Michigan Republicans gave themselves COVID bonuses. Now they have to return the money

Among the many that were allowed to use COVID-19 funds without much oversight was a conservative Michigan town where county commissioners used the allotted money to pay themselves bonuses.

According to The Guardian, called out Shiawassee County commissioners were told by prosecutors that the payments were illegal and that they had to be paid back. The Argus Press reported the incident to the local community, explaining that the Michigan state constitution doesn’t allow such compensation “after services had already been rendered,” prosecutor Scott Koerner explained.

It was July 15 when commissioners voted 6 to 0 to give themselves all $65,000 out of the $557,000 they voted to give to 250 county staffers as “hazard pay” during the COVID disaster.

“The smallest amounts for recipients were $1,000 to $2,000. But the chairman of the county board, Jeremy Root, got $25,000. Two commissioners received $10,000 each, while four received $5,000 each,” said the report.

They gave money to elected officials, the prosecutor included a sheriff and the county clerk.

“Since these payments were made, confusion about the nature of these funds has run rampant,” a statement said.

Michigan Live reported commissioner Marlene Webster being “mortified” and claimed that she had no idea that she voted to pay herself.

One commissioner, Marlene Webster, insisted she had no idea she had voted to pay herself. She returned the money last week.

“It’s a sad day … I feel badly,” the Republican said. “It’s a blow to county workers’ morale at a time when it’s difficult to keep good workers … I think (it shows) a serious lack of acknowledgment of what people did (during the pandemic).”

She went on to claim that she would never have voted to give herself that much money, if at all.

Another report over the weekend revealed that the commissioners violated the Open Meetings Act as well, by doing the vote in a closed session. Webster also noted that she wasn’t surprised by that because “it’s not the first time Shiawassee County has been sued over this.” Its not clear why the commissioners continue then to do closed sessions like these.

Read the full report at The Guardian.

6 terrifying beauty practices from history

Chemical peels that burn layers of skin from your face. Appetite suppressants that come with a risk of heart failure. Cosmetic surgeries that change the appearance of a woman’s most intimate parts. There are plenty of modern cosmetic practices that run the gamut from physically painful to medically risky. But most don’t hold a candle to the hazardous cosmetic techniques of yore. Check out these historic beauty practices that are even scarier than modern ones.

1. Wearing corsets

You know what really turns men off? When women take deep breaths. In the 1800s, the invention of metal eyelets allowed women to cinch their corsets tighter than ever before, with acute medical consequences. In fairness, not all women tightened their corsets to the point of injury, and probably none of them achieved the 14-inch waist advertised in 19th century fashion magazines. But the stylish undergarments were often laced so tightly that they restricted women’s breathing. In the long term, wearing corsets caused muscle atrophy, deformed the ribcage, and misaligned the spine. And extreme corset use wasn’t just limited to women, as indicated by the warped ribs of a 19th-century Englishman whose body was excavated in the early 2000s. The study authors felt that it was likely an orthopedic corset, but noted “corset use to obtain a fashionable silhouette cannot be ruled out.”

2. Eating arsenic

In the 19th century and earlier, some people (mainly in Styria, a region that encompassed parts of modern Austria and Slovenia) consumed arsenic to “produce a blooming complexion, a brilliant eye, and an appearance of embonpoint [sexy stoutness],” according to one 1857 magazine article on the practice. There were safety rules, of course: You were only supposed to take it while the moon was waxing, and you could only eat only a dose as big as a single grain of millet at first. If you took more than that before you built up a tolerance, you could die. Once you began eating arsenic regularly, though, if you ever stopped, you’d suffer from painful withdrawal symptoms like vomiting and muscle spasms. But wait, there was another downside—because arsenic interferes iodine necessary for thyroid function, eating it gave people goiters. Blooming, brilliant, embonpoint goiters.

3. Foot binding

A tradition that likely started around the late 10th century, foot binding was designed to turn a woman’s feet into 3-inch-long “golden lotuses” by folding the toes under and binding them tightly. The extremely painful practice began when a child was as young as 3 to 4 years old and continued into adulthood. The resulting wobbly walk and doll-like feet were considered highly attractive and vital to a woman’s marriage prospects. This one isn’t limited to the distant past, either: Foot binding wasn’t completely stamped out until China’s Communist Revolution in 1949, and there are still living Chinese women who feet were bound as children.

4. Applying radioactive face cream

In the early 20th century, before anyone knew about the health risks of radiation, radioactive consumer products were all the rage. In the 1930s, an enterprising doctor named Alfred Curie capitalized his association with the famous radioactive researchers (who he definitely wasn’t related to) to launch Tho-radia, a French cosmetics brand whose products featured radioactive chemicals like thorium chloride and radium bromide. Advertisements for his face cream claimed that the radioactive formula could stimulate “cellular vitality,” firm up skin, cure boils and pimples, even out redness and pigmentation, erase wrinkles, stop aging, and help retain the “freshness and brightness of the complexion.” It’s all vitality and brightness until someone’s jaw falls off.

5. Making eyedrops out of deadly nightshade

Deadly nightshade is also called belladonna, or “beautiful woman,” a likely reference to its role in the cosmetic routines of ladies in Renaissance Italy and beyond. Italian women — and later, women in Victorian England — would squeeze drops of deadly nightshade into their eyes to dilate their pupils for a striking, wide-eyed look they thought was seductive. Unfortunately, the side effects included blurry vision, vertigo, and headaches. And the blindness reported to result from its extended use? Worth it, as long as you got the watery-eyed look of a consumptive. The active ingredient in deadly nightshade, atropine, is still used today to dilate the eyes during eye exams, but unlike the cosmetic belladonna drops of the past, the highly diluted modern versions won’t blind you.

6. Using lead makeup

The 1700s were rough on the complexion. Even if you don’t count the miasmic filth in which even the richest people lived, there was smallpox to contend with — by the end of the 18th century, an estimated 400,000 Europeans were dying of it every year. If you were lucky enough to survive, the disease left severe scarring. The best way to cover these pockmarks and other cosmetic imperfections was lead face powder, and both men and women took advantage of it. It’s great stuff — inexpensive and easy to make, coats well, and has a silky finish. Except even then, it was known to be wildly toxic. Not only did it cause eye inflammation, tooth rot, and baldness, but it also made the skin blacken over time, requiring yet more of the noxious powder to achieve the pure white face, shoulders, and chest that were so fashionable. Ah yes, and then there was the fact that using it could eventually kill you.

Bonus: eating tapeworms (maybe)

This controversial fad diet — which may or may not have actually existed — was not only dangerous, but also really gross. In the early 1900s, several newspaper accounts reported that women were eating pills filled with tapeworm eggs as a way to lose weight. The tapeworm eggs would supposedly hatch and take up residence in the intestine of their poor, plump host, consuming the nutrients that would otherwise be digested. This would keep the person malnourished and thin. However, even a century ago, doctors doubted people would subject themselves to this kind of pain to look good. In 1912, The Washington Post ran an article called “Tapeworm Pills For Fat People Merely A Wild Yarn, Say Experts.” But as we know, people have done crazier things in the name of beauty.

The political history of dubbing in films

English-speaking audiences rarely come across dubbed films and television programmes. This probably explains why they tend to find dubbing so, well, weird. Dubbed voices usually sound a bit flat and never quite sync up with the mouths we see onscreen. This can be off-putting and perhaps even a bit unsettling.

But since the birth of sound cinema in the late 1920s and 1930s, dubbing has been commonplace in many countries, including (looking just at Europe) Italy, Spain and Germany. Dubbing is still used in many of these countries as a way of translating foreign films and television. In Italy, the dubbing system became so developed in the 1930s that it was even used to add voices to Italian films, right up until the 1980s when the growth of TV (which used directly recorded sound) led to changes in standard industry practice.

So why did such a seemingly bizarre practice gain a foothold in these countries’ burgeoning film industries? After all, aren’t subtitles a better way to keep the original film intact and translate it at the same time? There are a few reasons.

Nationalist voices

In the early 20th century, much of Europe’s film-going population had low literacy levels. Subtitles are useless if you can’t read them (or read them fast enough). There’s also the argument that subtitles ruin a film’s images and keep the viewer’s eyes glued to the bottom of the screen. However, perhaps the most important reason for dubbing’s favour was political.

Dubbing is a brilliant tool for film censorship. Sound films began to appear in the early 1930s, a time when many countries were falling under the sway of totalitarian regimes. In Europe, these included those of Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco and the Nazis. Censorship had been a feature of film production and distribution in Italy, Spain and Germany since before these dictatorships took power, but it increased markedly after they did so.

Italy and Spain, in particular, found dubbing ideologically useful. Mussolini’s Fascists, for example, manipulated foreign films during the dubbing process by changing dialogue to remove any unflattering reference to Italy or Italians. They also used dubbing to alter morally undesirable elements of film plots. For example, the Italian dub of the 1931 American film “Men in Her Life” was altered to remove a reference to Mussolini.

Perhaps even more nefariously, they also insisted that films be dubbed into standardised national Italian (the official form of the language that was generally understood around the country). This was an effort to stop people in different regions from speaking local dialects and minority languages, and to prevent foreign words from entering Italian culture. Dubbing became a key nationalist tool that could unify and isolate Italy at a fundamental socio-cultural level.

The same story played out in Franco’s Spain where dubbing kept films ideologically acceptable and marginalised minority languages like Catalan, Basque and Galician. In post-Nazi Germany, dubbing was used to alter film dialogue to play down references to the country’s Nazi past and the atrocities it entailed. For example, the Nazis in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1946 “Notorious” were rebranded as generic drug smugglers.

International voices?

In the post-second world war period, western Europe (with the exception of Spain) broke free of totalitarianism and literacy began to increase, but dubbing remained. This was partly because it had become an established and familiar habit. But dubbing had also become vital to the system of co-production, which European cinema was increasingly reliant upon. Co-production basically involved two (or more) production companies in different countries teaming up and making a film together. It was popular with producers as it meant they could pool resources and access grants and tax relief from multiple governments.

Like censorship, co-production had been around since the early days of commercial cinema. It was (and still is) a key initiative that allowed relatively small European countries to team up and push back against the ever-growing domination of Hollywood imports. Again, dubbing was crucial here as these co-produced films usually featured casts from several countries.

Dubbing meant that each actor could act in the language of their choosing on-set (if you watch an old dubbed film closely, you can often tell that actors are speaking different languages. Sergio Leone’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” is a clear example of this practice). The films were shot without sound and a range of different dubs in different languages were produced in post-production, using various teams of voice actors.

Many film directors hated this system, seeing dubbing as a way of erasing films’ national origins. And some claimed it was part of a wider political drive to homogenise Europe (NATO and the Common Market were also driving European integration at this time). In other words, totalitarianism may have waned, but for many dubbing was still a political tool.

Dubbing is still used as a key method of audio-visual translation in many countries and it still attracts politicised debates. For example, the film market in French-speaking Canada has argued that dubs produced in European French are not appropriate for that territory. Dubbing frequently and unsurprisingly ends up at the centre of debates around the politics of language and cultural imperialism, the imposition of one country’s culture onto another country or people.

What the political history of dubbing tells us is that even seemingly minor, technical or banal elements of film and television production can serve very concrete and significant political ends. In a world increasingly saturated with audio-visual media, we should take this lesson seriously.

Damien Pollard, PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge Centre for Film & Screen, University of Cambridge

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

Does your cat love you? Here’s what the science says

Cat owners may find it preposterous that scientists even question whether cats truly love their humans.

Those who have felt their cat affectionately rub against their leg, or looked into its understanding eyes, know the solace and comfort that felines can bring. Yet cats are as motivated by food and shelter as many humans, and there is an evolutionary advantage to them feigning interest in their masters in exchange for such things. Modern science allows us to peer into animals’ brains, yet to truly know the answer to such a question would require asking animals to verbalize their feelings directly — and except for a few rare instances, animals cannot speak human languages.

One study in PLOS One suggests that cats are, at the very least, more independent than their canine counterparts. Animal behavior experts Alice Potter and Daniel Simon Mills wrote that “adult cats are typically quite autonomous, even in their social relationships, and not necessarily dependent on others to provide a sense of security and safety.” Humans may not feel the same way: A 1994 study in the journal Psychological Reports found that humans who have cats as pets feel unconditionally loved by them, and that the sense of emotional comfort and pleasure is healthy for them.

So what gives?

“Although I wish we could, we cannot get into the brains of cats and know if they feel ‘love,'” Dr. Stacy Choczynski Johnson, DVM, veterinarian on staff for Pumpkin Pet Insurance, told Salon by email. “It’s a complicated emotion and this feeling of love is up for debate.”

Yet this does not mean that it is unprovable that your cat is emotionally invested in its relationship with you.

“Cats certainly feel attachment to their owners which could be considered a form of affection or love,” Johnson added. “Even outdoor feral cats form an attachment bond because we provide food and shelter. We also bond with our cats through play and entertainment.”

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Samantha Bell, a cat behavior expert at Best Friends Animal Society, noted that cats display their sentiments toward us in observable ways.

“While there’s no scientific way to measure love in regard to cats, I do believe they can feel great affection towards humans and each other,” Bell wrote to Salon. “I can say with certainty that we can help them feel safe and comfortable. And we can tell they enjoy being around us when they sit on our laps, stick around and don’t leave, purr, etc.”

Bell noted that cats, like humans, have different ways of gauging affection — similar to the human “love languages,” a pop psychology explication of how humans express affection in different ways that is currently in vogue.

