Shaving, nail clipping and beyond — What are the limits of public hygiene?

“You nasty, filthy, sloppy, disgusting, filthy f**king animal. You f**king pig, you should be ashamed of yourself.” That was the response from actor and podcaster Michael Rapaport — and plenty of other similarly repulsed viewers — earlier this month when a video appeared to show former New York City mayor and self professed “normal” drinker Rudy Giuliani openly shaving his face in the dining area of the Delta One lounge at Kennedy Airport. Not that any sane person should take their grooming cues from a man who has been known to ooze dark fluid, but out here in the civilization we’re attempting to maintain, personal grooming is generally expected to be confined to private spaces. What constitutes private activity, who has the privilege of said privacy and why these taboos exist at all, however, are incredibly subjective.

In 2018, a New Jersey Transit rider went viral after a fellow passenger filmed him giving his face a full Barbasol smeared shave during a commute. The clip was undeniably hypnotic, with the man casually flicking his foam onto the floor of the train. But after over 2.4 million views on Twitter and commenters calling him a “slob,” the passenger came forward to reveal he had been traveling from a homeless shelter to see his brother, and wanted to look “presentable” for his family. “My life is all screwed up,” he told the Associated Press. “That’s the reason I was shaving on the train.”

There is not a single personal activity that I haven’t seen someone conducting in a public space. Yet despite years of eyewitness experience, I doubt I could tell the difference between a presidential cybersecurity adviser and a down-on-his-luck person just coming out of a homeless shelter. So while I’m firmly against recording and publicly shaming everyone who isn’t Rudy Giuliani for their idiosyncratic personal upkeep rituals, I also would like to make a case for those of us who can to abide by some common sense etiquette. Basically, if it can leave behind debris from your body or creates an intrusive scent (like nail polish), try to do it somewhere else.

The least disputed versions of this rule of thumb include tooth flossing, hair plucking, earwax cleaning, pimple popping, shaving, spitting, nose picking and the classic — nail clipping. As artist Jason Shelowitz pleaded in his 2010 guerrilla New York City subway poster campaign, “Under no circumstance is the subway the right place for this. The sound is incredibly annoying and the little nail bits go flying all over the place. Keep it at home please. It’s crazy that this even needs to be mentioned.”

While the health risks are not comparable to those from sneezing or coughing, it’s just logical to limit all potential exposure to infection. This means that things that might make you bleed — clipping, cutting — are best done in clean, controlled environments. British Columbia’s HealthLink guide advises, “Blood and body fluids, such as saliva, semen and vaginal fluid, can contain viruses that can be passed on to other people.” And though “The risk is low… body fluids, such as sweat, tears, vomit or urine may contain and pass on these viruses.” (This is also another argument for wiping down your sweaty gym equipment, I beg of you.)

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Let’s say I have a fresh cut on my elbow, and then I sit down at a restaurant table where the previous patron just nicked his face shaving. In an “ER or Not?” Interview for University of Utah Health, Dr. Troy Madsen noted that “Anything where the skin is not completely intact, if it’s blood from a person where you don’t know they could potentially have HIV or hepatitis, err on the side of caution.”

Of course, the odds of getting hepatitis from the guy attending to his five o’clock shadow next to you at JFK are infinitesimal. But reasonable cleanliness and courtesy dictate that if you wouldn’t sneeze on a stranger, maybe don’t shave around them either. The lines get a little blurrier around less intimate — and more clearly gendered — acts of maintenance. Hair brushing and combing, with their obvious and inevitable leftovers of hair and dandruff, seem like no-brainers. A 2015 MTA campaign depicted subway riding figures attending to their nails and hair and advised, “Clipping? Primping? Everybody wants to look their best, but it’s a subway car, not a restroom.” Yet clipping is a far more clearcut action than “primping.” I don’t want anybody to go full DryBar on my commute, but I also know that no one with hair past their shoulders can avoid getting either in or out of a ponytail over the course of a day. I mean, my wrists exist to hold my Goody bands.

And what about makeup application, a seemingly victimless crime? In 2018, English journalist Nina Myskow sparked a fierce backlash for calling women “selfish” for doing their makeup on their commutes, demanding they “Get up earlier.” Yet as Aditi Shrikant responded in Vox, “Expecting a person to groom before commuting is assuming they have time to do so, but time to yourself is a privilege.” Courtesy is a dynamic process. We can endeavor to take care of our personal business before leaving the house for the sake of everybody who didn’t sign up to be part of that process, and we can grant some space and kindness for others who don’t have the same advantages. Which does not let the Guilianis of the world off the hook.

Offering the hottest possible take on all of this, The Independent’s senior commissioning editor Rupert Hawksley this week cheekily defended Guiliani’s bizarre shaving performance, observing, “Airports are hard enough without people judging your weird behavior. Things happen at airports that don’t happen anywhere else. Normal rules do not apply…. Christ, if Rudy Giuliani wants to have a quick shave over his lobster bisque, let the poor man get on with it.” I too have done things while traveling that can only be interpreted as a cry for help, but I’d like to think I was in those instances only hurting myself with that airport sushi.

We are living through a moment of unprecedented, reckless selfishness. We are confronted daily with evidence of our fellow humans disregarding the most basic of boundaries, refusing to consider the comfort and safety of others for the greater good. Why be thoughtful? Why be decent? The world is your spittoon and hygiene is unpatriotic! That’s why the sight of a prominent, privileged man treating an airport dining area like it’s his private bathroom feels uniquely insulting right now. It’s stubble as symbolism, a declaration of a certain class of individuals of their utter indifference to whatever mess they create and leave behind, for the rest of us to clean up.

Recovery from an ICU stay is tough. Could more protein help?

Paul Wischmeyer was a teenage athlete when he learned firsthand just how devastating an intense illness can be. After spending the better part of a year severely sick and frequently hospitalized with undiagnosed severe inflammatory bowel disease, his colon perforated, landing him in the intensive care unit. When he finally recovered, he went from being a starter on his high school basketball team to being too weak to walk down the court — profoundly disabled from just being in the hospital.

He built back his strength over the next few years, and eventually worked his way through medical school as a personal trainer in a competitive bodybuilding gym, where he helped clients sculpt their physiques by providing them with targeted workouts and having them add protein and other nutritional supplements to their diets. But it wasn’t until his training in critical care medicine that Wischmeyer began to thread together his interest in bodybuilding with his interest in ICU recovery.

Critical care experts have long known that a stay in the ICU can lead to long-term weakness lasting months or even years after discharge, regardless of the specific illness. Wischmeyer was especially struck by his patients’ massive loss of muscle, which reminded him of his own experience. “I’d watch people lose half their body weight in a short period of time and not be able to walk,” he says.

Today, Wischmeyer, a critical care and nutrition physician at Duke University, is a leading voice among clinicians and scientists investigating whether increasing protein intake during and after hospitalization could be an important and long-overlooked component of recovery. Lean muscle melts away startlingly quickly in ICU patients, and muscle-wasting is a predictor of long-term impairment after hospitalization, studies show. Proponents of the approach say that protein, a nutritional cornerstone for body builders, may help critically ill patients retain muscle or rebuild it as well. “Protein is what everyone is interested in in right now,” says Zudin Puthucheary, a clinical senior lecturer in intensive care at Queen Mary University of London. (Wischmeyer, like many researchers in the nutrition field, has received funding from industry.)

But some question whether simply adding more protein to patients’ diets will translate into increased muscle mass and better functioning. While several studies suggest that boosting protein levels early on after critical illness or surgery may improve recovery, they have mostly been small, and other studies have not shown a benefit. “Protein provision might be important, but there aren’t large studies to understand that yet,” said Renee Stapleton, a pulmonologist and critical care physician at the University of Vermont Medical Center. A handful of such studies are currently underway, but whether they will bring clarity to the protein picture remains to be seen.

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Clinicians have a name for the long-term disability some people experience after an ICU stay: ICU-acquired weakness. Critical care physician Margaret Herridge of Toronto General Hospital began quantifying the effect some two decades ago. More than half of people in their 40s and 50s who spend a week on a ventilator don’t return to work a full year after their hospital stay, she found, and a third never do. Even five years later, patients on average recover only three-quarters of the stamina and 6-minute walking distance of their age- and sex-matched peers.

The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted this issue by bringing huge waves of patients to the ICU. People hospitalized with Covid-19 tend to stay in the ICU longer than other patients, and that, along with the drugs and sedation they receive, likely ratchets up the risk of disability afterwards. “I think Covid has highlighted for the general public a lot more about what happens in the ICU,” including the challenge of reaching a full recovery, says Lee-anne Chapple, a critical care dietician at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

Researchers think that the massive muscle wasting that occurs during a critical illness deserves much of the blame for making recovery difficult. “The first thing we do when anything bad happens is we stop making muscle,” says Puthucheary. Not only that, the body also breaks down existing muscle through a process called catabolism. During muscle catabolism, proteins stored in muscle tissue are broken down into smaller molecules called amino acids and energy is released. That breakdown happens quickly: A person who undergoes surgery or who spends time in the ICU can lose up to a kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, of muscle mass per day during the acute stages of their illness.

Theoretically, adding more protein to a patient’s diet can help minimize the muscle loss. Yet nutrition has traditionally gotten short shrift in medicine, some experts say; a 2019 report from researchers at Harvard University called for better education about nutrition during medical training. This is especially relevant to critical care, a specialty in which monitoring vital statistics, stamping out infections, and generally ensuring survival has been paramount, says Daren Heyland, a critical care physician at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. But the mindset is shifting as physicians start considering nutrition as something that is “really modulating the underlying disease process,” rather than merely playing a supporting role, Heyland says. “It is a major paradigm shift.”

Ironically, this shift is driven by improvements in critical care. Today, doctors can save people from trauma and illnesses that would have led to death just two decades ago. “With all this great technology, are we creating survivors — or victims?” Wischmeyer says. “There’s this epidemic of impaired quality of life that we have to address. And I think that is drawing a lot more attention to nutrition.”

Dietary guidelines recommend that a healthy adult should consume around 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight each day. Current intensive care guidelines, meanwhile, suggest that adults receive 1.2 to 2 grams of protein per kilogram per day, generally delivered through a feeding tube. Wischmeyer and other experts advocate for amounts at the high end of that range, depending on a person’s age and other factors. Yet it’s not just a question of raising protein targets; clinicians need to ensure those targets are actually being met as studies in U.S. hospitals show that patients are often getting less than half the recommended amount. “We are not getting anywhere near the lowest level” of recommended protein, says Wischmeyer.

* * *

Nutrition interventions are challenging to study — particularly in critically ill people, who are a heterogenous group. A blood pressure pill has a measurable physiological effect, and a clinician can see within hours of administering it whether it has done its job. But that’s not the case for something like protein. Not only would it take much longer to effect a change in body composition, there are no tests to track whether muscle cells are actually able to use the protein, says Chapple. Additionally, the timeframe of ICU interventions is generally limited to the week or two that a person spends there.

Most critical care studies have tested whether an intervention improves mortality in the months or year after an illness. But expecting a week of protein shakes to determine whether a person lives or dies is unrealistic, Wischmeyer says. Only recently have some studies begun using more nuanced endpoints measuring changes in a person’s quality of life, such as their ability to stand up from a seated position or walk a certain distance.

Still, the idea that patients will benefit from increased protein does align with what researchers know about building back muscle after its intense loss, which was comprehensively demonstrated in a study called the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. The study, which ran from 1944 to 1945 — and would probably not pass an ethics review today — tracked the effects on 36 men of slashing caloric intake in half for six months. The researchers found that the loss of lean muscle mass was extraordinarily hard to reverse, and doing so required sharply increasing the men’s calories and protein intake for as long as two years.

Past studies of athletes have helped researchers understand the cellular processes that occur when a person gains muscle. But it’s not clear how these processes work in critically ill people, says Arthur van Zanten, a critical care physician at Gelderse Valley Hospital and a professor at the Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands. His work has shown that these patients usually have poorly functioning mitochondria — organelles that provide energy to cells in the form of adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. Without enough energy, the body can’t build muscle, no matter how much protein a patient consumes, van Zanten says.

Puthucheary and his colleagues are conducting a small study to test whether ketones — an alternative fuel source derived from the body’s breakdown of fat — or an amino acid metabolite called hydroxy methylbutyrate might work better. But given the altered physiology associated with critical illness, building muscle may simply prove too difficult, he says. For this reason, Puthucheary is also focusing on trying to prevent muscle wasting, which likely involves a different set of metabolic mechanisms. “Rather than making someone who’s sick unsick, we are trying to work with the sick physiology,” he says.

As researchers continue to investigate how exactly protein and related factors can affect the physiological processes that underlie recovery, a handful of large randomized trials of between 800 to 4,000 participants are currently investigating the basic question of whether increasing protein intake in the ICU improves recovery. A smaller trial combines protein delivery with exercise. “In the next two or three years we will know exactly what is happening,” says van Zanten. “I’m personally convinced the higher protein groups will do better.”

Puthucheary is less certain — for one thing, because most of them don’t include exercise, which is also a key component of building muscle, he says — but time will tell.

Other studies are exploring interventions that begin after a patient has recovered enough to leave the ICU. Wischmeyer’s team, for example, is using principles from elite athletic training to develop a diet and training regimen that people can start in the hospital, right after they leave the ICU, and then they can continue at home. Van Zanten and his colleagues are also investigating nutritional and other strategies for promoting recovery in the months after an ICU stay.

That long-term window is virtually unexplored, yet that period may offer an untapped opportunity, van Zanten says. In the ICU, clinicians can monitor precisely what nutrients a person receives, but that’s much tougher after discharge. People’s food intake often slumps when they are sent home, but with inflammation and catabolism resolving, it’s when protein and other nutritional interventions, as well as physical activity, are likely to be especially effective. It may not always be possible to restore function fully, says van Zanten, “but I am very convinced that we can do a better job.”

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Alla Katsnelson is a science journalist based in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Chemical & Engineering News, Scientific American, The New York Times, and other outlets.

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

Nat Geo’s “9/11: One Day in America” takes us inside the terror attacks with those who survived them

Ron Clifford remembers sharing the details of an important business meeting with his sister Ruth, who advised, "Ron, stand out." So he wore a new suit and a bright yellow tie. On that morning's ferry to Manhattan a man drinking champagne complimented his clothes, boosting his confidence.

Kevin Leary worked as a chef at the time, preparing sauces and pasta for a luncheon.

Joseph Pfeifer, a battalion chief with the Fire Department of New York, had 20 years and six days on the job. That meant he could have retired six days prior, but he was enjoying his time with the department so much that he wasn't even thinking about leaving.

It was a beautiful day, all told. Pfiefer and his crew were checking out a reported gas leak in a street. One of them was filming the job when American Airlines Flight 11 roared over them, seizing their attention before slamming into the World Trade Center's North Tower.

On September 11, 2001 terrorists attacked the United States by slamming that passenger jet and United Airlines Flight 175 into the World Trade Center's buildings, and a third, American Airlines Flight 77, into the Pentagon. But most Americans experienced these terrible events from through our televisions and radio reports, shocked and yet only able to imagine what New Yorkers were enduring. National Geographic's "9/11: One Day in America" closes that distance, taking everyone inside the smoke and flames, and terrible collapses of the buildings to relive each minute of those attacks with those who survived them.

The active horrors the disaster wrought unfolded in the span of a few hours, from the time the first plane hit through the second tower's collapse. But the accounts given by those who lived to talk about them fill every moment of this four-night, six-episode documentary series, making footage from that day come alive in ways few other reports have.

