The psychological toll of wanting your kid to be “perfect”

Joliene Trujillo-Fuenning, who lives in Denver, Colorado with her two kids, ages 3 and 22 months, has some pretty clear perfectionist tendencies. If she sends an email with a typo in it, she says, “It will drive me nuts for a solid week or two.” After her husband cleans the bathroom, she has to fight the urge to criticize. (Sometimes she’ll just clean it again.) And when it comes to her 3-year-old’s education, Trujillo-Fuenning says, “I have been very much struggling with the fact that she doesn’t want to write letters,” and finds herself thinking, “You are supposed to be at this point by three and a half or four, and if you don’t do it, you’re never going to.”

What Trujillo-Fuenning struggles with is something called other-oriented perfectionism. (You may have seen a shorter piece I wrote about the phenomenon for the Atlantic back in July.) Other-oriented perfectionism bears similarity to self-oriented perfectionism, when a person puts tremendous pressure on themselves to be perfect and then self-flagellates when they can’t be. It’s also a little bit like socially prescribed perfectionism, where one internalizes the need to be perfect thanks to perceived pressure from others.o

The big difference is that with other-oriented perfectionism, unrealistic expectations are directed at, well, others.

When a parent sets exacting standards for their child and assumes a critical attitude, it can change how they parent (to their child’s detriment) and leave the parent bitter, resentful, and sometimes even wishing they’d never had children. That’s particularly problematic in light of new research suggesting that both parental expectations and parental criticism have been on the rise. The impulse behind child-oriented perfectionism comes mostly from early life experiences and societal forces outside individuals’ control, but understanding — and interventions — can help thwart it, improving the wellbeing of both parent and child.

What does other-oriented perfectionism look like?

Natalie Dattilo, Ph.D., a psychologist at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, has a patient roster made up mostly of young doctors, some of whom are the targets of other-oriented perfectionists who are “looking around and wondering why everybody [they] work with is incompetent.” For a supervisor like that, she said, “There is going to be an over-reliance on control, especially wanting to control how people do things.”

The other-oriented perfectionist seems self-assured. They always know the best way to do things and everything would be splendid if only others weren’t so flawed.

“On the surface it looks like grandiosity,” said Thomas Curran, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology at London School of Economics and Political Science, “but at root, it’s really a profound insecurity about place in the world and whether you’re worth something.” The other-oriented perfectionist’s judgment, he said, is actually just “my way of projecting the things that I dislike in myself onto other people.”

People become other-oriented perfectionists in a variety of ways discussed in the book “Perfectionism: A Relational Approach to Conceptualization, Assessment, and Treatment.” Oftentimes a cocktail of other types of perfectionism is to blame. Trujillo-Fuenning worries about her daughter’s progress because she wants the best for her, but there’s something more than that. “I had a friend who pointed out that her language, her enunciation, her knowledge is pretty advanced for her age,” she explained, “And immediately, I had this sense of like, ‘Ha!’ It had nothing to do with me! Yet you still have a part of your brain that’s like, ‘She speaks well. That means I did my job right. If she reads early, I did my job right.'” The pressure Trujillo-Fuenning feels to be perfect requires being — and being perceived as — a perfect parent. “How you’re doing as a parent is a reflection of who you are,” she said, “There’s no separation there in my head.”

In a paper published in 2020, Konrad Piotrowski, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology at SWPS University in Poland, reported that both mothers and fathers there “tend to accept to a greater extent the mistakes and ‘imperfection’ of their children than those of their partner.” But sometimes they don’t. What seems to be the key determinant is which relationship—the romantic one or the parental one—is more strongly associated with the parent’s self-esteem. Those who hang their identity on their parental role, like Trujillo-Fuenning, are more likely to experience child-oriented perfectionism than those who do not, Piotrowski theorized.

John Lockner’s experience supports that idea. He was a stay-at-home dad for years and told me, “I kind of still am,” since he works part-time and spends the rest of it with his two teenage sons. “It’s definitely a struggle not to be on them all the time,” he said, but he knows that’s more about him than them. “I never wanted to be a manager, because I know I would expect my employees to do their best, and it would be very hard for me when they don’t,” he told me. As one of just a handful of dads involved at their old school, Lockner said, “I felt this pressure to be better, and because of that my kids needed to be better.” With up-to-the-minute access to their assignments and grades through an online portal, he’d issue reminders on the drive to school: “You have to be sure to check on that and make sure it was turned in” or “You’re going to ask for that extra credit, right?” And he’d grill them on test results as soon as they got into the car at pickup.

But now, he said, “I’m kind of working on myself, to let some of that go.”

The impact of other-oriented perfectionism on children

That’s likely a good thing for his kids. Curran, the British perfectionism researcher, looked at a questionnaire that’s been given to cohorts of young people for decades. He and his team found that current college students perceive that their parents were more expectant than past generations — which is problematic, because studies (old and new) tie a caregiver having performance-oriented goals to controlling, critical parenting.

Though the research is murky, because different forms of perfectionism both overlap and function in distinct ways, children of parents who are perfectionists likely have higher odds of developing psychological distress, including anxiety and depression. Even when the impact falls short of clinical classification, children whose parents expect them to be perfect often grow up in homes characterized by conflict and tension. “It’s going to be a pressure cooker,” Curran told me.

The end result is often another generation of perfectionists. A 2017 study of 159 father-daughter dyads found a tie between “controlling fathers who demand perfection” and perfectionist daughters. And Curran’s own research has found that as parents’ expectations and criticism have increased, so too have rates of adolescent perfectionism.

We make jokes about perfectionism. (Did you hear the one about the perfectionist who walked into a bar? Apparently, it wasn’t set high enough.) But it’s a truly stressful way to live, Dr. Dattilo said, “Always striving to prove that you are capable, to prove that you are worthy, prove that you are successful based on other people’s evaluations.”

It should come as no surprise then, that there are, in Curran’s words, “huge, uncharacteristically strong correlations” between perfectionism and psychological distress, including anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and anorexia.

“The data’s never that clean,” he told me.

Gayani DeSilva knows what it feels like to be one of those data points. “My parents really did put a lot of pressure on me as a kid to be perfect,” recalled the child and adolescent psychiatrist who practices in Southern California. “I had to have straight As, couldn’t have an A-minus.”

When she carried a D in Calculus at one point, “I was so afraid that I actually thought that my parents were going to kill me.” Now looking back with a therapist’s eye, she said, “I couldn’t imagine them actually physically harming me, I just knew that I was gonna die.”

She internalized their exacting standards, “There was just no room for anything other than what they expected.” And when she couldn’t meet them, she said, “I faced all this guilt, like, ‘Why couldn’t I do it?'”

Josh McKivigan, a behavioral health therapist based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, sees an impact at both ends of the economic spectrum. For kids of highly educated, well-off parents, he said, “You’d see them well put together, amazing grades, but behind the scenes, they’re barely holding it together. The only type of school they feel is acceptable is an Ivy League. They say things like, ‘I couldn’t imagine going to UCLA.'”

McKivigan also works with a refugee population. With these kids, he sees pressure to make something of a parent’s dangerous immigration journey. They end up saying, “I gotta make this right. I can’t let them down,” McKivigan told me.

But some kids don’t develop perfectionism of their own, instead responding to a parent’s pressure by rejecting their goals. After all, if someone is impossible to please, why bother trying?

Nicole Coomber, Ph.D., an assistant dean at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, said research on motivation explains why.

“Autonomy is an important piece of this where you have to actually buy into whatever the goal is,” she notes. Requiring that a child practice piano for hours each day when they’d rather be playing soccer “can really backfire,” she added. Kids can end up feeling like their parent’s project or product — and push back by quitting. No matter how much bravado accompanies that move, there’s often also a sense of having let themselves and their parents down.

DeSilva failed her first year of medical school, she said, “because I just didn’t know how to ask for help.” After a car accident, she quit residency and then spent two years in therapy: “Once I was able to admit, ‘I’m not perfect,’ I was successful at pretty much everything I wanted to do, and I didn’t have to be anxious about it. I knew I could do it, whereas before, when I had to be perfect, I was really insecure.”

After she worked through her perfectionism, she said, “I was trying for my own standard, my own goals, my own desires, instead of somebody else’s standard for me.”

Other-oriented perfectionism is bad for parents too, but they can change

Child-oriented perfectionist tendencies aren’t just bad for kids. Trujillo-Fuenning started to feel burned out by her high standards in the parenting realm. The cumulative effect of a thousand little maximizations, like “trying to make sure they were eating the right things every meal,” became overwhelming and depleting. “To be honest, that’s part of why I went back to work,” she told me.

In his 2020 study, Piotrowski found that parents who target their children with other-oriented perfectionism tend to display higher levels of stress, dissatisfaction with parenthood, and feeling so burdened by the parental role that they regret parenthood entirely. He explained, “For mothers characterized by increased other-oriented perfectionism, family life is probably associated with many frustrations and stress, hence the focus on alternative visions of themselves that seem to be better than [being] a parent.”

When she starts trying to work on literacy again, Trujillo-Fuenning said, “I have to pull back and remind myself, if she’s fighting you, just let it go.” The same thing goes for micromanaging her kids’ appearance. “I’m catching my own insecurities of like, ‘You don’t look well put together. People are going to look at you and think I’m not taking care of you.'” But to avoid acting on those impulses requires “a constant mental check,” she told me.

Every now and then Lockner’s wife would say, “You’re being too hard on them. You are expecting too much.” But that doesn’t seem to be what made him change. His sons are at an all-boys school now, and, Lockner said, “Being around other groups of dads made a difference. Listening to how they act, and how their kids are, made me think, ‘Maybe I can ease up a little. My kids really are pretty good.'”

This sort of shift is what Curran sees happening in society as a whole—only in reverse.

Other-oriented perfectionist parents aren’t the only ones ratcheting up expectations and pressure. Some parents don’t want to push, Curran said, “but they feel like they have to in this world where elite college is harder to access, where you basically have an economy where the middle class is downwardly mobile with increasing costs of living and stagnated income, and you’ve got chronic and increasing inequality.”

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And the pressure can be even more intense for parents like Eric L. Heard, author of “Reflections of an Anxious African American Dad.” He described feeling “the need for immediate feedback” from his son’s teachers: “I always held a fear that I would not address some problem and he would head down a well-worn road of destruction” for Black men, he wrote. “My mind was haunted by the crippling thought of how I would be judged …. I would wear a permanent brand … a large white D for being a deadbeat dad who couldn’t save his son.”

If you’re a parent ruminating on the odds stacked against your child, it is rational to drive them to work harder, achieve more, and be better. Other parents react the same way, the result of which is a frenzied, fearful “rug rat race.”

Once that starts to kick in, Curran said, “it’s really hard to stop, at a societal level. It creates an echo chamber where everybody’s engaging in unhealthy behaviors and no one wins.”

He doesn’t just mean that we all lose when we succumb to perfectionism. It also just plain doesn’t work.

“Everybody’s engaging in this frantic upward comparison, and no one gains an advantage,” he said. “We just move the average of what’s expected further and further. It’s looking bad.”

But individuals can push back against a trend of overwhelmed young people and parents who, like the old Lockner, feel no choice but to be “the bad guy.” Now that he’s backed off, he said, “It’s easier on me. It’s easier on them.” They do more for themselves, and “they seem more willing to do stuff if I’m not on them all the time.” Truth be told, he likes himself more now.

Therapists can help their clients get there. Dr. Dattilo would tell an other-oriented perfectionist they need to believe it when someone says, “I’m doing the best I can.” Parents can interrogate their perfectionism in psychotherapy: Why is having a perfect child so important to me? Where did this need come from? And cognitive-behavioral therapists push people to fact-check their anxiety: What level of pressure is really necessary to prepare your child to live a good life? Is parental pressure truly the most effective way to forestall your fears? What will happen if you just back off?

When it came to parenting her son, DeSilva, the perfectionist-turned-psychiatrist, said she made a conscious decision. “I was going to raise him to have his own ideas and his own set of standards and really, for me to learn about and help him develop his strengths. And also, to really be comfortable with his weaknesses and vulnerabilities.” That puts her at odds with her own parents. When it comes to her son’s homework, they think, “It’s your job. You have to make sure his homework is done,” she said. His grandparents even tell her to fix it for him “so it’s correct.” Instead, she explained to her son the consequences of not doing homework, or not doing it well, and let him decide. “He didn’t like it that his teacher was upset with him. So the next time he did his homework, he did it as best he could.”

Tying it all together

Yet individual parents can’t reverse course alone. Putting aside economic inequality for a minute, Curran said, “I think if the pressures of things like standardized testing — for young people to perform perfectly in school at such a young age — could be recalibrated downwards” it would take pressure off parents too. He called online grade portals “even scarier.”

If kids were just allowed to learn, to be, without all the tracking, assessing, and ranking, maybe more parents would feel like they can afford to break — and encourage their kids to break — the link between one’s accomplishments and one’s worth.

As Curran talked, I realized that much of the ground we’ve covered in my Are We There Yet? column is more related than I’d thought. Pressure on parents, including around the “one right way” to parent, produces intensive parenting and lack of autonomy for kids, and it also contributes to parents’ perfectionism and even abusive behavior, all of which lead to faltering mental health in adolescents, often with their own perfectionism as the mechanism. It’s a perfect storm for stressed out, sexless parents who worry they don’t measure up raising stressed out, helpless kids who worry they don’t measure up. To borrow Curran’s words, “It’s all interconnected.”

It’s not just COVID: recall candidates represent markedly different choices on health care

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Gov. Gavin Newsom’s covid-19 rules have been a lightning rod in California’s recall election.

But there’s a lot more at stake for Californians’ health care than mask and vaccine mandates.

Newsom, a first-term Democrat, argues that their fundamental ability to get health insurance and medical treatments is on the line.

Republicans are seeking to “take away health care access for those who need it,” according to his statement in the voter guide sent to Californians ahead of Tuesday’s recall election.

Exactly where all the leading Republican recall candidates stand on health care is unclear. Other than vowing to undo state worker vaccine mandates and mask requirements in schools, none have released comprehensive health care agendas. Nor has Kevin Paffrath, the best-known Democrat in the race, who wants to keep existing vaccine and mask mandates.

Outside of his pandemic measures, Newsom has, in conjunction with the legislature, funded state subsidies to help low- and middle-income Californians buy health insurance; imposed a state tax penalty on uninsured people; and extended eligibility for Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program for low-income people, to undocumented immigrants ages 19 to 26. This year, he signed legislation to further expand eligibility to unauthorized immigrants ages 50 and up. Republicans opposed all those initiatives.

Voters, who have been mailed ballots, have two choices to make: First, should Newsom be removed? Second, who among the 46 replacement candidates should replace him? A Public Policy Institute of California poll released Sept. 1 showed that 58% of likely voters want to keep Newsom in office.

To see where the leading recall candidates stand on health care, KHN combed through their speeches and writings, and scoured media coverage. Republicans John Cox and Kevin Kiley and Democrat Paffrath also consented to interviews. Republicans Larry Elder and Kevin Faulconer did not respond to repeated requests for interviews.

Larry Elder

Elder, 69, a conservative talk radio host, is far ahead of other candidates in polls. Elder believes health care is a “commodity,” not a right, and wants government out of health insurance.

He opposes Obamacare — even some of the most popular provisions of the 2010 law embraced by other Republicans, such as allowing children to stay on their parents’ health insurance until age 26 and guaranteeing coverage for people with preexisting medical conditions.

“Forcing an insurance company to cover people with pre-existing conditions completely destroys the concept of insurance,” Elder wrote in a 2017 opinion piece on his website.

In a 2010 opinion piece on creators.com, he wrote that he would end Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for low-income people, and phase out Medicare, the federal insurance program for older Americans and some people with disabilities. (As governor, he would not have the authority to do either.)

Instead, he wants people to rely primarily on high-deductible health plans and pay their hefty out-of-pocket costs with money they have saved in tax-free accounts.

Elder told CalMatters he doesn’t think taxpayers should spend money on “health care for illegal aliens” but also recently told CNN he has no plans to limit their eligibility for Medi-Cal, saying it’s “not even close to anything on my agenda.”

Elder calls himself “pro-life” but has said he doesn’t foresee abortion access changing in California. Still, anti-abortion activist Lila Rose tweeted that Elder had promised her he would cut abortion funding and veto legislation that made abortion more accessible.

Kevin Faulconer

In campaign stops and debates, the mayor of San Diego from 2014 to 2020 has cast himself as a moderate, experienced leader who worked with Democrats to clear the city’s streets and provide shelters for homeless people.

Faulconer, 54, often refers to San Diego’s success at decreasing homelessness as one of his greatest achievements in office. But that success came only after a 2017 hepatitis A outbreak killed 20 people and sickened nearly 600 others, most of whom were homeless. Faulconer and the city council were criticized for not intervening sooner to open more restrooms and hand-washing stations, despite warnings from health officials.

The city’s 12% reduction in the number of people sleeping on the streets from 2019 to 2020 resulted largely from efforts to curb the spread of covid by placing people in shelters.

A fiscal conservative, Faulconer is moderate on health care. He supports abortion rights and two years ago vowed not to restrict them.

If elected governor, Faulconer said, he would push to expand California’s paid parental leave program to 12 weeks at full pay. Currently, new parents get up to 70% of their income for up to eight weeks.

John Cox

Cox, 66, has centered his campaign — as he did his unsuccessful 2018 gubernatorial bid against Newsom — on his business credentials. The lawyer and accountant thinks the solution to California’s health care troubles lies in the free market, for example by letting patients know the cost of care ahead of time so they can shop for a better deal.

“I understand that health care is expensive, and families can’t afford it very well,” Cox said in an interview with KHN. But that’s because “there’s not enough price discrimination, not enough consumer orientation, not enough consumer choice.”

Health care is expensive partly because doctors and hospitals can charge whatever they want, and patients overutilize care because they don’t have to pay the full price, he said.

He favors health savings accounts with some government assistance for low-income people, which he said would make consumers more discriminating and keep health care prices in check. But he doesn’t want to take profit completely out of health care.

“I certainly want companies to make money from providing health care,” Cox said. “Because I think that’s what gives them an incentive to innovate.”