“Every cat has their own personality, and some show more affection than others,” said Bell. “I have one cat that sleeps on my pillow and another who sleeps at the foot of the bed. They both ‘love’ me, in my opinion — they just show it to varying degrees.”

Yet while cats are individually expressive, there are certain general tendencies that offer clues about their thoughts and feelings. Johnson told Salon that cats communicate through “physical, vocal and chemical cues,” from purring and blinking to sharing their pheromones by rubbing their cheeks against you. That last one is done to “mark people and objects as being familiar and comforting.” They will also illustrate trust by leaning in or arching their backs when you pet them, allowing you to access vulnerable areas like their bellies, and greeting you when you arrive and using their tongues to groom you. For that matter, if your cat tolerates your presence in areas where it might otherwise be defensive (such as its bed), that too is a sign of affection.

The reasons for these behaviors relate to evolution. For the most part, cats in the wild are solitary predators and avoid social groups (lions are an exception). Those cats that formed an alliance with humans have adapted to being in a pack, but unlike dogs they are not innately pack animals. One could argue that, in a sense, you should be honored when a cat decides that it views you as family and wants you to stick around.

“When cats are comfortable around other cats, they’ll rub on them and spend time and sleep near them,” Bell explained. “If your cat is doing these things with you, they likely see you as one of them — one of the family.”

“For the morning gays”: The importance of LGBTQ-owned cafes as sober, queer spaces

When I call Andrew Zarro on a sweltering July afternoon, he’s taking a break before he starts his second job as a councilperson in Portland, Maine. He’s just spent eight hours at Little Woodfords, his coffee shop, which is easily identifiable by the rainbow flag fluttering above the peachy-pink front door.

In both positions, he has big plans for his community.

“In Portland right now, there really are not many queer spaces and that’s a problem that we need to continue to work on as a community,” Zarro said. “How do we get back to those spaces that are designated and intentionally created for the queer community?”

He continued: “But I also like to joke and say, ‘Oh, we actually are one of those nuclear spaces. We’re just for the morning gays.'”

Little Woodfords opens everyday at 7 a.m. and closes at 3 or 4 in the afternoon. They don’t serve alcohol, but, as Zarro puts it, customers can have all the caffeine and housemade ice cream sandwiches they want. “When people think of gay spaces or queer spaces, they immediately think of a nightclub or bar — maybe a little hole in the wall,” he said. “They don’t necessarily think a bright coffee shop, but we’re happy to change that.”

Gay bars hold a deeply important place in the history of LGBTQ rights and visibility in the United States. For decades and decades, just visiting a gay bar was a high-risk activity. Raids were common and patrons would face jail time and the possibility of being outed when their name, occupation and address appeared in newspapers the next day. Through time and years of hard activism, the shroud of intense secrecy surrounding these gathering places gradually dissipated and they emerged with the joyful nightlife reputation many hold today.

For young members of the LGBTQ community, going out to a gay or lesbian bar was almost like a rite of passage.

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But amid the rise of the sober-curious movement — and as more people practice “mindful drinking,” which the New York Times described in a 2019 article as “a half-measure approach to sobriety where you drink less, perhaps think about it more” — many queer folks are looking for places where they can still feel the same sense of community while taking an occasional or permanent reprieve from alcohol.

That’s where a new generation of queer-owned and LGBTQ-friendly coffee shops are stepping in.

Growing up as a queer, Black women in Louisville, Kentucky, Arielle Clark said that she felt like there were certain “milestones” she wanted to meet to feel at home in the community: She wanted to attend Kentucky Pride and meet other LGBTQ people, and then she wanted to get into some kind of gay bar or nightclub because that’s where everyone spent time on the weekends.

When she was 18, she got into a now-defunct place called The Connection — a bustling nightclub that pulsed with music and lights. “It was the first time I experienced drag and that was absolutely amazing,” Clark said.

“As far as I knew, going out to LGBTQ nightclubs — or just nightclubs, in general — was the only way to meet other LGBTQ people aside from the internet, but you know [that’s] hit or miss,” she said. “So, I felt this pressure to drink because I was around a bunch of drunk people and I was in a bar. So, I just continued drinking.”

But once Clark reached college, she began dreaming about creating a visibsly queer gathering space outside of the clubs — one that was far more diverse than what she’d seen at Kentucky Pride and area bars, which she described as being filled with predominantly white patrons. In 2019, she established Sis Got Tea. Clark’s business is currently online, but she is in the midst of crowdfunding to raise money to open a physical location.

She has her eyes on spaces close to the University of Louisville and already has plans for the kinds of events she’d like to host in her space: open mic nights for queer erotica, dance classes centered around body acceptance, tastings with a local LGBTQ-owned chocolate shop.

However, raising funds through traditional avenues has been difficult for Clark.

“When you try to go through a bank, you really start to see the systemic barriers that are in place that prevent folks of marginalized identities from getting the funding that they need,” she said. “My family doesn’t have a nest egg — like generational oppression and generational poverty are a real thing, you know.”

She’s raising money with the help of the local community (the Sis Got Tea GoFundMe has currently raised $7,790 of their $65,000 goal) and while it’s a slower process, Clark really believes in the importance of opening a space like what she envisions.

“The goal is to just have a space where any folks of different backgrounds and different identities can come together,” she said. “But in particular, I want folks to know that it’s LGBTQ- and Black-owned so that LGBTQ folks and Black folks and those at the intersections of those identities can meet in a chill, sober cafe-style space.”

For both Clark and Zarro, continued queer visibility is important in their communities — especially as the pandemic caused many already-struggling LGBTQ-owned gathering spots to close and former president Donald Trump worked to weaken LGBTQ protections.

The day before Zarro and I spoke on the phone, the rainbow flag in front of Little Woodfords had been torn down and tossed into the street. This happens every few months, he said, along with occasional threats of violence towards him and his staff members.

“Unfortunately for now, it comes with the territory – but we make sure to get the flag right back up there,” he said. “Because representation matters and spaces like this matter.”

Read More from Salon’s Coffee Week

Cherries and goat cheese meet for a tangy, sweet grain salad

Back-of-the-box instructions for couscous yield mushy, clumpy granules. Toasting uncooked couscous in butter and garlic sets the starch in the pasta, which keeps the granules separate and prevents them from blowing out. It also adds a nutty flavor. To enhance the cooked couscous further, we added sweet, tart, and spicy flavors — dried cherries, pecans, arugula, and goat cheese. You can eat the salad immediately, but it will improve if you let the flavors meld for 30 minutes or so. Do not substitute pearl couscous in this dish, as it requires a different cooking method and will not work in this recipe.

***

Recipe: Cherry and goat cheese couscous salad
Serves 4 to 6

Ingredients

2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 cups couscous
1 cup water
1 cup chicken or vegetable broth
1 teaspoon table salt
1 cup pecans or walnuts, toasted and chopped
1 cup baby arugula, chopped
1 cup dried cherries, chopped
4 ounces goat or feta cheese, crumbled (1 cup)
6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
4 tablespoons scallions, sliced thin
3 tablespoons lemon juice

Directions

1. Melt butter in medium saucepan over medium-high heat. Stir in garlic and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add couscous and cook, stirring frequently, until grains begin to brown, about 5 minutes. Add water, broth, and salt; stir briefly to combine, cover, and remove saucepan from heat. Let sit until liquid is absorbed and couscous is tender, about 7 minutes. Uncover and fluff couscous with fork.

2. Combine pecans, arugula, cherries, goat cheese, oil, scallions, and lemon juice in a large bowl. Stir in couscous until well combined. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve.

If you like this recipe as much as we do, check out “The Complete Salad Cookbook” by America’s Test Kitchen.

The vinegary bliss of balsamic chicken

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

* * *

Though balsamic vinegar has been around for centuries, it didn’t catch on in the United States until the late 1970s, when an entrepreneur named Chuck Williams started selling the little-known Modena specialty at his little-known San Francisco store, Williams-Sonoma.

By 1980, The New York Times wrote that balsamic vinegar is “at most fine food shops for $2.79 to $3.50.” Fast-forward to 1990 and The Baltimore Sun reported, “in a little more than 10 years, balsamic vinegar has gone from utter obscurity to great renown, from the precious stocks of families in Modena, Italy, to American supermarket shelves.” And fast-forward to today and you’d be hard-pressed to find a grocery store without it.

And by it, I mean American balsamic, not unlike American Parmesan, an ingredient that has become a staple in the U.S. and, all the while, means something else entirely in Italy. The real deal — the good stuff — is known as aceto balsamico tradizionale di Modena, DOP label included. Depending on the bottle and price tag, it’s probably older than most of the cast members on the new season of Too Hot to Handle.

All that said? Don’t waste the good stuff on this recipe. Whatever balsamic you buy need be neither fancy nor schmancy. Any store brand will still lead you toward your new favorite chicken recipe — and the only other ingredients you need are butter and salt.

Like many Big Little Recipes, the balsamic comes in more than once. First, it teams up with water and salt for a brine-slash-marinade. This mixture encourages lean chicken breasts to stay juicy (aka insurance for when you forget to set a timer and get distracted by how fluffy your cat is — it happens). And what’s more, because vinegar is so acidic, a shorter marinade is ideal. Just 45 minutes to an hour, depending on when your workday wraps.

As soon as the chicken breasts are almost done cooking — this happens in about the time it takes for me to toss together a salad, which is to say, next to no time at all — more balsamic and a big hunk of butter join the pan. This effortlessly deglazes the flavorful bits stuck to the bottom, then simmers into a glossy sauce to baste the chicken, and make it feel like the only girl in the world.

And as soon as the chicken is out of the pan — you guessed it — even more balsamic. Like a squeeze of lemon over battered and fried fish, this sunny brightness wakes up all the flavors, turns on the radio alarm clock to their favorite song, tells them, c’mon, get out of bed. Get out of bed, get out of bed, it’s going to be a great day.

Recipe: Buttery Balsamic Chicken

Prep time: 1 hour 5 minutes
Cook time: 15 minutes
Serves: 2

Ingredients

Balsamic-Marinated Chicken

2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (about 1 pound total), halved horizontally

Balsamic Butter

1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter, divided
2 tablespoons balsamic, plus more for drizzling
Kosher or flaky salt, for sprinkling

Directions

Combine the balsamic and salt with 1/4 cup of cold water. Add the chicken to an airtight container or bag, then pour the balsamic brine on top, making sure all the chicken pieces are coated. Marinate for 45 minutes to 1 hour.
Remove the chicken pieces from the marinade and use paper towels to pat them dry.
Set a large skillet over medium heat, then add 2 tablespoons of butter. When that’s melted, add the chicken. Cook for 3 to 4 minutes, until the bottom of the chicken is golden, with some char around the edges, rotating the pan and lowering the heat if needed to avoid any burning.
Flip the chicken and keep cooking until almost done, another 2 to 3 minutes. When you’re about 1 to 1 1/2 minutes out from the chicken being done, add the remaining butter and balsamic to the pan. (You can transfer any thinner pieces to a plate if they’re finished before the thicker ones.) Cook until the sauce has thickened, flipping and basting the chicken as the sauce reduces.
Transfer all the chicken to a plate, then pour the balsamic butter on top. Drizzle with more balsamic and finish with a big pinch of salt.

The power of “Evil” compels us to celebrate the monstrous reasons it speaks to us right now

In a recent episode of the thrilling yet wickedly witty series “Evil,” the tormented, determined Dr. Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers) enjoys a moment of peace with one of her four daughters, with whom she snuggles in her bed. Kristen consoles the girl through a possible encounter with that week’s night terror, zombies, when she asks something millions of kids have posed to their parents.

“Mom, are there monsters? Like, real monsters?”

“Evil” revolves around such simple questions, which is one of the reasons the show earned loyalists during its first season run on CBS and second life on Netflix. Tagging along with Kristen as she assists the Catholic Church with determining whether afflicted people are possessed or merely ill makes answering that question tougher now than it might have been for previous generations.

The show and its creators, Robert and Michelle King, provide many reasons as to why that is. Some are evidentiary, others theoretical. Mainly what it comes down is that we live in a world that’s a lot darker than the one that existed before the dawning of the Internet and social media, which was the overarching position of the first season.

But we’re knee-deep into the second season on Paramount+ now, and Kristen has seen some things. Moreover her colleague David Acosta (Mike Colter), a priest-in-training has shown her a few things. Their other team member, hardcore skeptic tech specialist Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi) can usually find mundane reasons for various bumps in the night, but even he has experienced enough close calls to move him to prayer.

She also has a night visitor, a demon called George. Another psychologist, Dr. Leland Townsend (Michael Emerson) might be hell spawn, too. He harrows Kristen, David and Ben for no stated reason other than to twist them into knots, and he succeeds in driving Kristen up the wall by romancing her mother Sheryl (Christine Lahti).

Kristen has also witnessed a pregnant woman plead for help while claiming to be devoured by a possessed fetus and saved one co-worker from being murdered by a racist “Angel of Mercy”-style nurse and another from being dragged into Hell by a homicidal elevator.

Another sinister occurrence strikes closer to home: a serial killer who claims to be possessed by a demon named Roy is convicted of his crimes only to be released, leaving him free to kill her daughters. Maybe she’s done something about that. It sure seems like she has.

All of this informs how she answers her sweet child. “Well, there are people who do monstrous things, I guess,” she says. “But I don’t know if I’d call them monsters because they’re still people underneath.”

“You just have to find that person?” the girl asks, and Kristen replies. “Yup. Sometimes that’s hard because they’ve forgotten who they really are, or they like being a monster too much.”