"9/11: One Day in America," produced in official partnership with the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, may be the most emotionally taxing examination of the events surrounding those attacks that you'll see this year. Hopefully the weight of that statement lands as it should, considering the slew of 20th anniversary commemorations debuting over the next couple of weeks. Encore presentations of previously released productions will certainly be part of this observance; we're not lacking for coverage of that day's events.

But as you experience these hours – not just watch, but feel them – what may immediately strike you is how antiseptic most of the documentary reports or news coverage have been. After the attacks the media's attention turned to the how and the why of them, offering deep dives into the structural collapse of the Towers, the government's failure to act on intelligence tip-offs or insights into how the hijackers planned and trained to turn passenger planes into weapons of mass destruction. Close your eyes and you can probably picture George W. Bush's grim face as he sat in that classroom, receiving the news. And there are all the accounts of those mourning their dead.

For the most part, though, coverage of the September 11, 2001 attacks all these years later enables us to emotionally separate from the human nightmare of it. To take that part in requires us to accept the fact that we are indeed vulnerable, that the actions of 19 zealots could take the lives of 2,977 people and injure more than 6,000 others.

If we couldn't do that before, executive producers Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin make that possible by placing viewers inside the frightened, thumping hearts of people who were inside the towers and the first responders who ran in and up the nearly 100 flights of stairs of the North Tower to get people out. Through footage featuring Pfeifer and his team we see the first plane hit. We watch their reactions and those of other New Yorkers in that moment as that flawless Tuesday explored in flames and disintegrating concrete and steel. We watch as bystanders head toward the blast out of curiosity and hear as their companions scream at them to run for their lives. Then we see the disaster unfold in real time from different angles, from the air and on the ground, outside the rolling poisoning clouds and from inside, watching abandoned cameras continue rolling as the world darkens in the moments after the buildings crash to Earth.

"9/11: One Day in America" is the product of a massive undertaking, involving sorting through 951 hours of archival footage, including shots never seen before on TV, to build out a narrative of that day told by those who survived it, and in chronological order.

The filmmakers contextualize the footage from that day by editing present-day interviews with 54 survivors around it, some of which prominently features the interviewees. Seeing archival footage of a younger Pfeifer on that day, directing his men from the lobby of the North Tower while its top floors were in flames, is extraordinary in the way that it showcases his composure in the face of imminent death. His description of his inner turmoil in those moments places puts us right in the midst of anxious uncertainty with him.

And this experience isn't limited only to his portion. Footage of Clifford with a gravely injured woman he assisted that day reveals their panic and fear as they're running for their lives, but only after he describes every moment leading up to it – finding her still smoking from flames that burned her alive, sitting and praying with her to assure her she won't die.

The highly sensory focus of these hours can be overwhelming, especially when we see those unforgettable shots of of people jumping from the highest floors of the North Tower, choosing that kind of death over immolation. But in keeping with its insistent focus on the living, what stays with us is how those moments register from the firefighters' perspective that day – the dreadful thud of bodies hitting the ceiling above them, the absolute shock registering on their faces as they realize what's happening.

You may want to look away, but the eyes of the men remembering that day as they lived it hold us. By having subjects speak directly into the camera, the filmmakers create an intimacy between the survivors and the viewers that makes is easier to bear witness and relive that nightmare with them and for them. To absorb the enormity of it. Leary, for example, talks about a choice he made that saved his life by a matter of seconds, whereas another wasn't so lucky. He still wears the wide-eyed shock of it as he recounts the memory. If you're moved to weep in the course of watching this, or have other intense reactions, that's part of bargain. It's only a portion of what these survivors felt and continue to feel.

"9/11: One Day in America" isn't entirely immersed in horror, however. The filmmakers include notes of hope at every turn, structuring each episode around a particular story that contains the simplest of mysteries. Will anyone come to save me? Did my friend survive? How am I going to make it out of this hell? Will I get to walk my daughter down the aisle on her wedding day?

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Episodes are edited in such a way to make the most of this human drama without cheapening each individual's accounts, circling back to reveal endings of rescue efforts that sound hopeless at first. Sometimes it turns out that they are. But the editing choices maintain the tension of not knowing, even though those telling these stories know how they end, without robbing them of their integrity. Then, by sticking us back inside blinding clouds cut by falling, flaming debris as the tales unfold, we obtain a visceral sense of how dire every second was, that living through it was indeed a miracle.

Through its subject, the documentary carefully honors the people whose sacrifices made all the difference, like the small team of firemen who kept heading up stairs to save more than 70 people and never made it out. Or the three-man security team who stayed behind to make sure all of their 2,000 people escaped, and were still inside when the second Tower collapsed on top of them. Or, of course, the group of people who overpowered the hijackers of United Airline Flight 93, including a young man whose mother called him to tell him what was going on and encouraged him to fight for his life – hoping, she says, that her son could be a killer.

For all the devastation, Pfeifer recalls, "There were also signs of hope. And at this extraordinary time in history, those little moments of caring for another were the difference between life and death."

Twenty years hence America is contending with other disasters. The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed hundreds of thousands of American lives, and the death toll is still escalating. In Afghanistan, the war launched in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks is finally ending; America is not victorious and worse, other terrorists are attacking personnel on their way out. It all has a terrible symmetry to it.

And yet, the main message "9/11: One Day in America" leaves with us is a reminder of how delicate and precious life is. Sometimes it does this joyfully, as with one subject who attributes her survival to simply being determined that the building was not going to take her away from her family.

Others like Frank Razzano, a lawyer who barely made it out of the North Tower's adjoining Marriott Hotel, make that point sorrowfully as he explains that his reflexive instinct upon heard the first crash was to secure the legal documents he had with him. "I was at the apex of my career at this time," he said, acknowledging how silly that sounds in the face of death.

All this is completely relatable because we view September 11, 2001 through his eyes and his memory, not through a newscaster's lens. To him and everybody else, it was a normal, peaceful day.

"Not a cloud in the sky," Clifford recalls at the top of the premiere installment. Who would have guessed that a few hours later the World Trade Center towers would be gone, that ash would black out the sun and concrete particulates choke the air? It was still the same day, and yet in the space of a few hours a new era began. "This was my world," Clifford observed, "never to be the same again."

"9/11: One Day In America" airs over four consecutive nights at 9 p.m. starting on Sunday, Aug. 29 on National Geographic, with episodes available the next day on Hulu.

Joe McCarthy was never defeated — and Donald Trump now leads the movement he created

A few years ago, I was interviewing Roger Stone when he happened to use the phrase “new McCarthyism,” describing those who accused former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort of being a tool of Russian interests. This was more than a little ironic for abundant reasons, especially given that as a younger man, Donald Trump had been mentored by the infamous Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man, Roy Cohn.

Stone tried to defend himself by saying that he’d read M. Stanton Evans’ book “Blacklisted by History,” and found it “a more balanced review of exactly what McCarthy was talking about and what he did.” That didn’t make much sense either: Evans’ book is a revisionist attempt to defend McCarthy, which is widely maligned by serious historians. It’s not surprising that a longtime Republican operative would read it — but then, if Stone was on McCarthy’s side, why was he accusing other people of “new McCarthyism”?

Stone tried to salvage that one too, arguing, “Whether I like it or not, people view McCarthyism, as a label, as the hurling of false accusations.” Overall, though, there was more truth-telling in that exchange than you normally get from Stone. The Republican Party of 2021 is very much the party that McCarthy envisioned, centered on a supposed strongman’s personality, viciously seeking to destroy any outsiders seen as threats and rooted in blatant bigotry. In that context, it’s important to clarify what Joe McCarthy did and why his legacy is still dangerous.

McCarthy was elected to the Senate from Wisconsin in 1946, and his early years in office were unmemorable — except for one revealing episode. He denounced the death sentences handed down in U.S.-occupied Germany to a group of Waffen-SS soldiers convicted of murdering American troops in an event known as the Malmedy massacre. This moment in McCarthy’s career, though virtually forgotten today, is highly instructive On the surface, he presented himself as a crusader for justice, arguing that the Army was covering up judicial misconduct and that this called into question the validity of the Germans’ confessions. (He never provided any evidence for this.)

In fact, McCarthy was doing something much more sinister. On some level he understood that defending a group of Nazis would appeal to the antisemitic American far right at a moment when expressing public hatred for Jews was unacceptable. At least implicitly, McCarthy was accusing the Jewish Americans who helped investigate the crimes of seeking vengeance and perpetrating injustice. Today we might call this flipping the script: Suddenly Jewish people, in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, were persecutors, and “Aryan” Germans — those who had committed mass murder — were their victims.

That wasn’t enough to make McCarthy a right-wing superstar, probably because any hint of pro-Nazi sympathies was completely out of bounds in the postwar years. McCarthy needed a different vehicle to achieve political stardom and found it in 1950 when, while delivering a speech in West Virginia, he claimed to have a list of more than 200 known Communists who were allowed to work in the State Department. (No such list existed.) ‘

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The speech was a smash hit and over the course of four years, the Wisconsin senator accused countless people of either actually being Communists, being “Communist sympathizers” (whatever that meant) or being “soft on Communism,” a hopelessly vague term that could be applied to almost anyone who didn’t support open military confrontation with the Soviet Union. With America on edge during the early years of the Cold War, McCarthy inflamed widespread paranoia, without once provided evidence that any of his targets had done anything illegal. That didn’t much matter: He was saying what unhappy right-wingers wanted to hear, and they supported him with enthusiasm. (Yeah, some of this might sound familiar.) gave him tremendous political influence as a result.

Many of McCarthy’s targets were political opponents, like Sen. Millard Tydings, a Maryland Democrat who had criticized him, and Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential nominee in both 1952 and 1956. He also persecuted members of marginalized groups, claiming that they could be vulnerable to Communist influence: Today we would say he was obsessed with the “cultural elite,” going after East Coast intellectuals and LGBT people (although that term did not exist), left-wing activists and journalists, members of the Washington political establishment and, of course, Jews. His strident attacks powered Republican victories in the 1950 midterm elections, and plenty of Southern Democrats liked him too.

McCarthy was rewarded with a powerful chairmanship, at the Senate Committee on Government Operations, where Cohn and the young Robert F. Kennedy serving as assistant counsels. There he targeted the Voice of America, the overseas library program of the International Information Agency (this led to book burnings), several prominent Protestant clergymen and finally the U.S. Army. That last crusade proved to be a bridge too far: Joseph Welch, chief counsel for the Army, called out McCarthy on national television for his cruelty and recklessness, famously demanding, “At long last, sir, have you no decency?”

The American public, seeing McCarthy exposed as a bully and liar, rapidly turned against him. He died in 1957, likely as a result of alcoholism, but if he’d lived would likely have lost his Senate seat the following year. Although the term “McCarthyism” had been coined well before his downfall, that guaranteed that it would be an epithet rather than a compliment. From that point on, even Republicans began using the term “McCarthyist” to refer to baseless and malevolent smears.

This brings us to the Trump era. First of all, the accusations that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russian agents in 2016 are not “McCarthyist,” both because they were highly plausible (and at least partly true) and because they had nothing to do with left-wing or Communist ideology. For a better idea of what McCarthyism actually entails, consider this passage from a 2017 article about Cohn’s influence on Trump. It practically lays out, step by step, the ways that Trump’s narcissism would later fuel his attempts to overturn the 2020 election:

For author Sam Roberts, the essence of Cohn’s influence on Trump was the triad: “Roy was a master of situational immorality . … He worked with a three-dimensional strategy, which was: 1. Never settle, never surrender. 2. Counter-attack, counter-sue immediately. 3. No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat.” As columnist Liz Smith once observed, “Donald lost his moral compass when he made an alliance with Roy Cohn.”

That attitude is a key element of McCarthyism. The only two ingredients missing from that description are the blatant pandering to bigotry and paranoia and the way supporters are seduced by a narcissist’s charismatic allure into a sense of shared omnipotence with them. Without the former, the McCarthyist lacks the fuel necessary to whip up the mob against supposed enemies; without the latter, the demagogue can’t convince the mob that his individual desires are also their own.

The bogus and evidence-free claim that Trump really won the 2020 election is quintessentially McCarthyist: Trump refused to settle or admit defeat, trying to proclaiming victory before all the votes had been counted and filing dozens of nonsensical lawsuits. Like McCarthy and Cohn, Trump gaslit America. As with McCarthy’s claims that he had lists of Communist agents in the government, Trump’s empty allegations force his supporters either to take him at his word or reveal their disloyalty — and nobody who wants a career in Republican politics can afford to be disloyal to Trump at the moment. In both cases, proof was no longer needed, and on some level was viewed with scorn. To doubt Joe McCarthy in the early ’50s was to become an accomplice to the Communist conspiracy, just as anyone who rejects Trump’s Big Lie today is clearly a socialist antifa liberal.

That is how a lie becomes political dogma, a phenomenon also visible in the current right-wing obsession with “critical race theory.” Just as McCarthy defined “Communism” so broadly that it lost all meaning, opposition to “critical race theory” has very little to do with the academic approach that term actually describes — but a great deal to do with maintaining white supremacy. Salon’s Chauncey DeVega has described it this way:

For today’s Republicans, Trumpists and other members of the white right, “critical race theory” is a form of political ectoplasm: It’s both a liquid and a solid, something slimy and sticky which can be shaped into whatever frightening or dangerous thing suits their mood and needs in a given moment.

In this political context, “critical race theory” means both everything and nothing; it is a fetish object used to summon up centuries-old racist nightmares and fears about “scary” Black and brown people who are plotting a rebellion or uprising to undermine the (white) family, indoctrinate (white) children and attack (white) America.

By implication, if “critical race theory” and other Black and brown bogeymen are threats to (white) America, then preemptive violence is both necessary and reasonable. Moreover, multiracial democracy is seen, by definition, as incompatible with white people’s safety, security and material interests.

In channeling McCarthyism, whether consciously or otherwise, Trump has been successful to a degree McCarthy himself could only have dreamed about. But the connection is clear. While McCarthy was personally discredited, he made it difficult for any prominent American to express unpopular or radical views without being accused of disloyalty or possessing “Communist sympathies.” The McCarthyist current has been with us ever since, and as Trump’s career demonstrates, has not yet been defeated. If anything, it appears to be winning. Roger Stone is correct, in an upside-down fashion: There is a new McCarthyism in America today, and his pal Donald Trump and his supporters are the ones practicing it.

Kevin McCarthy’s Afghanistan contradictions baffle reporters at press conference

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has had a lot of political maneuvering to do this week. The California Republican has been vehemently critical of President Joe Biden’s handling of the Afghanistan crisis — while carefully avoiding criticism of former President Donald Trump and glossing over the fact that Biden was essentially following the Trump/Mike Pompeo plan for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan. And reporters are pointing out how badly McCarthy is contradicting himself and flailing around as he tries to articulate a coherent argument.

At a news conference this week, McCarthy contemptuously said of Biden’s administration, “Why would you negotiate with the Taliban?” But negotiating with the Taliban is exactly what Trump and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did in 2020. Pompeo met with Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, and Trump even talked about bringing the Taliban to Camp David.

Neocon Republican war hawks like Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and former National Security Adviser John Bolton have at least been consistent in their views, slamming the Trump/Pompeo plan for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan as badly flawed and slamming Biden for following it. And paleoconservative isolationist Patrick Buchanan, writing for the right-wing Antiwar.com website this month, has criticized U.S. involvement in Afghanistan as a failed nation-building experiment that was doomed from the start.

