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“Ted Lasso” creators Jason Sudeikis and Brendan Hunt want you to know it’s OK not to be OK

“Ted Lasso” debuted nearly a year ago on Apple TV+ during summer’s dog days. If that timeline seems off, that is because it didn’t find its audience until mid-autumn. Actually, it’s more accurate to say it took a few months and a contentious, stressful presidential election and its ugly aftermath, for its people to flock to it – out of curiosity, yes, but also out of an intense need.

Putting the outpouring of love aside, though, series co-creator Brendan Hunt demonstratively managed his expectations going into Season 2. “I certainly hope, at least, that ‘because the world was on fire’ isn’t the only reason people like the show,” he told Salon in a recent interview. “I hope people would have thought it was good no matter when it came out.”

Multiple Emmy nominations, bubbly social media valentines and the effusive emoting that erupts when one person mention the show’s title to another should have assuaged Hunt’s concerns by now. Maybe not, though. Hunt, like his character Coach Beard, is the resident soccer nut among the American side of the writers room. He’s the one who introduced the phrase “the hope that kills you” into the show’s narrative.

This was his way of drawing a contrast between British stoicism and the title character’s American “we can do anything” optimism, an attitude captured in phrase that describes the America sports fanatic’s outlook: “Do you believe in miracles?” This sets up the first season’s finale nail-biter in which Ted and Beard’s underdog football (i.e. soccer) team AFC Richmond is relegated from being a Premier League team to Championship level. Through that defeat Hunt sought to prove something else. If “Ted Lasso” followed the setup on a usual sports movie the title character’s guiding mantra, “Believe,” would be enough. But it wasn’t. Now what?

“Ted Lasso” was introduced as a the story of a out-of-place Kansas yokel in Britain, with Jason Sudeikis playing Ted as the kind of man aware of the assumptions people will make about him. He knows people see his gigantic mustache, hear his cornpone accent and predilection for bombarding everyone with folksy figures of speech, and underestimate him. He’s a fascinating player in the American story, part of the reason the show nestled into our hearts so suddenly, if later than expected.

Ted’s singular means of seduction, like the show, resembles the figurative photograph mainstream America carries around in its psychological wallet. We all have some version of it – that family photo showcasing us in our Sunday best, all smiles. Such pictures make us look like friendly, helpful, upbeat engines of ingenuity. Good guys.

Aspiration is the cornerstone of this show, a siren call drawing an audience at a time when the world was exhausted. To address Hunt’s concern, that would have been the case under any circumstances, but given how badly off we were in late 2020 it felt particularly salubrious.

But if every meaningful TV show tells us something about who we are, Season 2 challenges our longstanding narrative that defines our goodness as being an extension of our greatness, and of only showcasing the positive while hiding our darker truths, by introducing sports psychologist Dr. Sharon Fieldstone (Sarah Niles). Dr. Sharon, as Ted calls her, arrives to counsel players through whatever psychological blocks may be holding them back. Her purpose in these new episodes is quite specific, particularly to the main characters’ arcs. Her arrival brings out a nervous energy in Ted for reasons that aren’t immediately clear.

Sudeikis, in a separate interview, explains that in adding Dr. Sharon to the AFC Richmond team, he wanted to show people that “sometimes, the best way to help others is to help yourself.”

Dr. Sharon represents something else too: a challenge to the narrative Americans tell ourselves about ourselves. She doesn’t believe in exceptionalism. In fact she suspects that Ted’s American charm offensive is, to use a favorite termof President Joe Biden’s, utter malarkey.

Dr. Sharon doesn’t smile easily – certainly not at Ted’s jokes or his bending over backwards to be liked. He tries to win her over by offering her a box of cookies meant for his boss Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham); she hands them back, but only after questioning why he’s so devoted to disarming new people with over-the-top humor. Her entire manner throws Ted off his game.

That’s because the doctor is an astute observer of behavior. First season viewers know that Ted has panic attacks. although he’s managed to hide them from everyone at AFC Richmond except Rebecca. But Dr. Sharon is also playing out some version of the skeptical perspective the rest of the world may hold about America after the last five years . . . and the many decades before it, extending all the way back to the end of World War II.

Hunt describes it by recalling the time in his life when he, Sudeikis and their fellow executive producer Joe Kelly were doing comedy in Amsterdam. “That was a time when we started to see America from the outside, and the way that other people were looking at America,” he said. “The main way they looked at us was as this very big fat people. But, you know, another difference is this, you know, niceness… this friendliness, which, you know, a lot of people in Britain find to be false.”

Ted is genuinely friendly, which throws off everyone in the football club and the U.K. in general. His kindness is infectious enough to transform a fractured team into a bonded family unit, from the kit man all the way to the top of management.

Dr. Sharon accepts that, Hunt explains. “I don’t think she questions the authenticity of it. I think she questions the reasons of it. She questions what’s going on inside that would make him want to disarm everyone, and make him want to charm people instead of talking about himself.”

Hunt said the current season’s therapy arc is meant to inspire everyone watching Ted and the rest of AFC Richmond fight their interior battles as they struggle on the field to realize that we could all benefit from talk therapy.

Its larger metaphor underscores the necessity of taking a long hard look at the culture in which we live, and maybe reconsidering our place in an interconnected world as part of that. The pandemic doesn’t exist in the world of “Ted Lasso.” This is intentional, part of its strategy to allow the story to play on a field of idealism and emphasize its loftier messages of both knowing yourself and “to thine own self, be true.”

“Sometimes that feels a little selfish,” Sudeikis admitted. “On a global scale, and even more recently in the political realm, we’ve seen that if we believe the only way to survive is to be selfish, we lose touch with the need to heal within. To love yourself and allow that to spill over and to find a place within your own home, within your community, your country, the world, is really the one thing you absolutely have control over.”

Hunt agreed. “The fact that Americans do have this ingrained optimism, even against a lot of actual information about how things work, is not that bad of a quality. You know, I think it is one of our better qualities.”

At the same time, he added, “We all should be taking a good, long, hard look at ourselves and figuring out what we are and how we got the way we are. And make damn well sure that we’re doing at least something to make what’s going on inside a little bit of a better situation.”

Hunt was referring to each of us as individuals. But that’s also sound coaching for the nation.

New episodes of “Ted Lasso” stream Fridays on Apple TV+.

7 historical cases of cannibalism

Desperate times call for desperate measures. And sometimes, when survival is at stake, that means human flesh is on the menu. According to William Seabrook, a journalist who nibbled on cooked human flesh during his travels to West Africa in the 1920s, “It was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal.” Here’s a look at some cannibals who knew that taste intimately.

1. The settlers of Jamestown

The first year at Jamestown was rough. Founded in 1607, the English settlement was home to 104 settlers. Only 38 made it through the first winter. Disease, drought, and dismal farming conditions forced the colonists to depend on cargo shipments for food. Things only got worse with the arrival of 300 new settlers and, not long after that, the harsh winter of 1609, which came to be known as “The Starving Time.” According to George Percy, a Jamestown settler, the conditions were so bad that people ate their own boots.

Others resorted to nibbling on their neighbors: “[N]otheinge was Spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe those things which seame incredible, as to digge upp deade corpes outt of graves and to eate them,” Percy wrote [PDF]. “And some have Licked upp the Bloode which hathe fallen from their weake fellowes.”

For decades, historians were unsure if Percy was exaggerating. But in 2012, archaeologists discovered the bones of a 14-year-old girl, her skull cracked open to remove the brain—evidence that she had been cannibalized.

2. Anybody who visited the doctor in the 17th Century

Not long ago, it wasn’t uncommon to consume powdered mummies — as well as other human body parts — as medicine. According to Smithsonian magazine, “In the 16th and 17th centuries, many Europeans, including royalty, priests and scientists, routinely ingested remedies containing human bones, blood and fat as medicine for everything from headaches to epilepsy.”

Indeed, the powdered remains of Egyptian mummies were prescribed to quell internal bleeding, blood clots, and menstrual issues. Headaches and other ailments were cured by ingesting a tincture containing crushed skulls. (Sometimes mixed with chocolate!) One of King Charles II’s favorite homeopathic potions, called “The King’s Drops,” mixed powdered human skulls with booze.

Apparently, few physicians stopped to think if this qualified as cannibalism. (Newsflash: It does.)

3. The Colorado cannibal

Either Alferd Packer was a victim of circumstance, or he was a cold-blooded murderer — it all depends on your perspective. Packer, a prospector and wilderness guide, led five men into the San Juan Mountains of Colorado in February 1874 in search of gold. Months later, he returned alone.

What happened is uncertain. At first, Packer claimed that his party got lost during a snowstorm. But this was clearly a lie, as Packer was carrying the belongings of multiple men. When questioned further, Packer changed his story: His party had perished along the trail, and they were forced — one-by-one — into cannibalism.

Was this a lie, too? When hikers traveled the path, Packer’s story unraveled again: All five bodies were discovered near the same camp. Confronted a third time, Packer claimed that one of the travelers, Shannon Bell, had gone mad and killed the other men with a hatchet. Packer shot Bell in self-defense. He then consumed their flesh for survival.

It’s unclear which version of events is true. A jury convicted Packer of manslaughter. Today, the pass where the men died is called “The Cannibal Plateau.”

4. The marooned Méduse

There are dozens of tales of cannibalism at sea, stories of desperate sailors clinging to life by gnawing on the bones of their dead shipmates. But the tale of the French frigate Méduse is among the most harrowing.

In early 1816, after the Napoleonic Wars gave France control of Senegal, the Méduse sailed south to Africa to take the reins of its new territory. But tragedy struck. Fifty miles offshore, the ship ran aground. It quickly dawned on the ship’s 400 passengers and crew that there weren’t enough lifeboats to save everybody.

Instead, those who couldn’t fit into the lifeboats — 147 passengers in total — huddled onto a makeshift raft. (Some passengers, meanwhile, opted to stay behind with the frigate.) Initially, the raft was towed by the remaining lifeboats . . . until someone made the fateful decision to cut the ropes. For 13 days, the raft drifted aimlessly. People died — from murder, from being washed (and tossed) overboard, from starvation. Eventually, the survivors turned to cannibalism (and drank their own urine). By the time the raft was discovered, only 15 people were still alive. The tragedy would later inspire one of the biggest paintings of the 19th century, the 16-by-23-foot The Raft of The Medusa.

5. Lewis Keseberg and the Donner Party

The winter of 1846 and 1847 saw intense snowfall around the Sierra Nevada Mountains, with more than 25 feet of accumulation. So when the pioneers of the Donner Party (who not only had gotten a late start on their trek but had also lost valuable time taking a never-before-traveled shortcut) became trapped in the woods northwest of Lake Tahoe, they settled in tents and cabins and waited it out. The icy conditions soon killed their cattle and depleted their food supplies. It wasn’t long before the pioneers were desperately chewing on rugs for sustenance.

It would get worse.

Months later, a rescue team arrived and was horrified to discover the camp littered with human remains. There, they found Lewis Keseberg preparing himself a meal of human organs — the lungs and liver of Tamsen Donner.

Of the 87 people who attempted the journey, 42 died. Around half of the survivors, including groups that hiked out in search of help, resorted to cannibalism. But it was the fate of Keseberg that would capture the public’s imagination, as rumors swirled that he did more than eat the dead. Rather, some believe he had murdered his fellow travelers after acquiring a taste for human flesh.

6. The doomed Franklin expedition

In 1845, Sir John Franklin and his crew set sail to explore the Arctic, with the goal of finally finding the Northwest Passage. In September 1846, the expedition’s two vessels —the Terror and Erebus — became icebound in the Victoria Strait, in Nunavut. This was likely expected; the sailors knew the ice in the Arctic froze in winter. What wasn’t expected was the lack of a spring thaw. Their progress halted for more than a year as the ships drifted in the ice. Desperation set in.

Franklin died in June 1847, and eventually, his crew abandoned their ships and trekked across the ice toward the mainland. They would never be heard from — at least, not by Europeans —again.

Years later, the explorer Charles Francis Hall interviewed local Inuit who had heard about what had become of Franklin’s crew. They explained that “a great many had their flesh cut off as if someone or other had cut it off to eat,” Hall wrote. In 2015, researchers corroborated the Inuit’s story when they found skulls and bones with cut marks consistent with cannibalism.

7. The Kentucky cannibal

Before Hannibal Lecter, there was Levi Boone Helm. Called the “Kentucky Cannibal” because he was a native of that state, Helm was an all-around scoundrel from a young age. He wasn’t afraid to settle petty squabbles with a bullet or a knife. He also wasn’t one to let perfectly good protein go to rot.

Helm was an experienced survivalist who spent months at a time traversing the wilderness (often when on the run from the law). So when he killed a man, he wasn’t afraid to take some human leftovers for the hard journey ahead: “Many’s the poor devil I’ve killed, at one time or another,” Helm is reported to have said, “and the time has been that I’ve been obliged to feed on some of ’em.” (Helms didn’t always kill for his meals. On one occasion, when a member of his party died by suicide, he ate one leg before chopping off the other and carrying it on the road.) After a long career of mayhem and murder, Helm was caught and executed in 1864. Overall, it’s believed that “The Kentucky Cannibal” killed at least 11 men — likely more. The number he snacked on is anybody’s guess.

DHS warns of “increasing but modest” threats of violence from August Trump conspiracies

The Department of Homeland Security said Friday in a bulletin obtained by ABC News that it was predicting an increasing, but “modest” likelihood of violence in connection with Trump-related election conspiracies.

It has become a talking point in far-right circles that former President Donald Trump will be reinstated during the month of August, most notably pushed by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. This week the Minnesota pillow magnate is hosting a “cyber symposium” in South Dakota, where he claims he will unveil irrefutable evidence of industrial-scale election fraud — evidence that will be used to propel Trump back into office one way or another.

DHS is warning that online chatter of violence in response to these claims is growing, though it did not cite any specific plot or network planning imminent attacks.

“Some conspiracy theories associated with reinstating former President Trump have included calls for violence if desired outcomes are not realized,” the bulletin, which ABC obtained from DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis, reads. The network reported that the bulletin was sent to the department’s state and local partner agencies.

“Past circumstances have illustrated that calls for violence could expand rapidly in the public domain and may be occurring outside of publicly available channels. As such, lone offenders and small groups of individuals could mobilize to violence with little-to-no warning,” the bulletin adds.

A senior DHS official who spoke with ABC said the department learned from the Jan. 6 insurrection that an increase in online chatter may be an early signal of another upcoming attack on government institutions — though he reiterated that the bulletin does not indicate any specific threats.

“We don’t want to overreact, but we want to make sure that we are at the earliest stage possible providing awareness to law enforcement and other personnel who are responsible for security and are critical to mitigating risk,” the senior official said.

Meet the “scholar-activists” fighting Big Ag

Industrial agribusiness has been a scourge on our environment and communities. We’ve long and rightly celebrated the immigrants and workers who stood up to the corporations who colonized our richest farmlands throughout the United States.

Yet, some of us may be surprised to learn that scholars also have a long history of taking on industrial agribusiness, especially in California. In our new book, “In the Struggle: Scholars and the Fight Against Industrial Agribusiness in California,” we profile eight scholars who were both researchers and activists and who saw the two as inseparable. 

Their work focused on California’s Central Valley, the site where some of the fiercest battles against corporate encroachment onto the land took place. One of them, Ernesto Galarza, was born on August 15, 1905, and he sets the model for activist scholarship as we continue the fight against land monopolies and economic concentration that threaten all rural communities and our broader democracy.