Television viewers have a long history of enjoying visions of Heaven through its representatives, mainly angels. “Highway to Heaven,” “Touched by an Angel” and its spinoff “Promised Land,” “Joan of Arcadia” and “God Friended Me” are part of a sizable list of shows depicting soothing tales of divine guidance.

Most of these shows aired on CBS, and with the exception of “God Friended Me,” the majority of them hail from eras before social media and scores of TV channels fractured our attention into segments.

Considering all that, Heaven’s had a pretty good run in primetime. Hell is another story. “Supernatural” may have gleaned a decade and a half’s worth of mileage out of a war between angels and demons, neither which is necessarily better for humanity than the other. But beyond the Winchesters and the odd comic book adaptation like “Lucifer,” the Devil’s had a tough time attracting and maintaining our attention.

This is doubly true for shows about demonic possession and exorcisms, the meat and potatoes of “Evil.” Fox tried to expand “The Exorcist” into a weekly series without much success. Its problem, I think, had to do with a lack of belief. People simply don’t scare as easily anymore.

“Evil,” however, is not expressly about believing in anything. Rather, explaining is its currency – explaining, but not necessarily providing solid answers. Not yet. The writers spin the show’s fabric out of uncertainty. Creeping us out is a bonus; the writers much prefer to be wicked, which is much funnier.

Emerson jumps into that pool with two feet and splashes around like a sugar-shocked toddler, which reminds us that one of the reasons evil is so seductive is that it’s so darn amusing.

What’s interesting, though, is that for all of its manifestations of demons like George or the occasional appearances by a horned beast that resembles the Sabbatic Goat Baphomet, the scariest monsters are human. Whether it manifests as racism, bullying, or subliminal conditioning to self-harm, “Evil” shows us how ordinary and banal most diabolism is. Given the dangerous state of our country, that’s truly frightening.

Season 1 hooks into that dread. It debuted as the presidential election was heating up in 2019, hinging upon the simple idea that the world is getting worse because terrible people are connecting via social media. David says this in the pilot; by the season finale a broader web of connection is revealed, alluding that actual dark forces may be behind a wider plan.

Back then the writers probably hadn’t accounted for QAnon’s widespread reach, to say nothing of the pandemic or a white supremacist attack on the U.S. Capitol building. That’s probably why this new season feels more ominous than the first, because its plots ask us to turn inward, acknowledging that evil can’t flourish unless good people allow it to do so.

The Kings are also the creative force behind “The Good Fight,” a legal drama in which the protagonists frequently operate in ethically gray areas because that’s where the money hangs out. Without cash flow, the firm can’t hire top notch lawyers to go to bat for worthwhile causes. Championing the righteous means dirtying your hands from time to time.

Meanwhile “Evil” cautions against remaining in morally murky places for too long, because that’s where devils prey on people. This season’s storyline explores the corrupting nature of malice, as Leland figures out that the best way to defeat David, Kristen and Ben isn’t to attack them from the outside with gun-crazy incels, bigots or homicidal maniacs clothed in good suits and religious sanctimony.

Getting under their skin is so much more effective. Leland approaches David’s superiors with a generous donation, demanding an exorcism in return. The team insists he doesn’t need one, that he’s faking everything. A mountain of cash in the church’s figurative collection plate says differently. Thus he takes every opportunity to needle at them, and many of his jabs are too accurate to ignore.

But his torture is an extension of everything already percolating in the world around the team, and us. The Kings have hinted to the press that most of what we see in the show is inspired by current events. Of course, we’re not to take some things literally, like the possibility that zombies exist. However, America’s obsession with zombies is quite real and a natural inspiration for a storyline that wonders where that comes from.

One plausible explanation is that zombies physicalize our fear of mortality and decay. They’re something we can see and therefore stand a chance of defeating. Then again, all you have to do is watch a few prepper shows to recognize that some who claim to fear such monsters aren’t concerned about the undead. They’re afraid of certain kinds of living, breathing people.

And it all leads us to question not only what we know, but what comforts us. Does prayer work? Is violence ever justifiable? Despite what Kristen encourages her daughter to do, her actions don’t square with her assertion about trying to find the person underneath the monster. Whatever she did, she believes she had to do. The chilling part is that it doesn’t appear to have affected her mental state.

In the same way that partisan politics and conspiracy theory quackery has made millions of people entirely unreasonable and likely unreachable, this show has no problem stating that there are folks in the world who do bad things and encourage others to do bad things for the sheer pleasure of it.

David states this in the show’s pilot, explaining that these people pretend to be normal, “but their real pursuit is evil. Encouraging others to do evil. You don’t have to believe in the supernatural to know that.” Strangely enough, this is a relief. It means we’re not insane, but the world probably is. It means there might be demons, but whether they exist doesn’t matter. Evil is real. “Evil” makes dealing with it entertaining.

All episodes of “Evil” Season 1 and the first six episodes of Season 2 are available to stream on Paramount+. Following a hiatus, new episodes will resume on Sunday, Aug. 29.

Edgar Allan Poe’s engagement with American science

“SCIENCE!…” opens a poem started in the late 1820s by a youthful Edgar Allan Poe and revised throughout his life. “Why prey’st thou upon the poet’s heart, Vulture! Whose wings are dull realities!” Poe, a soon-to-be West Point cadet studying mathematics, geometry, and engineering, goes on mournfully: “How should he love thee — or how deem thee wise…?”

Past interpreters have read this “Sonnet — To Science” as a standard romantic attack on the disenchanting effects of objective inquiry, then a growing force in the young republic. In a world dissected and reduced to mechanisms by the rational eye of science, how are wonder and mystery, the provinces of the poet, to survive?

But as historian of science John Tresch argues in his new biography of Poe, “The Reason for the Darkness of the Night,” there’s another way to read the poem and indeed Poe, whose beloved phantasmagorical tales have influenced writers from Paul Valéry and Joseph Conrad to Stephen King and Jordan Peele: Far from an attack on science, writes Tresch, the poem might be read as Poe’s call to unite the projects of the poet and the scientist, to “stay true to science’s specific form of wisdom, without being destroyed by it.”

Tracing the entanglements Poe had with science through his turbulent life, many of them overlooked by past biographers, Tresch, a professor at the Warburg Institute at the University of London, presents a convincing case that grappling with the consequences of scientific knowledge was the central project of Poe’s work. He also finds in Poe’s enigmatic stories and mystical verse a kind of conscience against scientific hubris, and a model for anyone who looks to science as a source of imaginative power.

Along the way, Tresch offers a heady portrait of the crackpot theories, unscrupulous press, and genuine science taking shape around Poe in antebellum America, all of it material for this master of the uncanny and the weird. As quoth Poe: “The simple truths which science unfolds, day after day, are in fact, far stranger, apparently, than the wildest dreams.”

To make his case for the centrality of science in Poe’s career, Tresch follows Poe year by year from his aristocratic upbringing in Richmond, Virginia through his rise and eventual downfall in the rancorous literary circles of Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia. Wherever possible, Tresch takes detours when Poe’s life intersects with key events and characters in the “forging” of American science, focusing especially on the creation of scientific institutions like the Smithsonian Institution and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The result is a sweeping, if often tangential, view of the carnivalesque scientific milieu in which Poe crafted some of his most beloved and most forgotten works, including, we learn, a scientific textbook about shells. Incredibly, “The Conchologist’s First Book, Or, A System Of Testaceous Malacology,” was Poe’s bestselling work during his life, outperforming classics like “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and even “The Raven.” (Other historians have pointed out that while Poe — likely due to his popularity — was listed as the sole author of the shell book, his role was more editorial; the book itself was originally written by the scientist Thomas Wyatt.)

But the shell book was just one of Poe’s more explicit run-ins with science. Tresch picks up the scientific signal across Poe’s work and life, finding it nearly everywhere he looks.

Born in 1809 (the same year as Charles Darwin), Poe studied at the science-oriented University of Virginia before tensions with his foster father forced him to leave. He joined the U.S. Army, which Tresch points out was then “the nation’s most reliable body for technical knowledge,” where he oversaw ammunition supplies and equipment, and worked on his poetry, including a long poem inspired by the astronomical observations of Tycho Brahe.

After two years, Poe left to seek a commission at West Point, which he gained, only to be thrown out in under a year for skipping class, again due to family drama. Though relatively brief, Tresch argues that this exposure to technical and scientific knowledge while at West Point “decisively shaped [Poe’s] career as a poet, critic, and author.”

Out of West Point, and cut off from his family’s financial support, Poe went to Baltimore in 1831, where he struggled to make ends meet selling his writing. After returning to Richmond, Poe secured a position as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger and began to build his name as an incisive critic and provocative author “tinkering with the springs and motive powers of the American system of literature.” For the rest of his life, Poe would zigzag between similar editorial roles and other publishing schemes, struggling despite his growing fame to achieve financial and mental stability. In 1849, he died in a delirium — possibly related to alcohol — in Baltimore. He was 40.

But running through this chaotic career, Tresch traces a clear scientific thread: Poe published reviews of works of popular science and technical manuscripts, and engaged in disputes on scientific issues ranging from the formation of nebulae to cryptology. He also weighed in on the rampant quackery of the time, such as a traveling showman’s claim to have designed a chess-playing automaton.

Though Tresch notes that Poe appropriated many of his observations about the chess illusion, his writings on various fields made him “one of America’s first science reporters.” Still, Poe wasn’t immune to quackery himself, finding trendy pseudosciences like phrenology and animal magnetism perfectly sensible. (Despite Poe’s volume on these matters, Tresch finds him largely silent on the issue of slavery and most of the days other urgent political questions — though the author also notes Poe’s involvement in the sale of an enslaved person in 1829.)

Poe also participated in a few hoaxes of his own. Once, tapping into 19th century ballooning fever, he wrote an account of a balloon trip that had crossed the Atlantic in just three days. He only revealed it to be a fiction a month — and many readers — later. As Tresch explains, Poe understood that without a trustworthy press and established scientific institutions, “truth and belief were, at least in part, questions of style.”

Tresch shows how these anxieties over who and what to believe in a maelstrom of scientific claims inspired not only Poe’s writing, but the creation of some of America’s earliest scientific institutions: Their elite founders, with whom Poe rubbed elbows on a number of occasions, were increasingly concerned with drawing the line between what was science and what was merely “humbug” — the 19th century equivalent of fake news.

Tresch, an evocative close reader, also picks up the scientific signal at all levels of Poe’s fiction: Scientific subjects regularly appear in many of Poe’s plots, as in the novel “Pym,” about a journey of discovery to the “Southern Ocean.” Scientific language appears in Poe’s precise descriptions of physical phenomena, both real and supernatural, as in the horrifying moonlit climax of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” And scientific logic is apparent in the inductive reasoning employed by Poe’s famous detective character C. Auguste Dupin; it’s even in the intricate, cog-like constructions of his verse.

Both Poe’s engagement with science and Tresch’s book culminate in a cosmological lecture delivered in New York City near the end of Poe’s life. In the lecture — titled “On the Cosmography of the Universe,” later published as “Eureka” — Poe presented his view of the creation of the universe. Accepting scientific facts “as far as they went” at the time, Poe described a “primordial Particle” exploding into fragmented bits, each retaining an “appetite for unity.” He explained forces of attraction and repulsion caused the fragmented matter to form nebulae, which would eventually collapse together into a “globe of globes” before beginning the cosmological cycle again.

The dense work is admirably summarized by Tresch, who calls it “punishingly digressive and lopsided” and “a glorious mess.” But also “one of the most creative, audacious, and idiosyncratic syntheses of science and aesthetics in nineteenth-century America.” In one of the more intriguing parts of the book, unfortunately left to a few pages in the conclusion, Tresch also traces possible influences of “Eureka” on modern cosmology, finding connections between Poe and several 20th century physicists involved in theorizing the Big Bang and the Big Crunch, which Poe’s “primordial Particle” and “globe of globes” both seem to anticipate.

Tresch also finds his title in a short section of “Eureka,” where Poe, as has been acknowledged by contemporary physicists, became the first to accurately explain the reason for the darkness of the night: There are a finite number of stars in the universe, thus there are dark spaces between them.

Tresch is not the first to comment on Poe’s many connections with science, but his new biography succeeds in giving the full view, combining an ample tour through the major scientific ideas of the early 19th century with deft and frequently profound readings of Poe’s large body of work. Though at times ponderous, the book is valuable reading for anyone drawn to the strange beauty within and just beyond science, and who wonders, as Poe did, what role a poet has to play.

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

The secret sex lives of ducks

To us humans, ducks are a symbol of tranquility, and one of a select group of avian species that cohabitates with humans in urban areas. Yet the adorableness of the duck family you might observe at the park belies their bizarre sexual behavior, which truly put the human sexual imagination to shame.

Indeed, ducks are not merely one of the few species to have mastered land, water and air, but they also have some very weirdly-shaped genitals, which have co-evolved through a process called sexual conflict.

Sexual conflict occurs when there is a difference in the mating strategies benefitting the male and the female of a species. These different reproductive goals in ducks and other waterfowl have ultimately led to the coevolution of complex and very weird genital structures – long, anticlockwise corkscrew phalluses, and vaginas that have dead ends and a clockwise corkscrew goings in the opposite direction. Ouch.

How did ducks evolve such odd genitals?

Ducks are mostly socially monogamous, forming a bond with a single partner per breeding season. These bonds are formed by female choice, while the males compete by giving vocal and visual ritual displays in which they show off their colorful plumage to prove their “quality.”

