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Freud, Nietzsche, Paglia, Fanon: our expert guide to the books of “The White Lotus”

Freud and Nietzsche may not be what you have in mind when thinking of pool-side reads, but they are among the books flipped through in “The White Lotus” — the tense, new TV drama about the lives of the rich and privileged as they overlap at a Hawaiian resort.

Are Paula and Olivia truly delving into the mind of the anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon, or indeed, into Camille Paglia’s deconstruction of the Western literary canon? Or are they just books for show: an intellectual performance to hide secret glances and gossip?

Either way, frequent book covers speak loudly in the show. So here, then, is what the experts think you should know about these props and the stories they tell.

Maybe you will find one to pick up the next time you fly off for your island holiday. Just try to avoid the White Lotus resort.

“The Interpretation of Dreams,“ by Sigmund Freud

“If I cannot bend the heavens above, I will move Hell.” Sigmund Freud quotes the poet Virgil to describe his aim in this book of explaining the meaning of dreams — by recourse to his theory of the unconscious mind.

Freud always considered “Interpretation of Dreams “his masterpiece, and ensured it would be published in 1900 to mark its significance.

Dreams had traditionally been viewed as either senseless or vehicles of communication with the divine. Freud instead contended all dreams involve the fulfilment of a wish.

In adults, he wrote, many of the wishes we have are of such an “edgy” nature their fulfilment would wake us up if staged too directly.

So, in order to at once fulfil these unconscious wishes and stay asleep, the “dream work” of the sleeping mind distorts the wish, using mechanisms of displacement (making insignificant things seem important, and the other way around), condensation (bringing together multiple ideas in single images), and transforming words into the seemingly random images.

Packed with striking dream analyses, and containing perhaps the best systematic statement of Freud’s theory of the mind, this book is an influential classic.

—Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy

“The Wretched of the Earth,“ by Frantz Fanon

Psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 in the French colony of Martinique. After the second world war, he studied in France. Later, in 1953, he moved to Algeria, joining the Algerian National Liberation Front.

“The Wretched of the Earth” (originally published as Les damnés de la terre in 1961) was written at the height of the Algerian War of Independence. Based on Fanon’s first-hand experience of working in colonial Algeria, it is a classic text of postcolonial studies, examining the physical and psychological violence colonised people experience.

Fanon’s book is a lucid and damning account of the impact of colonialism: the ways it irrevocably changes people, their societies and their culture.

A passionate call to resist colonisation and oppression, “The Wretched of the Earth” was seen as dangerous by colonial powers at the time of its publication. It is still an important anti-colonial work today.

—Isabelle Hesse, Lecturer in English

“Sexual Personae,“ by Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia’s “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson” (1990) is a provocative survey of Western canonical art and culture.

On its publication, “Sexual Personae” was considered iconoclastic, groundbreaking and subversive for, as Paglia wrote, its focus on “amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism and pornography in great art”.

The book was both lauded for its insights into sex, violence and power; and labelled anti-feminist and sinister in its views about gender and sexuality.

“Sexual Personae” discusses the decadence and enduring influence of paganism in Western culture. Paglia connects sexual freedom to sadomasochism and argues that our self-destructive and lustful Dionysian impulses are in tension with our Apollonian instincts for order.

Named after Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” (1966), Paglia’s book charts recurrent types in the Western imagination, such as the “beautiful boy,” the “femme fatale” and the “female vampire.” Through these personae, she discusses works such as the Mona Lisa, “Wuthering Heights” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Particularly famous is the chapter on Emily Dickinson and Paglia’s analysis of the brutal and sadistic metaphors in Dickinson’s poetry.

Paglia’s “Sexual Personae” is both electrifying and divisive; still one of the most important texts in 1990s sexual politics.

—Cassandra Atherton, Professor of Writing and Literature

“My Brilliant Friend,“ by Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend” (2011), the first volume of her Neapolitan Series, is a feminist coming-of-age story that begins with a mystery.

In the first few pages, a distinguished writer, Elena (known as Lenù), learns an old friend, Raffaella (or Lila), has disappeared without a trace. Lila’s disappearance prompts Lenù to begin writing the story of her life, focusing particularly on the pair’s complicated friendship.

Focusing on their childhood in 1950s Naples, she writes unsentimentally of poverty, violence, familial conflicts and organised crime.

The novel is densely plotted and written with unsparing accuracy about the characters of Naples, but Lenù’s candid narration makes for an utterly engrossing reading experience. In plain, fast-paced prose she describes a grim childhood full of misogyny and domestic violence, but enlivened by her friendship with Lila.

Ferrante gives us a moving portrait of friendship. Over the course of the novel, both girls begin to see glimpses of how they might move beyond the limitations of the world they have inherited.

—Lucas Thompson, Lecturer in English

“The Portable Nietzsche,“ edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann

For Nietzsche, to write philosophy was to render one’s experience into life-affirming art — even if that art rocked the very foundations of culture itself.

Walter Kaufmann’s translations in “The Portable Nietzsche” (1954) showcase much of the power and beauty of one of the finest minds in Western culture.

Here is Nietzsche’s devastating psychological portrait of St Paul; here is the infamous announcement of the death of God. They sit together with his complex notion of cheerfulness practised in the face of the terrifying collapse of certainties.

Despite his reputation in some quarters as a malevolent destroyer, Nietzsche’s actual aim of avoiding nihilism is well-captured here.

His cavorting and richly subversive “fifth gospel,” “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” is reproduced in full, as is “Twilight of the Idols,” one of his last works and a fine condensation of his mature project.

Kaufmann’s translations are now dated and his selection of Nietzsche’s works is occasionally eccentric, but “The Portable Nietzsche” goes an admirable way to presenting Nietzsche’s many aspects: the shy recluse, the loather of anti-Semites, the brilliant transfigurer of pain into texts of depth and beauty, and the lover of life, come what may.

—Jamie Parr, Lecturer in Philosophy

“Blink,“ by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Galdwell’s Blink (2005) opens with an anecdote about a kouros: an ancient Greek statue bought by the Getty Museum in 1985 for just under $10 million. Despite months of due diligence to check the authenticity of the statue, the Getty was duped – the statue had been made in the 1980s.

The discovery of the fake was attributed to an art historian who, according to Gladwell, knew as soon as he clapped eyes on it that it was not the real deal.

This instant of recognition (a “blink”) is what Gladwell describes as the “power of thinking without thinking”. Gladwell argues going with your gut can often lead to far superior decisions than thinking things over.

“Blink” is an entertaining collection of anecdotes, from art-historians to “marriage-whisperers” who can tell if a relationship is going to last from watching split-second videos of partners interacting. But, as the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data.

—Ben Newell, Professor of Cognitive Psychology

None of these strike your fancy? The characters also pick up Judith Butler, Aimé Césaire and Jacques Lacan — just more light reads on feminism, colonialism and psychoanalysis.

Jane Howard, Deputy Section Editor: Arts + Culture, The Conversation

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

Take it from a lab rat — you don’t have to fear “unapproved” vaccines

It’s been a recurring argument of late — one seen in chilling newspaper stories and all over your extended family’s Facebook posts — that the vaccines are too new, too untested; that we don’t know the long term effects of these shots that have been authorized for emergency use. You can even now buy t-shirts, perhaps to wear to your next insurrection, that read “I’m not a lab rat” and feature a vaccine vial with a line through it. But may I suggest that an escalating pandemic that has already killed over 600,000 of your fellow Americans is not the best moment to develop such a unique position on bodily autonomy? Instead, take some advice from a real life lab rat: please don’t be afraid of being a COVID vaccine lab rat.

Back in April, a CNN poll estimated that 26% of adults said they would not get the COVID vaccine. You’ll never believe what happened next! The reasons for vaccine hesitancy are not singular or even entirely partisan. We are facing an onslaught of causes from misinformation to youthful hubris; as FiveThirtyEight reported last month, “the younger the age group, the less likely it is to be vaccinated relative to its share of the population.” The are also entirely legitimate historical and contemporary reasons to be skeptical of our healthcare industry. It’s not like the track record is so great here.

The US has committed atrocious acts in the name of scientific progress — the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the early combined contraceptive pill trials in Puerto Rico, the list goes on. Again and again, the most vulnerable have been treated with callous, intentional and often fatal disregard. And while those shameful acts are part of our past, we are living in a present day moment of reckoning over the opioid epidemic havoc wreaked from corporate pharmaceutical fraud.

And yet, you can be cautious and hold authority figures accountable and also minimize your chances of imminent death at the time. Those are all good goals. Urgent crises call for unprecedented measures. The rewards — not dying gasping for breath, unable to even hold a loved one’s hand — outweigh the current risks. In extraordinary circumstances, being a so-called lab rat can be a pretty sweet deal. 

I’ve been one for nearly a decade already. In 2011, I was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma and became one of the first ten people in in the world on a combination immunotherapy clinical trial. Of the 52 of us in the initial group, “adverse events of any grade, regardless of whether they were attributed to the therapy, were observed in 98% of patients,” while “treatment-related adverse events were observed in 93% of patients.” More than half of the patients experienced grade 3 or 4 (severe) treatment related adverse events. My own side effects included dizziness, rash, fatigue and not dying of cancer. Twelve weeks after I began the trial, I had no evidence of disease. Ten years on, analysis of over one hundred similar immunotherapy trials shows an estimated fatality rate “ranging from 0.36% to 1.23%.” I’d take those odds.

Over the years, both of my daughters have also participated in trials, one for a mental health study and one for a device for a heart condition. Meanwhile, I have gone back to school to try to crack the code of making clinical trials more accessible and patient-centered. What I can tell you from my own experience and work is that the system is messy as hell and that we have to be able to trust and respect each other if we’re going to survive. We cannot get to anything even resembling a new normal while those who have no compelling medical or accessibility excuse continue to, as Amanda Marcotte puts it, “selfishly refuse the shot.” And it hurts my heart that there are people with life-threatening conditions right now, while the willfully ignorant are fighting for their right to prolong a pandemic.

My friend Stacey, a yoga instructor in Manhattan, participated in one of the Astra Zeneca trials late last year. “I have a friend who’s a nurse and works in drug trials at New York Presbyterian,” she recalled recently. “He came to me in November and said, ‘We’re starting up again for the trial. I figured, if that means I get the vaccine early, that’s good. That being said,” she adds, “my teenage son wanted to do it and I wouldn’t let him. I would’ve felt terrible if he’d had an adverse reaction.”

My friend wound up getting the placebo, and was subsequently unblinded so she could go ahead and get fully vaccinated. Which she — and her son — did. “That’s what all these trials are for,” she says. “For about a year, people have been doing these trials. The people getting the vaccine now are not the first. Millions of people have gotten it. Some do have adverse reactions. But it’s still a protection against something that could kill you, or affect the people around you.”

Writing in Vogue last year, Molly Jong-Fast, who participated in the Pfizer trial, expressed a similar sentiment. “As someone who has struggled with health anxiety, being a medical-trial participant wasn’t an obvious life choice. But I felt I had to,” she said. “I am not a particularly brave person, but in a country with uncontrolled virus spread, I’d much rather take my chances with the vaccine than with the virus.” That’s a choice, she notes, that reduces the risks for others as well.

Nothing in life is guaranteed. I have to shake my head in amazement when I see commenters disingenuously protesting that we just don’t know how these vaccines will affect us in ten or twenty years. There are people dying today. I took a chance on a clinical trial when I likely had a few months to live. Whatever long term effects that experience bought and whatever lifetime of monitoring I signed up for, it gave me these past ten years to raise my children. I went and got the Pfizer vaccine in March, spent a day feeling like hell and accepting that small price to pay for getting more days with my family. This is not abstract; this is the simple calculation that a majority of us can make. If something in my health goes sideways in ten or twenty years because I got vaccinated in 2021, I will consider myself extremely fortunate.

Last month, a neighbor and her entire family got breakthrough cases of the virus. It was a real dumpster fire. Her sister still refuses to get vaccinated. My friend told me a few days ago that she’d tried to explain to her sister that yes, they got vaccinated and they got sick, but nobody had to go the ICU. Nobody died. Your best option isn’t always a perfect one. But the choice between making it better and making it worse, for everybody, is very clear. And right now, I’d much prefer to be a lab rat than a name on a headstone. Wouldn’t you?

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17 corn side dishes for peak summer flavor all year long

Even though corn on the cob doesn’t peak until later in the summer, when it’s good, it’s excellent. Growing up, I ate boiled corn on the cob, lightly butter and salted, at least three times a week as a side dish for dinner during the summer. It got stuck in my teeth and stayed there for days no matter how much dental floss I went through, but it was worth it for that sweet, milky flavor and powerful crunch with each and every bite. Of course, boiled corn is great (especially when served alongside, say a 1 1/2-lb. whole lobster . . . not that I’m being picky or anything) but there are so many other incredible ways to enjoy corn on the cob, too.

For Thanksgiving, many families (mine included) enjoy scoop after scoop of corn pudding and slice after slice of cornbread. If you’re in a part of the country that gets good corn on the cob during fall (let me know, because I’d like to move there please), we’ve got a fabulous method for roasting it in the oven as well as modern takes on classic recipes like corn casserole, corn fritters, and elote (Mexican street corn). And when you’re missing corn come the dead of winter, we’ve got a few special recipes that make use of frozen corn kernels.

* * *

Our best corn side dishes

1. Effortless Oven-Roasted Corn on the Cob with Husks

The most popular methods for cooking corn on the cob are generally boiled in salted water or grilled over smoky coals. But the former can quickly lead to overcooked corn kernels, whereas the other method means frequent flare-ups. For an even easier and tastier method, try roasting the cobs in the oven for the best corn side dish recipe.

2. New-Fashioned Corn Pudding

Corn pudding (aka corn casserole spoon bread) is a decades-old recipe inspired by Black American culinary traditions and is always a crowd-favorite side dish. This modern-day iteration created by Food Editor Emma Laperruque calls for some punchy ingredients like hot sauce, garlic, ground mustard powder, and super-sharp cheddar cheese.

3. Creamed Corn

This side dish recipe for Thanksgiving is so, so much better than the canned version of creamed corn. And it only calls for five basic ingredients—corn on the cob (duh!), shallots, smoked paprika, butter, and an assortment of tender green herbs. To make the “cream” part of this corn side dish, fresh corn kernels cook in water or stock with a bit of butter. After a few minutes, it’s blended together and then mixed with the remaining kernels.

4. Angel Corn

Just like Grandma used to make (or at least recipe developer Cory Baldwin’s grandmother), this fluffy, creamy side dish uses frozen corn, which means you can make this even when fresh corn isn’t at its best (like during the peak holiday season for Thanksgiving). Ritz crackers are mixed into the casserole and sprinkled on top for even more crunch.

5. Sriracha-Lime Corn Salad

Kick up your fall harvest dinner with this spicy corn salad. It gets a few dashes of heat from Sriracha, crunch from red bell pepper, and creaminess from crumbled Cotija cheese. It has the flavors of elote, or Mexican street corn, in one convenient side dish.

6. Maque Choux (Fried Corn with Green Peppers)

This one-skillet corn dish originated in Louisiana, thought to originate from a combination of Native American food with French cuisine. To make it, sauté fresh sweet corn kernels with a bevy of spices, peppers and onions, and heavy cream for a quick and easy side dish.

7. Fresh Corn Salad with Brown Butter, Chives and Chiles

Food Editor Emma Laperruque was inspired by Food52 co-founder Amanda Hesser’s tomato salad when she developed this corn side dish for Thanksgiving. But instead of juicy heirlooms, she decided to switch things up and used fresh corn instead.

8. Jalapeño Cornbread

“In this cheesy, spicy spin on my classic base recipe, chopped, fresh jalapeños, cubes of full-fat cream cheese, and freshly shorn corn kernels stud a grainy, hardy crumb that’s rounded out by slightly salty, tangy buttermilk,” writes recipe developer Renae E. Wilson. Maybe it’s exactly like the style you grew up with, or maybe it’s something entirely different. Either way, give it a try for Thanksgiving this year!

9. Next Day Grilled Corn, Pineapple and Peach Salsa

We’re all about repurposing leftovers into something entirely new and delicious. This recipe does that super well. It’s made with pre-grilled corn on the cob, pineapple slices, and peach halves, which are mixed with olive oil and the remaining fruit juices, plus chile peppers and a few dashes of your favorite hot sauce.

10. Sauteed Corn, Green Onions, and Shiitake Mushrooms

This 20-minute corn sauté is about as simple as it gets. Over medium-high heat, cook fresh corn kernels, scallions, and mushrooms until they’re caramelized and fully cooked through. Serve with kebabs or burgers during summer or roast turkey for Thanksgiving.

11. Grilled Corn with Basil Butter

Follow this recipe to learn how to make grilled corn and then dress it up with an herby spread made from two sticks of butter and an entire cup of fresh basil leaves.