Born in Mexico in 1905, Galarza moved with his family to the United States when revolution convulsed his homeland. As a child, he worked as a hop picker near Sacramento. At that time, he recalled, “I became a leader of the Mexican community at the age of eight for the simple reason that I knew perhaps two dozen words of English.” He took jobs as a newsboy, cannery and packing shed laborer, social work aide, interpreter, Boys Club organizer, elementary school teacher, co-director of a progressive elementary school and education specialist with the Pan American Union.

Galarza received a B.A. from Occidental College, an M.A. from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He taught at a number of prestigious universities, including the John Marshall School of Law, University of Denver, Claremont University, University of Notre Dame, San Jose State University, UC San Diego, UC Santa Cruz, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In 1979, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

This journey was long considered, a diligent and earned preparation for public service to his Mexican community in the United States. Galarza’s return to California as a farm labor organizer, after he finished his Ph.D. at Columbia, was the most intense application of that commitment.

Rather than parley his Ivy League degree into an academic career, Galarza set out on this task of resolving the “living and working conditions” of farmworkers by taking a position with the National Farm Labor Union. Between 1947 and 1959, Galarza worked as the Director of Research and Education for the National Farm Labor Union (NFLU), later re- constituted as the National Agricultural Workers Union (NAWU), both affiliated with the AFL-CIO. This effort to confront and organize farmworkers laboring within California’s system of industrial agriculture arose as an outgrowth from the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU).

The STFU were a tough, nonviolent, and bi-racial union that recognized all classes of land workers, including day laborers, tenants, share- croppers, and small farmers. Forged in the crucible of Southern planter reaction, where they faced extreme violence and waves of systematic terror, the STFU were steeled to face California’s agribusinesses. The union, under the banner of the NFLU, entered the fields in 1947.

Galarza led the way, noting later that he participated in “probably twenty strikes,” mostly in California but also in Florida, Texas, and Arizona. From his position in the fields with the workers, he not only led strikes against particular farming operations but studied the broader, strategic issues and policy impediments facing farmworkers in California. His strategy involved attacking the “alliance” between agribusiness and government bureaucracies while introducing innovative approaches to labor organizing in the fields. With only a modicum of union support and financial backing, Galarza battled agribusiness for over a decade.

By standing on the ground and looking up through legal and political structures that hindered the farm labor movement, he identified specific objects for political engagement, most notably the DiGiorgio Fruit Corporation and Public Law 78, the authorizing legislation for the Braceros program. Both were audacious targets. DiGiorgio was the nation’s foremost vertically integrated agribusiness, marshaling enormous political influence, while the Braceros program was a federally supported, international farm labor infrastructure funneling workers to the United States from Mexico. The exploitation of these bi-national laborers subsidized agribusiness profitability versus family farms and undermined farmworker union organizing in California and across the country.

Galarza used his position and role as a scholar to battle the power elite of California. He took it upon himself to map, in fine detail, the industry he was organizing against. His research was enhanced by his close proximity to the problem. Social theories and scientific methods enabled him to see the structures he assaulted.

Books were at the center of Galarza’s politically engaged scholarship and corresponding organizing strategies.

“Strangers in Our Fields” (1956), more pamphlet than book, had the educational and political purpose of undermining Public Law 78. The book documented this law’s extensive problems by using accessible language, graphic photographs, simple statistics, and direct quotes from the braceros themselves. Its approach was reminiscent of Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor’s book “American Exodus,” as it had an explicit purpose to influence public policy. Galarza later admitted that the book was purposely provocative: “Presented with the experiences of the braceros in their own language, it was possible that the growers and government agencies would elect to challenge the material and thus bring the issue into the open.” As he was prone to do, Galarza baited his adversaries into overreacting.

As planned, the publication of “Strangers in Our Fields” instigated intense industry blowback. A resolution by the California State Board of Agriculture made numerous charges that it contained statements that were “derogatory,” “unfounded,” “inaccurate,” “untrue, disparaging, or otherwise damaging,” “erroneous and unjustifiably unfavorable,” and that the report was published “without independent investigation and evaluation of the reliability of the research methods and statements of findings, or of possible motives for bias.” An October 1, 1956 letter from the San Diego County Farmers, Inc. found:

The pamphlet entitled “Strangers in our Fields” by Ernesto Galarza, made possible through a grant-in-aid from The Fund for the Republic (Ford Foundation) contains a vicious group of false insinuations, and accusations. Its author, Ernesto Galarza, is well known in California for his active participation and leadership in creating labor disputes and social unrest. The convictions, and inferences recorded in this publication signify the author’s contempt for the honest efforts of faithful representatives of the U.S. and Mexico governments. It appears to be a biased, prejudiced, one- sided opinion by one whose interest and leanings could be questioned.

Agribusiness representatives tried to impugn Galarza’s integrity and his research. Rarely in his life did he allow such a challenge to go unanswered. Due to this backlash, the Department of Labor refused to publish the report. The U.S. section of the Joint United States-Mexico Trade Union Committee, which did publish it, agreed to investigate any discrepancies within the research. It later found no need for substantial revisions or corrections. Galarza responded in the second edition’s preface:

We remind those who previously denounced “Strangers in our Fields” and attempted to suppress it, that truth thrives on controversy and that mere denunciation never altered a fact. Censorship in a democracy is never called for except by those who fear the truth. On behalf of the trade union movement in both the United States and Mexico we pledge that organized labor will never cease its efforts in this area until abuses and exploitation of these Mexican workers as reported in this pamphlet are ended.

The goal of eliciting a challenge, of baiting agribusiness and its allies, had been successful. The straightforward booklet is a comprehensive, personalized account of the Bracero program’s effects. It situates the voice and perspective of farmworkers out front, while its chapters offer a view into the daily life of the bracero’s bureaucratized lives, smothering counterarguments in a barrage of detailed, first-person stories. Workers’ grievances included dilapidated housing; insufficient wages, or outright theft of wages; over-supplying labor markets, causing depressed wages; overcharging for substandard food; inaccurate record keeping and inappropriate pay deductions; unsafe transportation; health insurance premium deductions for inadequate or non-existent coverage; use of the farm labor padrone system; lax enforcement of program regulations; and poor worker representation at all institutional levels.

The braceros were inherently vulnerable and exploitable within this labor system. One said, “These things have to be tolerated in silence because there is no one to defend our guarantees. In a strange country you feel timid—like a chicken in another rooster’s yard.” Perhaps unknown to these workers, Galarza and his union were attempting to fill this role, starting by compiling documentary evidence and publishing the empirical findings.

A four-month survey enabled Galarza to collect first-hand accounts from braceros. He visited camps and worksites where he conducted interviews. Photographs emphasized his descriptions of housing and living conditions. “Strangers in Our Fields” begins with a Mexican farmworker saying, “In this camp we have no names. We are called only by numbers.” From this statement, Galarza proceeds to ethnographically document the conditions of the braceros experience in the United States spanning the transborder recruitment and migration from Mexican villages to work conditions in the fields.

The book remains close to its research subjects and readers, who are placed in the fields and work camps through his descriptions. From this first inflammatory account, Galarza followed with increasingly analytic scholarship.

Congress terminated Public Law 78, ending the Bracero program, on May 29, 1963 With subsidized braceros labor (used at times as strikebreakers, negatively affecting overall working conditions) purged from the labor market, the United Farm Workers union found traction and collective bargaining success immediately upon the defeat of Public Law 78, vindicating Galarza’s strategy and objective.

Galarza held no misconceptions of the system’s fairness, nor doubts of his opponent’s strengths. Methodically, he spent years in preparation for battle. As industrial agribusiness continues to lay waste to the economic vitality of rural communities in California and beyond and its hand in the environmental crisis becomes ever clearer, we would do well to remember the man born 117 years ago who may be the model for work still before us — particularly in new battlegrounds across the Sunbelt and Midwestern United States.

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O’Connell and Peters are coauthors of “In the Struggle: Scholars and the Fight Against Industrial Agriculture in California.”

 

How to shop for cheese, according to an expert

That Cheese Plate is a column by Marissa Mullen — cookbook author, photographer, and Food52’s Resident Cheese Plater. With Marissa’s expertise in all things cheddar, comté, and crudité — plus tips for how to make it all look extra special, using stuff you probably have on hand — we’ll be crafting our own cheesy masterpieces without a hitch. This month, Marissa is sharing how to make the most out of shopping for cheese.

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Shopping for cheese can be an intimidating process. There are countless styles to choose from, wide price ranges, different milk types, and many countries of origin. In my years of cheese plating, I’ve learned to always invest in good cheese, specifically cheese from a farmstead or small-batch dairy farm. Typically at these smaller operations, the animals are treated sustainably, and the cheesemaking process isn’t completely mechanically produced. The cheese is the base of your creation, acting as the founding flavors to build pairings upon. With high-quality cheese, the sensory experience is much more impactful.

To that end, I love supporting local cheese shops with my plate purchases. Cheesemongers are a gift to this world, brimming with dairy-based knowledge to help you craft your perfect cheese board. If you don’t have access to a local cheese shop, that’s OK — grocery stores can have a great selection as well. The question is, where should you start? I asked my friend Erika Kubick to weigh in with some advice. Kubick is a Cheese Educator and Advocator, Chicago cheese blogger and author of the forthcoming book, Cheese Sex Death: A Bible for the Cheese Obsessed.

Tip 1: Learn how to navigate the cheese case 

Upon entering a cheese shop, you will be greeted by a glorious case of cheese. From creamy blues to stinky taleggios, the cheese case has something to offer for all cheese lovers. Kubick recommends entering with a plan. “Are you looking for something to cook with or snack on yourself? Are you making a cheese plate? How many people are you trying to feed? Once you answer those questions, try to decide on a budget for yourself. That will narrow things down for you. It also helps to make a mental list of the cheeses that you know you already like, so you can look for something similar.” For a cheese plate, she recommends selecting 3 to 6 types and a variety of textures, milk types, and ages to keep things interesting.

Tip 2: Ask questions 

Over my years of cheese-plating, I’ve learned that you should never hold back while asking questions — cheesemongers are here to help. Kubick loves asking cheesemongers what cheese they’re excited about in their store. “Nobody knows their cheese selection the way they do, so they’ll always steer you in the best direction. They’re usually happy to share stories about their cheeses, which is always fun. Definitely ask for pairing recommendations, too.“

Tip 3: Know when to splurge 

A common topic of discussion around cheese is the price. Some cheese can weigh in at over $30 per pound, which can be a bit out of the budget for many people. Which cheese is worth the splurge? Kubrik recommends shelling out the extra bucks for farmstead cheeses. “Farmstead means that the maker owns their animals and makes the cheese, so they oversee the whole process. These cheeses can be expensive, because taking care of animals and the land in a sustainable and humane way is expensive. But these cheeses are really special, and so are the people who make them.”

Tip 4: Understand the price of cheese 

So why is some cheese so expensive? Is there really a difference between a $20 wedge of farmstead cheddar and a $5 package of a pre-sliced grocery store brand? Typically, artisanal operations have smaller margins, which affects the ability to mass produce for a cheaper price point. This ensures a higher quality cheese, though. Kubick explains the overhead costs behind the best cheese: “You have to pay for premium transportation, account for the time that the cheese has to age, and care for the animals year-round, even when they aren’t milking. Cheesemakers work so hard, and don’t get a lot of days off. When all is said and done, they really don’t make a lot of money either, because the whole production is so expensive as it is. When you spend money on artisan cheese, you’re supporting small businesses and keeping the art of cheesemaking alive. And that’s amazing.”

Tip 5: Know how to buy cheese for a crowd 

Say you’re hosting a big party and can’t push the envelope with a plate exclusively made of expensive, high-quality cheese. What kinds of cost-effective cheese can you supplement from the grocery store? Kubick recommends splurging on a few special wedges from a cheese shop, and filling the rest in with grocery store finds. “Cow’s milk cheeses like Gouda, crunchy aged cheddars, and Parmigiano are always great and not too expensive.”

Tip 6: Support your favorites! 

If you have the ability and the budget, it’s always nice to support your local favorite cheesemongers. Check to see what farms or cheese shops are around your area and pay them a visit. Kubick is constantly looking for new cheese shops when she’s traveling and racked up some favorites. “In Detroit, I love Mongers Provisions. They have wonderful cheesemongers, and an incredible selection of artisan chocolate. One of my other favorite shops is The Cheese Shop of Salem in Massachusetts. I really think that they are just perfect: from the mongers to the selection of accompaniments to their epic grilled cheese sandwiches. I also adore DTLA Cheese in California, Saxelby’s Cheese in New York, Antonelli’s Cheese Shop in Austin, and, of course, both All Together Now and Beautiful Rind here in Chicago.”

With these tips, you’ll be a pro cheese shopper in no time.

Sarah Baartman’s hips went from a symbol of exploitation to a source of empowerment for Black women

In “BLACK EFFECT,” a track from Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s 2018 collaborative album “EVERYTHING IS LOVE,” Beyoncé describes a quintessential Black female form:

Stunt with your curls, your lips, Sarah Baartman hips
Gotta hop into my jeans like I hop into my whip, yeah

The celebration of Sarah Baartman’s features marks a departure from her historical image.

Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman was an African woman who, in the early 1800s, was something of an international sensation of objectification. She was paraded around Europe, where spectators jeered at her large buttocks.

With celebrities like Beyoncé recognizing Baartman’s contributions to the ideal Black female body – and with the curvaceous posteriors of Black women lauded on TV and celebrated on social media – I wanted to understand how this ideal is viewed by the very people it most directly affects: Black women.

So I interviewed 30 Black women from various cities in South Africa and the mid-Atlantic U.S. and asked them about Baartman. Would her image represent a reviled past or a canvas of resilience? Were they proud to bear a similar buttocks or ashamed to share a similar stature?

Hips and history

Baartman, a Khoisan woman from South Africa, left her native land in the early 1800s for Europe; it’s unclear whether she went willingly or was forced to do so. Showmen exhibited her throughout Europe, where, in an embarrassing and dehumanizing spectacle, she was forced to sing and dance before crowds of white onlookers.

Often naked in these exhibitions, Baartman was sometimes suspended in a cage on stage while being poked, prodded and groped. Her body was characterized as grotesque, lascivious and obscene because of her protruding buttocks, which was due to a condition called steatopygia that occurs naturally among people in arid parts of southern Africa. She also had elongated labia, a physical feature derogatorily referred to as a “Hottentot apron.”

Both became symbolic markers of racial difference, and many other women from this part of Africa were trafficked to Europe for white entertainment. Because they diverged so drastically from dominant ideas of white feminine beauty, Baartman’s features were exoticized. Her voluptuous and curvaceous body – mocked and shamed in the West – was also described in advertisements as the “most correct and perfect specimen of her race.”

The Baartman ideal

Of course, Black women’s bodies vary; there is no monolithic – nor ideal – type.

Nonetheless, there is a strong legacy of the curvaceous ideal, more so than in other races.

It persists to this day.

In my interviews, Black women revealed how they felt about Baartman’s story, how they compared her to their own body image and what her legacy represents.

One American participant, Ashley, seemed to recognize how entrenched the Baartman ideal has become.

“[Baartman] was the platform for stereotypes,” she said. “She set the trend for Black women [to] have these figures and . . . now these stereotypes are carrying through pop culture.”

Mieke, a South African woman, described being proud of her proportions and the way they’re connected to Baartman, saying, “I’m proud of my body because of the resemblance I feel it has with hers.”