Yet while ducks have a reputation for being sweet, innocent birds, forced copulation outside of the chosen mating pair is pretty common, and is observed in one-third of all waterfowl species — including mallards, pintails and gadwalls.

So why do certain species of ducks perform this horrible forced copulation? Dr. Patricia Brennan, a biology professor at Mt. Holyoke who is an expert in bird genitalia, says it may stem from the sex ratio among duck populations.

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“There are more males than females in most duck populations,” Brennan says. “Since most ducks are socially monogamous, there are typically many males that are left without a mate. Those males sometimes turn to forced copulations as a way of gaining some paternity any given year. Males who had a partner also can perform forced copulations after their partner is incubating the eggs.”

In other words, the male wants to maximize his reproductive success and the number of offspring that he sires, which is why extra pair copulation — meaning, cheating by mating with someone else besides his monogamous partner, then ditching her — is useful to him. The female only wants to mate with the male she chose as her mating partner, wanting her offspring to inherit the genetic benefits of that male only; thus, she doesn’t want to extra-pair copulate.

This “forced extra-pair copulation,” as it’s known, is a fairly rare strategy across birds as a whole. So why do so many waterfowl species do this? It’s because they can – they have an organ that lets them.

Big duck energy

Ducks, among other waterfowl, are one of only 3% of bird species that even have a penis at all. Waterfowl are therefore quite different compared to other birds. Their penises can range between 1.5 centimeters to 40 centimeters— sometimes longer than the bird himself — and vary hugely in terms of elaboration.

Ducks’ evolution of a penis is thought to have facilitated males being able to force copulations to gain control of fertilization. In fact, the length of the male penis has been shown to be significantly correlated with the frequency of forced extra-pair copulation seen in that species.

This is crucial to the coevolution of the male and female genitals, as the female has coevolved defenses against the males’ advances to gain back control.

Not only do waterfowl have very, very long penises, but they also have an anticlockwise corkscrew shape. Dr Brennan thinks that the spiral penis shape is an adaptation to increase the male’s chance of successful fertilization.

“Female birds only have one active oviduct on the left side, so the penis has to bend to the left in order for it to go in the oviduct”, she says. “To make the penis bend left, one part is shorter and one part is longer, so as the penis grows, there is a spiral.”

The male appears to have the upper hand in term of fertilization objectives. But, the female does not just let this happen.

The fempire strikes quack

Firstly, females always resist all forced extra-pair copulation, at large direct costs to themselves. Female ducks can actually make their injuries worse by struggling, but do it nearly without fail in order to reduce the success of the extra-pair male.

The female duck has also evolved a vagina structure to combat males: it corkscrews in up to eight 360-degree spirals in the opposite direction to the male’s penis, and has up to three dead-end pockets near to the cloaca, which is a catch-all organ in avians for both reproduction and waste excretion. The spirals are thought serve as barrier to entry without the female’s cooperation, preventing the penis from entering or at least fully everting, thus forcing him to deposit his sperm much lower in her reproductive tract.

The duck vagina also has several pockets, thought to impede sperm deposition further inside.

“Females benefit by preventing these unwanted males from siring any of her young. That means her chosen partner gets most of the paternity, and therefore she gains the benefit through her offspring,” says Dr Brennan.

The females choose their mates for their perceived quality; therefore, her male offspring will benefit by gaining his mother’s intended mate’s genes – his sons will be more likely to be chosen as a mate too. In mallards, while forced extra-pair copulation can constitute up to 40% of all sexual encounters, only 2-5% of offspring are actually sired in the act of forced copulation. This indicates that the female’s adaptations do indeed lower the extra-pair male’s chances of successfully fertilising her.

Additionally, in mallards, offspring viability has been experimentally shown to be lower when females are prevented from reproducing with the males that they prefer, further supporting the main benefit of her funky vaginal shape in giving her her choice of partners.

So, the weird and wacky genitals of ducks are a result of millennia of coevolution, with the males and females both racing to one-up the other in terms of reproductive outcome. This sexual conflict-driven genital evolution can be seen in other species across the animal kingdom, from bedbugs’ traumatic insemination (the male stabs the female in the abdomen with his penis) to flatworm hermaphrodite penis swordfights (really). Humans may pride ourselves for our sexual inventiveness, but compared to the animal world, we are real vanilla.

Our tips for the crispiest, crunchiest, charred-est pizza ever

We love ordering pizza from our favorite local slice joint or Neapolitan-style spot, but the taste of homemade pizza — especially our favorite grilled pizza recipes — is something truly special. A lightly charred crust drizzled with olive oil, a sprinkle of basil leaves, a swirl of marinara sauce, and a generous amount of ooey-gooey mozzarella cheese is as simple and delicious as can be. Of course you can go all out with truffle-flavored ingredients or meat-lover toppings galore. If you’re looking for an upgrade to your summer dinner (after all, who doesn’t want a new and improved menu for entertaining family or friends?), make homemade pizza on the grill. Ahead, we’ll tell you how to do just that like a pro.

How to grill pizza

Any great pizza — whether wood-fried, brick-oven baked, or grilled — starts with the perfect pizza dough. You can make your own with your favorite recipe or buy store-bought from a local pizzeria. Even if you love a deep-dish or Sicilian-style pizza, now’s not the time to make an extra-large pie. Instead, Paula Disbrowe, author of Food52’s Any Night Grilling: 60 Ways to Fire Up Dinner (and More), recommends stretching the pizza dough out to ½ inch thick or less. “Place the stretched crust on a pizza peel dusted with cornmeal or semolina flour, then add your toppings right before you slide the pizza onto the hot grates,” says Disbrowe. For an extra-crispy crust, grill one side of the pizza dough first, add toppings like pizza sauce, pepperoni, meatballs, clams, or an assortment of different cheeses to the charred pizza crust, and then slide the pie (uncooked side down) back onto the grill for an additional few minutes.

Disbrowe recommends using a high heat and waiting for the grill to reach 600°F before placing the pie down on the grates. Try to avoid repeatedly opening the grill, as this will lower the temperature, just as it would with a regular oven, causing the pizza to take longer to cook. Generally pizzas will be done in as little as 2 to 3 minutes and no more than 5 minutes or so. But use your eyes, not the timer, to decide, says Disbrowe.

Fear not — Disbrowe says that she’s never experienced a pizza crust falling between the grates of the grill. “The hot grates will begin to cook the crust the second you place the dough on the grill. As the crust cooks, it will dry and “release” from the grates, making it easy to remove a topped pizza,” she explains. As an added precaution, oil the grates generously before placing the uncooked dough over the fire. If you experience flare-ups on the grill, Disbrowe recommends that you close the lid quickly and/or adjust the vents on your grill to snuff out the oxygen that’s fueling the fire.

If you’re wondering how to tell if your pizza is fully cooked, look for a pizza crust that is an even golden-brown color all over with a few darker spots and shows off those picture-perfect grill marks. Another telltale sign that your homemade pizza is ready to serve is when the cheese is melted completely.

The best tools for grilling pizza

The only tools you need for grilling a pizza are, first, a hot grill (duh). A charcoal or gas grill will work fine, but just choose one that is large enough to accommodate a 12- to 14-inch pizza. A wooden pizza peel will help you to easily transfer the dough on and off the grill, just as you would use if you were baking the pizza in an oven. Long-handled tongs (ones that you would use for any other grilling project), like this pair from the Food52 shop, will also assist, as you lift the edge of the crust to check the doneness of your pizza (one of Disbrowe’s pro tips).

Pelosi names Kinzinger as second Republican on Jan. 6 committee: “When duty calls, I will answer”

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection is getting another Republican member.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Sunday that she had appointed Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., to the committee, making him the second Republican to formally join the effort.

“When duty calls, I will answer,” Kinzinger wrote in a statement following the announcement. “Today, I was asked by the Speaker to serve on the House Select Committee to Investigate January 6th and I humbly accepted. I will work diligently to ensure we get to the truth and hold those responsible for the attack fully accountable.”

Pelosi had said earlier Sunday morning during an appearance on ABC’s This Week that her “plan” was to nominate Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., to the committee. “You could say that that’s the direction that I would be going,” she told ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos.

The addition of Kinzinger also comes after Pelosi rejected two of Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s picks for the committee, Reps. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Jim Banks, R-Ind., whose selection for the job she called “ridiculous.” Both Jordan and Banks voted to overturn several states’ election results following the riot on Jan. 6, and have sought to discredit the investigation by instead casting blame for the events of that day on Democrats, who they say were deliberately unprepared for the violent assault on the nation’s Capitol.

“We have to ignore the antics of those who do not want to find the truth,” Pelosi said Sunday on ABC.

As a result of Pelosi’s rejection of those two members, McCarthy decided to pull the other three Republican representatives he had nominated, leaving Rep. Liz Cheney, R-WY, as the only remaining GOP member on the committee.

Both Kinzinger and Cheney voted to impeach former President Donald Trump following Jan. 6, and have not signed on to the GOP’s repeated attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.

What’s a “Stuck Nation”? America in 2021, paralyzed by injustice and inequality

What do we call a nation where one man builds a multi-billion-dollar empire by outwitting its tax system and uses a fraction of the fortune he's made at the expense of every other taxpayer to build his own rocket so he can leave the planet?

A Stuck Nation.

I selected @StuckNation as my Twitter handle shortly before I left WNYC-New York Public Radio in 2013. By that time, I had spent more than 20 years covering local, state and national politics — long enough to see a discernible pattern of American stagnation where, regardless of the issue, the forces of capital prevailed over labor. No matter what injustice would catch fire, politicians would gain traction by appearing to address it just long enough to win elections, yet the underlying problem that had sparked protest was left to fester.

From gun violence to local flooding from overdevelopment, public calls for reform would crest and dissipate as the commercial forces that profited from the status quo endured.

When President Barack Obama was just into his second term, I could see that in places where I was reporting — like Newark and Paterson, New Jersey — things had actually continued to deteriorate from the Great Recession. There was a disturbing disconnect between the MSNBC, NPR, New York Times rhetoric of recovery and my lived and reported experience. At street level, in the neighborhoods where I had reported before Obama was elected, the slide had continued. The same mortgage predators paid their Department of Justice fines, but continued their corrupt practices, driving primarily African American families from their homes that had been in families for generations, leaving a devastated streetscape of zombie homes and disrepair.

African Americans got bragging rights for having a Black man in the White House, but millions of them lost their own homes. This was just more evidence of a "stuck nation," so stuck because its leadership was cut off and willfully blind to the circumstances of a broad swath of the country, particularly people of color.

In my WNYC interview with then-Sen. Obama on March 27, 2008, he had a sweeping command of the national economy and the global situation.

Obama's answers to my questions, spanning from the perils of offshore banking to foreign policy, were smooth and considered, but his vague response on the question of the essential need for a shift in the U.S. policy on drugs — away from a criminal justice approach to a public health focus — made me realize that he was more of a charismatic moderate than a change agent.

On Aug. 28, 2008, I was in Denver's Mile High Stadium when Obama accepted his party's nomination as its presidential candidate. I was standing with the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, on whose 1984 presidential campaign I had worked, as the sense of limitless possibilities surged through the capacity crowd.

"Four years ago, I stood before you and told you my story, of the brief union between a young man from Kenya and a young woman from Kansas, who weren't well-off or well-known, but shared a belief that in America their son could achieve whatever he put his mind to," Obama told the adoring crowd.

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On the night of the 2008 general election, I decided the best place from which to file my reporting throughout the night would be the Rutgers University New Brunswick campus. It was a place where the college students really had to fight hard to get to vote, because the local election authorities saw them as interlopers. When the networks called the election for Obama, the wave of youthful exuberance surging out of those dormitory buildings and into New Brunswick's night air was electric, as college students even embraced police officers who were swarmed by a tsunami of joy.

Just three years later, in September 2011, I would be covering the Occupy Wall Street Movement, which had taken root in its prolonged encampment in lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park. I recorded hours of interviews with the primarily young activists who had come from all over the nation to camp out in the canyons of Wall Street and protest an economy that was increasingly rigged against them.

No doubt most of them had been Obama voters. For them, hope and change had become despair and stagnation. Many were buried under mountains of debt for college educations that society had told them they needed as the foundation for a good life; but for so many, that turned out to be a dead end of living in their parents' basements.

The global war on terror was now over a decade long, and Uncle Sam just seemed to be a robot stuck spinning his wheels in a deepening rut on foreign soil.

Stuck Nation seemed completely apropos on every level.

This stuck-ness was even manifest in the way New Jersey would flood in the same places year after year, where the bipartisan complicity in real estate development had permitted filling in the wetlands, blowing up mountains and clearing forests, only to be "surprised" when, year after year, people's basements flooded.

As the Obama years drew to a close, the Economic Policy Institute observed astutely that the country had "suffered from rising income inequality and chronically slow growth in the living standards of low- and moderate-income Americans."

The erosion of the middle class that has been in the making at least since the 1970s — when American workers stopped seeing their wages grow at a pace with their increasing productivity — was continuing. By August 2016, EPI reported that from 1973 until 2015, while productivity increased by more than 73%, hourly pay for workers went up only 11% — in other words, productivity grew by more than six times the rise in wages earned by workers.

For decades, American workers had been losing leverage, while the world's biggest corporations were able to successfully play one country's workforce off another.

Jobs with health care benefits were increasingly hard to find as corporations like Uber figured out how to profit from the increasing precarity of the workforce. The rideshare-app company benefited considerably from the counsel of former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, who became Uber's policy chief in 2014, as it bullied its way into local markets and destroyed the existing local taxicab business model along the way.