But McCarthy wants to have it both ways, attacking Biden as weak on national defense without directly criticizing Trumpist isolationism.

One reporter pointed out that Trump did something McCarthy is now criticizing Biden’s administration for: Trump negotiated with the Taliban:

"You said 'you shouldn't be negotiating with the Taliban.' Trump did that too, to be clear. So, I mean, was it wrong when he did it?" pic.twitter.com/rP7MNWVQFX

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 27, 2021

Punchbowl News’ Jake Sherman described McCarthy’s contradictions in detail:

And then he said no one believes there should be troops there.

So we’re all a bit unclear on what he believes here.

And, yes, we asked him about the dissonance between his position now and when Trump was in office.

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) August 27, 2021

For ex: he also said in this news conference that we shouldn’t be negotiating with the taliban. I asked what about trump? He negotiated with them. And he said there were conditions. But still — he negotiated w the taliban.

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) August 27, 2021

That means keeping troops in Afghanistan. https://t.co/VE3lwNwPDo

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) August 27, 2021

CNN’s Kendall Brown described McCarthy’s tortured logic this way:

Kevin McCarthy’s entire argument essentially boils down to, “we should have done exactly the opposite of what Donald Trump promised we’d do, restarting the war and provoking likely Taliban attacks on thousands of US military members.” https://t.co/C4i45HcGgX

— Kendall Brown (@kendallybrown) August 27, 2021

It’s notable that all of the people familiar with Bagram trying to explain why keeping it would not have been the panacea to the issues we’re currently facing are being just completely ignored by most coverage of this https://t.co/5619sUkFII

— Max (@aoxamaxoa) August 27, 2021

Kevin McCarthy is spewing dangerous lies about Afghanistan, because he’s a desperate and pathetic traitor.

— Scott Dworkin (@funder) August 25, 2021

Ron DeSantis takes COVID advice from CA psychiatrist pushing ivermectin: report

According to a report from the Bradenton Herald, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has been speaking with a California psychiatrist who is a proponent of using Ivermectin, an antiparasite drug used on animals, as an alternative treatment for COVID-19.

DeSantis, whose state is reeling from a massive surge of infections and COVID-related deaths, is already under fire for slow-walking or outright hindering measures to slow the spread of COVID, with a Politico report on Friday saying it could cripple his political future.

According to the Herald report, Dr. Mark McDonald of Los Angeles is “advising” DeSantis, with the report labeling the doctor as being, “….among a fringe group of outspoken medical professionals who have pushed ivermectin as an alternative to widespread vaccination against coronavirus. McDonald called ivermectin an ‘effective, safe, inexpensive treatment’ in a Aug. 5 Twitter post, and he shared an article by the Jerusalem Post citing a recent study of the drug in Israel.”

The Herald reports that McDonald was invited by DeSantis to a closed-door discussion on masks in schools back in July, noting, “In his comments, he argued that ‘masking children is child abuse,’ according to video of the meeting later released by the governor’s office.”

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The report notes, “McDonald accused the Food and Drug Administration of sidelining ivermectin because it already has spent billions of dollars to ‘mass vaccinate the population.'”

In an interview, he stated, “If the goal of these people is to advance public health and make the public well, why have none of them spoke a single word about prevention and making one healthy to prevent an infection or hospitalization or death/ I think there is a lot of dishonesty here and cancellation of people who support truth.”

According to Dr. John Sinnott, the chairman of internal medicine at University of South Florida’s Morsani College of Medicine, any doctor pushing ivermectin to treat COVID is “evil.”

“Any physician who espouses this should be reported to their state medical association,” Sinnott stated.

Planting trees to offset the legacy of racist housing policies

When Dovie “DJ” Arnold plants trees in Richmond, California, the neighborhood cheers him on. Older residents try to tip him and bring him water. Arnold, who is Black, works with Groundwork Richmond — a local chapter of a national network aiming to improve greenspaces in low-resource communities. He works in many of the same neighborhoods where his grandparents and other families were pushed when they moved to the city following war-effort jobs in the 1940s.

The neighborhoods, a result of segregationist policies, have been long passed over for green improvements. “Seeing people happy with the results of what we do,” Arnold said, “it’s really heartwarming.”

In the United States, Black and Brown neighborhoods, like those where Arnold works, face higher pollution than their White counterparts. According to new research, the ones that were segregated also have fewer trees. This disparity was made possible by a series of racist policies instituted in both federal and local government agencies that relegated the unsavory parts of cities to Black neighborhoods.

A growing body of scientific research focuses on one of those housing policies, redlining, and how it continues to shape modern health and environmental outcomes. Redlining dates to the 1930s, when the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) designated many Black and Brown neighborhoods as high risks for financing, outlining the areas in red on maps. Mostly White neighborhoods, meanwhile, were usually lined in green and considered good investments. (The U.S. outlawed redlining in 1968 through the Fair Housing Act.)

Unlike other Bay Area cities, Richmond — which had a population of less than 25,000 back in the 1930s — wasn’t itself redlined by the HOLC. But it was still subject to policies that resulted in housing segregation, and has suffered a similar long-term fallout when it comes to health and environmental disparities.

Out of all of the past segregationist housing policies, redlining is particularly illuminating because the maps left behind by the appraisal process make it relatively easy to study, said Joan Casey, an environmental epidemiologist at Columbia University who co-authored one such study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives in January. Research like Casey’s has shown how the policy continues to shape the landscapes of U.S. cities.

“Oftentimes we’re describing inequitable distributions of resources, or increased levels of pollution in communities of color,” Casey said, which doesn’t point to why these inequities exist. “So assessing historical redlining,” she added, “helps fill in the pieces of this puzzle.”

* * *

Previous research has shown that formerly redlined neighborhoods are on average 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than non-redlined ones, and have higher rates of preterm births and asthma hospitalizations. Most often, this work has highlighted health and environmental outcomes between redlined neighborhoods, graded as D by HOLC appraisers, and neighborhoods outlined in green, which were given an A grade. (Neighborhoods in between received blue for the B grade and yellow for the C grade.)

For their January study, Casey and her collaborators took a different approach. To best isolate the effects of redlining as a policy, they focused on neighborhoods that were redlined compared to neighborhoods with similar racial and economic demographics that, for unknown reasons, were graded C instead.

In order to compare the communities, the researchers used a measurement that estimates vegetation based on how much near-infrared light an area reflects — the more light reflected, the more plant cover. The researchers used this measurement, called the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), while comparing old redlining maps with satellite imagery of greenspace in 102 cities. The redlined neighborhoods had a nearly 8 percent lower NDVI score than neighborhoods outlined in yellow, after the researchers eliminated demographic outliers. Yellow neighborhoods, in turn, had a 10 percent lower NDVI score than neighborhoods in blue.

“We compared those communities that had the same probability of getting the Grade D or the redline, and found — flash forward all the way to present day — the ones that actually got redlined have lower greenspace,” Casey said.

For Casey, comparing greenspace between D and A neighborhoods would do little to show the fallout from redlining, since other factors could explain the difference in the number of trees and parks. Wealthy residents, for instance, are more able to pay for local beautification and to support existing tree cover. By comparing more similar neighborhoods, she says her team’s data are both more interesting and more damning of the policy. While other forms of disinvestment may have followed, redlining is the factor that initially placed some neighborhoods on a path that led to less greenspace in the next century.

Other researchers see Casey’s study as providing a link between current conditions and historic causes. Jennifer Wolch, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley, has also studied greenspace disparities, focusing on urban park space across the U.S. In a 2005 study on park distribution in Los Angeles, for instance, she found that neighborhoods that were at least 75 percent White had nearly 19 times more park space per capita than those that were at least 75 percent Black, and 53 times more park space per capita than neighborhoods that were at least 75 percent Latino. Wolch used current neighborhood demographics rather than historic housing policy, but her results show the same trend as Casey’s team. Wolch said both datasets are complimentary, and help explain how formerly redlined neighborhoods appear today.

“It’s important to look at the historical context of present-day circumstances — very important. Cities are sticky, they don’t change really super fast,” Wolch said. Policies like redlining, she added, left their mark on neighborhoods in ways that don’t vanish once the policy itself is made illegal: “The historical shadow on these places is really deep.”

* * *

Although Richmond was never formally redlined, housing policies throughout the city’s history have left similar marks. In 1940, only 270 Black people lived in Richmond, but thousands moved to the area to work the shipyard when the U.S. entered World War II. By 1945, the Black population had reached 14,000. Richmond was unable to provide living space for the workers, so the federal government built temporary housing. The housing projects were explicitly segregated; Black workers were placed closer to the shipyards, which became polluted with the pesticides DDT and dieldrin that were packaged and shipped from the area. There was other pollution, too. “Much of the Black population was always focused around maritime industry,” said Darrell Owens, a Bay Area policy analyst and housing advocate. “Which actually was a problem, because that’s where a lot of munitions were located. And that’s where dumping was located.”

As Richard Rothstein, a fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, a worker-focused think tank, argues in his history of segregation, “The Color of Law,” because Richmond was essentially all White before the war, the federal government’s role in housing directly established segregation in the city.

North Richmond, where Arnold’s grandparents lived at one point, had sprung up as an offshoot to the city where Black, Latino, and Asian families could live when they could not find housing in Richmond proper. The neighborhood did not have discriminatory zoning, but also lacked basic services like streetlights and paved roads because the city of Richmond was not responsible for its upkeep.

After the war, the federal government subsidized suburban neighborhoods on the express condition that they would be White only, providing examples of restrictive covenants that mandated home buyers be of the same race as the seller. The Federal Housing Administration’s 1938 Underwriting Manual stated that including a restrictive covenant would make projects more likely to get government loans. Rothstein writes that in Richmond, this meant when White families moved to newly-built suburbs like Rollingwood, Black people were left in the same public housing built for the war, closer to pollution from industry and without federal money to help them buy their own homes. By 1950, the war projects housed more than 75 percent of Richmond’s Black population.

In the decades after the war, the Black population in Richmond expanded into more neighborhoods, and White families continued to leave the city in favor of segregated — and green — suburban neighborhoods. In 1950, 80,000 White people lived in Richmond. By 1960, that number fell to 56,000. Meanwhile, Latino and Asian families moved to Richmond, now comprising about 42 percent and 15 percent of the city’s population, respectively, drawn by some of the most affordable housing prices in the Bay Area.

When the state needed to find a place for environmentally damaging and politically unpopular projects, those projects often ended up in the communities of color. In the 1950s and 60s, residents of some of San Francisco’s wealthier neighborhoods were able to stop the construction of a maze of freeways that would have divided the city. Richmond did not have the same political power, and is surrounded by interstate highways to this day, part of a national trend of freeway construction that isolated communities of color and polluted them with exhaust fumes. Today, Richmond is crisscrossed by rail lines, and is home to an oil refinery.

“When the constituents are more Black people,” Owens said, “the environmental concerns are not taken as seriously.”

* * *

Groundwork Richmond and locals are working to build a more hospitable environment. Arnold started working for Groundwork Richmond in May of 2019 as an urban forestry technician, planting and maintaining trees across the city. Now he keeps track of the data on tree location, age, and maintenance needs for all the trees the organization has planted.

“It started off just because I needed a job, but the more I got into it, it is important,” Arnold said. “We do need these trees. They serve a really big purpose.”

The trees aren’t just a matter of aesthetics. Greenspace is associated with reduced mortality rates, especially due to respiratory disease, which can offset some of the pollution burden from the freeways, trucking, and the oil refinery that give Richmond some of the worst air quality in the Bay Area. In the mortality rate study, researchers note that sociodemographic factors may have influenced their mortality data, hinting that greenspace is only one part of the urban geography that determines which places are the designed to keep people healthy. Mental health also improves with greenspace. A 2013 study in the journal Public Health found greenspace, including both parks and dispersed city plants, is associated with reduced anxiety and mood disorders in residents of Auckland, New Zealand. By reducing energy costs and offsetting the effects of the urban heat bubble caused by concrete and asphalt, trees also make neighborhoods more climate resilient, providing refuge from the physical and mental stress of heatwaves in a paved landscape.

“I think there’s a very clear environmental justice issue,” Wolch said. “We’re used to thinking about environmental justice as disproportionate impact from exposure to toxic waste or pollution of various kinds. But it’s also a disproportionate lack of access to good things in the environment.”

Arnold and Groundwork Richmond are working to bring those good things to their city, collaborating with other nonprofits to turn a rail line built in the early 1900s into a strip of green cutting across Richmond. The tree team plants individual trees along city streets, and knocks on doors to see if residents want a free tree in their yard. Lorenzo Plazola, who runs the tree planting program, says the trees have a way of going viral.

“Sometimes we’re just driving around a neighborhood and just talking to people, and you know ‘Hey, would you like a tree?'” Plazola said. “People really take to it. In fact, sometimes we’re planting a tree and people will just come up and say ‘I want one. I saw my neighbor’s got a really nice tree. I want one just like that.'”

Groundwork Richmond, which has received funding from the city and the National Park Service, focuses on the neighborhoods lacking resources — the ones surrounded by railways and industry, that are hotter and more polluted. Plazola is from San Leandro, another heavily Latino part of the Bay Area 25 miles south. He recognizes other similarities.

“Even though I grew up outside of Richmond, every other person had asthma. And that comes from somewhere,” Plazola said. He, too, was raised between freeways, and feels fortunate to have escaped the disease. “I grew up landlocked between the 580 and the 880, so I just got lucky.” Richmond is sandwiched between 80 and 580 as well, Plazola notes.

Casey, the Columbia University researcher, says she hopes her team’s work will make lawmakers and voters consider the long-term outcomes of housing policy proposals. “This is an example of how policy decisions — from now almost 100 years ago — are still impacting environmental quality and health in communities today,” she said. “We wanted to be able to make the point that policy decisions really matter. And things that we enact now could reverberate and have effects on people 50 years down the line.”

But Wolch says new housing policy will be needed to get the most from Groundwork Richmond’s environmental gains. As neighborhoods become greener, property values go up, and locals can be pushed out before they receive any benefit from the new green spaces. In New York City, for instance, an elevated park called the High Line that was built in 2009 raised nearby property values by 35 percent, displacing residents from the area. This has led some critics to caution against flashy greening projects out of fear that it will trigger gentrification. For Wolch, a middle ground is possible. Communities, she said, need affordable housing policies that can combat gentrification and keep people in their homes so that environmental justice work can truly provide for them a healthier future. Local input, Wolch added, is key. Greening projects planned by outside investors tend to bring more people into neighborhoods than projects locals develop for themselves.

When Plazola started working at Groundwork Richmond in 2015, the organization’s big project was building what would become Unity Park in central Richmond, a 12-acre park that Groundwork and other groups planned out and built with input from the community. The piece of land used to be an abandoned lot. Now there’s a playground, a basketball court, and trees and bushes growing along garden pathways. Sandwiched between the sheet metal walls of neighboring buildings, murals depict scenes of clean blue water and people walking in the forest.

“We’re doing this to try to bring the community together, and creating this whole transformation from within,” Plazola said. “We’re all working here together, and doing this thing for Richmond, by people from Richmond.”

* * *

Joe Purtell is an independent journalist interested in climate, ecology, and geography. He lives in Oakland, California.