12. Corn Fritters with Cheddar and Scallions

Corn fritters can be simple and basic or they can be a little spicy and sassy. These fall somewhere in between, with their flavorful combination of sharp (and we mean SHARP!) cheddar cheese, scallions, and cilantro.

13. Cacio e Pepe Panzanella with Corn and Burrata

Life doesn’t get better than this corn salad. Two Italian dishes — cacio e pepe and a panzanella salad — make one colorful side dish using cherry tomatoes, baby arugula, fresh basil, crunchy croutons, and ultra-creamy burrata cheese.

14. Dilled, Crunchy Sweet Corn Salad with Buttermilk Dressing

Highlight the beauty of perfect, uncooked corn kernels in this sweet side salad. There’s plenty of crunch from the corn, cucumbers, and peppers, plus a tangy yogurt dressing that is truly cooling alongside roast turkey, mashed potatoes, and green bean casserole.

15. Amagansett Corn Salad

Not heading out east for vacation? You can still capture the flavor of Long Island’s prime corn on the cob in this super easy salad recipe that’s a bright spot during dinner.

16. Charred Corn and Avocado Salad with Lime, Chili, and Tomato

Capture summertime in a bowl no matter the time of year. A little bit of lime juice perks up fresh corn, cherry tomatoes, creamy avocado, and sautéed peppers and onions in this easy, breezy side dish.

17. Black Bean and Roasted Corn Salad

Serve this as a side salad for a holiday meal or use it as a colorful taco topping. The majority of the cooking time is dedicated to brining and cooking dried black beans; assembling the beans with corn kernels, red bell peppers, jalapeño peppers, and herbs happens in a flash.

What’s the secret ingredient for more refreshing summer beverages? Salt

During the peak heat of Louisville summers, when the air is so muggy that the hot black pavement practically steams, lines would form outside of Safier, a Middle Eastern and Indian-influenced deli in the heart of downtown. Businessmen in sweat-drenched button-downs, girls with rolled skirts from the nearby Catholic school and I — with a backpack of audio gear slung over my shoulder — were all waiting for one thing: mango lassis. 

Youness, the deli’s head cook, would slide plastic cups of the tangy, golden-orange drink down the laminated counter with the ease of a veteran bartender in a legacy saloon. Customers would pay, take their cups and post up — eager for refreshment — under the black-and-white family photos that lined the walls. 

I worked at the public radio station a couple of blocks down from the deli, so I found myself waiting in line for lassis a lot. During one particularly sweltering week, Youness began teasing that his recipe included a secret ingredient. Each visit, I’d toss out a new guess — buttermilk, lime zest, an extra teaspoon of honey —but he demurred until one day, I approached the counter, and he set a slim box of Morton Kosher salt in front of me with a thud. 

There was my answer. 

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I tasted more carefully, and sure enough, the little hit of salt cut through (and perhaps elevated) the tang of the whole-fat yogurt and the sugary nectar of the mango pulp. Since then, I’ve realized most of the best summer beverages all have a touch brine. 

There’s the classic margarita on the rocks, of course. Though the exact origin of the drink is hazy, competing stories all mention the salt-rimmed glass as a key component. One theory is that hotel manager Daniel “Danny” Negrete created the drink in 1936 as a surprise for his girlfriend, Margarita, who found salted beverages to be refreshing after spending the day in the brutal Pueblo sun; another is that Rosarito bar owner Carlos “Danny” Herrera mixed up the first margarita for Ziegfeld showgirl and actress Marjorie King and used crushed salt to bejewel the glass. 

For a more dressed-down version of the margarita, I’ve been relying on ranch water, a cocktail that’s simple enough for even the most novice home bartender. Combine Topo Chico (yes, it has to be Topo Chico) mineral water, lime juice and tequila in a salt- and Tajin-dusted highball glass. 

Extra dirty martinis — the kind where the gin is absolutely clouded by olive brine — are a perennial favorite, but in my search for other gently salted beverages, I came across a more seasonally celebratory variety: the tomato water martini. 

Tomato water, which is made by straining puréed tomatoes and a hefty pinch of salt, serves as the cocktail base. From there, add gin, vermouth, a squeeze of lemon and a few drops of Pernod if you’re partial to the slightest whisper of anise. In a similar vein, I’ve been making Kat Kinsman’s recipe for tomato lemonade on repeat over the past few weeks. It’s got a mellow acidity that pairs perfectly with a garnish of salt-preserved lemon peel. 

These days, I find myself dreaming of traveling again by way of perusing cocktail bar menus for their play on salted drinks. Currently, Miami Beach is high on the list, so I can sample a cocktail at Tanuki made with salted banana purée and a fat-washed butter popcorn Brugal Anejo Rum. San Diego is a close second, so I can try Madison’s Jumping Cholla — a potent combination of smoky mezcal, pineapple, jalapeño and a sprinkle of black lava salt. 

In the meantime, though, I’m keeping refreshed with an at least once-a-week curbside order of mango lassi. 

More Salon stories about cocktails: 

Sunflower butter-packed “sunshine sauce” is the creamy, earthy condiment of your dreams

I’m skeptical about a lot of stuff associated with restrictive diets, but one good thing that came out of the Whole-30 craze of the 2010s was my introduction to sunshine sauce. 

Within the confines of some trendy elimination diets that eschew legumes, sunflower seed butter is a symbol for deprivation, a poor substitute for full-fat peanut butter. But in sunshine sauce, it’s the basis for a creamy, complex condiment. At its most basic, sunshine sauce is a whipped blend of sunflower seed butter, lime juice, coconut milk, ginger and a hit of garlic. Sometimes, recipes call for the addition of some kind of spice — minced jalapeño, cayenne peppers, bird eye chilis — and perhaps other ingredients like lemongrass or even a tiny drizzle of tamarind paste. 

It’s a play on sambal kacang and bumbu kacang, Indonesian sauces made from ground, fried and roasted peanuts (and sometimes chilis), often known simply as “peanut sauce” in the States and served alongside satay, a dish composed of seasoned, skewered and grilled meat. It’s really a perfect sauce —  salty, a little sweet, acidic and packs some heat. 

But the substitution of sunflower seed butter gives the sauce a really distinct roasted, earthy and occasionally slightly bitter flavor that pairs great with grilled meats, as well as lettuce wraps, rice bowls, salads and as a complement for roasted vegetables. 

Obviously, it’s perfect for diners with peanut allergies, but it’s also flavorful and versatile enough that it can be enjoyed simply as a nuanced, spicy-sweet dip. This version is a little richer than the typical Keto versions — thanks largely to the addition of coconut cream and a sprinkle of brown sugar. 

***

Recipe: Sunshine Sauce 
Makes ⅔ cup

Ingredients 

1/4 cup sunflower seed butter (no sugar added)
2 tablespoons lime juice
1 tablespoon white miso paste
1/2 teaspoon rice vinegar
1 jalapeño, de-seeded
1 teaspoon fresh, grated ginger
1 clove garlic, minced
¼  cup coconut cream 
2 teaspoons of dark brown sugar
Salt to taste 

Directions

1. Combine the ingredients in a blender and pulse until completely smooth (if needed, add a tablespoon of water at a time until blended). Add salt to taste.

Read more Saucy:

 

“Jeopardy!” fans, LeVar Burton still might not have a chance – or may not want one anymore

Just when we grumbled that he was in, “Jeopardy!” host for a day Mike Richards is officially out . . . but still very much present in our lives.

On Friday the “Jeopardy!” executive producer who helped conduct an extensive, months-long and like, totally serious, you guys search for a new permanent host before handing himself the job, announced his decision to relinquish it.

Richards’ self-selection as the late Alex Trebek’s replacement was met with widespread consternation and led to reporters digging up several gender discrimination and sexual harassment lawsuits in which he was named, filed by models for “The Price Is Right,” on which he served a producer. Richards resolved to soldier on nevertheless, and “Jeopardy!” production studio Sony Pictures Television supported him.

Then The Ringer unearthed an old podcast of Richards’ in which he made antisemitic, sexist, racist and fat-phobic jokes. Ignoring past legal documents is one thing. But when the public can hear the same voice that calls the hallowed categories on the “Jeopardy!” board saying in pig Latin, “Ix-nay on the ose-nay . . . She’s not an ew-Jay” while referring to someone’s large nose, that’s a jackass of a different color. That brought the Anti-Defamation League all up in the show’s business.

There was only one thing Richards could do, albeit halfway. He quit the hosting gig. As of Friday, he was still the show’s executive producer.

“I want to apologize to each of you for the unwanted negative attention that has come to ‘Jeopardy!’ over the last few weeks and for the confusion and delays this is now causing,” Richards kinda sorta-mea culpa’d in an official statement. “I know I have a lot of work to do to regain your trust and confidence.”

The statement added that Sony Pictures Television intends to resume the search for a permanent syndicated host, bringing back guest hosts to continue production for the new season. Richards filmed one week’s worth of episodes, which will air.

At any rate, there was great joy on the socials. With loud shrieks written in all caps, unclean spirits tweeted their way out of those who were possessed. Many of the paralyzed and lame on OnlyFans were healed. 

It may seem that with Richards exiled from the podium, Sony could reconsider how badly they botched this transition from a public perception point of view. By making those initial guest host “tryouts” a show without no real purpose or weight behind most of them raised the profile of a show most people watch only occasionally.

Now, theoretically, they get a second shot to repair this mess.

Along those lines, people immediately resumed campaigning for internet favorite LeVar Burton to get a second shot, given less-than-ideal circumstances surrounding his one and only tryout date. (“Jeopardy!” shoots five shows in a single day, you see. Most of the guest hosts received the benefit of two dates; Burton and the contenders who came after him, as well as Robin Roberts, only received one.)

That would be splendid, right? Actually, no, and not just because it’s probably not going to happen. Indeed, it shouldn’t happen.

No offense to Burton, by the way. Despite his guest host slip-ups and shaky performance, he’d still be wonderful at the “Jeopardy!” helm. If Sony execs wanted him, they’d give him all the coaching he would need to succeed. He’s an award-winning actor, after all. Of course he can do this.

But Sony never wanted Burton. They never wanted Robin Roberts, either. The late Alex Trebek mentioned CNN legal analyst Laura Coates as one of his two choices to succeed him. You’ll notice that she never made any of Sony’s lists, either. A likely excuse, if they even knew about Coates, let alone considered her, is that producers might have suspected that too many people would say to themselves, “Who is Laura Coates?”

But when the nation collectively asked that about Mike Richards, they had plenty of faith that we’d eventually find out. They were right! We did.

My guess is they never wanted a person of color. They barely wanted a woman. Mayim Bialik may have clinched the primetime and specials hosting gig – which, according to Newsweek, also upset some fans – but from the time that was announced it seemed like a consolation hire.

This is said with full acknowledgment that Bialik gave a splendid guest host performance. But given the fact that she was one of four women out of a list of 16, and the other three are newscasters, it was obvious what Sony wanted and for the time being, still wants: another white guy.

If that weren’t true, Richards wouldn’t still be serving as executive producer of “Jeopardy!” with Sony’s blessing, backed by their Sen. Susan Collins-flavored assurance that he’s learned his lesson. “Mike has been with us for the last two years and has led the ‘Jeopardy!’ team through the most challenging time the show has ever experienced,” its official statement reads. “It is our hope that as EP he will continue to do so with professionalism and respect.”

But if you were a woman or a person of color, would you take that on faith? Would you trust your job to the guy who originally wanted it, had it, and then was forced to give it up due to bad press?

No. You. Would. Not.

Too many cautionary tales are floating around in the entertainment industry – or, heck, on Glassdoor or Reddit – about how such scenarios doomed the suckers invited to such Elysian Fields only to be presented with a cliff.

In fact, a subplot in Netflix’s new limited series “The Chair”  tells one such story. In it, a patriarchal white dean makes a show of ceding a prestigious position to a woman of color while ensuring she never has real decision-making power or a prayer of succeeding at her job.

Obligatory spoiler warning: if you haven’t watched this show, stop reading right now and go watch. It’s only around three hours long and worth your time.  If you keep reading a rather significant but highly relevant surprise will be blown for you.

Last chance . . .

In “The Chair”  Sandra Oh plays Dr. Ji-Yoon Kim, the first woman to chair the English department at her University. Paul Larson (David Morse), who is her boss and the school’s dean, loves to show her off at hoity-toity events. Behind the scenes he thwarts her efforts to gain tenure for a popular Black professor, Yasmin McKay (Nana Mensah). Ji-Yoon’s warns him that Yaz is in high demand in their field, but the dean simply doesn’t care.

Granted, Ji-Yoon makes a few significant mistakes in an effort to enact diplomacy, including imposing an overtly envious older professor Elliot Rentz (Bob Balaban) upon Yaz in order to boost his ailing class registration numbers. Ji-Yoon does this as a favor to Elliot, expecting him to give Yaz a glowing recommendation. Instead, he drags down Yaz’s lectures and harpoons her performance in his evaluation.

None of this compares to Dean Larson’s final insult to Yaz’s skills and intelligence. To ease the sting of Elliot stealing Yaz’s shine, Ji-Yoon names her as the college’s Distinguished Lecturer. Dean Larson casually snatches away the honor at the behest of a major benefactor – an elderly white woman who merrily announces that she’s found a more suitable choice for Distinguished Lecturer while she was out shopping.

And it is none other than . . . David Duchovny.

Yes, the actor is playing himself. Duchovny actually is a best-selling author. He also meets Ji-Yoon in his swimming trunks and generally comes off as a self-important boob. The “X-Files” star views his casual sojourn into academia as being on par with touring the country with his rock band or filming a movie. He proposes dusting off a paper he never defended and handing it in so he can finally get that doctorate he never got around to completing, as if he were filling out a credit card form.

Ji-Yoon is appalled. Dean Larson is unmoved. And although the chair finds a way to ameliorate the situation, her relationship with Yaz is damaged beyond repair. All because at an important crossroads, a patriarchal institution decided that the feelings of a couple of status quo white people were of greater worth than one woman of color’s potential and abilities, to the point of negating another woman of color’s political power.

So yeah: About that whole business of Richards keeping his executive producer bag. It’s not a great situation into which any outsider should willingly enter. Certainly not a non-white person. Even alternate frontrunner “Jeopardy!” GOAT Ken Jennings and fellow champion Buzzy Cohen should be wary. But if a few industry insider predictions prove to be accurate, Richards’ executive producer title may also be, shall we say, in a transitional phase.

That said, the American public has a habit of forgetting what men behind the camera did and may continue to do without millions of eyes on them, especially after the headlines die down. Joining Richards’ clubhouse may be simpler for Jennings and Cohen, and choosing one of them or someone like them may be sufficient for Sony to keep “Jeopardy!” chugging along and bring its elderly-skewing audience with it.

Meanwhile, somewhere out there is a smart producer who may see what “Jeopardy!” didn’t in Burton or Coates or someone else denied a fair shake by Richards and executives like him. Imagine what could be possible if that person were to create a general knowledge competition built to attract a modern, intellectually curious viewership while casting an eye toward the future.

That’s a story I hope someone is bold enough to write with someone like Burton, Roberts or Coates steering it. But it won’t find an audience within an unnecessarily bruised institution too stubborn to part ways with the “team player” who damaged it.

In Muslim countries, a push for donor breast milk

In 2014, Mohammad Bagher Hosseini spent two months on sabbatical at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden. While there, he says, something intrigued him.

“It was very interesting for me that all of the preterm infants received breast milk, not one of them received formula,” recalls Hosseini, who heads the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at Alzahra Teaching Hospital of Tabriz in northwest Iran. By contrast, babies in Iran’s NICUs were given formula if they couldn’t be breastfed.

The benefits of breast milk for preterm babies — those born before 37 weeks — are well known. In particular, breast milk reduces the rate of some complications, including potentially fatal infections, associated with prematurity. At Karolinska, Hosseini observed, babies in the NICU had a ready supply of breast milk from a nearby human milk bank. The facility screened suitable donors (healthy lactating parents with an excess supply), collected the milk, and tested it for contaminants before pasteurizing and freezing it.

The whole thing made Hosseini wonder, “why we don’t have this type of support of preterm infants” in Iran. He returned home determined to change things. In a ceremony in July 2016, Hosseini and colleagues opened the country’s first human milk bank, based out of his Tabriz hospital. Today, Iran has nearly a dozen such facilities — part of a global network that spans more than 750 milk banks in nearly 70 countries.

Iran, however, is an anomaly: It is the only country in the Muslim world with a network of milk banks. In general, Islam makes the practice tricky. The opposition centers on a tenet called milk kinship, which states that a parent-child bond is formed when a woman gives milk to a baby who isn’t biologically related to her. To avoid future incestuous marriages between so-called milk siblings, the tenet says, the foster relationship must be clearly delineated. Since milk bank donors are typically anonymous and the donations are often combined, the practice is rejected in most of the Muslim world.

However, Iran has found a way to make milk banks workable through transparency and permission from the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (also its spiritual leader). Other countries with large Muslim populations, including Singapore and Kuwait, have had similar successes. Their approaches may help more Muslim nations and communities establish milk banks, too.