By 2016, after eight years of struggle packaged as recovery, millions of voters were ripe for Donald Trump's picking. A critical number of Obama voters of color just stayed home, and Hillary Clinton was not perceived as a change agent.

From the oligarchs' point of view, there was nothing better than Trump's strategy of having the victims of predatory, multinational capitalism go after each other over issues like race and national origin. Both major parties had long since been co-opted at the top by these corporate interests. It was all pay-to-play, no matter who the players were.

When first Bernie Sanders and then Trump carried Michigan, it became clear that the rising anger within the electorate was about an America that no longer worked for American workers. What we had on our hands was a political predator class that had been ignoring the social and economic circumstances of the vast majority of people for a long time, and had profited by doing so.

American multinationals avoided paying hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes every year, transferring the tax burden to small business and working people. We were misled to suspect that the undocumented among us were the real drag on our national treasury. Yet these folks, one in three of whom own homes here in the U.S., pay billions of dollars in taxes each year. Likewise, when unions were chased out of the private sector but made inroads in the public sector, big-money interests proceeded to demonize public unions for getting the type of pay and benefits that the rest of us were denied, because (they alleged) the new global trade imperative would not permit it.

Meanwhile, on the ground the lack of affordable housing was the nexus of so much of the dislocation I was encountering, more than 40 years after the New Jersey Supreme Court's landmark Mount Laurel decision was hailed nationally for proclaiming that it was unconstitutional for towns to exclude housing for the poor and working class. Decades later, New Jersey was still in a full-blown affordable housing crisis and was leading the nation in foreclosures; and despite the scarcity of affordable housing, there were tens of thousands of vacant homes just wasting away.

How stuck was this nation?

In 2018, I told a too-common story of the lack of affordable housing through the lived experience of a pair of 20-somethings living in their car. Kelee Patterson and her boyfriend Tim Johnson knew all too well about the failure to live up to Mount Laurel's 43-year-old mandate. They spent the winter of 2018 living in Patterson's car with her three dogs. Almost six years after Superstorm Sandy had hit their part of Monmouth County, New Jersey, along the Route 35 corridor, finding affordable housing was impossible.

"In the front seat, we put the little dog on the floor on where I drive," Patterson explained. "The driver seat has two little dogs. On the seat there is one dog, and on the floor, there is one little dog. Then the big dog is on the passenger seat with the seat laid down. Then we cuddle up in the back. We make that in with blankets and pillows. All our clothes are in the back."

Patterson tried to remain positive about the couple's prospects and a pending job interview later that day. "I would love to be in my own home to wake up and brush my teeth, shower and go to work … because right now we go to Target [or] QuickChek bathrooms to get ready for an interview, and thank God we have an interview."

"I hope we get these jobs. Get these jobs and save money and get to a state where the cost of living isn't so high," Johnson added.

Inside MJ's Pizza in Middletown, over a late lunch, Patterson recounted the story of her mother's home in Middletown, which the family lost in foreclosure. "My mom has lived there for 18 years, and so have I," she said.

For Johnson, his life was upended when his father came down with pancreatic cancer and within just a few months died. His mother fell behind on the mortgage payments. "I had a similar story with foreclosure too; my mother was foreclosed in 2002," he said. "When my father passed away, our house was foreclosed. She had to sell it before it was foreclosed."

Johnson's mom's home in Middletown was still listed as vacant when I finished reporting the story in 2018. It was one of nearly 40,000 empty homes throughout New Jersey at the time.

In "Stuck Nation," I share my observations on the origins of our national stuck-ness, my reporting on how it endures and my analysis of what might be required for us to change the course of our historical patterns. I've written this book while our country has been in the convulsions of a global pandemic that had been long predicted by public health experts. Yet the nation and the planet were caught so unprepared that millions would die; and, as of this writing, 115,000 health care workers around the world have perished.

And in the midst of this once in a century public health crisis, the United States itself — despite the expenditure of trillions of dollars in military procurement and global deployment in the name of protecting democracy — was almost toppled from within by one of the two national political parties, which had been commandeered by a white-supremacist authoritarian.

In "Stuck Nation" I have assembled accounts of individuals and a broader movement willing to put everything at risk to change our national narrative, so that America can begin what the Rev. Dr. William Barber describes as a "Third Reconstruction," one that puts the condition of the people ahead of profits so obscene they can launch a handful of billionaires into space.

New idea gaining steam in right-wing circles: Only parents should be able to vote

Fox News hosts on Sunday promoted the idea that “childless” Americans should not be allowed to participate in society by voting.

The idea was recently floated by Ohio Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance.

“Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of the children,” Vance told a conference on the Future of American Political Economy.

The hosts of Fox & Friends discussed the merits of the idea that the “childless left” should not be able to vote.

“I think it’s an interesting idea,” host Will Cain said. “I’m into interesting ideas. Let’s think about it. Let’s talk about it. He’s saying childless leaders are making decisions that are short-term in mind, not focused on the long-term future health of this country because they don’t have a stake in the game. Parents have a stake in the game, they have children so give parents a bigger say.”

Co-host Pete Hegseth pointed out that fellow co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy would get nine votes because she has nine children.

“I don’t know about that solution, that seems not feasible,” Campos-Duffy said. “But I will say that I agree with the premise of it, that it is absolutely true that people like [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], Pete Buttigieg — you can name the left-wing politicians, people who think that we should legalize marijuana because they don’t have kids and they don’t really have a stake in what that looks like.”

“I agree with him 100% that they don’t have a stake in the game,” she continued.

“That is looking at it through the lens of the actual solution, which is the family unit,” co-host Pete Hegseth agreed. “So many ills that we have in our society stem from that breakdown. I agree with you. [It’s] not a feasible policy but what it is in principle is a reflection of the fact that — what Ronald Reagan said, freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

“And if you’re Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — our favorite comrade — and you’ve said the world is going to end in 12 years, what do you care?” he added. “It’s this idea of absolute pessimism that the world’s going to end and as a result, we’re the problem and don’t have kids.”

According to Hegseth, a large family is “a reflection of optimism.”

“Do you want to pass AOC’s America off to America or J.D. Vance’s?” Campos-Duffy asked. “American Marxists want to tear down the American family.”

Watch the video below from Fox News:

Chloe Shaw on when she first asked, “What Is a Dog?”: “I wrote from a place of specified grief”

Books about dogs are frequent, and also frequently romanticized, oversimplified, or dumbed down. You can count the ones that are great on one hand (I would mention, e.g., “Bandit,” by Vicki Hearne, “My Dog Tulip,” by J. R. Ackerley, and “The Dog of the Marriage,” by Amy Hempel, or almost anything by Amy Hempel). “What Is a Dog?” by Chloe Shaw emerges startlingly from a field primarily of mediocrities, then, a remarkably perceptive memoir which is mostly about dogs — or, maybe, much more than that.

Maybe it’s a memoir of Shaw’s youth, and maybe it’s not a memoir but rather a group portrait, one that is achingly attuned to the capacity of humans to fail to connect, and the connections instead that dogs can provide amid that failure: the lessons, the tutelage, the genuine and selfless love that dogs can give.

Chloe Shaw’s voice, often lucid and funny, is, upon reflection, deeply observant and mournful, even as it celebrates what great companions her dogs have been. This is one of the most inventive memoirs of recent years, poignant and improbable as it nimbly sidesteps all the pitfalls of animal sentimentality. I was excited, therefore, to talk to the author (whom I have known for many years, it should be said), which we at last managed by email in June and July. Her interview voice is like her prose voice: charming, warm, and also very, very insightful.

Your title, “What Is a Dog?,” is powerful and moving. How early in the process did you understand that this was the title, and that the title was essential to the book as a whole?

Thank you. This book began in essay form, which was published at The American Scholar. I finally sat down to write about our dear, departed dog, Booker, in one big burst a couple of years after he died. As I wrote from a place of specified grief, I began thinking not only about what he’d meant to me and represented in my life, but what all of the dogs that preceded him meant and represented. I began thinking more broadly and philosophically about what dogs are. What is a dog? I wrote early on in that essay, trying to conjure the first moment I ever saw one as an infant — my parent’s afghan hound, Easy. (She was their first baby.) And that question took hold as I wrote, as I remembered, as I watched the world around me fill with dogs. I became more interested in the question of what a dogs is than why we love dogs. There’s certainly an overlap here, but I felt like diving a bit deeper. And I had six willing subjects (four gone, two still here), with whom to do this deep dive. So the title seemed obvious the moment I typed the words. It’s the question I asked myself over and over while writing both the essay and book. Without knowing it, I think I’ve always been asking this question and still ask it every day.

When I first knew you, back when, you were a fiction writer, more commonly, and I think, in those days, you were writing a lot of short-short stories. What occasioned to the transition over to nonfiction? Is it a permanent transition?

You have a good memory. We met and knew each other through 9/11. The shock of that experience settled in in myriad ways. One of them was that I found I couldn’t sit still for long. My focus was shot. So I began writing short-shorts. They were the perfect format for me at that fractured time. The switch to nonfiction was not something I could have predicted. I finally sat down to write about Booker and my whole heart fell out. This was something I’d been struggling with in my fiction — not lack of heart, but vulnerability. Something about finally speaking from me as me allowed me a voice that felt relieving and powerful. I don’t think I can say it’s a permanent transition, but it has certainly muddied the waters as to what’s next.

There are ways that “What Is a Dog?” advances a very important literary agenda: It muddies the debate about what constitutes a complex character. Booker’s characterization, for example, amounts to “personhood,” especially in the truly powerful monologue he gives in the first chapter. There are not that many great literary works that have attempted to describe animal point of view accurately. (“Flush,” by Virginia Woolf, might be an example.) Did you think about the book this way, as an investigation of what constitutes a literary character? Or was it simply a by-product of trying to describe the dogs of your life?

Oh, “Flush.” It’s been so long since I read it, but what a magnificent book! I can’t say I had this idea of literary character in mind, so I suppose it was mostly a by-product. But I am an unabashed, life-long anthropomorphizer. I can’t help it. So perhaps what you are noting is a by-product of that tendency as well. I certainly took my job as dog translator seriously. The monologue of which you speak is something I swear I heard come straight out of Booker’s black-spotted-tongued mouth.

I’m a little bit interested in the opposite idea in your book (the opposite of anthropomorphism, that is), in which it appears that humans have some dog-like characteristics. Or, to put it another way, is the title asking us if the categories of human and dog are really stable? Maybe there is enormous shared terrain? After all, I think you, the Chloe-narrator, begin the book lying on a dog bed, yes?

I love this question. I do not think the categories are stable. After all, I have spent much of my life being the dog in lieu of Me. And, of course, as you point out, I’ve found myself quite literally on many a dog bed over the years. I do believe there is enormous shared terrain. Something mutually animal seemed to be exchanged back when the first wolves (who some believe happened to be nicer wolves on the great scale of wolf etiquette) befriended us. They needed our food and we needed their loyalty and ever-ready, fluff-filled affection. All these years and generations later, now they need our loyalty and affection, too. I think we’ve landed together in an exact middle ground of our two species. My relationship with my dogs feels a bit like a romance. It’s a commitment that requires patience, humility and a good listening ear. I know dogs don’t talk the way we do, but they surely speak to us if we listen.

A slightly heretical question. What about your cats? They have only a small role here, but will they get a volume of their own? Or is feline consciousness too different?

I have often joked that my next project will be “What Is A Cat?” Though I’m not sure I feel fully qualified. Feline consciousness is so different, yes. But living with both has a kind of balancing effect. While my dogs mostly cater to my human self-absorption, my cats have been self-absorbed beings of their own. In other words, they’ve kept me in check. Unfortunately, I’ve lost both Tito and Lolita these last two years. It definitely threw off the balance in this Peaceable Kingdom. I miss the challenge of keeping not two, but three species content under one roof. That’s always been such a beastly thrill for me, having successful inter-species relationships. I mean, what an honor! I’m not saying I haven’t been looking at kittens on Petfinder, but (in case my husband is reading this) I’m also not saying I have ….

Can you talk about the humans/dogs/creativity balance in your life? How do work the writing in, and is animal care a help with this question in any way?

I was lucky enough to receive my MFA as a younger person amidst multi-aged people. I had three slightly older friends and inspirations — Dinah, Sue, and Sally — who were all not only also getting their MFAs, but raising families. (I didn’t even have a dog or cat back then.) I remember feeling in awe of them, of all they were doing, all at once. Their examples certainly taught me how to use any minutes I have available. I wrote two novels during baby naps, in the spaces between feedings, and before anyone woke up. I am so lucky to have a supportive extended family, including very involved grandparents on both sides and lovely friends who show up. But the balance was also between my husband and me. As a psychoanalyst, he has a full, consistent case load, and as a writer, I’m supposedly more flexible. A blank page awaits, not a human. But I’ve come to see that blank page as my version of that human, and so has he. We’ve learned to share household/parenting responsibilities because that blank page and human both matter deeply. In terms of animal methodology, all three things feel animal to me, innate: writing, time among dogs, and becoming a mother. I do feel like they all intertwine. All three, lifeblood. I must do a little of each in order to get out of bed every day. I’m not sure it ever feels quite balanced — but working, rotating forward.