Kevin Kiley

Kiley, 36, a state Assembly member representing a suburban Sacramento district, often speaks out against government interference in people’s lives. The former teacher and attorney believes government rules about insurance coverage, doctor-patient relationships and independent contracting have contributed to higher health costs.

Like Elder and Cox, he wants more transparency and consumer choice in health care.

“I’m not sure it’s necessary to be continually specifying what every single plan needs to entail,” Kiley said in an interview with KHN. “I don’t know that legislators are always in the best position to be weighing in.”

Rather than provide health benefits to undocumented immigrants, Kiley said, lawmakers should scrutinize Medi-Cal, which covers about one-third of Californians but is failing to provide basic preventive care, including childhood vaccines, to some of its neediest patients.

Kiley downplayed the coverage gains made under Obamacare that have reduced the state’s uninsured rate from about 17% in 2013 to about 7%, saying a reduction was inevitable because of state and federal requirements to get health insurance or be penalized.

He has authored legislation, which did not pass, to increase funding for K-12 student mental health, which he says has only become more urgent in the pandemic.

Kevin Paffrath

Paffrath, 29, made his fortune giving financial advice on YouTube and renovating houses in Southern California.

If elected, Paffrath said, he would create 80 emergency facilities across the state to connect homeless people with doctors and substance use and mental health treatment. And he would require schools to offer better mental health education.

He also wants to create vocational programs for interested students ages 16 and up. With better job training and higher salaries, Medi-Cal rolls would naturally shrink, he argues.

“It’s not Californians’ fault that one-third of Californians are on Medi-Cal,” Paffrath said in an interview with KHN. “It’s our schools’.”

Paffrath supports the Affordable Care Act and said he is willing to consider questions such as whether California should adopt a single-payer health system or manufacture generic prescription drugs.

Paffrath said he’s most interested in cutting health insurance red tape, which creates bureaucratic hurdles for patients, makes doctors spend more time on paperwork than patient care, and discourages new providers from entering the field.

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

“Impeachment” pokes at the enduring myth of conservative feminism through Paula Jones’ mentor

The story of Monica Lewinsky, currently unfolding in dramatized fashion on FX’s “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” is the stuff of legend in American pop culture. But less known is the story of Paula Jones, an Arkansas woman who accused Bill Clinton (portrayed by Clive Owen) of sexual harassment in the 1990s, and whose story is being portrayed parallel to Beanie Feldstein’s Lewinsky on “Impeachment.”

We meet Paula Jones (Annaleigh Ashford) as a doe-eyed, former Arkansas state employee, whose experience being pursued by Clinton in his hotel room is making the rounds in political media. Determined to clear her name and assert that the president made unwanted and unreciprocated sexual advances on her, Paula soon aligns herself with a formidable legal team, and gains support from Susan Carpenter-McMillan (Judith Light), a savvy, conservative firebrand and president of the Women’s Coalition.

In real life, Carpenter-McMillan became Jones’ chief counselor and spokeswoman by 1997. A notorious anti-abortion activist, her prolific media appearances were described by Slate in 1997 as “manic, sarcastic, [and] vitriolic,” and “the summer’s best entertainment.”

In the second episode of “Impeachment,” Carpenter-McMillan introduces herself to Jones’ legal team as an advocate for what she calls “conservative feminism.” Of course, she puts “conservative” before “feminism” because the two ideologies are inherently at odds with each other, no matter how many Carly Fiorinas, Ivanka Trumps, Sarah Palins or Kellyanne Conways swear they’re aligned.

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It’s difficult to fully blame conservative women for the recurring nuisance of the self-titled conservative feminist movement. After all, liberal feminism has long opened the door for it by frequently celebrating powerful women in politics and corporations with minimal scrutiny applied to these women’s policy stances or their treatment of other women and marginalized people.

When feminism is reduced to hollow, capitalistic acts like buying an expensive pair of high heels or becoming a She-E-O, conservative anti-abortion women can easily co-opt this movement, assigning the “feminist” label to anything — and I mean anything — women do. Had feminism concretely been attached to tangible acts and values that empower all women and marginalized people, rather than a select minority of the most privileged among them, Carpenter-McMillan would have had little to cling onto. The enduring myth of “conservative feminism” would subsist, and white, Republican lady-grifters would have to find a new schtick.

On “Impeachment,” Carpenter-McMillan declares she’s there to protect Paula’s interests, despite minutes later later telling a sales lady at Nordstrom that Paula is “dumb as a rock.” Beneath Carpenter-McMillan’s claimed support for Paula and sexual harassment victims, she regards them as an opportunity to bring down a president whose stances on reproductive rights are decisively beneficial to women and pregnant people.

One scene highlights Carpenter-McMillan’s clear anti-abortion stance. Although she wants Paula to make TV appearances about her case, her lawyers try to refuse, asserting that the Supreme Court will rule on it.

“The same Supreme Court that made it legal to murder children?” Carpenter-McMillan responds. Paula is stunned, taking the anti-abortion activist literally, which brings Carpenter-McMillan to clarify that she means “unborn children” — or, you know, fetuses and embryos.

Also, in the Nordstrom changing room, when Paula expresses discomfort with the chic, “city” girl pantsuit Carpenter-McMillan wants her to wear.

“It’s all dress-up, Paula. People get confused when I tell them I’m a conservative feminist,” she says. You don’t have to be a lesbian or an abortionist to believe a woman deserves equal respect to a man.”

Much emphasis has been made in “Impeachment” on Carpenter-McMillan’s anti-abortion aspirations, which makes sense if she’s a “conservative feminist” in the camp of more recent Republican women and female Trump advisers. Carly Fiorina, a 2016 presidential candidate and another self-proclaimed conservative feminist, drew widespread support among Republicans when she spread the bizarre lie that she’d seen video footage of a Planned Parenthood worker “harvesting” an aborted fetus’ brain. Last year, Ivanka Trump declared she is “unapologetically pro-life,” and campaigned for a slew of rabidly anti-abortion women politicians, including Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, who signed a near-total abortion ban in her state.

Just last week, Sarah Palin took to Fox News to declare herself a “real feminist,” and accost Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for “milking the whole female thing.” Ocasio-Cortez had refuted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s claim that he would end rape so that women wouldn’t have to give birth to their rapists’ babies, in defense of his state’s near-total abortion ban. Despite Ms. Sarah “real feminist” Palin’s support for Abbott, Texas’ ban is especially harmful to survivors and victims, whose abusive exes could use it as grounds to stalk and report them for having abortions.

So-called “feminists” who hold anti-abortion views have long existed, insisting women “deserve better” than abortion without actually articulating what that entails. Truthfully, even if America miraculously addressed all of the material conditions that make pregnancy and motherhood so punishing, and enacted generous paid family leave and universal child care, the need for abortion care wouldn’t magically disappear. No matter how many pantsuit-clad, smiling, white Republican women try to spin it differently, without the right to abortion, women and pregnant people are reduced to incubators who can be forced by the government to carry pregnancies and birth children without their consent.

One could devote hours to rattling off the infinite hypocrisies of pro-life feminists, including often opposing insurance coverage of birth control. But doing so is frankly pointless — their activism isn’t about logic or cogency, but pink-washing violent patriarchal oppression. These “feminists” often refer to abortion as “abuse” inficted upon hapless pregnant women by evil, scary abortion providers, or “abortionists,” all while not even marginally caring about actual rape and abuse victims. Conservative “feminists” either want victims to carry their rapists’ babies, or somehow prove to doctors and law enforcement that they were raped and thus worthy of health care.

In 2018 at the height of the #MeToo movement, Republican and Democratic women Senators unanimously backed an effort to crack down on Congressional sexual harassment. It seemed like a unifying, special moment, but shouldn’t have. On the surface, liberal and conservative so-called feminists alike purport to care about sexual harassment. But when feminism is a branding moniker rather than an ideology for gender justice, its stated values are seldom ever enforced. Instead, political opportunists of all genders, and across the ideological spectrum, selectively target and hold accountable some alleged abusers but not others, pending their politics.

This, of course, brings us back to Carpenter-McMillan. Perhaps she was right to take action against Bill Clinton, but she was motivated by her aspirations to end legal abortion, not help sexual harassment victims. Her unflinching opportunism on “Impeachment” is emblematic of conservative “feminism” as a whole. Beneath layers of shallow empowerment rhetoric, conservative “feminism” is really just conservatism — specifically, a conservatism that implores women to happily give up their rights, rather than have them seized.

“Impeachment: American Crime Story” airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on FX.

Empty words: How Bush and Giuliani failed to capture the moment on 9/11

Joe Biden delivered his “Sept. 11 speech” two days before the actual anniversary of 9/11.

It was Sept. 9, 2021, when Biden uttered the words that will almost certainly define his presidency. Speaking to a nation crippled by COVID-19, he blamed a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” for both loss of life and the loss of our way of life, then detailed his plans for protecting America from this threat. One is reminded of George W. Bush, who as president during the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks likewise needed to prepare America for tough policy choices. Bush had gone into hiding on the day of the attacks themselves, only poking his head out long enough to deliver a stilted, utterly forgettable national address. By Sept. 14, however, he was visiting Ground Zero with New York firefighters, speaking through a bullhorn. When one person shouted that he couldn’t hear the president, Bush memorably replied, “I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you!”

He closed with a vow: “The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”

There is a lesson in this story, not just for Joe Biden, but for all aspiring leaders: When faced with a crisis, you must try to meet it with eloquence and effectiveness. Without the former, your best efforts will be forgotten, dragged into obscurity by the shackles of mediocre verbiage. Without the latter, your words may take on meanings you never intended, redounding to your shame instead of your credit.

In Bush’s case, his promise to the firefighter was shameful for two reasons. At a moment when the United States needed soaring oratory, Bush was an inarticulate man mouthing the most anodyne platitudes. Neither of his planned addresses — one on the night of the attacks, the other nine days later — contained any especially memorable turns of phrase or spontaneous displays of authentic emotion. It’s telling that Bush’s rhetorical high point on September 11th came when he was thinking quickly and allowed to display some intuitive wit. If he had presided over the killing of Osama bin Laden, and if the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had been a success rather than an unmitigated disaster, the clip of that exchange would serve as a mic drop, defining his legacy.

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But it was Barack Obama who got bin Laden, and today the Taliban are back in power in Afghanistan. And we see how one man’s eloquence can be retroactively turned against him.

Although Bush was president during the 9/11 attacks, he was not the only national leader. Hard as it may be to imagine today, Rudy Giuliani emerged as a unifying and beloved icon during the 9/11 era, striking many people as the president Bush failed to be, crafting an image of strength and resilience. Whatever the subsequent faults of “America’s Mayor,” he understood the importance of appearing to be on site at all times, dirtying his hands figuratively and literally as he helped his city rebuild.

He also came up with the phraseology that wound up defining the so-called “War on Terror,” creating an absurd narrative that Republicans would dutifully follow for the remainder of the 2000s. That happened during Giuliani’s address to the UN three weeks after the attacks. His words are worth quoting at length:

Our freedom threatens them, because they know if our ideas of freedom gain a foothold among their people, it will destroy their power. So they strike out against us to keep those ideas from reaching their people.

The best long-term deterrent and approach to terrorism, obviously, is the spread of the principles of freedom and democracy and the rule of law and respect for human life. The more that spreads around the globe, the safer we will all be. These are very, very powerful ideas. And once they gain a foothold, they cannot be stopped.

Giuliani was not the first Republican to characterize the Sept. 11 attacks this way, but he used the most artful prose to do it, and his particular framing was the one that stuck. It was also utter nonsense; superhero movies add more nuance to understanding their villains’ motives than Giuliani and company did in analyzing Sept. 11. There is no defending terrorism, by Islamist fanatics or anyone else, but it’s reductive and childish to claim that those who commit such acts are simply motivated by a hatred of freedom and a fear of democracy. America has tried to spread its version of those things around the world for decades, with a notable lack of success.

Giuliani’s failure wasn’t the quality of his rhetoric but the fact that he simply didn’t have a valid point. He might have benefited from looking at American presidents who led successfully during a crisis because they did have a point.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, America was in the throes of the Great Depression, the worst economic setback in our history. During his first inaugural address, he used a brilliantly crafted phrase to capture his approach to governing: “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” While those words are engraved in historical memory, the ones that immediately follow are just as important: Roosevelt singled out the “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” During his presidency, Roosevelt frequently rose above ideological concerns and experimenting with a wide range of policies that might alleviate economic suffering. He believed Americans needed to keep an open mind, and used his oratorical gifts to help them do that. Everyone came to associate Roosevelt’s political brand with a fearless and even daring approach to governance, including his political opponents.

A similar observation can be made about Roosevelt’s famous speech given the day after the Pearl Harbor attacks in 1941, probably the closest parallel to 9/11 in our history. Again, it is helpful to recall not just his most memorable line (italicized below), but the words that immediately followed it:

Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the U.S. had to that point carefully avoided direct military conflict with any of the combatant nations in World War II. Roosevelt’s “date which will live in infamy” conveyed, with perfect gravity, the emotional import of the betrayal that had suddenly thrust America from peace into war. Roosevelt knew that millions of Americans wanted the U.S. to stay out of the war, and he wished to convey respect for their views while making clear that the time for isolation had passed. These words helped frame the narrative in which America entered World War II not as a predatory superpower, but as a peaceful bystander dragged in from the sidelines by an act of unprovoked aggression.

Moving closer to the present, we could consider the speech delivered by Lyndon Johnson shortly after he became president, which of course happened when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963. The nation was traumatized by the first presidential assassination in more than 60 years, and millions of Americans had viewed Kennedy as a visionary leader and felt shattered by his death. Johnson knew he had to assure people that Kennedy’s agenda — quite liberal for its time — would not be abandoned by a new president widely regarded as a conservative Southern Democrat. Here’s what he said:

Today in this moment of new resolve, I would say to all my fellow Americans, let us continue.

This is our challenge — not to hesitate, not to pause, not to turn about and linger over this evil moment, but to continue on our course so that we may fulfill the destiny that history has set for us.

From there, Johnson proceeded to list JFK’s main priorities at the time of his death: Civil rights legislation, tax reform, education spending, expanding youth employment, foreign aid and so on. As a master parliamentarian, Johnson had the skills and resources to bring Kennedy’s bills into reality — and he largely did that — but the leadership skills he displayed in the immediate aftermath of Kennedy’s death was instrumental to his string of historic success. By turning Kennedy into a martyr, Johnson essentially sanctified his agenda and pushed it onward.

Going back to Rudy Giuliani after the 9/11 attacks, his words were pretty but rang hollow because he didn’t have a genuine cause, only vague clichés about the greatness of America. FDR wanted to lift America out of the Depression and win a war; LBJ wanted to turn Kennedy’s ambitious social agenda into reality and help disadvantaged Americans from all walks of life. (Importantly, both men mainly succeeded in their goals.) Giuliani had nothing comparable to offer. He literally just claimed that the terrorists hated our freedom.

It is almost certainly a coincidence that Biden’s big speech about the COVID-19 pandemic came so close to the 9/11 anniversary, but the parallel is interesting and instructive. It was a fine speech in rhetorical terms, but more important, he was right. Americans are dying and losing their freedoms because a minority, primarily motivated by bizarre right-wing partisanship and mistrust of science, refuses to get vaccinated, wear masks or follow basic public health guidelines. There is no sound argument to support their refusal, and an overwhelming scientific consensus that they are misguided. Allowing this defiance to continue without penalty puts innocent lives at risk and hurts those who are behaving responsibly. Biden struck the right balance between scolding the wrongdoers and announcing policies designed to pressure them into doing right, while remaining poised and dignified. In rhetorical terms, his speech was as adept as Bush’s moment at Ground Zero, or the finest flourishes from Roosevelt and Johnson.

Now, however, Biden has to follow through on what he promised, which is always the difficult part. Biden has learned at least one important leadership lesson from 9/11, in that he gave a great speech — something Bush was unable to do. Now Biden has to make sure that the speech is remembered as a turning point, and not as a promise he couldn’t keep.

More from Salon on the 20th anniversary of September 11:

Pizzagate conspiracy theorist melts down after George W. Bush calls out domestic terrorists

Former president George Bush appears to have struck a nerve on Saturday after he called out domestic terrorists during his 9/11 remembrance speech, saying there is little difference between them and the religious extremists who killed nearly 3,000 people during the attack in 2001.

During his speech in Shanksville, Pennsylvania the former president noted, “There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, disregard for human life. In their determination to defile national symbols they are children of the same foul spirit and it is our continuing duty to confront them.”

Despite the fact that Bush never mentioned Donald Trump or the January 6th insurrection and riot that followed his speech at a “Stop the Steal” rally, conservative gadfly Jack Posobiec lashed out by saying Trump supporters were being attacked.

According to Posobiec — an editor at Human Events who was one of the conservatives who pushed the “Pizzagate” conspiracy that was an article of faith among QAnon followers — Bush was out of line.

Taking to Twitter, he wrote, “Disgraced fmr president George W Bush is using the 9/11 memorial to say Trump voters are the same as the radical jihadists who attacked 20 years ago This is who he is.”

He then followed that up with a series of tweets attacking Bush — which you can see below:

Disgraced fmr president George W Bush is using the 9/11 memorial to say Trump voters are the same as the radical jihadists who attacked 20 years ago

This is who he is

— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) September 11, 2021

How many American families lost their children bc of Bush’s lies?

Let’s talk about the Bush bodycount

— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) September 11, 2021

Al Qaeda, Iraq, ISIS pic.twitter.com/lnjJ5N11l3

— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) September 11, 2021

Absolutely insane comments of a deranged sociopath https://t.co/72HpaJtjni

— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) September 11, 2021

Bush is publicly comparing 9/11 to Jan 6

They want Trump supporters treated like jihadists

Are you paying attention yet?pic.twitter.com/ByOi5hEoXt

— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) September 11, 2021

Mike Lindell, pro-Trump conspiracy theorists fail to draw crowd at Kentucky rally

Some of the biggest names pushing pro-Trump conspiracy theories were unable to draw much of a crowd at a “We the People Reunion” rally in Kentucky.

“The event is hosting speakers such as the CEO of MyPillow, Mike Lindell, former national security advisor Michael Flynn and Pastor Greg Locke, who has in the past admitted to being at the Capitol during the January 6 Capitol riot,” WFIE 14 News reported.

The station reported on attendance at the event.