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

Swiping right in the fertility doctor’s office: On pursuing romance and single motherhood at once

From my OB-GYN’s waiting room I browsed through dozens of profiles: car-selfies, men holding wine glasses, or grinning beside their big catches on the decks of motor boats. I swiped right, and evaluated suitors as the nurse called out a name that wasn’t mine, “Come on back, honey.” A long-legged young woman in denim cutoffs stood, her bump barely there, holding hands with a baseball-capped man who looked about 19. I scoped the scene — three couples and a woman robotically rocking a stroller with a sleeping child strapped to her chest. I was the only one partner-shopping on a dating app right now. The door swung open. “Sophie,” the nurse said. I shoved my cell in my purse like it was a dirty magazine and prepared for an up-close visit with my follicles.

It was January, I was 39 and determined to start the year with new life in my belly. I’d selected a specimen from an elite, local Los Angeles sperm bank reputed for accepting fewer applicants than an Ivy League university. All the donors were stellar — spotless medical histories and well-scribed personal narratives about why they wanted to donate — but it didn’t eclipse the image of a nuclear family I’d always envisioned for myself.

I figured I’d delete the dating app once my insemination journey started, but it persisted. I wasn’t thirstily trying to book dates, but I enjoyed the prospect of romance, far-fetched as a match felt on such sites. In times of boredom, I’d thumb through the way others do news headlines, scrolling until one grabbed me.

A few weeks earlier, a woman in my writing group in her mid-50s declared, “I think it’s trashy for pregnant women to use dating apps.”

“Aren’t they allowed to get laid too?” I snapped back.

But the jab nettled a greater insecurity: that pregnant women shouldn’t be single. Or is it that pregnant women shouldn’t be horny? Either way, it signaled that unmarried women are supposed to choose between motherhood or romance — not pursue both at once.

Once I was gowned and ready for probing, my OB-GYN pressed a glob-laden wand inside me and determined that the size of my follicles meant go-time was near. After I dressed, the nurse swung the door open, ushering me into a metal chair to have my blood drawn. In the preceding days, I’d peed on ovulation sticks, procured my specimen from the sperm bank and continued my daily routines — meticulously answering students’ emails, instructing online college writing classes, and buying fertility-boosting groceries — without excessively examining the decision I’d made to become an unpartnered mother through AI.

It wasn’t an easy one. I’d met my former spouse when I was 31, married at 32, started trying for children at 33, then divorced at 34. The sorrow of my marriage ending was softened by the assumption that I’d soon meet another man and plunge toward procreation while conception was still a natural biological option. Post-divorce I dated vastly, even moving to Berlin for a year on the notion that love was more tenable in a foreign setting, or that 30-something Deutsch men made better fathers. Only a month in did I learn that Berlin is known as the “City of Singles.”

Abroad, men from all over the globe lay at my fingertips, but navigating the nuances of their home countries’ dating cultures was difficult. After 13 months, I shlepped my overstuffed suitcases back to LA with a deepened perspective on the potential to fall in love again and the difficulty of it.

When months of dating stateside brought me no closer to romantic partnership, I considered freezing my eggs. I wanted to insure motherhood in the face of dating roulette. Over the 35-year-old mark, eager suitors were distinctly fewer than in years past. One morning, a close confidant suggested becoming a mother on my own. “Make this choice for yourself and you’ll never regret it,” she said.” I shocked myself at how right it felt.

My parents didn’t initially support it. Who would choose single-parenthood for their daughter? But the roots of procreation’s impulse runs deep. They changed their minds, eventually fully backing me. I was grateful; I needed all the support I could get. My dad started criticizing how much power men have in dating. “Get off birth control and let the guys worry about their actions,” he said.

Was this the new feminism? Dating as sperm-donor shopping?

My writing group colleague’s opinion was uninvited, but not unpopular. According to a UK study by BabyCentre, “research suggests that dating in pregnancy is one of the final taboos for single mums-to-be. 71% say there is a stigma surrounding dating during pregnancy, with 64% feeling they can’t even tell friends or family that they are dating or considering it.” I’m hard pressed to find other sources even collecting such data — a testament to the stigma.

Another woman in the group had chimed in, “I used to have a male roommate who dated a woman doing artificial insemination. He wanted children, even proposed to her, but she said his best hope was trying for a second child together. They eventually broke up.”

“But he can still have children,” I said. “He can meet someone else and father children until he’s 70. She doesn’t have that option.” I argued.

I wondered if either of my writing comrades understood what “choice” meant in a world where people date as though biological clocks don’t exist?

While single-motherhood-by-choice (a term I hate—we’re no nobler than single women who didn’t opt in) seems unusual, my predicament isn’t uncommon. After I penned a New York Times essay about pursuing artificial insemination as a single woman with depression, women wrote to me in droves. As one put it, “If I don’t find a partner within the next 4 years or so, I will go the single-mother-by choice route.”

Two days after my doctor’s appointment, I was in stirrups again, legs up and praying while my OB-GYN slipped a catheter into my vagina and sent the magic-making serum into my uterus. I was taking a step toward a baby—alone. I realized I owned my future. The dream of motherhood that was planted in my heart before I was born was at last, taking seed. Or so I hoped.

Later that afternoon, I met my friend Rachel at the dog park.

“I got inseminated this morning,” I said. “And I have a coffee date tomorrow. Should I tell the guy?” I asked

“Tell him what? Wait until you know if you’re pregnant,” she said. “Also, congrats!” Her shoulder bone dug into my cheek.

The following day, my date Dave and I sipped Americanos by the Silver Lake Reservoir.

After our date he texted, “I had a great time. I’d love to see you again.” He was into me! Would he be into my potential plus one in life?

I boasted as much to my younger sister. Her face went serious.

“You need to decide what you’re doing,” she said. “Are you trying to get pregnant or are you dating?”

“Both!” I said.

“No guy is going to be cool with you actively trying to get pregnant with another man’s baby,” she said.

“But it’s just my baby.” I said.

Before meeting Dave, I didn’t think I’d actually find someone I connected with on the apps.

“What if you fall in love right now?” My sister said. “Are you just going to drop your plan because you like this guy?”

The part of me that always wanted love, marriage, then the baby carriage caused me to pause.

The film “The Back-Up Plan” came to mind. In this romantic comedy, Jennifer Lopez’s character Zoe meets a dashing man on the same day she gets successfully inseminated. Shenanigans follow as she hides her condition. What if instead of meeting the dashing man after she got doctor’s-office knocked-up, they had locked eyes on a subway on the way to her appointment? Would she have cancelled? Postponed it a month or two? Where’s the scene where J.Lo admits the back-up plan is great and all, but doesn’t hold water to Plan A, where her baby gets to have a mom and a dad?

Is that what I was really doing by choosing to stay on the dating app? Hoping for an eleventh hour romance?

Ten days after the insemination, I called the doctor’s office to get my pregnancy test results. “We’re all rooting for you,” the nurse said. Then the doctor got on the line; it was negative.

“Don’t get discouraged,” she said.

Disappointed, but equally determined, I geared up for another round of hormones and follicle-monitoring.

Dave and I hiked one cloudy afternoon after brunch together. Resting on a log, watching the water skippers on the creek,

“Do you want more kids?” I asked him. He was already the father of a five-year-old son.

“In the future,” he said.

“How’s six months?” I wanted to ask, but stayed quiet.

I considered shelving artificial insemination for a cycle or two to see how our romance played out. But nature decided for me. All the hormones had confused my ovaries, which failed to produce a mature egg that month. A “crash” cycle my OB-GYN called it. I left her office relieved we couldn’t inseminate. Because I have a date with Dave tonight? I wondered.

I decided to take dating Dave day by day before telling him. Meanwhile, I monitored my basal body temperature, weighing motherhood against the seriousness of our courtship. If we kept bobbing toward the sea of love, I’d reveal that I was trying to conceive.

Then the pandemic crashed in, sweeping Dave out with it. First, he sheltered at home alone, closing himself off from me. It was hard to tell what was happening because he never broke up with me. He just washed away.

Then restaurants, shops, and even my doctor’s office went dark, too. I’d told myself that if our relationship didn’t work out, I still had my baby dreams, my back-up plan. But with all elective procedures suspended, I found myself without pregnancy hopes or romance.

Weeks later, I returned to the dating scene in vague hopes of a fresh romance. Dating had gone completely online. Hinge, Bumble, and Tinder were ripe with new members. Everyone was eager to find their version of company, comfort, or conjugal relations in the pandemic.

I emailed my doctor three months in. “When can we resume insemination?” I asked.

“Your next cycle,” she said.

Mother’s Day passed. For every husband on social media honoring the mother of their children, I reminded myself that I would be a mama soon. The images still stung.

I was now 40, which felt like 100 in dating years. Throughout my inseminations and the pandemic I continued to date, wavering between whether risking my heart with romance was worth it or not.

A couple of months ago, I met a man on a dating app who I deeply connected with. Joe is 43 and recently divorced with three kids. Despite the fact that he already had a family, I was immediately attracted to him. Or maybe it was his paternal ways that endeared him to me. Unlike most of the men I’d met on apps, he was used to caring intimately for others.

On date four, I told him I was trying to conceive on my own. My impulse was to soften my words, but a month’s pause in insemination was all I could offer him. He revealed that he had a vasectomy, which could be reversed “for the right person.” But what does that mean when you’ve only just started dating someone? I leaned into what he was offering — companionship and romance — but couldn’t go back to the idea of relying on a man to make me a mama.

“A few years ago that might have scared me off,” he said. “But I understand. Let me sit with it for a bit?”

It hurts to imagine falling in love with Joe and conceiving a child that bears a resemblance to some mystery donor. But I also recalled what my OB-GYN said the first time she inseminated me.

“I wish I’d done it this way, honey. My kids’ dad didn’t stick around,” she said. “It was hard on them. But I was never embarrassed by being a single mother.”

“Really?” I said.

“This new generation will need to do a lot of thinking outside of the box.”

For now, I’m inseminating with donor sperm each month and dating Joe.

Sometimes I imagine an idyllic union with Joe and his children, my baby, his ex-wife and her boyfriend, raising our families in a communal village where we celebrate Thanksgivings, Christmases, Hanukkahs, Mother’s and Father’s Day, and the birthdays of those long fought for as one loving, interconnected community. Maybe the future of romance will be dictated less by the strictures of coupling and conscious-uncoupling and more by the free exchange of love. It is a beautiful re-envisioning of the paradigm, one that honors a woman’s need to be a mother without denying her the love she deserves.

Biden vows to continue drone strikes in Afghanistan following airport attack: “Make them pay”

Even as he planned to withdraw all remaining U.S. troops from Afghanistan by August 31, President Joe Biden said Saturday that the drone strike that was launched Friday night in retaliation for an attack claimed by ISIS-K “was not the last.”

“We will continue to hunt down any person involved in that heinous attack and make them pay,” the president said in a statement Saturday afternoon. “Whenever anyone seeks to harm the United States or attack our troops, we will respond. That will never be in doubt.”

The Pentagon said the drone strike killed two “planners and facilitators” of the explosion outside Kabul’s airport, but according to The Guardian, in addition to targets related to the ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan and Pakistan, an elder in Jalalabad reported that three civilians were killed and four were wounded in the U.S. strike.

The bombing on Thursday killed as many as 170 civilians and 13 U.S. service members, and prompted calls from anti-war groups and lawmakers including Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) for the U.S. to refrain from taking further military action in Afghanistan as two decades of the U.S.-led war there comes to an end.

Following the U.S. retaliatory strike on Friday, Ariel Gold of CODEPINK pointed out that even if no civilians were killed as the Pentagon is reporting, “these drone strikes help ISIS recruit.”

“This is not what ending a war looks like,” said CODEPINK of the president’s threats of even more military action in the coming days, as he warned that more attacks are expected near the airport in Kabul in the next 36 hours.

This is NOT what ending a war looks like. All these strikes do is further fuel hatred and violence against the US and further risk the lives of Afghan civilians. https://t.co/KRXP3yMsfQ

— CODEPINK (@codepink) August 28, 2021

In addition to the U.S. drone strikes, BBC correspondent Secunder Kermani reported that according to eyewitnesses, many people who were killed in Thursday’s attack were shot by U.S. troops.

The New York Times reported Saturday that investigators in Afghanistan are examining where the gunfire came from during Thursday’s attack.

Mike Lindell’s election software handout a gift to hackers, experts say: “The door is now wide open”

According to a report from the Guardian, efforts by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and Arizona Republicans seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election have had the adverse effect of making fraud easier in coming elections.

With the report first noting, “Republican efforts to question Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020 have led to voting system breaches experts say pose a risk to future elections,” it goes on to state that — in the case of Lindell — his handouts at his cyber seminars are making the job easier for any hacker who wants to interfere in future elections.

“Copies of Dominion Voting Systems softwares used for designing ballots, configuring voting machines and tallying results were distributed at an event this month in South Dakota organized by the MyPillow chief executive, Mike Lindell, a Trump ally who has made unsubstantiated claims about last year’s election,” the report states before adding, “The software copies came from voting equipment in Mesa county, Colorado, and Antrim county, Michigan, where Trump allies challenged results last fall. Dominion software is used in some 30 states, including California, Georgia and Michigan.”

According to election security expert Harri Hursti, who attended Lindell’s South Dakota event, he claims he and others were handed “three separate copies of election management systems that run on the Dominion software” which can be used for practicing entering systems.

Speaking with the Guardian, he explained, “The door is now wide open,” before adding that all hackers would need is “… physical access to the systems because they are not supposed to be connected to the internet.”

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Kevin Skoglund, an election technology expert, agreed saying sabotage, including changing election results could be possible.

“This disclosure increases both the likelihood that something happens and the impact of what would happen if it does,” he admitted.

“Ryan Macias, an election technology and security expert who was in Arizona earlier this year to observe that review, was alarmed by a lack of cybersecurity protocols,” the report states.

“This is what I anticipated would happen, and I anticipate it will happen yet again coming out of Arizona,” Macias said. “These actors have no liability and no rules of engagement.”

You can read more here.

Consider the lobster thermidor: In defense of mixing seafood and cheese — sometimes

Well, would you put a slice of cheddar on a lobster roll? This is the text I received when I messaged my friend, a lifelong Mainer from a fishing family, to ask his thoughts on mixing seafood and cheese. I’ll admit, the thought of that particular dish made me queasy. But I wasn’t opposed to the combination in other dishes.

To me, it depends on context. To him, however, the thought of a cheese-covered lobster was grotesque enough to close the conversation.

“What about lobster thermidor?” I inquired, referring to the French dish made by removing lobster meat from its shell, cooking it in an egg yolk and brandy sauce before returning it to its shell to cover with cheese — often Gruyère — and baking until bubbly and brown. “Or white clam pizza?”

No response.

It’s a controversial combination, but one that appears in cuisines around the globe. The best enchiladas del mar I ever had were stuffed with minced crab and shrimp, covered in a salsa verde and generously sprinkled with crumbly, briny cotija. In Greece, there’s shrimp saganaki, a flavorful mix of sautéed shrimp, tomatoes, olives and pan-fried cheese, typically feta. McDonald’s has the Filet-O-Fish, Maryland has crab dip, my local deli has a tuna melt, and — and I’m going to show my midwestern roots here — just writing this has me craving a hearty, cheddar-covered tuna noodle casserole.

When I ran a Twitter poll asking people how they felt about the combination, 259 people responded over the course of 12 hours. Almost 46% were on board, citing dishes like lobster macaroni and cheese, cream cheese bagels with lox and shrimp with cheese grits as affirmative reasons. Thirty-five percent said the thought made them squeamish, while the remaining respondents said they’d never given their preferences much thought. Of those who said they were against the combination, some of the most adamantly opposed were Italian, Italian-American cooks and food professionals.