One last question. The book, as I make my way through it, seems to have a shadow subject, which I belief is, as you have noted about Booker, the subject of grief. I hope that does not seem like a spoiler, or like I am controlling interpretations in some fashion. But in a way this memoir is a catalogue of loving relationships with dogs in which the fact that dogs have (mostly) shorter life spans than their humans becomes an unassailable truth. This coming to terms with grief, then, seems central to the work as I read it. Does that feel accurate? Do you feel you have any special accumulated wisdom with respect to this inevitability of loss?

Grief is, I would say, the second subject of the book (next to dogs), but as my friend Larry reminded me after his wife died, that means it’s also largely about love. I knew that Booker broke me open to grief in the singular experience of his death, but now that you mention that catalogue of loving relationships with dogs, I realize that it’s better stated this way: it was a more gradual process over many years that culminated with the loss of him, which was the turning point for me. I believe one of the best lessons of empathy in childhood comes from animals. Whether you’re able to have a pet, visit a local shelter or farm, animals don’t speak the way we do so we must listen harder and listen differently, and therefore give up something of ourselves. I’m not sure it could be called special wisdom, but what I learned through my dogs is how to show up in times of big emotion. How not to turn away. How to talk to my kids about sorrow and loss and all of the love that goes with those experiences, too, and to try my best to normalize emotions, big and small. Dogs certainly let you know how they’re feeling without shame. My hope is the same for humans. For this human, dogs have helped.

Chloe Shaw lives in Connecticut with her husband, two kids, and two dogs. “What is a Dog?” is her literary debut.

In health care, words can hurt — or heal

When it comes to healthcare, words can be matters of life and death.

Research shows that physicians, nurses, and other providers’ terminology actually influences health outcomes — either by demonstrating respect that improves the provider-patient relationship and leads to positive behavioral changes, or by stoking stigma and shame that can worsen inequities in healthcare access.

That’s one of the reasons why some medical schools are overhauling their curricula to better develop doctors’ social and cultural competencies, and certain states are incorporating anti-bias training into their medical licensure requirements. These moves toward “conscious language” are small but necessary steps in the right direction.

But what does this mean? Essentially, conscious language is the intentional use of words and terminology to describe something in an inclusive, non-stigmatizing way.

A common example is “person-first language,” a concept and practice championed by disability rights activists. Using this approach, a person is defined not by their condition but by their humanity. For instance, one might say that someone is “living with bipolar disorder” instead of identifying them as “bipolar.”

Conscious language is broader than just “person-first language,” though. It seeks to reduce stigma and discrimination by understanding the social, cultural, and linguistic healthcare needs of each person, and by changing the way we talk about common health conditions like diabetes, mental illness, or substance use disorders.

That means avoiding terminology with negative connotations. It also means being aware of language that may seem neutral but subtly devalues or denigrates people. Rather than saying “they were infected with HIV,” instead consider “they contracted HIV.” In this instance, replacing “infected” with “contracted” removes a negative connotation that may stigmatize people living with HIV. That might seem minor, but these kinds of language shifts have a huge effect on patients.

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Such concerns may get dismissed as “political correctness,” but conscious language isn’t about limiting what a person can say — it’s about expanding representation and ultimately improving people’s health. As medicine evolves, so too should the language we use. Not long ago, medical practitioners commonly used terms that are now widely recognized as offensive and derogatory. Most of us avoid these words today not out of a desire to appear “PC,” but as a matter of basic respect.

It’s important to note that much of this progress only came about after disability rights and social justice activists educated others about the pain such words can cause and advocated for systemic change. Scientific understanding also advanced. For example, mental health disorders are now recognized as illnesses, many of which are rooted in our genes — and are not symptoms of poor character, as was once believed.

Empathizing with people living with disabilities or chronic conditions is not just a sign of moral progress. It’s also good health practice.

Numerous studies show that hurtful or careless words from healthcare providers can affect patients’ mental and physical health. And that stigma can literally make people sick.

Providers may believe that being blunt is the best way to communicate the gravity of someone’s health status. Using fear-based or alarmist language, a physician may hope to jolt their patients into making changes to improve their health.

Yet research shows that negative words have the opposite effect. Rather than galvanizing people to make positive changes, negative language can discourage healthier behaviors and even induce adverse physiological reactions in people.

For example, researchers have found that exposure to negative words can cause stress and blood sugar levels to spike in people with diabetes — and thereby exacerbate the very condition the doctor or nurse is trying to treat.

Similarly, one literature review determined that stigmatizing language around substance use — using terms like “drug abuser,” “clean,” or “dirty” — contributed to negative perceptions by physicians. This, in turn, limited people from seeking or completing treatment for substance use disorders.

Most providers have good intentions and want to motivate their patients toward healthier lives. But their choice of language can sometimes reflect unconscious bias against people perceived to be “at fault” for their conditions as opposed to looking at the broader picture. Social determinants of health like socioeconomic status, access to education, racism, food access, and safe housing all powerfully impact health outcomes.

This bias can affect the care people receive. A 2018 study by Johns Hopkins University researchers found that when clinicians see stigmatizing language in someone’s medical record, they’re more likely to view that patient negatively and less likely to manage their pain aggressively.

It’s easy for conversations around language to be brushed off as a debate over semantics, but the data is clear: words matter. Changing the way we speak is a cost-free way to bring about a more humane, more inclusive, and more effective healthcare system.

Free school meals for all children can improve kids’ health

Recognizing that millions of U.S. children are at risk of hunger, Maine and California have approved funding to offer free school meals to all students within their state. Meanwhile, a bill proposed in Congress aims to make free school meals a permanent fixture in all states.

The Universal School Meals Program Act would provide free healthy meals and snacks to all children in public and nonprofit private schools regardless of income.

Currently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has allowed school districts to provide meals free of charge to families during the pandemic. Previously set to expire in September, the policy has been extended through the 2021-2022 school year. This marks the first time in the 75-year history of the National School Lunch Program that all U.S. public school children are getting equal access to school meals, with no questions asked.

As a registered dietitian nutritionist and researcher who specializes in child food insecurity, I frequently see how access and availability to nutritious foods can shape kids’ health.

When children return to schools in the fall, the ongoing policy waivers provide an opportunity to examine how universal free school meals impact nutrition in school meal programs and health inequities among children.

Better health

Good nutrition plays a crucial role in strong academic outcomes. School meals have been shown to reduce childhood food insecurity and childhood overweight and obesity while improving overall diet quality.

School meals are often more nutritious than meals eaten elsewhere or even home-packed lunches. Studies have shown that access to school meals can improve attendance, academic performance and behavior.

Less stigma

Many children, especially those from low-income and minority families, eat up to half their daily calories at school. For these families, the cost of school meals, usually between US$2.48 and $2.74 depending on grade level, can add up quickly over a week, month or school year.

Children with outstanding meal debts could be shamed, refused a meal or provided a lower-cost alternative meal – such as a cheese sandwich, fruit and milk rather than the standard meal served to other students.

Needed relief

School meal programs are run like a business and depend heavily on federal reimbursements from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. When families can’t or don’t pay for meals served, schools may need to use their own funds to cover the losses. The Department of Agriculture prohibits using federal funds to pay off unpaid meal debt. The Universal School Meals Program Act would eliminate around $10.9 million of existing unpaid school meal debt reported by 75% of U.S. school districts.

In addition to school meal debt, during the first full year of the pandemic, schools served fewer meals, resulting in further losses in revenue. The meals served were more costly due to packaging and personal protective equipment for staff. As a result, more than 50% of school meal programs reported a financial loss in 2019-2020. An even greater number of programs report expecting a loss for the 2020-2021 school year.

Return on investment

A national study found that schools participating in universal free meal programs reduced their per-meal costs while maintaining nutritional quality of meals served. School meals can stimulate local economies because they can drive purchases from local farmers and ranchers and create jobs in school nutrition, food production, sales and distribution.

For school districts, switching to a universal model of meals for all children – regardless of income – is likely to reduce administrative burdens. Schools would no longer have to waste time on applications and meeting reporting requirements like they have to do under the current reimbursement model. They could focus on healthy meals and nutrition education instead.

I believe the return on investment from universal school lunches would benefit our country’s economic recovery from the pandemic as well as the health and well-being of our country’s children.

Matthew J. Landry, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Stanford University

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

Meet Team USA gymnasts: Here are the newcomers joining Simone Biles on the quest for gold

With the historic Tokyo Olympics finally underway, all eyes have been on Team USA’s men’s and women’s gymnastics teams, which have been dominant in their respective competitions for years. This tradition is expected to continue, with commentators speculating that Team USA’s women’s gymnastics team is the squad to beat. They are, after all, helmed by Simone Biles, widely regarded as the greatest gymnast of all time, who’s achieved a number of gravity-defying feats that have literally been named after her.

But Biles is joined by an impressive — and diverse — squad of Olympians, including Sunisa Lee, Jordan Chiles and Grace McCallum, who will compete in the team event, as well as Jade Carey and MyKayla Skinner, who will compete in the individual apparatus events. They’re the first women’s gymnastics team to compete in the Olympics following two significant events: the exit of longtime coaches Bela and Marta Karolyi, and the ousting of USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar amidst the devastating revelations that he had assaulted hundreds of young, female gymnasts through the decades.

And while the women’s team has often been more widely recognized, the men’s team is impressive, too, featuring Brody Malone, Sam Mikulak, Yul Moldauer, Shane Wiskus, and Alec Yoder.

If you’re planning on tuning in to watch the squads compete, here’s what you need to know about their trailblazing members. Plus, check out the full schedule when each event will take place.

Women’s Gymnastics

Simone Biles

At 24 years old the compact but dangerous 4-foot-8 Biles is a generational talent with a long, decorated history of making history, shattering records for winning more titles than any other American woman at world competitions. She holds a record of seven U.S. all-around titles, and five world championship all-around titles — numbers that were unheard of prior to her. She currently holds the record for most medals in world championship history at 25, and world titles at 19.

While she is clearly an all-around powerhouse, her strongest events are the vault and floor exercise, having two unprecedented moves named after her for each event, including the notorious Yuchenko double pike on vault. Its difficulty is so high that other gymnasts are discouraged from attempting it.

But a key part of Biles’ legacy is her courageous support for her fellow survivors of sexual assault, sharing her story as one of Nassar’s victims, and fighting for change and accountability within USA Gymnastics. In an interview with the “Today” show in April, Biles says a key reason she chose to return for the Tokyo games despite the toll of the pandemic was her desire to keep the memory of other Nassar survivors alive, and shine a light on the need for more accountability.

“Since I’m still here and I have quite a social media presence and platform, they have to do something,” she said. “So I feel like, coming back, gymnastics just wasn’t the only purpose I was supposed to do. . . . I don’t think I knew [that was part of my reason], either, but I feel like gymnastics wasn’t the only thing I was supposed to come back for.”

Sunisa Lee

Hailing from Minnesota, Lee is an 18-year-old Hmong American who is widely regarded as a favorite for Olympic gold on the uneven bars. Her routine that helped her qualify for the team went viral on social media in June, and is known to be one of the most difficult in the world.

A two-time national silver medalist in the all-around, Lee’s path to Tokyo included recovering from a broken foot in 2019, and losing a loved one to COVID-19 last year. Lee has also shared the story of her family’s struggles after her father became paralyzed following an accident. Her place on Team USA has been widely celebrated by the Hmong community, and especially those in her home state of Minnesota.

Jordan Chiles

At 20 years old, Chiles, born in Oregon and raised in Washington, is well-known for training with Biles at World Champions Centre in Texas. Chiles had initially struggled and questioned continuing to pursue elite gymnastics following a disappointing ranking in the 2018 National Championships, only to carve out a path toward Olympic gold by moving to Texas to train with Biles.

In June, Chiles placed third in the all-around at the U.S. National Gymnastics Championships right behind Biles and Lee, and dominant performances on the vault, uneven bars, balance beam and floor clinched her a spot on the team at the end of last month.

Grace McCallum

Like Lee, McCallum, 18, also hails from Minnesota, and is overcoming injuries, including a broken hand, from the past year to join Team USA. McCallum has been particularly dominant on the balance beam, and finished fourth at the U.S. Olympic Trials. Her credits include a U.S. balance beam bronze medal earlier this year, a 2019 World team championship, a U.S. all-around bronze medal in 2019, and a 2018 World team championship. One of six children, McCallum completed high school online, and her social media indicates she’s a loving dog-mom to German Shepherd Bella.

McKayla Skinner

Born and raised in Arizona, at 24 years old, Skinner is one of the more senior members of the women’s team. Skinner will be competing in the individual events on the vault and floor after finishing fifth behind McCallum. She previously joined Team USA in Rio as an alternate back in 2016. Skinner’s accolades include being a part of the U.S. team that won gold in 2014 at the world championships, four gold medals at the 2014 Pan American Championships, and two NCAA gold medals.

Skinner, also a member of the University of Utah’s gymnastics team, has announced her plan to retire from professional gymnastics after the Olympics, and focus instead on completing her degree.

Jade Carey

Another Arizona native, Carey, like Skinner, will also compete in the individual events, separate from the four-person U.S. team. Carey qualified for the Olympics even prior to the trials last month by claiming a spot over a year ago, through earning enough points at the Individual Apparatus World Cup Series on the floor and vault.

Carey, 21, has won four world championship medals, and won a silver on vault and the floor exercise at the 2017 World Championships. She committed to Oregon State University back in 2017, but deferred enrollment to focus on preparing for the Olympics.