To be clear, Islam isn’t against milk donation and other life-saving interventions. If there is an emergency and the only option is to use a milk bank, then there is no problem whatsoever from a religious perspective, says Mohammed Ghaly, a professor of Islamic bioethics at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar.

But when it comes to creating a national policy on milk banking, the tenet of milk kinship can’t be disregarded, he says: “If we just import the Western model to the Muslim world, it will not work. Technology is not working in a vacuum.”

* * *

Premature babies’ immune systems aren’t fully developed, so they are especially vulnerable to infections. Of these, the bacterial-borne disease necrotizing enterocolitis — or NEC (pronounced “neck”) — is particularly worrisome. 

“The risk of NEC on its own is relatively low, but it’s a devastating disease,” says Tarah Colaizy, a professor of pediatrics and neonatology at the University of Iowa and the research director of the Human Milk Banking Association of North America. In premature babies weighing less than about three pounds, 5 to 7 percent develop NEC and 15 to 20 percent die from it, Colaizy says, making the disease one of the leading causes of mortality in preterm infants. Though the exact numbers are not well documented, according to Jennifer Canvasser, founder and director of NEC Society, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization, approximately 500 babies in the United States succumb every year.

NEC often occurs suddenly and causes the gut to become inflamed. While some infants may experience mild cases that can be treated in part with antibiotics, the infection can damage portions of the small intestine, which then must be surgically removed. This can result in long-term complications such as a reduced ability to absorb nutrients (called short bowel syndrome), and poor neurological and motor skills development.

“Every neonatologist you talk to just will say, ‘I hate that disease,'” says Colaizy.

NEC is so feared in part because its exact cause is unknown, making it hard to prevent. Researchers do know, however, that the use of infant formula appears to increases NEC risk in preterm babies by as much as 10-fold, while human milk helps prevent it.

Because breast milk appears to offer protection against NEC and other diseases, numerous guidelines — including those from the AAP, Unicef, and the World Health Organization — recommend its exclusive use in preterm infants. And when the birth parent’s milk is unavailable, the next best alternative is pasteurized donor milk.

“We have the data that shows there’s been a significant decrease in morbidity and mortality of these premature babies with human milk versus formula,” says Natasha Sriraman, a pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters in Norfolk, Virginia. She says that milk banks undoubtedly provide an essential service.

Hosseini remains convinced of the benefits milk banks provide. According to a retrospective study he and several co-authors published this year, after his hospital in Iran established its bank, the incidence of NEC in preterm infants fell nearly 90 percent. The rates of sepsis and eye damage, both frequently associated with prematurity, the study found, also declined significantly.

* * *

Despite the health benefits, milk banks haven’t had much of a chance to gain footing in the Muslim world. In 1985, the legal arm of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), an international association comprising 57 member states that describes itself as “the collective voice of the Muslim world,” issued a ruling forbidding milk banks. “These scholars argued against milk banks to protect the lineage of children so that they would not one day accidentally marry a ‘milk sibling’,” Nadia Khan, a doctoral candidate in Islamic studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School, wrote in an email to Undark.

This is due, in part, to how Islam recognizes kinship, says Ghaly, the Islamic and biomedical ethicist. In addition to family relations via blood or marriage, the religion also considers kinship “that is created through breastfeeding,” he says. Because the operations at most milk banks make it difficult for kinships to be traced, most religious scholars think that the banks “should be treated like breastfeeding,” Ghaly says.

Some researchers have suggested — without scientific support — that babies could inherit a milk donor’s genetic material, leading to an increased risk of genetic disease if they were to have children with a milk sibling in the future. The thinking is that “if babies are breastfed by the same mother regularly, they might share similar epigenotypes,” explains Zilal Saari, a social scientist from the University of Technology Malaysia who studies milk sharing, referring to patterns of gene expression.

But most experts say this notion is highly implausible. According to an article published in the journal Pediatrics in February, “intact genetic material is not passed onto the recipient infant” from breastmilk and the argument regarding milk siblings “is not supported by the known processes of consanguinity and genetic disease.”

“It’s just completely not scientific opinion,” says pediatrician Jean-Charles Picaud from Lyon, France, who runs the region’s milk bank and is the former head of the European Milk Bank Association. Studies have also found that the human gut breaks down traces of genetic substances in breast milk.

Still, many Muslim countries continue to uphold the OIC’s 1985 ruling. For instance, when Turkey and Bangladesh came close to opening pilot milk banks in 2013 and 2019 respectively, the plans were denied on religious grounds.

* * *

Iran was able to find a way to make milk banks work, in part due to its interpretation of the milk kinship tenet. In the tenet’s strictest form, which is more common in the Sunni branch of Islam, just one feeding of donated milk leads to kinship. But in Iran, Hosseini believes the milk banks were possible because 9 in 10 Iranian Muslims practice Shia Islam, which considers milk kinship differently. In this version, a baby must have suckled directly from the breast and completed at least 15 feedings to establish kinship, among other conditions. 

In Iranian milk banks, babies are typically fed by spoon, bottle, or through a special tube, and the milk they receive is often a mix from three to four donors in order to provide babies with milk that is more homogenous in terms of its fat, protein, and nutritional content. (For this same reason, donor milk is often also pooled in some Western countries including the U.S., Canada, and France — though Sweden does not recommend it.) In Iran, the pooled donor milk also ensures no one infant receives multiple feedings from the same donor, which abides by the Shia interpretation of milk kinship.

Hosseini’s success in Iran also hinged on another factor: early buy-in from the country’s religious leaders. 

Early on in the process, Hosseini enlisted a fellow neonatologist who was familiar with how other countries cared for babies in their NICUs. But more importantly, the colleague was a trusted adviser of Ayatollah Khamenei. Together with representatives from the health ministry, the doctors wrote a letter to Khamenei explaining how many babies in Iran were born prematurely and that their mothers weren’t always ready to produce milk. Elsewhere in the world, there were breast milk banks that collected and pasteurized donor milk to give to premature babies, which helped reduce mortality rates.

Khamenei issued a religious edict, or a fatwa, allowing the practice. He answered that “as the infant is not fed directly from the breast, milk kinship is not formed, so donating milk and feeding an infant by donated milk is not prohibited at all,” says Hosseini. “It was very important for us to have this type of permission.”

Some countries with sizeable Muslim communities have adopted similar approaches. Singapore, for instance, launched a milk bank in 2017. Although only about 15 percent of its citizens practice Islam, “we are a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural country,” says Mei Chien Chua, director of the Singapore’s KK Human Milk Bank.

“We identified that we would need to address the concern on milk kinship among the Muslim community,” she adds.

Chua’s team consulted with the country’s Islamic religious council, which eventually issued a fatwa granting permission for milk donation when medically indicated. And the religious council got involved from very early on, says Paul Zambrano, a regional technical adviser in Southeast Asia for Alive & Thrive, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the nutrition of mothers, infants, and young children. “I would say it’s best practice,” he adds. 

Malaysia, which is aiming to open its first milk bank under the Ministry of Health by 2025, has heeded these lessons as well. Islam is the country’s official religion, and three-fifths of the population is Muslim. “After a series of consultations with the Islamic Authorities, milk kinship is not an issue in the human milk bank concept which will be established in Malaysia,” Zalma Binti Abdul Razak, head of nutrition at the country’s health ministry, wrote to Undark in an email.

Back in Iran, Hosseini and other health officials plan to open more milk banks. Some will be in regions where people mainly practice Sunni Islam, with its stricter conditions for milk kinship. But before expanding, Hosseini says, they will have to speak to the leaders in those areas to resolve the milk kinship issue. “It’s very important,” he says. 

* * *

In the tiny Gulf nation of Kuwait, Niran Al-Naqeeb presents parents with another option. In 1999, the neonatologist had just returned home after completing a postgraduate degree at London’s Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital, one of Europe’s oldest maternity hospitals. It was there that she was introduced to milk banking and became convinced, she says, of “the very importance of human milk for preemies.”

Al-Naqeeb was keen to offer a similar service where she worked at Al-Adan Hospital, which handles between 6,000 to 7,000 deliveries a year. But she knew the service would have to be adapted for it to work in her predominantly Muslim country. 

Al-Naqeeb decided her program would not be a traditional milk bank, but rather a tailored donor scheme. Unlike milk banks that pool donations, her approach only includes milk from a single donor for each baby, which makes it easier to trace milk relationships and avoid what the Quran might consider incestuous relationships between their families. Additionally, she gets the donor and recipient parents to meet prior to the exchange. Knowing each other’s identities, says Al-Naqeeb, “is extremely important,”

After the donation, both families receive a certificate detailing their names, contact information, how much milk was received, how it was dispensed, and the number of feeds involved. “When we follow this exactly,” says Al-Naqeeb, “it was acceptable for most parents.”

Doctors in Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population, are thinking along similar lines. Health care experts in the country are hoping to open the country’s first milk bank in the coming years and in stakeholder discussions, they emphasize how milk will come from single donors, says Wiyarni Pambudi, a pediatrician and lecturer at Jakarta’s Tarumanagara University, who has been involved in the talks.

While the varied approaches don’t always resemble Western milk banks, health experts say they are a way forward for Muslim countries. “It’s an adapted model, but it’s not entirely different,” says Alive & Thrive’s Zambrano.

“It’s very possible,” he adds, “to do it.”

* * *

Sandy Ong is a freelance science journalist based in Singapore. She covers stories about science, technology, health, and the environment.

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

Mike Lindell, still in Trump’s good graces, has new prediction: reinstatement by New Year’s

Pillow magnate-turned-election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell has a new prediction: Donald Trump will be back in the Oval Office by New Year’s Eve.

For months, Lindell floated August as the deadline for Trump’s reinstatement, landing on Aug. 13 as the day Joe Biden’s electoral victory would be thrown out. Though the 13th passed without any developments and his South Dakota “cyber symposium” fell flat, the infamous MyPillow CEO is still in Trump’s good graces — earning a glowing endorsement from the previous commander-in-chief at a packed rally in Cullman, Alabama, Saturday night.

“[Mike Lindell is] a patriot, a wonderful man, a man who puts his guts into everything. A man that they don’t treat properly. He’s smart; he loves his country so much,” Trump said, to cheers from the crowd. “He’s willing to die for this country.”

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“I watched him over the last week at his symposium, which was really amazing, some of the people he had were incredible, incredible people. Mike Lindell!” Trump continued. “True! I’ll tell you, true. It’s true. He had some people up there, really – they were scientists, they were political scientists and beyond. They were incredible, what they said and what they understand.” 

Lindell was even given a prominent speaking slot at the event, using the time to rail against Fox News for ignoring him while continuing to promote a variety of debunked election-related conspiracies. In a side interview with the Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN) before his speech, Lindell also claimed that Trump would be re-instated by the end of the calendar year.  

“It has to happen now. It’s Trump 2021. 100% Trump 2021! And it’s — this election when it does get pulled down, there were so many down-tickets effected. Maybe the Supreme Court and that they just do a whole new election, which is fine,” the pillow tycoon said. “But remember everybody, we have to melt down the machines to make prison bars out of them!” 

Salon attended Lindell’s “cyber symposium” and found no evidence he had ever posessed the long-promised “packet capture” (PCAPs) election data he attempted to present at the South Dakota gathering. Instead, Lindell baselessly accused “antifa” of infiltrating his event to sabotage him and divert attention from the disclosure of his “absolute proof.” 

While Trump praised Lindell’s handpicked experts on Saturday night, the actual three-day event included dozens of third-party cybersecurity experts that said his data was essentially bunk. One career “packet capture” specialist even told Salon the data Lindell shared was in the wrong format — leading him to demand a cut of the $5 million reward promised to anyone who could prove the data was not legitimate. 

The Dispatch’s Khaya Himmelman, who was at the confab, reported:

Lindell had claimed multiple times that the PCAPs he had collected alone would demonstrate the widespread fraud he’d been claiming for months, and would be enough to convince the Supreme Court to overturn the election once and for all— unanimously. The basic idea of Lindell’s PCAP claim is that he has a team of experts who gathered internet traffic from foreign computers to U.S. counties, where foreign computers came into contact with computers that are meant to provide election results. This all supposedly pointed to data that show a system intrusion that changed votes. And yet there were no PCAPs. In fact, all we got were a series of teasers of various pieces of “evidence” that never materialized. The whole event seemed like an effort to distract attendees with graphics, numbers, slideshows, and tangents, without ever sharing anything at all. 

In fact, Lindell’s handpicked cyber team — the same group Trump praised Saturday during his speech — spent the 3-day conference sharing bizarre conspiracy theories about election technology company Dominion Voting Systems, including that the company uses “Serbian technology with Chinese characteristics.”

Lindell further failed to reveal the alleged Dominion machines that he claimed were in his possession.

“Autism is not a disease — it’s a disability”: Journalist Eric Garcia debunks autism myths

2021 has, in its own strange way, brought autism issues front and center.

First there was the ongoing debate about COVID-19 vaccines, which partially drew on the vaccine skepticism that has existed for years because of the myth that certain inoculations cause autism. Then there was the February release of “Music,” a film by international pop star Sia that aroused outrage from many autistic commentators for its stereotypical and offensive depictions. In March, Alek Minassian, a terrorist who killed 10 people with a van in Toronto, tried to use autism as an excuse for his actions. (The excuse failed, and he was later found guilty of murder.)

These developments speaks to the larger predicament facing autistic people today. Certainly, autistic individuals are making their voices heard, especially online where we have a platform to call out insensitive media depictions. While it is unlikely that Minassian would have ever succeeded in his attempt to use anti-autism prejudices to his advantage, the fact that the court emphatically rejected it at face value reveals that old stigmas are losing their potency.

Meanwhile, as we can see in the vaccine debate, pernicious assumptions about autism still influence our culture — even in ways that on the surface don’t seem to have anything to do with autism issues.

That, perhaps, is where “We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation” enters the picture. Written by an autistic political journalist named Eric Garcia, the book systematically debunks many myths about autism while urging for a national conversation that includes autistic voices. Autistic people are not prone to violence, only able to work in technology or exclusively white and male. Many autistic people are perfectly capable of advocating for themselves, holding down jobs and sustaining meaningful relationships. Being autistic does not turn you into an automaton, and it certainly does not strip you of agency. Indeed, as I can attest from my own experience, it is often more akin to a language difference, or an unorthodox way of understanding the “rules” of human interactions.

Salon spoke with Garcia to discuss his views on everything from autism and neurotypicality (that is, not being autistic) to whether Sia and Donald Trump hate autistic people.

As we’re both on the autism spectrum, I think I’ll be approaching this interview perhaps from a different vantage point than some other people. I’m really intrigued by the fact that you’re focusing so much on changing the conversation about autism from one of “curing” the condition to one of being accepting of neurodiversity. Can you explain how you decided to write a book with that angle in mind?

It began really, really weirdly. I think it was mostly [when] I was writing at National Journal. At the time I had pitched to my editor writing a piece about lots of people in Washington who were on the autism spectrum. I thought it would just be kind of a fun, chatty piece about Washington D.C. life. And then my editor said, “Why should this exist?” And I said, ‘I think we focus too much on trying to cure autistic people and not enough on trying to help autistic people live fulfilling lives. And then he was like, “Okay, that’s this piece.”

So I wrote that piece and then that came out and then I think that the following question was ‘Well, what would that look like?’ And I think the reason why I wanted to write that was (a) I think then it was also me justifying writing that piece, but (B) I thought at the time that we felt that any conversation about autism was almost always questions about curing or questions about vaccines. I feel like they’re rooted in the same idea that autism is something to be avoided, but even if autism can be “cured,” I don’t think that it would even fix the lives of autistic people today.

Not only would it not fix the lives of autistic people today, it would fundamentally misrepresent what autism is.

Yeah, because autism is not a disease. It’s a disability. With that in mind, it’s just like deafness or cerebral palsy or anything else. Even with something like polio, where we basically eradicated polio, it was also a lot of people with polio who were the activists who passed the ADA — the Americans with Disabilities Act. I don’t even think curing autistic people would improve their lives or fundamentally alter who they are. Of course we want to help autistic people with any impairments they have, or any comorbid conditions, or anything like that, but we also don’t want to change who they are. We don’t want to change their fundamental essence. We want to fix the impairments, all the difficulties, but we also don’t want to change who people are. We don’t want to, and you can’t separate the autism from the person.

Let’s take a step back and pretend that society was not organized around the principles of neurotypicality. As a hypothetical premise, what approach should we have to everyone in a way that would welcome both neurodivergent and neurotypical voices? Does that make sense?

That’s a really good question. I think it’s really hard to start from that baseline as such, because basically you have to start everything from scratch. I think if we were to start from that assumption, the thing we would need to do fundamentally is start by asking people, what do they need? And I think for a long time, we’ve talked a lot about autism while talking past autistic people. Does that make sense?

I understand that on a very personal and visceral level.

