities with too few safety precautions. “I always felt really down and sad when I had to miss things,” Elin said.

Liv and Elin Hendrickson (Photo credit Christine Hendrickson)Liv isn’t as anxious since she’s vaccinated now, but chimed in, “If wearing a mask for seven or eight hours a day might stop the pandemic, I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”

And that was these kids’ refrain: Masks are annoying, but they’re not terrible; and if they are (or even might be) effective, why waste energy arguing about it?

Nadia Fox, an eighth grader from Coppell, Texas said, “It doesn’t feel like a very big deal at all. It’s just something really small, and it’s meant to help a lot of other people.” Ariana agreed: “It’s a bit of a pain to wear it, but just going through the halls from class to class, it’s really crowded so I feel like it’s necessary.” Leah went to camp over the summer. She said, “By the first day, I’d forgotten that I was wearing a mask. I tried to drink water through it! It’s not that big of a deal. You get used to it.”

Even though Sullivan wears glasses and “gym class sucks with masks,” he said, “It’s fine,” and a small price to pay: “I have never been so excited to end summer break in my life,” he added, “My mom was surprised.”

Like other kids in schools with mask mandates, Bradshaw doesn’t understand the fuss: “It’s not going to harm you. Just wear your mask.”

The students I talked to who come from communities where masks aren’t the norm have classmates who’ve decided not to wear them, but they said even those kids don’t seem riled up about the issue.

The same general attitude applied to gender-inclusive bathrooms.

When I asked Leah whether her school has them, she paused: “It took me a second, because I haven’t been there in awhile.” But it did, the eighth grader soon remembered: “I’ll use the female restroom, because that’s what I feel is appropriate for me. You can go in whatever bathroom you want to. I don’t care.”

Sullivan Davis (Photo Credit Sara Lachenman)Sullivan said the same stance reigns at his school. “Students don’t care…. If you’re a boy and you feel like you want to be a girl, then no one’s going to stop you walking into the women’s bathroom.” When it comes to the gender-neutral bathroom at Bradshaw’s school, he said, “Everybody really respects it. They’re fine about it.”

Elin, from South Dakota, said their school doesn’t have gender-neutral bathrooms, but, “I would really like that, as a gender fluid person, because sometimes you feel different on different days — like a girl sometimes, like a boy sometimes, and sometimes like a non-binary identity — so I feel like it would be important to just feel a little bit safe.”

Leah was more forceful: “I think it’s ridiculous. Why do you care what bathroom another child uses? It has nothing to do with you. It’s not going to make your child uncomfortable, and if it does then your child needs to think about what it feels like to those other people having to go to a bathroom that doesn’t represent who they are.”

They want to talk about race and racism

“So when I first heard about critical race theory,” Sullivan said, treating the complex academic approach as simply “talking about racism” like most Americans these days, “I’m pretty sure it was in my social studies class. And we were online and as soon as the teacher told us what people were saying, every kid in the class was like, ‘What? Are you kidding me? Like, if a country can’t own up to its mistakes, it sucks.”

Here too, Leah had an opinion: “I think that race should absolutely 100% be discussed in schools. If you’re white like me and you grew up in a primarily white town, you’re kind of sheltered from having to think about race. And then all of a sudden they’re hit over the head with Black Lives Matter protests. And you just kind of realize that your experience isn’t like what other people have experienced. I was just shocked.”

Ariana focused on how engaging the topic is: “There’s usually a disconnect with the past. You don’t really think of people in the past as people. But this will help be like, ‘No, they really were people and those issues at the time, they were really real,’ and the more in-depth we learn about it, the more we just learn.”

“Especially in South Dakota,” Liv said, “because the history of South Dakota is a lot of Native American stuff, and there’s no other way that you’re going to learn about it, except maybe your parents telling you.”

Where Nadia lives in Texas, she says that “the mayor and the social studies teachers still want to continue teaching about the history behind it all and how it formed our society and how it’s still going on, but there’s a lot of laws being passed and some of the people in my area support them.” She said adults around her are “trying to tone it down or sugar coat it away from the kids, but it’s not really helping, especially whenever the kids are the ones who are trying to bring up the issues.”

Nadia Fox (Photo Credit Jonathan McInnis)That was another common thread in my conversations. These students feel capable of engaging in nuanced discussions and approaching fraught topics with care — even if today’s politicians don’t seem to think they can handle it.

“Kids should have a lot more say in what’s being taught to them,” Nadia said, “and whenever things are glossed over, I feel like the kids should be able to be like ‘Hey, wait, that’s not accurate at all. What about this?'”

Leah drew a parallel to health education. “My PE teacher showed us the video on why they originally created JUUL pods. The entire curriculum was, ‘Don’t JUUL. JUUL will kill you.’ And he showed us this video that said they originally created it to help people ease off smoking addictions. And I was like, ‘That’s actually really cool.’ It’s horrible that they appeal to teens now, but it’s really interesting that it started with this good purpose.”