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Dig into the history and there are a variety of explanations behind the unofficial ban. Some say it’s a way to maintain a regional divide and associated traditions. Northern Italian food tends to be a little richer and, due to the region’s proximity to Switzerland, Austria and France, there’s a lot of crossover in how cheese, meats and cream are used in dishes. Southern Italian food is lighter and brighter, with a lot of simple seafood and vegetable-based dishes.

According to Daniela Savone, chef brand ambassador for Botticelli foods and writer for La Cucina Italiana USA, the traditional course structure of Italian meals didn’t incorporate the mixture of seafood and cheese.

“For Italians — in Italy — fish or seafood, if eaten as the entree or ‘secondo’ course, prepare and serve it as simple as possible, typically with olive oil, lemon & fresh herbs, and with a small vegetable side or ‘contorno’ because they don’t want to take away from the beauty, freshness and taste of the fish,” she said.

Savone said that while she likes to sprinkle a little grated cheese on a bowl of pasta and shellfish, like linguine alle vongole, “adding cheese and lots of heavy cream to seafood is an Americanized thing.”

“Italian-Americans, depending on the generation and ‘how Italian’ they truly are — and who have been to Italy or grew up like myself in a first-generation Italian home — know that the way seafood and cheese is served here would never be served in Italy,” she said.

Maureen Minard, a D.C.-based history instructor whose family is Puglian, said there may also be some old wives’ wisdom associated with reluctance to mix the two.

“Italians actually have tons of strong opinions on dairy and when to consume it,” she said. “For example, one never has a cappuccino after 11 a.m. It is due to the dairy upsetting the stomach. Italians are very concerned with one’s health and constitution. There are tons of phrases or things a nonna might say about how food might sit in your stomach.”

While that may not be true for everyone, there is a lingering, prevailing sense that the combination of seafood and cheese just isn’t done.

“Why don’t cheese and seafood go together?” said food writer Natalia Manzocco. “Because my nonna said so and if you put parmigiano on your spaghetti frutti di mare her ghost will chase you with a wooden spoon.”

As a non-Italian, I understand the hesitancy. The idea of overpowering delicate steamed mussels with, say, a hunk of buttery brie is not just unappealing, but it seems like a waste of both ingredients. The mussels will shine more brightly with a simple splash of citrus while the brie belongs with something acidic. (Perhaps Maggie Hennessy’s tomato and brie pasta?) That said, home cooking is more fun when culinary “rules” — including so-called bans — are viewed as suggested parameters.

After all, it’s not too late to change your mind, as seen on a recent episode of “Top Chef” when judges Padma Lakshmi and Tom Colicchio were served a smoked trout dish showered with a dusting of briny cheese.

“Considering I really hate any mixture of seafood and cheese, I didn’t mind this dish,” Lakshmi said. Collichio, mid-bite, nodded: “I’m with you.”

We snagged the recipe for Carmine’s hearty Italian meatballs

Carmine’s first opened its doors in August 1990 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Artie Cutler, the restaurateur behind the venture, favored, as the New York Times put it, “hearty, easy-to-enjoy” dishes.

“Carmine’s served huge platters of spaghetti and meatballs, rivers of marinara sauce and mountains of garlic at a time when the trend in Italian restaurants was toward elevating the image of the cuisine with extra-virgin oils, aged vinegars and cheese made from buffalo milk,” wrote Times reporter Eric Asimov.

The restaurant focuses on family-style eating, including gigantic, flavorful meatballs which you can now recreate in the comfort of your own kitchen now that Carmine’s has shared their weeknight-friendly recipe with Salon readers.

A classic Italian dish, parents can never go wrong with pasta and meatballs. Using a blend of veal, beef, fresh garlic, breadcrumbs, basil, and parmesan or romano cheese, Carmine’s meatballs are a winner. To mix it up, leftovers can easily be made into meatball heros.

***

Recipe: Spaghetti with Carmine’s Meatballs
Serves 6 to 8

Ingredients

1 ½ cups bread crumbs
2 ½ cups chicken stock
1 ½ tablespoons chopped garlic
2 large eggs, beaten
4 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
4 tablespoons chopped fresh basil 1 tablespoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
½ pound ground veal
1½ pounds fresh ground beef chuck
1 ¼ cups grated Romano cheese
10 cups Marinara Sauce
2 pounds spaghetti, cooked al dente

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 450°F.

2. In a large bowl, combine the bread crumbs, 1 cup of the chicken stock, the garlic, eggs, 3 tablespoons of the parsley, 2 tablespoons of the basil, the salt, and pepper. Add the veal, beef, and 1 cup of the grated cheese. Using your hands, mix well, but do not overwork the mixture. Refrigerate for 1 hour to allow the mixture to set up.

3. Lightly oil a high-sided sheet pan with olive oil. Using a large ice cream scoop, scoop out rounded balls of the meat mixture. Arrange them on the sheet pan, spacing the balls evenly apart, until you’ve used up the mixture; there should be about 12 balls.

4. Coat your hands with a little bit of olive oil and tightly pack each ball while rolling it round to maintain a uniform shape.

5. Pour the remaining 1 ½ cups of chicken stock into the sheet pan around the meatballs. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until the meatballs are browned and cooked through. Remove and let cool.

6. When you’re ready to serve, combine the meatballs with the marinara sauce in a medium pot, and simmer for 15 to 20 minutes. While the meatballs simmer, cook the spaghetti.

7. Spread the pasta out on a serving platter and place half the meatballs along the center. Top with 3 cups of the sauce. Garnish with 2 tablespoons of the grated cheese, the remaining 1 tablespoon parsley, and 1 tablespoon of the basil, and serve.

8. Add the remaining 2 tablespoons cheese and 1 tablespoon basil to the remaining sauce and meatballs

9. Let any leftover meatballs and sauce cool and then refrigerate for meatball heroes the next day.

The secret ingredient in this salsa is peanut butter — or is it?

Every week in Genius Recipes — often with your help! — Food52 Founding Editor and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook.

* * *

When poet and recipe developer Andrea Aliseda started unraveling the history of her great-grandma’s Guillermina’s storied salsa, she was surprised to find two very different recipes — depending on who she asked.

Until then, Andrea hadn’t inherited lots of recipes from her family. In fact, “the only one I know of is this salsa,” she wrote when she shared this recipe on Epicurious earlier this year. And it had only arrived in her life recently, when her mom started making it to sell to friends at the elementary school where she works in San Diego.

Intrigued by the heat-taming powers of an uncommon swirl of peanut butter, Andrea traced its roots as far back as she could: First, to the version her mom Alejandra had learned from Guillermina shortly after marrying into the family. Then, to the one kept by her great-aunt Rosalinda, as Guillermina was no longer alive to tell her more.

The two recipes shared only a foundation: serrano chiles, onions, and garlic fried in rough chunks, blended with some of the heat-stoked oil they’d sizzled in, plus bouillon for a rounded salty oomph.

But the older version of Guillermina’s recipe kept by Rosalinda had a lot more garlic, and left the salsa chunky, like guacamole, where her mom’s was always blended smooth. And the signature ingredient was missing: “So it says chile serrano, onion, olive oil, little bit of bouillon…” Andrea read, fact-checking in her mom’s old recipe notebook on this week’s episode of The Genius Recipe Tapes. “Yeah, there is no peanut butter!”

The version Andrea makes now is really a third Salsa Guille. She added back some of Guillermina’s garlicky heft. And while her mom’s peanut butter tempers the fire of the serranos, Andrea goes even further, scraping out the seeds and ribs to taste more of the grassiness, with less of the heat. This is fully customizable — Andrea’s mom will ultimately win out when they make it together. “I would probably just do little dots on each bite.”

Guillermina served hers with meaty dishes like carne asada. Andrea’s mom likes to scoop it up on baguettes and slices of sourdough. Andrea spoons it on crispy mushroom tacos, sandwiches, and tofu scrambles. I’ve asked it to uplift many a roasted vegetable-grain jumble. There’s little it wouldn’t improve, and in the fridge it keeps well for as long as two weeks. The leftover serrano-spiced oil can replace any oil in pan-fries and salad dressings to joyous effect.

This recipe has changed what I want in a salsa, and what I’ll make to thrill anyone I’m feeding. But best of all, it shows the promise of following family recipes back through every thread and splinter. Everyone it’s touched will have something more to tell you.

Salsa Guille From Andrea Aliseda

Prep time: 40 minutes
Cook time: 10 minutes
Serves: 6-8

Ingredients

2 cups avocado oil or grapeseed oil
1 medium white onion, quartered through stem end, peeled, and layers separated
12 to 14 garlic cloves, smashed
8 serrano chiles, halved lengthwise, seeds and ribs removed
2 tablespoons unsalted, sugar-free creamy peanut butter
1 teaspoon vegetable bouillon concentrate (preferably Better Than Bouillon)
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more
Chopped salted, dry-roasted peanuts, for serving (optional)

Directions

In a large heavy pot, heat the oil over high. When the oil is shimmering, carefully dip the edge of a piece of onion in — if it sizzles, it’s hot enough; carefully add the onion, garlic, and chiles. Reduce the heat to maintain a low simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onions are translucent, chiles are blistered, and garlic is golden around the edges, about 10 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, scoop the vegetables into a blender or food processor and let cool for 10 minutes.
Add the peanut butter, bouillon, and 1/2 teaspoon salt to the blender and purée. Remove the small inset lid from top and, with the machine on the lowest setting, slowly pour in enough of the cooking oil to make it creamy and scoopable (this could take up to 1 cup, but feel free to stop when it reaches the consistency you’re like). Blend until the salsa is velvety and emulsified. Taste the salsa and season with more salt if needed.
Transfer to a small bowl and top with peanuts just before serving.
To make ahead: The salsa (without the peanut topping) can be made 2 weeks ahead. Cover tightly and chill.

“He’s All That” and why the Pygmalion story is so important to – yet undermines – teen stories

Netflix’s delightfully inane teen rom-com “He’s All That” may be a gender-flipped remake of the 1999 hit “She’s All That,” but the messaging is the same, for better or for worse.

In the update, real-life TikTok dancer and social media influencer Addison Rae makes her onscreen acting debut as Padgett Sawyer, a Los Angeles-area high schooler and beauty influencer who loses followers and sponsorships after fans witness her perfect life implode in real time. To win back her audience and gain cachet with ultra rich friends, Padgett takes on the challenge to secretly befriend and then make over the most challenging project she can find: Cameron Kweller (Tanner Buchanan of “Cobra Kai“).

The brooding misanthrope couldn’t be further from being prom king. Not only does Cameron like taking photographs with actual film, he also dresses as if enjoying crisp Seattle weather even though he lives in sunny LA. But a “Great Gatsby”-themed birthday party, “Street Fighter”-style rumble, a Kardashian appearance and epic dance battle later, and those two crazy kids achieve a FOMO-inducing level of fun together. The makeover is also successful inasmuch as Cameron’s newly groomed persona is embraced, and affection blossoms through this experience.

Love is great and all, but is this story of guided transformation a healthy message to promote?

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As noted before, “He’s All That” is not the first teen rom-com to dip into this well. “She’s All That” spun the fixer-upper fairy tale for millennials to great success, and its film’s stars Rachael Leigh Cook and Matthew Lillard even make appearances in the update. In fact, for every generation, there is such a story. One era’s “He’s All That” is another’s “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Pretty Woman” or “The Princess Diaries.” Or it’s “My Fair Lady” with your choice of Audrey Hepburn or Julie Andrews (or a myriad of others like Karen Gillan).

Of course, all of these are Pygmalion stories, based on or loosely inspired by George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play of the same name about a professor of phonetics who attempts to educate a poor flower vendor. And in turn that has its roots in Greek mythology based on narrative poem.

It’s clear that this tale of glowing up under the direction of another has endured for centuries in one form or another. But why does it work so particularly well in teen programming?

“So many love stories for women were always about this man who would, in fact, be a mentor to you,” says Gina Fattore, a screenwriter whose resume is heavy on televised teen dramas like “Dawson’s Creek” and “Gilmore Girls.” She recently created the USA Network adaptation of Megan Abbott’s cheerleader-set suspense thriller “Dare Me.”

Although Fattore has never worked with this trope in her own writing, she couldn’t escape its underlying messaging about self-worth and relationship dynamics.

“This idea that love is something that fundamentally changes you is baked into all of our conversations,” she says. “Heterosexual relationships are about how you have to change this man. You have to change him into, basically an adult. So essentially, meaning you have to mother him.”

Also, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a beauty blogger trying to hold onto her sponsorships or a rich guy who picks up a prostitute with a heart of gold on Hollywood Boulevard.

“The trope is popular because it holds out the idea that social hierarchies – of gender, class and race, for example -– are changeable,” says Leila Neti, an English professor specializing in 19th and 20th century British literature at Los Angeles’ Occidental College. She says they bestow the notion that “with the help of the right people, anyone can transcend social limitations.”

This concept, especially in the hands of a heteronormative romance, is a double-edge sword however.

“When we dig a little deeper, though, we see that the transformation always works in one direction,” Neti says. “Whether in ‘My Fair Lady,’ ‘Pretty Woman,’ or more recent versions of this story, social hierarchies are cemented, rather than challenged, because these narratives tend to affirm the value of the socially dominant position.”

She says that this narrative can be particularly problematic when shown to impressionable audiences because it “channels teen desires toward normative ends, encouraging young women to identify with, and value, dominant ideals of beauty, as well as [male] wealth, power, and privilege . . . Ultimately, it furthers conventional ideas that don’t speak to the feminist aspirations of the contemporary era.”

Yet, “He’s All That” is premiering at a time when teen programming is going through a sort of renaissance. They’ve become more inclusive, both ethnically and in regards to LGBTQ+ awareness, and are having more frank discussions of sex and consent.

“The world is becoming less heteronormative at every turn, which is great because young people are leading the charge in all those areas,” says Fattore. “The old standards for the stories are not working for them.”

Therefore, it makes sense that the makeover trope is also part of the conversation and being scrutinized. In an episode of HBO Max’s new iteration of “Gossip Girl,” the popular and scheming Luna La (Zión Moreno) offers to “Pygmalion” new outsider Zoya (Whitney Peak) – but, she stresses, “I don’t mean a feminized transformation in order to please a cis man. I’m talking elevating your taste level so that no one calls you Zugly again.” Cue a montage of her tutelage.

At the end of “He’s All That,” Padgett comes clean about her own contributions to societal standards of perfection while Cameron loosens up a bit and still keeps his new hair and clothes. It’s a toddler’s step in the right direction.

But, as Neti notes, “The Pygmalion trope originates in Greek mythology in which a sculptor falls in love with the statue he creates. So there is also a kind of narcissism in the concept, in the sense that the creator is falling in love with a version of themselves.” This is the male gaze made corporeal.

“That’s also why, even though the trope seems to be about change, it is really about keeping things the same; what you really are falling in love with is a version of yourself, not someone different,” she adds. “Changing the sex or gender of either of the main characters doesn’t change the fact that the storyline usually works to preserve social norms and the status quo.”

“He’s All That” is now streaming on Netflix.

8 complaints to the FCC about children’s TV

Anyone can file a TV-related complaint through the Federal Communications Commission. While most of the 11,399 TV complaints received through the Consumer Help Center from December 29, 2014, to May 17, 2015, were about billing issues, 2181 were filed under “Indecency.”

Back in 2016, we filed a FOIA request to get any complaints filed over the past several years about popular kids’ shows like “Sesame Street,” “Yo Gabba Gabba,” “Dinosaur Train,” “Dora the Explorer,” “Phineas and Ferb,” and “Arthur.” By far, the most common target was “Sesame Street, “followed closely by a number of complaints about advertisements shown during children’s programming. Below are some of the complaints we received. Some are perfectly reasonable. Others are bizarre.