Exploitation or empowerment?

Today, the Baartman body can be advantageous, especially on social media, where Black women have the opportunity to produce content that’s socially and culturally relevant to them and their audiences – and where users can make money off their posts.

On various platforms, women leverage their looks to obtain paid advertisements or receive free gifts, services or merchandise from various beauty and apparel companies. They’re also more likely to gain more followers – and perhaps attract more wealthy suitors, depending on their ambitions – by hewing more closely to the contemporary Baartman ideal.

So you could argue that Black women are taking control of their objectification and commodification to earn money. They’re also protesting the ideals of white mainstream beauty, seizing Baartman’s exploitation and mockery and recasting her as a source of pride and empowerment on places like #BlackTwitter, Instagram and OnlyFans.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CPzepgwA18G/

On the other hand, it cannot be denied that Baartman’s image is rooted in a legacy that is engulfed by slavery, unwillful submission and colonialism. The white gaze that fetishized Baartman’s body as exotic and overtly sexual was the same one that promulgated the stereotype that Black women were sexually promiscuous, lascivious and hypersexual.

While Baartman may not have been able to keep the cash people paid to ogle at her, Black women today can strive for her body type and make money off it. Once subjected to the mockery of an insidious white gaze, Baartman’s physique is now profitable – as long as these women are comfortable with being objectified.

But is selling this body type always a form of empowerment? Would someone who wasn’t already exploited do it?

This may explain why Black women today are conflicted when they think about Baartman.

Lesedi, from South Africa, highlighted this tension.

“I feel you do find girls like me who are not proud of what they see when they look in the mirror and they just feel like, ‘I need to drop this off,'” she said. However she added that “you find other girls that are just so happy about it that they twerk. … I guess Sarah Baartman definitely does have an influence, but it’s either positive or negative whether you’re proud to have a bum.”

Rokeshia Renné Ashley, Assistant Professor of Communication, Florida International University

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

Trump’s Scottish golf courses may soon be at center of their own “McMafia Law” investigation

Lawyers affiliated with a global activism organization are intensifying their push for a “McMafia” legal order against former President Donald Trump.

Under that order, Trump would be required to disclose financial origin of his “all-cash purchases and development of his two Scottish golf resorts,” HuffPost reports.

Citing the Trump Organization’s legal and financial woes with prosecutors in New York, the lawyers argue that their concerns about the Aberdeenshire and Ayrshire properties have merit.

Last week, Kay Springham, a lawyer for the American-based nonprofit Avaaz, laid out his arguments during a virtual hearing with Scotland’s highest civil court.

“It’s evident from the matters set out in the petition that there are real and substantial concerns about financial arrangements of the Trump Organization, of which Mr. Trump is the sole or principal owner,” Springham argued.

Springham also referenced the charges against Allen Weisselberg, former chief financial officer for the Trump Organization. Prosecutors allege Weisselberg was part of “a 15-year tax scheme to defraud the city, state and federal government by concealing the salaries of top company executives.”

In fact, Weisselberg is even accused of hiding certain details about more than $1.7 million of his own income.

Springham is now seeking an extension outside of his three-month deadline to prepare a full case for the court, as he noted that the Scottish Parliament voted against a previous motion that would have required Trump to disclose the sources of his cash.

HuffPost reports Judge Lord Sandison said “that as far as the issues raised by the petition were concerned, they passed the test set out by the law, so he was convinced “there is enough to have a sensible argument.”

Trump praised Hitler’s “economic miracle” — and that’s even worse than it sounds

In his newly-released book about the 2020 election, Wall Street Journal White House reporter Michael C. Bender reveals that former President Trump allegedly praised Adolf Hitler’s role in Germany’s economic recovery in the 1930s as evidence that the Führer “did a lot of good things.” 

It is easy to get bogged down in the shock value of a sitting president giving Hitler’s economy an approving nod. But in the case of Hitler’s economy, Trump is not exceptional. 

I’m a professor of rhetoric at San José State University in Silicon Valley, and I’ve been studying Nazi propaganda for more than five years for a book I’m writing about Hitler’s rhetoric. Hitler’s supposed “economic miracle” was a Nazi talking point throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s. 

But Hitler’s economic achievements can’t simply be dismissed as Nazi propaganda. They were also the subject of heated debate among historians and economists — including those who staunchly opposed Hitler — for decades after WorldWar II. Nearly a century later, the theory that Hitler restored Germany’s economy persists.

In fact, although White House chief of staff John Kelly was reportedly appalled by Trump’s statement, he acknowledged the possibility that Hitler “was solely responsible for rebuilding the economy” with the caveat that those economic accomplishments didn’t balance out subsequent Nazi atrocities.

The implication that Hitler’s economic accomplishments could potentially offset the Holocaust is unsettling on its face. It’s also ignores the inconvenient fact that Hitler’s economy wasn’t detached from Nazi atrocities.

It’s true the German economy rebounded under Hitler. And he did massively reduce unemployment numbers. But Hitler’s “economic miracle” was based explicitly, though not exclusively, on newly-introduced anti-Semitic laws. 

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The Nuremberg Race Laws were the Nazis’ most famous anti-Jewish legislation. Passed in 1935, they defined Jewishness as a race instead of a religion, stripped Jews of their citizenship and enforced segregation between Jews and so-called Aryans.

The Nuremberg Laws were the legal framework that eventually enabled the Holocaust. But well before Nuremberg, Hitler and the Nazis passed far-reaching legislation explicitly targeting Jewish Germans’ role in the economy.

Some of the Nazis’ first legislative acts were designed to “strengthen the economy” by putting Germans back to work, and Hitler wanted to prevent Jews from holding stable, good-paying, state-aided jobs, specifically to free up those employment opportunities for non-Jewish Germans. So the Nazis drove Jewish professionals out of jobs they already held and smothered future professional opportunities for anyone deemed Jewish.

In April 1933, for instance, less than three months after Hitler was appointed chancellor, the Nazis passed the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which excluded Jews from civil service jobs. That same month, the Nazis passed legislation to reduce Jewish enrollments in schools and universities and restrict Jews’ options for practicing law and medicine.

Within a few months, the Nazis put strict legal limits on Jewish professionals’ ability to work with state or state-regulated entities. The list of suffocating professional restrictions only grew over the next few years, extending to the media, the military, education, business ownership and beyond.

Of course, removing one person from a job to replace them with another doesn’t reduce the number of people out of work. So to accomplish their goal of reducing the unemployment rate, the Nazis redefined who counted as “German” and who qualified as “unemployed.”

Under the new laws, a non-Jewish German man without a job could be officially counted as “unemployed” (women were also legislated out of the job market). After 1933, he could increasingly count on the Nazis to help find him a job — often based on his demonstrated loyalty rather than his qualifications.

By contrast, an out-of-work Jewish German didn’t officially count as unemployed. After 1933, they became a burden on the state and were in some cases designated “work-shy” and sent to concentration camps. 

But Hitler’s anti-Semitic economic laws didn’t merely strip Jewish Germans of their employment opportunities. Jewish Germans forced out of the workforce soon found they didn’t qualify for any form of state aid, which also reduced the cost of state-funded social services — a double boon for the Nazis’ economic miracle.

By the time the Nuremberg Laws were enacted, virtually every piece of anti-Semitic legislation passed during the Nazis’ first two years in power had targeted Jewish Germans’ ability to find work and earn a living in Hitler’s booming economy.

All the while, the Nazis (and not a few influential businessmen, economists, journalists and politicians outside Germany) trumpeted Germany’s miraculous economic revival.

Little mentioned among people praising Hitler, of course, was that economic recovery was the direct result of redefining a whole group of people out of the economy. Little mentioned to this day, among people who see Hitler’s economy as evidence that he did “some good things,” is that terror, abuse and brutality were important engines of the Nazis’ economic recovery.

Far from showing he “did a lot of good things,” Hitler’s rebounding economy revealed the first signs of Nazi horrors to come.

Nearly 90 years after the Nazis passed their first anti-Semitic laws, no one is suggesting (at least not so far) that we should pursue genocidal atrocities in order to improve the economy. But using economic ends to justify inhumane means — for example, displacing the poor for international sporting events, destroying the rainforest and displacing indigenous communities, or rejecting public health guidance during a global pandemic — remains frighteningly common. 

The breaking news about Trump’s nescient comment to John Kelly, although hardly surprising, sheds further light on the former president’s priorities. But ultimately, it is less important in evaluating Trump as a person than in drawing attention to one of the most pressing questions of our time: How long will we continue to justify inhumane means in the pursuit of good economic ends?

Joe Rogan blasts right-wingers for embracing cancel culture after Black Rifle Coffee fracas

Joe Rogan took conservatives to task Friday for embracing cancel culture after a number of high-profile right-wingers criticized the founders of Black Rifle Coffee for denouncing extremists during an interview with The New York Times. 

He made the remarks during an episode of his hugely popular podcast, the “Joe Rogan Experience,” with Black Rifle CEO Evan Hafer as a guest. 

“When people were attacking you, I got butthurt,” Rogan said. “I was like, come on. Evan? Get the fuck outta here.”

Black Rifle Coffee is a veteran-founded company that became a conservative darling for its pro-gun and pro-military and police branding. Its roasts even include blends like “Silencer Smooth roast,” “Murdered Out” and “AK-47 espresso.”

But over the years Black Rifle’s brand was embraced by all manner of far-right characters, with the company’s merchandise showing up in photos of the Capitol insurrection, anti-vaccine and anti-mask protests as well as an incident in which Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who shot and killed two Black Lives Matter protesters during unrest in Wisconsin last summer, was pictured in a Black Rifle Coffee shirt after being released from jail.

In the New York Times piece, titled “Can the Black Rifle Coffee Company Become the Starbucks of the Right?” the founders of the company attempted to distance themselves from “extremists” who they said had “hijacked” the brand.

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In particular, Hafer denounced the Proud Boys and other violent white nationalist groups that embraced Black Rifle over the years.

“The racism [expletive] really pisses me off,” Hafer said. “I hate racist, Proud Boy-ish people. Like, I’ll pay them to leave my customer base. I would gladly chop all of those people out of my [expletive] customer database and pay them to get the [expletive] out.”

These comments infuriated right-wing pundits, who lashed out and called for boycotts of Black Rifle Coffee.

“It was so weird to see cancel culture come from the right,” Rogan said on his podcast. “I was like, I didn’t know it worked that way. I didn’t know you fucking idiots would do the same shit. Like, what is going on?”

“It was the weirdest dog pile I’ve ever watched.”

Listen below via Spotify:

Danny Trejo reflects on life, prison and Hollywood: “Movie stars are d**ks, OK? They suck”

If I had a dollar for every time a producer, director or actor tried to use my reckless background as a tool to add validity to their film or television show about “the ghetto,” I would be a very rich man. The problem is that I have too much integrity to sell out my neighborhood, my family and myself, which is a rarity. I know that in America, everybody with money thinks that everything is always about money –– and it’s not. If my community knew that I was a part of a project that didn’t honor our neighborhoods in the right way, I would not be able to come back home. Legendary actor Danny Trejo writes about the same kind of community loyalty in his new memoir, “Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption and Hollywood” (Atria, July 6).

Most know Trejo from the dozens of movies and television shows he starred in, including “Heat,” “Machete,” “Anaconda,” “Breaking Bad” and “Spy Kids” to name a few, but that is just the second half of his life. In “Trejo,” Danny writes about his time in prison with Charles Manson, struggles with addiction, struggles with personal relationships, struggles with his kids, his road to recovery, financial hardships that arose during his career, and how he became a successful businessman, while feeding the homeless, surviving a stroke, meeting Obama and pushing for prison reform. Yes, this man has a story. Trejo’s past has gained him access to work on the kinds of exploitative movies I mentioned, and he walked away because he has that same kind of community loyalty. I took a long stroll with Trejo down his amazing past on a recent episode of “Salon Talks.”

You can watch my “Salon Talks” episode with Danny Trejo here, or read a Q&A of our conversation below.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

A lot of people who studied your work or who saw you in films over the years, and we saw interviews that we’d get like little bits and pieces of you, but this goes in. It’s a lot to unpack here, so just to kick it off, can you just tell us how the project came about? What made you sit down and say, “You know what? It’s time for me to put my story out.”

You know what? I did a documentary called “Inmate #1,” and everybody thought that it was “Inmate #1” because I’d done time. I said, “No, no, no! That’s ‘Inmate #1’ because that’s the first five years of my acting career.” I played Inmate No. 1, a bad guy and Chicano dude, mean dude with tattoos. I never even had a name, so that was where I got the name.

Then, my kids’ mom, she read it. She saw the documentary. She said, “It’s very nice, Danny. That’s like you were a bad kid, you went to prison, and now you’re a good guy. It’s like, what about your mom? What about your dad? What about the things that made you?” I said, “Well, that’s their story. It ain’t got nothing to do with me.” She said, “Dan, why do you think you’ve been married four times? Why do you think you’ve been divorced four times? Why did you get children with women you weren’t married to? How come you couldn’t trust a woman?” I said, “What are you talking about, man? I was with you 10 years. You didn’t trust me to go to the market!” It’s really funny. No woman’s ever done me wrong. If you read the book, you kind of understand why I didn’t trust. So, we wrote it and, when she read it, she, and this is the lady who’s been with me 40 years, not together, but she’s the mother of my children, so you can’t get away from baby’s mama. So, when she read it, she says, “You know what? I feel like I’m talking to you,” and that was it. We got it because that’s me. What you hear is me.

One of the best part of the book and I think something that people are really going to be inspired by is the battle that a lot of us men face, right? We’re from two different generations, but we suffer the same way when it comes to vulnerability. 

You said it perfect. I don’t think I could’ve done anything without Donal Logue. I mean, I’ve been in AA. I’ve done inventory after inventory, I’ve been sober 52 years, but I would still write I had a good day and this is what happened today and when I was young, but nothing about my mom, my dad. So, I don’t think I could’ve done that without Donal, without somebody that I really trusted. When I started, boom! It just came out.

It was funny because, while I was writing it, my son had written a movie called “From a Son.” So, I’m already all emotional anyway, and he’s showing me these baby pictures of him, “Look, dad. Remember when I hurt my arm?” and all these baby pictures. I had baby pictures in my trailer of him. You know what I mean? When it came time to do this crying scene, I wanted to do it like John Wayne, “OK, pilgrim.” I had all these pictures, and then Sasha, the girl that we cast as his girlfriend, I asked her, “Did you kill my son?” We’re in the desert. It’s freezing cold and she goes, “No! I loved him. He was my only friend,” and she started bawling. I broke loose. John Wayne, my ass! I had boogers, that kind of crying nobody’s supposed to see. That way when you’re alone at a family movie or some shit. You know what I mean, but I couldn’t stop, man. When he finally said, “Cut”, the whole crew was crying. My son, little shit, goes, “Nice acting, dad.” I go, “Shut up! I’ll put you on timeout!”

Something that resonated with me on a personal level was, I just had my first kid a year ago. I got a baby girl.

I think you’re going to learn more about women than you’ve ever known raising a daughter. Honest to God. I learned patience. I got patience from nobody but my daughter. You know what I mean? She was three years old. I was a single parent. We’d jump in the car and she goes, “Daddy, I forgot my purse.” I go, “You’re three-years-old! You already got a purse?” She would just give you that look. They’re born with that look. That look, it’s a kind of a, “You an idiot and if you don’t do that, I am going to be a brat the rest of the night.” So, I go up and get her purse, and that purse don’t match her shoes. She’s three-years-old! I got to take her up to pick a purse. I swear to God, and then you love doing it. In the middle of the night, you wake up laughing at some of the s**t she does. You know what I mean? It’s like there’s no love like a dad for his daughter. We used to sit on the couch and talk about boys stink. The boys would be on the other couch.