Before we ever do anything, what we need to do is ask. And we should ask as broad a gamut of autistic people as possible, because your autism is different from my autism, and our autism is different from the proverbial girl in Austin, Texas who is 13 years old. We need to talk with who does have an intellectual disability, and it’s going to be different from somebody who doesn’t have an intellectual disability but might have trouble speaking. All of our autism is going to be very different and we need to include as many people as possible. Now I want to add something. And if you don’t want my asking, because I feel this is very important, but do you mind if I include something? 

Of course, just ask.

So a lot of people will say that it is inappropriate for us as autistic people to think that we can speak for autistic people who can’t speak. And they’re correct. We can’t speak for them. But what we can say is that we are more like them than you realize. So a lot of parents will say, “you don’t know what it is like to have a kid who’s constantly having meltdowns.” And you’re right. But even if I can speak, I know what it’s like to have a meltdown. Even if I can hold a job, I know what it is like to have all of your senses on fire. Even if I can go to school, I know what it’s like to misunderstand social work or have trouble doing certain things. I think that it is important to recognize that, yes, we understand what some of those things are like. And that is why we want the same thing for your kid that we want for ourselves.

My next question is about the general thesis of your book. If there was one way that your book could change the national conversation about autism, what would you want that to be?

Just assuming that autistic people should be at the table about anything that pertains to them. I think that that’s the simplest thing.

Now I want to go into the subject of pop cultural representations of autism. As you know, earlier this year I reviewed a controversial movie about an autistic character, [the Sia-directed film] “Music.”

Your review was really good, by the way.

Thank you. I appreciate that. It was scathing because I detested the film. Having said that, I almost feel like it’s worth watching just to understand how autism is misunderstood, because what’s strange about the movie is, I don’t feel like it came from a hateful place. I feel like it came from a condescending place.

Yeah, I think that’s the most important thing to take into account, is that when you do these kind of endeavors, these kind of pop culture endeavors, but you don’t have the input of autistic people, you wind up offending them. You wind up not listening to what they’re saying. I think that that’s why the pushback was so bad. Because I think that could happen isn’t that Sia made a bad movie, it’s that she didn’t back down. She doubled down.

This ties into your book, I think — the idea that condescension is directly connected to the fact that autistic people don’t have a place in the conversation. Someone makes a movie that’s supposed to be for a certain community, but it doesn’t ever occur that excluding people from that community inherently defeats the purpose. And this would be true, regardless of which community one is trying to speak for. 

I think that it’s because a lot of people assume that autistic people can’t speak for themselves or that autistic people can’t describe their own experiences. They’re not experts on their own experiences.

How the conversation has evolved about vaccines since the pandemic? How do you feel that that evolution has in any way changed the aspect of anti-vaccine debates that specifically pertains to the infamous autism myth popularized by Dr. Andrew Wakefield?

The autism vaccine myth and panic is to the COVID vaccine disaster what “The Hobbit” is to “The Lord of the Rings,” so to speak. It laid the groundwork for this current crisis. You would not have as many people skeptical of vaccines, or you would not have a climate that accepted this, or you would not have this kind of conspiratorial mindset about vaccines without the autism vaccine panic and myth.

Now I have to ask about the possible connections between prejudice against autistic individuals and the Trump movement in general, because I can tell you from personal experience, I’ve had Trumpers insult me by citing my autism. Do you think it’s just them playing to their most vulgar instincts or is there a trend here?

I think that it goes back to Donald Trump saying that autism has become an epidemic during a Republican primary debate. To your point, it goes to their kind of base, these bullies. A lot of these people are bullies and they’re going to find something, but there’s also this kind of weird, at least from my experience, there’s this weird kind of psychosocial anxiety about autism because some white nationalists think that it’s something that — I’ve seen it on Twitter — think that like only like the psychologically superior or autistic, like kind of like the next generation of Übermensch or whatever. I’ve also seen them say autistic people are lesser or they’re inferior. Nobody has ever argued white supremacists make any sense, but they’re very contradictory here.

Is there anything else that you feel is important that needs to be added?

A lot of people misunderstand what I say, what I want, which is for you to accept autistic people. A lot of people think that I say that that means that autism is all rainbows and butterflies. Just like with any disability, there are challenges. And just like with disabilities, any disability, there are impairments. But what I’m arguing fundamentally is that that being disabled does not warrant you losing your rights, your humanity or your dignity. And if there is anything that I’m arguing in this book, it’s that autistic people are humans and they are fully deserving of being treated as human beings.

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Wait — have we been watering our houseplants all wrong?

I was just minding my own business, scrolling through Instagram, when I came across a video of plant care tips that “everyone should know.” Naturally, I watched it to see if I was following said tips, and in addition to basic things like using pots with drainage holes and “quarantining” new plants to avoid bug infestations, one of the suggestions was to bottom-water your plants.

Now, I’ve always bottom-watered my African violets because . . . OK, I’m not sure why exactly, but my mom told me to. However, I don’t do it with any other plants. Curious if there were actual benefits of the practice, I went down a rabbit hole about bottom-watering, and it turns out it’s highly touted and actually recommended by a lot of plant experts. Here’s why.

What’s all the fuss with bottom-watering? 

https://www.instagram.com/p/CQezYO2JGb-/

Bottom-watering, sometimes called reverse watering, is when you place a plant in a bowl of water, allowing the soil and roots to soak water from the bottom up. (Naturally, your pot needs to have drainage holes for this to work.) People love to create time-lapses of the process — it’s super satisfying to watch the water level in the bowl go down as plants drink up the liquid.

Why would you do it this way? Apparently, there are quite a few benefits to watering your plants from the bottom instead of the top. It can help plants develop strong root systems, as they’ll grow downward toward the source of water, and reverse watering also ensures soil is saturated, as sometimes water runs right through the pot when you top-water. It’s also a great option for houseplants that don’t like having wet leaves, such as African violets and snake plants. (So that’s why . . .) Some people even say it can help prevent pesky insects like fungus gnats!

What do the experts think? 

I’ll be the first to admit that the internet occasionally misses the mark with its “life hacks,” so I wanted to check in with a few experts to see if bottom-watering is really the best thing since sliced bread. The verdict? Yup, it’s a great option for your plants!

“Sometimes the roots do not get enough water when watering the top of the soil, which is why the occasional bottom-soaking can be beneficial,” explains Joyce Mast, official Plant Mom at Bloomscape.

“[Bottom-watering] is great because some soils don’t absorb water as well if you don’t give them more time to get saturated,” says Mark Grundy, a houseplant consultant and owner of Moss & Fern. “It’s also great because the water doesn’t make it up to the top of the soil, and since fungus gnats like to lay their eggs in moist soil, they have nowhere to lay them, therefore preventing pests.”

However, Grundy does point out that reverse watering takes longer than traditional watering methods, so you might not be able to do it all the time. When you do have a few extra minutes, though, bottom-watering can help keep your beloved plant babies happy and healthy! Consider me a convert.

How to bottom water your plants 

If you’re ready to give bottom-watering a try, it’s really quite simple. Fill a bowl or saucer with room-temperature water, and mix in some fertilizer, if needed. From here, you can simply place the plant in the container and let it sit for 15 minutes or so. (Larger pots may need longer!) Don’t let your plants sit in water continuously — this can lead to root rot — and keep in mind that you should occasionally top-water plants to flush out excess salts that can build up on the soil.

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Having trouble figuring out when to water? After bottom-watering, note the weight of your plant — this will help you gauge the next time it needs to be watered, as it will feel much lighter when the soil is dried out.

Finally, it’s worth noting that some plants do prefer top-watering — i.e. bromeliads, which have a “tank” that needs to be filled with water, and orchids with aerial roots that like moisture. However, the majority of houseplants will be very pleased to suck up water from the bottom.

Patagonia boycotts popular Wyoming ski resort after owner hosted fundraiser with MTG

The outdoor athletic company Patagonia dropped a lucrative deal to sell its clothing and accessories at a Wyoming resort after its owner hosted a fundraiser for the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, reports said. 

The Aug. 5 event, held at well-known ski hotspot Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, featured speeches from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. All three have parroted election conspiracies and anti-vaccine messages over the past year, as well as a number of stances that diverge from Patagonia’s public positions on social issues like voting rights, environmentalism and support for the Black Lives Matter Movement. 

“Those that know us in Jackson Hole are aware that we make business decisions and build relationships in alignment with our values and advocacy efforts,” Patagonia spokeswoman Corley Kenna told The Washington Post. “We join with the local community that is using its voice in protest. We will continue to use our business to advocate for policies to protect our planet, support thriving communities and a strong democracy.”

Jay Kemmerer, the resort’s co-owner, is a prolific conservative donor who has in recent cycles given to Republican candidates like Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., Sen. Mitch McConnell and Sen. Tommy Tuberville, among others, according to campaign finance data compiled by the nonprofit OpenSecrets.org. He also contributed more than $200,000 to Trump’s reelection campaign in recent years, the Jackson Hole News & Guide reported.

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He’s clashed openly with both the resort’s board and staff over his political stances, culminating in an op-ed published in the local paper last week touting the business’ contribution to local environmental policies and commitment to diversity. 

A number of Wyoming residents also called for a boycott of the popular ski destination, with many joining a sizeable protest outside the fundraiser — which reportedly cost a minimum of $2,000 per couple to attend.

Kenna told another local outlet, WyoFile, that the resort was Patagonia’s largest customer in the area, though she did not offer specifics. 

“It is our largest customer in an area — that’s really critical,” she said. “That tells you something about the importance of this relationship. We don’t take ending it lightly.”

Patagonia said it will reconsider its boycott of Kemmerer’s resort if it reconsiders several of its priorities — especially the ski resort’s commitment to environmentalism.

“This is very much about staying true to our strong feeling and our responsibility as a benefit corporation to stand up for and advance our priorities, our policies to protect our planet and our communities,” Kenna said.

The war in Afghanistan was a huge victory — for the military-industrial complex

Descriptions of Afghanistan’s takeover by the Taliban have been packed with histrionic language: “a stunning rout” (The Associated Press) accomplished with “breathtaking speed” (The New York Times); a “spectacular collapse” (The Washington Post); “a crisis that could have lasting humanitarian and national-security consequences” (The Wall Street Journal). 

The news was accompanied by a sudden rush of hand-wringing over the fate that awaits the Afghan people. “The Taliban insists it has changed. Afghanistan’s future hinges on whether that’s true,” read one headline in the Washington Post. 

But over the last 20 years, the future and well-being of ordinary Afghans — continuously bombed, starved and displaced by all sides and all armies — have been buried under different headlines. It took a nationwide resurgence of the bearded, brutal, cruelly misogynistic Taliban — picture-perfect antagonists for American audiences — to wrench Afghan civilians from the bottom of the priority pile, as if life in Afghanistan before last weekend had been a rosy affair. 

In addition to watching in horror as the Taliban made themselves comfortable in Kabul’s presidential palace, much of this coverage bemoaned the war’s tactical failures. It was viewed, in other words, not as a catastrophic decision to have been made in the first place but as a logistical embarrassment. 

Yet, this meandering, ineffectual, deadly war — the longest in American history — was a grand victory for one behemoth sector of manufacturing that thrives upon tactical failures and stalemates: the military-industrial complex. 

Mainstream coverage of Afghanistan this past week touched a bit on military spending but generally omitted the vast profits accumulated since 2001 by big guns like Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Raytheon, as well as hundreds of smaller and lesser-known defense contractors. 

Instead, such reports framed the American occupation as a moral imperative. Ever since George W. Bush swaggered into what some call the Heart of Asia — mountainous, gorgeous, ever-antagonized — the invasion, unlike that of Iraq, has been seen as a flawed but justified battle against evil: the Taliban, al-Qaida and terrorism. 

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The initial poster boy for military action, of course, was Osama bin Laden. But when he escaped into Pakistan — on horseback, the story goes — a mere two months after the U.S. started dropping bombs, the war was repurposed as a “feminist mission … to liberate Afghan women from their burqas,” as Arundhati Roy put it in 2002. When the Taliban were beaten out of governance, the mission changed again — this time to one of grueling, corruption-prone, glacially incremental reconstruction. The U.S. would build, Bush said at the time, “an Afghanistan that is free from this evil and is a better place to live.” What this really meant, whether or not he knew it, was fresh billions — and steady billions — for the Pentagon, State Department, contractors, mercenaries and a host of Afghan warlords and politicians. 

The war was ultimately a colossal financial operation with an unfathomable toll in taxpayer dollars and human lives. That it accomplished virtually nothing of political or civic durability only confirms this. 

“Largely out of sight, our gargantuan military machine is also increasingly out of mind, especially when it comes to the ways in which it spends, and misspends, our money,” Andrew Cockburn wrote in Harper’s in 2019.  

Indeed, the $2.26 trillion that the U.S. spent on Afghanistan is hardly a comprehensible number — its scale obscures the venality at play. But if we hone in on days and months, on individual multimillion-dollar contracts awarded to companies supplying explosives, helmets, boots and armed security guards, we can see what the spoils of war really look like. 

One only needs to spend a few minutes perusing the Department of Defense’s contracts page to get a sense of how much money U.S. taxpayers were allotting daily to the war as recently as July 30. So far this year, the Pentagon has given away $225.83 million in contacts for work exclusively intended for Afghanistan and another $498.08 million for work partly in Afghanistan. Unsurprisingly, these are small sums in comparison to earlier years, when military operations were thriving. In just August and September, 2015, the DOD signed away $672.95 million solely for America’s “forever war.”

Days selected at random show us where our money was going in Afghanistan, in lieu of strengthening our own schools, health care, infrastructure and social services:

On Dec. 31, 2014, DynCorp International, LLC was awarded $100.78 million to train police and army officers at the Afghanistan Ministry of Interior.

On June 22, 2016, ​​Harris Corp. received $1.7 billion for “radios, ancillaries, spare parts and services.” 

On Feb. 14, 2017, Propper International Inc. was awarded $32.46 million for “hot weather combat boots.” A week later, Wolverine World Wide Inc. received $17.99 million for “tan temperate weather combat boots.”

On April 28, 2017, ORC Industries Inc. was awarded $20.49 million for wet weather ponchos. 

On July 3, 2019, AAR Defense Systems & Logistics received $209.96 million to train recruits for the Afghan Air Force, among other tasks. 

On April 30, 2020, L-3 Fuzing and Ordnance Systems Inc. won $64.97 million for an order of multi-option fuzes to trigger mortars. 

“I don’t think I could overstate that this was a system just basically designed for funneling money and wasting or losing equipment,” said a U.S. veteran with Joint Command, which oversaw training of Afghan forces, in a wrenching interview with Michael Tracey last month. 

The veteran’s frustrating (and not at all uncommon) experiences testify to Andrew Cockburn’s assertion that “if we understand that the [military industrial complex] exists purely to sustain itself and grow, it becomes easier to make sense of the corruption, mismanagement, and war, and understand why, despite warnings over allegedly looming threats, we remain in reality so poorly defended.”

To publish tactical analyses by people like Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a former director of Raytheon, while ignoring the vast profits accumulated by that company from never-ending wars, symbolizes the ingrained failure of the mainstream press to scrutinize our political leaders in ways that matter. When Austin pressed President Biden to preserve a military presence in Afghanistan, for example, the New York Times reported it with no apparent irony. 

Austin was just one of a sizable number of establishmentarian voices urging that the occupation be prolonged, in one form or another. Former Secretary Hillary Clinton warned of “huge consequences” if troops were to be withdrawn. Former Secretary Condoleezza Rice sagely recommended a sustained counterterrorism mission. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, foresaw “some really dramatic, bad possible outcomes.” 

Jim Mattis, who took a short break as a director of General Dynamics to serve as Trump’s defense secretary, warned that withdrawal from Afghanistan could leave the U.S. vulnerable to threats of terrorism. In the less than two years that Mattis served in Trump’s cabinet, General Dynamics was awarded $277.66 million for work either fully or partly in Afghanistan. 

* * *

When we lose sight of the bigger picture — of history, cycles, agendas and consequences — we can find ourselves seduced by the smaller picture: a bombing here, an atrocity there, a rifle-toting militant sitting behind an ornately carved presidential desk. We forget who attacked whom first. Who funded whom. Who profited. Who lied. In isolation, sensationalized increments capitalize upon our outrage, preserving axioms and insulating institutions. 

In its editorial last week condemning the fall of Kabul, the New York Times solemnly referred to the 20-year occupation as “a story of mission creep and hubris but also of the enduring American faith in the values of freedom and democracy.” The paper of record’s editorial board dwelled on American soldiers lost, not Afghan civilians slaughtered. It reserved its rancor for the “militants” overrunning the region, not the foreign militaries that precipitated its bloody unraveling. It went so far as to lionize the U.S. military as a “logistical superpower” able to “move heaven and earth.” The chaotic scenes of Afghans swarming an American military plane at the Kabul airport, the Times observed, “seemed to capture the moment more vividly than words: a symbol of America’s military might, flying out of the country even as Afghans hung on against all hope.”