“Promoters said they expected crowds of around 10,000 people. Fewer than 300 were at the event when 14 News arrived,” the network reported.

Maine and Oregon want manufacturers to foot the bill for getting rid of packaging waste

Most consumers don’t pay much attention to the packaging that their purchases come in, unless it’s hard to open or the item is really over-wrapped. But packaging accounts for about 28% of U.S. municipal solid waste. Only some 53% of it ends up in recycling bins, and even less is actually recycled: According to trade associations, at least 25% of materials collected for recycling in the U.S. are rejected and incinerated or sent to landfills instead.

Local governments across the U.S. handle waste management, funding it through taxes and user fees. Until 2018 the U.S. exported huge quantities of recyclable materials, primarily to China. Then China banned most foreign scrap imports. Other recipient countries like Vietnam followed suit, triggering waste disposal crises in wealthy nations.

Some U.S. states have laws that make manufacturers responsible for particularly hard-to-manage products, such as electronic waste, car batteries, mattresses and tires, when those goods reach the end of their useful lives.

Now, Maine and Oregon have enacted the first state laws making companies that create consumer packaging, such as cardboard cartons, plastic wrap and food containers, responsible for the recycling and disposal of those products, too. Maine’s law takes effect in mid-2024, and Oregon’s follows in mid-2025.

These measures shift waste management costs from customers and local municipalities to producers. As researchers who study waste and ways to reduce it, we are excited to see states moving to engage stakeholders, shift responsibility, spur innovation and challenge existing extractive practices.

Holding producers accountable

The Maine and Oregon laws are the latest applications of a concept called extended producer responsibility, or EPR. Swedish academic Thomas Lindhqvist framed this idea in 1990 as a strategy to decrease products’ environmental impacts by making manufacturers responsible for the goods’ entire life cycles – especially for takeback, recycling and final disposal.

Producers don’t always literally take back their goods under EPR schemes. Instead, they often make payments to an intermediary organization or agency, which uses the money to help cover the products’ recycling and disposal costs. Making producers cover these costs is intended to give them an incentive to redesign their products to be less wasteful.

The idea of extended producer responsibility has driven regulations governing management of electronic waste, such as old computers, televisions and cellphones, in the European Union, China and 25 U.S. states. Similar measures have been adopted or proposed in nations including Kenya, Nigeria, Chile, Argentina and South Africa.

Scrap export bans in China and other countries have given new energy to EPR campaigns. Activist organizations and even some corporations are now calling for producers to become accountable for more types of waste, including consumer packaging.

Packaging helps sell consumer products, and consumers are starting to demand more sustainable containers.

What the state laws require

The Maine and Oregon laws define consumer packaging as material likely found in the average resident’s waste bin, such as containers for food and home or personal care products. They exclude packaging intended for long-term storage (over five years), beverage containers, paint cans and packaging for drugs and medical devices.

Maine’s law incorporates some core EPR principles, such as setting a target recycling goal and giving producers an incentive to use more sustainable packaging. Oregon’s law includes more groundbreaking components. It promotes the idea of a right to repair, which gives consumers access to information that they need to fix products they purchase. And it creates a “Truth in Labeling” task force to assess whether producers are making misleading claims about how recyclable their products are.

The Oregon law also requires a study to assess how bio-based plastics can affect compost waste streams, and it establishes a statewide collection list to harmonize what types of materials can be recycled across the state. Studies show that contamination from poor sorting is one of the main reasons why recyclables often are rejected.

California paint recycling data from PaintCare, a nonprofit stewardship organization that runs paint recycling programs across the U.S. PaintCare

Some extended producer responsibility systems, such as those for paint and mattresses, are funded by consumers, who pay an added fee at the point of sale that is itemized on their receipt. The fee supports the products’ eventual recycling or disposal.

In contrast, the Maine and Oregon laws require producers to pay fees to the states, based on how much packaging material they sell in those states. Both laws also include rules designed to limit producers’ influence over how the states use these funds.

Will these laws reduce waste?

There’s no clear consensus yet on the effectiveness of EPR. In some cases it has produced results: For instance, Connecticut’s mattress recycling rate rose from 8.7% to 63.5% after the state instituted a takeback law funded by fees paid at the point of sale. On a national scale, the Product Stewardship Institute estimates that since 2007 U.S. paint EPR programs have reused and recycled almost 24 million gallons of paint, created 200 jobs and saved governments and taxpayers over $240 million.

Critics argue that these programs need strong regulation and monitoring to ensure that corporations take their responsibilities seriously – and especially to prevent them from passing costs on to consumers, which requires enforceable accountability measures. Observers also argue that producers can have too much influence within stewardship organizations, which they warn may undermine enforcement or the credibility of the law.

Few studies have been done so far to assess the long-term effects of extended producer responsibility programs, and those that exist do not show conclusively whether these initiatives actually lead to more sustainable products. Maine and Oregon are small progressive states and are not major centers for the packaging industry, so the impact of their new laws remains to be seen.

However, these measures are promising models. As Martin Bourque, executive director of Berkeley’s Ecology Center and an internationally known expert on plastics and recycling, told us, “Maine’s approach of charging brands and manufacturers to pay cities for recycling services is an improvement over programs that give all of the operational and material control to producers, where the fox is directly in charge of the hen house.”

We believe the Maine and Oregon laws could inspire jurisdictions like California that are considering similar measures or drowning under waste plastic to adopt EPR themselves. Waste reduction efforts across the U.S. took hits from foreign scrap bans and then from the COVID-19 pandemic, which spurred greater use of disposable products and packaging. We see producer-pay schemes like the Maine and Oregon laws as a promising response that could help catalyze broader progress toward a less wasteful economy.

Jessica Heiges, PhD Candidate in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley and Kate O’Neill, Professor of Global Environmental Politics, University of California, Berkeley

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

What I remember about the dust

My childhood home in Spokane was filled with dusty glass cases and shelves displaying my parents’ collections: scrimshawed walrus tusks, cast-iron coin banks, carved corkscrews and bottle tops, trinkets made of vegetable ivory, vintage sewing machines, gold-plated mechanical pencils. In one corner, a 5-foot whale baleen like a feather plucked from a griffon; in another, a prototypical washing machine, its tub made from a half cask of whiskey.

Sometime around 1981 or 1982, my mother purchased three sets of human remains from a funeral home downtown. The family-run mortuary had outlived its line of heirs. An estate auctioneer led a walking tour through the house, selling off the furniture, the artwork and the carpets in each room before moving on to the next. My parents had gone looking for anything curious and undervalued.

The auction crowd thinned as the day stretched on. My parents bought a “fainting bed” — a long wooden daybed on wheels with a narrow horsehair mattress. No one bid against them. A man from Seattle bought several oak doors that had been stored in the basement. He said he planned to make dolphin pens out of them.

Finally they came to a supply room stuffed with miscellaneous junk. Broken garden tools, cardboard boxes stuffed with who-knows-what. The auctioneer announced that he would sell everything in the room together as one lot. My mother noticed a galvanized watering can and bid $10. She won the whole room, and workmen loaded everything into my father’s van. It was only later that we discovered the tagboard urns. There were three of them, green cubes each with a gummed label — a typed name and the word “scatter.”

In the official version of this story, the one my parents told at cocktail parties and reunions, they made some phone calls, and then a chastened representative of the funeral home came out to our house to retrieve the ashes. (In my constructed memory, the driver arrived at our curb in a hearse.) But I have a conflicting memory of at least one box that remained for years on a shelf of knickknacks. Memory, like dust, changes as you sift it. It may settle, but it’s easily stirred.

II.

I became a photographer, an occupation in which dust is an obsession. Every photographer must learn to spot out the dust. It used to be that we’d do this with a fine-bristled brush — dabbing various densities of black dye onto the print. Now we mostly use Photoshop, grabbing a cluster of nearby pixels and pasting them over a speck in the image.

I might photograph you for 15 minutes, or maybe the whole morning. But it’s afterward, at my computer, that I get to know you intimately. I spend hours with an image of you, spotting dust.

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I spot out the dust on your clothes, your face, your hair. I hover the clone tool over a patch of clean skin, copy those pixels and transplant them. Your portrait, magnified to 100 percent, extends well beyond the edges of my screen, so that only a piece of you is visible — an eyebrow now. It’s not that you’re dirty, not at all — you’ve showered this morning — but you are nevertheless speckled. Anything light enough to be borne by the wind might land on you — bits of hair and skin, pollen, the decaying husks of dead insects, the driest soil of the Sahara, ash from a Colorado wildfire, the pulverized glass and concrete of a demolished skyscraper. The worst of it is on your glasses. Dust is pernicious. It’s everywhere.

III.

For millennia, storytellers have been turning people to dust. In Greek and Mayan myths, in the Hebrew bible, in Stoker’s “Dracula” and now the Avengers movies, anyone or anything turned to dust is rendered harmless. But dust isn’t harmless.

In 2008, the accumulated dust at a sugar packing plant in Port Wentworth, Georgia, had grown inches deep in places. This was not just the granulated crystals but also a finer powder, crushed in the gears of machinery and underfoot. The dust suspended in the air reached precisely the right concentration to be flash combustible. Fourteen people died in that dust explosion.

IV.

A good tool for cleaning dust from photographic negatives is a camelhair brush with a small piece of polonium at the base of the bristles. The weak radioactive field disrupts static electricity, which would otherwise attract more dust. The radiation also leaves a light brown burn on the inside of the cardboard box in which the brush is stored.

My earliest memory is from inside the cab of a wrecked U-Haul truck. My father is lifting me from the overturned six-wheeler, out through the driver’s-side window and into a sky filled with swirling dust. In this memory, the world is nearly static — the sky is framed by the dark trapezoid of the window opening. Nothing moves except the dust sifting in the sunlight.

This was months before Mt. St. Helens blew its top, but in my memory (a toddler’s memory) the dust rising from our wreck off the shoulder of the highway is the same fine stuff that fell over seven states in the wake of the eruption. A recollection persists of a footprint stamped in ash on the road — my own, or my father’s, or maybe an image transposed from an entirely different context. (Buzz Aldrin’s photograph of Neil Armstrong’s bootprint on the surface of the moon, perhaps.)

Though it was 250 miles away from the volcano, our new house in Spokane had also been dusted with volcanic ash. If a strong gust of wind shook the trees in our yard, you’d see the dust rising from the branches. A narrow heap of ash residue bowed the telephone lines and power lines.

People old enough to remember tell me that the sky had been strange for weeks after the eruption — the sunsets fiery and eerie from all that dust clouding the atmosphere. It’s difficult to imagine a cloud that weighs 540 million tons, though even that is modest by geological standards. The fossil record indicates that still more massive, ancient volcanic eruptions might have dimmed the sun for years, causing ice ages and great extinctions. Mt. St. Helens wasn’t nearly so destructive, killing only 11,000 rabbits, 6,000 deer, 5,200 elk, 1,400 coyotes, 300 bobcats, 200 black bears and 15 mountain lions.

In all, 57 people died, and a few hundred more lost their homes. A rescue helicopter, already overladen, spotted Lu Moore in her hunter-orange jacket, trying to traverse a sea of downed trees with her husband and son. They’d been camping. The pilot shouted down to her that they could climb aboard, but she’d have to leave her backpack behind. “There’s a baby in it,” she shouted back.

The Spirit Lake Lodge disappeared entirely, along with its proprietor, and along with the lake itself. The water — which had been completely displaced in a landslide — later returned, but the lake is now 200 feet shallower. Four dozen bridges burned or collapsed under the weight of ash and debris.

Yes, it’s difficult to imagine that much dust and ash suspended in the air. But reading about it now, you conjure a ready image from memory, don’t you? A different cloud of ash billowing in a bright blue sky.

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Eventually, of course, there was new growth. The volcanic ash was rich in nutrients. Verdant green moss grew on the boulders in our yard, and on the house itself. If I peeled the moss away in clumps, the ash remained, soft as talcum between my fingers.

Our house caught fire one winter. The chimney had been choked with soot and ash, and ash crammed every gap in our wood shake roof. Outside in my Spider-Man pajamas, I watched the firemen douse the flames. Not much was lost, and by morning the water from the fire hoses had formed icicles thick as tree trunks and filthy with ash. They blocked the back door, but came crashing down with the slightest nudge, shattering on the icy concrete patio.

VI.

Twenty years later (and 20 years ago), I witnessed the September 11 attacks in New York. Leaning out the eighth-story window of a photography studio at NYU, I watched the towers fall. For weeks afterward, a column of dust and smoke hung in the sky. From my neighborhood across the East River, the dark cloud seemed impossibly inert, something that should be moving and changing but wasn’t — unnervingly static, like one of Doc Edgerton’s high-speed photographs of a bullet piercing an apple. All those little particles suspended in kinesis. The dust cloud was even there at night, illuminated by the searchlights at ground zero, casting a sinister backlight around the silhouette of the Woolworth building, the pupil in the Eye of Sauron. We had a vague awareness that the dust might be poisonous. Flyers went up in my neighborhood, posted by a local appliance store, letting us know FEMA would reimburse the cost of an air purifier.

At that time, I lived in the worst apartment on the best street in Brooklyn. Friends taller than 5 feet, 10 inches couldn’t stand up in my place without bumping their heads on the ceiling, but there were three historic churches on my block. Greenpoint’s bank tellers and grocery clerks spoke Polish at me presumptively. The river and a view of the Manhattan skyline were only a short walk away. I’d been shooting photographs there almost every day, among empty lots and abandoned warehouses, construction sites and homeless camps, under a huge Shepard Fairey mural of Andre the Giant. “The Brooklyn Riviera,” someone had named the place, painting the words on a plywood sign above the entrance, a gaping rip in a chain-link fence. After the attack, candlelight vigils were held there every night. But life also went on — fire dancers still practiced twirling their batons and skaters still compared their scrapes and bruises, only now under a dark cloud that would have seemed painted-on if not for the acrid smell. That’s where I went to photograph the dust of 9/11.

In retrospect, treating dust as a subject of photography seems an inversion of the craft. A speck of dust on a photographic negative will become a void on the enlargement, a white tumor on the print. Dust can etch glass, leaving microscopic scratches on a lens. On a digital camera, a particle that lands on the sensor will become a fixture in every photograph thereafter, a black spot at pixel location x-by-y. Dust had always been an impediment and an irritant, something to be erased rather than documented.

Six hours after the attack, I made it home to Brooklyn. It was still sunny. There were more people about than usual — the neighborhood had come out in reverence to watch the end of the world. What even were we looking at? We waited. Surely some revelation was at hand.

The proceeding generation, those born after 9/11 or too young to remember it, anticipate a plodding, protracted apocalypse — a warming of the world, predicted for decades and approaching with terrible, slouching inevitability. But on that day, calamity felt imminent. What had started couldn’t be stopped. We were shepherds at the foot of Vesuvius, and it was too late to run. Something was changing. Something had changed. Three strangers sat on the shore of the river, motionless, in uncanny symmetry. I raised the big Contax and snapped a photograph. That’s what I remember. That’s what remains.

on the 20th anniversary of September 11:

Drink this decadent pumpkin spice milkshake while contemplating seasonal creep

“Seasonal creep” is a term folks like to throw around these days, usually in reference to big-box department stores stocking up on and displaying holiday paraphernalia — Christmas trees, stockings, jack-o’-lanterns, wreaths that look like turkeys — months earlier than the actual holiday itself.

Starbucks, the global coffee chain, has made an event of season creep year after year with the release of its fall beverages, most notably the pumpkin spice latte (or PSL, for those in the know). The beverage itself is steeped in controversy. As Vox’s Rebecca Jennings put it, “since its inception in 2003, the pumpkin spice latte has become something of a straw man for discussions about capitalism, seasonal creep and the meaning of ‘basic,’ resulting in widespread hatred for an otherwise innocuous beverage.”

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However, more than 200 million cups are sold annually, and there tends to be a less-than-subtle undercurrent of misogyny to the PSL hate. Society as a whole has a problem with decrying the things many girls and women like — from musical artists, to the entire genre of romance novels, to feminine-coded coffee drinks — as vapid. But it’s been a rough year, and I don’t want to talk about misogyny right now; I want to talk about milkshakes.

While Starbucks released their fall beverages on Aug. 24 this year (a day earlier than in 2020), I’m still in peak summer mode. It’s still in the upper 80’s and low 90’s across large swaths of the U.S., and a steaming-hot cup of coffee is not on my radar.

That said, the flavors — cinnamon, ginger, cloves, cream and coffee — sounded pretty divine. I had baking spices in my pantry, espresso powder on the counter and an unfinished pint of vanilla ice cream in the freezer. I thought, “Why not?” After some trial and error, I finally came up with the perfect PSL Milkshake, a beverage to enjoy as the seasons continue to creep.

***

Recipe: PSL Milkshake

Serves 1

Ingredients:

1 cup vanilla ice cream
3 tablespoons of half-and-half
2 teaspoons of espresso powder
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons ground ginger
2 teaspoons ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground allspice
1 teaspoon ground cloves
Whipped cream and cinnamon stick for garnish

Directions:

In a small blender, combine the ice cream, half-and-half, espresso powder, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice and cloves. Pulse until fully blended.
Pour into a chilled glass and garnish with whipped cream and a cinnamon stick.

Optional:

If you want to go more of a pumpkin pie route, feel free to add in 3 teaspoons of canned pumpkin pie filling, as well.

Related:

The 5 best non-alcoholic beers we know

There’s often a stigma about non-alcoholic beer: It just doesn’t taste like beer. Ask people who’ve had beer stripped of its alcohol, and you’ll hear that it is cloying. The mouthfeel just isn’t right. Or, quite simply, it doesn’t provide the full hoppy, fruity, complex-flavor experience present in alcoholic beer. The combination of malt, hops, yeast, water, and adjuncts like coffee and fruit creates a multitude of flavors in today’s beer that just hasn’t been possible in non-alcoholic beer.

Until now! According to the Brewers Association, non-alcoholic beer sales are trending upward, and more people than ever are participating in “dry January,” a month where drinkers abstain from alcohol. And to keep up, several breweries across the country are investing in new technology to create better non-alcoholic beers, in styles ranging from pilsners and hazy IPAs to fruit beers and chocolate stouts. With so many brews to choose from in this fast-growing category, it can be hard to know where to start. To help, we’ve highlighted some of our favorite non-alcoholic beers below.