It’s a blessing. I think the part that’s going to resonate with a whole lot of people is when you talk about your time incarcerated. One thing I wanted to ask you was, as we’re moving into this space where society is starting to care more about returning citizens the way they should, what are some of the biggest misconceptions that people on the outside have about people inside and people returning? What do they need to know from you?

Our systems for prison are broken, first of all, OK? You start with a district attorney. We got a three-strike law. That took all the power away from the judge and gave it to the district attorney. So, no matter what I do, I’m going before a guy that’s got the whole game. I’m going before a district attorney. Now, he’s going to make a deal because district attorneys don’t stay district attorneys if too many people go free. That’s our system. So, it’s his job to put people in jail. Guilt, innocence don’t have a damn thing to do with it. It’s numbers, OK? Now, I would estimate, and it’s a pretty good estimation, that 10% of the people in the California prisons belong in prison. I was one of the ones that belonged in prison until I had a life-changing experience, and it’s like, basically, I knew most of the guys that belonged in prison. So, that means 90% of the people in prison could’ve been dealt some other way. Non-violent drug offenses, OK? Now, I know people got away with 13 kilos, 14 kilos of cocaine, and I know people that are in prison doing eight, 11, nine, 12 years for 3 grams of cocaine, all right? I know people that are doing five years for paraphernalia, OK? So, we say, “Wait a minute. Something is wrong here. Something is definitely wrong.”

My best friend got 30 years for a non-violent drug crime. He’s 15 in right now.

My little cousin went to the joint when he was 16 years old, bad second-degree murder. He was supposed to go to prison.

Gilbert, right?

Yeah, Gilbert. Now, that’s my uncle’s son. I’ve been trying to get him out, so I talked to everybody, just literally everybody, all the way to the governor. We got a law passed that if you’re a juvenile, you can still come up for parole because when you have a life sentence, every 15 years you come up for parole. Now, you’re a different person when you’re 16, when you’re 30. You’re a different person, whether you’re in prison or not, you’re a different person. You might be crazy as a loon or you’re better, but there’s an evaluation. So, now, we got Gilbert out. It set a precedent for a law. Now, 4,500 people that were sentenced as juvenile have got out because of that law. I get stopped on the street by guys that did 30 years. “Man, thank you, man. Thank you. You got Gilbert out,” my nephew. “You got him out. I got out on that same law.” I said, “I’m so proud of that, man! Gilbert, his name’s in the law book, Gilbert Trejo. First, he went to work as an electrician on the Rams stadium. Go, Rams! I know you’re from Baltimore, I know, but go, Rams! We finished the Rams stadium, so he went as an electrician over to LAX. You got to put down three references so, as soon as he put down the references, the feds grabbed him, says, “You got three ex-felons, Danny Trejo, Mario Castillo, and Salvador Saldana. They’re all exes.” Thank God that the powers that be, [Gavin] Newsom and everybody else, our governor, they knew we were doing good so, right now, Gilbert’s working at LAX. He’s doing great.

That’s another story that made me really, really happy when I finished the book. So, people know Danny Trejo, the actor. People know Danny Trejo, street guy. People know Danny Trejo, the businessman. A lot of people don’t know Danny Trejo, the firefighter. Let our viewers know a little bit about your days as a firefighter because I really want them to feel the storyteller?

You know what? Silliest thing in the world is standing there throwing a shovelful of dirt at a 80-foot flame, feel like a complete idiot, but enough shovelfuls, you’ll put it out. I’d been fighting fires. I went to camp when I was 16 years old, and I was fighting fires. Then, when I was in the joint, they sent us to fight a fire in Sacramento and all the fires that were up there. It was funny. These old ladies would come out in the middle of the night at 2 o’clock in the morning. They come up, “Here, son. Would you like some coffee?” and then they’d wink. So, old lady, 108 years old, giving us a shot of whiskey in a cup of coffee. It was beautiful. That’s what I’ve done. I’ve fought fires. I’ve done everything for the State of California. 

I think one of the things that’s really inspirational is the time you spent as a counselor and helping people with their sobriety and becoming clean. How important was that work to your own redemption and recovery?

We still do that. I still do that. I still work for Western Pacific Med Corp. My CEO, Mark Hickman, that guy lets me do whatever I got to do. The way God works is so funny. I met Mario Castillo in 1991. I was doing “Blood In Blood Out.” We were doing it in San Quentin State Prison. He was a resident. He refused to be called an inmate. “No, I’m a resident.” “Yeah, well, you’re still busted, sucker!” We talked and we made friends. 

Then, eight years later, he came out and he was trying to stay clean and stuff, and then he got a job working in recovery. Then he got sick. When he got sick, he couldn’t work and lost everything. Come stay with me, so he stayed with me. That guy saved my kids’ lives. Do you understand? I get a call. I’m in Germany. I get a call, and one of my son’s friends, “Man, Gilbert’s dying! He’s over here in this crack house. He’s got that ATM card.” People are like, “Hey, come on.” I said, “S**t!” I called Mario. “Mario, you know what? I got to find Gilbert, man.” Now, the bodyguard goes because Mario took a bodyguard with him, pulled up in front of a crack house that’s got two guards out in front. The bodyguard says, “Let’s call for backup,” and Mario was, “Man, f**k you!” Crashed, kicked in the door and grabbed my son, carried him out, threw him in the car. “Let’s get the f**k out of here!” My son, “Hey, Dad. I’m OK.” I got home. We took him to rehab. My son’s going on eight years clean right now.

That’s a blessing there.

I’m telling you, but that’s the way God works. I didn’t know that, in 1999, this fool who thought he was a resident in San Quentin was going to save my son’s life.

You mentioned “Blood In Blood Out.” Talking about “Blood In Blood Out” and “American Me,” what was happening at that time? And I really, really, really like when you said, “There’s no poetic license when you’re pissing off the wrong people.” I would like you to talk about making the transition from being a guy who still has all these connections, but being brand new in the industry and staying loyal to your community versus just jumping in front of whatever Hollywood puts in your face?

You know, it’s so funny that I told the director, Edward James Olmos, “You can’t do this. You’re disrespecting the wrong people. You’re being a fool.” He goes, “No, no!” You’re not dealing with theatrical people. See, that’s the thing. I needed an English literature major from the streets. Well, he’d have been perfect. You’d have been perfect. I like talking to you. You would’ve been perfect. It’s like, here’s this dude was never in a gang, never from the streets, started acting when he was nine. So, all of a sudden, he’s portraying this bad guy. When they showed that this guy, the leader of the mob who’s raped, I would say, “Wait a minute. You’re disgracing this guy’s family. You’re disgracing everything.” He was, “Well, theatrically, doesn’t it come . . .” “You don’t understand theatrical, sucker!” He wouldn’t listen because people got it in their mind that, “I know more because I’ve played a bad guy.” Well, these guys ain’t playing, and it was straight out. Eight people killed in Folsom that had taken part in that and four people killed on the streets. I remember one time, Edward was trying to say, “No, that wasn’t because of the movie.” Big Donald, one of the leaders was standing right behind him, and he goes, “Excuse me, Mr. Olmos. Yes, it was.” The whole room went ice cold.

When I walk into a club and there’s like five or six Mafiosos standing, everybody knows who they are. It’s so funny. When they’re in the club, there’s like a secret wall around them. They’re there, they all got two girls. There’s a moat around them that nobody gets close to. It’s so funny, not because they’re acting tough, but because the respect that people have for bullets. When I walk in, they’ll go, “Uh!” They’ll all stand up. “La Onda” because that was the name in “Blood In Blood Out.” They respect the s**t out of us. It was funny because the guys that worked on “America Me,” the actors called me and said, “Danny. We understand you. Are we OK?” “Yeah, yeah, yeah. You ain’t got nothing to worry about. You were workers,” because, when Joe Morgan called me and asked me what was I going to do, I said, “I’m going to do ‘Blood In Blood Out.'” He goes, “Oh, yeah, yeah. That’s the cute one.” Now, we’re doing a movie about murders, killers. That’s the cute one, but it was cute because we weren’t saying Mexican Mafia. You know what I mean? So, I told, “They ain’t got nothing.” Joe Morgan told me, “You can do that other one.” I ain’t doing that one. I know. I know respect. I’ve never lost respect of that both ways.

Some of the things that I wasn’t expecting was reading about you coming across Charles Manson and George Jackson in the joint?

You know what? Now, Jackson, he was bad. There was nothing phony about George, but when I met Charles Manson, he wasn’t the guy you saw on TV with that beard and the swastika. That wasn’t him. When I saw him, they were getting ready to do him in the county jail. He was just a skinny kid, and he was so poor he had a string tied – his pants were being held up with a string because he didn’t have a belt. He couldn’t have done that to those girls, like on the North side of Philly or in Compton or in East LA. He was in Haight-Ashbury with some broken little girls from Broken Elbow, Louisiana somewhere that were abused there, came out to Frisco and were abused there. George Perry, a good friend of mine, who was a pimp from Oakland, he said, “Man, everybody was running them girls crazy. Everybody was using them.” So, when he showed up, they’re looking for a Messiah, “Be my daddy.” When we saw him on TV, we thought it was funny. Look at this guy. We protected this fool.

So many people out there are saying, “I used to run with Danny Trejo” from the early years. What do you think those people say now when they see you now? If they get a chance to walk through LAX and here you walk in?

Listen, my daughter came into LAX with three of her friends, right? She was staying in Ohio and flew in. The first thing they heard was, “Hi. I’m . . . Hey, there’s your dad!” Everybody was asking her for an autograph.

What would you say to young artists who feel like they just get caught up in the world where they’re scared to just jump out there and do what they love because of whatever reason why people walk away from things?

The advice that was given to me, the best advice that was ever given to me was, “The whole world can think you’re a movie star, but you can’t.” It’s like I’ve watched kids that, because they’re doing, “Wow! I’m in the movies,” then all of a sudden, they think they’re something. You got to think like, “I’m a house painter” or, “I’m a plumber” or, “I’m a electrician” because that’s all it is. It’s a job. Yes, it’s a job with a lot of perks, but you got to fight that battle. It’s a battle. It’s a battle because Hollywood is meant to seduce you, and it’s meant to seduce you so they can get rid of you. It’s meant for you to think you are so good that you’re so big a problem, they can get you out of there. You look at everybody that became a movie star. They’re gone, but you talk to Robert DeNiro, you call him a movie star, he’ll go, “No, no, no. I’m an actor. I’m a working actor.” Do you understand? Movie stars are dicks, OK? They suck.

The etymology of 15 weird and wonderful Olympic words

Every two years we get to marvel at them — no, not the superhuman feats of strength and skill from the greatest athletes in the world, but the weird and wonderful names of the many, varied Olympic sports. Here’s a look at some winning Olympic words and their origins.

1. Polo

At today’s Olympics, polo is a water sport; its original form, played on horseback, left the program after the 1936 games. The British army brought the sport, and term, to the West from the East. The ancient game is believed to have originated in either Central Asia or modern day Iran, spreading to the mountainous regions of India and Tibet, where it was encountered by the British in the mid-19th century. Cited in 1872, polo is a rendering of a Balti Tibetan word, pulu, or “ball,” that target of the sport’s swinging mallets.

2. Badminton

Another game British officers imported from the East is badminton, inspired by the Indian poona. In England, it’s said that the game was first played at Badminton House in western England in 1873. But record of badminton predates this allegedly inaugural match by a decade, which describes it as closely related to the children’s game of battledore and shuttlecock (don’t tell the Olympians). But it is possible it’s still named after the house itself; the 1863 account is about “Life in a Country House,” but it never says which house.

3. Javelin

Javelin throwing was one of the events of the original pentathlon at the ancient Greek Olympics. The historic Hellenes didn’t call it the javelin, of course: akon or akontion was the word they flung around.

Javelin is first documented in the compound javelin-spear in 1513. A related form, javelot, appeared several decades earlier. Both terms come from a French word for a “light spear.” Where the French javeline comes from, though, is much disputed; many scholars look to a Celtic root that means “forked,” a branch of a tree presumably fashioned into a spear.

4. Discus

The discus was another event of the original pentathlon. The Greeks threw diskos, while the Romans threw discus, which is the immediate source of the English word, by 1581. Both diskos and discus referred to various “round, flat objects”—and not only objects athletes heaved, but also the “face” of the sun. At the root of the Greek diskos is a verb meaning “to throw” or “cast.” English’s disc and disk are related, as are dish and desk, but don’t go trying to throw them to earn your gold medal.

5. Marathon

The ancient Greeks didn’t run marathons in their Olympics, though footraces were a main event of their games. The marathon joined the Olympic program when the games were rebooted from antiquity in 1896. Much lore surrounds the historical marathon. In one account, it’s claimed that a Greek hero ran from Marathon to Athens to announce that Greece was victorious in their battle with Persia. He delivered his message—and then died, his feat living on in the word marathon.

6. and 7. Bantamweight and welterweight

Boxing also punches back to the Olympic games of yore. Today, we classify the fighters by weight class, including: flyweight, bantamweight,welterweight, middleweight, and heavyweight.

Bantamweight apparently takes its name from the bantam, named for a particularly feisty kind of chicken, originally from Bantam in Java. The welter in welterweight is obscure, possibly from welt, a term for “beat” or “thrash,” as in raising lashes, or welts, on the skin. The original sense of this welt is well outside the ring: It’s a strip of leather sewn right above the sole of a shoe.

A bantamweight boxer is attested by 1884. The simple welter named this heavier-weight boxer (and heavier weight horseriders) much earlier, in 1804. Welter, a “state of confusion or turmoil,” is unrelated.

8. Trampoline

Good thing trampolinists don’t have to perform their routines on the etymology of their event. Trampoline, in English since at least the late 1790s, is from the Italian trampoli, meaning “stilts.” The further origin is unclear, but many scholars think it’s indeed related to the English word tramp, “to stamp around,” whose walking-about inspired the slang for “vagrant.”

9. Scull

In scull rowing, the athlete propels the boat by swinging two oars at the same time. These oars are known as sculls, a name since given to the kind of boat the rowers use. Scull is a very old word in the English language—the Oxford English Dictionary attests it as early as 1345—but its origin is obscure.

Could scull be related to skull, a word it looks and sounds so much like? No, not that skull. (Well, probably not that skull.) English also had this word skull, a “drinking- bowl.” A few etymologists liken the scooped blade of the scull to the hollow basin of the skull—and others have argued that humans once made these drinking-bowls from actual human skulls.

10. Slalom

In the canoe slalom, Olympians zigzag their watery way through obstacles. The original slaloming, as we know from the Winter Games, is executed on skis. And so slalom, fittingly, is from a Norwegian word: slalåm, literally “sloping track.” (The English word lane is related to låm, “track.”) Slalom skiing dates back to the 1920s in the English-language record, its canoeing cousin to the 1950s.

11. Skeet

Skeet-shooting is another sport that owes an etymological debt to Norwegian. A Massachusetts businessman and hunter is credited with cooking up this clay target shooting in the 1920s. And according to a 1926 edition of the National Sportsman, a competition gave the new sport its name. As the Oxford English Dictionary quotes the magazine:

“Since the prize of $100 was offered for the most suitable name for the new shooting sport … nearly 10,000 suggestions have been received … After careful consideration, the name that seemed best was ‘skeet’, a very old form of our present word ‘shoot’ … Mrs. Gertrude Hurlbutt, Dayton, Montana, sent in the suggestion.”