Men’s Gymnastics

Brody Malone

A Georgia native and decorated collegiate gymnast at Stanford, Malone, 21, is new to international competitions, but has won the past two NCAA all-around titles. Malone led the pack at trials, finishing first on high bar, second on floor and rings, and third on parallel bars. In addition to his decorated gymnastics career, Malone has competed in rodeo events like team roping and jackpots. He’s also one of four siblings, and lost his mother to cancer in 2012.

Sam Mikulak

Mikulak made his Olympics debut back in 2012 in London, and at 28-years-old, is one of the more senior members of the squad. The Southern California native is a formidable competitor, winning all six U.S. titles he competed for from 2013 through 2019, and placing first on floor and second on high bar at the trials last month. Both of Mikulak’s parents are former competitive gymnasts themselves.

Yul Moldauer

Moldauer, 24, was born in South Korea, and adopted and raised on a farm in Colorado. Since, he’s won a national title and two NCAA all-around titles while competing for Oklahoma. Moldauer wound up in second place at the Olympic trials in St. Louis, and is expected to dominate on nearly all exercises in Tokyo.

Shane Wiskus

Born in Minnesota, Wiskus is a three-time NCAA champion, and the son of a stunt pilot father. His career has had its ups and downs, as he struggled in this year’s national championship placing ninth in all-around standings — only to come back strong for Olympic trials and place third. Wiskus’ placement on the men’s team has sparked controversy and backlash against the University of Minnesota, which canceled its men’s gymnastics program that Wiskus had competed for.

Alec Yoder

Yoder joins the men’s Tokyo squad as a “plus-one,” competing as an individual with his scores not counting to the team. Yoder, 24, is a first-time Olympian who will compete on pommel horse, but has previously competed as a member of the 2018 world championships team. He also has a promising career outside of gymnastics in fashion: in 2019, Yoder featured in a Hugo Boss modeling campaign called the Suit Challenge, and is one of few men’s gymnasts who have crossed over into fashion.

When to watch

Here’s a breakdown of when the major Olympic gymnastic events will take place. For more detailed coverage, check out NBC’s schedule. You watch at NBCOlympics.com, stream on Peacock or catch primetime highights on NBC.

Saturday and Sunday, July 24-25: Men’s and women’s qualifications
Monday, July 26: Men’s team final
Tuesday, July 27: Women’s team final
Wednesday, July 28: Men’s individual all-around
Thursday, July 29: Women’s individual all-around
Sunday, Aug. 1: Finals for Men’s floor, Men’s pommel horse, Women’s vault and Women’s uneven bars
Monday, Aug. 2: Finals for Men’s rings, Men’s vault, Women’s floor exercise
Tuesday, Aug. 3: Finals for Men’s parallel bars, Men’s horizontal bar, Women’s balance beam

Was this Barack Obama’s finest hour? His 2011 roast of Donald Trump warned us what was coming

As legendary quarterback Tom Brady celebrated the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ 2021 Super Bowl victory with President Joe Biden, Brady cracked some jokes at the expense of a guy widely perceived as his friend — at least until now. Along with ridiculing one of Donald Trump’s disparaging nicknames for Biden, Brady also mocked Trump’s claims that he didn’t really lose the 2020 election by quipping, “Not a lot of people think that we could have won. In fact, I think about 40% of the people still don’t think we won.”

It’s not likely that Trump enjoyed being mocked as a sore loser by one of America’s most famous sports winners. Brady, who had not visited the White House to celebrate a Super Bowl victory since 2005, may have very well put the final nail in his controversial relationship with Trump. He also reminded us of one of the most underrated speeches in American political history — the one delivered 10 years ago by Barack Obama at Trump’s expense.

There were many moments in Obama’s historic presidency that could be described as his “finest hour,” but my personal favorite has always been Obama’s roasting of Trump during the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Not just because Obama was funny (although he was), but because he wound up foreshadowing Trump’s ensuing presidency with uncanny accuracy. The history surrounding that speech also imbues it with deeper meaning. And since Obama got in his digs at Trump while retaining his dignity and basic courtesy, his words come across not so much as insults but wry meditations about the sensibilities that could catapult the unlikeliest of all presidents into the White House.

Before Obama’s speech, Trump had been working the media to promote the debunked conspiracy theory that America’s first black president had not actually been born in the United States. Then a mere reality TV star, Trump was testing the waters for a 2012 presidential campaign and thought “birtherism” might be a winning issue. Not only did it none-too-subtly play on racist fears of a nonwhite president, it also sent the message that Obama was somehow disloyal to American interests.

This was the backdrop to April 30, 2011, when Obama and Trump wound up in the same room for a night of unflinching comedy. The other was that as Obama skewered Trump in front of the world, he was also secretly working on the raid that would achieve what Republicans President George W. Bush had not — killing al-Qaida leader and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Obama couldn’t say that to the audience, of course, but he did throw his American bona fides in Trump’s face. He opened the evening by displaying a copy of his birth certificate against a montage of hyper-America iconography, all as the Hulk Hogan theme song “Real American” played in the background. After that, he showed the opening scene from “The Lion King” while joking that it was his own birth video. (The most prominent conspiracy theory held that Obama had been born in Kenya, as his father unquestionably had been.) All of this took on the birther issue directly, deflating what Trump hoped might be his signature talking point for the 2012 election cycle.

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But Obama didn’t stop there. He moved on to ribbing other public figures at the event, but eventually returned to Trump with an even sharper wit. Pivoting with a joke about how Trump could work to discredit Mitt Romney, then the future 2012 Republican presidential nominee (and later, coincidentally, Trump’s most high profile Republican critic), Obama landed a devastating blow by mocking the six-times-bankrupt businessman for embracing ludicrous conspiracy theories:

Now, I know that he’s taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter — like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?

This section of the speech is the most prescient because it anticipated Trump’s greatest shortcoming as president. Despite his numerous scandals and policy failures, Trump was reasonably well positioned to be re-elected in 2020 because he had inherited Obama’s booming economy. His downfall, from a strategic standpoint, was in failing to listen to scientists about the COVID-19 pandemic and embracing pseudoscience instead. If he had heeded early warnings and embraced bold policies to help Americans get through this traumatic period, he could have saved many thousands of lives, done less damage to the economy intact and quite likely cruised to a second term. Instead he played down the pandemic, ignored basic science and even got sick himself. Americans suffered far more than they had to, turning his policy failure into an inevitable political one. And all that could have been avoided had he not been exactly the type of person Obama described in 2011 — a fool.

Obama’s lampooning of Trump continued:

But all kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For example — no, seriously, just recently, in an episode of “Celebrity Apprentice” — at the steakhouse, the men’s cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn’t blame Lil’ Jon or Meat Loaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir. Well handled.

There’s a lot to unpack in those sentences. It is easy enough to see that in Obama’s sarcastic praise for Trump’s “credentials and breadth of experience,” he was referring to the fact that Trump had no political or military experience. (He became the only president elected without at least one of the two.) Historical context, however, reminds us that Obama was himself accused of being too inexperienced to serve as president when he ran in 2008, even though he had served as an Illinois state senator and then a U.S. senator for nearly a dozen years. It seems almost certain that this double standard — which would become only more conspicuous after Trump was elected in 2016 — wasn’t on Obama’s mind.

Then there is Obama’s quip about Trump’s main job at the time, hosting the reality show “The Celebrity Apprentice.” Once again, there was obvious commentary on Trump being held to a different standard than Obama, who was dismissively compared to a celebrity throughout his political career even though Trump literally was a celebrity, with no visible professional or political qualifications. There is also deeper meaning in the way Obama singled out Trump’s fetish for firing people. The man had built his brand around the TV catch phrase, “You’re fired!” As president, Trump got in trouble for the circumstances around his firing of FBI Director James Comey and his willingness to turn on or terminate even the most loyal aides if they wouldn’t break the law for him (Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Vice President Mike Pence and Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr come to mind).

After his fear of losing to Joe Biden turned to reality, Trump became the first president to lose an election and refuse to accept the result, assaulting George Washington’s legacy in the process. Indeed, he had telegraphed his willingness to be a historic sore loser before that election, making clear that he would never accept being fired by the American people. No other president has reacted as badly to electoral disappointment, with the possible exception of James Buchanan, who allowed the Civil War to break out after the 1860 election didn’t go his way — but he wasn’t even on the ballot that year.

Obama wrapped up that section of his speech with the one lame joke in his repertoire against Trump (a visual gag about Trump’s tacky architectural aesthetic that simply didn’t land). He moved on, but the world of comedy fondly remembers his performance.

“Every time a politician cracks a few easy jokes they didn’t even write, headline writers will rush to call them a ‘comedian’ which diminishes what we do,” comedian Steve Hofstetter told Salon via Twitter. “That’s like calling someone the president because they voted once. But Obama had something I’ve never seen from another president: He had timing. When most politicians deliver a joke, they seem surprised when it gets a laugh. But Obama was familiar with the material and he knew how to deliver it. While I’m sure he had writers, he executed as if he’d written the jokes himself.”

It was a speech reporters would later claim left Trump fuming — but that seems to be a legend invented after the fact. If you watch the actual video of the event, you see that Trump went along with Obama’s jokes cheerfully enough, even waving at the crowd. Whether or not he was just putting on a polite show, he didn’t act like a man whose ego had been severely stung. His reactions are, dare I say, even a little humanizing: He appears for all the world like he’s having a good time, smiling and enjoying himself like he did during a Comedy Central roast a few weeks earlier. Indeed, he later directed his anger not at Obama but at comedian Seth Meyers (whose barbs were much more pointed). Trump said he’d had a “great time” listening to Obama, was “honored” to be singled out by him and thought he had delivered his jokes well. Meyers, by contrast, he described as “too nasty, out of order.”

This matters because it showed that if Obama drew blood, the target didn’t realize he had been pricked. Obama had deftly struck a balance, drawing attention to the ways Trump is ridiculous while also remaining respectful. It wasn’t until after the dust had settled that Trump began to feel aggrieved, eventually refusing as president to attend the annual correspondents’ dinners.

Obama certainly made other negative remarks concerning Trump, but his 2011 monologue stands out because it feels like a prologue to the history we’ve been living since 2016. In that sense, it can be placed next to the “Economic Bill of Rights” section of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union address or Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” address as a prophetic work of oratory. It’s also the only historically significant presidential speech that was primarily meant to be funny (and largely was).

Arguably, that’s the one sense in which it was misguided. Ten years ago it was easy to laugh at Donald Trump. Now that his Big Lie about the 2020 election is fueling a fascist insurgency, it is a lot harder to find him funny.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson confronted during Montana vacation: “You are the worst human”

Fox News host Tucker Carlson was called out while visiting Montana.

A video posted to Instagram shows Carlson at Dan Bailey’s Fly Shop in Livingston, Montana, the HuffPost reports.

“You are the worst human being known to mankind. I want you to know that,” Dan Bailey, no relation to the store, says.

“It’s not everyday you get to tell someone they are the worst person in the world and really mean it! What an asshole!” Bailey wrote on his post.

“This man has killed more people with vaccine misinformation, he has supported extreme racism, he is a fascist and does more to rip this country apart than anyone that calls themselves an American,” he added.

Bailey included the hashtags, “#f*cktuckercarlson #stayoutofmontana #democracywillprevail and #trumplost.”

Dale Sexton, who bought the legendary store with Mark Gurley in 2020, is apparently fine with Carlson’s vaccine misinformation, racism and fascism. Instead of joining his local customer in telling Carlson to “stay out of Montana,” the company bragged about treating Carlson respectfully.

“On July 23rd, a well-known television personality, Tucker Carlson, was affronted while shopping at Dan Bailey’s Outdoor Company. Coincidentally, the person engaging Mr. Carlson was a local resident named Dan Bailey. This person has no affiliation with our business, other than he shares the same name as our founder, who passed away in 1982. Our staff was professional and cordial to Mr. Carlson, as we are with all of our customers,” the company said in a statement posted to its website.

In Park County, where the incident occurred, only 52% of the eligible population is vaccinated.

Watch:

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Kyrsten Sinema ripped by key supporter ahead of Trump visit: “Why are you even in the Senate?”

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) received harsh criticism from one of her key political supporters as Donald Trump travels to Arizona to push his “Big Lie” about election fraud against the backdrop of the Arizona audit.

Attorney Grant Woods was elected attorney general as a Republican. During Sinema’s 2018 election, her campaign featured Woods in campaign ads as a key GOP endorser:

Woods subsequently became a Democrat and now worries Sinema isn’t doing enough to stop GOP voter suppression efforts.

Trump is visiting Arizona for a “Rally to Protect Our Elections” put on by the far-right organization Turning Point Action. Arizona Reps. Andy Biggs, Paul Gosar and Debbie Lesko are scheduled to speak at the rally.

“I’m generally not too alarmist about most of these things but i am on this one,” Woods told CNN’s Jim Acosta. “I do believe this is a fight for our democracy.”

He explained his views on the filibuster.

“And I’m against the filibuster in general. To me, it is a joke that people act like this is 20 years ago or 40 years or 50 years ago. It’s not, it is 2021. Look at the behave of the Republicans in the Senate, they mass together and won’t work cooperatively on virtually anything,” Woods explained.

“So they got to rid of the filibuster, period. Certainly we have to make an exception here for voting rights and craft something with senator from my state, Sinema. I don’t know what her problem is, frankly,” he said. “A lot of us can’t believe the behavior.”

“If you can’t do it to preserve democracy, to make sure that we have fair elections, that people are allowed to vote and that it’s not disproportionately impacting negatively on people of color and people that the republicans don’t want to vote, then why are you even there? Why are you in the Senate?” he wondered.