Other influential newspapers also missed the point. The Washington Post questioned Biden’s foreign policy credentials — not because of his instrumental support for the catastrophic invasion of Iraq, but because of his “cold” and “harsh” decision to pull out of Afghanistan. The Post worried that Biden’s “callousness … will make it hard to gain allies in the nation’s next conflict” (my own, disbelieving italics). It quoted Rep. Michael Waltz, a Florida Republican and U.S. Army veteran, saying, “Who’s going to trust us again?” — as if the U.S. foreign policy record thus far had been a model of trustworthiness. It even devoted front-page attention to Sen. Lindsey Graham’s fears that a Taliban victory might pose new terrorist threats to the United States. That same day, the AP reported, Gen. Milley warned senators that the rise of the Taliban might indeed endanger the United States in unforeseen ways. 

Neither the AP nor the Post noted that such new “threats” usually prompt new bonanzas for defense contractors and new catastrophes for the unlucky civilians who pay the ultimate price for campaigns launched in the names of “security” and “freedom.”

The Wall Street Journal, the AP and others peppered their reportage with (doubtlessly factual) indictments of the Taliban’s brutality and its history of violently subjugating women. But the antagonisms ended there. There was no mention of the fact that in 2019, U.S. and Afghan forces killed more civilians than the Taliban did. Or that U.S. and Afghan forces are under investigation by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, including rape and torture. Or that a staggering number of deaths and injuries have been inflicted by U.S. drone operations and airstrikes throughout the region. Or that the National Security Agency had been spying on virtually every Afghan with a cell phone. Or that the U.S. decision to re-destabilize the country critically exacerbated the refugee catastrophe (with roughly 6 million Afghans displaced so far). Also swept under the carpet were the Afghanistan Papers, leaked documents that revealed U.S. officials had blatantly lied and fudged reports about the progress of their trillion-dollar project for years. 

When it comes to foreign policy, American lawmakers seem to be feminists and freedom fighters only when it’s convenient. Otherwise, human rights and democracy serve as buzzwords and stratagems, too easily wielded by a military establishment that believes global problems require military solutions, which in return require half of Congress’ discretionary spending. 

When it comes to the media establishment’s selective criticisms of tragedies like Afghanistan and the broader role of the U.S. military — not to mention its often inglorious and sometimes depraved history — it ends up doing the bidding, knowingly or otherwise, of the world’s most moneyed military-industrial complex.

“Nine Perfect Strangers” and the orientalist displays of the western wellness industry

Television revolving around vacations and retreats is having a moment right now, between the class-exposé satire of HBO Max’s “The White Lotus,” and now, Hulu’s “Nine Perfect Strangers,” based on the Liane Moriarty novel of the same name. The latest Nicole Kidman mystery follows, well, nine perfect strangers, each with their own demons, arriving at a beautiful but eerie wellness resort, which may or may not be a cult run by Kidman’s enigmatic Masha Dmitrichenko. 

The resort, unironically called Tranquillum, is the image of inner peace, a wellness influencer’s dream location to film and share yoga meditations on Instagram Live. It’s not just the waterfalls, rivers, hot springs, superfood smoothies and yurts that convey this imagery. It’s also the orientalism: the bamboo shoots, the dragon fruit slices, the frequent rounds of East and South Asian inspired meditations and acupuncture.

Then of course there’s Manny Jacinto as Yao, one of Masha’s dutiful underlings, who greets guests upon arrival with a soulful “Namaste” and fits neatly into the role of the Spiritual Asian. Tranquillum staff — or cult — members are also notably clad in what appear to be the simple, unassuming tunics of Buddhist monks, or at least some version of what white people think Buddhist monks dress like.

“Nine Perfect Strangers” comes across as a decently self-aware show, literally featuring an Instagram lifestyle influencer whose obsession with social media seems to be fracturing her marriage. Its invocation of the west’s predominantly white wellness industry and the industry’s penchant for orientalism seem like smart satire, a critique of the tactics and deceits of the typical white, wellness industry charlatan. 

As audiences struggle to decipher what Masha’s game is, and what twists and traps Tranquillum inevitably has in store for its nine, carefully curated guests, there’s no wonder the characters seem to fully buy Tranquillum as an ordinary wellness resort — it certainly presents that way. 

The wellness industrial complex and its “superfoods,” yoga, meditation and spirituality comprise a vast, trillion-dollar, cutthroat capitalist enterprise, that charms customers and followers with Asian-coded language and imagery, and Asian-influenced wellness practices and foods. Despite this, it’s often mystical white women like Masha who are cashing in on the west’s fetishization of eastern culture and spirituality.

Ironically, eastern medicine and health practices have long been mocked and dismissed as “voodoo,” mystical nonsense — that is, until the right white influencers peddle it and are subsequently called geniuses and awarded with exorbitant wealth. With their wealth, fame and significant social platforms, white wellness influencers may take on everything, like selling all kinds of often Asian-influenced wellness foods and products, opening their own yoga studios, and even pushing QAnon conspiracy theories.

And from pitaya to matcha, ingredients that often feature in the busy kitchen of Tranquillum, the wellness industry has an obsession with eastern, often Asian “superfoods,” which is how western health influencers often refer to high-nutrient, “exotic”-looking, nonwestern foods. “Superfoods” sounds supernatural, foreign — and the label also conveniently erases these foods’ true cultural identities, spinning them as magical treasures discovered by adventurous white people, rather than an everyday part of the diets of people around the world.

Take for example the recent saga detailed in Grubstreet of the self-styled “Congee Queen,” a white woman named Karen Taylor who stumbled upon the wonders of congee and decided to sell pre-packaged kits of the dish to western palates. In an essay originally titled “How I discovered the miracle of congee and improved it,” she used orientalist language to dismiss the dish that has historical and cultural significance in Asia as nothing until she put her spin on it. 

“Nine Perfect Strangers” may not feature Lululemon-clad, white women yoga instructors, or Buddhist paraphernalia and koi pond-side tai-chi, but the pursuit of some sort of intense, transcendent spiritualism that’s brought all of the guests together feels strikingly orientalist. The patrons of Tranquillum were all selected by Masha because of their unique inner demons, including the Marconi family’s struggles with grief and trauma over the loss of their son years ago, Tony Hogburn’s (Bobby Cannavale) struggles with addiction and separation from his family, Frances’ (Melissa McCarthy) struggles with a waning career and loneliness, Ben and Jessica’s (Melvin Gregg and Samara Weaving) marital issues, and Carmel’s (Regina Hall) struggles with self-image and anger.

The guests turn to Tranquillum because they seem to believe, on some level, that they need some otherworldly force to overcome their life problems. Little else seems more “otherworldly” to white people and westerners than the customs, traditions and imagery of the east, but comfortably and conveniently packaged into a wellness resort helmed by an adequately ethereal white woman.

Jacinto’s quiet but steady presence as Yao is also notable, as the only Asian character on a show that features a predominantly white cast, despite the race-bending of several characters from Moriarty’s original novel. Yao, like Delilah (Tiffany Boone) and their co-workers, is a personal wellness guide to the guests, but his serene presence, sage wisdom, and leadership at the resort feel deliberate. Like the original version of Jacinto’s performance as Jason on beloved comedy “The Good Place,” Yao is the image of the self-actualized Buddhist monk who’s achieved nirvana and is capable of speaking in the Instagram caption-worthy wellness platitudes that white consumers seem to find so very comforting. (Moriarty also pokes fun at Tranquillum’s reliance on the appearance of orientalist wellness practices. In the book, it’s Yao who must learn tai chi from Masha first before he becomes an instructor at the retreat.)

“Nine Perfect Strangers” may not as overtly comment on race, class, privilege and settler colonialism as “The White Lotus” did. But the Hulu limited series’ subtle shades of the wellness industry’s orientalism closely mirror the ongoing oppressions of colonialism in the show’s own way.

After all, the white-led wellness industry of the west is a modern extension of colonial capitalism in itself. “Nine Perfect Strangers” seems to subtly allude to how white people claim eastern cultures as their own, and commercialize and then profit from these cultures, while the true pioneers of these wellness practices receive nothing — except, perhaps, a job as a “personal wellness guide” at Tranquillum, doing the dirty work for white women like Masha.

“Nine Perfect Strangers” is streaming on Hulu, with new episodes released on Wednesdays.

Right-wing radio host Phil Valentine dies of COVID-19 after mocking vaccines for months

Right-wing radio host Phil Valentine has passed away after battling coronavirus.

“Yes, the rumors are true. I have COVID. Unfortunately for the haters out there, it looks like I’m going to make it,” Valentine wrote on Facebook in July.

Valentine’s death was announced online by his radio station.

“Though Valentine downplayed the efficacy of vaccines and even went so far as to record a parody song mocking them, he reversed his opinion while in the hospital, advising his family members to get the jab,” The Daily Beast reported. “Before he fell ill with the virus, Valentine had spoken out against mask mandates and written a parody of The Beatles’ song ‘Taxman’ called ‘Vaxman’ mocking the preventative. He sang it on the air.”

Watch WKRN coverage:

Trump booed at rally after telling supporters to “take the vaccines”

Former President Donald Trump on Saturday emphatically embraced the COVID-19 vaccine in front of a crowd of his supporters, igniting boos from rally-goers in Alabama, video shows.

“Take the vaccines! I did it, it’s good!” Trump told the crowd as some attendees started to boo.

Responding to the boos, Trump continued: “No, that’s okay. That’s alright. You got your freedoms, but I happened to take the vaccine.”

“If it doesn’t work, you’ll be the first to know, okay?” he added, as the crowd erupted in applause.

Cullman, AL, where Trump’s rally was held, declared a state of emergency on Thursday after experiencing a 218% increase in hospitalizations over the previous two weeks, Insider reports.

Advisers to the former president have reportedly urged him for months to make a public service announcement about the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine. In April, Trump suggested he would make a “commercial” for the vaccine, but that video never materialized. Still, the former president’s face-to-face appeal to a crowd of supporters marked, as one commentator put it, “the first good thing Trump has ever said.”

Can an inexpensive anti-depressant treat COVID-19? Researchers are cautiously optimistic

Could an anti-depressant called fluvoxamine prevent severe disease of COVID-19 if administered early enough? Scientists are curious enough to keep testing as early results from a clinical trial hold some hope.

At an Aug. 6 symposium, officials of the Together Trial, which is an international clinical trial studying repurposing drugs to treat COVID-19 in Brazil, discussed early results showing that fluvoxamine could be a possible option in treating COVID-19 from progressing if administered early in a patient. Fluvoxamine is an inexpensive anti-depressant often sold under the brand name Luvox, and is of a common class of anti-depressants know as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Two previous smaller studies showed promising results for fluvoxamine as a COVID-19 treatment as well.

In the study of 2,100 people, researchers observed a 30 percent reduction in hospitalizations among those who took fluvoxamine. The Together Trial also studied the much-debated COVID-19 drug candidates hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, which showed no detectable benefit, according to the early results. Notably, the results have yet to be published or peer-reviewed.

Scientists were excited by the numbers that they observed regarding reduced hospitalization.

“That’s a one-third reduction, and that’s a potentially big impact for medicine that costs $10,” said David Boulware, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota’s Medical School. “We basically have three studies that have all sort of shown there’s a benefit to this medicine [fluvoxamine], which is exciting because it’s available worldwide for the most part.”

One of the earlier studies Boulware mentioned was a preliminary study of 152 COVID-19 patients with mild-to-moderate disease who were recovering from COVID-19 in their homes. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found that the fluvoxamine appeared to prevent some of the most serious complications — like going to the hospital for supplemental oxygen. None of the 80 patients who received fluvoxamine were hospitalized, while four out of the 72 who received the placebo were hospitalized. 

“The patients who took fluvoxamine did not develop serious breathing difficulties or require hospitalization for problems with lung function,” said the paper’s first author, Eric J. Lenze, MD, a professor of psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis, in a press statement. “Most investigational treatments for COVID-19 have been aimed at the very sickest patients, but it’s also important to find therapies that prevent patients from getting sick enough to require supplemental oxygen or to have to go to the hospital. Our study suggests fluvoxamine may help fill that niche.”

How could an anti-depressant sometimes used to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder help with COVID-19?  Fluvoxamine is part of the widely used selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitor cohort of anti-depressants, though it has anti-inflammatory properties, too. Scientists suspect the latter fact could have something to do with stopping the progression of COVID-19.

“There are several ways this drug might work to help COVID-19 patients, but we think it most likely may be interacting with the sigma-1 receptor to reduce the production of inflammatory molecules,” said senior author Angela M Reiersen, MD, an associate professor of psychiatry. “Past research has demonstrated that fluvoxamine can reduce inflammation in animal models of sepsis, and it may be doing something similar in our patients.”

But experts caution more data is needed.

“The question of fluvoxamine is, what’s the right dose and duration, who do you give it to?” Boulware said. “Does it work for everyone, is it really early, or is it later? Of the three studies published so far, they’ve all used different doses.”

The National Institute of Health’s Activ-6 study, which Boulware is working on, is looking into it.

“There are still some questions that need to be answered, but it looks very promising,” Boulware said.

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4 major environmental treaties the U.S. never ratified — but should

In one of his first acts in the White House, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to have the United States rejoin the Paris climate agreement. It signaled an important step in the country recommitting to action to tackle climate change after the Trump administration withdrew the United States from the accord and worked to roll back environmental regulations nationwide.

Biden’s move was hailed by world leaders and applauded by environmentalists at home. But the climate convention wasn’t the only global environmental agreement from which the country has been conspicuously absent.

Here are four international treaties that have been ratified by most of the world’s countries, but not the United States.

1. United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea

The 1982 Law of the Sea helped set an international framework for managing and protecting the ocean, including by delineating exclusive economic zones and creating the International Seabed Authority, which is currently tasked with drafting regulations for deep seabed mining.

“Originally the U.S. government was on board with the treaty when it was being finalized in the late 1970s, but when President Reagan came into office he called for a review of the negotiations, fired the State Department’s head of negotiations and appointed his own people who created a new list of demands,” says Kristina Gjerde, an adjunct professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and a senior high seas advisor to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Global Marine and Polar Program.

When the treaty wasn’t reworked to meet those needs, Reagan’s team didn’t sign it. It would take until 1994 to get a U.S. signature, but the country still has yet to ratify it. To do so, would require a two-thirds approval in the Senate.

“The Law of the Sea has been uniformly supported by everything from the U.S. Navy to the Department of Commerce,” says Gjerde. “There’s nobody who’s really against it — other than those who don’t like the U.S. to be engaged in multilateral institutions.”

Unfortunately there are enough people in the Senate with that mindset to hold up this treaty, and many others. But that hasn’t stopped people from continuing to push for the United States to accede to the Law of the Sea.

There are numerous reasons why it would be beneficial for the country, but Gjerde says one of the most important right now is that the United States has to take a back seat while regulations are being drafted on deep seabed mining.

“The United States doesn’t have a voice in helping to make sure that the regulations are appropriately environmentally precautionary,” she says. “And the country has a lot of islands and waters that would be subject to potential environmental impacts from seabed mining by other states.”

2. The Convention on Biological Diversity 

The treaty, which garnered its first signatures at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, has been called the world’s best weapon in fighting the extinction crisis. It has three main stated objectives: the  conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components, and the equitable sharing of benefits that arise from using genetic resources.

The United States was a big player in drafting the agreement, but when 150 nations stepped up to sign it, George W. Bush declined to do so. Bill Clinton signed the treaty after he took office in 1993, but it never received the necessary ratification vote by the Senate.

And it still hasn’t.

The United States is the only member of the United Nations that has yet to ratify it, “which is just a disgrace,” says Maria Ivanova, a professor of global governance and director of the Center for Governance and Sustainability at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

This omission stands in stark contrast to the country’s history of commitment to conservation, she says.

“The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species was initially called the Washington Convention because the first meeting was in D.C.” says Ivanova. “The United States was a champion for that convention and the first to start national parks.”

But that commitment began to fade in the 1980s with “run-amok capitalism,” she says. “That means you can use nature with impunity without replenishing anything. “

The United States does still participate in the Conference of Parties that assemble for the Convention on Biological Diversity, but without having ratified the agreement, it’s relegated to “observer” status. This year it will get some extra muscle from a California delegation that will also be attending in the hope of ramping up the United States’ commitment to biological diversity.

3. Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants

The Stockholm Convention, an effort to protect the health of people and the environment from harmful chemicals, was adopted in 2001. The treaty identifies “persistent” chemicals — those that stay in the environment for a long time and can bioaccumulate up the food chain.

Currently the treaty regulates nearly 30 of these chemicals, which can mean that countries must restrict or ban their use, limit their trade, or develop strategies to properly dispose of stockpiles or sites contaminated by the waste from the chemicals.

So far 184 countries have ratified the agreement. The United States signed it in 2001, but once again, the treaty has yet to be ratified by the Senate. That means that the United States is often behind the curve on banning harmful chemicals, such as the highly toxic pesticide pentachlorophenol.

4. Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal

The United States has also signed but not ratified the Basel Convention, which took effect in 1992. This international treaty limits the movement of hazardous waste (excluding radioactive materials) between countries. It was written to help curb the practice of richer, industrialized nations dumping their hazardous waste into less developed and less wealthy countries.

The convention is now taking on the global scourge of plastic waste, of which the United States is the largest contributor. A new provision went into effect this year that seeks to curb the amount of waste shipped to other countries that can’t be recycled and ends up instead being burned or escaping into the environment.

The Basel Convention has also worked to address electronic waste. The failure of the United States to ratify the treaty, experts say, has allowed companies to shift recycling of toxic computer components to developing countries. Outsourcing of plastic and e-waste recycling from the U.S. to developing countries has recently been linked to chemicals entering the food chain through eggs eaten by the world’s poorest people.

Next Steps

If you’re seeing a pattern here of the United States signing — but not ratifying — treaties, you’re not wrong. “In the United States, the biggest hurdle is that ratification of a treaty has to go through the Senate,” says Ivanova.

Despite this roadblock, which has stopped the United States’ full participation in some international agreements for decades, some still hope for a different outcome. “I think it’s sort of the dream of most who are engaged in international action that the United States would join these important international processes,” says Gjerde.

When it comes to the Law of the Sea in particular, she says, “It’s an opportunity to show real, global leadership again in tackling the many challenges facing the ocean.”

There are others who might not agree.

“You hear the argument from a lot of the policymakers internationally that they’ve been doing fine without the United States in the negotiations,” says Ivanova. “So maybe it’s better that the United States doesn’t sign.”

That may be because the United States can object to a lot of things and be an obstacle as negotiations are worked out. Or because the country can negotiate from its own national interest point of view.

“The United States has disproportionate power in global governance,” she says. “Or it used to. It has to regain the credibility and the legitimacy that it lost.”

But, she says, there are likely more benefits to the United States ratifying the conventions and being a rightful actor on the world stage.

“All of these problems are global, and we need all countries engaged,” she says. “We need all hands on deck. And the United States is a powerful state and brings with it a lot of additional expertise and engagement.”

The United States, in addition to government representation, has top universities and NGOs that do research and advocacy. “And so when the United States is a part of an agreement, it brings with it all of the power that it has intellectually and financially,” says Ivanova.

Not participating leaves the country open to criticism, as well as reduces the likelihood some countries will improve their laws on their own. Most recently, the United States’ environmental shortcomings have been called out by China whenever its own record is questioned.

With this in mind, the best thing the United States can do to reestablish its environmental credibility internationally is to take action at home. The Obama administration got the narrative right, but it didn’t sufficiently match on action, Ivanova says. Now, it’s crucial to do better.

“A lot of people misunderstand the global part [of these international treaties],” she says. “You actually implement them at home — you don’t go and implement them in The Gambia or wherever. To achieve those goals, you actually have to take action at home.”

A feminist reckoning for six Beyoncé songs

Denim thongs and Black cowboys don’t typically come to mind when I think about women’s liberation. Yet, Beyoncé‘s hot new video announcing the latest cowgirl-themed collection “Ivy Park Rodeo,” left me pondering what the Queen’s business decisions say about her self-identification as a feminist. 

Beyoncé has been a living example for the women’s movement many times over: when severing ties with recklessly macho men like her Dad and embattled Ivy Park co-owner, Phillip Green; posing fearlessly before a humongous projection of the word “Feminist” in her 2014 VMA performance; and ardently speaking out against the gender pay gap. As a devout Beyoncé fan, I love singing along to songs like “Black Parade,” “Independent Women,” and “Me, Myself, and I” that left me feeling worthy and empowered no matter how hard patriarchal dimwits tried to shrink my life. Her music and persona make me feel like I can enjoy my bootyliciousness and journey to women’s liberation at the same time. 

Still, as a 36-year-old Black woman sociologist – who wrote a dissertation on Black women cultural entrepreneurs – when I think about the underlying messages in her music throughout her career, I sometimes doubt that her booty-shaking and freedom fighting necessarily go hand-in-hand. After all, unlike the super successful songstress, most women cannot eject powerful men from their lives because they’ve been denied access to the  “f**k you money,” that allows Beyoncé to do so without consequence. Also, one of the ways she’s built her professional success is as a business leader who uses low-wage labor to manufacture her fashion line, seeming to indicate that her loyalty to feminism and her career aspirations may be in conflict. It might boggle the mind, but I wonder if Beyoncé’s approach to women’s empowerment shows that even Black women can have white feminist leanings. 

Hear me out. white feminism, also known as corporate, girlboss, or self-fellating feminism, is a path to women’s liberation that creates financial success for already privileged women by exploiting underpaid women workers who are too oppressed to climb corporate ladders. White feminists presume that financially privileged white women’s interests are universal – pause for laughter – and these women should set the agenda for how all women should think, act, and feel when advocating for gender equity.

Like Demita Frazier, co-founder of the pioneering Black feminist Combahee River Collective, I love Bey’s sex-positivity, but am concerned that her fans see her extreme wealth and male-centric music as the “epitome” of feminism. In “How We Get Free: Black Feminism and The Combahee River Collective,” Frazier’s biggest frustration is that young women desperately want to emulate Beyoncé and “This aspirational thing is intense!” 

And that’s how I found myself reflecting on six Beyoncé songs, as well as what it means for women of different backgrounds (and tax brackets) to collectively “run the world” designed to objectify us.

“Suga Mama” off of “B’Day” (2006)

That was so good I want to buy him a short set . . .
It’s so good to the point that I’d
Do anything to keep you home
Baby, what you want me to buy?
My accountant’s waiting on the phone

As a woman opposed to slut-shaming, I love seeing women celebrate their sexual appetite for someone who hits it so good you want to create the conditions that keep him around. Enter Bey, who becomes the stereotypical Suga Daddy in her 2006 jam, “Suga Mama.” She’s found her favorite courtesan and is willing to pay big bucks to transform him into a kept man. The song affirms my own desire for a high-quality brand of Vitamin D. Plus, she reminds me: Women don’t have to play the oft-expected submissive role in bed. 

However – and this may seem like a stretch – this song has a white feminist undercurrent that leaves me wanting more than playing out sexual fantasies. As OG intersectional feminist Audre Lorde warned: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” The reality Lorde helped me see is that many men fear having to compete with women on equal footing, and risking the ultimate humiliation of losing (their privileges as society’s masters) to a girl. Pretending to be a Suga Mama seems to imply that, like a man, Beyoncé refuses to lose to anyone – even if it requires play-acting as the prototypical sexually needy and domineering man. 

If Beyoncé thinks flipping already problematic gender roles will free women from the economic oppression baked into a male-dominated society, she’s projecting a white feminist delusion. Playing the economic exploiter instead of the exploited doesn’t make systemic oppression go away. Lying to ourselves only offers a fashionable set of rose-colored glasses that leads us to think fighting to be men – and not against the human hierarchy that they unfairly benefit from – is the path to gender equality.

“Crazy in Love” off of “Dangerously in Love” (2003)

I’ve been playing myself, baby, I don’t care
‘Cause your love’s got the best of me
And, baby, you’re making a fool of me
You got me sprung and I don’t care who sees
‘Cause, baby, you got me, you got me so crazy . . .
Your touch got me looking so crazy right now (Baby, your touch)
Got me hoping you’ll page me right now (Yeah, babe)
Your kiss got me hoping you’ll save me right now (Oh)

In “Crazy in Love,” Beyoncé reassures her partner that she appreciates the awe-inspiring love he shares, and is bonkers for their relationship. Despite media depictions of men as stoic, Beyoncé and I both know men can be vulnerable and emotionally insecure from time to time – anyone, regardless of gender, needs reassurance from their partner. Not Beyoncé’s! She is boastful about losing her identity, becoming a woman who is “not herself” and “playing herself” for a man’s hypnotic affection. 

In a popular interview Chimamnda Ngozi Adichie critiqued Beyoncé’s feminist style, saying it “gives quite a lot of space to the necessity of men . . . did he hurt me, do I forgive him, did he put a ring on my finger?” Granted, Adichie’s sentiments about trans women are as ridiculous as the ideological entirety of white feminism, which may call into question her legitimacy as a women’s advocate. Still, her incisive commentary on the outsized attention women give men resonates with me. 

So, I wonder if Beyoncé’s obsessiveness in this song – which reminds me of how I, too, have fetishized men – goes too far. I recently told a woman friend, “I should walk around with a sign that says, ‘If you’re an intelligent and charismatic man, please stay away from me.'” I hadn’t yet realized that romantic entanglements with men aren’t inherently dangerous. The true threat is the dignity I lose when obsessing over their approval or disregard.

“Independent Women, Pt. 1” off of “Survivor” (2001) 

The shoes on my feet, I bought ’em
The clothes I’m wearing, I bought ’em
The rock I’m rocking, I bought it
‘Cause I depend on me if I want it
The watch I’m wearing, I bought it
The house I live in, I bought it
The car I’m driving, I bought it
I depend on me (I depend on me)…
Girl, I didn’t know you could get down like that
Charlie, how your Angels get down like that?

As an “Independent Woman,” Beyoncé declares women are entitled to take pride in hard work that may threaten men, but liberates us financially. She has certainly backed this idea up by taking actions that promote economic empowerment for both women and Black people. In her 2016 album “Lemonade” she showed Black women that, yes, even she has to navigate men’s disrespect in the marital institution that continues to disadvantage Black women in particular. And, most recently the 28-time Grammy winner joined Twitter’s Jack Dorsey in donating $6 million for African-Americans’ mental health during the pandemic. However, like aloof white feminists, I’m not sure Beyoncé recognizes that emotional validation and charity are not enough to remedy economic oppression for the communities she belongs to. 

As a Black woman who makes a six-figure salary, I enjoy the ability to dismiss sexist colleagues that my own “f**k you money” affords. Still, I know that I wouldn’t have been able to acquire the power to banish jerks and basic Beckys without the support of economically marginalized women. White feminists believe women’s independence requires access to the same “shoes, clothes, and rocks” as the men they emulate, even if it means building their careers on the backs of the women who take care of our children and clean our homes. 

One look at various studies, like Prosperity Now’s report on racial equity, Path to Zero — and it’s easy to see the alarming consequences of ongoing injustice. The racial wealth divide in America is growing at a dangerous rate, and is on track to leave Black women with zero wealth by 2053. In gross contrast, “median White household wealth would climb to $137,000 by 2053 and $147,000 by 2073.”  

Evidently, the majority of women of color are too financially insecure to flaunt their own money, as hard as they may try to be independent. These women cannot afford to confuse individual financial prosperity with gender equity. The only way Beyoncé can help women “get down like that” is by advocating for complete redistribution of wealth and power – a structural change that creates irrevocable economic parity for all Black women, especially those most vulnerable to poverty.

“Cater 2 U”  off of “Destiny Fulfilled” (2004)

Baby, you blow me away
I got your slippers, your dinner, your dessert and so much more…
I’ll keep it tight, I’ll keep my figure right
I’ll keep my hair fixed, keep rockin’ the hottest outfits
When you come home late, tap me on my shoulder, I’ll roll over
Baby, I heard you, I’m here to serve you (And I’m lovin’ it)
If it’s love you need to give it is my joy
All I wanna do, is cater to you, boy

Six years after the release of “Independent Women, Pt. 1,” Beyoncé pulled a 180 with “Cater 2 U.” Instead of depending on herself, as the lead singer of Destiny’s Child, Beyoncé sang, “I put my life in your hands” to a man whose love blew her away. At the time, I was a 20-year-old woman who giddily imagined celebrating a kind man like the one Beyoncé believed would take care of her for a lifetime. 

When I feel safe, free, and understood around a man my default is to keep him close by any means necessary. Like Beyoncé, I thought doing things for a man like offering a warm welcome home, making a nice meal, and doing my best to satisfy him seemed obvious – especially satisfying what I presumed were his sexual needs. It wasn’t yet clear that a healthier take meant seeking security, liberation, and validation in my own life pursuits, as opposed to a man who savored the ego boost my admiration provided. I didn’t realize how centuries of masculine domination left a deep, sexist impression on my psyche. Our world has a history of reducing women to pets, fetching a man’s slippers and being prepared to offer “so much more” as he pleases. 

Even though first-wave white feminists supposedly were against catering to men in their home life, they catered to them politically. True to white feminist form, they did so at the expense of Black women. Women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, ​​an early leader of the women’s rights movement, were so desperate to gain political power and the right to vote, she appealed to white men with decision-making power. How did she do it? By selling Black women out. Harboring racist beliefs, Cady Stanton convinced men that allowing white women to vote would cancel the Black man’s vote, and that made the men willing to support women’s suffrage. 

Most men want to ensure that the women in their lives have nothing over them – if this were not the case, they would surely have used all that genitalia-centered power to ensure women’s basic voting rights without requiring sycophancy in return. Although Beyoncé’s feminism is light years ahead of unapologetically racist women, “Cater 2 U” locks her man’s masculine fantasy of entitlement and superiority in place. Fortunately, vulnerable conversations with women friends and relationship-focused therapy has gotten me to a place where I won’t let that mistake slip by. I will always correct myself when I start to think that I can cater to a man while secretly telling myself: “I’m here to serve him. I hope he allows me to be his slave.”

“Run the World (Girls)” off of “4” (2011) 

DJ don’t be scared to run this, run this back
I’m repping for the girls who taking over the world
Help me raise a glass for the college grads
41′ Rollie to let you know what time it is, check
You can’t hold me (You can’t hold me)
I work my nine to five and I cut my check
This goes out to all the women getting it in
Get on your grind
To the other men that respect what I do
Please accept my shine

I used to see “Run the World” as an exciting escape from a sexist society. In various professional positions I’ve seen the common pattern of several women performing the emotional, physical, and intellectual labor that allow men to project an image of self-made success (even though it was largely due to their women caregivers).  So, I can see why it is appropriate to proclaim that the survivors of girlhood run the world.

Reality, however, would beg to differ. Although Fortune described the number of women CEOs as “soaring to an all-time high,” the numbers aren’t that impressive. There are now 23 women, compared to 477 men, serving as CEOs of Global 500 businesses. Given that there were 14 women Global 500 CEOs in 2020, the huge professional gap doesn’t suggest that women are on track to run the world no matter how much we demand that men “cut our checks.” 

Beyoncé encourages us all to know we have the power to run the world, while accurately conceding that she needs to ask a man to “please accept my shine.” But is self-affirmation enough to put women on the path to success as equal workers and equal earners with equal power to shape the world? The feminist future is bleak if we have to ask for men to accept and acknowledge our hard work while we’re still denied access to run powerful businesses.

“Sorry” off of “Lemonade” (2016) 

I don’t give a f**k, chucking my deuces up
Suck on my balls, pause, I had enough (Sorry, I ain’t sorry)
I ain’t thinking ’bout you
I ain’t thinking ’bout
Middle fingers up, put them hands high
Wave it in his face, tell him, boy, bye (Sorry, I ain’t sorry)
Tell him, boy, bye, boy, bye . . .

I thoroughly enjoy telling anyone who disrespects me to suck on my imaginary balls. I know what it’s like to feel done when a partner takes love and loyalty for granted. In a sexist society that makes it difficult for women to fend for themselves outside of marriage (an institution designed to privilege men), sometimes all you can do is flip the bird to someone who abuses your trust.

But for most married women of color, it’s not that easy, and that’s because there are harmful gendered expectations associated with the institution of marriage. Sure, Beyoncé’s wealth and influence allows her to daringly say “boy, bye” to partnership with men. But women who don’t want to risk being shamed for not being in a relationship at all, may concede to being in a relationship with someone who hurts and takes them for granted. Consequently, women ponder sacrificing their emotional well-being to protect themselves from the perception of being incomplete and vulnerable without men’s companionship.

What’s more, women of color can’t “Sheryl Sandberg” our way out of America’s racial, gender, and economic caste system. A caged bird can’t set itself free no matter how many shallow, Oprah-like affirmations it recites. A cage is meticulously designed to not let captives escape. Failure to be Black women’s accomplices seems to suggest that, like their men, white women are too threatened to help us get free – they wouldn’t want to risk failing when forced to compete with us in an egalitarian society.

* * *

To be sure, I believe Beyoncé deserves grace given that she is only one person and doesn’t have the governmental power to change the policies that harm women overnight. Nevertheless, as she attests in “Savage,” a song starring hip-hop artist Megan Thee Stallion, “I’ma boss. I’ma leader,” indicating that she well knows that people are looking to her as an example of women’s power and freedom. I gathered this much while repeatedly watching her self-directed personal documentary, “Life is But a Dream.”

In the short film Beyoncé seemed like any other sister when she said, “We all have the same abilities, and we all need each other . . .  It’s nothing like a conversation with a woman that understands you.” As her new Ivy Park Rodeo trailer conveys the singer’s readiness for a showdown with any presumptive hater, I’m not sure that having a conversation with her about feminism would reveal how much she understands me. I have simple desires for sexual satisfaction, financial abundance, and the attention my fashion-forward choices command. 