When it comes to trusting adolescents to hold multiple truths at once and think critically, she said, “I wish they would do more of that.”

Grown-ups don’t seem to be talking about the issues that matter most

But the most important thing to these adolescents wasn’t what adults are talking about in the wake of distance learning; it’s what they’re not talking about. Relationships were their number one priority, but they raised a bunch more, some of which surprised me.

A concern that came up repeatedly? Making more free time and feeling less stressed about tests.

During the pandemic, Nadia said, “I was able to take more time to myself and figure myself out more.” She thinks kids her age need more agency in deciding how to fill their time. Bradshaw didn’t stress over homework as much during lockdown, “because I knew once I finished it, then I don’t have to really do anything else,” he said. And Leah liked being able to just sit and listen to music. When I started to say goodbye to Aiden, he stopped me. “You know what you should put on the news?” he said: “Kids need more video game time after school.”

They could use less pressure around tests as well. Leah said when it comes to Massachusetts state testing, “They really pushed that one. They basically tell you, ‘You need to be stressed.'” But other kids, like Nadia, felt test anxiety all year round. End-of-grade tests in Durham and even missing classwork and bad test grades ultimately didn’t count last year, Sullivan said, but because no one told him that up front, he felt pressured.

The older Ariana has gotten, the more worried her classmates have become around testing and college admissions.

“A lot of people are especially stressed out about the SATs, because it really can impact where you go to college, and if you’re going to get in at all.” She said teachers and parents haven’t directly told her it’s a high-stakes situation, “but they don’t really need to, because we already know how much it can matter.” It doesn’t really help when colleges make submitting SAT scores optional, she said, because they’ll assume “if you didn’t put the test on, it meant you didn’t do good,” but she’s felt some relief from the University of California system refusing to look at SAT scores altogether.

Teaching practical skills and making learning fun

“I think the biggest class that I did fall behind on was PE,” Karina said, “Now, we’re doing volleyball, and I find it really fun.” Milo Evans from Walnut Creek, California is also a big fan of PE, especially experiences like dodgeball and capture the flag.

One of the saddest parts of the pandemic, he said, was trying to hold band practice over the internet: “We couldn’t all play at the same time because the Zoom glitched out so everybody just played muted.” You might be tempted to write off Milo’s suggestions for enhancing extracurricular opportunities as a less mature take, but that would be a mistake. “The thing they should be mainly focusing on is how happy the kids are at the school,” Milo said, “because if the school is fun, then they will want to go to school.” He said the same thing goes for assignments: the more topics and tasks appeal to kids, the more they’ll learn.

Milo Evans (Photo credit Katie Evans)Leah wants adults to shift their concern to “the lack of teaching of how to do actual things that you need in life.” She said she can write a five-paragraph essay, “but I couldn’t tell you how to open a bank account. I have no idea how to put a lease on a house. I don’t know how to register for a credit card.” She’d like to see her school’s family and consumer science class enhanced and expanded.

Ariana agreed. “A lot of the complaints I hear, especially from my friends, is that we’re not going to use this stuff in real life and we’re wasting some of our time on subjects we’re not going to think about.” She wants to see more of a focus on current events and culturally relevant materials. Subjects like media literacy, she said, should get much more attention.

Prioritizing equity and mental health

Ariana also said if adults were talking about equity during the pandemic, they weren’t doing it loudly enough.

“If your house is a lot quieter and also your internet was better, you have a computer, it all really impacted how well you did or even just how easy you could focus.” (Milo and Aiden also raised the issues of Zoom failures and having to work with a sibling nearby.)

With in-person schooling, Ariana said, students come from different backgrounds and circumstances that make it easier for some to concentrate than others. But the physical space of the classroom is at least the same, removing one layer of inequity. And she says her friends have benefited from being able to access free lunch without filling out forms. Still, she wants to see more progress and more discussion of what progress would look like.

Nadia and Leah both agreed that oppression and biases aren’t topics that should be raised in a humanities class and then never brought up again. They want adults to get as fired up about educational equity as they have about mask wearing.

Multiple students mentioned the value of school-based relationships in preserving and improving mental health. They also largely appreciate their schools’ attempts at social-emotional learning, even if that’s a term some adults find off-putting. And they want more of it all. Leah said, “It definitely needs to be something that’s talked about and normalized more in school. You don’t need to be scared to tell somebody that you’re anxious or stressed. It shouldn’t be a stigma.”

Kids are tired of the fighting

One more thing was clear: Kids are over our drama.

Liv said, “In person, I haven’t really seen most people get into a really huge debate, but I’ve definitely seen it more on social media, because people are more bold behind the screen.” And she’s sick of it.

Elin chimed in, “The world isn’t big enough for everybody’s argument. If we can just try and get along, we’ll make school better for everyone.”

This frustration with their elders — not necessarily those around them, but with the arguments they’ve watched unfold on the news and in TikTok comment sections — surfaced repeatedly.