1. Untitled Art Brewing Company’s Watermelon Gose, Florida Weisse and Juicy IPA

This Madison suburb brewery (brewed at Octopi Brewing Co., a large contract brewery) has quickly become known for its array of eclectic flavors in barrel-aged stouts, smoothie seltzers, and more. The brand has also dabbled in CBD water and currently has a line of non-alcoholic beers mirroring the flavors in its alcohol-filled line.

Of the six available flavors (ranging from a pilsner to IPAs to fruit beers), the Watermelon Gose, Florida Weisse, and Juicy IPA are must-try beers. If you placed any of those in front of me to try blindly, I wouldn’t be able to tell you they didn’t have alcohol. The gose is reminiscent of biting into a juicy slice of melon during a picnic. A touch of lime is just beneath the surface, and the backend is punctuated with a bit of sea salt. The Florida Weisse is bursting with passion fruit and guava within its bright, vibrant ruby body. And the Juicy IPA is rife with grapefruit pith, citrus, and a hint of melon.

2. Samuel Adams’ Just The Haze

While there is a tendency to argue if Samuel Adams is craft (the brewery makes a lot of beer and is a large business), one thing remains constant: the brewery makes good beer. The Samuel Adams New England IPA was a huge surprise when compared to the smaller breweries making a name for themselves with the style. It’s no surprise, then, that the non-alcoholic version is also delicious. The aroma reminds me of smelling grain straight out of the bag on brew day and features an intense nectarine and grassy hop aroma. The flavor isn’t as extreme; layers of apricot, grass, grapefruit, and tangerine are all detectable. This is just a good hazy IPA, regardless of alcohol content.

3. Lakefront Riverwest’s Stein NA

This Milwaukee stalwart is known for creating some of the most renowned lagers in the Midwest. After all, Wisconsin’s largest city was made famous by its beer barons who specialized in lager. Lakefront was able to fit all the flavor of its amber lager into this non-alcoholic version. This means you get a malty caramel flavor throughout with a touch of sweet berries (mostly blueberry). The body is robust and full, proving once again that Lakefront knows how to make a good beer, alcohol content notwithstanding.

4. Lagunitas’ Hoppy Refresher

This might be one of my favorite non-alcoholic options. Where many non-alcoholic beers have .5% alcohol or less, this one has none at all! It has zero calories, zero carbs, and zero gluten. This highly carbonated drink is essentially dry-hopped sparkling water. It has a nice orange and lemon flavor with just a touch of sweet pine. The uppercut of citrus on top of the strong carbonation makes for a rather unique showcase for some popular hops (if you like Citra, Cascade, Centennial, and Chinook hops, you’ll enjoy this). Plus, it’s a really cheap option at around $6 for a four-pack.

5. Athletic Brewing Company’s Light Copper

This popular non-alcoholic brewery has several different styles and flavors, but Light Copper has been my favorite after sampling it and the IPAs. Your palate is immediately hit with a minerality, followed by fresh biscuit, and just a touch of honey that is sweet but not cloying. Each Athletic beer pour results in a tall, frothy head for maximum aroma and presentation. If that beer isn’t your style, there are IPAs, a stout, and even a blackberry Berliner weisse. The company also offers several seltzers infused with hops. As a bonus, Athletic can ship beer to select states.

How 9/11 helped define this generation’s new brand of patriotism

Nick Gorki is one of about 100 children who were born after their fathers died in the terror attacks that took place on September 11, 2001. Twenty years later, he’s a new college student who came of age in the post-9/11 world.

As one of the seven subjects of the PBS documentary “Generation 9/11,” he confesses he’s “tired of living through historical events.” Gorki’s generation has waded through defining presidential elections, national tragedies ranging from school shootings to the Jan. 6th insurrection, and now a global pandemic — all without a moment to breathe. Despite this, Gorki has remained determined to resist bitterness and hate.

“I want people to know that 9/11 hasn’t made me spiteful,” he told Salon. “I’ve been told that it would be justified if I was Islamophobic or even hateful toward these groups that were turned against after 9/11. Although I’m not fond of al-Qaeda and the groups involved, I find that life is so complicated that hating someone because they share a simple, broad similarity to those connected with the attacks . . . creates so much unnecessary hate in the world that we don’t need any more of.”

Gorki’s compassionate politics might come as a surprise to anyone who’s been on the receiving end of a chilling “OK boomer” or some variation of the mocking Twitter meme du jour to excoriate political conservatives, transphobes or racists. Yet, Gorki’s desire to not reproduce the harms that have befallen him, or, simply put, to try and make things better and not worse for others, isn’t actually all that different from other young people his age.

Today’s post-9/11 youth are understandably outraged by the devastating consequences of 9/11 and the post-9/11 wars they’re forced to experience each day. Gen Z, the first generation to grow up after the events of Sept. 11, is more likely than any other generation to believe other countries — like those with socialized health care and education, and more humane criminal justice systems — are better than the U.S.

According to a 2020 report by the Carnegie Endowment for International peace, 70% of zoomers believe that the wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan were “a waste of time, lives, and taxpayer money and they did nothing to make us safer at home.” Less than half of Gen Z believes “America is stronger because of its global leadership,” and about half of this generation believes American foreign policy should focus instead on combatting climate change.

This skeptical outlook on the country doesn’t necessarily comprise an unpatriotic view. Rather, it’s a fresh, increasingly popular application of patriotism, not as an obsessive fetishization of stars and stripes, but a determination to improve the material lives and circumstances of our fellow Americans. It’s a determination to enact positive change in the world based on compassion for others, a determination uniquely forged by the harsh realities stemming from 9/11, which have indelibly shaped this generation’s lives and values. For all their skepticism, just last year, a national poll of young people (ages 18 to 24) found 83% said they believed they have the power to change the country through voting.

Youth patriotism in 2001

In August, a viral video compilation of post-9/11 Disney Channel interstitials began to recirculate, in the weeks leading up to the 20th anniversary of the national tragedy. The supercut is a stunning historical relic that memorializes former child stars who have since faded into relative obscurity or at least ended up in Hallmark movies. The commercials also enshrine a nationalistic and dated patriotism, as 2000s teen heartthrobs wax poetic about the beauty of the American flag to young, impressionable audiences.

It also reflects the true sentiment at the time, when a majority of Americans came together in their shared grief and terror over experiencing the attacks either in person or through their TVs. However, it’s the sort of patriotism many of today’s young people, who have lived and come of age in the harsh aftermath of our post-9/11 country, would gaze upon with revulsion, or mockingly subject to the meme treatment.

In one of the clips, “7th Heaven” star Beverly Mitchell describes her feelings for the American flag. “It means everything to me,” she says. “It means life, it means freedom, it also means unity and it means love.”

Hilary Duff, who may have inadvertently originated the “and then everyone clapped” meme, says, “I saw a fire truck pass by the other day, and it had an American flag on it, flowing in the wind. It was so amazing and everyone started clapping, cheering.”

Another of the commercials features former First Lady Laura Bush. “All across the country, everywhere I look, I see an American flag,” Bush says. She continues, “It stands for the rights of many people, religions and beliefs. That’s what freedom’s all about.”

Ask almost any vaguely online Gen-Zer who’s ever shared an Instagram infographic on some form of injustice for their thoughts on Bush’s commercial. You’ll probably hear the same thing: Who are the “many people” and “religions” for whom the flag affords protection? Certainly not the nearly 500,000 people killed in the United States’ post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since 2001.

New media, new patriotism

Today, the media we consume isn’t at all awash with those Disney Channel odes to the flag. Many modern shows and movies, and especially those that are more targeted toward young people, are just plain more aware and demonstrate a social consciousness. This content is infinitely more willing to confront and unpack issues of violent nationalism, the military industrial complex, or the more inhumane features of post-9/11 America, in general.

With the advent of streaming, older zoomers can now watch past shows from the last 20 years. It’s common to hear from college students that their favorite shows to binge are ’90s or 2000s hits like “Friends,” “The Office” or “Parks and Recreation.” Similarly, that means catching up with more adult fare on HBO. That includes “Veep,” a foul-mouthed but beloved adult comedy with an honest if not depressingly bleak outlook on the corruption and insincerity of American politics. By the end of the series, in what’s perhaps the show’s most real-world development, ex-POTUS Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is briefly held under house arrest in Norway for committing war crimes — specifically, a drone strike in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, two very different Disney+ series, but with political messaging, demonstrate what the younger zoomers may be consuming. Comedy “Diary of a Future President,” now in its second season, follows the political aspirations of Latina tween Elena Cañero-Reed (Tess Romero) as she seeks to run for student-body president of her middle school, decades before she’ll eventually become the first woman POTUS (portrayed by Gina Rodriguez). The series at times alternates between Elena’s junior high political career and the early parts of her presidency, as she swerves from pushing her school to change its sexist mascot, and supporting a friend in coming out as gay, to prioritizing diversity in her presidential cabinet as an adult.

“Diary of a Future President” is a patriotic if not mildly critical undertaking, one that perceives the United States and its political systems as redeemable in the right hands (by a woman of color), and asserts that leadership and change start young. The show is fundamentally optimistic, as all content for its age group should be.

With another Disney+ series, Marvel’s “Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” young people will grow up with a Black Captain America in Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie). Sam very publicly reckons with what it means to represent a country with deep origins in white supremacy, and succeed a beloved predecessor with blond hair and blue eyes. The show calls into question the racist history of the iconic shield and its roots in racist experimentation on Black people in order to create the MCU’s renowned supersoldiers.

This hidden history carries deep parallels with real life, drawing on America’s dark legacy of racist human experimentation projects. “Falcon and the Winter Soldier” unflinchingly highlights the horrors of institutionalized white supremacy. But it also goes the typical MCU route of portraying radical revolutionaries who support anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist policies as needlessly violent extremists. In other words, there are, indeed, some conversations about the dark side of American nationalism that we’re ready to have in society. But in terms of discussing solutions to these inequalities that involve actual redistribution of power and resources, we may not quite be there.

Overall, this isn’t your grandparents’ Disney Channel — nor is it the Disney even millennials consumed as children, rife with American flags and Laura Bush testimonies. It’s neither fully in awe of American exceptionalism, nor fully confident that America is irredeemable. Like today’s post-9/11 young people, it’s still finding its political footing, determining where it stands.

This makes sense considering that this is the era of majority-millennial parenting, that is focused more on the wholeness of their Gen Z children. Whether it’s mental health, gender identity or political activism, these are deemed what’s important for the messaging in today’s youth programming.

A mixed political bag

Nick Gorki recounts that participating in “Generation 9/11,” in which he recounts his coming out as gay, was both “therapeutic” and enlightening for him. Prior to the documentary, Gorki says, “9/11 was something I didn’t like to talk about a lot, because it was a sore subject with so many people, not just in my life but adults in general.”

He continued, “Being one of the first generations to not have any memories of 9/11, it felt intimidating to ask about something that was so fresh in people’s minds, especially something so traumatic for many people.”

The young subjects of “Generation 9/11” present a unique microcosm of the political diversity, not to mention diversity of lived experience and cultures, of the greater post-9/11 generation. Notably, other subjects, cohorts who also lost their fathers in the attacks, seemed to feel somewhat differently from him on the issues, including post-9/11 Islamophobia. One of the subjects, a young man from a military family in Texas, at one point defends the racial profiling that notoriously happens at airports because there are “a lot of bad people in the Middle East.”

Another subject, Claudia Szurkowski, whose godfather is a police officer, criticizes the harshness of the criminal justice system and says she intends to enter the legal profession to help fix this. But her family also waves a Blue Lives Matter flag on their porch. She slams calls to defund and abolish the police — which have stemmed from concerns about outsized police budgets and endemic police violence — as wrongheaded and dangerous.

Like Gorki, Szurkowski told Salon she’d made a conscious effort to not let 9/11 shape her political views. “Recently getting into politics, I made sure to do my research and check all sides and hear all opinions and make the choice for myself without thinking about the attacks,” she said. Still, Szurkowski emphasized the importance of remembering 9/11 and the thousands of families it devastated, adding, “History is bound to repeat itself if we forget.”

“Overall I am angry and very confused on a constant basis,” Szurkowski said. “I am angry at the fact that this had to happen to my family, and that I lost the opportunity to even have a so-called normal family.” But despite this anger, Szurkowski continues to move forward each day. “The documentary has shown me how independent and mature I am, and how to embrace my story and not shy from it,” she said.

The post-9/11 generation faces some of the greatest political and economic catastrophes in our country’s history that directly or indirectly extend from the events of 9/11. This has naturally made many members of this generation more open-minded about solutions involving wealth redistribution and other sweeping reforms, or seeking inspiration from other countries. Despite this, “Generation 9/11” highlights how young people ultimately remain a politically mixed bag.

With an endless war, endless turmoil

Twenty years ago, 9/11 marked a turning point, an inception of two Americas, one of which was engulfed in flags, the national anthem and the warmth of an almost unprecedented sort of unity. The other America, for brown people and those perceived to be Muslim or “other,” was engulfed in violent bigotry, surveillance, and a devastating rash of Islamophobic hate crimes that continues to this day. Directly after, ICE was formed under the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to combat terrorism and perceived foreign threats. Fundamental privacy rights of all Americans eroded, and racial profiling of nonwhite people in the U.S. escalated.

In a similar vein, many members of the pre and post-9/11 generations live in two entirely different post-9/11 Americas, too. Many older Americans still associate 9/11 with intense fear and loss, which caused the country to come together and even briefly view Rudy Giuliani as an American hero, not a disbarred national disgrace. In contrast, today’s young people, including many millennials and Gen Zers alike, view 9/11 as the beginning of one of the most devastatingly consequential events of our lives: an endless war.

It’s a well-known statistic that for $63 billion per year, the U.S. could make public college tuition-free. America has spent $2 trillion on the war in Iraq alone on the taxpayer dime, as of 2020. A 2019 report found the U.S. had spent $6.5 trillion on all wars in the Middle East.

Suffice it to say, many millennials and zoomers, who share in a $1.7 trillion ocean of student loan debt, aren’t exactly enthused by how the post-9/11 wars have shaped America’s spending priorities over the last two decades. In contrast, more than half of young Americans support tuition-free public college, per a 2019 survey.

And as today’s young people watch the world burn around them, it’s not lost on this more environmentally conscious generation that the U.S. military has become one of the world’s biggest polluters. Climate change stands at the top of the list of young people’s (ages 18 to 25) concerns about global issues, and the U.S. military creates 750,000 tons of toxic waste each year, in the form of depleted uranium, oil, jet fuels, pesticides, defoliants, lead and other chemicals. Our armed forces comprise a bigger polluter than 140 countries combined, yet, it’s individual consumers who are chastised and told to not drink from plastic straws, somehow use neither plastic bags nor tote bags, and acquire costly electric cars.

In the 2020 presidential election, young people between 18 and 39 rejected Donald Trump by a wider margin than any other age group. The Trump era itself is a notable consequence of the events of 9/11, and the racist fears this national tragedy awakened in many older white people of anyone and anything foreign or “other.”

For a period of time during Trump’s presidency, migrant families were deliberately separated to cruelly discourage border crossings, leading to the advent of the political rallying cry, “Abolish ICE.”. For many young Americans, this is more than a slogan: One YouGov survey found 51% of adult voters ages 20 to 37 say they distrust ICE, compared with about 40% of voters from older generations.

All of this — from the student loan debt crisis, to impending climate catastrophe, to the horrors of the Trump era — are emblematic of the dramatic shift in national priorities post-9/11. The misguided patriotism the tragedy stoked among older generations yielded broad support for costly, endless wars, and has amounted to disastrous outcomes that young people more than any other generation must now reckon with.

If today’s young people seem cynical, even put off by the traditionally patriotic displays of the 20th anniversary of this national tragedy, consider the unique, generational circumstances in which they’ve come of age. Their patriotism may be self-critical, sometimes a hybrid of nasty snark and unwavering compassion — but it’s patriotism, all the same.

Still, despite watching the world burn around them, the post-9/11 generation doesn’t lead a joyless existence. They’ve more than retained their sense of humor, inventing new ways to organize their communities, and finding comfort and laughter in surprising places. This is the sort of optimism Nick Gorki certainly embraces, especially since wrapping “Generation 9/11.”

“I’ve picked up journaling since the documentary,” he recounts to Salon. “I found that having something to just recall the day, and think in the bigger picture of the day, has helped me tremendously in finding gratitude for little things.”

More from Salon on the 20th anniversary of September 11:

“Where is Trump?” Former president notably absent from 9/11 events

Three Democratic Presidents — Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden — were all in attendance at a 9/11 service in lower Manhattan Saturday for the 20th anniversary of the terror attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 Americans.

Meanwhile, George W. Bush, a Republican, was in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, giving a speech near the spot where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed that day after passengers overwhelmed several al Qaeda hijackers who had taken control of the plane.

Former President Donald Trump, however, was nowhere to be seen at any of these memorials Saturday. “Where’s Trump on 9/11?” a New York Times headline read. “Not at Ground Zero.”

“Former President Trump — absent from the 20th anniversary 9/11 ceremony in his own city,” McClatchy politics writer Dave Catanese tweeted.

Former President Trump — absent from the 20th anniversary 9/11 ceremony in his own city. pic.twitter.com/gjWq7muu4c

— David Catanese (@davecatanese) September 11, 2021

“He had the option to attend but decided to honor the day with different stops,” his spokeswoman Liz Harrington said.

Instead, he released a video statement praising New York City’s “brave” first responders — while also blasting Biden’s decision to end the 20-year war in Afghanistan, which started shortly after 9/11. Later, he traveled several blocks from his Trump Tower home to make a surprise appearance at a fire station and police precinct.

He used the photo-op to again criticize Biden for his handling of Afghanistan, and hint at his 2024 ambitions.

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

He told the first responders his re-election plan “was an easy decision that would make them happy,” according to the Associated Press, while also joking with officers, “If I catch COVID it’s because of you.”

Trump’s absence at any organized 9/11 events was not lost on his many critics, who blasted the former commander-in-chief for skipping the somber ceremonies that have become a hallmark of post-presidential life for every other former resident of the White House.

“Trump feels strongly about Robert E Lee but skips out on conventional patriotism,” Vox co-founder and Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center Matthew Yglesias tweeted.