While there are old forms of shoot that look broadly like skeet (such as scytt from circa 1000 CE), it might have actually been referring to the Old Norwegian skotja.

12. Fencing

Fence, the artful swordplay, is shortened from defence. Via French, defence—or defense—comes from the Latin defendere, to “drive away,” hence defend. And yes, a picket fence also ultimately derives from this verb.

13. Steeplechase

Why are steeplechasers chasing steeples in this unusual 3000-meter event, requiring runners to jump over hurdles and water on the track? History has it that this event began on horseback in Ireland, where riders once raced through the countryside, using steeples as distance markers/finish lines and negotiating stone walls and streams along their way.

14. Shot put

What is the put in the shot put? Here, the hardy hurlers are putting the shot, where put is a much older sense of today’s common put: “to thrust.” In the 1300s, this put referred to the act of thrusting a heavy stone in medieval contests—a usage that survives in shot put.

15. Freestyle

Swimmers, sadly, aren’t rapping in the pool when they swim a freestyle race. Freestyle rapping emerged as a term in the early 1980s, whereas freestyle swimming goes all the way back the 1910s. Freestyle means a swimmer is “free” to choose whichever stroke, or “style,” he or she wants in the race. The earliest known freestyle reference, according to the Oxford English Dictionary made its first splash, actually, in reference to discus-throwing.

How QAnon convinced a Parkland shooting survivor’s dad that the tragedy was a hoax

Last month, an anonymous Reddit user with a throwaway account posted in r/QAnonCasualties, a Reddit group for people whose spouses, family members and loved ones have been consumed by the baseless conspiracy theory known as QAnon. QAnon, for the uninitiated, posits that American politics are dictated by an elite, Satan-worshipping pedophile cabal which Donald Trump and his inner circle opposed.

Most QAnonCasualties posts take on a tone of desperation — heartfelt sagas of loved ones who have become unmoored from reality, and for whom the outlandish conspiracy theory is the ultimate truth. This post in particular hit on those tropes, but with an added twist: “I survived the Stoneman Douglas school shooting and my dad is suddenly convinced I’m a liar and part of a false-flag operation,” the pseudonymous poster wrote.

“I think my dad has gone f***ing insane; It’s going way too far and I have trouble processing the last 5 months. He’s always been very conservative, but now QAnon has consumed his life to the point where it’s tearing our family apart along with my mental health,” the Reddit post said. “Back in January he saw the video of Marjorie Taylor Greene harassing [fellow high school student] David Hogg about the shooting being a false-flag operation, and while my dad was already into Q, he’d never gone down that particular rabbit hole and now he’s convinced everything was a hoax and it breaks my f***ing heart.”

As Salon has previously reported, QAnon has torn apart marriages and families; hence, the creation of the aforementioned Reddit forum, which has become a digital support group for nearly 179,000 people who swap stories, advice and guidance. Some posters describe the experience of completely “losing” their loved one. Others are more alarming, like the woman whose “Qhusband” got a gun license because of the conspiracy, which made her feel “sick to my stomach.” But this user’s shed light on how the cult-like group can brainwash family members of those who have firsthand experienced a horrible national tragedy, like the Stoneman Douglas school shooting, which left 17 people dead in 2018.

Last week, Vice spoke with the author of the Reddit post and confirmed their identity as a survivor of the Parkland, Fla. shooting; the author spoke on the condition of anonymity using the name “Bill.”

“It started a couple months into the pandemic with the whole anti-lockdown protests,” Bill told Vice. “His feelings were so strong it turned into facts for him. So if he didn’t like having to wear masks it wouldn’t matter what doctors or scientists said. Anything that contradicted his feelings was wrong. So he turned to the internet to find like-minded people which led him to QAnon.”

It’s an interesting and tragic tale, and at odds with how parents of Sandy Hook’s victims responded when far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones tried to convince his followers the massacre was a hoax. Joe Kelly, a cult intervention specialist, said trauma affects people differently, and straight-out denying an event happened — like your son almost dying in a school shooting — could be one way to cope.

“When it’s not dealt with by a trained individual, people will start to scattershot trying to find help in any form,” Kelly said. That can put someone in a vulnerable position where they can be taken advantage of by a group like QAnon with toxic agendas. “They will say this is because of this, and they’ll touch on that moment, and you’ll feel heard, you’ll feel appreciated and understood, finally, for the first time in that moment of vulnerability.”

From that point on, Kelly said, this group that’s provided “comfort” and “assuredness” starts to take control of the traumatized individual.

Doni Whitsett, Clinical Professor Emerita of Social Work at the University of Southern California who specialized in cults, said via email that “denial is a great defense against feelings that are uncomfortable, in this case, feelings of powerlessness [and] helplessness.”

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“These are feelings that actually define what is meant by a trauma,” Whitsett said. “This is part of the personality profile of those prone to believe in conspiracy theories.”

As numerous psychologists previously told Salon, some people are prone to conspiratorial thinking. These types are unlikely to recovery from their QAnon beliefs, and, if not QAnon, would likely have been drawn to other conspiracy theories. 

“I’m glad the QAnon casualty community is helping ‘Bill’ leave the situation, because sometimes that’s all you can do,” Whitsett said.

As Bill noted in his Reddit, it doesn’t help that prominent politicians, like, Marjorie Taylor Greene, R.-Ga, perpetuate the falsehood that the shooting was a hoax. In part, Kelly said, the continuing existence of these falsehoods is the fault of far-right leaders like Greene.

“Leadership allows for this to continue to take place — they’ve never come out and outright said this stuff is garbage, right?” Kelly said. “And this is dangerous, and that’s exactly what we see in cult leaders.”

Kelly, who has worked as a cult interventionist for nearly 30 years, said some are drawn to QAnon because it fulfills a specific need — in some cases, loneliness. In other cases, they may be struggling with other demons that make them susceptible. 

“You’ll have people who were struggling, for lack of a better word, with mental health issues — they could have been minor, and yet during pandemic, they became isolated, then surrounded or bathed in liquid that QAnon became,” Kelly said. “It fills the brain, and that suspended judgment becomes solidified faith and belief . . . these things are all reinforced by this new community you meet online, and you don’t have to get to know these people — their nuts and bolts and where the warts are — these are just faces behind the screen, promoting an ideology [for which] now you’re a prophet.”

And that, Kelly said, is how someone who nearly lost their son in a national tragedy could disbelieve what happened right in front of them.

America talks big about “human rights”: We should be ashamed of that hypocrisy

Human rights: It’s a term tossed around all too easily, a hollow piece of rhetoric practiced mostly in the breach, a faux cliché uttered in fragile times. It’s a mantra lacking moral conviction and humane behavior, a way to cover the shame of failed promises, a salve without resolve spread by self-righteous, glib politicians at podiums and to the media. It’s a hollow claim that enables us to believe we are an “exceptional” country. It’s a lie in the face of multiple human tragedies in which we are complicit. These are tragedies that we fuel, facilitate, ignore, without asking ourselves how committed we are as a nation to the imperative of human rights.

I come to this awareness when I ask how it is that we condemn Russia’s or China’s or Myanmar’s human rights abuses against their people while continuing to sanction Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinian people. 

I come to it when I think about how we abandoned the people of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia who helped us during that dreadful war in Southeast Asia, and then tried to do the same thing to the Afghan people who worked at the U.S. embassy or for American contractors and the American military, lessened in its shameful practice (but not eliminated) only because of public outcry.

I come to it when we were silent about what Saudi Arabia has done in Yemen, and in its embassy in Turkey, and when our silence did not help end the atrocities in Syria. Of course I understand the politics of non-action no matter where it occurs, but when politics trumps humanity I shudder.

I come to it when a kid is tased by cops for going through some bushes to see his girlfriend, when Black men are shot in the back and Black women are shot in bed.

I come to it when women are denied agency over their own bodies and jailed for “infanticide” when they miscarry. 

I come to it when we fail to make the connections between poverty, policy and practices, whether in schools, courtrooms, jails or other institutions, for surely housing, food security, safety from judicial harm, appropriate quality health care, a decent and equal education and a livable planet are all basic human rights.

Surely there is something inhumane about the Bezoses and Zuckerbergs of the world accumulating billions of dollars of wealth while paying no taxes while the poohbahs of parliaments think earning a livable wage is too much to sanction and legislate.

The fact that almost 7 million people in the world live in abject poverty, according to World Vision — often situational, generational or geographic — while wealthy nations like ours look the other way, illuminates the hollow rhetoric of “human rights.” It is also shameful that the United States has the fourth highest poverty rate in the world, at nearly 18%, and the largest income inequality gap in the world, according to the Brookings Institution.

According to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a milestone document in the history of that concept, there are two kinds of human rights violations: those committed overtly by the state, and those in which the state fails to protect against human rights violations. These violations can be civil, political, economic, cultural or social in nature. Civil rights include the right to life, safety and equality before the law, while political rights include the right to a fair trial and the right to vote.

Economic, social and cultural rights include the right to work, the right to education and the right to physical and mental health. These rights relate to things like clean water, adequate housing, appropriate health care, non-discrimination at work, maternity leave, fair wages and more.

Just take a look at that list of human rights and then try convincing me that we haven’t violated, and do not continue to violate, each and every one of them, all the while claiming that we champion “human rights.”

Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. are often quoted on the issue of human rights, reminding us of our failures to protect these rights. Mandela asked that we remember that “to deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.” King admonished us to never forget that “a right delayed is a right denied.”

Mary Robinson, Ireland’s first woman president, asked us never to forget that “today’s human rights violations are the causes of tomorrow’s conflicts.” 

Wise words, all. But how sad that we need to hear them over and over again, and that we still fail to instill them in our hearts and our policies.

For me, the words of Eleanor Roosevelt resonate most: “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?” she asked. Her answer: “In small places, close to home — so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. … Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.”

Would that we take those words to heart at every level of our private and public lives. 

The US Army tried portable nuclear power at remote bases 60 years ago – it didn’t go well

In a tunnel 40 feet beneath the surface of the Greenland ice sheet, a Geiger counter screamed. It was 1964, the height of the Cold War. U.S. soldiers in the tunnel, 800 miles from the North Pole, were dismantling the Army’s first portable nuclear reactor.

Commanding Officer Joseph Franklin grabbed the radiation detector, ordered his men out and did a quick survey before retreating from the reactor.

He had spent about two minutes exposed to a radiation field he estimated at 2,000 rads per hour, enough to make a person ill. When he came home from Greenland, the Army sent Franklin to the Bethesda Naval Hospital. There, he set off a whole body radiation counter designed to assess victims of nuclear accidents. Franklin was radioactive.

The Army called the reactor portable, even at 330 tons, because it was built from pieces that each fit in a C-130 cargo plane. It was powering Camp Century, one of the military’s most unusual bases.

Camp Century was a series of tunnels built into the Greenland ice sheet and used for both military research and scientific projects. The military boasted that the nuclear reactor there, known as the PM-2A, needed just 44 pounds of uranium to replace a million or more gallons of diesel fuel. Heat from the reactor ran lights and equipment and allowed the 200 or so men at the camp as many hot showers as they wanted in that brutally cold environment.

The PM-2A was the third child in a family of eight Army reactors, several of them experiments in portable nuclear power.

A few were misfits. PM-3A, nicknamed Nukey Poo, was installed at the Navy base at Antarctica’s McMurdo Sound. It made a nuclear mess in the Antarctic, with 438 malfunctions in 10 years including a cracked and leaking containment vessel. SL-1, a stationary low-power nuclear reactor in Idaho, blew up during refueling, killing three men. SM-1 still sits 12 miles from the White House at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. It cost US$2 million to build and is expected to cost $68 million to clean up. The only truly mobile reactor, the ML-1, never really worked.

Nearly 60 years after the PM-2A was installed and the ML-1 project abandoned, the U.S. military is exploring portable land-based nuclear reactors again.

In May 2021, the Pentagon requested $60 million for Project Pele. Its goal: Design and build, within five years, a small, truck-mounted portable nuclear reactor that could be flown to remote locations and war zones. It would be able to be powered up and down for transport within a few days.

The Navy has a long and mostly successful history of mobile nuclear power. The first two nuclear submarines, the Nautilus and the Skate, visited the North Pole in 1958, just before Camp Century was built. Two other nuclear submarines sank in the 1960s – their reactors sit quietly on the Atlantic Ocean floor along with two plutonium-containing nuclear torpedos. Portable reactors on land pose different challenges – any problems are not under thousands of feet of ocean water.

Those in favor of mobile nuclear power for the battlefield claim it will provide nearly unlimited, low-carbon energy without the need for vulnerable supply convoys. Others argue that the costs and risks outweigh the benefits. There are also concerns about nuclear proliferation if mobile reactors are able to avoid international inspection.

A leaking reactor on the Greenland ice sheet

The PM-2A was built in 18 months. It arrived at Thule Air Force Base in Greenland in July 1960 and was dragged 138 miles across the ice sheet in pieces and then assembled at Camp Century.

When the reactor went critical for the first time in October, the engineers turned it off immediately because the PM-2A leaked neutrons, which can harm people. The Army fashioned lead shields and built walls of 55-gallon drums filled with ice and sawdust trying to protect the operators from radiation.

 

‘The Big Picture,’ an Army TV show distributed to U.S. stations, dedicated a 1961 episode to Camp Century and the reactor.

The PM-2A ran for two years, making fossil fuel-free power and heat and far more neutrons than was safe.

Those stray neutrons caused trouble. Steel pipes and the reactor vessel grew increasingly radioactive over time, as did traces of sodium in the snow. Cooling water leaking from the reactor contained dozens of radioactive isotopes potentially exposing personnel to radiation and leaving a legacy in the ice.

When the reactor was dismantled for shipping, its metal pipes shed radioactive dust. Bulldozed snow that was once bathed in neutrons from the reactor released radioactive flakes of ice.

Franklin must have ingested some of the radioactive isotopes that the leaking neutrons made. In 2002, he had a cancerous prostate and kidney removed. By 2015, the cancer spread to his lungs and bones. He died of kidney cancer on March 8, 2017, as a retired, revered and decorated major general.

Camp Century’s radioactive legacy

Camp Century was shut down in 1967. During its eight-year life, scientists had used the base to drill down through the ice sheet and extract an ice core that my colleagues and I are still using today to reveal secrets of the ice sheet’s ancient past. Camp Century, its ice core and climate change are the focus of a book I am now writing.

The PM-2A was found to be highly radioactive and was buried in an Idaho nuclear waste dump. Army “hot waste” dumping records indicate it left radioactive cooling water buried in a sump in the Greenland ice sheet.

When scientists studying Camp Century in 2016 suggested that the warming climate now melting Greenland’s ice could expose the camp and its waste, including lead, fuel oil, PCBs and possibly radiation, by 2100, relations between the U.S, Denmark and Greenland grew tense. Who would be responsible for the cleanup and any environmental damage?

Portable nuclear reactors today

There are major differences between nuclear power production in the 1960s and today.

The Pele reactor’s fuel will be sealed in pellets the size of poppy seeds, and it will be air-cooled so there’s no radioactive coolant to dispose of.