“The fighting with adults is … I don’t know,” Karina sighed, “It’s mostly pointless just because of the topics. They need to start working together, because we do have some really big issues right now. . . like climate change is a big one for me.”

From Texas, Nadia concurred. “I feel like they should maybe stop arguing with each other and see what the younger generation has to say about it, since they’re the ones who are being impacted the most.”

11 slow-cooker soup recipes to comfort, nourish and delight

Welcome to Set It & Forget It, a series about all the ways we rely on our Crock-Pots, Instant Pots, and stovetops for a healthy dose of comfort cooking.

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Deeply in need of a warm, comforting meal after a long day of work? Under the weather and seeking something spicy to clear out your sinuses? On the hunt for an easy dinner with a minimal ingredient list that tastes like you put in hours of work? These 11 slow-cooker soups check all those boxes — and then some.

1. Slow-Cooker Chicken Soup with Ginger and Fennel

To start, a chicken soup you can make from start to finish in the slow cooker. Lots of grated ginger and garlic perfume this aromatic broth, then razor-thinly sliced fennel and scallions join the party. For a little protein, stir in shredded cooked chicken — last night’s leftovers or grocery-store rotisserie work great. Pop the top on the slow cooker and you’re basically done. To serve, come back in a few hours to brighten the soup with a big hit of lemon juice, then ladle it into bowls over cooked soba noodles or brown rice. For a final flourish, drizzle on crunchy, spicy chili crisp. Presto: a weeknight soup that tastes like you’ve tinkered all afternoon long.

2. Vegan Slow-Cooker Tomatillo Stew

This stew’s body begins with blended jalapeños, tomatillos, and cilantro, which form a verdant paste. This gets poured into the Crock-Pot with usual stew suspects like oil, broth (vegetable!), onion, garlic, as well as two cans of beans. Though any beans will taste great in this recipe, here I use those you might find in a chili, specifically pinto and black. After the stew cooks down, slowly, a potato masher is used to crush most of the beans. This process releases starches, which will thicken the stew even further. You could serve this meal with any cooked grain like rice or quinoa, but I think crushed tortilla chips are the superior accompaniment.

3. Slow-Cooker Pasta e Fagioli

Pasta e fagioli is so named as it’s literally a soup of “pasta and beans.” As the soup made its way into Italian-American neighborhoods in the United States, fagioli (or fosule) morphed into “fazool.” This soup can be made entirely in a slow cooker, but for a bit more depth of flavor, sauté the onion, carrot, and garlic separately in a skillet. If you’re not planning to finish all the soup tonight, cook the pasta separately until just barely al dente, then ladle both pasta and soup it into bowls, storing leftovers separately. If you’ll finish all the soup tonight, stir the dry pasta directly into the slow cooker.

4. Slow-Cooker Chicken Parmesan Soup

If your go-to order at an Italian-American restaurant is chicken parm, this is the soup for you. Skip the pasta and serve this dish with crusty bread for sandwich vibes if that’s more your thing, but either way, top with plenty of parmesan.

5. Slow-Cooker Greek Lentil Soup from Eleni Vonissakou

Slow-cookers love a lentil, there’s no doubt about it. And ding-ding-ding: you probably already have everything you need for this ridiculously simple soup already in the kitchen (brown lentils, stock, onion, tomato paste, olive oil, and spices). Serve with any bread or cooked grain and a crumble of feta or big dollop of yogurt.

6. Slow-Cooker Mediterranean Chicken Thigh Stew

OK, we know this is a “stew” not a soup, but really, isn’t a stew just a thicker soup? Don’t overthink it. Boneless, skinless chicken thighs go shreddable and tender after a long cook in tomates, kalamata olives, and artichokes.

7. Martha Stewart’s Slow-Cooker Tom Kha Gai

Everyone’s favorite creamy, spicy-sour soup is a revelation after a few hours in the slow-cooker. If you’re not feeling like chicken, try using torn firm tofu instead.

8. Slow-Cooker Lentil and Root Veggie Soup

A hearty vegetarian soup fortified with lentils, celeriac, parsnips, and parmesan (cheese and rind!), this is one of those simple cold-weather lunches or dinners you’ll make once, then add to your weekly rotation.

9. Slow-Cooker Creamy Cauliflower and Sweet Potato Soup

This creamy, filling, 100% vegan soup is the perfect meal to throw together on a weekend morning. Pretend you’re in a cute cafe and serve it with lemony greens and thick slices of toast.

10. Slow-Cooker Shiitake-Noodle Hot and Sour Soup

This classic soup is a full meal in a bowl — mushrooms, cabbage, tofu, noodles all swimming in a tangy vegetable broth, just waiting to be slurped.

11. Slow-Cooker Moroccan-Spiced Lentil Soup

Cumin, coriander, turmeric, and cinnamon pack the punchiest of flavors into this lentil and cauliflower soup. The recipe calls for spinach, but any green you have on hand will do. Make it in advance and let the flavors meld, then brighten it up with fresh lemon juice and cilantro right before serving.