“Where is Trump? Where he has always been in the moments adult leadership has been needed: nonexistent,” author John Pavlovitz adde d.

Where is Trump?

Where he has always been in the moments adult leadership has been needed: nonexistent. https://t.co/tymVhqXG6X

— John Pavlovitz (@johnpavlovitz) September 11, 2021

“He literally has an apartment here,” Daily Beast editor Molly Joing-Fast wrote.

Following his surprise FDNY/NYPD photo-op, Trump will travel to Florida to host a primetime boxing match with “no holds barred commentary” alongside his son, Donald Trump Jr. Evander Holyfield and Vitor Belfort are slated for the main card.

More from Salon on the 20th anniversary of September 11:

35 happy little facts about Bob Ross

Whether or not you’re artistically inclined, there’s a good chance that you — like millions of other people around the world — have been captivated by Bob Ross’s instructional landscape paintings and soothing voice. Here are 35 facts about the happy little legend.

1. Bob Ross kept an alligator in the bathtub as a kid.

A lifelong animal lover, Ross was always rescuing wounded animals and nursing them back to health. As a kid growing up in Florida, this meant one rather strange addition to the family: an alligator, which he attempted to nurse back to health in the Ross family bathtub. Even in his adult life, Ross was always playing host to orphaned and injured animals, including an epileptic squirrel that lived in his empty Jacuzzi.

2. Bob Ross was an Air Force master sergeant.

Ross’s quiet voice and gentle demeanor were two of his most iconic traits, which makes the fact that he spent 20 years in the United States Air Force and retired with the rank of master sergeant all the more surprising. Basically, he was the guy who told everyone else what to do.

3. Bob Ross used to be quite the yeller.

Before he lent his dulcet voice to “The Joy of Painting,” Ross spent a lot of time yelling. “I was the guy who makes you scrub the latrine, the guy who makes you make your bed, the guy who screams at you for being late to work,” Ross once said. “The job requires you to be a mean, tough person. And I was fed up with it. I promised myself that if I ever got away from it, it wasn’t going to be that way anymore.”

4. Before Bob Ross painted happy little trees, he painted pans.

While stationed in Alaska during his stint in the Air Force, Ross indulged his creative side by painting his now-iconic landscapes onto golden pans, which he sold for $25 apiece. Today, they can fetch thousands of dollars on eBay.

5. Bob Ross was inspired by Bill Alexander.

From 1974 to 1982, German painter Bill Alexander hosted an art instruction show on PBS, “The Magic of Oil Painting,” where he shared his “wet-on-wet” oil painting technique. Ross discovered the series while working as a bartender, and became an immediate fan of the artist. He ended up studying under Alexander, who became his mentor. In fact, Ross dedicated the first episode of his own PBS show, “The Joy of Painting,” to Alexander. “Years ago, Bill taught me this fantastic technique,” Ross told viewers. “And I feel as though he gave me a precious gift, and I’d like to share that gift with you.”

6. When Alexander retired, he appointed Bob Ross as his successor.

In the early 1980s, as Alexander was preparing to retire, he asked Ross to take over teaching his painting classes. Ross agreed, and set out to tour the country on his own in a motor home, traveling and teaching people Alexander’s “wet-on-wet” technique. He told his wife Jane that he’d try it out for one year, and if he didn’t make enough money, he would return to Alaska.

4. Bob Ross’s signature perm was an economical choice.

It was during Ross’s time on the road that he adopted his iconic hairstyle. Since teaching painting wasn’t an extremely lucrative profession, Ross learned to stretch every penny. One way he did this was to save money on haircuts by getting his locks permed.

8. Bob Ross hated that hairdo.

Though Ross reportedly hated the permed hair, he was a businessman first, which is why he kept it. “When we got a line of paints and brushes, we put his picture on,” Bob Ross Company co-founder Annette Kowalski told Mental Floss. “The logo is a picture of Bob with that hair, so he could never get it cut. He wasn’t always happy about that.”

(You can see what he looked like without his trademark perm here.)

9. Bob Ross was “discovered” by one of his students.

Though it was Alexander who got Ross started on his career path as an artist, it was Kowalski — one of Ross’s students — who put him on the pop culture map. Kowalski, who is often credited as the woman who “discovered” Ross, took a five-day instructional course with Ross in 1982, and quickly became enamored with his calming voice and positive messages.

In addition to newfound painting skills, Kowalski left the class with a new client: she became Ross’s manager, helping him broker the deal for “The Joy of Painting” television show with PBS, and later, a line of Bob Ross art supplies.

10. Bob Ross worked for free.

“The Joy of Painting” ran new seasons on PBS from 1983 to 1994, so even at public broadcasting rates the show must have made Ross quite a bit of loot, right? Not quite. Ross actually did the series for free; his income came from Bob Ross Inc.

Ross’s company sold art supplies and how-to videotapes, taught classes, and even had a troupe of traveling art instructors who roamed the world teaching painting. It’s tough to think of a better advertisement for these products than Ross’s show.

11. Bob Ross could film an entire season in about two days.

How did Ross find the time to tape all of those shows for free? He could record a season almost as fast as he could paint. Ross could bang out an entire 13-episode season of “The Joy of Painting” in just over two days, which freed him up to get back to teaching lessons, which is where he made his real money.

12. “The Joy of Painting” was a worldwide hit.

In addition to being carried by approximately 95 percent of all public television stations across America, reaching viewers in more than 93.5 million homes, “The Joy of Painting” was a hit outside of the U.S. as well. The show was broadcast in dozens of foreign countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, South Korea, and Turkey.

13. Bob Ross was particularly big in Japan.

“The Joy of Painting” was a big hit in Japan, where it aired twice a day. (His voice, however, was dubbed.) On a visit to the country, Ross was reportedly mobbed by fans.

14. Bob Ross likened his popularity to a drug addiction.

“We’re like drug dealers,” Ross once said of the popularity of his painting technique. “Come into town and get everybody absolutely addicted to painting. It doesn’t take much to get you addicted.”

15. Viewers loved Bob Ross. Fellow artists? Not as much.

Though he was undoubtedly a pop culture phenomenon, the art world didn’t exactly embrace Ross. “People definitely know who he is,” Kevin Lavin, a “struggling” painter, told The New York Times in 1991. “In his own way, he is as famous as Warhol.”

“It is formulaic and thoughtless,” sculptor Keith Frank said of Ross’s work in the same article. “Art as therapy.”

“I am horrified by art instruction on television,” added Abstract Expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart, who passed away the following year. “It’s terrible — bad, bad, bad. They are just commercial exploiters, non-artists teaching other non-artists.”

16. Some art supply stores kept Bob Ross’s products at a distance.

The New York Times paid a visit to Pearl Paint Company, an art supply store in New York City, where an employee pointed to the “happy little corner” where they kept Ross’s products. “We hide them,” he admitted, “so as not to offend.”

17. Bill Alexander wasn’t thrilled with Bob Ross’s success.

Bill Alexander was one of the artists who wasn’t thrilled with Ross’s success, even though he had been his protégé. “He betrayed me,” Alexander told The New York Times. “I invented ‘wet on wet.’ I trained him and he is copying me — what bothers me is not just that he betrayed me, but that he thinks he can do it better.”

18. Bob Ross’s happy little comments weren’t ad libbed.

Though part of Ross’s appeal was his conversational tone, none of this talk of happy accidents or other happy little things was ad libbed. “He told me he would lay in bed at night and plan every word,” Kowalski once said. “He knew exactly what he was doing.”

19. Bob Ross was missing part of his left index finger.

Though you’d never know it from his painting technique, not all of Ross’s digits were intact. He lost part of his left index finger when he was a kid in a woodworking accident while working with his dad, who was a carpenter.

20. Bob Ross rarely painted people.

While trees and wildlife often helped bring Ross’s paintings to life, he rarely painted people. In fact, he liked to keep his work as people-free as possible.

“I will tell you Bob’s biggest secret,” Kowalski told FiveThirtyEight. “If you notice, his cabins never had chimneys on them. That’s because chimneys represented people, and he didn’t want any sign of a person in his paintings.”

21. Bob Ross kept a tiny squirrel in his pocket.

“The Joy of Painting” regularly featured a rotating cast of happy little animals, with a tiny squirrel named Peapod probably getting the bulk of airtime. According to Ross, Peapod liked to sit in his pocket.

22. Not many people actually painted along with Bob Ross.

Though “The Joy of Painting” was a beloved series, people didn’t seem to be watching it to learn how to be the next Picasso. It was once estimated that only 10 percent of viewers were actually painting along with Ross.

23. Bob Ross really did love trees.

In 2014, FiveThirtyEight did a statistical breakdown of Ross’s work on “The Joy of Painting” and found that 91 percent of them included at least one tree — by far the most popular element. (And if he painted one tree, there was a 93 percent chance he’d paint a second one — though he referred to any additional trees as “friends” on the show.)

24. Bob Ross’s son, Steve, preferred lakes.

On a few occasions, Ross’s son Steve subbed for his dad as a guest host. That same data set discovered that Steve liked happy little lakes: 91 percent of Steve’s paintings featured one (as opposed to Bob’s 34 percent).

25. Bob Ross made three copies of each painting you see in “The Joy of Painting.”

Ross shot 403 episodes of “The Joy of Painting” and made three near-exact copies of each painting per episode. The first copy always hid off screen, and Ross referred to it while the cameras rolled (none of his on-air paintings were spontaneous). Ross painted a third copy when filming finished. This time, an assistant would stand behind him and snap photos of each brushstroke; these pictures went into his how-to books.

26. Bob Ross didn’t get a whole lot of interview requests.

For all his worldwide popularity, there aren’t a lot of interviews with Ross. It has nothing to do with the artist being publicity-shy — it’s just that people rarely asked. “I never turn down requests for interviews,” he once said. “I’m just rarely asked.”

27. Bob Ross was an MTV pitchman.

For all his hokey-ness, Ross was cool enough to be asked to be a pitchman for MTV—which he deemed “The land of happy little trees.”

28. Nintendo has planned a series of Bob Ross video games.

Though some thought it was an April Fools’ joke, Nintendo had plans to create a series of video games based on “The Joy of Painting.” Unfortunately, the project ran into production problems pretty early on, so we’ll never know what might have been.

29. “The Joy of Painting” is great for insomnia.

In 2001, Bob Ross Inc. media director Joan Kowalski told The New York Times how people almost seemed embarrassed to admit that Ross’s voice was the perfect solution to insomnia. “It’s funny to talk to these people,” she said. “Because they think they’re the only ones who watch to take a nap. Bob knew about this. People would come up to him and say, ‘I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you’ve been putting me to sleep for 10 years.’ He’d love it.”

Even today, Ross has become an ASMR star: On the ASMR thread on Reddit, “Bob Ross” is listed as a common trigger. A video of Ross painting a mountain has a staggering 7.7 million views, with others regularly surpassing 2 or 3 million views. Of course, not all of those are ASMR viewers, but a mounting online presence suggests they certainly deserve some of the credit.

30. Bob Ross didn’t sell his paintings.

In a 1991 interview with The New York Times, Ross claimed he’d made over 30,000 paintings since he was an 18-year-old stationed in Alaska with the Air Force. Yet he was not one to hawk his own work. So what happened to them? When Ross died of lymphoma in 1995, most of his paintings either ended up in the hands of charity or PBS.

“One of the questions that I hear over and over and over is, ‘What do we do with all these paintings we do on television?’ Most of these paintings are donated to PBS stations across the country,” he said. “They auction them off, and they make a happy buck with ’em. So if you’d like to have one, get in touch with your PBS station, cause . . . we give them to stations all over the country to help them out with their fundraisers.”

31. Bob Ross’s van was once burgled of 13 paintings.

The fact that Ross didn’t try and turn a profit from his own work doesn’t mean that you can’t find one for sale. At one point, more than a dozen of his paintings hit the black market when someone stole 13 reference paintings from Ross’s van during the show’s second season.

32. Bob Ross hoped to develop a children’s show about wildlife.

In the early 1990s, Ross was looking to branch out from art and had an idea for a kids’ show called “Bob’s World,” where he planned to go out into nature and teach kids about wildlife.

33. If you happen to find yourself in Florida, you can check out some of Bob Ross’s original works.

The Bob Ross Art Workshop in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, is a must-visit destination for Ross die-hards: In addition to offering art classes in Ross’s method, you’ll find a collection of the artist’s original paintings.

34. You can view more than 400 of Bob Ross’s works in one place.

Two Inch Brush — named after Ross’s brush of choice for the wet-on-wet technique — is an unofficial database that organizes all 403 paintings from “The Joy of Painting” by season and episode.

35. Bob Ross is a Funko toy.

In August 2017, Funko released a vinyl figurine of the iconic artist/television personality. It depicts Ross dressed in his trademark jeans and button-down shirt, holding a painter’s palette. Sadly, it doesn’t come with any miniature paintings of “happy little trees.”

Pregnancy is much more dangerous than abortion — meaning abortion bans like Texas’ will be deadly

Abortion saves lives. I have never felt the truth of this statement as deeply as when I looked into the eyes of a pregnant teenager who wanted but couldn’t get an abortion. Staying pregnant is just not an option for some. Safe abortion provides them a way into their futures. Forcing them to stay pregnant causes harms up to and including death.

Before abortion was made legal nationwide under Roe v. Wade, desperation led millions to seek unsafe abortions. The stories and statistics from that time are chilling. Coat hangers. Hospital wards full of young women in septic shock. Hundreds of deaths a year.

Since the US Supreme Court allowed Texas’ near-total abortion ban to go into law, other states will almost certainly follow suit, enacting total or near-total abortion bans. We should ask what the resulting death toll will be. While the gruesome consequences of illegal abortion before Roe might seem like the best place to look for answers, it’s not likely to be our future – even if more and more states ban abortion earlier and earlier in pregnancy.

Even when abortion is completely illegal, abortion is never gone. But abortion outside of clinics in our post-Roe era will be very different from abortion outside of clinics pre-Roe, because technology and advocacy have changed significantly in the past 50 years. We are likely to see organizations like Plan C organizing to help pregnant people self-manage their abortions safely with the medication misoprostol. Others will be able to travel to states where abortion is still accessible – but how many is very uncertain, as the landscape of abortion access will be radically altered. Some people may turn to other, less safe and less effective methods like herbs, physical methods like being hit in the abdomen, and other desperate measures.

In this changing landscape, there is really no way to estimate precisely how many people will die because of less-safe abortion if abortion is banned in the U.S. or in specific states.

But we know that banning abortion also increases pregnancy-related deaths by forcing people who want abortions to stay pregnant. Without access to abortion, more pregnant people will die simply because staying pregnant is riskier than having an abortion.

Abortion is incredibly safe, with 0.44 deaths per 100,000 procedures in the most recent statistics. Staying pregnant is about 40 times riskier, with 20.1 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2019. Cruelly, the mortality risk of carrying a pregnancy to term is more than three times as high for non-Hispanic Black people compared to non-Hispanic white people.

When you put people at higher risk of death, you should expect more people will die. So in a paper forthcoming in the journal Demography, I demonstrate that banning abortion in the US would increase the number of pregnancy-related deaths by 21% overall and 33% among non-Hispanic Black pregnant people. Any increases due to unsafe abortion would be in addition to these estimates.

These estimates assume that people who currently have abortions would carry their pregnancies to term or experience random miscarriage. This means that helping people self-manage their abortions safely would save lives. Helping people leave their states to get abortions would save lives. And not banning abortion would save lives.

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These estimates are also for the whole US, but the states that are likely to totally or nearly totally ban abortion following the Texas example have higher than average maternal mortality rates. This means that the proportional increases in pregnancy-related death in the states that are most likely to ban abortion may be even greater.

U.S. maternal mortality rates are higher than any other rich nation and – while our peers have achieved steady declines in these rates in recent years – ours have been going up since the 1980s. Denying people wanted abortions means forcibly exposing them to these high, unequal, and increasing risks.

Of course, death is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the harms of denying people abortions. A group of especially rigorous studies has demonstrated that denying people abortions hurts their emotional, physical, social, and economic lives – often for years to come. Simply put, denying people abortions hurts them and their families.

When someone is pregnant and doesn’t want to be, forcing them to remain pregnant forces them into a future they do not want. Because pregnancy is especially dangerous in the United States, forcing someone to remain pregnant can even foreclose on their future entirely. “Abortion saves lives” is more than just a slogan; it is an empirical truth that everyone, no matter their position on the morality of abortion, needs to consider.

Is a patty melt a hamburger or a sandwich? Either way, it’s the best

I’ve realized that the population of my Brooklyn neighborhood, where I’ve lived for a decade, can be divided into buffalo chicken salad people and patty melt people. I put myself in the latter category. One of my favorites was the patty melt they served at beloved local spot MeMe’s Diner, which closed its doors in 2020 but has been reborn as K.I.T., a natural-wine spot that also sells excellent baked goods.

But here’s the question: Is the patty melt a sandwich or a hamburger? Because if it’s a burger, then we enter a minefield of issues that people just love to debate when it comes to things you can grill in the summertime and put between a bun.

“I’m not a philosopher,” Libby Willis, owner of K.I.T., says when I ask her how she’d categorize the melt. “And I do think it’s a philosophy question.”

While I don’t disagree with Willis, I feel confident saying that, yes, a patty melt is a sandwich. It comes between two slices of bread and not a bun. In my opinion, it’s a sandwich in the same way a grilled cheese or a tuna melt is a sandwich. The hamburger patty is invited to the bread’s party, and thus gives up any right to be defined as anything other than a sandwich.

Yet there was something about the patty melt Willis served at MeMe’s (and that she sometimes brings back for the die-hards at K.I.T.) that really got me thinking deeper about the patty melt and why it stands out as a perfect beef sandwich to me, a person who is super picky about a slab of red meat between bread. If you’re going to recommend a Reuben or corned beef sandwich to me somewhere, you’d best hope it stands up. I’ve had more than my share of bad smoked-meat sandwiches, and I just don’t have the cholesterol to spare.