Being able to produce energy with fewer greenhouse emissions is a positive in a warming world. The U.S. military’s liquid fuel use is close to all of Portugal’s or Peru’s. Not having to supply remote bases with as much fuel can also help protect lives in dangerous locations.

But, the U.S. still has no coherent national strategy for nuclear waste disposal, and critics are asking what happens if Pele falls into enemy hands. Researchers at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the National Academy of Sciences have previously questioned the risks of nuclear reactors being attacked by terrorists. As proposals for portable reactors undergo review over the coming months, these and other concerns will be drawing attention.

The U.S. military’s first attempts at land-based portable nuclear reactors didn’t work out well in terms of environmental contamination, cost, human health and international relations. That history is worth remembering as the military considers new mobile reactors.

Paul Bierman, Fellow of the Gund Institute for Environment, Professor of Natural Resources, University of Vermont

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

 

N.C. GOP candidates struggle to out-Trump each other — who will be the Biggest Loser?

Republican infighting has derailed the U.S. Senate primary campaign in North Carolina, as candidates seek to undermine their opponents and win over Donald Trump’s loyal base — even as some Republican operatives think that could be disastrous in next year’s general election in the critical swing state.

Trump first teased a potential Senate run by Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law, who ultimately declined to join the race. Then the former president upended the primary campaign during an appearance at the state’s Republican convention in June. Despite staying out of other statewide primaries where candidates have fallen over themselves to out-Trump their opponents, the former president made a surprise endorsement nearly a year before the primary election, backing Rep. Ted Budd over former Rep. Mark Walker, a longtime Trump supporter, and former Gov. Pat McCrory.

“Everybody was blindsided, including the Walker and McCrory campaigns and maybe even Budd,” Andrew Taylor, a political science professor at North Carolina State University, said in an interview with Salon.

Budd, a two-term congressman who supported a lawsuit seeking to overturn Trump’s election loss and voted against certifying President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, has seen a major boost in the polls and fundraising since the announcement.  

“I don’t know if I believe in game-changers in politics, but that’s as close as you can get to one,” Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, said in an interview with Salon. “That was huge.”

Walker, who also backed the election lawsuit and has tried to position himself as the most pro-Trump candidate in the primary, accused former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, a longtime fixture in North Carolina conservative politics — and his former intra-party rival when both were in Congress — of having “orchestrated” the endorsement. Walker has suggested that Meadows never told Trump about a straw poll of delegates at the state GOP convention that showed Walker leading Budd by 44% to 29%.

“How did President Trump get the endorsement so wrong at the convention?” Walker complained during a subsequent Republican luncheon.

At the convention, Trump also took a not-so-veiled shot at McCrory, the former governor who has been critical of Trump’s false claims of election fraud, despite crying fraud himself after narrowly losing his own 2016 re-election bid.

“You can’t pick people who have already lost two races and do not stand for our values,” Trump told the convention audience.

Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at Catawba College, described that as “a subtle dig at the former governor,” but said in an interview with Salon that Walker was undoubtedly hurt worst by Trump’s endorsement: “It may come down to Budd and McCrory being the big fight going into the primary next year.”

Walker has gone on the offensive since the convention, repeatedly attacking his opponents as unelectable, which has launched a round of name-calling, prompting allies of other candidates to depict their opponents as losers who can’t win a general election.

“I don’t see how [Budd] can win a general election,” Walker told Politico in June, calling it a potential “Roy Moore situation,” referring to the failed Alabama Republican Senate candidate who lost to Democrat Doug Jones in 2017 after facing numerous decades-old allegations of sexual assault and misconduct.

With the Senate evenly split and a number of tight races on the horizon, North Carolina’s race to replace retiring Republican Sen. Richard Burr could easily determine which party controls Congress next term.

Despite failing to win Trump’s endorsement, Walker has continued to court Trump’s base and echo the former president on Twitter, criticizing McCrory as a “career politician who has lost more statewide races than he’s won” and for having “attacked conservatives including President Trump.”

Walker, whose supporters include former Trump White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and ardently pro-Trump Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., previously slammed McCrory after the latter was vetted and rejected for a Trump administration job.

“If Pat wasn’t good enough for Trump’s administration, he’s not good enough for NC,” Walker tweeted, touting himself as the “most conservative and pro-Trump” member of the state’s congressional delegation.

But the state’s sitting GOP senators are not on board. Burr, who is retiring after three terms in the Senate — and who, perhaps not coincidentally, was one of the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial — has privately told “everyone” that “McCrory is the only one that can win the general election,” Politico reported in June, and has criticized Walker’s “anemic” fundraising.

Burr also said he was surprised that Trump endorsed Budd so early in the race. “I can’t tell you what motivates him,” he told Politico. “I’ve never seen individuals endorse a candidate a year before the primary. That’s unusual.”

Fellow Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, who survived a tight re-election race last year, has publicly said he has “no support for Mark Walker,” who threatened to primary him in 2020, and doesn’t think he’s “right for the job.”

In an interview with the Raleigh News & Observer, Tillis slammed Walker for his “lack of body of work and lack of name ID and lack of fundraising acumen,” predicting that “the biggest indirect supporter of financial support for Walker will come from Chuck Schumer and Democrat interests that would like to see him win the primary” because he’s not a “credible” general election candidate.

Tillis also made sure that an NBC News report in May noted that he left Walker off his list of “viable candidates” and continued to trash-talk him in a Politico interview in June.

“If I were Mark Walker,” he told the outlet, “I would not have run for the Senate because I could not see a path for myself.”

McCrory, a favorite of the party’s establishment who is best known nationally for signing the anti-LGBTQ  “bathroom bill,” has tried to position himself as the only electable candidate in the field.

“If Republicans want a majority in the U.S. Senate, they will nominate Pat McCrory,” Jordan Shaw, an adviser to the former governor, told Politico. “Otherwise, Democrats are going to take this seat and keep the majority.”

But the quarrel between Trump and McCrory, who has the highest name recognition in the race, could kneecap his chances of winning over a very pro-Trump Republican base. That has already become evident in the money race: McCrory’s early fundraising edge largely evaporated after Trump backed Budd.

When the North Carolina Republican Party sends out fundraising emails, “Donald Trump is almost always mentioned in the first paragraph, if not the first sentence,” Cooper said. “So clearly, Donald Trump is the de facto leader of the Republican Party in North Carolina. … I think the best hope McCrory has is that Walker and Budd split the hardcore Trump MAGA vote and that McCrory gets the small government, big business, banking, almost-a-libertarian conservative vote.”

While Walker and Budd openly battle for the pro-Trump lane, McCrory has said he would welcome Trump’s support but appears to be hedging his bets, likely believing that the Trump brand would be a burden in the general election.

Paul Schumaker, a consultant for McCrory, recently circulated a memo using private Republican polling to warn that Trump’s endorsement “will actually be a hindrance” to Republicans in a state that Trump won by just 1.3 points last year as suburban and unaffiliated voters abandoned him in droves, according to the Washington Post.

“McCrory has a built-in advantage having run statewide,” Bitzer said. “So he has obvious name recognition. I think he would have a little more of the establishment party behind him. Budd and Walker tend to be much more the Tea Party, Trump conservatives of the party. But I’ve been surprised that Budd hasn’t been able to capitalize more on that Trump endorsement.”

Republican consultants are clearly worried that Trump’s support could backfire in a general election. One North Carolina Republican strategist told The Hill that Trump backed “the losing horse” by backing Budd, predicting that he will “have a problem in the general.” Another state Republican operative predicted that Democrats would “hang” Trump’s endorsement “around our necks.”

“It could hurt at the margins and, in an election decided at the margins, that could be crucial,” Cooper said, noting that unaffiliated voters outnumber registered Republicans in the state.

While Budd has earned Trump’s backing early in the race, keeping it is an entirely different matter. Trump’s litmus tests for candidates change all the time, Taylor said, which could hurt Budd if Trump does anything controversial or pushes his allies into unpopular positions.

“The Trump litmus test for hardcore Trump voters could change and it might not be to the benefit of the Trump candidate,” he said. “If the Trump litmus test becomes more and more outrageous to mainstream Republicans, that’s going to presumably help McCrory and change the dynamic as to how Walker and Budd present themselves.

“If you want to make Trump the sun that you revolve around,” Taylor concluded, “then you better hope that he’s doing things that are good for your electoral chances.”

“Masterclass in cronyism”: Louis DeJoy has ties to company just awarded $120M USPS contract

U.S. lawmakers and ethics advocates on Friday reiterated calls for firing Postmaster General Louis DeJoy after The Washington Post revealed that the United States Postal Service awarded a $120 million contract to XPO Logistics, a company he helped run and “with which his family maintains financial ties.”

“Louis DeJoy is a walking conflict of interest,” declared Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.). “He had no business being named postmaster general, and he has no business continuing to serve.”

“It’s long past time to #FireDeJoy,” added Connolly, chair of the House Subcommittee on Government Operations, which has legislative jurisdiction over the Postal Service.

Connolly was far from alone in responding to the report by calling for DeJoy’s removal.

“How in the world is Louis DeJoy still the postmaster general?” asked Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.). “It is long past time to #FireDeJoy.”

DeJoy’s personal spokesperson referred most of the newspaper’s questions to USPS—whose spokesperson “said that DeJoy did not participate in the procurement process for the XPO contract, which was competitively bid.” The company’s spokesperson noted that XPO was not awarded some other contracts it sought.

Under the contract that XPO got, it will take over two centers that organize and load mail. Dena Briscoe, president of the American Postal Workers Union branch for Washington and Southern Maryland, told the Post that the move felt like a “slap in the face” to workers.

“This is the work that they’ve been doing for years and years and years,” Briscoe said, “and you’re going to segregate it away from them, put in another building, give it to a company that previously had a [top executive] that is now our postmaster general. A lot of our members are taking offense to that.”

As the Post detailed:

The new contract will deepen the Postal Service’s relationship with XPO Logistics, where DeJoy served as supply chain chief executive from 2014 to 2015 after the company purchased New Breed Logistics, the trucking firm he owned for more than 30 years. Since he became postmaster general, DeJoy, DeJoy-controlled companies, and his family foundation have divested between $65.4 million and $155.3 million worth of XPO shares, according to financial disclosures, foundation tax documents, and securities filings.

But DeJoy’s family businesses continue to lease four North Carolina office buildings to XPO, according to his financial disclosures and state property records.

The leases could generate up to $23.7 million in rent payments for the DeJoy businesses over the next decade.

Although the leases to XPO were cleared by government ethics officials before DeJoy took office last year, some experts are still critical—such as Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel at watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

“There’s no question he’s continuing to profit from a Postal Service contractor,” Canter said. “He can comply with these technical legal requirements… but it does create an appearance issue about whether it’s in his financial interest to continue to make policy that would benefit contractors like XPO.”

Friday’s calls for the USPS Board of Governors to fire DeJoy are just the latest from the past year. He has been accused of slowing down mail service before the 2020 election and now faces a criminal probe over GOP political donations; DeJoy has denied any wrongdoing on both fronts.

DeJoy’s “14-month run as postmaster general has been a masterclass in cronyism and deception,” Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) said in response to the Post reporting. “The amount of suspicion I had about him and his efforts to intentionally undermine delivery times at [USPS] could have filled the Grand Canyon. The Board of Governors should #FireDeJoy.”

Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.), who led previous calls for the board to oust the postmaster general, said Friday that “Louis DeJoy should’ve been fired long ago for his sabotage of USPS. He is under federal criminal investigation and now may be using your post office to wet his beak. The postal governors protecting him need to be fired first. This is an outrage.”

DeJoy is spearheading a controversial 10-year reform plan for USPS that would involve cutting hours, slowing first-class delivery, and raising prices—an approach that has also provoked demands for his immediate ouster.

The 10-year plan was a key focus of a Board of Governors meeting Friday—the first that included all three members appointed by President Joe Biden and confirmed by the Senate.

“Ronald Stroman, the former deputy postmaster general and one of Biden’s nominees, took the most aggressive approach in criticizing DeJoy’s plan, saying the delivery slowdowns would hinder the agency’s ability to provide prompt and reliable service without federal funding,” reported Government Executive.

According to the outlet:

He said the plan is “strategically-ill conceived, creates dangerous risks that are not justified by the relatively low financial return, and doesn’t meet our responsibility as an essential part of America’s critical infrastructure.” USPS expects to save about $170 million annually from the changes, a small fraction of its operating budget.

“There is no compelling financial reason to make this change,” Stroman said. “The relatively minor savings associated with changing service standards, even if achieved, will have no significant impact on the Postal Service’s financial future.”

Stroman accused DeJoy and the existing board members of abandoning the customers most loyal to and dependent on the Postal Service and said the plan would accelerate people and businesses turning away from the mailing system. He added that “rarely, if ever,” has a USPS policy change received such widespread pushback.

DeJoy, for his part, acknowledged to the board that the plan involves some “uncomfortable changes,” while doubling down on it: “We are confident we are headed in the right direction.”

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) disagrees. In a March letter urging DeJoy’s firing, she wrote that his “pathetic 10-year plan to weaken USPS demonstrates that he is a clear and present threat to the future of the Postal Service and the well-being of millions of Americans, particularly small business owners, seniors, and veterans, who depend on an effective and reliable USPS to conduct daily business, safely participate in democracy, and receive vital medication.”

Anti-vaxxers are getting rich thanks to this Christian crowdfunding site

As America responds to the spread of the Delta variant of COVID-19 amid surges in southern states, vaccine skeptics are raising big money online.

“Part of the reason that misinformation about vaccines is so intractable is that it can be very lucrative,” Aaron Mak reported for Slate. “Now, vaccine skeptics with large followings are turning to crowdfunding platforms—both the relatively obscure GiveSendGo and the decidedly mainstream GoFundMe—to monetize their activities, often to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

GiveSendGo describes itself as, “a place for Christians. A place to fund hope. A place to pray and connect with the body of Christ around the world. A place not only to raise money but a place for givers , senders and goers to work together to be the light of the world.”

Slate reported GiveSendGo has “also become the preferred tool for far-right figures to raise cash for fringe causes, and not entirely by accident.”

“It became notorious this January when members of the Proud Boys and other extremist groups used the site to fund travel and supplies for the Capitol riot, and then to raise money to cover legal fees after many of them were arrested,” Slate reported.

The article cited a few examples of fundraising efforts that have netted vaccine skeptics big money.

“A crowdfunding campaign for ‘independent journalist’ Ivory Hecker, for instance, has raised nearly $200,000 to support her ‘true journalism.’ It’s not entirely clear what the money is being spent on, but Hecker achieved infamy in June when she was working as a local reporter for Fox 26 Houston and interrupted a weather report to allege that the network was ‘muzzling’ her,” Slate reported. “Former Facebook employee and self-styled ‘whistleblower’ Morgan Kahmann has enjoyed even more success on GiveSendGo, raising more than $508,000.”

 

Malcolm Nance bashes Ben Shapiro for misunderstanding authoritarianism on ‘Real Time’

National security analyst Malcom Nance ridiculed far-right provocateur Ben Shapiro for not understanding authoritarianism on Friday night’s “Real Time” on HBO.

Host Bill Maher noted Shapiro’s new book, published in July 2021, is titled, The Authoritarian Moment.

“With Tucker Carlson in Hungary right now, kissing up to the dictator Victor Orbán, I thought it would be a great time to talk about your book The Authoritarian Moment.”

“Which, I must say, I’m not being snarky here, when I saw the title I thought, ‘Oh, he’s writing about Trump.’ But you’re not, your thesis is the authoritarian moment is coming from the left,” Maher noted.