1. “I am oppalled by this”

“Sesame Street” often parodies pop culture, but one person believed the show took it too far when they ran a segment on “Fifty Shades of Grey.“ The complaint, filed February 19, 2014, read:

Sesame St referenced Fifty Shades of Gray book in the episode. Calling the book fifty shades of oatmeal. Then saying it was really steamy stuff! I am oppalled by this! I have never heard them reference the Bible but they can reference this book that is clearly meant for ADULTS. This is a children’s show. I am extremely disappointed.

2. “I am not sure why this is being marketing to my 6-year-old”

On November 14, 2011, one enraged parent sent the following complaint:

In-between episodes of Phineas & Ferb CARTOON ON A DISNEY CHANNEL there was an advertisement for Pure Romace parties which I know to be a company that sells sex toys and other sexual enhancement products (among other things.) I am not sure why this is being marketing to my 6 year old. It would be unfortunate for kids to be visiting this companies web site after watching A CARTOON ON A DISNEY CHANNEL!

3. I’ll get right to the point

One “Sesame Street” complaint filed on January 25, 2011, said simply, “Big birds offend me.”

4. “What is better with springs?”

“Several times during the day on the DisneyHD Channel, there was a commercial show for Sleepy’s for Sealy Posturpedic,” a parent wrote to the FCC on March 27, 2011.

In this commercial, it shows in the beginning couples laying back showing satisfaction implying that they just had sex. The words ‘better with springs’ then shows on the screen with an implied bounce and then again back to the satisfied couples. I believe that this is an inappropriate commercial for this ‘kid based’ channel. My eleven year old boy at first didn’t get the commercial, but when he did he thought that it was gross. I can imagine younger children after seeing this commercial and putting their parents on the spot by asking ‘what is better with springs’ and ‘why are those people acting like that?’ This commercial should be removed from this type of audience and kept to prime time.

5. “A gross lack of judgment”

Who is in charge of these commercial breaks? The person who filed this complaint on January 6, 2012, wrote:

During a commercial break between Dora and SpongeBob, Nick aired a commercial for the adult company Adam and Eve. While I am not against Adam & Eve, the airing of an adult sex toy commercial on a kids network (in the middle of the day while my kids were watching) shows a gross lack of judgement.

6. “This sucks”

This “concerned mother, grandmother AND daycare provider” was alarmed enough by the language in a Honda commercial — which her charges parroted back — to file a complaint both with the FCC (on September 30, 2013) and with Honda:

Good Morning,
I run a daycare out of my house, and I frequently allow the children to watch programs on the Nickelodeon channel. On this particular morning, while watching a program with the children, a Honda minivan commercial came on. This particular commercial shows the new Honda minivan with a built in vacuum. There are some talking toys in the commercial. One of the toys says THIS SUCKS and to my dis-belief, the 4 children watching the program all said in unison THIS SUCKS.
Now I understand what is going on in the commercial, but it was extremely difficult for me to inform the children’s parents what they over heard, especially on a family type of channel. More precisely, a children’s channel. I did call Honda and voiced my concern. They informed me that my complaint has been logged and to have a nice day.
Concerned Mother, grandmother AND daycare provider.”

7. “Unfortunately my young sons were watching it”

Sesame Street’s flying fairy program promoted homosexuality. In the program, the girl’s kiss didn’t wake up the sleeping boy fairy, so a boy kissed him and woke him up. Unfortunately my young sons were watching it.

The “flying fairy program” referenced in this complaint, filed on July 4, 2011, is “Abby’s Flying Fairy School,” a “Sesame Street” segment designed to teach kids about how to solve problems using logic and reasoning.

8. “America is slowly turning into a third world country”

“PLEASE DO NOT ALLOW SESAME STREET TO GO AWAY AND DO NOT ALLOW THAT HATEMONGER WHO WANTS TO TAKE OVER THE STATION’S TIME SLOTS TO PREVAIL. THIS IS AN OUTRAGE. AMERICA IS SLOWLY TURNING INTO A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY.”

This comment was sent in on May 6, 2011 — long before Romney’s infamous “Big Bird” comment during the 2012 election season about cutting funding for PBS. But politicians have been talking about cutting government spending on public broadcasting for years, so this writer could have been referencing any number of people. Or something else entirely. It’s hard to know.

A version of this story originally ran in 2016; it has been updated for 2021.

Why the Hyde Amendment and other barriers to reproductive care lead to more domestic violence

Earlier this month, the House of Representatives passed a historic budget that didn’t include the Hyde Amendment, a budget rider that’s severely restricted coverage of abortion care by withholding federal funding since 1976. Of course, the gift of hindsight shows us celebrations of this monumental moment proved slightly premature, when it was quietly undone with a single stroke on Aug. 10.

By a narrow margin, determined as ever to deny us good things, the US Senate adopted an amendment to restore Hyde to the budget, and usher in yet another year of abortion care being all but banned for those who are struggling financially. Today, despite the relative quietness and feelings of helplessness attached to this loss for reproductive justice, we’re closer than ever to eliminating Hyde, and there’s too much at stake — especially for many victims of domestic abuse — to give up now.

The repercussions of Hyde through the years have proven devastating, despite how the policy has often been treated as something as a third-rail issue for the majority of politicians who are still struggling to string together the words, “a woman’s right to choose,” let alone acknowledge how economic barriers have rendered this “choice” inaccessible for many. Among pregnant persons on Medicaid who are unable to afford an abortion, Hyde forces one in four of them to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. And, as the well-known research of a study called the Turnaway Study has shown, there are long-term consequences for people who are unable to get the abortion care they seek — who are unsurprisingly more likely to be people of color, low-income people, and those who are already marginalized by the health system.

But in addition to making those who are denied abortion care four times more likely to be pushed into poverty, the Turnaway Study found being forced to keep an unwanted pregnancy also increases the risk of being entrapped in an abusive relationship. Another study found that more than a tenth of people who seek abortion care do so because their partners are abusive, and people experiencing domestic abuse are more likely to remain in violent situations if they carry their pregnancy to term. Demographer Diana Greene Foster, the author of the Turnaway study, told Salon a few years ago that “being unable to have the abortion tethered women to violent men, while women who have the abortion were more able to escape abusive relationships.”

From Hyde, to state and local-level bans, to rising criminal ordinances on abortion, all restrictions on reproductive health care carry specific and significant impact on victims and survivors of abuse. The connection between the seemingly separate issues of reproductive care, consent and autonomy becomes obvious when you connect the dots. Domestic abuse and abortion bans extend from the same well of rampant gender-based violence in society and politics — and even more dangerously, in our health system.

Forced pregnancy as a triggering violation of consent

To state the obvious, all abortion bans and barriers are an insidious violation of consent, especially for those who have experienced some form of sexual harm or coercion beforehand. By the twisted logic of anti-abortion zealots who see women as subhuman, consent to sex is falsely equated with consent to pregnancy, ignoring how forced pregnancy and birth can be a deeply traumatic violation of someone’s body, not unlike being subject to sexual violence.

As more and more particularly extreme state abortion bans — like the recent Texas law that empowers local narcs to sue those who have or help someone have an abortion — draw attention for not offering exceptions for rape, it’s worth listening to survivors and recognizing how these exceptions can do more harm than good for victims, anyway.

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Think about it this way: Rape exceptions to abortion bans are more likely to help anti-abortion lawmakers, because lawmakers can performatively cite these exceptions to depict their laws as less cruel and extreme than they are. Rape exceptions also imply that rape is easy to report and “prove” to police or medical professionals — this is demonstrably false, to put things lightly. In reality, rape exceptions simply make access to health care conditional on whether survivors can prove their trauma to medical or law enforcement institutions, which both have long histories of dismissing or covering up sexual violence they perpetrate.

And as states pass a historic number of abortion bans and restrictions this year, another connection between attacks on reproductive rights and domestic abuse is brought into the fold: reproductive coercion between intimate partners, which could include tampering with a partner’s birth control and condoms, or otherwise controlling their reproductive decisions and abilities. When state lawmakers exert control over the bodies and reproductive health options of pregnant people, they act to normalize such behaviors, which are often reproduced by abusers in their relationships. One 2010 study found 15% of women who report experiencing physical violence from a male partner also report birth control sabotage.

The gendered violence enacted by federal and state abortion policy

Just as anti-abortion lawmakers tacitly endorse reproductive coercion by practicing this behavior in their legislation, when these same lawmakers equate abortion care with murder, they may incite retaliatory and inherently gendered violence against those purportedly responsible: abortion providers and their patients. Words have consequences, and in this case, the consequence can be gendered violence.

Protesters outside abortion clinics have been known to stalk, harass and dox clinic staff and patients, or even out abortion patients to their partners or family members who may be abusive. In a number of well-documented cases, they’ve committed arson or murdered providers.

The synergy between anti-abortion stigma, cultural disdain toward pregnant people, and American policymaking has yielded a crisis of gender-based violence, and not just outside clinic doors. Unsurprisingly considering ICE’s whole thing is essentially racist regulation of the US population, the agency has been exposed for acts ranging from forcing detained migrant youth — many of whom are victims of sexual violence, sometimes victimized in ICE detainment centers — to carry unwanted pregnancies, to allegedly carrying out nonconsensual sterilizations on hundreds of migrant women.

Law enforcement agencies similarly target and surveil the pregnancies of people who are citizens, and often weaponize feticide laws — laws which were created to protect pregnant people from domestic violence — to instead work against the pregnant person. Case in point: In 2019, Marshae Jones miscarried after being shot in the stomach, and was briefly jailed for manslaughter, which feels like a twisted, perfect metaphor for “pro-life” politics at large.

Feticide laws and other policies that supposedly “protect” pregnant people and domestic abuse victims instead have led to criminal charges for people who experience miscarriage, stillbirth, self-induce their own abortions at home, or face any other pregnancy complications, a UC Hastings Law study concluded. The War on Drugs was particularly weaponized against Black pregnant women suspected of substance use, and today, people of color are disproportionately policed, and in some cases jailed for their pregnancy outcomes.

The punishment and neglect of pregnant people and survivors of sexual violence, and especially those of color, is mirrored in the gendered cruelties of our capitalist health system. The US maintains the highest maternal death rate in the industrialized world, with significantly higher rates in states with more restrictions on reproductive care, and particularly high rates for women of color: Black women are three to four times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related complications.

On top of this, many health providers fail to provide trauma-informed options for essential, life-saving reproductive care like pelvic exams and pap smears, which can be highly triggering for survivors of sexual harm. This lack of options for victims, or really even cultural cognizance that this is, in fact, an issue, speaks to the intersecting ways survivors and pregnant-capable people are harmed by the health system.

In many if not most cases, patients who have experienced sexual trauma aren’t even asked about their levels of comfort with pelvic exam services, or what would help them feel safer in having these services. Like the aforementioned, dangerous outcomes pregnant people face, this absence of even basic consideration of the fact that survivors exist and, hey, are probably going to need a pap smear at some point, stem from societal failure to connect gender-based violence prevention with reproductive health care accessibility.

Race, poverty and inaccessible abortion as risk factors for abuse

Like pretty much everything else in this world, vulnerability to the intersections of sexual violence and barriers to reproductive care isn’t identity-neutral. The Hyde Amendment specifically reveals how socioeconomic status and poverty are weaponized to control and coerce the reproduction of low-income people. Consequently, Hyde also shows how the state has made poverty and race essentially become risk factors for gender-based interpersonal violence.

In the 1970s, Rep. Henry Hyde, the namesake of the notorious budget rider, proudly walked us through his Evil Plan to design a bill that would specifically ban abortion for poor people and people of color. Congress’ renewal of the unapologetic white supremacist’s amendment each year since speaks volumes about how little has changed for pregnant people and survivors of color in the last decades.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, poverty and barriers to health care increased exponentially, and unsurprisingly, so did cases of domestic violence, when families around the world were confined to their homes, granting domestic abusers more power than ever. Victims of domestic abuse who feared losing shelter or health care, or experienced an unwanted pregnancy but couldn’t access abortion or birth control in the COVID-strained medical system, found themselves entrapped in abusive situations.

There are many factors that have created this devastating reality that’s still unfolding around us, from the brutality of the for-profit health system, to the crisis of unaffordable housing, to the recklessly mismanaged pandemic, and the broad inaccessibility of abortion. But the Hyde Amendment is what binds the seemingly disconnected issues of pregnancy, domestic abuse, poverty, and the global health crisis. It’s the through-line that connects all of this shameful and inherently racist, gendered violence. Hyde and any policies that create financial barriers to abortion care form the chokehold of financial insecurity and patriarchal control that can tie vulnerable pregnant people to abusers for a lifetime.

To me, this ingredient will always be better than bacon

Big Little Recipe has the smallest-possible ingredient list and big everything else: flavor, creativity, wow factor. That means five ingredients or fewer — not including water, salt, black pepper, and certain fats (like oil and butter), since we’re guessing you have those covered. Psst, did you hear we’re coming out with a cookbook? We’re coming out with a cookbook!

* * *

Depending on which New Jerseyan you ask, the most magical pork product of all time is either called “Taylor ham” or “pork roll.” The former is more common in the north chunk of the state (that’s me). The latter, more popular in the central and south. In any case, neither is the full name — as a 1908 advertisement read, “LOOK OUT For Imitators…SEE That You Get the Genuine TAYLOR Pork Roll.”

The omission of ham was not an accident. Because technically speaking, Taylor ham is not ham. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 nipped that in the bud. Made with salt, sugar, and spices, it has a salami-like flavor and Spam-like texture — so irresistible that, not long after its inception, my great-grandmother couldn’t stop cooking it for breakfast, to the scorn of her kosher relatives.

Taylor ham was invented by John Taylor, born in 1836, in Hamilton Square, New Jersey. After working in a brick yard as a teenager, he went on to own a grocery store, chair a finance committee, establish an opera house, and become a senator, all the while fishing in his spare time. But pork roll is his legacy.

In New Jersey, this ingredient is findable at just about any supermarket — in a log or, more commonly, a pre-sliced package. It’s also a given at just about any diner. Which is saying something in a state with more diners than any other state. Like bacon, Taylor ham thrives alongside fried eggs and hash browns. It’s even better on a Kaiser roll with gooey eggs and gooier cheese. (NJ.com even ranked the top 20 “Taylor ham/pork roll sandwiches” — an honor-to-just-be-nominated sort of deal.)

Still, to limit Taylor ham to breakfast would be like caging a seagull at the shore. It is at home, yes, but it cannot soar as it longs to. Taylor ham is a smart swap just about anywhere you would use actual ham or bacon or sausage. Think: fried rice, carbonara, potato salad, macaroni and cheese, baked beans. Or a BLT.

Like bacon, Taylor ham only needs minutes in a skillet to become crackly at the edges and glossy with rendered fat. The trick is to score the slice, so that instead of puffing, it stays flat in the skillet, becoming crispy, then crispier, then crispiest. Its salty, porky umami is a soulmate to juicy tomatoes, watery lettuce, squishy bread, and so much mayonnaise.

And before you say it — I know. I know it can no longer be called a BLT without the B. And I agree, neither THLT or PRLT has quite the same ring. But none of these technicalities matter after you take a bite.