The patty melt, on the other hand, is a little less difficult to screw up. Why? You take the bread and “fry it in butter and put American cheese on it,” just like Willis says. Add your beef and some caramelized onions, and that’s pretty much it. Super simple. Beyond the beef, it has three things that bring most everybody joy: fried, butter-soaked carbs; onions that look like they stayed on the beach too long; and beautiful, processed-to-the-moon-and-back yellow American cheese. It’s the most “If this is wrong, I don’t want to be right” type of meal there is. Willis puts comeback sauce on hers, but if you want just ketchup or just mayo or ketchup and mayo, you do you. I personally don’t think it needs any of that, but to each their own.

There is also something undeniably classic about the patty melt, which supposedly originated at the California-based chain Tiny Naylor’s at some point in the middle of the 20th century. It has the feel of a big American idea, born out of earnest ambition. It was a way to stand out, but also something Tiny Naylor’s wanted people to enjoy. And there seems to be some thought put into the sandwich — not just a bunch of things plopped together.

Willis certainly believed in it. When she was opening MeMe’s with her old partners, there was a lot of testing, going to diners, and finally making her own. “There was a lot of trial and error, like, how do we put the condiments on it, and what are the condiments? And it was clear that it was all of the condiments mixed into one.” She also knew what she didn’t want: lettuce and tomato. “I don’t want those anywhere near my patty melt. The bread is hot. You’re not supposed to put cold things on it.”

It all comes back to the bread. Maybe that’s what drew me to the MeMe’s patty melt in the first place. This will probably upend my argument that the patty melt is a sandwich, but the first time I tried it, I was instantly brought back to a place we used to go to on special occasions when I was a kid, called Hackney’s. Known for two things, its French-fried onion loaf and its Chicagoland-famous Hackneyburger, Hackney’s was always ahead of the fancy-burger curve. It was a nice burger restaurant in a sea of fast food choices, and the only place I remember as a kid where you sat down to order a burger with a white napkin in your lap. Today, that’s normal, but in 1989? I don’t think it was as much of a thing. And while the patty held its own, the thing that really wowed people in those more innocent times was that they served it between two slices of rye bread.

Now, bringing it all back to the sandwich vs. burger debate, I’ll conclude that I believe it’s all about intention. If you make a patty with the intention of serving it like a burger, with tomato and sliced onions and lettuce, then it’s a burger. But the patty melt is not that. And the one Willis makes is extra special because she goes out of her way to locate seedless (very important since the bread is fried) marbled rye, and there aren’t many places that do that for some reason or another. So on the rare occasion K.I.T. brings this famous sandwich out of retirement, it’s a real event for me and the other patty-meltheads in my part of Brooklyn. It’s a special occasion patty melt. And, really, while I’m a fan of nearly anything between two slices of bread, nothing beats a special occasion sandwich.

What our Spotify playlists reveal about the emotional nature of financial markets

We like to think our purchase decisions are based on rational calculations and facts, but we know they are often driven by emotions, too. When we splurge on nice food, clothes or electronic gadgets, are we really thinking in terms of cost and benefit, or are we responding to stress, frustration, happiness or excitement?

The same can be asked of financial markets. The famous “efficient markets hypothesis” argues that stock prices are driven by rational calculations. But traders are human and humans are affected by emotions. Do these emotions feed through to the stock market?

Studying this question is difficult because people’s emotions aren’t observable. While emotions do manifest in observable actions, many such actions (aggressive behaviour or language, for example) are not captured by any data.

But what if there was a way to measure the overall mood of a country and relate that to the behaviour of financial markets? In the age of Spotify, this has become a real possibility.

Our research, published in the Journal of Financial Economics, uses the music people listen to as a measure of national sentiment affecting market behaviour. It builds on the concept of a “mood congruence” — that people’s music choices reflect their mood (sad songs at funerals, happy songs at parties and so on).

Spotify provides aggregated listening data across a country, as well as an algorithm that classifies the positivity or negativity of each song. Using these inputs, we calculate “music sentiment” — a measure of a country’s sentiment as expressed by the positivity of the songs its citizens listen to.

How is sentiment usually measured?

Investor sentiment is often defined as the general mood among investors regarding a particular market or asset. While this definition is widely accepted, it’s challenging to construct a pure measure of mood that isn’t complicated by economics.

Many natural measures – consumer confidence, GDP growth, unemployment, coronavirus cases and deaths – have direct economic effects. So, for example, if a high consumer confidence index sees the stock market rise, this doesn’t necessarily suggest emotions directly affect the stock market.

Rather, the rise could be a rational response to an improvement in the business and employment conditions the index is based on. One alternative, then, is to look for other “mood proxies” as viable indicators of national sentiment.

Previous research on investor sentiment has used shocks that affect the national mood but not the economy, such as the results of major sports tournaments.

However, other factors may affect mood – a country could lose a sports game but also enjoy falling COVID cases. Hence our proposed alternative way of capturing the mood of individuals using national Spotify data.

Using music to measure sentiment

One concern with music listening data is that people may choose music to neutralise their mood rather than reflect it — listening to upbeat music to cure a downbeat mood, for example.

We show this is not the case. Music sentiment is more positive during sunnier and lengthening days. Research has already shown these to be high mood periods, as are those times when COVID restrictions are lifted.

The novelty of our study, therefore, lies in finding a measure that reflects national mood. A citizen’s music choices reflect their mood regardless of what caused it — soccer results, COVID cases or anything else.

Indeed, Spotify listening data have been shown to predict consumer confidence more accurately than standard consumer confidence surveys.

Stock markets overreact to sentiment

Linking our sentiment measure with the stock markets, we find that higher music sentiment is associated with higher returns to a country’s stock market during the same week. It also leads to lower returns the next week, suggesting the initial reaction was a temporary one driven by sentiment.

One might argue these results show only a spurious correlation, similar to the “Superbowl effect” where the identity of the Superbowl winner predicts U.S. stock markets, even though there is no rational or behavioural reason for that.

But we show our result holds across 40 countries and is not driven by a couple of outliers skewing the data. We also show the result is robust across asset classes. While our main results consider stocks, we also find high music sentiment is associated with greater purchases of equity mutual funds.

High music sentiment is also correlated with lower returns to government bonds, indicating that investors switch out of safe bonds into risky stocks.

Why music sentiment matters

The point of our study is not to uncover a profitable trading strategy. We do not suggest investors should calculate music sentiment and use it to predict the stock market.

Instead, using a novel measure that reflects national sentiment and is available in 40 countries, we want to show emotions affect the stock market. This suggests investors should be wary of their own emotions when making investment decisions.

Our findings also imply that sentiment rather than fundamentals could drive rising stock prices – of electric vehicles or artificial intelligence products, for instance. Therefore, investors should be wary of buying into a bubble or selling in a crash.

Moreover, this study demonstrates the power of big data to reveal aggregate ongoing sentiment. Unlike sporting events, which are infrequent, music is enjoyed everywhere all the time. Being a universal language, music enables us to construct a comparative measure of national sentiment, in real time, around the world.

Ivan Indriawan, Senior Lecturer in Finance, Auckland University of Technology; Adrian Fernandez-Perez, Senior Research Fellow in Finance, Auckland University of Technology; Alexandre Garel, Chercheur en Finance, Audencia, and Alex Edmans, Professor of Finance, Academic Director, Centre for Corporate Governance, London Business School

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

George W. Bush compares domestic “extremists” to 9/11 attackers: “Children of the same foul spirit”

As a part of his speech to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, former President George W. Bush also called out domestic “extremists” — saying they share much in common with the religious fundamentalists who seek the destruction of America for ideological reasons.

He made the comments during a somber, 10-minute address given in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, near the spot where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed that day after passengers overwhelmed several al Qaeda hijackers who had taken control of the plane.

Bush reflected on how America was able to come together following the attacks — and how that spirit of unity has seemingly evaporated in recent years.

“Many Americans struggled to understand why an enemy would hate us with such zeal,” Bush said. “The security measures incorporated into our lives are both sources of comfort and reminders of our vulnerability and we have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders but from violence that gathers within.”

“There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, disregard for human life. In their determination to defile national symbols they are children of the same foul spirit and it is our continuing duty to confront them.”

Despite the current state of American politics, Bush also made an appeal for the country to remember what it felt like in the days following Sept. 11, 2001.

“When it comes to unity of America, those days seem distant from our own,” he said. “Malign force seems at work in our common life … so much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear and resentment.”

“I come without explanations or solutions — I can only tell you what I’ve seen. On America’s day of trial and grief, I saw millions of Americans instinctively grab for a neighbor’s hand, and instinctively rally to the cause of one another. That’s the America I know.”

Watch below via CNN:

More from Salon on the 20th anniversary of September 11:

Too soon, or too late? Who got canceled after 9/11, and why

When my then-wife got me out of the shower on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, to tell me that someone had flown a plane into one of the Twin Towers, my first thought was not just selfish — which is normal — but deeply mundane. I suspected that the meeting about a radio documentary project I had scheduled later that day would probably be canceled, and that the entire project might be in trouble.

Of course the rest of the day — and the week, the year, the decade — took rather a different turn a few minutes later, when the second plane hit the second tower. I didn’t think about that documentary again for quite a while. (It never happened.) But at least that first perception that this event would be a major disruption to ordinary life was correct, whereas so many of the things we thought or believed or concluded in the disorienting aftermath of the 9/11 attacks were simply not true.

I lived in midtown Manhattan at the time, and I don’t need to tell anyone who was there that it was a life-changing, before-and-after event, quite different — in terms of sound and silence, sights and smells, and emotional resonance — from what people experienced elsewhere. But no matter where we lived, we had the unmistakable feeling that “the world has changed,” to quote the opening scene of Peter Jackson’s “The Fellowship of the Ring,” which was semi-accidentally released a few months after the attacks.

So it had — but not in a good way, as most of the American public agrees, 20 years later. A brief moment of national reflection, reckoning and mourning rapidly gave way to the radically opposed energies of jingoism, racism, paranoia and war fever.

We didn’t just surrender all previous norms about privacy and empower a vast surveillance bureaucracy whose true scope and abilities remain a state secret, but did so eagerly. Cynical opportunists in the Bush administration seized on the temporary longing for national unity to push for an ambitious military campaign meant to reshape the entire Middle East, revealed in the event as one of the most hubristic and self-destructive wars ever launched by any nation. But let’s not forget that a large majority of the public and nearly all the national media, including a startling number of “liberals,” rode along with enthusiasm, erotically aroused by the promise of seeing America’s damaged masculinity renewed on a world stage (at the expense of nameless brown people who lived in distant, dusty places and might or might not be “terrorists” or their allies).

I could name names; I’m talking about people I worked with, people I liked. But in the interest of healing and moving on — not that either of those things has happened — I guess I won’t.

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And then there were the thought-police pronouncements: Irony was dead, certain guardians of culture proclaimed; sincerity was the order of the day. Even beyond the fact that those were idiotic, reductive uses of those words and that historical irony was very much not dead, as the succeeding two decades would bear out, it wasn’t clear what that was supposed to mean. Was it just that snarky humor was inappropriate to this moment of grave national purpose — or was it that the supposedly flip, supposedly hip, non-earnest attitudes of Gen X cultural consumers had revealed a moral weakness, and invited the terrorist attacks as a sort of divine reality check?

In a strange way, that points us directly at “too soon,” which has since become an ironic cultural punchline — see what I did there? — but at the time was almost always a way of deflecting things we actually needed to hear. More specifically, it was a way to fend off any attempt to step back from 9/11 and consider it in historical or cultural context, rather than as a uniquely appalling injury to the soaring American spirit. Actual things happened on that day — tall buildings fell down and nearly 3,000 people died — but those became secondary to 9/11 as a sacred signifier, whose meaning is fixed in place. Any effort to reinterpret the real events, or to question the mythology built up around them, is always by definition “too soon.”

Let’s consider three key examples of “too soon,” in what may well be the only time these people will ever appear in the same article: the TV comedian Bill Maher, the French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard and the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Although their cases were different (and I doubt Maher had ever heard of the other two), they were also strikingly similar: A trio of contentious and self-important dudes from the culture zone, who thrived on outraging what we would now call the “normies,” suddenly found out that you weren’t allowed to do that anymore. All three were accused of justifying terrorism or apologizing for it or covertly supporting it, which they absolutely did not do. Furthermore, from the perspective of 2021, all three were speaking truths that “we” — meaning the fearful, bewildered, myth-making collective psychology of turn-of-the-century America — did not want to hear.

Maher and Stockhausen’s cases come first, within a day of each other and within a week of the actual attacks on New York and Washington. It’s interesting (to me, anyway) that in the decades since 9/11 Maher’s preening, self-glorifying brand of political comedy has slid slightly but noticeably rightward, into the “yeah I’m a liberal but let’s get real” zone as well as the atheist-but-mostly-Islamophobic zone previously colonized by Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris.

Maher ultimately lost his first talk show, which was then on ABC and called “Politically Incorrect,” for saying this on Sept. 17, 2001, after George W. Bush had described the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks as cowards: “We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.”

I mean, every part of that was true, but the damaging part was not the observation that Mohamed Atta and his comrades were not cowards — which was obvious to anyone with functioning brain cells — but rather “We have been the cowards,” which began to point toward uncomfortable explanations of “why they hate us” and why anyone would want to do such an awful thing to such a wonderful country. Calling the 9/11 hijackers cowards is just an infantile insult, as if we expected a group of religious fanatics who numbered in the dozens to march onto the battlefield and declare war against the greatest military power in human history. You might as well call George Washington a coward for pursuing an asymmetrical guerrilla strike-force strategy against the British Army.

Stockhausen’s case is especially instructive because of who he was and how quickly everyone in classical music, and even in the tiny and rarefied world of avant-garde “new music,” ran away from him. He was a difficult and sometimes disagreeable person who believed in spiritualism and angels and astrology and all sorts of other illogical things, and he was also a visionary composer who combined symphonic and electronic elements in ways that have shaped what contemporary film and TV and video game music, and a lot of pop music, sounds like now. Even if you’ve never knowingly heard anything Stockhausen composed (which is likely), you live in a world full of sounds he inspired.

Five days after the 9/11 attacks, Stockhausen, who was then 73, gave an interview in Hamburg relating to his enormous seven-opera sequence “Licht” (“Light”), which is somewhat about the religious and cultural significance of the days of the week and features Eve, Lucifer and the archangel Michael as central figures. He brought up the attacks, saying, “I pray daily to Michael, but not to Lucifer. I have renounced him. But he is very much present, like in New York recently.” A journalist then asked how the events of 9/11 had affected him, and he said this:

Well, what happened there is, of course — now all of you must adjust your brains — the biggest work of art there has ever been. The fact that spirits achieve with one act something which we in music could never dream of, that people practice 10 years madly, fanatically for a concert. And then die. And that is the greatest work of art that exists for the whole cosmos. Just imagine what happened there. There are people who are so concentrated on this single performance, and then 5,000 people are driven to resurrection in one moment. I couldn’t do that. Compared to that, we are nothing, as composers. … It is a crime, you know, of course, because the people did not agree to it. They did not come to the “concert.” That is obvious. And nobody had told them: “You could be killed in the process.”

There’s a lot you can say about that, including that it was tonally clueless, which was nothing new. Stockhausen should have said the part about it being a crime first, and for that matter should have saved the entire insight for his personal journal. He walked right into the media buzzsaw, which announced that the crazy old Kraut composer had said 9/11 was the greatest work of art ever. In an especially disgraceful article, Anthony Tomassini, then the classical music critic for the New York Times, took the money quotes completely out of context and effectively declared Stockhausen an unperson.

But when you read the whole thing — and yes, this is an interpretation — it feels like he was the first person to say out loud that we were all impressed by the scale of the achievement of the 9/11 attacks, but that we did not know what to do with that reaction. The exaggerated scale of our response, featuring 20 years of pointless warfare, “Terrorist Hunting Permits” on every F-150 in the heartland and a display of public grief that was impossible to distinguish from kitsch, testifies to the power of what Stockhausen calls “this single performance.”

That brings us to Baudrillard’s “L’esprit du terrorisme,” which provoked a horrified reaction when it was published in English translation (but under its French title) in Harper’s in February 2002. I’ve written about that essay on several previous occasions: It strikes me not just as a brilliant early attempt to place 9/11 in a historical and psychological context but possibly as the best single work of Baudrillard’s problematic career as a cultural critic.

His central premise, to boil it all the way down, is that the call is coming from inside the house. It was no good talking about “us” and “them,” or a clash of civilizations; 9/11 represented Western civilization’s death wish pushing to the surface, reflecting a “deep-seated complicity” between the global capitalist order and those who would destroy it. “The West, in the position of God,” he wrote, “has become suicidal, and declared war on itself.”

Here I might as well quote what I wrote in 2018, observing that Baudrillard’s essay written many years earlier also seemed to describe the rise of Donald Trump:

In the most famous and most controversial passages of his essay, Baudrillard described the collapse of the Twin Towers as “a fiction surpassing fiction,” a “Manhattan disaster movie” that combined the 20th century’s “two elements of mass fascination”: “the white magic of the cinema and the black magic of terrorism.” He was not denying that real people died in the towers, only saying that nearly all of us consumed that dreadful event as a media spectacle. There are premonitions of a certain reality-show celebrity turned politician who subverted an entire campaign cycle here as well, in the observation that the terrorists exploited the media economy and its “instantaneous worldwide transmission” of spectacle, but that none of us could resist its power: “There is no ‘good’ use of the media; the media are part of the event, they are part of the terror, and they work in both directions.”

Consciously or otherwise, Baudrillard was embroidering atop the things that Maher and Stockhausen had already said: We understood that the terrorists had done something daring and spectacular that had changed our relationship to reality. But we didn’t want to admit it, or to think about its significance. He went on to argue, almost uncannily, that our “gigantic abreaction” was likely to give them a major victory. The “whole ideology of freedom … on which the Western world prided itself, and on which it drew to exert its hold over the rest of the world” would likely be sacrificed in favor of “a police-state globalization, a total control, a terror based on ‘law-and-order’ measures.”

This, as one letter published by Harper’s expressed it, apparently amounted to “the shocking assertion that terrorism is justifiable, that the threat of globalization, as visualized by Baudrillard, justified the World Trade Center attack.” He hadn’t said anything like that, of course. But that letter, like the “too soon” version of cancel culture in general, was yearning for some kind of cultural or national consensus that was already gone.