Nance ridiculed the thesis.

“It’s a nice title for his book and I think a lot of people who think he’s talking about real authoritarianism could be trapped into giving you $28.99,” Nance said.

“Oh, I said, ‘be nice,'” Maher interjected.

Watch via HBO:

Tucker Carlson’s Hungary trip culminates with rant calling immigrants “chaos and filth and crime”

Tucker Carlson’s trip to Hungary culminated Friday with an unhinged segment advocating for America to adopt stringent immigration laws similar to that of Viktor Orbán’s “illiberal democracy,” slamming recent arrivals to the United States as “chaos and filth and crime growing all around us.”

He started the diatribe with a reference to a recent news report out of Minnesota, in which an undocumented immigrant from Cuba, 42-year-old Alexis Saborit, allegedly beheaded a woman in broad daylight.

“It didn’t need to happen,” Carlson says, and only did because “authorities refused to deport him.”

“He had rights,” the Fox host added with a sneer.

He went on to slam the “news media” for not reporting the fact that Saborit was in the country illegally — though it’s unclear what reports Carlson was referring to, given the murder happened last week and ICE hadn’t released his legal status until Thursday in a right-wing local Minnesota news site.

Here was where things really got heated for Carlson.

“The Biden administration did this on purpose, and they’re still doing it,” he said “And that is exactly why Democrats become hysterical when you mention the obvious successes that are on display here in Hungary on the immigration question. They don’t want you to know that there is an option to the chaos and filth and crime growing all around us.”

Newsmax sends reporter to heckle Fox News for not airing Mike Lindell’s wild “cyber symposium” ad

Newsmax continued its never-ending campaign to troll fellow conservative cable outlet Fox News this week, sending a single reporter to picket its larger rival’s office building in New York City. 

The one-man protest appeared to be prompted by Fox News’ decision to not air an ad for election conspiracy theorist and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s upcoming South Dakota “Cyber Symposium,” at which the bedtime technology magnate plans to outline the evidence he plans to use to propel former President Donald Trump back into the White House.

Lindell recently pulled all of his company’s advertising from the network over the snub — a substantial sum that will disproportionately hurt Fox News primetime stars like Tucker Carlson, whose ad revenues were being held afloat by increasingly large MyPillow buys following several high-profile advertiser boycotts in recent years.

Despite Lindell’s recent icy reception at Fox, Newsmax made sure this week to communicate that the self-made businessman and former crack addict is always welcome on its airwaves. In fact, an analysis from Media Matters for America found that his ad has been aired more than 150 times this week already.

“So, folks, it is time now for some pillow talk,” Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield said during his Wednesday evening program. “MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell recently pulled his ads from Fox News. Why? Because Fox News is refusing to run a paid TV ad promoting Mike Lindell’s upcoming cyber symposium. Newsmax is airing these ads. Apparently, free speech and pro-Trump messaging is considered fringe at Fox, but not here.

We’ve been airing Mike Lindell’s ad, and when they refused, Fox, we sent out our Newsmax correspondent Mike Carter to ask the people why they think Fox News is so afraid of Mike Lindell.”

Newsmax then cut to a video of reporter Mike Carter running around the streets of New York City asking random folks about Lindell. The Newsmax reporter also brought a custom picket sign and lobbed question at Fox News from outside of their midtown Manhattan highrise. 

“Here at Newsmax, we believe in a good night’s sleep, so we’re running that ad,” Carter said. “And today, we’re taking Fox News to the mattresses… We have a Fox News alert, we have a banned pillow salesman!”

“Why does Fox News hate a good night’s sleep?!” he asked. 

Returning from the segment, Stinchfield offered the Newsmax reporter praise. 

“Mike Carter, great job right there. Hey, I’ll tell you what — Mike Lindell, if you’re listening, I’ll air your ads right on this program. I’ll do it for $25 million, half-price, ok?” he stated. “That’s a deal, probably a lot less than that.”

A Fox News spokesperson didn’t return a Salon request for comment. 

The pillow chief appeared proud of the Newsmax trolling, relaying to Salon how ashamed Fox News should feel. “Shame on Fox News,” Lindell told Salon on Thursday. “Shame on Fox!”

Not just Paris: How did the “celebrity who can’t cook” become food TV’s fastest growing genre?

Paris Hilton can’t really cook. This was evident during her pandemic-born YouTube series “Cooking with Paris,” during which she made her “infamous” Sliving Lasagna. “Sliving,” it should be noted, is Hilton’s new catchphrase; it’s a portmanteau of “slaying” and “living.” (Though Hilton appears fixated on getting “sliving” to be a thing, it hasn’t caught on yet.)

Over the course of the 15-minute video, Hilton, who was dressed in a shimmering rainbow shirt, spent an inordinate amount of time puttering around her new kitchen on the hunt for various utensils: a cheese grater, a spatula, something appropriate for stirring five tubs of ricotta cheese. 

She offered up a few tips so offbeat that they almost registered as camp. After adding too much salt to a bowl, Hilton demonstrated her “towel trick,” which involved wiping out the excess with a dampened paper towel. Despite the fact that Hilton forgot to add garlic and onion to her sauce, she demonstrated how she had actually brought a pair of glittery sunglasses into the kitchen to don while cutting onions so her mascara wouldn’t run. 

“Lasagna is very hard to make,” she said. “Well, actually, I don’t think it is, but people think it is. But it’s actually really fun and really easy. But, I guess it is a lot of steps compared to, like, making toast or something.” 

While the final product didn’t look too shabby — the lasagna had a golden-brown, bubbling top after spending about 40 minutes in the oven — Hilton’s lack of kitchen prowess is evident yet again in her new Netflix series, also titled “Cooking with Paris.” 

The premise of the series is simple and, on its face, doesn’t diverge too much from the format of beloved cooking programs like “Barefoot Contessa.” Hilton chooses a theme for dinner, goes out and does the shopping, decorates her home and prepares a meal for a special guest. However, we’re not roasting chicken for Jeffrey here. 

Instead, Hilton does things like pay an events company to pack her dining room with thousands of white balloons while she cooks breakfast (read as: attempts to cut marshmallows that aren’t set and burns French toast) with Kim Kardashian.

Over the course of the season, Hilton asks Siri, “What does lemon zest mean?” She also asks a grocery store employee what chives look like and what you do with them. Hilton even spits out her own food in the sink, and when a batch of ravioli doesn’t come out, pulls some of the pre-made Eataly variety from her fridge as she encourages viewers to always have a backup plan. 

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In all, the show feels like an elaborate joke, though one that Hilton is obviously in on — a vanity project that seems more meant to sell a collection of “Sliving” cooking gloves than to demonstrate skill. Yet while watching the rainbow and glitter-decked spectacle, I found myself wondering what we expect of cooking shows these days, anyway? Hilton isn’t the only celebrity to take a stab at hosting a contemporary stand-and-stir with the added curveball that they aren’t a trained cook. 

Over the past year, Amy Schumer, Ludacris and Selena Gomez (“Amy Schumer Learns to Cook,” “Luda Can’t Cook” and “Selena + Chef,” respectively) have all taken on similar gigs.

How, exactly, did we go from watching Jacques Pépin flip a perfect omelet with impeccable technique to watching Ludacris struggle to open an aluminum can? 

***

One of the first food TV programs, “Cooks Night Out,” aired on the BBC in 1937. It was hosted by Marcel Boulestin, a French chef and restaurateur, who created a five-episode series during which he demonstrated how to cook five different dishes, including an omelet, filet de sole Murat, escalope de veau Choisy, a salad and crêpes flambées. They could be cooked separately or as a five-course meal. 

As Mario Bustillos wrote in his essay “The Chef for Every Age,” the show’s target audience was upper-class individuals who could afford then-very expensive TV sets, but whose at-home cooking staff had already shoved off for the evening. 

By the time food TV made its way to the States in the ’40s, by way of beloved programs like James Beard’s “I Love to Eat” and Julia Child’s “The French Chef,” the tone was decidedly more egalitarian. Both Beard’s and Child’s passion for culinary education was born from a love of good food. “Once you have mastered a technique, you barely have to look at a recipe again,” Child once said. 

The Food Network launched in 1993, with the original brand positioning of “TV for people who cook.” The original lineup for the network included Donna Hannover, Robin Leach, Emeril Lagasse and Jacques Pépin. Within the year, the network also acquired the rights to the Child’s library. And while the first several years were successful for the burgeoning network, audience interest shot through the roof as the branding was changed in 1997 to “TV for everyone who loves to eat.” 

It’s a subtle but significant change that signaled a shift in mainstream food media: You don’t have to be a good cook to enjoy our programming. As long as you like to eat, our chefs can guide you.

Of course, Food Network was created, at least in part, to educate — but more than that, it was created to inspire confidence in home cooks. Viewers who spend 30 minutes watching “Barefoot Contessa” or “East Meets West” finish feeling as though they can cook like Ina Garten and Ming Tsai. That’s the magic of aspirational food TV. As Allen Salkin, the author of the Food Network history book “From Scratch,” told me in 2017, thus began an “almost a two-decade tradition at Food Network of an underlying theme that anybody should be able to cook.” 

The concept that everyone can cook also became the foundation of some of the network’s most popular programming. In 2005, “The Next Food Network Star” was launched. It put talented home cooks alongside industry members in a competition to earn their own cooking series. In 2016, the network released the series “Cooks vs. Cons,” which pitted two home cooks against two pros to see whose kitchen skills reign supreme. Their identities are concealed from the judges until the very end. 

The amateurs try to con the judges into thinking they’re a real chef, while the pros simply try to prevent the “embarrassment” of being beaten out by a real estate agent or a high school geography teacher. 

“It’s on everybody’s mind that they all want to be a chef,” judge Geoffrey Zakarian said during a Food Network Q&A. “So it’s very fun for people to imagine trying to trick someone like myself and two judges into [believing they’re] a chef, so I think it really sets up their interest first.”

***

As Food Network continued to flourish — and following the publication of radically insider books like Anthony Bourdain’s  “Kitchen Confidential” — the cultural perception of chefs also began to shift. While the phrase “chefs are the new rockstars” was eventually repeated to the point of parody (so much so that there was a 2013 festival called CHEFStock), restaurants became destinations for some diners who wanted to brush against a different kind of celebrity. 

While chefs became celebrities, some celebrities sought to become recognized as chefs — or at least as talented home cooks and entertainers. In 2012, singer Trisha Yearwood debuted “Trisha’s Southern Kitchen,” which won a Daytime Emmy the next year.

In 2015, actress Valerie Bertinelli launched her Food Network show “Valerie’s Home Cooking,” in which she was advertised as “more than a successful actress” and “a homegrown whiz in the kitchen.” That same year, Tiffani Thiessen of “Beverly Hills: 90210” began hosting her Cooking Channel series “Dinner at Tiffani’s.” Also in 2015, former NFL player Eddie Jackson won “The Next Food Network Star” and remains in heavy rotation on the network. 

While there were some nods to the hosts’ celebrity — watching “Trisha’s Southern Kitchen,” for example, you knew it was only a matter of time until her husband and fellow country star Garth Brooks walked into the kitchen —they otherwise operated like a standard stand-and-stir TV show. 

At some point, the cooking show genre skewed yet again, and people who couldn’t cook took a turn in the celebrity spotlight. In 2010, “Worst Cooks in America” debuted on Food Network. The premise was simple: Two heralded celebrity chefs take on the task of transforming useless home cooks into seasoned semi-pros. While it could be argued that the show was a modern, if slightly snarky, interpretation of the network’s “everyone can cook” ethos, it also elevated amateurism as entertainment. 

This isn’t a surprising development; reality TV has long mined the trials and tribulations of average folks for drama and cringe, and countless viewers are primed for those types of shows. From this swirl of entertainment, education, amateur and celebrity comes this new genre of culinary programming: celebrities who struggle to wield a knife but are going to take a stab at hosting a cooking show, anyway. 

Perhaps this is because they’re genuinely interested in becoming better home cooks; for what it’s worth, that seems to be the case for Gomez, whose show “Selena + Chef” features her virtually cooking alongside experts like Angelo Sosa, Antonia Lofaso, Candice Kumai, Daniel Holzman, Ludo Lefebvre, Nancy Silverton, Nyesha Arrington, Roy Choi and Tanya Holland. 

For some of the other hosts, I have a sense that these were merely pandemic projects. As production schedules, tours and concerts came to a screeching halt, celebrities were notoriously not OK. (Remember the ill-advised celebrity cover of “Imagine”?) Getting into the kitchen perhaps seemed like an easy way to connect with one’s fan base.

I’m not sure that it’s necessarily a bad thing. It’s natural that as a genre continues to develop, a spectrum begins to develop. The Olympics airs alongside “Wipeout.” You’ve got prestige dramas and “F-boy Island.” And “Chef’s Table” is available on the same streaming service as “Cooking with Paris.” After all, everyone can cook. 

 

For more stories about how food television (and our relationship with it) has changed over time, read these: 

In Richard Trumka, the U.S. labor movement loses one of its best leaders

Richard Trumka, longtime president of the AFL-CIO, has died of a heart attack at the age of 72. There is much to admire about Trumka’s career. He will be remembered in part for his failure to turn around the downward trajectory of the American labor movement, but that’s in part because people often don’t understand either how the labor movement works or the structural issues in the way of rebuilding labor.

Born in 1949 in Nemacolin, Pennsylvania, Trumka grew up in a true working-class family. His father was a Polish-American coal miner at the height of the United Mine Workers of America’s (UMWA) power. John L. Lewis, its long-time president, had built that union into a force, creating the Congress of Industrial Organizations to organize the nation’s industrial workforce, and developing a fearless union that would even strike during World War II. Trumka grew up in this milieu. He also grew up in a transitional time. Many blue-collar kids would follow their fathers to the mines and mills of America. Trumka did this for awhile, going to work in the mines in 1968. But this was a time when many working-class kids had the chance to go to college and live a different life from their parents. Trumka did this, too. He graduated from Pennsylvania State University in 1971 and Villanova University Law in 1974.

Trumka could easily have taken his education and lived an easy life in a white-collar job. He could have represented corporations with that law degree. He did not. He would never turn his back on blue-collar America. He used his education to become a fierce fighter for the rights of working Americans. In 1974, on graduation from law school, the UMWA hired him as a staff attorney. He worked as a union lawyer for the next five years. He rose quickly. In 1981, he won election to District 4 of the UMWA and then, in 1982, replaced Sam Church as union president. He was only 33 years old at the time, a mere child compared to the ancient ages of most union presidents.

Trumka was a breath of fresh air as president of the UMWA. That union had gone through a tumultuous 15 years before Trumka took the helm. On the retirement of John Lewis, the union had a culture best described as a dictatorship with leadership more interested in protecting their privileges than representing workers. Lewis created that dictatorship, but he always fought for his workers. By the time the corrupt Tony Boyle took over, it was just a dictatorship indifferent to workers and hostile to any kind of union democracy. Boyle had his challenger Jock Yablonski brutally murdered in his home in 1970, leading the president into prison. Miners for Democracy, a rank-and-file movement to change the culture of the UMWA, broke the dictatorship, but then its leader Arnold Miller also tried to rule as an autocrat. Church later took over for Miller. He was a weak president, noted for once punching someone who leaked union business to the press, but also one without that much support. When Trumka ran against him, Church red-baited him, saying he was supported by communists, a ridiculous allegation. But Trumka whipped Church by a 2 to 1 margin.