A former advice columnist on the pain problem that persists and his enduring answer, 15 years later

Fifteen years ago, Salon’s then-advice columnist Cary Tennis received a letter that posed a troubling question. The writer, who gave the name “Ready for the End,” was a 36-year-old in the throes of deep depression. The writer asked, “What’s the best method for a painless suicide?”

Tennis’ reply has over the years become a kind of “Yes Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus” for a struggling and largely invisible audience. Internally, Salon staff spotted its enduring readership a few years ago and discovered that it’s a top search result for the phrase “painless suicide.” This story comes up almost immediately, underneath the number for a suicide prevention lifeline. The column persists because that question, borne from the depths of pain and despair, persists.

Tennis’ column is a conversation between two strangers, one of whom says, “there really is no future for me” and one of whom has to craft an empathetic response to that statement. I’ve long wondered about what became of the anonymous letter writer, as well as the effect the experience had on the person who received it and responded.

Tennis now lives in Italy, where he is writing a book about an Italian engineer who rebuilt the medieval convent next door to his house, “and how a chance meeting on a train from Orvieto to Milan in 1952 set off a chain of events leading to our coming to live in Castiglion Fiorentino.” I spoke to him recently about that “Since You Asked” letter, and what he would say to the writer of it today.

For those who don’t know the context, can you give some history of “Since You Asked,” and what happened when you received this particular letter?

“Since You Asked” was the successor to Garrison Keillor’s “Mr. Blue” column, and I wrote it from October 2001 to September 2013. I wrote over 2,000 columns, probably 2,100, something like that. [Note: I found nearly 2,500.]

Out of all of the thousands of letters you received and you answered, what did it feel like when this one came in?

I got a lot of letters from people in pain. I got used to people who were writing and were desperate, or angry, upset. I got used to people who were angry at me. People who were in really desperate, awful situations. I got used to that as a writing job.

So I followed some guidelines, one of which was to always take people at their word, to accept the suffering they were in, and to accept their version of reality. I would try to bring a perspective that was not the normal perspective and was my own, and try to really think it through. In this one, I took it through logically. You don’t really know that suicide is going to work. You don’t really know that it’s your best option. It sounds like an option. It sounds like, well, this would eliminate pain, but you don’t know that. You really don’t know.

I’ve witnessed, through various recovery groups and just observing life, that people in really desperate situations sometimes do get better. Yeah, they get better. I’ve seen people come out of all kinds of hell — out of prison, out of abuse, out of addiction, out of despair and depression, certainly. For me, it’s a given that things can change, because that’s my daily experience. My opinion about people’s assertion that it’s never going to change, and that it’s always going to be like this, is that’s just not evidence based. What I see is people who change and get better. I see life get better all the time. That’s my background; that’s my approach to it.

People complain that it’s false advertising, like, “I thought you were going to give me a painless suicide method. And here you are with this crap.” I wonder, though, if what people are really looking for when they say “a painless method of suicide” is something other than suicide. They’re looking for the pain to stop.

I took delight in just weighing the options and arguing the case. And it has worked. I get letters, personally, from people about that column. I got one not too long ago, from a guy named Joe. He says, “I wanted to kill myself. Today, I picked up my sharpest knife from the kitchen, sharpened it and drew a bath. I didn’t think I had the stomach to finish myself that way. So I started looking for an easy way to commit suicide, and instead found a blog post by you from 2006. You described suicide as an incredible gamble. I had never looked at it through that lens before. It really put things in perspective, regardless of what’s going wrong, right now. I have agency to change things. Taking my own life forfeits that agency for random chance. Today I’m deciding to not take that chance. I don’t even know you, but I needed to say that.”

I imagine you get a lot of that.

I do. It’s pretty awesome and humbling.

Here in the U.S., the Anthony Bourdain documentary just came out, and there’s a lot of very public conversation about suicide. There’s also been an increase in suicide and suicidal ideation. It’s really entered a different phase of our of our public understanding, as a public health crisis. Has anything changed in the way you understand suicide or the way you think about it?

Well, also the rate of overdose deaths has increased. And gun violence has increased. And depression has increased. Maybe it’s worldwide, but I focus on America. And I think that American life is really, really hard and ugly. There’s so much pressure on people, and there’s so much uncertainty and fear, economically, socially.

We left America five years ago, and we live in a different country now. This has really crystallized my feeling that there’s something wrong with American life. It doesn’t have to be that way. Because I live now with people who don’t have much money and whose job prospects are poor and who live with a corrupt government. But suicide in Italy is not a big problem, really. The town that we live in is full of happy people who have stable families and good food and health care. They take care of each other. And there’s no question that if you get sick, you go to the hospital. There are just so many uncertainties in American life and so much fear. I’m not surprised that people are going a little crazy. It’s a very hard life.

If that letter writer wrote to you today, do you think you would give the same advice? Or would you say something different, given that things are different now?

A thing I often did in the column was focus on external conditions, which is a political statement. I see people talking about mental illness as a pathology. But I think a lot of it is political — that because of political and economic conditions, meaning because of adults in power making decisions — people’s lives are bad. They don’t know it because everybody’s life is bad in the same way.

So you have this focus on suicide and depression, but not enough focus on the political conditions that give rise to civic organizations, unions, churches, families, groups that would foster healthy growth, healthy life. They they’re not as strong as it used to be.

Life is scary. Life is really f**king scary. I can’t imagine having shelter in place drills. The fact that “active shooter” is a normal phrase. So I try to focus on external things, to say, “Look, you’re not necessarily that crazy. You’re living under harsh conditions.” That’s one way I would try to address it. Don’t blame yourself, necessarily. Get angry. Look for alternatives.

I think part of what makes that column so unique is that what the letter writer says is such an intimate and vulnerable and candid assessment. It’s specific in so many ways and, and universal in so many other ways.

I would love to know what happened.

So you never heard back from that person again?

Not to my knowledge.

Sometimes when people write to me personally, I don’t know precisely who it is because I was very scrupulous about not finding out who they are, not knowing who they are when I answered them. I would take the email off the draft. I wish I had it. But it’s in the past.

If you can imagine, 15 years later, the letter writer reading this conversation now, is there something you’d like to say today?

Yeah, I’d like to say I didn’t mean any disrespect, I just disagree with your premise. That’s been my process out of depression through cognitive therapy, to see that many of the things I thought were true, were not really true. And that my thinking about what was possible in life, and what direction I was in, was in a way fatally flawed.

I’ve been through depression. I’ve been in that horrible spot. It brings tears to my eyes just to think about it and remember. It’s an awful thing. And I was helped. I was helped by books, by therapists, by finding some light in the darkness, which you have got to claw your way through to find. I sure hope that person was able to.

One of the readers wrote to say, “Oh, what a bunch of bulls**t, I hate all this life gets better stuff.” It doesn’t necessarily get better, but it’s worth the struggle.

I don’t know if it’s the Grateful Dead or the people in AA who say, “Don’t quit before the miracle happens.” That sounds corny as hell. I would not say that to this person. I would never say, “Don’t quit before the miracle happens.” But I would share my own experience, which is that I’ve been in the darkest and most hopeless places. And I did come through it.

If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 (TALK), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Observations from a Chicago Dunkin’ Donuts

It’s just after 7 a.m. under a milky Chicago sun in mid-July, and the temperature has already reached 80 degrees as I walk into the Dunkin’ Donuts near my house. While I await my large with lite cream, a husky man pulls up in his Chevy and orders a large black with a little ice.

“Anything else?”
“That’ll do.”
“You want a receipt?”
“Nah, I’m not gonna return it.”

It’s been a year and a half since I spent more than five minutes inside a coffee shop, so I park myself in a Dunkin’-orange pleather barrel chair near the register. I like this location. Perched on the corner of a busy east-west street halfway between a highway entrance and an El stop in the middle of a fast-gentrifying neighborhood, it feels particularly consequential — and like a microcosm for the city itself.

In the hourish I spend at Dunkin’, all kinds of people pass through — painters in Jackson Pollocked boots, electricians and a construction worker perpetually stretching his sore shoulders. A bearded 30-something with a laptop bag slung over his shoulder wordlessly grabs a pre-ordered, large black iced. A garbage collector and a delicately tattooed art student both order blueberry cake donuts. An older man in Wranglers and cognac-hued alligator shoes gets a small decaf, followed by a youngish woman in a flouncy pink dress who stirs a couple of Splendas into a large iced with skim. A trim man in skinny jeans and pristine white sneakers; a woman in cargo sweatpants and a coffee-themed logo tee; a city worker haloed in musky cologne; more Blackhawks, Cubs, Sox and Bears gear than I can count.

More than a third of the patrons pay in cash. Almost no one takes advantage of Dunkin’s now extensive specialty-coffee menu, which includes all manner of flavored lattes and macchiatos. In an hour’s time there’s a single ask for oat milk. Nonetheless, the very subjective morning coffee order is on full display.

“One large, regular cream, four pumps of caramel.”

“Dos cafés medianos; una crema, un azúcar.”

“Medium iced coffee. You don’t have Stevia?”
“Tenemos Stevia? No, we don’t.”
“OK, that’s fine. Wait, did I already say iced?”

Not once is there a lag between drip coffee refills; iced coffee likewise appears to be in endless supply for the relentless stream of customers. After consecutive rushes ravage the cruller and double-chocolate donut baskets, the pastries rematerialize in neat rows within seconds.

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“How do you get up so early?” one employee marvels at another, who’d been up since 3. “Yo no puedo levantar.”

A lot of customers bring in trash from their cars to throw out — old receipts, orange parking ticket envelopes and takeout bags. Some stay on their phones the entire time they order, mouthing “sorry” to the untroubled cashiers.

“Is that a Tesla?” a woman asks the man standing with her in line, nodding toward the shiny black car through the window. (Tesla guy is already on his way out, dressed for golf and bearing a large iced with cream and a cruller.) “Yeah,” her companion replies. “Did you know they’re making electric trucks now?”

Among the more consequential headlines I skim through on my phone this morning, India’s true pandemic death toll is likely to top 3 million, staggeringly more than the 414,000 officially recorded deaths. Jeff Bezos, the richest human in the world, goes to space, then publicly thanks his employees for footing the bill. A wildfire in Oregon is so big and hot that it’s generating its own weather systems. I realize that the smoke plume engulfing the Northwest would explain this third straight day of haze in northeastern Illinois.

A lull hits around 8:15, and I notice that “Juicy” by Notorious B.I.G. has been playing on the radio. I get up and head back into the watery sunlight with a few lukewarm sips left in my cup for the walk home. I hold the door for a woman in scrubs who’s juggling two mediums and a bag of donut holes. Line painters out front are almost finished painting new crosswalk stripes; the iced coffees they ordered earlier are no longer iced.

Behind me, the parking lot starts filling up again. A couple’s Jeep almost gets rear-ended as they pull over where there’s, admittedly, nowhere to pull over. As the car behind them lays on the horn, the woman in the passenger seat flies out toward Dunkin’s double doors.

Inside, another rush has started.

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Here are the keys to crafting a classic potato salad, the ultimate make-ahead side dish

Potato salads are arguably the ultimate make-ahead salads. They need time to chill, and doing the prep work ahead of time means that you don’t have to scramble at the last minute before a picnic. But this make-ahead recipe abbreviates the waiting time too and offers flavorful, tender potatoes and crunchy bits of onion and celery, accented by a creamy dressing. We found that seasoning the potatoes while they were hot maximized flavor, so we tossed hot russet potatoes with white vinegar. One celery rib added just enough crunch. Choosing between scallions, shallots and onions, we picked a red onion because we liked it best for its bright color and taste.

For a pickled flavor, we decided to use relish, which required no preparation and gave the potato salad a subtle sweetness. Note that this recipe calls for celery seeds (which add complexity of flavor), not celery salt; if only celery salt is available, use the same amount but omit the salt in step 3. When testing the potatoes for doneness, simply taste a piece; do not overcook the potatoes or they will become mealy and break apart. THe potatoes must be just warm, or even fully cooled, when you add the dressing. If the potato salad seems a little dry, add up to 2 tablespoons more mayonnaise.

***

Recipe: Classic potato salad
Serves 4 to 6

Ingredients

2 pounds russet potatoes, peeled and cut into 3/4 -inch pieces
½ teaspoon table salt, plus salt for cooking potatoes
2 tablespoons distilled white vinegar
½ cup mayonnaise
1 celery rib, chopped fine
2 tablespoons sweet pickle relish
2 tablespoons finely chopped red onion
2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley or chives
¾ teaspoon dry mustard
¾ teaspoon celery seeds
¼ teaspoon pepper
2 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and cut into ¼-inch pieces (optional)

Directions

1. Place potatoes and 1 tablespoon salt in a large saucepan and add water to cover by 1 inch. Bring to boil over medium-high heat. Reduce heat to medium and simmer, stirring occasionally, until potatoes are tender and paring knife can be slipped in and out of potatoes with little resistance, about 8 minutes.

2. Drain potatoes and transfer to a large bowl. Add vinegar and use rubber spatula to toss gently to combine. Let sit until potatoes are just warm, about 20 minutes.

3. While potatoes sit, combine mayonnaise, celery, relish, onion, parsley, mustard, celery seeds, pepper, and salt in a small bowl. Using rubber spatula, gently fold mayonnaise mixture and eggs, if using, into potatoes, Refrigerate until chilled, about 1 hour. Serve.

If you like this recipe as much as we do, check out “The Complete Salad Cookbook” by America’s Test Kitchen.