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Recipe: Taylor Ham, Lettuce and Tomato Sandwich

Prep time: 5 minutes
Cook time: 3 minutes
Makes: 1 sandwich

Ingredients

1 to 2 thick tomato slices
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 slices Taylor ham
2 to 3 iceberg or butter lettuce leaves
Mayonnaise, for slathering
2 sandwich bread slices, toasted

Directions

Thickly slice the tomato and generously season it with salt and pepper.
Set a cast-iron skillet over medium to medium-high heat. Score the perimeter of the Taylor ham at 12 o’clock, 3 o’clock, 6 o’clock, and 9 o’clock. (This helps it crisp.) Add the ham slices to the hot skillet. Cook for 3 to 4 minutes total, flipping as needed, until crispy-edged.
Spread both pieces of toast with mayonnaise. Build the sandwich in this order: bread, Taylor ham, lettuce, tomatoes, bread.

The disturbing history of how conservatorships were used to exploit, swindle Native Americans

Pop singer Britney Spears’ quest to end the conservatorship that handed control over her finances and health care to her father demonstrates the double-edged sword of putting people under the legal care and control of another person.

A judge may at times deem it necessary to appoint a guardian or conservator to protect a vulnerable person from abuse and trickery by others, or to protect them from poor decision-making regarding their own health and safety. But when put into the hands of self-serving or otherwise unscrupulous conservators, however, it can lead to exploitation and abuse.

Celebrities like Spears may be particularly susceptible to exploitation due to their capacity for generating wealth, but they are far from the only people at risk. As a lawyer with decades of experience representing poor and marginalized people and a scholar of tribal and federal Indian law, I can attest to the way systemic inequalities within local legal practices may exacerbate these potentially exploitative situations, especially with respect to women and people of color.

Perhaps nowhere has the impact been so grave than with respect to Native Americans, who were put into a status of guardianship due to a system of federal and local policies developed in the early 1900s purportedly aimed at protecting Native Americans receiving allotted land from the government. Members of the Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma – Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole nations – were particularly impacted by these practices due to the discovery of oil and gas under their lands.

Swindled by “friendly white lawyers”

A conservatorship, or a related designation called a guardianship, takes away decision-making autonomy from a person, called a “ward.” Although the conservator is supposed to act in the interest of the ward, the system can be open to exploitation especially when vast sums of money are involved.

This was the case between 1908 and 1934, when guardianships became a vehicle for the swindling of Native communities out of their lands and royalties.

By that time, federal policy had forced the removal of the Five Civilized Tribes from eastern and southern locations in the United States to what is presently Oklahoma. Subsequent federal policy converted large tracts of tribally held land into individual allotments that could be transferred or sold without federal oversight – a move that fractured communal land. Land deemed to be “surplus to Indian needs” was sold off to white settlers or businesses, and Native allotment holders could likewise sell their plots after a 25-year trust period ended or otherwise have them taken through tax assessments and other administrative actions. Through this process Indian land holdings diminished from “138 million acres in 1887 to 48 million acres by 1934 when allotment ended,” according to the Indian Land Tenure Foundation.

During the 1920s, members of the Osage Nation and of the Five Civilized Tribes were deemed to be among the richest people per capita in the world due to the discovery of oil and gas underneath their lands.

However, this discovery turned them into the victims of predatory schemes that left many penniless or even dead.

Reflecting on this period in the 1973 book “One Hundred Million Acres,” Kirke Kickingbird, a lawyer and member of the Kiowa Tribe, and former Bureau of Indian Affairs special assistant Karen Ducheneaux wrote that members of the Osage Nation “began to disappear mysteriously.” On death, their estates were left “not to their families, but to their friendly white lawyers, who gathered to usher them into the Happy Hunting Ground,” Kickingbird and Ducheneaux added.

Lawyers and conservators stole lands and funds before death as well, by getting themselves appointed as guardians and conservators with full authority to spend their wards’ money or lease and sell their land.

Congress created the initial conditions for this widespread graft and abuse through the Act of May 27, 1908. That Act transferred jurisdiction over land, persons and property of Indian “minors and incompetents” from the Interior Department, to local county probate courts in Oklahoma. Related legislation also enabled the the Interior Department to put land in or out of trust protection based on its assessment of the competency of Native American allottees and their heirs.

Unfettered by federal supervisory authority, local probate courts and attorneys seized the opportunity to use guardianships to steal Native Americans estates and lands. As described in 1924 by Zitkála-Šá, a prominent Native American activist commissioned by the Secretary of Interior to study the issue, “When oil is ‘struck’ on an Indian’s property, it is usually considered prima facie evidence that he is incompetent, and in the appointment of a guardian for him, his wishes in the matter are rarely considered.”

The county courts generally declared Native Americans incompetent to handle more than a very limited sum of money without any finding of mental incapacity. Zitkála-Šá’s reportand Congressional testimony documented numerous examples of abuse. Breaches of trust were documented in which attorneys or others appointed conservators took money or lands from Nation members for their own businesses, personal expenses or investments. Others schemed with friends and business associates to deprive “wards.”

“Plums to be distributed”

One such woman in Zitkála-Šá’s report was Munnie Bear, a “young, shrewd full-blood Creek woman . . . [who] ran a farm which she inherited from her aunt, her own allotment being leased.” Munnie saved enough money to buy a Ford truck and livestock for her farm, with savings remaining in a bank account. Once oil was discovered, however, the court appointed a guardian, who appointed a co-guardian and retained a lawyer, each of whom deducted monthly fees that depleted Bear’s funds. During the period of her guardianship, she was unable to spend any money or make any decisions about her farm or livestock, nor did she control her bank investment.

Zitkála-Šá’s report displays the extent of this practice:

“Many of the county courts are influenced by political considerations, and … Indian guardianships are the plums to be distributed to the faithful friends of the judges as a reward for their support at the polls. The principal business of these county courts is handling Indian estates. The judges are elected for a two-year term. That ‘extraordinary services’ in connection with the Indian estates are well paid for; one attorney, by order of the court, received $35,000 from a ward’s estate, and never appeared in court.”

Wards were often kept below subsistence levels by their conservators while their funds and lands were depleted by the charging of excessive guardian and attorneys’ fees and administrative costs, along with actual abuse through graft, negligence and deception.

Reports like that of Zitkála-Šá’s resulted in Congress enacting the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. This put the Indian land that had not fallen into non-Indian hands during the federal policy of allotting plots back into tribal ownership and secured it in the trust of the United States. It also ended the potential for theft through guardianship.

But the lands and funds lost as a result of guardianships were not restored nor did descendants of those swindled ever enjoy the benefit of their relatives’ lands and monies either.

Andrea Seielstad, Professor of Law, University of Dayton

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

Evangelicals, science and the vaccine: Refusal is built on deep-seated fear

When my daughters were coming of age I never prevented any book from being on our shelves. Any book or any topic they wanted to read about or discuss, I made sure I provided for them. I don’t believe in editing information from my daughters, from the churches where I served as an evangelical pastor, from my students or from my family and friends. I never understood when people were unwilling to engage with material that threatened their own point of view. Unfortunately for my fellow Christians, this is a major part of church history and the current Christian culture. This close-minded approach has been on full display during this pandemic of the unvaccinated.

From Darwin to COVID the church has been wrong. It’s really about fear among the Christian faithful when they turn away from science. Even scientific theory is dismissed out of hand by the church because of a fear that somehow science will prove that God does not exist. As the pandemic spreads from one church to another and global warming continues to be ignored by the evangelical movement, it is clear that practitioners of the current Christian faith have not evolved from their ancestors who condemned Galileo and Darwin.

This is why it has been so difficult to get evangelicals to accept things proven by the scientific community. You have probably noticed that many Republicans still will not confirm that climate change is even a thing. They almost certainly know better but are spineless, too afraid to alienate their hardcore Christian constituency, despite the clear ignorance behind the evangelical understanding of the climate crisis.

As I said, this is about fear. Understand that for many people of faith it has become very challenging to hold onto that faith. Christians are asked to believe in an invisible being in the sky who keeps score of all our sins, and in the literal truth of a giant book put together over thousands of years that describes people rising from the dead, seas parting and water becoming wine. Because of this intense insecurity, which they cannot admit, some Christians cannot tolerate any information that weakens the case for the existence of God. (The more liberal Protestant denominations and the Catholic Church have made some progress in this area, although even there the relationship to science remains uneasy.) When science becomes the enemy, something like a vaccine cannot be trusted — because it was created by the same people that are trying to destroy God.

If Darwin is correct, then Adam and Eve never existed. If Adam and Eve never existed, then the lineage from Adam to King David (of David and Goliath fame), and then to Jesus Christ must be questioned. Many Christians simply do not want to ask those difficult and complicated questions. If dinosaurs were real (I know it is not if — just bear with me) then God never created anything in six days and then rested on the seventh. Science has proven that the earth is a few billion years old, instead of just a few thousand years old as the Bible would indicate. Science appears to the evangelical Christian to be a relentless hunter of their faith.

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But science is just science. It has no agenda except to discover the truth. That is precisely the problem it presents for the faithful. To a person of faith, at least in the evangelical or fundamentalist tradition, only God is truth. Only God can be trusted. There is no theory or scientific method to discovering one’s faith. A person either decides to accept the truth of God’s existence or reject it and be condemned.

The scientific evidence around the climate crisis has become a threat to many evangelicals because it suggests that God’s ultimate plan for his creation is not working. You see, according to the evangelical reading of the Bible, after the time of Christ there is a distinct calendar of events that follows, culminating in Armageddon. Evangelicals are usually pretty excited about this idea. Those nasty non-believers finally get what’s coming to them and the good Christians get to win the battle against evil. In that context, a warming planet cannot be understood as a real concern. Potentially, it is even a signal of the return of Christ — why would a true believer do anything to stop that?

This brings us to the COVID vaccines and the fact that evangelicals have a culture and a long history of rejecting science. Somehow this vaccine has become a symbol of government overreach, but what’s even more important to evangelicals is the idea that science is telling people of faith what is true. No matter how many evangelical leaders encourage their followers to get the vaccine, this rejection of scientific data is completely ingrained in the church, dating as far back as Galileo. It is and has always been about the fear of losing their faith.

I have never understood this fear, and in my view neither should any other person of faith. I go out of my way to read theories I disagree with, to listen to preachers I deem heretical and to attend seminaries that are in direct opposition to my political and social beliefs. This is how my faith grows. Reading a book like “The God Delusion” should be required by all Christian leaders. Not because the book expresses the words of the enemy but because we all must explore our own doubt. The leap is a leap for a reason and people of faith should lean into it, not run away from it. There is nothing to fear from scientific data and proper research. There is something to fear from the fearful and ignorant. Anyone who is not willing to question their own belief structure, or anyone that remains in their own echo chamber, is dangerous. That is why there is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. It is expressing the fear of people who claim to have none. It must be addressed, but that will not be easy.

Bill Maher justifies rightward shift: “Comedy goes where the funny is”

Bill Maher has been spending more time on his HBO show “Real Time” making fun of liberals — and justified it Friday night by saying simply, “comedy goes where the funny is.”

The conversation began as a discussion about Fox News late night host Greg Gutfeld, who has rocketed up in late-night ratings and regularly gets more viewers than Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon, according to a Newsweek report highlighted by Maher.

“Fox News found a good thing — they can make fun of liberals,” Maher said. “And they’re doing it to great success.”

Maher then featured a slate of what can only be described as conservative memes, before launching into a monologue about what he called “Onion headline” policies championed by liberals in recent years.

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“I keep saying to the liberals, you know what, if what you’re doing sounds like an Onion headline, stop. This is why there’s an opening for conservative comedy, because, you know, when you tear down statues of Abraham Lincoln in the Land of Lincoln — Land of Lincoln cancels Lincoln, it’s an Onion headline. You know, three-year-olds pick their own gender is an Onion headline,” Maher said.

“The problem is, [conservatives] don’t know how to do comedy,” he added. “But if they found someone who did, they could. Because I do it now more here than I used to, because comedy goes where the funny is and there is funny on the left now as well as the right.”

From Britney to Lorde: Young women shift from embracing body positivity to body neutrality as teens

At just 16 years old, Lorde skyrocketed into stardom with her 2013 single “Royals,” and has since cemented her place as one of the most decorated and beloved popstars of the era. With the long-awaited release of her third studio album “Solar Power” last week, Lorde is opening up about her journey as an artist and a young woman after nearly four years of existing under the radar. After all, not only did Lorde’s legions of loyal fans have to wait four years for the album, but they’ve also had to endure near radio silence from the reclusive star, who partakes in almost no social media unless you count the New York Times cooking app.

In a recent interview with the Irish Times, Lorde specifically opened up about body image and being one of the most visible and watched stars in the world as a teenager, which she rightfully called “a tender time.” Lorde had deliberately tried to “not [invite]” conversations about her body, and had drawn boundaries in terms of outfits and behaviors she wasn’t comfortable with.

“I sort of kicked that out the conversation,” she said. “I was pretty intent about that. I didn’t want people to be talking about what my body looked like. I was a kid. And I really wasn’t ‘in’ my body. As a teenager, you kind of wear your body like an outfit that doesn’t fit yet.”

This revelation might have come as a shock to fans who have been celebrating the bold and (literally) cheeky album art of “Solar Power” since it was first revealed in June: a sunlit shot upward from the ground that captures her almost bare rear as she runs on the beach. Of course, Lorde is 24 years old now, and the cover of “Solar Power” evokes her adult comfort and confidence in her body. But as she expressed to the Times, album art like this understandably wouldn’t have been comfortable for her before when she was a teenager. This is only natural — our comfort and approaches to bodily self-expression will shift and change over time.

Billie Eilish, another pop phenom who just recently turned 19, has expressed similar sentiment, wearing only baggy, non-form-fitting clothes for the early years of her career. Like Lorde, she also rose to fame as a young teen, and is already a Gen-Z music icon. Eilish chose her unique fashion choices because she didn’t want her body to be perceived and commented on by voyeuristic media and its obsession with hypersexualizing women and girls, no matter their age.

“Nobody can have an opinion because they haven’t seen what’s underneath,” Eilish said in 2019, as part of a Calvin Klein ad. “Nobody can be like, ‘she’s slim-thick,’ ‘she’s not slim-thick,’ ‘she’s got a flat ass,’ ‘she’s got a fat ass.’ No one can say any of that because they don’t know.”

And speaking of shifting and changing with time, like Lorde with the cover art of “Solar Power,” Eilish’s approach to self-expression seems to have changed, too, as she poses in lingerie and revealing, luxurious outfits on the June cover of Vogue UK this year.

Both of these women took control of their appearances while younger, giving them both the confidence and healthy fortitude to continue to decide how they want to present themselves now, regardless of who’s looking.

Body neutrality or body positivity?

Lorde and Eilish’s early approaches, and their decisions to center their comfort in how they dress, comprise a rebellious response to hypersexualization of teens and especially teen popstars. They also seem to endorse the concept of body neutrality and its de-emphasis on publicly celebrating bodies and appearances. Body neutrality, a term coined by Anne Poirier in 2015, differs from body positivity by recognizing it can be unrealistic to expect everyone to be able to “love” their body or appearance in a society that’s long told essentially all non-skinny white women to hate themselves.

Instead, body neutrality focuses on appreciating your body for what it’s able to do in a world that makes so many demands of us. And it also respects that some people just don’t want their bodies to be perceived or commented on at all — including compliments.

Body positivity is a well-meaning and powerful movement that’s uplifted and empowered many people of all body types, but it might not be for everyone. Some who wrestle with insecurities about their bodies can feel pressured or frustrated with themselves for not being able to adequately “love” their bodies — for them, body neutrality and just peacefully existing in their bodies without public attention might be the more comfortable approach.