What Trumka brought to the UMWA was a renewed militancy and a culture of solidarity. The 1980s were a terrible time for American labor. Reagan had fired the air traffic controllers in 1981, setting off a round of union-busting that decimated organized labor for the rest of that decade and beyond. Trumka led the biggest exception to this dark era. The 1989 Pittston Coal strike was epic. The strike began when the Pittston Coal Company canceled the health benefits of 1,500 retirees, disabled miners and widows. They focused heavily on nonviolent civil disobedience. They opened a sort of women’s auxiliary to the strike. The Daughters of Mother Jones as they were known, named after the legendary mineworkers’ organizer, conducted a sit-in at the Pittston headquarters in Virginia. Mineworkers began blockading roads into plants, leading to their arrests. This was illegal, but all nonviolent.

The illegality cost the union big time. The courts served the UMWA with millions in fines for its actions while ignoring the company thugs that were provoking the union and committing crimes that it then blamed on the union. Again, when the law is entirely on the side of companies, at what point do workers have the right to disobey the law? Finally, 98 miners and one minister conducted a sit-in at a Pittston mill.

Wildcat strikes also began spreading with up to 37,000 workers who were not UMWA members going on unauthorized strikes to not only put pressure on Pittston, but to protest terrible working conditions and poor-health care in the non-union mines.

The Pittston strike finally ended on February 20, 1990. It was nearly a total success. Miners again received their benefits. Pittston had to pay $10 million toward the health care of the miners who had retired before 1974. The mines could stay open with extended shifts, but the amount miners had to work was limited by the agreement. The UMWA got the fines against them dropped (which had included $13,000 a day against individual union officials and a total of $64 million against the union) in exchange for 10,000 hours of community service, which spread among the members, wasn’t too bad.

Trumka’s leadership was decisive in the UMWA during the Pittston strike. He became one of the big hopes for a revitalized American labor movement and he rode this into the leadership of the AFL-CIO. In 1995, John Sweeney, from the Service Employee International Union, ran a dark horse campaign to replace the retiring AFL-CIO head Lane Sweeney. Trumka was the Secretary-Treasurer nominee on Sweeney’s New Voice campaign that won, ushering in a new day for the labor movement. The Cold War fighting past was replaced by a new emphasis on organizing and building for a new era. As Secretary-Treasurer, Trumka was seen as Sweeney’s heir apparent.

It was during this period that I met Trumka. I was involved in campaigns at the University of Tennessee between 1997 and 2000 to focus on labor rights. In 1999, my co-organizers and I held a labor teach-in at the university. This event spurred the organizing of UT’s workers into the United Campus Workers, today an affiliate of the Communication Workers of America. Even though Tennessee is a right-to-work state, the UCW became a model of how to organize even in a place where you will never win a contract. Anyway, Trumka was gracious enough to attend and speak at our teach-in. He even took time to meet with myself and the other student organizers personally, giving us an inspirational speech about the work we were doing. It was great.

Sweeney’s reforms were incomplete when he chose to retire and Trumka took over as AFL-CIO president in 2009. Now, to understand Trumka’s work here, we need to take step back and look at what the AFL-CIO actually does. First, it is not a union. It is a federation of unions. Even major newspapers will confuse this point. It really matters. Trumka may have been the head of the American labor movement for the last 12 years, but it is more of an honorary head than a dictator. Made up of dozens of different unions, the federation is rife with infighting. This shouldn’t surprise us. Organized labor is a diverse movement. There are unions dominated by left-liberals and there are unions with a lot of conservative members. The building trades don’t often have a lot in common with the public sector. The service-based unions, made up of people of color and immigrants, may be openly hostile to the police unions, who share that contempt right back. Trumka had to manage the big egos of union heads. Everything he would say was going to anger someone else in the labor movement.

This doesn’t mean we can’t criticize Trumka’s leadership. His first term as president was quite progressive, but things slowed down after about 2015. He placed less emphasis on organizing over time. Connections with worker centers, spaces where low-wage and often undocumented workers can fight for their rights outside the labor movement, frayed. I often disagreed with Trumka on his approach to one of the trickiest issues in organized labor—climate change and green energy. The Laborers Union has led the way inside the labor tent in fighting green energy with its president, Terry O’Sullivan, often denigrating alternative energy sources and antagonizing other unions that tried to ally the labor movement with environmentalists. O’Sullivan fights for his members’ jobs and we all need to understand that. But the future of life on this planet is at stake. Trumka could have done a lot more to push back against the building trades on this. On the other hand, those trades could also just leave the AFL-CIO. Lots of unions do not belong to the federation. He could not push that hard.

But even had Trumka remained a great forward-thinking leader into his later years, there wasn’t too much he could do to turn around the struggles of labor in America. He had close relationships with Barack Obama and especially Joe Biden, but organized labor has become a junior partner in the Democratic Party, with moderates often indifferent or even opposed to its demands. You can put all the money into organizing you want. It doesn’t mean it will win in the face of a labor law regime captured by corporate America with its ability to run intensive anti-union campaigns that scare people into voting no in union elections. How much union resources should go to campaigns that are not going to bring new members into the labor movement? These are not always easy questions to answer. It’s a lot easier to scream “ORGANIZE” than it is to be in Trumka’s position trying to navigate the rickety ship called the SS Labor.

Trumka nearly retired in 2017, but did not. He likely would have retired in the meantime, but with his heir apparent Liz Shuler, the present Secretary-Treasurer of the federation and now acting president facing a real challenge from Association of Flight Attendants president Sara Nelson, one not dissimilar to the one he and Sweeney had that won in 1995, he chose to stay on for the time being. His close relationship with Biden has paid off. Democratic presidents have largely ignored unions for decades—Carter and Clinton were terrible on organized labor’s issues and Obama wasn’t much better, especially in his first term. On the other hand, Joe Biden made a statement directly supporting the attempt to organize Amazon in Alabama, an unprecedented positive intervention into an organizing campaign by a sitting president. It may not have worked—workers still lost the union vote through a brutal anti-union campaign from Amazon. But Trumka convinced Biden to tell the nation how much he supported unions. Moreover, Trumka helped bridge the gap between the Biden administration’s support of green energy projects and the building trades’ hostility toward them, creating space for real discussion between the president and the labor movement. This was Trumka at his best and most useful.

Trumka also helped steer labor away from its traditional anti-immigrant platform to become of the biggest progressive allies of the immigrant rights movement. He stood strong against racism, including giving a speech in 2008 rejecting the racism pointed at Barack Obama, that got a tremendous amount of attention. Targeting union members who expressed reservations about a Black candidate, Trumka’s speech was a statement that racism was no longer welcome in the labor movement.

In the end, Trumka wasn’t a saint. But he was one of the best leaders the American labor movement has ever seen. Whether you think that’s a low bar or not depends on your perspective. But he worked hard to move the labor movement in a direction that pointed the way toward justice, which the movement had largely abandoned from the 1950s to the 1990s. That he wasn’t able to organize the masses of Americans is hardly his fault. He had his weaknesses and maybe hung around a little too long, maybe got a bit out of touch with the workers he represented. But in the pantheon of American union federation leaders, we should remember Trumka as one of the very best.

“Val” captures the bittersweet paradox of Kilmer’s life and art, both hamstrung by his own intensity

Val Kilmer creates his own paradoxes. He was an intense, promising young actor who wanted to play Hamlet and worshipped Marlon Brando (what young male actor doesn’t?), but his early film roles are in the goofball comedies, “Top Secret,” and “Real Genius.” He is a perfectionist but often frustrated by directors on set, and therefore, frequently called “difficult.” (If one alleged rumor about Kilmer is to be believed, he was so hated during the shooting of “The Saint” that some of the Russian crew approached director Phillip Noyce with an offer to hire a hitman. Apparently, Noyce considered it before politely declining, explaining that he might need Kilmer for reshoots — which proved to be the case).

With the Amazon documentary “Val,” Kilmer acknowledges another paradox. Midway through this film, he muses about “selling his old self and career” which is often a low point for many performers. But, he concedes, doing this now, at this stage in his career is an experience more gratifying than humiliating. 

“Val” takes a bittersweet stroll down memory lane as directors Ting Poo and Leo Scott nimbly trace Kilmer’s life and career from inception to the present in 108 minutes. Kilmer talks about his hits and missed opportunities, his triumphs and tribulations off screen, and makes poignant observations about the decision points he faced in what he calls his “magical life.” The film joins the growing list of documentaries by and about actors who documented their lives and careers as they were happening. (See “Love, Antosha” and Soleil Moon-Frye’s “Kid 90” as recent examples). But while there is much to appreciate in evaluating Kilmer’s life and career here, the film feels more like clips assembled from an extended DVD commentary.  

“Val” opens with images of collaging, and the filmmakers assemble their own collage with this film. They have Jack Kilmer, Val’s son, effectively read the narration because Val’s voice has been compromised following a bout with throat cancer. (Kilmer speaks using a voice box). They knit together not just Kilmer’s copious video footage, but his audition tapes (for roles in film by Kubrick and Scorsese that he never got), behind-the-scenes moments (Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon moon Kilmer), home movies (of his family, including his late brother and their early filmmaking efforts), along with interviews. Scenes filmed in the present day have Kilmer revisiting his old haunts, Julliard and London, or attending a screening of “Tombstone” in Texas. Viewers will wax nostalgic as Kilmer is seen at the “Top Gun” premiere with his date Cher, or empathize with him as he falls ill during a Comic-Con signing. 

Kilmer wants this documentary to tell a story about truth and illusion, and while he is often candid, his bias colors the reality. Cases in point: Hired for the lead role in the off-Broadway play “Slab Boys,” Kilmer gets demoted twice(!) when Bacon and then Penn are cast. He fulfills a contract to play Iceman in “Top Gun” and complains about the thin script, recounting the backstory he creates to flesh out his arrogant character. He accepts the “dream job” of “Batman,” but finds himself unable to perform in the rubberized suit and declines playing the role again, choosing to make “The Saint,” where he can create 10 characters in one film. 

These revelations have moments of insight about the life and work of an actor. However, there are only a few useful nuggets — as when Kilmer describes wanting to lie on a bed of ice for his deathbed scene in “Tombstone” so he can feel the discomfort his character, Doc Holliday, must have been experiencing. Less impactful is Kilmer describing the year he spent wearing leather pants and learning how to move like Jim Morrison in preparation for “The Doors.” His commitment to his craft as a method actor is never questioned, but “Val” lets viewers connect the dots about what all his efforts accomplished, and some may not be bothered. 

 “Val” often glosses over things that are of potential interest. When Kilmer finally gets to work with Brando on the “doomed” production of “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” there is one limited exchange with the legendary actor. (Reportedly, they did not get along, which begs for a meet-your-idols response). At least a fight Kilmer has with director John Frankenheimer, and his chats with his beleaguered costar David Thewlis are interesting.

Kilmer acknowledges that for an actor, once you agree to the role, you have to forget your life for a period of time. This is hardly a groundbreaking pronouncement, but it feeds into his commitment to play Mark Twain in a one-man show he wrote called “Citizen Twain.” Alas, his health fails which derails his future plans for the show. 

The moral of “Val,” may be that Kilmer is his own worst enemy, an idea that gives the film its diffused power. It is not unlike Kilmer’s commitment to Christian Science — his faith is what he claims gets him through, but his self-esteem still keeps taking repeated beatings. “Val” certainly engenders sympathy, but at times it feels like crocodile tears. 

A sad story from Kilmer’s personal life supports this assumption. When his father, a real estate developer, has Val cosign papers for a deal — and puts his son’s name on a number of shell companies without permission — Kilmer is forced to either sue or write a check. It is another paradox for the actor. What he does explains much about his character. If only “Val” was always so eye-opening.

“Val” is available to stream on Aug. 6 on Amazon Prime.

The Paloma is the perfect, simple summer cocktail — you can make one with as few as two ingredients

As a child, grapefruit was the flavor of deprivation — those sour diet breakfasts of Grandmother’s when she decided it was time to cut back. The bitter taste of restriction, of depriving yourself of what you really want, lingered well into adulthood. But I came around to grapefruit, especially the redder varieties that offer just a hint of sweetness with the sour. Have grapefruits gotten better, or has my palate simply grown? A riddle that may never be entirely solved. 

Not all diets need to be built on deprivation, though — sometimes what we need less of aren’t indulgences but complications, itineraries, dedication to things that may or may not actually nourish us. As an adult with a typically over-scheduled life, I’ve also come to appreciate how simplifying and streamlining can improve my ability to enjoy the moment rather than always planning three steps ahead. Some days, my joy is located in executing a complex process. But other days, all I want is my time and mental energy freed from their commitments so they can wander in new and surprising directions.

Enter the Paloma, the perfect simple summer cocktail. You can make a Paloma with as few as two ingredients — tequila and grapefruit soda, an ingredient sure to trouble Grandmother’s diet’s ghost — but it’s best with the juice of half a lime added, just for an extra tart acid kick. Still, it’s about as easy as grown-up cocktails get. Add salt or Taijín to the rim, if you like. Throw a wedge of grapefruit or a lime wheel on for a garnish, if you can be bothered. But don’t sweat it at all if not. The Paloma is the quintessential “don’t go to any trouble” cocktail that delivers every time. 

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“Meehan’s Bartender’s Manual,” one of my go-to sources, doesn’t quite arrive at a definitive origin for this Mexican cocktail — an apocryphal recipe pamphlet “Popular Cocktails of the Rio Grande,” a venerable bartender in the town of Tequila who disavows its creation — but Meehan does cite cocktail historian David Wondrich’s finding that Squirt soda claims it’s been used as a tequila mixer in Mexico since the ’50s. 

If, like me, you find your refrigerator more likely to stock whole grapefruit or grapefruit juice and club soda these days — and you don’t want to make a special trip out to pick up grapefruit soda — just use the juice and club soda, plus some simple syrup if you’re using fresh-squeezed juice instead of bottled. The point of the Paloma, this summer at least, is to stop overthinking for a while — and live in the moment as best you can.  

Ingredients:

Serving size: one beverage

  • 2 oz. reposado tequila
  • 1/2 oz. lime juice (fresh squeezed is best; most limes yield about 1 oz. of juice)
  • 4 oz. grapefruit soda (such as Squirt, Jarritos or Crush Grapefruit)*
  • Salt or Tajín seasoning for the rim (optional)
  • Grapefruit or lime wheel for garnish (optional)

*You can also break down the components to 2 oz. fresh grapefruit juice, 1/2 oz. simple syrup and sparkling water, with or without grapefruit flavor.

Gear:

You don’t need any specialty equipment to mix a simple cocktail. Improvise with what you have — a Mason jar with a lid makes a fine shaker in a pinch. But here’s what I keep at hand:

Instructions:

Add a salt or Taijín rim to your glass, if you’re feeling fancy. Add tequila and lime juice — and grapefruit juice and simple syrup, if you’re going that route — to a shaker with ice, then shake vigorously for 30 seconds, then strain over ice and top with soda. 

Variations:

If you’re more of a mezcal fan, swap out the tequila for a smokier version. Add 1/2 oz. each of orange and lemon juices to your basic Paloma, and you’ve got a Cantarito. Herbs that pair well with grapefruit can be infused in simple syrups to add an extra dimension of sophistication. Also, I recently had a divine variation at Cleveland’s venerable Prosperity Social Club that added a touch of pomegranate liqueur to the base and subbed in a grapefruit Hefeweizen for the soda. 

More Oracle Pour:

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