But, I know without also meeting my deeper spiritual needs my life will not be fulfilling. The truest version of myself can only exist in a world in which my gender doesn’t determine who I answer to, how my desires are judged, and my likelihood of poverty. I don’t get to experience the true me unless I arrive at my authentic self in sisterhood with the community that defines my social identity.

The promise of feminism is a world in which all humans, including women, have the freedom to be their true selves, knowing that self-determination is their birthright. Even as a Beyoncé admirer, I’m still not sure I can consider voices like Bey’s voice to be a trustworthy guide to that societal destination. Of course, we are all enablers of this system, especially someone like me who benefits from it professionally. But, unlike Beyoncé, I know that successfully making my way to the top of a rich white man’s world is nothing to celebrate or encourage – which is why I disagree with the message Beyoncé sends in “Formation,” rapping “best revenge is yo paper.” 

Way before Beyoncé’s solo career, women fought for the freedom to run their worlds as they saw fit. Yet, we remain stuck with the planet that imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal dicks have imposed. And, whether we accept it or not, all of us – and not just Beyoncé and white feminists – are enablers of this system. The tragically obvious truth is there is no hiding place for any of us – misogyny has everyone psycho-spiritually surrounded. We’ll only find our way off the dangerous route to masculine domination when we replace white feminism’s janky-ass map with a transformative, transracial feminist agenda. Otherwise, it’s “boy, bye” for all of us.

 

When foreign policy goes south: Biden, Afghanistan and the lessons of history

Earlier this month, I compared Joe Biden to John F. Kennedy, who salvaged his image after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 by admitting his mistake — and learning from it. I acknowledged that the parallel was imperfect, since “foreign policy and domestic policy mistakes are obviously very different kettles of fish.”

How quickly things change. Thanks to the rapid collapse of the Afghan government and the Taliban takeover, those two kettles of fish suddenly look awfully similar. As with Kennedy, it is likely that Biden’s presidency can avoid being defined by this fiasco. Providing, of course, that Biden and his supporters learn the right lessons from history.

There are three big ones.

First of all, the main political similarity between the Bay of Pigs and the Afghan withdrawal is that, on each occasion, a Democratic president paid the price because Americans take our imperial ambitions for granted. In Kennedy’s case, military hawks had convinced him that Fidel Castro’s Communist regime could not be tolerated because Cuba was too close to American shores — and that it could be overthrown without a risky invasion by U.S. troops.

For Biden, as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte points out, it was the notion that the U.S. could somehow have “saved” Afghanistan by staying there just a little bit longer, despite 20 years of futile conflict. On both occasions, painful realities intruded on these jingoistic delusions. Castro still had deep public support among the Cuban people in 1961, and the Taliban had never been fully defeated in Afghanistan. If anything, the Taliban had improved greatly as a tactical and strategic force after 20 years of engagement with the U.S. military. When Biden told the American people that he was “the fourth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan — two Republicans, two Democrats,” he was making an obvious and valid policy point. There was no end in sight except through withdrawal.

So that’s the first lesson: Before you view a foreign policy fiasco as a failure, ask yourself how it looks in the broader context of history. 

Even so, it looks from here as if the Biden administration failed in both strategic and communication terms, repeating its chief error on the eviction moratorium issue by being caught unprepared. Until the last minute, there was no clear plan to get U.S. and Western civilians and Afghan refugees out of the country. (Arguably, there is no clear plan now.) That ineptitude no doubt cost innocent lives and, even setting aside moral issues, reinforces the same message sent when the U.S. abandoned its Kurdish allies in Syria: We are not a reliable friend. Biden foolishly vowed in July that there was “no circumstance where you see people being lifted off” — referring to America’s infamously bleak withdrawal from Vietnam — after a rapid Taliban conquest. This, of course, was exactly what happened. It’s as if the president had tempted fate to humiliate him.

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Indeed, Biden’s unfortunate historical analogy deserves more attention, since it illustrates the second major lesson that the president and his supporters could glean from the dramatic events of the past week: Optics aren’t everything, but they matter. 

Gerald Ford was president when the U.S.-supported government of South Vietnam fell to the Communists in 1975, but politically Saigon’s collapse did not hurt him. U.S. military forces had ended their involvement in the war two years earlier, to the great relief of most Americans. No doubt the harrowing images of helicopters taking off from the U.S. embassy roof, and depicting the desperate plight of Vietnamese refugees, were traumatic for many American observers, and some blamed the Ford administration. (Ford had been in office for just eight months, only slightly longer than Biden has now.) As Biden just did, Ford reminded the American people that this war had to end one way or another. He was also able to improve his reputation with some meaningful foreign policy accomplishments, including the rescue of American hostages held by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.

Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican president with a sterling military record, faced his own embarrassing foreign policy crisis in 1960, his last full year in office. It began when a CIA spy plane was shot down deep inside Soviet territory that May, weeks before an important peace summit. Eisenhower initially denied that the U.S. government was involved, but the Soviets collected incontrovertible evidence that wasn’t true. Faced with sharp criticism for not being in control of his own administration, and for making America look bad, Ike finally owned up to his role in authorizing and overseeing the controversial spy missions, defending them as necessary for national security. He was praised for his frankness — but pretty much blew up the peace talks. That of course was a dramatically different era, and Eisenhower was a universally respected figure, even by political opponents. When a congressional ally defended him before the House of Representatives, members from both sides responded with a standing ovation.

Joe Biden has no such reservoir of goodwill, and also has no foreign policy good news to offset the catastrophe in Afghanistan. The good news, perhaps, is that he can change both those things. Despite Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, Biden is not a polarizing figure and is not widely despised (as Trump was and is), even by his enemies. While the optics of this past week have been dreadful, Biden is not ultimately to blame for what happened in Afghanistan, and most Americans across the political spectrum were eager for the U.S. to withdraw. 

There’s another possible lesson of history, one Biden may not wish to contemplate too deeply: Sometimes foreign policy goes so wrong it costs presidents their jobs — and even the support of their own party. 

After the Tet Offensive in early 1968 — a string of victories by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese military that made clear the U.S. and South Vietnam were not winning the war — President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not run for re-election. (Johnson had narrowly won the New Hampshire primary over antiwar candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy, but clearly faced a stiff battle for the Democratic nomination.) Despite Johnson’s withdrawal, nothing went right for Democrats after that. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who would have likely been the strongest nominee, was assassinated in June, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey wound up winning the nomination — without even running in the primaries — at the disastrous Chicago convention, featuring pitched battles between police and left-wing demonstrators. Richard Nixon was elected in the fall, at least partly because segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace (a once and future Democrat) won several Southern states as a third-party candidate. 

Twelve years after that, President Jimmy Carter did run for re-election even after the disastrous failure of an effort to rescue American hostages in Iran, but his perceived weakness likely doomed his campaign from the beginning. Carter held off a primary challenge from Sen. Ted Kennedy (the only time he ever ran for president) but was wiped out by Ronald Reagan in a milestone election. Intriguing but unanswerable questions hang over both those elections: If Bobby Kennedy had lived, and if Teddy Kennedy had prevailed against Carter (or if Carter had quit the race), would Democrats have held onto the White House? Recent American history might look very different in that alternate universe.

In this universe, however, Joe Biden is president, and Afghanistan has fallen to the Taliban. It is difficult to imagine any scenario where things turned out differently in Afghanistan if Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz or Bernie Sanders were president instead. So the smart money says that Biden won’t be much affected by this in the long term, any more than Ford was by the fall of Vietnam or Kennedy was by the Bay of Pigs. If, that is, our current president is willing to learn the lessons of history.

Capitol riot-related charges against Infowars host could spell trouble for Alex Jones

The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday announced charges against InfoWars co-host Owen Shroyer in connection with the Capitol riot on Jan. 6. Shroyer, who hosts a Web series on the conspiracy-driven network run by Alex Jones, is facing charges of “disorderly conduct and entering a restricted area of Capitol grounds,” according to Mother Jones.

In a new criminal complaint filed on Friday, August 20, the Justice Department detailed the charges Shroyer is facing. The complaint also included a number of videos and an image of an advertisement for Jan. 6 that featured a photo of Shroyer with Jones. Part of the complaint also mentions Jones.

The complaint reads:

“Shroyer marched to the U.S. Capitol from the Ellipse shortly before the U.S. Capitol was breached. One video 5 depicted Shroyer marching with other individuals, leading a crowd of people in a “1776!” chant as the host of the Infowars show on which the video was streamed stated, “Alex Jones at this moment is leading the march toward the Capitol building.”

In the same video, Shroyer can be heard telling the crowd, “Today we march for the Capitol because on this historic January 6, 2021, we have to let our Congressmen and women know, and we have to let Mike Pence know, they stole the election, we know they stole it, and we aren’t going to accept it.”

The publication also reports:

“The complaint includes images of Shroyer in restricted areas, along with Jones. The images include one picture of Shroyer, near Jones, at the top of the stairs on the east side of the Capitol. This came after the crowd had pushed past police officers guarding the area.”

Following the Justice Department’s announcement on Friday, Shroyer addressed the criminal complaint on air. He admitted that he does plan to surrender to authorities on Monday, August 23, Buzzfeed reports.

“A couple hours ago, I was informed by my attorney that there is a warrant out for my arrest with allegations involving Jan. 6, and I will have to turn myself in Monday morning,” he said. “There’s a lot of questions, some I have answers to, some I don’t. I’m not going to be getting into more of this today on the air. And I plan on declaring innocence of these charges because I am.”

While Alex Jones has not been charged in connection with the Capitol riots, Mother Jones notes that the charges against Shroyer raise speculation about the possibility of him being charged in the near future. Since January, the DOJ has brought charges against more than 600 individuals in connection with the Capitol insurrection.

AP blasts top DeSantis aide for “abusive behavior” toward reporter

The Associated Press has issued a warning to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) following his press secretary’s allegedly “abusive behavior” leveled toward one of its reporters.

The push from AP comes after Pushaw’s Twitter account was temporarily suspended following a series of seemingly threatening tweets aimed at Tallahassee-based reporter Brendan Farrington.

On Friday, August 20, the AP’s incoming CEO Daisy Veerasingham penned a notice to the Republican governor urging him to take action against his aide, Christina Pushaw, for her “harassing behavior.” The publication’s request comes as it joins a campaign to end online bullying aimed at members of the press.

“You will ban the press secretary of a democratically-elected official while allowing the Taliban to live-tweet their conquest of Afghanistan?” Pushaw said. Veerasingham said those who “challenge false narratives are often silenced by corporate media and Big Tech collusion.”

AP reports that Pushaw “denied trying to direct the governor’s followers to target AP’s reporter despite retweeting his article and writing ‘drag them’ in a now-deleted post.”

The latest debacle began on Tuesday, August 17 when Pushaw expressed disapproval of AP’s story by written by Farrington. In that story, Farrington shed light on one of DeSantis’ multimillion-dollar donor’s investments in Regeneron, one of the drugs used to treat COVID-19. Ironically, DeSantis has been promoting the drug in his state.

Pushaw also posted a threat toward Farrington saying that if he “didn’t change the story, she would ‘put you on blast.'” She also retweeted a threatening post aimed at Farrington in which one Twitter user said, “Light. Them. Up.”

Brian Carovillano, AP’s vice president and managing editor, has also sounded off about Pushaw’s tweets describing them as “particularly egregious.”

“There’s pushback, which we fully accept and is a regular facet of being a political reporter or any kind of reporter, and there’s harassment,” Carovillano said. “This is not pushback, it’s harassment. It’s bullying. It’s calling out the trolls at somebody who is just doing his job and it’s putting him and his family at risk.”

In response to the backlash, Pushaw has attempted to offer clarity about her remarks. In reference to the “drag them” tweet, she dismissed it as nothing more than social media slang. However, when Farrington began receiving threats, she claimed to have tweeted to her followers that such behavior was unacceptable.

“As soon as Farrington told me he received threats, I tweeted that nobody should be threatening anyone, that is completely unacceptable,” she said. “I also urged him to report any threats to police.”

The newest disease detection tool for COVID and beyond: poop

Since reopening campus at the University of California-San Diego last summer, university officials have relied on the tried-and-true public health strategies of testing and contact tracing. But they have also added a new tool to their arsenal: excrement.

That tool alerted researchers to about 85% of cases in dorms before they were diagnosed, according to a soon-to-be published study, said Rob Knight, a professor of pediatrics and computer science and engineering who helped create the campus’s wastewater testing program.

When covid is detected in sewage, students, staffers and faculty members are tested, which has allowed the school to identify and isolate infected individuals who aren’t yet showing symptoms — potentially stopping outbreaks in their tracks.

UC-San Diego’s testing program is among hundreds of efforts around California and the nation to turn waste into valuable health data. From Fresno, California, to Portland, Maine, universities, communities and businesses are monitoring human excrement for signs of covid.

Researchers have high hopes for this sludgy new data stream, which they say can alert public health officials to trends in infections and doesn’t depend on individuals getting tested. And because people excrete virus in feces before they show symptoms, it can serve as an early warning system for outbreaks.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds the practice so promising that it has created a federal database of wastewater samples, transforming raw data into valuable information for local health departments. The program is essentially creating a public health tool in real time, experts say, one that could have a range of uses beyond the current global pandemic, including tracking other infectious diseases and germs’ resistance to antibiotics.

“We think this can really provide valuable data, not just for covid, but for a lot of diseases,” said Amy Kirby, a microbiologist leading the CDC effort.

The virus that causes covid infects many types of cells in the body, including those in the respiratory tract and gut. The virus’s genetic signature, viral RNA, makes its way into feces, and typically shows up in poop days before symptoms start.

At UC-San Diego and other campuses, researchers take samples flowing from individual buildings, capturing such granular data that they can often deduce the number of infected people living or working there. But in most other settings, because of privacy concerns and resource constraints, testing is done on a much larger scale, with the goal of tracking trends over time.

Samples are drawn from wastewater, which is what comes out of our sewer pipes, or sludge, the solids that have settled out of the wastewater. They are typically extracted mechanically or by a human with a dipper on the end of a rod.

When researchers in Davis, California, saw the viral load rise in several neighborhood sewage streams in July, they sent out text message alerts and hung signs on the doors of 3,000 homes recommending that people get tested.

Before the pandemic, testing sewage to identify and ward off illness in the U.S. was largely limited to academic use. Israel used it to stave off a polio outbreak in 2013, and some communities in the U.S. were sampling sewage before the pandemic to figure out what kinds of opioids people in their communities were using, a service offered by the company Biobot.

But when covid hit the U.S. amid political chaos and a shortage of tests, local governments scrambled for any information they could get on the virus.

In rural Lake County, California, health officials had identified a handful of cases by sending nurses out to look for infected people. They were sure there were more but couldn’t get their hands on tests to prove it, so in spring 2020 they signed up for a free sewage testing program run by Biobot, which pivoted to covid testing as the pandemic took off and now is charging to test in K-12 schools, office buildings and nursing homes, in addition to local governments and universities, said Mariana Matus, CEO and co-founder of the company.

The covid virus turned up in samples at four wastewater treatment facilities in Lake County.

“It is a way to just get more information because we can’t do testing,” Gary Pace, then the county’s health officer, told KHN at the time.

As sewage sampling took off around the world, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services began awarding grants in fall 2020 to wastewater treatment plants. Biobot won a bid to run a second round of that program, currently underway through late August, testing the sewage of up to 30% of the U.S. population.

At least 25 California wastewater treatment plants are participating in the program, and numerous others are getting money from the CDC, working with local universities or paying for their own testing. While such states as Ohio and Missouri have created public dashboards to show their data, California’s efforts remain scattershot.

The test data alone doesn’t provide much value to health officials — it needs to be translated to be useful. Scientists are still learning how to read the data, a complicated process that involves understanding the relationships between how much virus people excrete, how many people are using a wastewater system and how much rainwater is running into the system, potentially diluting the sewage, among many other factors. Since using wastewater to track diseases was not widespread before the pandemic, there’s been a steep and ongoing learning curve.

Beleaguered public health officials have struggled to incorporate the new data into their already overwhelming workloads, but the CDC hopes it can address those issues with its new national system that tracks and translates wastewater data for local governments.

Throughout 2020, Kirby, the CDC microbiologist, and engineer Mia Mattioli were a two-person wastewater team inside the agency’s larger 7,000-person covid response. During that time, academic colleagues generously shared what they knew about wastewater epidemiology, Kirby said. By September 2020, the pair had launched the National Wastewater Surveillance System, which interprets sampling data for state and local governments. Today, they lead a team of six and have a permanent place in one of the CDC’s departments.

“Every piece of this system had to be built largely from scratch,” Kirby said. “When I look at that, it really amazes me where we are now.”

In the months since the system debuted, it has been able to detect an uptick in cases anywhere from four to six days before diagnostic testing shows an increase, Kirby said.