Neither Lorde’s nor Eilish’s explanations of their unique fashion choices were solely about avoiding criticisms and attacks on their appearances, but avoiding this sort of attention or any commentary at all, positive or negative, really. Even positive and well-meaning comments about someone’s body can be harmful, triggering, or just uncomfortable for someone for any number of reasons in a society with so many exhausting, unattainable beauty standards. These compulsory beauty standards make each of us feel so many complicated feelings about our bodies from adolescence onward — feelings that can be triggered by a single word from someone else.

Being praised for being thin or curvy or any other aspect of your appearance can be difficult to hear for people who struggle with eating disorders, chronic illness, or any other personal factors for why their body looks the way it looks, which is why body positivity movements can be uncomfortable for people who don’t want any attention on their bodies. Even being praised for being thin can make someone feel anxiety about losing this body type, or convince them their value and attractiveness are tied to their thinness.

Many people, and especially women, simply don’t want to be perceived. On social media, many women have expressed feeling more comfortable wearing masks in public because it removes the stress and pressure of having your appearance appraised by strangers or attracting unwanted attention. Mask-wearing hasn’t unilaterally stopped gross street harassment and cat-calling, but it’s at least given most women and girls at least some level of privacy and distance from the public gaze and its tireless scrutiny and consumption of the female form.

A departure from the exploitation of 2000s pop princesses

It’s a relief to hear from Lorde and Eilish, two female pop icons of the 2010s and 2020s, on the decision-making power they’ve had in creating their public images, and what outfits and performances they felt comfortable with, even as those have changed over time. It would be naive to suggest industry and societal sexism have been cured, simply because famous young women are now allowed to wear formless clothing if they so choose, but it’s certainly progress from the experiences of young female pop icons like Britney Spears or even Miley Cyrus.

In Lorde’s interview with the Irish Times, she opened up about how she feels looking back at the early years of her career.

“There were just things I wasn’t going to do if they weren’t comfortable for me to do. I wore the exact outfits I felt like wearing. I wore suits. I loved suits. I felt powerful in them,” she said. “The fact that I sort of did it in a way that felt right for me – that meant I don’t look back and feel f*cked up by it.”

In contrast, media hypersexualization of Spears and obsession with her body, appearance and sexuality while she was still a minor pushed her to the brink, and are certainly could be seen as part of the reason she’s trapped in a conservatorship she’s called abusive to this day. Also as a minor, Cyrus was often adulitified and hypersexualized as a “Disney wild child” and at different points has suffered from addiction.

Early in their careers, and for Spears to this day, both were denied the agency in creating their public images that young women in pop like Lorde and Eilish thankfully seem to have more of now. The consequences of being denied this agency, as Lorde notes, can leave someone feeling “f*cked up,” or force them to deal with the mental repercussions of being exploited and hypersexualized for years to come.

Industry sexism and sexual exploitation of women remain, but the growing ability of artists like Lorde to build careers around what’s comfortable for them and embrace a sort of body neutrality is cause for hope.

“I think it all worked out,” Lorde told the Times. “How my body looks is not a big centre of curiosity now,” she said. “Which I think is in part because of the grounding I lay as a teenager. So yeah – I feel good about baby me doing that for future me.”

Orwell’s ideas remain relevant 75 years after “Animal Farm” was published

Seventy-five years ago, in August 1946, George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” was published in the United States. It was a huge success, with over a half-million copies sold in its first year. “Animal Farm” was followed three years later by an even bigger success: Orwell’s dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

In the years since, Orwell’s writing has left an indelible mark on American thought and culture. Sales of “Animal Farm” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four” jumped in 2013 after the whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked confidential National Security Agency documents. And “Nineteen Eighty-Four” rose to the top of Amazon’s best-sellers list after Donald Trump’s Presidential Inauguration in 2017.

As a philosophy professor, I’m interested in the continuing relevance of Orwell’s ideas, including those on totalitarianism and socialism.

Early career

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Blair. Born in 1903 in colonial India, Blair later moved to England, where he attended elite schools on scholarships. After finishing school, he joined the British civil service, working in Burma, now Myanmar. At age 24, Orwell returned to England to become a writer.

During the 1930s, Orwell had modest success as an essayist, journalist and novelist. He also served as a volunteer soldier with a left-wing militia group that fought on behalf of the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. During the conflict, Orwell experienced how propaganda could shape political narratives through observing inaccurate reporting of events he experienced firsthand.

Orwell later summarized the purpose of his writing from roughly the Spanish Civil War onward: “Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism.”

Orwell did not specify in that passage what he meant by either totalitarianism or democratic socialism, but some of his other works clarify how he understood those terms.

What is totalitarianism?

For Orwell, totalitarianism was a political order focused on power and control. The totalitarian attitude is exemplified by the antagonist, O’Brien, in “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” The fictional O’Brien is a powerful government official who uses torture and manipulation to gain power over the thoughts and actions of the protagonist, Winston Smith. Significantly, O’Brien treats his desire for power as an end in itself. O’Brien represents power for power’s sake.

Much of Orwell’s keenest insights concern what totalitarianism is incompatible with. In his 1941 essay “The Lion and the Unicorn,” Orwell writes of “The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power … .” In other words, laws can limit a ruler’s power. Totalitarianism seeks to obliterate the limits of law through the uninhibited exercise of power.

Similarly, in his 1942 essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” Orwell argues that totalitarianism must deny that there are neutral facts and objective truth. Orwell identifies liberty and truth as “safeguards” against totalitarianism. The exercise of liberty and the recognition of truth are actions incompatible with the total centralized control that totalitarianism requires.

Orwell understood that totalitarianism could be found on the political right and left. For Orwell, both Nazism and Communism were totalitarian.

Orwell’s work, in my view, challenges us to resist permitting leaders to engage in totalitarian behavior, regardless of political affiliation. It also reminds us that some of our best tools for resisting totalitarianism are to tell truths and to preserve liberty.

What is democratic socialism?

In his 1937 book “The Road to Wigan Pier,” Orwell writes that socialism means “justice and liberty.” The justice he refers to goes beyond mere economic justice. It also includes social and political justice.

Orwell elaborates on what he means by socialism in “The Lion and the Unicorn.” According to him, socialism requires “approximate equality of incomes (it need be no more than approximate), political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privileges, especially in education.”

In fleshing out what he means by “approximate equality of incomes,” Orwell later says in the same essay that income equality shouldn’t be greater than a ratio of about 10 to 1. In its modern-day interpretation, this suggests Orwell could find it ethical for a CEO to make 10 times more than their employees, but not to make 300 times more, as the average CEO in the United States does today.

But in describing socialism, Orwell discusses more than economic inequality. Orwell’s writings indicate that his preferred conception of socialism also requires “political democracy.” As scholar David Dwan has noted, Orwell distinguished “two concepts of democracy.” The first concept refers to political power resting with the common people. The second is about having classical liberal freedoms, like freedom of thought. Both notions of democracy seem relevant to what Orwell means by democratic socialism. For Orwell, democratic socialism is a political order that provides social and economic equality while also preserving robust personal freedom.

I believe Orwell’s description of democratic socialism and his recognition that there are various forms socialism can take remain important today given that American political dialogue about socialism often overlooks much of the nuance Orwell brings to the subject. For example, Americans often confuse socialism with communism. Orwell helps clarify the difference between these terms.

With high levels of economic inequality, political assaults on truth and renewed concerns about totalitarianism, Orwell’s ideas remain as relevant now as they were 75 years ago.

Mark Satta, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Wayne State University

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

“Win for common sense”: Judge strikes down DeSantis ban on mask mandates

A Florida judge delivered a blow to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ effort to stop public schools from mandating mask-wearing amid the state’s latest surge in Covid-19 cases, ruling that the governor violated the Florida Constitution with his executive order last month.

Second Judicial Circuit Judge John Cooper sided with several parents who sued DeSantis and his Department of Education over the state’s directive which barred school districts from requiring face coverings and threatened to withhold state education funding if school boards disobeyed.

Cooper granted the parents an injunction against the Department of Education and noted in his ruling that the state’s “parent’s bill of rights,” which lawmakers passed earlier this year and which DeSantis claimed allowed him to keep schools from following public health guidance, “doesn’t ban mask mandates.”

Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, a Democrat who is running to replace DeSantis a governor, called the ruling “a win for common sense, for children’s safety, and for all the families and school officials who have been fighting to protect their loved ones, students, and staff.”

Today, Florida’s judicial branch affirmed what we have known to be true: Governor DeSantis’ ban on masks in schools is not only a dangerous government overreach that puts children’s lives at risk, but it also violates Florida law.

— Commissioner Nikki Fried (@NikkiFriedFL) August 27, 2021

The governor indicated earlier this week that he planned to appeal Cooper’s decision to a more conservative appeals court if the ruling was not in his favor.

Several school districts have defied DeSantis’ order in recent weeks despite his threat to pull funding, and as of Thursday, more than half of Florida’s 2.8 million public school children were going to schools which have adopted mask mandates.

Cooper handed down his ruling as CDC Director Rochelle Walensky on Friday warned that outbreaks are beginning to overwhelm schools in districts choosing not to follow public health guidelines including masking, social distancing, and ventilation.

“In our outbreak investigations, large-scale quarantines or large number of cases are generally occurring in schools, because schools are not following our guidance, particularly our recommendations for teachers as well as students aged 12 and over to be vaccinated and for everyone right now to be masked,” Walensky said.

“I want to strongly appeal to those districts who have not implemented prevention strategies and encourage them to do the right thing to protect the children under their care,” she added. “We know these multi-layered mitigation strategies work, and thanks to the American Rescue Plan schools have the resources to implement these strategies.”

Amid DeSantis’ attacks on public health measures, Florida is now seeing more children hospitalized with Covid-19 than at any other point in the pandemic. The state currently has the fifth highest number of new infections per capita.

Walensky’s warning also applied to school districts in Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana, where tens of thousands of children have had to quarantine in recent days following exposure or potential exposure to the virus.

The Children’s Hospital Association on Thursday requested “immediate help” from the Biden administration as pediatric hospitalizations across the country reached 1,500.

Why is walking so good for the brain? Blame it on the “spontaneous fluctuations”

Like most people, I have been walking more than usual during the pandemic and enjoying it. My meetings with students and colleagues have turned into walking meetings around campus for over a year. Now, I have a problem: School is starting soon, and I don’t want to go back to the classroom. We all saw this coming. Give employees a taste of the outdoors, and they might not want to go back to their offices and desks. So I am thinking of teaching my fall courses outside.

Yet while I was researching this possibility, I discovered a problem. I had always read that walking increased cognitive functioning and problem solving, but it turns out that it’s not that simple. In 2014, a new study showed that walking decreased rational and linear thinking and increased divergent thinking and imaginative mind-wandering. Uh oh. Will my students learn less if I teach them while walking?

I teach philosophy, a discipline that prides itself on rational and analytic thinking. So is walking going to clash with the values of my profession?

But wait, aren’t philosophers famous for walking and being rational? Socrates loved to stroll and philosophize, and Aristotle taught his classes while he walked up and down the walkways of the Lyceum. The Stoics walked and talked on outdoor porches with art on display. Seneca, a Roman Stoic, told other Stoics, “We should take wandering outdoor walks so that the mind might be nourished and refreshed by the open air and deep breathing.” Plato’s school was even outside, in a grove of trees called Akadēmía. So either the Greeks weren’t as obsessed with rationality as we like to think — or maybe we are missing something.

What is the connection between walking and thinking, and is it still good for us if it makes us more irrational? We may have heard by now how walking makes us feel good by releasing endorphins, lowers risk our of depression; increases cognitive functioning; strengthens memory; enhances creativity; and produces a protein essential for neuronal development and survival, synaptic plasticity, and cognitive function. It sounds great, but how are all these related, and why do we have to sacrifice our hard-earned rationality to get them? This is what I wanted to know before sending my students to the realms of unreason.

A lot is happening to our bodies and brains on a walk, but one fascinating thing stands out. They are all related to an increase in what neuroscientists call “spontaneous cognitive fluctuations.” Scientists have been telling us that the background noises our brains make are random and unimportant for almost a century; hence, they have filtered and averaged them out of their studies. Yet increasing evidence shows that this “noise” is neither random nor unimportant.

The brain is always active. Even when we lay motionless in bed thinking of nothing, billions of neurons in our brain are firing. Yet, in almost a hundred years of research, scientists still can’t find the cause or consequences of this activity. Spontaneous fluctuations are like the dark matter or “junk” DNA of the brain. They make up the vast majority of brain activity but are shrouded in mystery.

Yet, what little we have recently discovered about them is already profoundly shifting our models of consciousness. Moreover, we now know that this flux is not just present when we are inactive but is involved in all brain functioning. It even eats up two-thirds of the brain’s total energy supply. That’s a big deal. We also know for sure it’s not coming from bodily activities like breathing or heart movements, or from the electrical instruments used to measure it.

The most interesting positive finding we have so far is that these spontaneous fluctuations are neither random nor deterministic, but have an unpredictable “fractal” structure. A fractal is a pattern that roughly repeats across scales — like a tree whose few big branches have many smaller branches with even more leaves that look like tiny branches. Scientists have found that spontaneous neural activity follows a similar branching pattern throughout the brain, and has a related proportion of a few slow and strong frequencies to more faster and higher frequencies scientists call “pink noise.” With this discovery, researchers are now starting to observe changes in these fluctuations related to aging, consciousness, mental health, experiences of art and nature, and memory.

One of the most compelling explanations for why healthy cognitive fluctuations have this fractal structure is that they were an evolutionary adaptation to aid humans in identifying, navigating, and remembering the fractal patterns ubiquitous in nature. For example, early humans spent a lot of their time walking around looking for things bathed in a world of fractal sights and sounds. This is why our eye moments and searching patterns employ fractal patterns of a few long and many short motions. Even the way we walk is fractal and becomes less so as we age. Fractal patterns are easy on the eyes, endlessly fascinating to see and hear and even inspire feelings of beauty.

When we take a walk outside, the fractal rhythms of our heart synchronize with the fractal rhythms of our lungs and our fractal gait. Researchers have also shown that our wandering bodies make our minds wander too. On a walk, our brain waves slow down. The underlying spontaneous fluctuations bubble up more easily, creating experiences of spontaneous thoughts and associations that seem to come from nowhere. We often call them “moments of inspiration.”

Seeing and hearing natural fractals helps slow our brainwaves down, and slowing down our brain waves allows our spontaneous fluctuations to help identify and memorize patterns and rhythms more easily or work through problems unconsciously as dreaming does.

The exciting conclusion of this research is that while it’s wonderful that walking increases blood circulation, the primary source of walking’s cognitive benefits seems to come from its effects on the mysterious spontaneous fluctuations of our brains. This has certainly changed the way I think about the nature of intelligence, consciousness, memory, and education. Reason is not the source of intelligence; it’s the product of it.

So while my students are out on their walks, they might be mind-wandering more than in the classroom, but this is a good thing. Perhaps this is what those Greek philosophers understood and what we have forgotten.

Recent studies on walking also show that walking with other people synchronizes their brain and bodily rhythms resulting in increased empathy, cooperation, and sharing. So walking may also be beneficial for everyone’s social and emotional education.

Knowing all of this, part of me still wants my students to sit down in a classroom and listen to every word I say, even if the studies show they are less likely to remember it than if we were walking through the trees like Plato’s students did. But I am going to take them outside anyway against my rationalist bias and see what our spontaneous fluctuations are capable of this quarter.

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