A day or two after my wife pulled me out of the shower on that September morning, a good friend said to me that “they” — meaning the hijackers, the terrorists — wouldn’t get anything they wanted. I agreed with her in the moment, but it all depends: If they wanted the American empire to reveal itself as the greatest paper tiger of all time, cowardly and easily confused, eager to abandon all its so-called principles and show its flabby ass to the world for a wholly imaginary promise of security, then they literally got it all. The people who were “too soon” tried to warn us, but we didn’t want to listen and now it’s too late.

on the 20th anniversary of September 11:

An entire generation of Americans has no idea how easy air travel used to be

During the mid-1990s I traveled between Dayton, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., twice a month during the school year as half of a commuting couple. I could leave Dayton by 5:15 p.m., drive nearly 80 miles to the Columbus airport during rush hour, park my car in the economy lot, and still get to my gate in plenty of time for a 7:30 p.m. departure.

Then 9/11 happened.

The terrorist attacks brought swift and lasting changes to the air travel experience in the United States. And after 20 years of ever-more-elaborate airport security protocols, many air travelers have no knowledge of – or only vague memories of – what air travel was like before 9/11.

As someone who has studied the history of airports in the United States – and someone old enough to remember air travel before 9/11 – I find it striking, on the one hand, how reluctant the federal government, the airlines, and airports were to adopt early security measures.

On the other hand, it’s been jarring to watch how abruptly the sprawling Transportation Security Agency system was created – and how quickly American air travelers came to accept those security measures as both normal and seemingly permanent features of all U.S. airports.

Security Kabuki

In the early decades of air travel, airport security – beyond basic policing – was essentially nonexistent. Getting on a plane was no different from getting on a bus or train.

But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a wave of hijackings, terrorist attacks and extortion attempts – the most infamous being that of the man known as D.B. Cooper, who commandeered a Boeing 727, demanded $200,000 and, upon securing the case, dramatically parachuted from the plane, never to be found.

Attacks on U.S. flights usually prompted another new security measure, whether it was the formation of the air marshal program, which placed armed federal agents on U.S. commercial aircraft; the development of a hijacker profile, aimed at identifying people deemed likely to threaten an aircraft; or the screening of all passengers.

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By 1973, under the new protocols, air travelers had to pass through a metal detector and have any bags X-rayed to check for weapons or suspicious objects.

For the most part, however, these measures were intended to reassure nervous flyers – security theater that sought to minimally impede easy passage from check-in to gate. For domestic travel, it was possible to arrive at the airport terminal 20 to 30 minutes before your flight and still be able to reach the gate in time to board. Families and friends could easily accompany a traveler to their gate for take-off and meet them at the gate upon their return.

Above all, airlines didn’t want to inconvenience passengers, and airports were reluctant to lose the extra revenue from family and friends who might frequent airport restaurants, bars and shops when dropping off or picking up those passengers.

In addition, these security measures, though called for by the Federal Aviation Administration, were the responsibility of not the federal government, but the airlines. And to keep costs down, the airlines tended to contract private companies to conduct security screenings that used minimally trained low-paid employees.

The clampdown

All that changed with the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Once the airlines returned to the skies on September 14, 2001, it was immediately apparent that flying was going to be different. Passengers arriving at airports were greeted by armed military personnel, as governors throughout the country had mobilized the National Guard to protect the nation’s airports. They remained on patrol for several months.

Security measures only increased in December 2001, when Richard Reid, the so-called “Shoe Bomber,” attempted to set off explosives in his shoes on an international flight from Paris to Miami. Taking off your shoes before passing through security quickly became a requirement.

Then, in 2006, British officials intercepted an attempt to carry liquid explosives aboard a flight, resulting in a ban on all liquids. This was later modified to restricting passengers to liquids of no more than 3.4 ounces. By 2010, the full-body scanner had become a familiar sight at airports throughout the U.S.

A 2019 study indicated that the average time to get through security at some of the nation’s busiest airports varied from just over 23 minutes at Newark Liberty to 16.3 minutes at Seattle-Tacoma, but could go as high as 60 minutes and 34 minutes, respectively, at those same two airports during peak times.

These new security measures became the responsibility of the federal government to enforce. In November 2001, Congress created the Transportation Security Agency, and by the early months of 2002, their employees had become the face of transportation security throughout the United States – at airports as well as railroads, subways and other forms of transportation.

Today, the TSA employs over 50,000 agents.

No end in sight

In the first decade after 9/11, the federal government spent over $62 billion on airport security in total, as annual spending for the TSA increased from $4.34 billion in 2002 to $7.23 billion in 2011, and has only grown since then.

In many ways, the post-9/11 scramble by airport officials to address security concerns was similar to the impulse to address public health concerns in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, when plastic barriers, hand sanitizers and floor markings encouraging social distancing appeared at airports throughout the U.S.

How long the COVID-19 measures will need to stay in place remains to be seen. However, the security measures adopted after 9/11 have proved permanent enough that they have become incorporated into recent airport terminal renovations.

For example, when Reagan National Airport’s new terminal opened in 1997, passengers could move freely between the shop- and restaurant-filled National Hall and the gates in Terminals B and C. After 9/11, airport officials placed security checkpoints at the entrances to Terminals B and C, effectively making shops and restaurants no longer accessible to passengers who had passed through security.

Now, the almost-completed $1 billion redesign will move the security checkpoints to a new building constructed above the airport’s roadway and open up access among National Hall, Terminals B and C and a new commuter terminal.

Nearly a generation has passed since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Even those of us old enough to remember air travel before that fateful date have grown accustomed to the new normal. And while passengers today might quite happily mark the eventual end of the COVID-19 public health security measures, they’re far less likely to see a return to pre-9/11 security levels at the airport anytime soon.

Janet Bednarek, Professor of History, University of Dayton

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

More from Salon on the 20th anniversary of September 11:

Bill Maher says “the left” is embarrassing him — and complains about the ‘Black National Anthem’

HBO “Real Time” host Bill Maher returned to the airwaves on Friday and once again discussed his rightward shift politically.

“To me, when people say to me sometimes, like, ‘Boy, you know, you go after the left a lot these days. Why?’ Because you’re embarrassing me,” Maher explained.

His comments came his all-white panel discussed racism being discussed in schools.

“I mean, I saw last night on the football game, Alisha Keys sang ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ which, now I hear is called the ‘Black National Anthem.’ Now maybe we should get rid of our national anthem, but I think we should have one national anthem,” Maher said.

Watch via HBO:

As unvaccinated patients overrun critical care resources, doctors forced to consider care rationing

In July, Nashville, Tennessee-based shock jock Phil Valentine produced a song called “Vaxman” – a parody of The Beatles’ “Taxman” – that mocked COVID-19 vaccinations. Briefly after he posted the song, Valentine said he had been diagnosed with the virus, but he was taking vitamins and ivermectin and expected to be fine.

Valentine, 61, died on August 21 after being on a respirator and then intubated. His family said he regretted not getting vaccinated and urged others to get the shots.

When the news broke, some social media followers offered condolences. Others, however, asked why someone who could have gotten a safe free, vaccine, was taking up needed critical care medical resources, like an ICU bed and respirator, when COVID-19 cases were surging.

Worse, some noted, Valentine used his locally popular radio show to persuade others not to get vaccinated thus, arguably, making the pandemic worse.

Phil Valentine certainly did have "an enormous impact on the lives of many Tennesseans." He convinced people not to get vaccinated, and then when he got COVID he took up an ICU bed and ventilator for weeks that could have saved people who got sick because of him. https://t.co/h0DaRwF5Pf

— Nasty Woman (@HandToForehead) August 24, 2021

Since Valentine’s death, several more outspoken opponents of vaccinations have died from complications due to COVID-19, including Florida talk show host Marc Bernier, 65, who went so far as to liken the government’s endorsement of vaccines to “acting like Nazis.”

pic.twitter.com/uodfGyZHLt

— Rational Mystic (@spiritjuiceee) August 29, 2021

Valentine’s plight, and the reaction to it, highlights an ongoing medical ethics question that has forced the medical industry and the public to focus on a horrific question: when hospitals are overwhelmed with unvaccinated adult COVID-19 patients, limiting their ability to provide medical care for some, how might hospitals ration care?

The debate emerges at a political moment during which, among much of the vaccinated public, ire towards the unvaccinated has already reached a fever pitch. “I am mad at [t]he willfully unvaccinated, people who, out of irrationality and often raw Republican tribalism, got us into this mess in the first place,” Salon contributor Amanda Marcotte wrote. “I am incandescent with rage that millions of Americans are putting it on the rest of us to protect them from COVID-19, just so they can avoid a simple, free shot that is available at every pharmacy.”

Thus, the question of care rationing towards a population that — some might argue — is willfully putting their lives and others’ lives at risk, is not merely a fair topic of conversation, but necessary given the dire condition in many American hospitals. And though it is spoken of in hushed tones among some healthcare providers, who say they have faced “retribution” for merely discussing care rationing, such moral calculus is not a luxury in the face of resource limitations. Indeed, the debate over care rationing has grown more urgent as COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths continue to rise, especially in those regions of the U.S. with lower levels of vaccination.

Those who need ICUs and respirators aren’t just people showing up at ERs with COVID-19. They include a retired physician, the father of Khary Payton – best known for playing King Ezekiel on “The Walking Dead.” Payton tweeted on August 30 that his father couldn’t get treatment for a rare form of leukemia because transplant wards were being used for COVID-19 ICU overflow.

“A lot of people who don’t trust doctors like my dad … didn’t get vaccinated and wouldn’t wear a mask but they went ahead and took my dad’s bed when they got so sick they could barely breathe,” Payton said on Twitter. “Now my pop’s life is in the balance.”

Some of you know my dad. He was your doctor or your kid’s doctor, or your grandkid’s doctor. You love Dr. Payton and his rye since of humor. He was there when you were sick. Some of you got real sick and saw my dad in GO MODE. He saved some of your lives.

— Khary Payton (@kharypayton) August 30, 2021

So the availability of a free, safe vaccine – and the existence of a large populace that refuses to be vaccinated and urging others to refuse – in some people’s minds changes the debate. Not only among laypeople and the commentariat, but among healthcare professionals.

“I can’t tell you how many emails I’ve had in the last 48 hours talking about this; those of us working with the National Academies right now are going around and around on this issue,” Dr. Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said in a Zoom interview.

“Some believe you can make an ethical case for including vaccination status in a ventilation or other critical care algorithm,” Toner said, adding that he, personally, wasn’t convinced that would be an acceptable criterion.

Toner was part of a Maryland task force that developed one of the existing large-scale plans for medical triage – also known as crisis standards of care – during a catastrophic public health emergency. The impetus for that plan, finalized in 2017, were emerging public health threats like the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus and Ebola.

The Maryland plan presciently noted “modeling studies suggest that an influenza pandemic similar to that of 1918 would require intensive care unit (ICU) and mechanical ventilation capacity that is many orders of magnitude greater than what is available.”

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A year-and-a-half into the pandemic, that time has arrived, at least in some areas of the country. Idaho Governor Brad Little, a Republican, described a “heartbreaking” tour of a Boise, Idaho ICU in an August 31 video, saying all the COVID-19 patients in that wing were unvaccinated.

“On a daily call with hospitals this morning, we heard there are only four adult ICU beds available in the entire state out of close to 400,” he said.

If that situation continued, Little said, “in essence, someone would have to decide who could be treated, and who could not.”

Idaho, historically a politically conservative state, has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country, with only 39.5% of its population fully vaccinated as of September 6, according to the Mayo Clinic based on data from the Centers for Disease Control.

On September 7, Little’s warning became reality in northern Idaho when the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare activated its crisis standards of care for that part of the state.

Even a state that has a higher vaccination rate, like Florida, with 53.8% fully vaccinated, is experiencing a surge of cases and mortality – reaching a 7-day average of 335 deaths – the most ever by September 3, according to data compiled by the New York Times. Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has variously been opposed to public health initiatives, including instituting a policy that schools couldn’t mandate mask wearing.

But the degree to which hospitals are overwhelmed, and the notion that care rationing may be a necessity soon for many hospitals, is not widely known among members of the public.

John Moskop, a professor of bioethics at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, speaking on an April virtual panel discussing allocation of critical care resources, said that though a state plan had been formulated, to his knowledge there was no public education effort about it.

“I think our state officials thought if we formally educate it will cause lots of pushback, concern, we don’t want to necessarily have to deal with that,” he said.

The only thing that seems to change people’s behavior is personal knowledge of someone being hospitalized with COVID-19, said Dr. Greg Martin, professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia and the president of the Society of Critical Care Medicine.

“It might make people more proactive and protective of themselves and others,” he said, adding, “but that message has been out there for months.”

Care rationing isn’t merely about the number of hospital beds in the ICU, or the number of respirators available for patients who can’t breathe on their own. Care is also limited by the number of skilled staff needed to run the highly specialized equipment that makes previously terminal conditions potentially survivable.

Besides crowded ICUs and more hours, the very act of deciding which patients get lifesaving resources – and which don’t – is a huge source of stress, Toner said in an email.

Healthcare workers “are experiencing real moral injury and extreme stress and this is an additional driver of the critical staffing shortage that now exists and leads to more crisis standards of care conditions,” he said.

In a recent National Academy of Medicine paper asking what was learned about crisis standards of care during the pandemic, the authors, including Toner, thanked healthcare providers for talking to them openly about their experiences.

However, they added a chilling note: “the authors are not able to share the specific details, as some of these colleagues have suffered professional retribution for raising these issues or being willing to have open and honest discussion of the tactics that were implemented.”

How September 11, 2001 became the borderline dividing two eras of late-night comedy

In a recent episode of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher”, right wing lobbyist Ralph Reed actually poses a legitimately relevant question about the state of late-night topical humor.

“When did comedy become reductionist politics?” the Faith and Freedom Coalition Chairman asks. Maher answers, “When everything became partisan. When it became more important to cheer for your team than to actually have a laugh.”

It’s not often that I find myself in agreement with Maher, but here he’s at least halfway correct. Late-night shows never avoided politics, but the landscape has become increasingly partisan over the last 20 years, tacking more extremely in that direction since the 2016 presidential campaign season and that election.

Maher didn’t assign an approximate date to this tonal changeover, which is somewhat strange given how abruptly the attacks of September 11, 2001 changed his own career. In another respect, that’s understandable. Maher likes to process the world as it relates to him and burnishes his point of view. Over the same period he’s said plenty of horrifying things and fueled a slew of “WTF?” headlines.

That same behavior won him enough of a loyal fanbase to earn his show two more seasons on HBO, ensuring we’ll be shaking our head at the man on a regular basis through 2024.

Still, in his reply to Reed, Maher sidesteps an important piece of 9/11-related history. Lots of people remember that on September 17, 2001, David Letterman resumed “The Late Show with David Letterman,” opening that broadcast with a sincere admission of feeling adrift in the wake of such unparalleled tragedy. His heartfelt words demonstrated a sincere level of commiseration with his audience, and his subsequent conversation with Regis Philbin was viewed as his way of giving people permission to laugh again.

Twenty years later Letterman’s opener is still recalled as a lighthouse guiding comics and other hosts out of that tragedy’s fog.

Somewhat forgotten is the detail that on the exact same date, Maher shared the opinion that would eventually lead ABC to cancel his show “Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher“: he said that the terrorists who hijacked the planes that downed the World Trade Center towers and crashed into the Pentagon were not cowards. “We have been the cowards,” he said, “lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly.”

If ever there was an example of “Too soon?” in action, that was it. But on the scale between Maher’s tone-deaf gaffe and Letterman’s considerate act of reassurance, late night comedy has steadily glided closer to the HBO host’s side.

This is not his doing, mind you, or Letterman’s. It is largely thanks to Jon Stewart’s stewardship of “The Daily Show.”

Comedy Central’s late night flagship turned 25 in July, but in the months and years after 9/11 it found its distinct purpose. Stewart was already lampooning the news before that, but with mainstream TV news’ skepticism concerning the Bush administration’s justifications for war decreasing and the influence of hawkish, extremist cable news punditry rising, “The Daily Show” secured its legacy by meeting the dangerous absurdity creeping into the news cycle with relentlessly sobering satire.

“Our show has changed . . . I don’t doubt that. What it’s become, I don’t know,” Stewart said when “The Daily Show” returned on September 20, 2001, for its first broadcast after 9/11.

Then he said something that viewed from 20 years hence might be considered meaningful. “‘Subliminable’ is not a punchline anymore.” Bush did not suddenly became an eloquent orator overnight; nor did comedians lay off the verbal stumblebum-in-chief. But that statement may have been a preview of the way the disaster necessitated a sharpening of political comedy’s edge.

Stewart’s honing of “The Daily Show” into a blunt force instrument wrapped in punchlines served a purpose that wasn’t being fulfilled by “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” or other broadcast late-night talk shows.

To Leno, “subliminable” and its like remained fair game, much in the same way his predecessor Johnny Carson feasted off tabloid scandal that, for example, ensnared a former senator photographed with two women who weren’t his wife on a yacht called the Monkey Business, sailing to a very funny sounding place called Bimini. The jokes wrote themselves; they were also toothless.

But as the destruction in New York and Washington D.C. began to recede in the memory, and war in Iraq and Afghanistan ramped up, a large portion of the country wasn’t in the mood to giggle at malapropisms or oddly titled destinations. This is how “The Daily Show” and its first spinoff, “The Colbert Report,” siphoned young viewers and their trust away from real news organizations and professional journalists.

A Pew Research report from 2007 reminds us of how quickly trust in mainstream media eroded after 9/11, mostly in the face of opinion shows passing off what Stephen Colbert famous called “truthiness” as fact. Respondents ranked Katie Couric, Bill O’Reilly and Charles Gibson as the most admired news figures, with Stewart tied for fourth place alongside Dan Rather, Brian Williams, Anderson Cooper and Tom Brokaw. He even outranked Jim Lehrer and, get this, Walter Cronkite.

Taking all of this into account, CBS choosing Colbert to replace Letterman when he retired was natural. And of course HBO and TBS would seize the opportunity to launch their own topical comedy programs helmed by Stewart-era alums John Oliver and Samantha Bee, respectively, after “The Daily Show” changed over to the Trevor Noah era.