She hopes that by the end of next year the federal monitoring program will be used to check for a range of diseases, including E. coli, salmonella, norovirus and a deadly drug-resistant fungus called Candida auris, which has become a global threat and wreaked havoc in hospitals and nursing homes.

The longer these programs are up and running, the more useful they become, said Colleen Naughton, a professor and civil engineer at the University of California-Merced who leads COVIDPoops19, which tracks wastewater monitoring efforts globally. Naughton is working with colleagues at the University of California-Davis to launch monitoring programs near where she works in the Central Valley but is finding that some smaller communities don’t have the resources to conduct testing or sufficient health personnel to analyze or use the data.

It’s in these smaller communities with limited access to testing and doctors where the practice may hold the most promise, Naughton said. Covid laid bare long-standing inequities among communities that she fears will be perpetuated by the use of this new public health tool.

Privacy concerns also need to be addressed, experts said. Wastewater data hasn’t traditionally been considered protected personal health information the way diagnostic tests are. Health officials have managed earlier concerns about wastewater tracking of illicit drug use by sampling from large enough sewage streams to offer anonymity. But testing for certain health problems requires looking at DNA. “I think that’s going to be a challenge for public communication,” Knight said, “to make sure that’s not perceived as essentially spying on every individual’s genetic secrets.”

Public health and wastewater officials said they are thrilled by the potential of this new tool and are working on ways to address privacy concerns while taking advantage of it. Greg Kester, director of renewable resource programs at the California Association of Sanitation Agencies, wrote to CDC officials in June 2020 asking for a federal surveillance network. He can hardly believe how quickly that call became a reality. And he hopes it is here to stay, both for the ongoing pandemic and for the inevitable next outbreak.

“As vaccination rates increase and we get the variants, it’s still going to be important because clinical testing is decreasing,” Kester said. “We really want to make this part of the infrastructure.”

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

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

While training for the Tokyo Paralympics, my biggest triumph came in the locker room

They say your 20s are for making mistakes. I set the bar high at 21. Driving my candy pink Vespa with my arm in a cast, I thought I was a real-life Powerpuff Girl. The crash landing that humbled me was not made of everything nice.

I was driving past my school, The University of Colorado, when a pedestrian stepped into the street without looking. I pulled the only brake I could with my un-casted hand — the front brake. I flew over the handlebars before I even realized what was happening. My unbuckled helmet came in handy as it rolled across the street. I was decorated head to toe in raw road burns, my clothing shredded. And the stoney bits of asphalt bedazzling my legs elevated them to the next level. But my left arm took the brunt of the impact that day. It became completely paralyzed from the elbow to fingertips.

I’m 27 now, and I haven’t yet topped that mistake.

Going from two fully functional arms to one meant I had to relearn everything I used to do with two hands. And as a person who’d sooner get lost than ask for directions, asking for assistance is difficult for me. Learning to tie my shoes with one hand felt like a miracle. One-handed hair tying drove me to madness. To me, a trip to the hairdresser is less appealing than a tea party with Darth Vader. Suddenly needing help with my hair every day was unthinkable. 

Then I met Anne, the new coach for my college swim team. Anne became my go-to person for hair tying. We never talked about it, and I never needed to ask. She’d just come to take the elastic off my wrist and put my hair up, whether it was 5 a.m. practice or the middle of a busy meet. Then I’d turn and hold my cap as she pulled it over my head. As long as Anne was at practice, I was OK. And if she wasn’t, I’d backtrack and go home instead of turning to someone else.

This went on for two years. Every time, I was livid at myself for failing what I felt was a test. But I hated needing help. Asking for it prompted the question, “What’s wrong with your arm?” I didn’t want to have to recount the worst day of my life every time I wanted my hair in a bun. Worse were comments like, “You’re so inspirational.” I just wanted to swim; in the water I felt powerful because it erased gravity’s constraints. After the crash, it was the only place I couldn’t feel the weight of my arm.

After college, I met Coach Alan through The Challenged Athletes Foundation. He was the reason I started to train for the Tokyo Paralympics. He saw me swim and told me, “You’ve got to go for it, champ!”

I swam my first Paralympic meet just two months after we met, driving from Denver to The Olympic and Paralympic Training Center (OPTC) a day early to get assigned a classification. In the Paralympics, classifications divide athletes into groupings to compete against others with likened disabilities. Once you have your classification, you can swim Paralympic meets and set your goals as high — or as low — as you like. I placed my bar as high as I could, and immediately went in with Tokyo 2020 in sight.

This Paralympic meet was unlike any other sports event I’d experienced. Camaraderie reigned supreme, and the trust between athletes was louder than the fans. This atmosphere was a stark contrast to some of my previous competitive experiences, like my senior year in college when I’d rush in the locker room to avoid the team bully. Even the OPTC’s more supportive environment, though, didn’t prepare me for what happened next. 

In swimming, a racing suit is called a tech suit, or a second skin — and I usually wished I did have a second or even a third skin once I finished putting one on. For tech suits, I aimed to go two or three sizes smaller than my usual size. And after a minimum of 15 minutes spent carefully inching into one of those tight knee-length suits, I’d be covered in bruises. If I got a tech suit on without tearing it, the painstaking process was worth it — in the water, the suit made me feel like a dolphin. If not, that’s $450 wasted. It took me a lot of practice and two torn suits, but by that first Paralympic meet I had become very skilled at pulling one on with one hand.

Removal was a different story. I was stuck.

The suit hung halfway off my body, nowhere close to moving. I felt trapped — a prude, half-naked in a swimsuit. It was my version of being lost in Jurassic Park, cold and vulnerable. And I was prepared to reach for the Swiss Army knife in my bag and cut my way out of this expensive new suit if it meant I wouldn’t need to call for help. 

A girl sitting on the bench near me, her prosthetic legs beside her as she changed, saw me struggling. “Come here!” she said, grabbing me with her knees to pull me closer. We both yanked at the hopeless suit for a while. Then she called for reinforcements. A visually impaired swimmer rushed over and managed to free me in less than a minute, skillfully unraveling the suit like the neatly rolled yarn ball it was not. I didn’t need the Swiss Army knife after all. That suit made it to see another few races.

At a Paralympic event, everyone has a disability, and being so resistant to asking for help made me the strange one. I felt sheepish for assuming that a call for a helping hand would be out of place. For the first time since I flew off that scooter and hit the pavement, I felt at home.

That locker room incident became the new normal for me. And finally, I got to be on the helping end as well. The day I was able to save someone from their stubborn suit made me feel blessed to be a part of such an exchange. It was a unique reciprocity amongst those who required strange help — strange to most, that is, but quite normal to anyone who lives with a disability. “Can you pass me my leg?” “Could you pull my suit off of my arm?” “Cap me?” “Help me up?” “Could you tie my shoe?” “Just a low ponytail, please!” Helping others and accepting help is a way of life in the Paralympics.

At the last meet I swam before the pandemic, I was on deck. Most people were in the pool. As usual, I needed help with my hair and swim cap. I looked over and saw one of the swimmers who’d medaled at Rio. I greatly admired her, and she made me the slightest bit nervous. But she had two arms and wasn’t in the pool yet.

“Could you do my hair for me, please?”

She started to gather my hair and asked if she should leave or remove the “Made in China” sticker that must have been stuck in my hair all morning. Once, such an encounter would have left me painfully humiliated. But we just laughed it off — and I only thought about it for two minutes afterward instead of two hours. She pulled my cap over my head, and I dove in. This was the normalcy I’d longed for.

My times qualified me to swim trials in my main event. But then the pandemic hit. It took a swim-free quarantine for me to realize what was once unimaginable to me: I missed asking for help. Battling a hair tie while trying to use my couch to keep my hair in place while wrapping a scrunchie around it was so much harder.

I decided not to go to trials this year. In the end, that wasn’t the goal I thought I’d set my sights on. Two and a half years of training for Tokyo wasn’t for nothing, though. It took me that long in the Paralympic setting to grasp that my prize wasn’t a medal to try to win at this year’s games. Learning to ask for what I needed was the adaptation that proved to be even more difficult than managing a one-handed ponytail. And learning to do so was the win I hadn’t initially set my sights on, but ended up wanting the most. 

Where are the “wine dads”? How gendered alcohol merchandise speaks to inequity in domestic labor

I’m not a mother, but I often find myself surrounded by “wine mom” merch. Really, we all do, whether we’re paying attention or not. Tucked into the racks of suburban staples like Target and Kohl’s are burgundy-hued T-shirts with slogans like “Mama needs wine” and “You whine, I wine.” A few aisles over, there’s likely an assortment of plastic wine tumblers with sippy cup lids, brushed with the phrase “Mommy Juice.” (Recently, I saw a version of this cup that comes in a set with a smaller, plastic baby bottle labeled “Boob Juice.”)

Retailers — from boutique home and partyware shops to big box liquor stores — profit from and perpetuate the trend. The term “wine mom” was itself popularized in the 2010s after the founding of the Facebook group “Moms Who Need Wine” quickly surged to a following of around 600,000 members. 

There’s been some pushback in the ensuing years, namely from public health and parenting experts who are concerned that diaper bags with wine bottle holders and sparkly “Bad Moms Club: Wine Provided” jacket patches could normalize high-risk drinking behavior. Meanwhile, some mothers simply decry the merchandise as basic or cringeworthy. 

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However, its popularity endures. In December 2020, the term “wine mom” hit an all-time high in Google searches, ostensibly as a result of gift-givers shopping for frazzled pandemic mothers; when I plugged “wine mom” as a search term into Etsy, it returned 65,339 results.

According to KC Hysmith, a cookbook writer and food historian with a particular interest in gender and motherhood, the meming and merchandising of the phrase is “kind of a public acknowledgment that parenting is super hard.” 

“That’s why it works,” she says, “because even if you hate it, it’s a little bit true for effectively all parents.”

That said,  “wine dad” merchandise is basically nonexistent. It’s a marked discrepancy I discovered while researching what I’ve come to call “wine mom” font — the loopy, hyper-feminine script that’s similar to what Vox termed “bridesmaid font.” For kicks, I googled the term in a variety of ways to see what would come up, and it was very much a “does not compute” situation. 

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Within the images, there were some photographs of older men dressed in cozy cardigans advertising a list of the most elegant wines for Father’s Day. There was a bunch of “Disney Dad” merchandise that popped up, complete with the signature mouse ears logo — so I’m not quite sure what happened there. I was redirected to a single “Daddy needs Vodka” tote bag, and the one “Wine Dad” T-shirt that I stumbled across was modeled by a woman.

Men drink. Men parent. So what gives? 

Those silly cups, T-shirts and home decor signs are actually clues to how domestic work — and its associated stresses — is assigned and valued. Put another way, the discrepancies in merchandise availability are actually a clue that points to enduring discrepancies in the division of parenting labor — something that has only come into clearer focus amid the novel coronavirus pandemic. 

***

Despite having a long cultural history associated with men, male production labor and the male-dominated professions of wine grape grower and sommelier, Hysmith says “wine (and most importantly, the general concept of wine, rather than the specific varietal or vintage) is now largely considered a woman’s drink.” 

That’s apparent in the way that many wines are marketed, especially the varieties that can be found on supermarket and Target shelves, according to Andrea Hernandez, a food and beverage trend forecaster and founder of the immensely popular Snaxshot. However, the face of the “wine mom” is shifting.

“I’m definitely a ’90s kid, and by the time Instagram arrived, I don’t think I was even 21,” Hernandez says. “But now, I have friends who are millennials who are having kids, and they want to go for the cute canned wines — the kind that look good in a photo grid.”

There are brands (think Babe, Beach Juice, Pampelonne and Recess) whose packaging seems custom-made for filtered summer social media photos. They’re in, Hernandez says, while bottles of Yellowtail and some less trendy boxed wines are out.

However, that doesn’t mean the implications of the “wine mom” label — and associated merch — have shifted. As a mother who does enjoy wine at the end of a long day of parenting or dealing with the stress of academia (a world that isn’t known for doing favors for mothers), Hysmith says she cringes reading the term but understands its appeal. Parenting is an exhausting endeavor, and embracing the “wine mom” moniker can serve as an exercise in self-deprecating humor or be used to signal solidarity and sympathy with other parents in the same boat. 

“But there’s the rub, it only applies to mothers, which is how so much of parenting already functions: along a gender divide,” Hysmith says. “This divide exists in the food world, too, and wine is already part of the gendered stereotype of ‘feminine foodways.’ The fact that dads don’t really get an alcoholic beverage label is likely due, in part, to the way we gender alcohol intake and the consumption of reward foods, the ‘treats’ we get for doing hard things: wine, chocolate, ice cream.” 

It’s cliché, but merchandisers know the stereotypes around “treat foods” are universally recognized enough to sell T-shirts with slogans like “Chocolate, Wine, Ice Cream — Repeat” until the end of time. In pop culture, these food items are positioned as the proverbial carrots at the end of the stick for mothers; they’re cute rewards for making it through another day of child-rearing, offered with a wink by a society that consistently undervalues the labor of primary caregivers. 

However, these food items are benign and beloved enough that they are actually merchandisable as an identity signifier, unlike, say, valium, a commonly-prescribed benzodiazepine that became known as “mother’s little helper.” You might remember The Rolling Stones’ 1966 song of the same name. One of the stanzas goes like this:

“Things are different today, ” I hear every mother say

Cooking fresh food for her husband’s just a drag

So she buys an instant cake, and she burns a frozen steak

And goes running for the shelter of her mother’s little helper

And two help her on her way, get her through her busy day

According to music historian Nicholas Schaffner, the song was meant to point out the irony in the fact that as adult media “rant[ed] about teenage drug use . . . harried middle-aged housewives incapable of getting through the day or getting to sleep at night, without the help of their legally prescribed ‘little yellow pills.'”  While things don’t end well for the titular mother (“No more running for the shelter of a mother’s little helper / They just helped you on your way, through your busy dying day”), the use of valium as a coping mechanism for American women remained a punchline for decades. 

“I remember growing up as a kid in the ’80s, and it was just so normal to have these jokes about how moms need to take a valium to deal with motherhood or to be a housewife,” Jordan Shapiro, a psychologist and author of “Father Figure: How to Be a Feminist Dad,” says.

He continues, “We’ve always acknowledged, on the one hand, that women and mothers are juggling so much, but then people sort of just shrug and say, ‘You know, there’s drugs or alcohol for that.'” 

However, a “Valium Mommy” pill holder probably isn’t going to sell as well as a “Wine Mommy” tumbler these days, though the sentiment is reminiscent of a 2021 “Saturday Night Live” sketch in which a woman (Aidy Bryant) is given a variety of kitschy home decor signs that get increasingly dark as her birthday party progresses. The first sign she’s given is branded with the cheeky, “Wine gets better with age, I get better with wine.” 

By the end of the night, she’s been given signs that say, “Hey barkeep, I wanna die tonight” and “I did ‘dry’ January. I never took a bath all January because I was always too hammered & I was worried I would slip under the surface of the water.”

***

“At least in a modern consumerist society, it is pretty normal for us to use some kind of product as an identity badge,” Shapiro says. “You could be an audiophile, and everything’s caught up in the way you think about your hi-fi equipment. You could be a whiskey drinker, and you might put a bourbon sticker on the back of your car. That’s normal.” 

As such, the bulk of the T-shirts and tote bags that are alcohol-themed and marketed to men display a pretty benign indication of enthusiasm. Think phrases like “Brew Bro” and “Support your local craft breweries: Drink local.”

However, once you wade into the intersection of alcohol and fatherhood, the tone is a little different. You’ve got slogans like “If you can read this, bring me bourbon,” “Shhh and bring dad a beer” and “You say beer belly, I say father figure.”

Sure, there’s some self-deprecating humor, but there’s also a decidedly misogynistic “Bring me my cocktail and slippers” throwback vibe. (It’s worth noting that the shirts for women have phrases like “Hey, Siri — or Alexa — bring me my wine,” so the demand is being made of a virtual assistant instead of a husband or a child.) 

“In the marketing of these items, there can almost be a notion of entitlement or privilege,” Shapiro says. “Like, ‘I should be allowed to have a hard drink at the end of a hard day.’ It’s not rebellious. It’s not escapism. It’s part of ‘being a man.'” 

While subtle, much of the messaging in the available merchandise inherently references traditional gender roles: Men have a hard day at the office, while women are homemakers. Pandemic lockdowns spotlighted some of the hidden labor that takes place in the home — a Brookings Institute report found that mothers spent twice as much time doing direct child care than fathers in two-parent households over the past year — but culturally, it hasn’t changed. 

“Responsibility for household food labor and food knowledge historically and statistically falls to women and mothers,” Hysmith says. “What and how you feed your kids, your partner, and then ultimately yourself — which extends to how you look — is all part of a complex (and precarious!) gendered food landscape.”

She adds, “This is perhaps why wine is sometimes called ‘mommy juice.’ A toddlerfied way to acknowledge the difficulties of motherhood without actually acknowledging the alcohol.” 

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