Nor is it surprising that NBC tapped “Saturday Night Live” Weekend Update host Seth Meyers to replace Jimmy Fallon on “Late Night” when Fallon inherited “The Tonight Show” in 2014. “Tonight” is obligated to shoot down the center, but Meyers’ knack of distilling political headlines and social flashpoints into pointed jokes and bits is different from what Fallon offers. He gives the broadcast network a way of competing in the market “The Daily Show” created and, until recently, had cornered.

Left-leaning hosts aren’t the only ones capitalizing on the template established by “The Daily Show” during the Bush era. In April, Fox gave Greg Gutfeld his own post-primetime talk show, and in August it made headlines by overtaking “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” in total viewership ratings as well as in the 25-to-54 age demographic.

Whether “Gutfeld!” is funny is a matter of personal taste. In many ways its quality isn’t relevant, since it is tapping into an audience whose humor hasn’t been centered in entertainment in a targeted way – outside of political rallies, that is.

September 11, 2001 isn’t solely responsible for these transformations. Conservative media already was on the rise, giving Stewart and other comics plenty of fodder to tear into.

However, we can view it as a distinct dividing line. In a previous era the late night talk show’s primary task was sending viewers into slumber with a smile on our faces and stars in our eyes. Some remain primarily devoted to this purpose.

But the shows heralded for their social relevance and political necessity in 2021 earn that designation because they are cathartic release valves helping us to make sense of injustice, corruption and the anxiety-inducing cultural upheaval that’s been simmering to a boil for two decades. We turn to them for reassurance that we’re not crazy, and for confirmation that the world certainly is. And they remind us that sometimes the sanest means of processing sorrow and fear is to find ways to joke about them.

More from Salon on the 20th anniversary of September 11:

9/11 and the birth of the Big Lie

What drove this country crazy after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11? Was it how vulnerable we had been shown to be, that a group of 19 men armed with nothing more than box-cutters could bring the entire country to a halt? Was it that the attack was aimed primarily against innocent civilians, with nearly 3,000 killed at the Twin Towers alone? Was it that with the 19 hijackers dead in the suicidal attacks, we didn’t seem to have anyone to retaliate against? Was it that we had no grasp whatsoever on understanding why our country, the freest and most democratic ever, was hated so much that they would attack us?

I remember how disconnected things felt for days, even weeks, after the attacks. Travelers outside the country didn’t have a way to get home because flights had been canceled. People stranded in cities they were visiting within the country couldn’t find cars to rent, there were so many trying to get home. Everyone seemed to feel a need to gather with families and friends and hunker down, as if another attack could come at any moment.

The country’s leadership was frozen, stunned. Remember the photos of George W. Bush as an aide leaned over his shoulder and whispered the news into his ear? He was the president of the United States, and he looked scared to death. In fact, he was rushed from the school he was visiting in Florida to Air Force One, and his plane took off on what amounted to a flight to nowhere as his administration tried to pull itself together and decide how they would respond. It wasn’t until hours later that Air Force One landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana and Bush hurriedly addressed the press in a windowless conference room, vowing to “hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.” Three days would pass before the president was flown to New York to appear atop the rubble of the World Trade Center at what became known as Ground Zero to take a bullhorn and make the pledge that would launch the country on a trajectory that has yet to change: “I can hear you!” he shouted to the workers at the site, “The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”

A collective madness ensued. A great scrambling began to protect us against … well, against what? Box-cutters first and foremost, it seemed, as a new regime of inspections began at airports everywhere. The initial panic over the hijacked flights would lead to the establishment of the Transportation Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security, a kind of domestic department of defense which proceeded to put us on what amounted to a wartime footing within our own country that persists even today. How many times have you had to throw a set of fingernail clippers into a bin at airport security because a TSA agent was defending us from terrorism? How about removing your shoes because a lone lunatic made an unsuccessful attempt to blow up an airplane with a “shoe bomb”?

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The entire paranoid regimen under which we still live 20 years later grew out of a supposed “war on terror” begun after 9/11 that has never ended. It took a decade to find and kill the actual terrorist who ordered the attacks on 9/11, but in the meantime two shooting wars were launched, only one of which had even the slightest connection to the terrorists who attacked us. There was an elemental problem: The war on terror wasn’t against an enemy, it was against an idea, and ideas don’t die when you hit them with bombs and bullets.

And so, without a readily definable enemy who could be seen and shot and killed and defeated, which is what wars are usually for, lies were substituted. We were buried with lies, and not just any lies. They had to justify the movement of hundreds of thousands of troops and the expenditure of trillions of dollars in treasure and the loss of thousands more American lives than died on 9/11 and countless more lives — enemies, civilians and, my goodness gracious, even a few real flesh and blood terrorists.

Sept. 11, 2001, was when the Big Lie was born. Or should we say, Big Lies, because they came fast and furious. By now they are known to be so completely without any basis in reality, so wholly bogus, that they hardly bear recounting. Weapons of mass destruction? Connections between Iraq and its government and leaders and the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11? Ha!

And then came new Big Lies to support the earlier Big Lies: that we were “winning” the war on terror. How many times were we reassured that all those lives and all those dollars were not being pissed away for nothing? How many times were we reassured that we were rebuilding the countries that hadn’t needed rebuilding until we attacked them? How many times were we told of the miraculous training of the Iraqi and Afghan armies? They even invented a new word that I never learned in the classes I took in military history at West Point, a word to describe the magic bullet that was going to win both wars: the surge. If only we sent 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000 or 50,000 more troops, we could win the mythical war on terror.

“Shock and awe” was a lie. “Taking Baghdad was a lie. The army of Iraq just went away. The “surge,” each and every one of them, was a lie. “Winning” was a lie, every single time the word was used. Every. Single. Time. The Afghan army was a lie. It didn’t even bother surrendering to the Taliban. It just went … poof. The Afghan “government” was a lie. It too went poof. The Iraqi government is a lie. Everything we have done to win the war on terror for two decades, 20 long years, has been a lie. We wasted trillions of dollars that could have been spent to, I don’t know, feed hungry children in Arkansas? Pay for health care for poor families? Send kids to college? Reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and save our planet?

We wasted all those lives, American and Afghan and Iraqi and German and Australian and Polish and every other soldier from every other NATO country who died fighting “terror.” And we killed hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi people for nothing.

For nothing.

The biggest Big Lie of them all was that it had meaning, that we accomplished something, that we somehow won the war on terror. Terror hasn’t gone away. Hell, we’re growing it ourselves now, right here at home.

I’ll tell you another war we lost, maybe even a bigger and more important war than the war on terror. We lost the war on truth. And we were warned. Oh yes, we were warned. Take Donald Trump’s first Big Lie right after 9/11 as just one example. He claimed — I hope you’re sitting down for this — that he could see from his office window in Trump Tower crowds of Muslims across the Hudson River, several miles away, on the roofs of buildings in Jersey City, cheering as the World Trade Center fell.

Remember that one? It was such a patently outrageous lie that it zoomed right past without anyone noticing as the rest of the Big Lies hit one after another.

But Trump got away with it, and he learned from it. Oh, yes. He learned how the Big Lie worked. He learned from watching Bush get away with lying about WMDs, and he learned from the Big Lies that we were winning in Iraq and Afghanistan. So he started trying out other Big Lies of his own, like the one about how Barack Obama wasn’t a citizen of the United States, that he had a fake birth certificate, that he was a “secret Muslim.” Remember when Trump was all over the TV for days and days claiming that he had sent detectives to Hawaii? All we had to do was wait and he was going to reveal the “truth” about Obama.

He got away with his “birther” Big Lie, and he learned something that he has used ever since, something that helped him drive us into the ditch of the pandemic he lied about for a year, something that has helped him transform an entire political party, the Republican Party, from one of two normal political parties in this country into an authoritarian cult.

He learned that if he told Big Lies that were big enough, and if he repeated them enough times, that he could get away with it, just like Bush got away with lying about WMDs to get us into Iraq. And his party, the Republican Party, learned right along with him. Look at what they are doing right this minute about the insurrection he incited against the Congress of the United States in his naked attempt to overturn the election he lost. Donald Trump and the Republican Party are on a campaign to deny that it happened. They are trying to make a case that it wasn’t Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol, it was somebody else, and those who were arrested are political prisoners facing false charges … and on and on and on.

The legacy 9/11 has left us is that there is no common set of facts we can agree on about anything: Not about the COVID pandemic and masks and vaccines; not about the climate change that has killed hundreds and left town after town burned to the ground or under water and destroyed by tornadoes and hurricanes. We cannot agree that votes counted amount to elections won or lost. We cannot even agree on the common good of vaccines that will save us, that science is worth studying, that learned experts are worth listening to.

The lies that followed 9/11 have torn us apart as a nation and put our democracy in peril. That’s our legacy: Lies are now considered by an entire political party to be legitimate political currency. A man who has told so many lies we have lost count of them is now a legitimate political figure supported for the highest office of the land by one of our two political parties.

Lies began tearing us apart after the attacks on 9/11, and we have not regained our footing as a nation. The question hanging over us now is whether we ever will.

on the 20th anniversary of September 11:

The struggle to keep track of India’s dead

Most people who die in Gadchiroli die at home. The remote, heavily forested district in central India is among the country’s least developed areas, and reaching the nearest clinic can take several hours on foot. After a death, relatives often bury or cremate their loved one in the fields.

When a Covid-19 surge arrived in India in 2020, it barely reached Gadchiroli. But in April 2021, as a devastating second wave tore through rural India, people began getting sick.

Yogesh Kalkonde, a public health doctor and researcher who worked with the nongovernmental organization Search in Gadchiroli until July, said he soon began hearing about deaths in villages — sometimes four or five in a single small community. People seriously ill with Covid-19 began turning up at his rural hospital. But, Kalkonde said, he had little way of gauging the extent of the outbreak.

Similar situations were playing out in other parts of India. While official figures recorded averages of around 3,000 or 4,000 Covid-19 deaths per day, analysts saw signs that mortality across the country was far higher. But they struggled to produce even rough estimates of the true toll. Indeed, experts say that the pandemic has highlighted a longstanding issue: In the world’s second-most populous country, policymakers have historically paid too little attention to tracking people’s deaths, with serious implications for public health.

In fact, more than 100 countries do not have functioning civil registration and vital statistics systems that record births and deaths, according to the New York City-based public health organization Vital Strategies. Several African countries collect little or no data on deaths. And the World Health Organization estimates that, globally, two-thirds of deaths are never accounted for.

These issues are acute in India, which is home to about one in six of the world’s people, and where around three-quarters of deaths take place in rural areas like Gadchiroli. In 2018, government surveys suggest, India registered 86 percent of all its deaths in its civil registration system. Even then, the cause often remains a mystery: Only one in five of those registered deaths were medically certified by a physician.

Those gaps, experts say, hampered public health efforts in India and other countries long before the arrival of Covid-19. Governments can use death data for all sorts of public health decisions: to identify malnutrition hotspots, address infant mortality, and even prioritize the shipment of vaccines.

“Counting the dead helps the living,” said Prabhat Jha, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto and director of the Center for Global Health Research, a not-for-profit organization co-sponsored by the university and St. Michael’s Hospital. “The main benefit of having data on who dies, and when, is to be able to understand what can be done about it today.”

While counting the dead is the first step, finding out how they died is also key. Cause of death data is like the “thermometer of a health system,” said Kalkonde. Without such data, he added, it is very challenging to track the progress of the health system.

Experts say the obstacles to improving data collection in India are steep. And even when such data exist, that doesn’t mean they will be accurate and available to the public — or to health researchers. Public health doctor and researcher Sylvia Karpagam said she doesn’t expect much government effort to discover and publicize the real toll of Covid-19.

“Right now, it is all about making the government look good, and it is more about PR,” she said. The country’s leaders, she added, “wouldn’t want to seriously look at how many people died.”

The government’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, refuting such criticism from activists and the media, said in an official statement in August that the suggestion that it was “missing out on deaths is completely unlikely.” The government’s Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner did not respond to requests for comment.

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Each year in India, according to government estimates, 9.7 million people die — more than the entire population of New York City. Those deaths are scattered across a country with 23 officially recognized languages, nearly 600,000 villages, and a severe shortage of medical personnel. Keeping track of those losses in areas without a functioning health care system is a difficult, but not insurmountable, task.

In large cities like Mumbai or Delhi, most deaths occur at or en route to a health facility. If a physician is present at the time of death, they fill out a cause of death certificate. Local authorities collect this information and pass it on to the state and then national government.

Far fewer deaths are certified in rural areas like Gadchiroli, where health facilities are bare or virtually non-existent. Complicating the data collection, rural people often have little incentive to report deaths. Birth documentation is an important part of one’s legal identity, enabling access to services like education. But for those with few resources, living in places where informal transfer of property is the norm, there’s little reason to report deaths to authorities, especially of babies.

Gender and social status also affect which deaths are counted: Women, for example, are more likely to die at home, and less likely to have their deaths counted and certified, according to Kalkonde. And people who belong to India’s tribal communities, or who fall low in the Hindu caste hierarchy, typically have less access to health care, and so show up less frequently in official statistics.

Then there is the dubious quality of data. Not all doctors are well trained to certify deaths, said Kalkonde. “What you write on death certificate in itself is a science,” he said. “So, even amongst the death certificates that are available, many times the cause of death is just listed as ‘cardiorespiratory arrest'” — meaning the person’s heartbeat and breathing stopped. “I mean, most of us die by cardiorespiratory arrest,” Kalkonde added.

To account for some of these gaps, in the 1960s the Indian government began sending surveyors door to door in thousands of areas across the country, in order to get a representative sample of the full population. When a selected household reports a recent death, the surveyor gathers the history of illnesses in the family, asks about the deceased person’s symptoms, and writes a report. Trained physicians look over the record and assign it a probable cause of death. Research suggests that this time-consuming process, called a verbal autopsy, provides a fairly accurate picture of the deaths. (China, the world’s most populous country, uses a similar system.)

In 2002, Jha and several collaborators began tracking mortality in 2.4 million households in India, using verbal autopsies to assign causes for deaths going back to 1998. The Million Death Study, as it is called, was far larger than other surveys, and its findings helped provide crucial insight into deaths by suicide, infant and child mortality, cancer in India, and more.

Still, researchers say, big gaps remain in the data. “It’s strange that, you know, 70 years down the road,” said Kalkonde, referring to the time since India’s independence, “we still have difficulty knowing what are the causes of death in India.”

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Government officials aren’t always especially eager to publicize mortality data. Registering and certifying all deaths allows for accountability that leaders might not want, said Karpagam. And the findings of such studies don’t always align with state narratives about an accepting, egalitarian culture. Verbal autopsies have suggested, for instance, that one in every three women who die by suicide globally is an Indian woman.

In response, health officials and politicians sometimes hide or fudge statistics: Independent analysts and news media have found that officials in the state of Maharashtra have downplayed the number of malnutrition-linked deaths, and policymakers have delayed — and even allegedly hidden — statistics on deaths by suicide among India’s farmers.

Those problems have worsened since 2014, Jha said. Since then, when the current prime minister Narendra Modi came to power, there have been more delays in releasing India’s sample survey. Recent years have also seen the delays in farmer death statistics.

When a massive second wave of the pandemic hit India in the spring of 2021, the shortcomings of these gaps in mortality data were suddenly on display, as there was hardly any accounting of how many people in India’s rural areas were dying from Covid-19. The data disaster made global headlines.

In response, some Indian states have begun conducting door-to-door surveys, trying to pin down more accurate figures. Others released revised death statistics after courts stepped in to flag irregularities.

The solution to the improving reporting of death data is different in urban and rural areas, Jha said. “In urban areas many deaths occur in hospitals, so you can improve that registration and reporting system,” he said. In rural areas, he added, some of the villages already track deaths. “I think that’s important, but that needs to be catalogued and shared.”

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A treacherous 10-hour drive along winding mountain roads northwest of Gadchiroli is the tribal region of Melghat. Deep in the forests, the phone network sometimes drops to zero. Melghat is known for its tiger reserve. It’s also poor: The region occasionally makes news for the high rate of child malnutrition deaths among its largely tribal population, spread across about 370 villages.

Mittali Sethi came here on her first government posting, part of national cadre of civil servants called the Indian Administrative Service. Until transferring to a new position in July, Sethi, a trained dental surgeon, was in charge of the development of the tribal population, including overseeing health programs.

According to Sethi, there is one private physician in Melghat and a handful of government ones. For specialized medical care, she says, locals have to leave the district and travel around three hours in a vehicle to a facility in the nearest city, Amravati.

Here Sethi put into practice what Jha recommends in theory. Through a national program launched in 2005, India’s villages have an army of women community health care workers called Accredited Social Health Activists, or simply ASHAs, which in Hindi translates to “hope.” Often working in their home villages, these women are trained in basic health care delivery, like providing pregnant women with iron and folic acid tablets, and helping with awareness campaigns on sanitation.

As the second Covid-19 wave arrived in April, Sethi reached out to the ASHAs in Melghat and asked the women to report every death to their nearest health center on a daily basis, along with the likely cause. “We were monitoring which village was having more deaths, because people were a little reluctant to test,” Sethi said. “So the proxy for knowing where Covid might actually be increasing was to see the number of deaths.”

This basic data was enough to give Sethi and her team information about where to step up Covid-19 awareness and vaccination campaigns. “Not having data has never been a problem here,” she said. The resultant campaigns were successful in countering vaccine hesitancy and made national news in India.

What Sethi did in Melghat is what Jha said could be done in every district in India. The approach essentially decentralizes the health system, gathering and responding to data in real-time instead of waiting for a national level analysis.

As other countries grapple with similar problems, experts are hoping the pandemic will draw attention to death registration. Having better data, the WHO writes in a new report on global birth and death registration, would help communities around the world combat Covid-19 — and forms “a cornerstone of a strong health system for the future.”

Romain Santon, deputy director of civil registration and vital statistics for Asia at Vital Strategies, which has helped 29 countries bolster their civil registration systems, said simple policy changes can yield better data. In some countries, he said, burial permits or other legal requirements could act as incentives to push up death registrations. Making registration simpler by reducing the number of forms, or digitizing the process, could also help.

Santon calls for compulsory, confidential, and permanent death registration worldwide. “Every single individual living in a territory,” he said, “should have access to birth and death registration.”

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Disha Shetty is an independent science journalist based in Pune, India. She writes on health, environment, and gender, among other subjects.

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